Canada

Canada

1. Introduction

As a British Dominion, Canada's attitude at the beginning of the Second World War was one of resignation. The memory of the heavy casualties in the First World War, when 60,000 Canadians died and 172,000 were wounded, naturally weighed heavily on the nation. The Great Depression had devastated the economy for ten years and continued unabated in its severity. And French Canadians, bitterly resentful of the way in which the anglophone majority had imposed conscription in 1917, had no desire to see Canada enter into another ‘British’ war in Europe that might lead to heavy casualties and inevitably to renewed demands for compulsory military service. On the other hand, many, perhaps most, English Canadians still assumed that when Britain was at war, so was Canada. The Liberal government of Mackenzie King managed to bring this reluctant, divided country into the war through King's political skill, a feat that was accomplished by promising that there would be no conscription for overseas service and by pledging a war of ‘limited liability’. Those attitudes prevailed for ten months. Not until the fall of France did most Canadians, including their government, take the war seriously as a struggle for survival; not until the summer of 1940 did war orders from the UK or the Canadian government begin to reach the factories in quantity. From that point until the victory over Japan in August 1945, the Canadian war effort increased exponentially.

2. Domestic life, war effort, and economy

Canada's population in 1939 was only 11.5 million scattered across a vast area reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Just under half the Canadian people were of British origin, with another third being French Canadians. The remainder were of immigrant stock, largely European (with Germans and Ukrainians predominating). A majority of the population lived in cities, though only eight urban populations were bigger than 100,000 and none was greater than a million.

The economy in 1939 was still caught in the toils of the Depression. Official estimates, probably understating the problem, had 400,000 workers unemployed and a million men, women, and children on direct relief. On 1 October 1939, only 3.8 million were gainfully employed, with 2 million men and women in agriculture and the rest in non-agricultural industry or self-employed. The country's Gross National Product was $5.6 billion. The war dramatically altered these numbers. The GNP in 1945 was $11.8 billion, a figure slightly below the 1944 total. Unemployment had disappeared and 5.1 million were gainfully employed, with 3.2 million in non-agricultural industry and 1.9 million working in agriculture. The manufacturing sector of the economy had almost doubled in six years, and war industry at its peak in October 1943 employed 1.2 million men and women, or 13.3% of the total population over 14 years of age.

Production quantities increased dramatically in every sector. In agriculture, good weather helped produce bumper crops of grain—556 million bushels in 1942, for example. The production of pork more than doubled and of beef increased by more than a third, and the country's agricultural exports rose from $332 million in 1939 to $1.12 billion in 1944, $409 million of that total going to the UK.

In the iron and steel sectors, increases were similarly dramatic. Pig iron and steel ingot production more than doubled between 1939 and 1944, and this fuelled astonishing developments in war industry. A country that in 1939 had built no merchant ships had produced 345 by 1944; aircraft production was 14,700 by the end of 1944; while 707,000 military vehicles and 45,710 armoured vehicles were built. Plant expansion was heavily financed by government which established numerous Crown corporations (for example, to produce synthetic rubber) and which financed corporate expansion.

The total of war production in Canada, supervised by C. D. Howe, was $10.9 billion by 1945, fourth among the Allies. Canada's war production amounted to one-seventh of total British Empire production, but only 30% of this production was used by the Canadian forces. Virtually all the rest was given freely to Canada's allies as gifts or under Canadian Mutual Aid, with the lion's share going to the UK. Mutual Aid, its financial planning directed by a team headed by the finance minister, J. L. Ilsley, was a contribution to the Allied war effort, but it was also an investment in full employment in Canada, something of which the government was fully aware. In effect, Ottawa decided it was better to give war production away rather than to see the economy run down in the middle of the war. For the hard-pressed British, the aid was important. As a Dominions Office paper noted in August 1946, ‘during the war we were never, from shortage of finance, prevented from securing all Canada could let us have for the war effort’.

Extraordinarily, the economic war effort simultaneously raised living standards at home to peaks never before attained. It was not that wages rose so much as that there was work for everyone. Full employment and all the overtime anyone wanted meant that families, often with every member over the age of 15 gainfully employed, had the money to eat better, even with rationing of meat, butter, sugar, tea, and coffee. Moreover, the fact that consumer goods were unavailable meant that savings rose, a cushion for the expected post-war downturn. The government's tough economic policies controlled inflation well. From the beginning of the war until October 1941, when wage and price controls were imposed, the cost of living rose by 17.8%; but from October 1941 to April 1945, the increase was a mere 2.8%. This was the most successful record of all the belligerents.

