With Friends Like These

Those who read the innumerable American historical accounts about the great Anglo-American efforts to win the Second World War may think they understand everything. Britain stood alone against the Nazis after the fall of France and survived financially only because of Lend-Lease from the United States. British soldiers lost battles everywhere until General Bernard Montgomery took over, but the victory over Erwin Rommel in Tunisia, which cleared North Africa, was won by U.S. troops. Then Italy was invaded because Winston Churchill pressed to attack the soft underbelly of Europe, but the Americans did all the fighting — including liberating Rome.

After the Allies invaded Normandy on D‑Day, the attack lost momentum because British and Canadian troops sat in front of Caen while the Americans broke out and almost destroyed the German forces, failing only because the Canadians and the British didn’t close the Falaise Gap. Supplies were short, in part because the Anglo-Canadian forces failed to quickly clear the Scheldt estuary so cargo could reach Antwerp. Montgomery was to blame. Finally, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Patton won the war; the British did little.

On the political side, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were friends, disagreeing about some matters but generally running the war harmoniously while their generals fumed at each other. Yes, FDR tried to get Joseph Stalin onside and create the United Nations, and, yes, he disliked Britain’s colonial policy, but this was a minor hiccup in what Churchill called the Grand Alliance.

This may be the received American version, but it is not the story that Marc Milner tells in Second Front. A professor emeritus at the University of New Brunswick, Milner began his career as a naval historian, writing on the Royal Canadian Navy and publishing an important book on the Canadian role on D‑Day and after. Now he has tackled a bigger subject in this massive history of the Anglo-American relationship from the First World War through to the end of the Second. Very well researched and generally well written, this volume aims to turn the American account on its head. Not incidentally, it also intends to get Canada into the story, which requires that the standard British explanations get poked as well. In other words, this is a first-rate revisionist history. After Milner, no one will be able to tell the old tales without challenge.

The United States entered the First World War in 1917 to ensure that Allied debts and an American victory on the battlefield would let Woodrow Wilson “dictate the peace and reshape the world in ways amenable to American trade, culture and finance.” Roosevelt’s aims two decades later, Milner adds, were “identical.”

There was no great American victory on the battlefield, however. The Germans were finally defeated in the Hundred Days Offensive — from August 8 to November 11, 1918 — by the British Expeditionary Force, in which the Canadian Corps played a leading role. The Americans, led by inexperienced generals unwilling to accept the hard lessons of battle experience, were scarcely present in large numbers until mid-1918. Had the fighting continued into 1919, as all expected, the American role would have mattered greatly, but it did not. Nonetheless, to American public opinion, it was the Yanks who had rescued Britain and France from defeat. That attitude did not sit well with the British nor with their dominions, not least Canada.

That said, American money and loans had kept the Allies going until the German surrender. The Treaty of Versailles called on Germany to pay for much of the Allies’ war costs, which would have been all but impossible. Then the Americans wanted their loans to be repaid, almost completely ignoring the shattered finances of the Allies and the ruination of much of France and Belgium. The unpaid debts infuriated Washington and fostered the deep distrust of Britain that had simmered since the Revolutionary War. Britain also had a large navy that kept its empire in check. In American eyes, colonies were inherently evil (except for their own: the Philippines and Puerto Rico), and Britain’s hold on India was especially infuriating because London kept control of markets there and beyond.

The Great Depression naturally worsened matters. The war debts remained unpaid, and the United States became a high-tariff nation in 1930, when Congress passed the Hawley-Smoot act. Milner quotes a partner of J. P. Morgan who said, “That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.” (There is some resonance with today.)

As the Depression continued and Germany fell to Hitler, public opinion was shaped, according to Milner’s unsparing account, by a right-wing media that worked to ensure that Britain would not drag America into another war. The great villain was the Chicago Tribune, unstintingly isolationist and anti-British. Adding to the mix was Charles Lindbergh’s America First campaign and what Milner sees as effective Nazi propaganda that roused large numbers of supporters. Roosevelt understood the dangers posed by Hitler, but he was hampered by Congress, general isolationism, and a relentless election cycle.

When Britain was in extremis after Dunkirk, FDR was seeking his third term as president and seemingly unable to help the United Kingdom, other than by making a defence arrangement with Canada and swapping aged destroyers for bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. After the election, he pushed Lend-Lease through Congress, but it took months and months for America’s unready industry to produce what Britain wanted. Even then, British needs were in conflict with the U.S. military’s own requirements. Britain was forced to sell off almost all its investments in the U.S. in return for Lend-Lease, and all the while the American media complained.

