Canadians entered the Hitler war in a more sombre mood than the one that had prevailed in 1914. They had been living with hard times that made the easy patriotism of an earlier generation difficult. They remembered the horrors of the earlier war. That mood translated into the limited war effort that the King government planned in the early months of hostilities, an effort that seemed appropriate for a “phony war” when nothing seemed to happen. But that complacency was shaken when the Battle of Britain opened in 1940, when France fell, and Dunkirk was evacuated. The real war had begun, and its outcome was highly uncertain.
Yet before the King administration could concentrate its undivided attention on the military war, it had first to settle certain issues on the home front. Some of King’s political enemies saw the war as an opportunity to destroy him. He, in turn, saw it as a chance to settle once and for all the fate of his two provincial tormenters, Maurice Duplessis and Mitchell Hepburn.
In October 1939, Duplessis dissolved his province’s legislature and called an election. The issue, he contended, was Quebec’s autonomy and the threat to it from Ottawa in the name of the war effort. Led by Ernest Lapointe, the federal Liberals entered the provincial campaign at full speed. The goal was to defeat Duplessis; their weapon, in addition to a full campaign war chest, was Lapointe’s threat that if Duplessis was returned he and the other Quebec ministers would resign. French Canadians would then be left unprotected in Ottawa. Once again Lapointe repeated his “no conscription” pledge. The Quebec voters responded sympathetically to Lapointe’s appeal, rejecting the Union Nationale, temporarily as events proved, in favour of the provincial Liberals. Ernest Lapointe, who had only a short time to live, had won a decisive victory.
Bomb Aimer, C. Charlie, Battle of the Ruhr: a watercolour (1943) by Carl Fellman Schaefer. In peacetime a painter of haunting rural landscapes, Schaefer served as an official war artist from 1943 to 1946. An rcaf flight lieutenant, he experienced the fury of aerial bombardment at first hand.
The next engagement on the domestic front was in Ontario. There, in early 1940, King’s nemesis, Mitchell Hephurn, won the approval of the provincial Conservatives for a resolution declaring that the federal government was not prosecuting the war effort with sufficient vigour. That was a code word for a conscription call—or so Mackenzie King chose to interpret it. With uncharacteristic decisiveness King struck back, dissolved Parliament, and called a wartime election. With the Tories advocating “national government,” harking back to the Unionist coalition of 1917, the Liberals responded with the national-unity theme and, especially in Quebec, repeated the pledge of “no conscription.” Once again King was victorious and the Opposition parties were humbled. The Liberal Prime Minister was never in a stronger position than the one in which he found himself in December 1940. Politics could now be set aside in favour of organizing the country for war. Or so it seemed.
Recruiting and the planning of wartime production were the first orders of the day. Once again Canadian factories began to hum, and unemployment quickly disappeared. Able-bodied men and women were soon in short supply as previously idle factories turned to the production of Bren guns, military aircraft, tanks, and ships. A deflated economy rapidly reinflated, and commodities that had once glutted the Market fell into short supply. Rationing of sugar, meat, and gasoline was introduced, wages and prices frozen. Most striking, perhaps, was the enormous increase in the number of women who entered the labour force—as they had done in the earlier war. “Rosie the Riveter” in the munitions plants was joined by her sisters in virtually every area of the manufacturing and service industries, earning higher wages than ever before. Union organization, which had stagnated in the 1930s, now flourished both because of labour shortages and because new labour legislation recognized collective-bargaining rights. By 1945 the number of unionized workers in Canada had doubled, and a substantial proportion of the increase was among women.
By 1941 more than 250,000 men and some 2,000 women had joined the army. When victory finally came in 1945, over a million Canadians had seen service in the armed forces. Nearly 750,000 men and women had enrolled in the army, more than
230.000 men and 17,000 women in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and almost
100.000 men and 6,500 women in the Royal Canadian Navy. Casualties were very heavy, especially in the army and the rcaf. Though there were fewer fatal casualties than in the First World War, still 42,042 Canadians lost their lives in the Hitler war.
From the outset of the war the importance of the neutral United States to the outcome of the conflict was obvious. Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7,1941, Canada devoted much diplomatic energy to winning its southern neighbour to the sympathetic support of the Allies. President Roosevelt and his closest advisers never doubted that the Allied cause was the American cause, and that the defence of North America required Canadian co-operation. This belief led to the Ogdensburg Agreement of 1940 establishing the Permanent Joint Board of Defence, followed early in 1941 by the Hyde Park Declaration, whereby financial arrangements were made that allowed Canada to finance the war materials that were being provided for Great Britain under the lend-lease agreement between the United States and Britain. Both these steps were important for the success of the war effort. Both also marked Canada’s passage from the British to the U. S. sphere of influence.
During the first years of the war, the Canadian army remained in Britain, prepared to defend that island against threatened invasion. Once that threat passed the “real” action, for which Canadians on the home front yearned, began. First there was the tragedy of Hong Kong, where Canadian troops had been sent in a futile attempt to defend the territory against the Japanese. (At home Canadian citizens of Japanese origin were evicted from their west-coast homes, their properties confiscated, and the community sent to camps in the interior soon after Pearl Harbor.) In the autumn
Early in 1942, when Japan had joined the war, the Canadian government moved to dispossess and relocate all British Columbians of Japanese origin, even those who were Canadian citizens; families were split up and whatever property they could not carry was disposed of by the government. This was the culmination of decades of anti-Asiatic feeling on the Pacific coast.
Of 1942, the Second Canadian Infantry Division suffered devastating casualties in the ill-fated raid on Dieppe. Next came Sicily and the hard slogging up the boot of Italy, leading to the fall of Rome in the summer of 1944. At last the invasion of France was undertaken, with the First Canadian Army, commanded by General H. D. G. Crerar, playing a major role. But the cost was unexpectedly high. As the casualty lists lengthened and the call for reinforcements grew more insistent, the ghost of conscription returned to haunt Mackenzie King, and to revive the political wars.
World History