3. Government

The federal election of 1935 had replaced the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett with the Liberals under King, previously prime minister 1921–6 and 1926–30. King was cautious and colourless, a fussy bachelor in his sixties, but he was a consummate political tactician with a clear idea of the forces that weighed on his country—the USA, with whom Canada shared the continent, and the UK, the Mother Country across the sea. The struggle between continentalism and imperialism was as old as Canada, as current as today's newspaper, and King had to deal with it. He also had to handle the tensions within the country. French-speaking Canadians, largely but not exclusively concentrated in Quebec, were separated by language and by religion from most of their English-speaking and Protestant country-men (see also religion). Their political support was traditionally given to the Liberal Party, and King, dependent on it, had to tread carefully on foreign policy questions and on any prospect of Canadian involvement in war.

The Statute of Westminster in 1931 had declared that Canada, like the other Dominions, was independent in foreign policy, just as it had been in domestic matters, but there still remained some doubt that Canada had a right to neutrality, or whether it was bound by a declaration of war issued by its sovereign, George VI, on behalf of Great Britain. Neutralist sentiment had a powerful voice in King's key foreign policy adviser, Dr Oscar Skelton, but the Gordian knot was cut by King in September 1939. The UK declared war on 3 September and, the Canadian parliament approving, the government asked King George to declare war on its behalf on 9 September. The next day Canada was at war with Germany. In the week between Britain's and Canada's declarations, the USA had considered Canada to be neutral, sending some war supplies across the border. Canada's independent decision to enter the war, the fulfilment of a much-repeated promise by King, did much to bring a relatively united country into the Second World War.

King then had to withstand a challenge to the war effort in Quebec when, later in September, Premier Maurice Duplessis called a snap election and charged Ottawa with using the conflict as an excuse to pursue centralist policies. Extraordinarily, the federal cabinet ministers from Quebec told the province's voters that they would resign if Duplessis was re-elected. That, they said, would leave Quebec exposed to conscription. The voters listened and elected a Liberal government. In January 1940, by contrast, the Ontario legislature voted to condemn the federal government's lackadaisical war effort. King seized the opportunity to call a snap election of his own for 26 March which he won with 51.5% of the popular vote and a majority of 117 over the combined opposition parties. The Liberal government was in power for the duration.

As important, King had got the election out of the way before the phoney war turned into an Allied disaster. The defeats in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France put enormous pressure on the government to step up the war effort, and King responded by personally drafting the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) which he introduced into the House of Commons on 18 June 1940. This act authorized conscription for home defence and called for a national registration. The prime minister pledged again that his government would not implement conscription for overseas service. While there was some opposition in French Canada to the NRMA, the prompt internment of the mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, who had urged his compatriots not to register, ended it quickly.

By late 1941, however, there were pressures for ‘total war’ everywhere in the country. At a meeting in November the opposition Conservative Party selected Arthur Meighen, the draftsman of the First World War conscription measure and twice prime minister in the 1920s, to be its leader, and the press began calling for full conscription. Within King's cabinet, his minister of national defence, J. Layton Ralston, and several of his colleagues supported conscription. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the entry of the USA into the war, and the developing threat to the west coast from Japan increased the pressure. But King felt bound by his repeated pledges to Quebec, and his solution was to stage a plebiscite on 27 April 1942 to ask the electorate to release the government from its past commitments restricting methods of raising men for military service. This plebiscite, asking all Canada to release King from promises made to Quebec, outraged French Canadians. A ‘non’ campaign was run by La Ligue pour la défense du Canada that effectively out-organized the feeble ‘oui’ campaign in Quebec. The result saw 72.9% of Quebeckers vote ‘non’, an overwhelming majority of the French-speaking population. Elsewhere in Canada, though the ‘yes’ vote won very large majorities, the French-speaking, German, and Ukrainian populations voted ‘no’ by large margins. King's response, once he had recovered from his shock, was to introduce a bill in parliament to delete the clause in the NRMA restricting the use of conscripts, by now known derogatorily as Zombies, to Canada. But his policy, brilliantly expressed in the phrase, ‘Not necessarily conscription but conscription if necessary’, remained unchanged. Canada still would not send conscripts overseas unless it was necessary; the definition of necessity was nowhere specified.

