How the West Was One

There is no epigraph in Tim Cook’s authoritative history of Canadian-American cooperation during the Second World War, though the prolific historian at the Canadian War Museum could have plucked the final words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.” For when North Americans “summon up remembrance of things past”— the sonnet’s second line — their happiest memories may include the work that William Lyon Mackenzie King, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and millions of unsung soldiers, sailors, aviators, makers of matériel, and others performed before and during the conflict.

Two countries, both alike in dignity, where civil blood made civil hands clean.

They conferred, mostly without conflict. They came together to strategize, often to great effect. They fought alongside each other, at times with astonishing force. They teamed up in Alaska, to ship planes to the Soviet Union at a moment of maximum danger to the Allied cause. They worked together at home, to protect the locks of the St. Mary’s River at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. They mobilized their naval forces, to ward off the U‑boats that in a four-month period in 1942 sank 198 ships. They battled in partnership to recapture two remote Aleutian Islands, owned by the United States but for a time occupied by the Japanese. They made parallel landings on the shores of Normandy, storming in tandem into the shallows and onto the beaches and, with great grit but with great loss, through the breaches in the hedgerows. They shared the horror of the discovery of the dead, the dying, and the pitifully near-dead of the Nazi concentration camps. The band of brothers, as Shakespeare would have put it, shed their blood together. They also grew up together, into modern, mature countries. That was not really the case beforehand.

There is a danger inherent in this Canadian-oriented approach, and it has its analogue in American-oriented accounts of what preceded the fighting of 1939–45. It involves, ironically, the phenomenon of America’s late entry into the First World War, which it joined almost three years after Canada did; it entered the Second World War more than two years after Canada. Just as it is possible to exaggerate the contribution of the United States in the Great War — this is a rampant phenomenon below the border — it is possible to exaggerate the contribution to victory in 1945 of Canada, significant as it was when measured against the country’s population of a little more than 11 million (less than the population of Ohio today) at the start of the war. To his immense credit, Cook does not do this in The Good Allies. His interest in the Canadian contribution does not inflate it. “The Canadians did not win the war on their own,” he writes, “although they were a small if undeniably valuable part of the Allied ground forces.” That strikes just the right balance: a significant, not a surpassing, participation.

Inevitably, the Canadian role is one of the major themes of the book. Now that eighty-five years have passed since the beginning of the conflict, there are whole generations that need to be reminded, as Bill Clinton put it in a tribute to the Allied fighters at the fiftieth anniversary of D‑Day, that “when they were young, these men saved the world.” The Good War, yes, and — let this be said, the revisionists be damned — not for nothing did the American newsman Tom Brokaw confer the title “the Greatest Generation” on these sometimes disparaged combatants and their cohorts.

The other theme here is the struggle, difficult in King’s time as it is in ours, for the maintenance of Canada’s territorial, cultural, and economic integrity — in short, its sovereignty — when the gravity of the situation and the gravitational pull of the United States threatened Canadian independence. To add to the difficulty, the country had a head of state 5,400 kilometres away from Parliament Hill. Indeed, in balancing its political allegiance to the United Kingdom with its geographical proximity to the United States, Canada faced a considerable geopolitical challenge. In retrospect, it did it with aplomb, mostly.

Canada wasn’t yet independent of London, but it managed to retain its independence from Washington — a happy surprise to the many north of the border who feared a repeat of 1775 or 1812 or occasional other threats from the south — even with a firm commitment to a congenial security partnership before and during the war. “Proven time and time again to be reliable in a period of unremitting strain,” Cook concludes, “the Canadians controlled their fears against being assimilated by the US, while contributing more than Washington believed possible.”

For his part, Roosevelt never felt doubt, though King — whose war years brought about a conflation of all the fears, neuroses, and (in both senses of the word) visions of his long tenure atop the greasy pole of Canadian politics — was a prisoner of it. But the two of them forged a strong personal relationship, even more extraordinary because it jelled when the smaller country was at war and the bigger one was not and because the bigger country generally did not bend the relationship to a selfish advantage when it easily could have. Part of this behaviour was good manners; FDR was part of the Dutchess County gentry, and though he was possessed of ample guile, he had been tutored in etiquette. Another part was simple enlightened self-interest: “The American president was mindful that it was in the interest of the United States to have a strong friend on its northern border. And so the two nations came together in the face of a common enemy, surmounting many long-standing national barriers and ingrained prejudices in the collective pursuit of victory.”

It also was true that with Britain weakened and consumed with self-protection, Canada at this stage needed a protector. There was one at hand. That said, the war left both Canada, which fought for six years, and the United States, which battled for four, in enhanced positions, financially as well as diplomatically, free to exploit and export their resources, confident enough to develop their national characters domestically, audacious enough to assert their values worldwide. It is worth noting that the two countries’ global roles — the one as the keeper of a fragile peace during perilous Cold War years, the other as a peacekeeper in crisis areas where proxy fights brewed — grew out of an effort that began simply as protecting the security of North America. It ended up providing the two countries with a future of boundless opportunity and boundless, if unequally distributed, wealth.

Not that the partners of this complicated galliard were entirely selfless.

