13

Appalling Mischief

In mid-July 1937 when Mackenzie King returned to Canada from his two months in Europe, he, like many politicians before and after him, gave no impression that he was pleased to be back in provincial Ottawa after his giddy excursion into international affairs. As he saw it, he had played a central, even divinely ordained, role in keeping peace in Europe. With reluctance, he took up the domestic political challenges that awaited him, dreading in particular controversies with Premier Duff Pattullo in British Columbia who promised something called “socialized capitalism”; with the newly elected Social Credit premier of Alberta, William Aberhart; with his brash nemesis in Ontario, the Liberal premier, Mitchell Hepburn; and in Quebec with the controversial nationalist premier, Maurice Duplessis. Canada, along with other developed countries, was gradually emerging from the economic depression that had, inter alia, overwhelmed Bennett’s Conservative government, but continuing high levels of unemployment and widespread western drought compounded persistent fiscal differences among the provinces and between them and Ottawa. And to complicate further the sour federal-provincial relations, a national election loomed in the autumn of 1939 (held, in fact, in 1940).

Early in 1938 foreign and domestic affairs coincided briefly with a bizarre incident in Canadian-German relations that surfaced unexpectedly in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The Montreal Gazette reported on 2 December 1937 that a Dutch company was discussing with the Consolidated (later the Consolidated Bathurst) Paper Company the possibility of buying the whole of Anticosti Island – larger than Prince Edward Island – and building a sulphite pulp mill there. In fact, the Dutch company was soon found to be a front for unspecified German interests, which had a team of engineers and technicians already on the Quebec island. Stories began to appear in newspapers, prompting a question in the House of Commons on 14 February 1938 whether Canada was protecting its sovereignty over the island and in the Gulf of St Lawrence.1 King returned a bland affirmative, but on 24 March Maxime Raymond warned the House that the German engineers on Anticosti had been sent “to secure raw materials or to establish a military base: one is as alarming as the other.”² After King replied that he would look into the matter, the German consul general in Montreal provided reassurances to him and to the now concerned premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis. More importantly, Göring wrote to his friend King, confirming that the technical team’s visit was “purely commercial,” intended to develop a dependable source of pulpwood for Germany. In the House of Commons on 17 May, the CCF carried forward its questioning, but with no result.³ Finally, on 24 June, six months after the first public reports, a long, rambling discussion in the House led by Bennett effectively ended the Anticosti incident, with King finally stating that Quebec and Ottawa had agreed that the island would not be sold to a foreign government.⁴ The team thereupon returned to Germany and the “Dutch” option lapsed, but there remain questions about the incident that have not been answered. The ragged way in which the discussions in the House played out suggests that the prime minister may have offered the leaders of the two opposition parties information from the RCMP or other confidential sources on the agreed understanding that it would not be made public in the House or otherwise, a practice occasionally followed when it is believed that any such disclosure would be contrary to the public interest.

From troublesome domestic matters King could still find diversion in exhilarating foreign affairs, at least intermittently. In early 1938 Franklin Roosevelt proposed an international conference to which the major powers, including Germany and Italy but not Japan, would be invited to discuss their grievances. The strength of American isolationists meant that no such conference could be held in the United States itself or at Geneva; Roosevelt favoured the Azores. Chamberlain, however, replied to a preliminary enquiry with no enthusiasm wherever it was to be held, believing that he could achieve more by his personal diplomacy. “What a fool Roosevelt would have looked if he had launched his precious proposal. What would he have thought of us if we had encouraged him to publish it, as Anthony [Eden] was so eager to do? And how we too would have made ourselves the laughing stock of the world.”⁵ It appeared most unlikely at the time that Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler would accept any such invitation, but as Churchill later speculated, Roosevelt’s proposal, if it had been accepted, might at least have had the effect of involving the isolationist United States in the threatening scene of Europe and subjecting Germany and Italy, whether or not they attended, to closer international scrutiny. “That Mr Chamberlain, with his limited outlook and inexperience of the European scene, should have possessed the self-sufficiency to wave away the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic leaves one … breathless with amazement. The lack of all sense of proportion, and even of self-preservation … is appalling.”6 Churchill’s rhetoric aside, Roosevelt’s idea remains as one of the “what-ifs” of the interwar era.

In the spring of 1938, war in Europe appeared increasingly likely. Chamberlain told the House of Commons that “At the last election it was still possible to hope that the League might afford collective security. I believed it myself. I do not believe it now … we must not try to delude ourselves and, still more, we must not try to delude small weak nations into thinking that they will be protected by the League against aggression … when … nothing of the kind can be expected.”⁷ Whether Chamberlain had Austria or Czechoslovakia or both in mind he of course did not say. In Ottawa King pursued his favourite theme of how difficult it was to govern Canada. It was almost always better to do nothing than to attempt to lead or to persuade. He cautioned his fellow Canadians against talk of war. As he told the House of Commons in one of his now more frequent references to external affairs, a war in Europe “would bring out deep, in some cases fundamental, differences in opinion, [it] would lead to a further strain upon the unity of a country already strained by economic depression and the consequences of the last war and its aftermath.”⁸ No word here of the horrors of war. King was as usual harping on the threat of internal discord, leading him to pursue the lowest common denominator in foreign policy. He told Lester Pearson that “in the course of human history, far more had been accomplished by preventing bad actions than by doing good ones.”⁹