Not until the autumn of 1944, by which time the Canadian Army was heavily engaged in the Italian and Normandy campaigns, did necessity become an issue. Because of General Staff miscalculations of the numbers of infantry reinforcements, because Canada relied on outdated British ‘wastage’ rates, by October 1944 there was a projected shortage of some 15,000 infantrymen. Expedients had already been tried and failed, and the only source for trained infantry seemed to be the 60,000 NRMA soldiers in Canada. An enormous political crisis erupted in late October and November, one that saw King sack Ralston in one of the most dramatic cabinet confrontations in Canadian history. His replacement was General McNaughton, until late 1943 the General Officer Commanding the First Canadian Army. McNaughton failed to find reinforcements, and his army commanders in Canada were increasingly rebellious. King then used the military's unhappiness as the excuse to reverse course on 22 November: the government now would dispatch 16,000 NRMA infantry overseas. The reaction of Quebec MPs was bitter and public opinion angry at what was seen as a betrayal. But clearly King had delayed the inevitable as long as possible, and the anger died away quickly.

What, after all, could Quebec do? The Conservatives were for all-out conscription and had scarcely any French-speaking supporters; the social-democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was mistrusted in Quebec; and the francophone Bloc Populaire Canadien, while nationalist in its orientation, was woodenly led. King seemed the only option.

In part that was because the Liberal government had run the war superbly, the question of conscription aside. Quebec received its share of war contracts and prosperity, too. Moreover, the Liberals had announced in September 1943 their intention of creating a social welfare state, largely because the mandarins of the federal financial bureaucracy had concluded that only through government outlays could a post-war return to depression be averted. To some extent, as well, the new government thrust was a response to political pressures. In 1942, the Conservative Party had changed its name to Progressive Conservative, elected a new leader in the Liberal-Progressive Premier of Manitoba, John Bracken, and adopted a programme that included social welfare measures. The CCF, with its firm commitment to welfare policies, was making substantial gains in opinion polls, in federal by-elections, and in provincial elections in Ontario and Saskatchewan. But the Liberals were in power, and beginning in 1944 they moved into action. Family allowances were introduced, offering mothers a cash payment for each child. Through an order in council (PC 1003, 17 February 1944), employees' rights to join and form unions were confirmed and machinery for defining and certifying bargaining units laid out. In effect, Canadian labour had its Magna Carta. At the same time, massive sums were pumped into housing, into the re-establishment of veterans, into export promotion. The government even pledged itself to the goal of full employment early in 1945. Keynesianism had arrived in Canada with a vengeance, and the era of small government was gone. In 1939, the federal budget had been $680 million; by 1945, swollen with war expenditure, it was $5.1 billion, and Ottawa was making clear that it was prepared to spend just as freely in the peace.

At the same time, the country had begun to assert itself in Allied councils. Arguing that Canada had contributed more in certain areas than all but the Great Powers, the department of external affairs, its able staff now headed by Norman Robertson, insisted on and won a seat on some of the Anglo-American Combined Boards (see Combined Chiefs of Staff) and on UNRRA's supply committee. King also played a prominent role in the formation of the United Nations in 1945 (see San Francisco conference), and his people, despite themselves and despite their ambivalence toward their prime minister, were impressed.

Thus when the federal election was held on 11 June 1945, fortuitously after the war in Europe had ended and before Canada's promise of a division for the Pacific war had time to be implemented. King's government was re-elected with 41% of the popular vote and 125 seats, a bare majority. In Quebec, however, King won 53 of 65 seats and, as one academic noted in an election analysis, ‘Quebec Saves Our King’. It was precisely true, though the Liberals did win more seats outside Quebec than any other party.

4. Canada–US relations

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Canada's diplomatic relations with the USA were, while close, largely limited to economic and boundary matters. Prime Minister King and President Roosevelt were friendly enough, something that helped with the crafting of major trade agreements in 1935 and 1938, but Canada remained a British country, more than a little suspicious of the Yankee power to the south. The war changed all this, forcing Canada and the USA closer together economically, militarily, and politically.

The economic pressure produced by wartime expansion led to substantial increases in imports from the USA and the incorporation of American-made components into munitions and matériel destined for the UK. But the British could not pay for their needs, and Canada's burgeoning trade deficit with the USA was out of control by 1941. The answer was the Hyde Park Declaration of 1941. This resolved the short-term problem but the resulting integration of the two North American economies would never be undone.

