bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988) — Spring 1988 // Printemps 1988, pp. 12–14
by James A. Gibson
On August 31, 1939 I was on late duty in the Prime Minister’s Office in the East Block, as one or other of my colleagues and I had been, in rotation, for several months. The only diversion in an otherwise quiet evening was an encounter with a peace activist (female) who, detained by the RCMP constable at the south door, demanded to see “someone in authority.” I went downstairs, and all unsuspecting, was given an unrestrained tongue-lashing: if war broke out it would be my fault, and I should be imprisoned for negligence and for misleading the people. The verbal tempest subsided, and I resumed my upstairs vigil until I p.m. when (the national news being over), I went home.
I was back again before 6 a.m. in response to an urgent summons from the switchboard operator. The United Kingdom ultimatum to Germany following the invasion of Poland had expired, and these two nations were formally at war. There was then a long day of waiting and wondering: the Cabinet met; Parliament was recalled for September 7; additional provisions under the War Measures Act were proclaimed. An office routine began which, with minor variations, was to last for nearly five years; a group of Foreign Service Officers was “frozen” into civilian occupations for the duration; and there were many weeks of seven-day duty and no regular holidays until I had resigned from the Department.
Two impressions among many are, after nearly 49 years, still compellingly vivid: the day-after-dayness of everyday tasks, which made any long-range perspective an uneasy prospect; and the companion-imperative of getting on with the job and with the ever-present hope that the total war effort could be that of a united Canada.
The broadcast which the Prime Minister made on September 3 (subsequently published under the title “Canada at Britain’s Side”) represented the crossing-over of a considerable height of land in Mr. Mackenzie King’s thinking about the war in Europe. At some time between September I and this broadcast he must in his own mind and conscience have crossed over a divide; and from then until “the hour of victory” (May 8, 1945) he never looked back.
As late as 1936 there was not much about Canadian foreign policy that had been public policy; there had been for at least 10 years a certain continuing pre-occupation with status (as opposed to function), creating, as it were, entitlement without implying involvement. It had more than once happened that the estimates for the Department of External Affairs were considered on the last day of the session in the House of Commons; there was never much sense of direction, nor indeed of urgency, from deliberations in Parliament itself. Mr. Mackenzie King’s attachment to “Parliament-will-decide-in-the-light-of-all-the-circumstancesthen-existing” was perhaps less a policy than an attitude of mind; and he seemed perfectly content to espouse the “back-seat” role for Canada outlined by Escott Reid (in 1937, before he joined the Department of External Affairs). Whatever attractions, outwardly, Mr. King’s interpretation might have seemed to embrace, it lacked an essential element of certainty, without which there could be no finality in any policy.
In 1937 it would perhaps have been easier to say that Canadian policy was not. As early as 1936 (in a speech in the Commons on the lifting of sanctions against Italy, Mr. King had said that two conditions essential to the working of any Plan for “universal compulsion” were “an overwhelming preponderance of power, economic and military… as against any possible combination of aggressors; the second was the certainty that members of the League would be ready to exercise that force when the occasion arose, regardless of where it arose or whether they had any direct interest in the quarrel.”
In remarks in the House of Commons on June 18, 1936. Mr. King had made it clear that neither of these conditions existed but he did not propose any alternative. The “conditions” must have been much in his mind throughout the ensuing three years.
His own ingrained belief was that “the really great people were the conciliators… the Pasteurs would be remembered when the Napoleons and the Hitlers were forgotten.” (A Diary entry in 1938 remarked that Hitler “will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people, and if he is only careful he may yet be the deliverer of Europe”.)
Later that year Mr. King was present at the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva; this was followed by travels in Europe, and after his return to Ottawa he spoke at a public banquet in Ottawa. The main theme appeared to be the scriptural admonition “be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good”; one commentator was heard to remark that this may have been the last occasion on which a Prime Minister of Canada could make a speech of that kind.