Once the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor, public opinion focused on the Pacific theatre. Milner’s superb account of the American press — and the ineffectiveness of British propaganda in the U.S. — merits a volume of its own. The British and their Commonwealth troops never could communicate what they were doing in the war — beating Rommel in North Africa, carrying the load in Italy, and holding off the panzers at Caen — to the American public. And if such news did make the papers, it often came across as a condemnation of the British forcing the dominions to bear the brunt of the fighting.

In Milner’s account, Roosevelt’s aims were to see Britain stripped of its colonial possessions (especially India), its sterling bloc destroyed, and its trade so reduced that the U.S. would have a clear run after the war. Like a later president, he failed to understand that Britain (and Canada) needed to sell to the U.S. in order to be able to purchase goods there. As Milner puts it, FDR wanted to win the war, while the British wanted to win the peace. Roosevelt got his way, naively convincing himself that he could work with Stalin and organize what became the United Nations, where the Great Powers could keep the peace. Churchill knew Moscow would swallow eastern Europe and that there would be scant peace after Germany’s defeat. Roosevelt is not the hero here.

Milner’s story plays out in Normandy and in the final push to defeat Germany. The British and Canadians had more troops on the ground than the U.S. for some time, and they took heavy casualties in tying up the panzer divisions. The U.S. media and later films like Saving Private Ryan blamed Montgomery for his “inaction” and for the failure of Operation Market-Garden, which sought to end the war in 1944, while boasting that U.S. troops crossed the Rhine first. Worse yet, Milner argues, U.S. historians have set these misconceptions into stone with hundreds of books, while the British have tried to hide the Canadian contribution.

Despite its remarkably critical role, Canada is not a major player in Milner’s account, but it does receive its share of attention. Mackenzie King had been carving out more autonomy for his nation since he first took office in 1921. Canada gained foreign policy independence with the Statute of Westminster of 1931, and King refused to commit in advance to going to war if Britain did. In September 1939, Canada waited a week until Parliament decided to declare war. Then King rejected British attempts to drag Ottawa into a single Commonwealth foreign policy, and his government sided with the United States in shaping the globe’s postwar economic and trade structure.

Wartime Canada transformed itself into an industrial power, building ships, aircraft, and military vehicles in huge numbers. Ottawa provided significant aid to Britain. By 1943, Milner notes, Canada had produced more for Britain than the Americans, and it gave even more when Ottawa offered a $1-billion gift in 1942 and put its Mutual Aid program into effect the following year, allocating almost another billion.

Militarily, Canadian troops worked under overall British command. However, Andrew McNaughton, our first commander in Britain, insisted on carving out areas of independence, intent on keeping the First Canadian Army together so it could be the “dagger” pointed at Berlin. But the men needed battle experience, so the army was split in two, with half leaving Britain to fight in Italy. McNaughton was replaced by Harry Crerar.

In Italy, the Canadians fought at Ortona and broke the Gothic Line. Like his predecessor, Crerar, who had briefly been in command in Italy, resisted attempts to constrain his country’s military independence and forced Montgomery to recognize that he, if pressed too hard, could appeal to his government. Under him, Canada’s troops fought well in Normandy, especially in the first days of the invasion when they beat back the enemy drive to push them into the sea. Then II Canadian Corps led the drive to slam shut the Falaise Gap, an effort, Milner argues persuasively, that was foiled when Omar Bradley, the American commander, refused to snap the trap closed and allowed 40,000 or more Germans to escape. The Canadians then cleared the Scheldt estuary, crossed the Rhine, and liberated the Netherlands. Canada did its military and financial duty to Britain and victory, and it emerged from the war more independent than it had been in 1939. Nonetheless, it was now much closer to the United States militarily and politically.

Unfortunately, Milner’s fine book deserved better treatment than it received from Yale University Press. There are far too many errors in the spelling of names, typos, and curious factual mistakes: for example, Britain did not pay all the costs of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan at its outset. Milner knows his nation’s history better than that.

It’s not all his fault. Milner reportedly had to cut his manuscript by 500,000 words, and this led to odd errors. An explanation of the British parliamentary system, for example, reads, “The Mackenzie King, of course, was the head of state.” That such confusion — and there is more — slipped through final copy-editing is inexcusable. The author always bears ultimate responsibility for errors, but Milner and his readers have not been well served by his publisher.