The same thing happened with defence. While there had been secret talks between the two countries' Chiefs of Staff before the war, little had been done to prepare continental defences. But the fall of France, coupled with the possibility that the UK might be occupied, obliged the two countries to co-ordinate their efforts. In August 1940, King and Roosevelt met and drafted a plan for a Permanent Joint Board on Defence that began at once to work out plans to defend both the east and west coasts. The two countries worked closely together in fighting the battle of the Atlantic from 1941 on, and plans were made to move US troops into the maritime provinces to meet any Nazi threat. The Japanese threat similarly sped the process in the Pacific, both countries informally co-ordinating their actions with respect to treatment of their citizens of Japanese origin (see Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians). More directly, American troops moved into Canada to build the Alaska Highway (see Alaska), a number of weather stations (see also meteorological intelligence), and an oil pipeline in the north. The trend was not one-sided, however. When Japan occupied two islands in the Aleutians, Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) squadrons were based in Alaska. In 1943 a Canadian infantry brigade, equipped with US weapons, participated in the attack on Kiska during the Aleutian Islands campaigns. At the same time, Canada provided troops for the First Special Service Force (see USA, 5(f)), which fought in Italy and elsewhere.

There was, however, a certain tension in the military relationship, a fear that the USA had designs on Canada. The Canadian government insisted on paying full value for every American base and fixed installation in Canada at the end of the war, an all-too-obvious effort to eliminate every vestige of an American claim on Canada. None the less, the military links forged during the war remained and they were restored and refurbished when the Cold War began.

Politically, the relations between the two countries also strengthened during the war. The friendship between King and Roosevelt grew, and the American government, while not according Canada a place at the Allied council tables when high strategy was being discussed, paid more attention to Ottawa than did London. Sometimes this caused difficulties, as in 1941 when Free French forces occupied St Pierre and Miquelon and Secretary of State Cordell Hull ordered Canada to evict them, a demand that was ignored. But Churchill and Whitehall all too often still treated Canada like a colony, and the Americans shrewdly used Ottawa's resentment to foster increased links. This was evident in trade matters, for example, where London's parlous financial plight led to restrictions on hard currency imports before the end of the war. Ottawa and Washington reacted similarly to this, and significantly Ottawa imposed the same terms as the USA on the British loan negotiated in 1946.

5. Civil defence and defence forces

At the outbreak of war, the federal government established a civil defence organization in areas it designated as dangerous. Some provincial governments, such as those in Ontario and Saskatchewan, supplemented this service with organizations of their own, and occasionally, as in the latter province, such home guards sniffed out suspect foreigners and verged on vigilantism. By 1943 the federal organization had a strength of some 225,000, including 45,000 women. Nurses, doctors, stretcher-bearers, and rescue squad members formed units in the designated areas and awaited the call which happily never came. In February 1945, except for specified areas in Nova Scotia and, more specifically, British Columbia, where Japanese balloon bombs were posing a minor threat to the province's forests, the organization disbanded.

6. Armed forces

(a) Introduction

Canada's armed forces at the outbreak of war were organized on a British model, including a Chiefs of Staff Committee composed of the heads of the three services. These services were tiny, ill-trained for the most part, and equipped with obsolescent weapons. The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) had a regular force strength of 1,990 officers and ratings, ludicrously small but still double its complement three years before. There were in addition 1,700 reservists. Its fleet consisted of four relatively modern destroyers, two older ones, and four minesweepers. The Permanent Force of the Canadian Army had a strength of 4,261 officers and men, along with 4 modern anti-aircraft guns, 5 mortars, 82 Vickers machine guns, 10 Bren guns, and 2 light tanks. Even trucks were in short supply. The militia numbered some 51,000. Nor was the situation any better for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). Regular force strength was 298 officers and 2,750 airmen and, although it had 270 aircraft of 23 types, only 37 were remotely combat-ready. There were in addition 1,000 reservists organized in seven auxiliary squadrons. It was a slender base on which to build the British Empire Air Training Scheme, which the British requested Canada to start, but the plan became the country's major air contribution to the Allies' victory.

From under 9,000 regulars, the armed forces expanded more than a hundredfold over the course of the war. The navy enlisted 106,522 men and women, the army 730,159, and the air force 249,662. Officers who had never seen a company in the field, let alone commanded one, led divisions in action. Inevitably, there were serious problems in all three services as demands outpaced resources and training, but on the whole the military effort was more than creditable.

Overall, Canadian military casualties were heavy: 42,042 dead, 54,414 wounded, and 8,995 taken prisoner. The direct cost of the war, in monetary terms, was $21.7 billion, a total that does not include pensions or long-term medical care. Was it worth it? Few Canadians, in 1945 or later, would argue that it was not. And they were very proud of their role in the war, something that the world seemed to notice too. At the San Francisco conference in the spring of 1945, a Soviet delegate told a Canadian ‘that there were only four countries that had really fought this war and they were the USSR, the US, the UK, and Canada.’ There was political guile in that Soviet comment, but Canadians wanted to believe it.