In 1937 there was a quickening of the pace of interest and the depth of concern, partly reflected in reaction to the “quarantine” speech made by President Roosevelt in Chicago; partly in the provision for increased spending on defence. Mr. King had been at the Imperial Conference and had visited Germany, which certainly had had a sobering effect on his perception of the possible menace of Hitlerism.
In retrospect there must have been a good deal of rationalization; a quality frequently drawn upon over the next six or seven years. At the Imperial Conference following the Coronation. Mr. King had been at pains to avoid commitments, though the experience seemed to have hardened his resolve, all on the side of caution. There was a continuing reserve, not to say suspicion, about all attempts at “centralization” “, partly originating in plans devised in Britain without consultation in advance, some of which now appear to have been founded on an expectation that Canada would not join in if Britain were involved in a “European” war.
In May of 1938 Mr. King said that the true Canadian task was to build up a genuine democracy at home, to promote sound social relationships, and to develop a tolerance and readiness to work together with other members of the Commonwealth, and in friendly relations with other countries. He added, that the notion that Canadians once in every generation should have to engage in wars of European making was “midsummer madness”
Something of the same mentality entered into responses to developments in 1938 culminating in the Munich agreement and the momentary emphasis on appeasement. The rationalization that was observable at this time may have been no more than political realism: General Maurice Pope has recorded that in talking with Mr. King (in Paris) about events leading up to the Munich agreement the Prime Minister had said that “Canadian public opinion… was not ready to come into the war… had he, in 1938, taken the stand that he took a year later, he would not have had a member of the Government from Quebec, nor one or two of the others from the East.” There had evidently been considerable feeling that a declaration of war in September, 1938, would have meant war in the face of a divided public opinion.
The cable which the Prime Minister sent to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (August 26) nowadays sounds fulsome; there were to be other cables to Mussolini and to the President of Poland. But some time during the following week, as I have suggested, Mr. King passed over the “height of land”. Perhaps, by that time, there appeared to be no alternative.
When Parliament was summoned it was not immediately made clear (the Speech from the Throne did not say so, and in his own main statement on September 7 Mr. King had not said so, though he remembered on the following day), that if both Houses adopted addresses in reply to the Speech from the Throne, this action would be followed by the issuing of a Proclamation declaring the existence of a state of war between Canada and the German Reich. What happened therefore was a deliberate, Parliamentary determination; the formal proclamation was issued on September 10.
From September, 1939 to May, 1940, there was a period of “building-up”. The Ist Canadian Division reached the United Kingdom in December. The agreement constituting the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was signed, also in December, and the production of training and operational aircraft, as well as of ships and many materials of war was gradually and, later, spectacularly increased. Financial aid to Britain was authorized after extended negotiations.
One sidelight on the impact of conditions of war is represented by Mr. King’s public statements and broadcasts.
Between September 3, 1939 and July 10, 1940, he made 15 broadcasts in Canada; one in the United States; 13 extended statements in the House of Commons; one major address in Winnipeg, and various other statements to the press (this was still before television), and one Convocation Address at Princeton University, where he received an honorary degree.
If one measures these statements against a chronology of main events, it becomes apparent that there were insistent pressures – pressures which in my own experience intensified the day-after-dayness of everyday requirements. Parliament met towards the end of January, 1940, but was dissolved after one afternoon session; part of Mr. King’s election strategy was to seek an unqualified mandate for the prosecution of the war effort. The result of the General Election (March, 1940) gave the Liberal Party a majority of 117 over the combined Opposition — the largest ever to that point — and for the first time since 1917 a party had a majority of the popular vote. The Government victory effectively put an end to any likelihood of a “national government, which had been, for the moment, part of the Opposition compaign : strategy; and it meant that for five years ahead there would be a clear run in terms of Parliamentary “elbow-room.”