For Canada, the point was to avoid vulnerability to foreign takeover — by the Axis powers, to be sure, but by the Americans as well. It was a question of assuring or buttressing Canadian independence of character and culture, of thought and action. Besides, if the Americans had to come to the rescue by dispatching military personnel across the border, King worried, they might never leave. For the Americans, Canada was a giant departure lounge for aid to the Allies, a way for Roosevelt to support Great Britain without going to war on its behalf — and to ensure that Canada was not a base for hostile raids on the United States (in retrospect, an amusing reversal of worries).

The grain of sand around which this continental pearl was formed was FDR’s 1938 speech at Kingston, Ontario, when the thirty-second president promised to defend Canada if it were attacked. The security umbrella would be wide enough to cover the Americans’ northern neighbour, which at the time possessed only ten warships and had a giant province, Quebec, determined not to sacrifice its sons for the British Empire. The result was a quiet development of military consultations and, after a 1940 summit in Ogdensburg, New York, the creation of a joint defence board. “Though there was some criticism among American politicians and in the press over linking the neutral US to warring Canada,” Cook writes, “Roosevelt’s response was to frame the agreement by emphasizing how it would assist in the protection of North America.”

I’m not sure I agree with Cook when he suggests that American insistence on charging Britain for armaments arose from congressional sentiment that the war was “an opportunity to put their traditional economic competitor to the screws and bleed the old country of its properties, securities, and gold.” As Cook himself points out, Canada “also had to charge the motherland for goods if it was to keep its industry churning.” Regardless, the United States soon provided Canada with a massive infusion of manufacturing tools, some of which had been ordered by France before its collapse in 1940, to aid its war industries. The result was an explosion of production, especially of ships, the construction of which involved 30,000 workers.

The balance between cooperating with the United States and being co-opted by it became ever more precarious after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, which ended American neutrality. It also added complexity to the Canadian outlook: “The new Japanese threat would test Canadians. In this fight for survival, they were forced to balance security with sovereignty, aware that either military defeat or uninhibited martial cooperation in the pursuit of victory might lead to assimilation by the United States.”

Canada balked at American entreaties to create a unified line of defence against Japan, from Alaska to British Columbia to California, though two Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons were dispatched to the southern end of the Alaska panhandle, the first Canadian troops to be based on American territory. In time, an American base in Newfoundland — not yet part of Canada — developed into a fortress against German invasion, a staging area for European fighting, and a symbol of cooperation, even as it generated awkwardness over the Yankee presence. To preserve security in the West, the two countries undertook the construction of the Alaska Highway through the Yukon.

None of this was easy for King, especially because the prime minister’s role slowly but — agonizingly for him — perceptibly diminished: “For Churchill and Roosevelt, King’s mediation, useful early in the war, was a thing of the past, although the president remained friendly towards King, and Churchill came to despise him less.” Woven throughout Cook’s account is King’s desperate effort to be included with the big boys and to have the (often significant) Canadian contribution acknowledged in campaigns such as the fighting in Sicily. This combination of pride and paranoia was especially evident at the Quebec Conference of 1943: “King retreated to the position of host, and his aides were reduced to looking through the keyhole to see what was happening in the room where decisions were made.”

Canada was important for continental defence, but as the war dragged on, and as the United States was drawn deeper into a two-front global conflict, American strategists “increasingly took Ottawa’s cooperation for granted.” The sting of the August 1942 disaster at Dieppe, with its Canadian death toll of more than 900 —“the pointless carnage of the misguided operation,” in Cook’s characterization — hurt. It stings still, and not only because “Canadians might be forgiven for feeling like pawns in this great power struggle.” (Having written this review shortly after landing at the Moncton airport, situated in Dieppe, New Brunswick, a city named in honour of those sacrificed for folly, I am recently reminded of the wound.)

D‑Day was another story entirely. Canadian forces performed superbly at Juno Beach, and in fact the invasion’s early days included 18,500 Canadians who advanced farther into Europe than did the American and British forces. The first week claimed 2,831 Canadian lives, but, Cook tells us, “the Nazi soldiers found that the little fish had big teeth.” More deaths would follow and so would heavy losses, along with some reversals. “Though the Canadians were never the equal of the British or the Americans in terms of size, importance, or impact, they played an outsized part in freeing the French,” Cook writes. They were indispensable, too, in combat around Antwerp, prompting Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to say, “It has been a fine performance, and one that could have been carried out only by first class troops.” Canada would have a less prominent role in the Pacific theatre, but its uranium was vital to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb.

In page after page of careful prose, Cook explains the dynamics and sets out the details of this special relationship and of the war the two countries fought together. He does so in unusually accessible language, as if he were taking readers in hand and guiding them slowly, carefully, wisely through a forest of thick growth. He shows how the two countries changed the course of the war, how the war changed them, and ultimately how, “navigating between history and geography, heart and head, Canadians were forced to grow up, be good allies, and discover what it meant to be North American.”

The Good War and the good allies, indeed. “Canadians and Americans served together to safeguard North America,” Cook writes, and “once it was protected from invasion and had its defences built up, they jointly took the war to the fascists overseas.” That is a bond worthy of a Shakespearean tribute.