(b) Army

The government's policy of ‘limited liability’ declared in September 1939 meant that Canada would fight the war with volunteers and without exerting itself, in the First World War phrase, ‘to the last man and the last dollar’. For a brief period there seemed some doubt that the cabinet would even authorize the dispatch of a division overseas, but on 19 September the people were informed that Canada would raise two divisions, of which one was to be prepared immediately for overseas service. To command this 1st Canadian Division, the government called on McNaughton, a scientific soldier, one who believed in using modern science to keep casualties low. That exactly suited the government which desperately feared high casualties which would inevitably lead to conscription. At the outset there was no shortage of volunteers—54,844 came forward in September, more than enough to get training under way. The first drafts of the 1st Division left Canada for England in December 1939.

The army's expansion proceeded slowly until the fall of France galvanized efforts. Fewer than 35,000 men enlisted between October 1939 and May 1940, but in June and July 60,000 volunteered. In all, 122,000 enlisted in 1940, 94,000 in 1941, 130,000 in 1942, 77,000 in 1943, and 75,000 in 1944. By 1942 the army had defined its overseas plans: a First Canadian Army of two corps incorporating three infantry and two armoured divisions with an additional two armoured brigades. By mid-1943, there were also the equivalent of three divisions defending the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. This was a very substantial force indeed for a small country, and its size greatly troubled the prime minister who continued to fear the effect of casualties on national unity.

But for three years army casualties were light. The 1st Division, training in England, became involved in the débâcle in France only peripherally. After Dunkirk, elements of the division landed in France as part of an effort to re-establish a defence line, but this was quickly abandoned—along with some of the division's equipment. Thereafter the Canadians, soon joined by the 2nd Division and now organized into a corps, shared in the defence of the UK. For a time, the 1st Division was the only well-equipped and trained formation available for this task. But after the likelihood of invasion receded, the Canadians, their numbers always expanding, continued to train.

The hunger for action of the Canadian people was substantial, and that pressure undoubtedly led to the army's two major disasters. In September 1941, Ottawa accepted a request to send troops to Hong Kong, and in late November two infantry battalions and a brigade headquarters arrived there. The Japanese attack on 8 December involved the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada in a desperate struggle that ended with surrender on Christmas Day 1941. Of the 1,975 Canadians, 40% were killed or wounded in the fighting; 268 subsequently died after brutal treatment in prisoner-of-war cages in Hong Kong and Japan. The swift Japanese victory—and the stunning speed of Japan's victories throughout the Pacific—caused near panic in British Columbia, led to the enforced evacuation of 23,000 Japanese-Canadians (see also Japanese-Americans) from the coast, and obliged the government to increase substantially its military presence on the Pacific coast.

Even more costly than the Hong Kong débâcle was the Canadian raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942 which involved 4,963 men of the 2nd Canadian Division. Only 2,211 returned to England, almost half of whom had never been sent ashore, 656 died in the raid, and 1,946 became prisoners-of-war, more than in the whole campaign in north-west Europe after D-Day. But the lessons of Dieppe were said to have played their part in the success of the Sicilian campaign (HUSKY) and OVERLORD, and Canadians were heavily involved in both operations, though General McNaughton, from 6 April 1942 in command of the First Canadian Army, had resisted efforts to divide his force. The Canadians were to be the spearhead pointing at Berlin in his view. But public pressure for action more successful than that at Hong Kong and Dieppe, as well as the obvious necessity to get some officers and men experienced in combat, led the government to overrule McNaughton and to agree to participate in HUSKY.

The 1st Canadian Division, led by Maj-General Simonds, and the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade landed near Pachino on 10 July 1943, and quickly moved inland. The Wehrmacht was not encountered for five days, but then the unblooded troops quickly learned what it meant to face a skilful defence. Operating in difficult terrain, the Canadian advance through the centre of the island was repeatedly slowed by well-planned delaying actions. The most notable of these occurred at Valguarnero (after which Field Marshal Kesselring reported that his troops had encountered ‘Mountain Boys’ trained for Alpine fighting), Leonforte, and Assoro before the division was pulled from the line on 2 August. Casualties in Sicily numbered 2,310, including 562 dead.