In a matter of weeks the “phantom war” had given place to concern and urgency, with Nazi penetration into Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and the capitulation of the Government of France. My own concerns, as a Foreign Service Officer on secondment, became increasingly determined and shaped by the day-to-day progress of hostilities on many fronts. Though I tried, on first arriving at the top floor of Laurier House (May 15, 1940), to provide some semblance of order within a considerable accumulation of “war records” the task was not easy, partly because it was difficult to determine what the Secretary of State for External Affairs actually wanted, needed, or would be satisfied with. The volume of material arriving daily meant that he rarely would have been able (with Cabinet and House of Commons responsibilities alone) to read it; even careful précis might go unread for days at a time; and if Mr. King chose to lock up documents at random there might be no early prospect of recovering and filing them. We attempted “colour-coding” to try to create some priority order, with only indifferent success. Learning on the job, we became more expert in timing, so that frequently we could obtain more decisions between 6:10 and 6:25 on Saturday afternoons than at any other time in the week.
In the end, one had to develop a sense of the mood of the day, sometimes of the hour, and to be vigilant accordingly. The Prime Minister was not apt to seek advice from Third Secretaries (wartime usuage inhibited substantive promotions): I would occasionally be asked what I thought about a particular matter, without any certainty that what I could reply would have any useful application.
One must add that the business of government, so far as decisions emanated from Laurier House, did proceed; and after a low point (in 1941) the process of securing decisions was markedly improved. It was sometimes worth the effort to concentrate on one or two “star” items and to deal lightly with the generality. A good deal of thought and patient effort had gone into the drafting of papers originating in the Department of External Affairs, and even though Mr. King might have no personal acquaintance with quite senior officers of the Department he took note of and acted on considered recommendations transmitted through the Under-Secretary.
The Prime Minister nevertheless maintained a considerable reserve, not to say discretion, to act or not to act on specific proposals. This perhaps arose because he maintained throughout the war a not-always-disguised suspicion of the motives of Whitehall (though the Dominions Office always ranked higher in his estimation than the Foreign Office or the Treasury or the survival of the Imperial Defence Committee). For more than 25 years — certainly since the Chanak incident – he had been opposed to any “centralization”; and at successive Imperial Conferences between 1923 and 1937, he had resisted any suggestion of an “Empire” posture collectively to link the Dominions. He thought some permanent officials in London took too much for granted, either that Canada would be a participant in a war not of her own making, or that whatever war effort might ensue might be submerged into a United Kingdom effort; and it must be added that some British participants in early negotiations (1939) were so insensitively superior that Mr. King took an immediate dislike to them, and said so.
There were considerable shifts in outward attitude after May, 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister in Britain. As early as 1904 Mr. King had expressed an unwillingness to meet the younger visiting politician in Ottawa; under wartime conditions nearly 40 years later he had to arrive at some working accommodation and position of co-operation. It was never an even-handed friendship; whether he acknowledged it or not Mr. King was the inferior; and especially after the United States entered hostilities (December, 1941) there was less and less room for any considerable Canadian share in the overall strategic direction of the war.
Writing nearly 50 years after the event, any judgment of Mr. Mackenzie King’s personal involvement in the events at which he was at the centre is bound to be subjective. It might reasonably be asked, given the circumstances of 1937 through 1945, and confronted by major problems of waging war, whether any man, or any combination of men, could have dealt with them so well and in a way so generally acceptable to the great majority of the people. In Mr. King’s case, in my own observation, there was a curious blending of the reflective and the ruthless, of the intuitive and the rational, of the peaks of aspiration and achievement and the valleys of disappointment and frustration. There was, as well, the loneliness and the anonymity of direction; the white heat of intensity from which decisions sometimes emerged and, only infrequently, the compensations of ordinary livelihood. Amid all the caution and reserve there were occasional flashes of what we would now recognize as “national identity”; and if in the end the Prime Minister supposed that the overall direction of the war effort was what a majority of the people of Canada of that generation wanted, for the time being he may well have been right.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988) — Spring 1988 // Printemps 1988, pp. 12–14. Read the rest of this issue →