Although Ottawa's intention had been that the Canadians would return to the UK once Sicily was taken, the division then participated in the Italian campaign, going ashore at Reggio Calabria on 3 September. It was soon joined by the 5th Canadian Armoured Division and the 1st Canadian Corps HQ under General Crerar. As part of the Eighth Army, the corps participated in the advance up the Italian boot, most notably in the cracking of the German Bernhardt Line which was anchored at the River Moro on the Adriatic, two miles south of Ortona. The 1st Division had the task of taking Ortona, defended by the 90th Light Panzer Grenadiers and the 1st Parachute Division. It took nearly all of December 1943 and some of the most savage fighting of the war, but Ortona fell on 27 December at a cost of 2,339 Canadian officers and men.

Crerar returned to the UK in March 1944 to take over the First Canadian Army and was succeeded by Lt-General Burns. The 1st Division played a major part in the attack on the Gustav Line on 16 May, and the Canadians, fighting for the first time as a corps, cracked the Hitler Line a week later. The Germans' brilliant defence dissolved into a rout that did not stop until well north of Rome. Then the Gothic Line was breached in late August as the 1st Canadian Corps aimed for Rimini. By September 1944 the Canadians had broken through the Apennine barrier, and by December they stood at the River Senio. Now led by Lt-General Foulkes, the corps waited out an appalling winter—and an eventual transfer to join up with the First Canadian Army in the Netherlands. Almost 93,000 Canadians served in Italy and more than a quarter of them became casualties: 5,399 killed, 19,486 wounded, and 1,004 captured.

In north-west Europe the Canadians played a major part in OVERLORD. The 3rd Canadian Division and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade landed on JUNO Beach, overcoming stiff defences, and some units actually surpassed their D-Day objectives. The first German counter-attacks, launched by the 25th SS Panzer-Grenadier Regiment, then fell heavily on units of the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade on 7 June, and the result was a bloody nose. The untried teenage Germans were better trained than the equally raw Canadians; and German equipment, especially tanks, was better, too. A series of brutal struggles occurred over the next few days, and the Canadians learned everything their training had not taught them: the 3rd Division lost 2,831 casualties in six days. Later during the Normandy campaign the Canadians closed the Falaise pocket and then took the Channel flank of the advance and moved through Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais, and into Belgium. There followed the long and wearing battle of the Scheldt Estuary, the Canadians fighting in the mud on both banks of the estuary. Fierce fighting took place on Walcheren Island, where Simonds demonstrated a high degree of tactical innovation, and in the Breskens pocket. The Scheldt was cleared by 3 November, but 6,367 casualties had been the price.

Not until February 1945 did the First Canadian Army go back into action, a respite that greatly eased the pressures in Canada after the conscription crisis of November 1944. With Crerar now commanding thirteen divisions (including British, American, Dutch, and Polish), it was the largest force ever led by a Canadian; its task was to clear the German forces west of the Rhine. Again the fighting took place in dreadful conditions, the Canadian divisions having to clear the Reichswald and Hochwald forests. By the beginning of March the task was complete, and the First Canadian Army, now including the 1st Corps from Italy, crossed the Rhine on 23 March. The final tasks assigned to the Canadians were to liberate the north-eastern and western parts of the Netherlands and occupy the German coast east to the Elbe, and these were accomplished before the German capitulation. Fatal casualties in north-west Europe in eleven months of operations were 11,336.

(c) Navy

The Royal Canadian Navy's major contribution to the war, and arguably the major Canadian contribution to victory, came in the battle of the Atlantic. The war for the convoys pitted the navy's corvettes, manned by prairie farm boys and Toronto clerks and captained by weekend yachtsmen, against Hitler's U-boats. In February 1940, Ottawa placed contracts for 64 corvettes, the first of 122 to be built in Canada. As soon as the little escorts, initially with a 47-man crew, came off the ways they were crewed, worked up, and thrown into the unequal struggle. Initially, training was below standard, and convoy escorts had to learn their trade on the job. Moreover, few Canadian ships had radar, and when they got Canadian-designed and -built sets, they were inadequate. Naval Service Headquarters in Ottawa always seemed to be slow to get new equipment and armament fitted on RCN vessels.

Still, as resources improved, the quality of the naval escort began to rise. By mid-1941, the RCN had assumed responsibility for all convoy escort in the area of Newfoundland. Thus convoys leaving Halifax were escorted by the RCN to a rendezvous point at which the Newfoundland Escort Force took over. At 35° West, ships of the Iceland Escort Force joined, and at 18° West, British-based ships took responsibility. Air cover, provided by RAF Coastal Command and the RCAF was also complete, except for the air gap in the RCN's North Atlantic sector. Advantage still lay with the U-boats, however, as the fate of Convoy SC-42 in September 1941 demonstrated. The convoy's 64 ships were initially protected by one RCN destroyer and three corvettes; two additional corvettes joined while the convoy was under attack by at least eight submarines. Sixteen merchantmen were sunk while the RCN claimed one U-boat. After-action evaluation concluded that the escort had been too small, that group training was inadequate, and that the fundamentals of anti-submarine warfare had yet to be learned.

It took time for those lessons to be mastered. In 1942 the U-boats moved right into the Gulf of St Lawrence, sinking two escorts and fourteen cargo ships in Canadian waters. Ottawa's panicky response was to close the Gulf to shipping for most of the rest of the war, a measure that enormously increased the strain on Canada's rail network and the port of Halifax. The strain was heaviest, of course, on the navy which seemed to be falling further behind in the struggle. After RN assessments showed in November and December 1942 that four-fifths of merchantmen recently sunk had been lost under RCN escort, the hard decision was taken to pull RCN escort groups out of the North Atlantic for re-training on the easier UK–Gibraltar convoy route.

But now the tide turned, as new technology, improved air cover, and better anti-submarine weapons arrived at last. In March 1943, the RCN took over responsibility in a newly created North–West Atlantic Command, west of the meridian 47° West and south to 29° North and quickly established command of the sea in the area. Of the 33 submarines sunk by the RCN, 22 were destroyed after March 1943.

The navy was also doing more than fighting U-boats. RCN destroyers played a major role in the English Channel before and after the Normandy landings. armed merchant cruisers served in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Normandy invasion. In 1944, the RCN operated two aircraft carriers, except for their air crews, and that year and the next it acquired two heavy cruisers. The idea that the RCN, which had begun the war with under 2,000 men, would man 365 ships by 1945, and be the third largest Allied navy, would have been thought simply incredible a few years before. The navy's fatal casualties numbered 2,024 and 24 ships were lost.

(d) Air Force

The Royal Canadian Air Force sent 48 squadrons and 94,000 officers and men overseas. Tens of thousands served in RAF squadrons, most quite happily, but it took enormous pressure on London from the air minister, C. G. Power, to get substantial Canadian formations created. Power's policy of Canadianization succeeded none the less, and there were soon RCAF fighter wings and a bomber group. Fighter pilots fought in the battle of Britain, in Malta, in the Western Desert campaigns, and in north-west Europe; two transport squadrons flew out of Burma; and a Catalina squadron served notably on Ceylon. The RCAF also had responsibility for home defence, notably on the east and west coasts. It also provided fighter squadrons in support of US forces in Alaska.

But it was in the bomber war that Canada made its greatest operational contribution. The RCAF formed its first bomber squadron in June 1941, entirely from Canadians serving with the RAF. The next year, seven more squadrons took to the air, and on 1 January 1943, No. 6 Group of eight squadrons came into being. Based in Yorkshire, a long distance from their targets, the RCAF Group suffered serious teething problems. It flew older Wellington bombers; it had bad luck, and it lost more than a hundred aircraft and crews between March and June 1943; it suffered in consequence from morale problems. Not until the disciplinarian Air Vice-Marshal ‘Black Mike’ McEwen took over command in January 1944, and not until Lancasters and Halifaxes had replaced the Group's Wellingtons, did matters improve. Thereafter the Canadians played their part well. In all, the group's aircraft flew 41,000 operations and dropped 126,000 tons of bombs, one-eighth of Bomber Command's total. The cost was 3,500 dead; another 4,700 RCAF officers and men died in other Bomber Command squadrons. In all, 17,101 members of the RCAF were killed during the war, a number almost exactly equal to the army's combat losses in the European theatre.

7. Intelligence

Canada's overall share in the secret war was small. In 1939 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided the country's intelligence and security service, and not very effectively. Its Intelligence Branch consisted of some 20 men across the country and two at HQ; all were obsessed with the communist threat and neglected the dangers posed by Nazi and fascist groups, and supporters of Japan. However, in a clumsy fashion happily mitigated by an appeals procedure that allowed for the correction of mistakes, suspects were swept up and interned in September 1939, June 1940, and December 1941.

The armed forces, tiny and undermanned as they were at the beginning of the war, operated a few listening stations in Ottawa to pick up German communications between South America and Hamburg. Military intelligence officers also kept watch, as in British Columbia where 23,000 Japanese-Canadians lived, on ‘suspect’ elements in the population. As the war progressed, the RCN's signals interception work (see signals intelligence warfare) made a substantial contribution to monitoring U-boat communications, and by 1942 its Operational Intelligence Centre in Ottawa had earned sole charge of the Western Atlantic area.

The key player, however, soon became the Department of External Affairs. In 1940, after the military rejected the idea of establishing a cryptographic bureau on grounds of cost, the department, in co-operation with the National Research Council, established the Examination Unit, so-called because it suggested little to the curious, and hid its modest costs under the NRC's budget. The amateurishness of the operation, which never grew very large, instantly became apparent when Ottawa recruited as the Unit's first head Herbert Yardley, the US cryptographer who in 1931 had published a book that compromised American efforts against Japan. Yardley was persona non grata in Washington and London, and the Examination Unit effectively received nothing from Canada's allies until he was dismissed. His successors came from the British deciphering centre, Bletchley Park, and the unit then did useful work in monitoring Vichy French communications from the legation in Ottawa, the embassy in Washington, and French Indo-China, in deciphering Abwehr traffic from South America, and in reading Japanese wireless communications intercepted by a station at Victoria, BC, including messages that implicated Spanish diplomats in Tokyo's spying. In September 1942, the unit created a Special Intelligence Section to analyse the last product; the section did especially well because its head was E. Herbert Norman, a Canadian diplomat who was one of the leading academic experts on Japan. As the unpublished history of the unit noted, ‘Ottawa grew in three years to the stature of London and Washington in those two fields (French and Japanese) on which we have worked’. That was perhaps a pardonable exaggeration.

The Examination Unit put Canada in close contact with US intelligence agencies, British Security Co-ordination in New York, and Bletchley Park. In effect, the war led Canada into the Allied signals intelligence network, and made it a de facto member of its intelligence community from the beginning of formalized Anglo-American co-operation.

8. Merchant marine

In 1939, Canada had a tiny ocean-going merchant fleet: 37 ships averaging under 6,000 tons and manned by 1,450 seamen. There had been no merchant ship construction during the inter-war years, and there were only a handful of yards capable of building a ship of 10,000-ton capacity. All this changed during the course of the war as shipbuilding accelerated dramatically under the control of a crown corporation, Wartime Shipbuilding Ltd. By July 1943, ships delivered and on order numbered 366 of 10,000 tons and 36 of 4,700 tons. By the end of the war, 410 ships had been delivered, their cost being $692 million. Shipbuilding employed 126,000 men and women.

At sea, the government moved to control the use of this new construction. Another crown corporation, Park Steamship Co. Ltd., was formed in April 1942 to supervise and control the shipment of munitions and supplies; its ships were leased to private companies. At its peak, Park received from the yards and operated 176 vessels, six of which were lost. All the remainder were sold or chartered at the end of the war.

During the war 68 Canadian flag carriers were lost, taking 1,148 seamen to their deaths.

9. Culture

Canada produced no great cultural achievements during the war. Canadian literature in French and English was in its infancy, the native theatre scarcely existed, and little music of note was being written. Aside from some armed forces shows, such as the immensely popular Meet the Navy, what stood out were two areas: war art and documentary films.

Canadian war artists, commissioned and attached to units of all three services, produced a splendid array of oils, water-colours, and sketches. Artists such as Bruno and Molly Lamb Bobak, Charles Comfort, and Alex Colville produced some of their most powerful work, portraits that convey the shock of war on the human spirit, and battlefield studies that capture the impact of modern technology on human flesh. It was all too true to be propaganda.

The National Film Board of Canada, created on 2 May 1939 just before the outbreak of war, and led by its commissioner, the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, presented open propaganda with brilliant effect. Its astonishing output, efficiently distributed to every corner of the land, glorified Canadians to themselves at the same time as it tried to explain the causes and purposes of the war in which they were involved. Nor were Canada's allies ignored—for example, films on the Soviets' struggle against Hitler were immensely popular. Fulfilling its commissioner's ideas, the NFB also used its short features with didactic intent to crusade for a new, more progressive world in peacetime. If the ideas were sometimes simplistic, the NFB's films undoubtedly had a major impact on Canadians.

J. L. Granatstein

Bibliography

Granatstein, J. L. , Canada's War: The Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939–1945 (2nd edn., Toronto, 1990).
Stacey, C. P. , Arms, Men and Governments: The War Policies of Canada 1939–1945 (Ottawa, 1970).