From the Spanish Civil War, which had begun in July 1936, King kept himself and Canada as far away as possible, but it was never absent as an element in continuing British post-Abyssinian efforts to conciliate Italy and wean it away from the embrace of Germany. Baldwin spoke of Chamberlain’s government as being resolutely determined not to be distracted, not to be dragged into the conflict, not to antagonize Mussolini or Hitler by supporting the Spanish republic. King in his silence had an additional reason: national unity. He avoided speaking about the war publicly, knowing that French-Canadian and Roman Catholic sentiment, led in part by Cardinal Villeneuve of Quebec, was on the side of the fascist general Francisco Franco, the latest would-be dictator to arrive on the European scene, against the allegedly communist-dominated Republican government. In one of its many editorials on the Spanish Civil War, L’Action catholique forecast that “[Franco’s] victory will be that of Christian civilization against Marxist savagery.”10 The papal delegate in Ottawa described Franco’s forces as an “army of heroes justly called Christ’s militia.”¹¹ Quebec had many more votes than the small number of active pro-Republican Canadians, but King, when forced to say something about Spain, again pursued a dual policy. He shunned the Republicans for Quebec’s satisfaction while attempting to placate English Canada by copying the same “keep out” domestic legislation that London and Paris had enacted. Britain had stood aside from the war partly from Chamberlain’s ill-founded conviction that Spain would only be a distraction, however vicious, in his broader efforts at appeasement. In an attempt to appear even-handed, Britain made it illegal for its citizens to volunteer or to provide military assistance to either side. King was gratified and promptly introduced almost identical legislation in early 1937. The Foreign Enlistment Act and amendments to the Customs Act together militated against Canadian involvement before Franco, with the indispensible help of Italy and Germany, ended the three-year civil war in March 1939 by finally taking Madrid.

In Ottawa there was no real debate about either the restrictive legislation or the Spanish Civil War itself. Parliament, following the lead of the prime minister, stayed out of it, aside from the occasional comment from Quebec that Canada was well rid of communist and other volunteers who should not be allowed to return to their homeland. Maxime Raymond, the Quebec MP who in time was to become one of the most outspoken anti-conscriptionist nationalists, represented many of his colleagues when he welcomed Canadian volunteers going to Spain “to enlist in the Red Army … it will rid us of those undesirable people provided that they do not return here.”¹²

Italy had placed whole divisions of soldiers and Germany squadrons of aircraft at the disposal of Franco, partly to put pressure on France to remain more or less passive. For Germany, the Spanish Civil War also served as a testing ground for modern weapons. Soviet Russia’s aid to the Republicans prolonged the civil war, but in the continuing absence of assistance from Britain and France the Republicans were ultimately doomed. About all of this, King said nothing. Yet even among isolationists the conflict had an inconvenient way of intruding on the government’s time. Canadian volunteers, to a total of 1,200, some confirmed communists, some anti-fascist democratic idealists, had managed to make their way to Spain to fight in the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau brigade as part of the larger pro-Republican International Brigade. The Canadian surgeon and communist Norman Bethune, who provided a much-needed blood transfusion mobile unit to the Republicans, was convinced that “democracy will survive or die” in Spain. For King, however, the Spanish Civil War was just that: a civil war for Spaniards alone. Certainly he did not take the occasion of his meeting with Hitler to recommend that everyone should, like Britain, France, and Canada, keep out. The civil war remained a problem for British-Italian relations, in which London spent what little influence it still had in Rome in attempting to induce Italy to remove its large forces from Spain, giving Hitler additional evidence that London would go to any length to avoid involvement in foreign disputes. Britain did, however, benefit in one way from the Spanish Civil War: the Government Code and Cypher School (later at Bletchley) began its successful reading of military operational code by breaking the Italian navy’s use of a commercial version of Enigma.

On 6 February 1938, Mackenzie King wrote a letter of congratulation to Ribbentrop on his appointment as foreign minister, following his two energetic if erratic years as ambassador in London. King regretted that “very few will write him and that a note of congratulations, expressing faith in his purpose of good will. England and Germany might … in the balance save a world war … Henderson has been helping towards bringing both countries together.”13 A week later King set out his own claims for having played a central role in preventing a world war. He reflected complacently on “my own efforts for peace between classes and nations which, if followed, would have saved the world today,” yet he offered parliament no account of those frustrated efforts at world salvation.¹⁴ To a question from a CCF member about his visit to Hitler, he curtly replied, “The interchange of views and information which took place was of a nature which it is not the practice to disclose.”¹⁵ A Conservative member was not surprised at King’s dusty response. “In the past it has been extremely difficult to get a discussion of foreign affairs … It has been the practice to bring in the estimates of the Department of External Affairs near to the close of the session … Year after year about the only opportunity that the House has had of discussing foreign or external affairs has been on the estimates, and they have come in very late.”16

On 20 February 1938, King pondered again the continuing international turmoil after reading the leaves in his teacup. He told his diary that he was convinced that a major speech that Hitler was scheduled to make the same day “will be firm but conciliatory for peace and I believe that ultimately all will be well … my letter to Von Ribbentrop … may have [tipped] the balance … I expressed faith in Hitler and his purpose being peace, with fearless assertion of what he believed to be justice to the German peoples. My letter would arrive just at the right moment.” In the evening, King with great satisfaction duly described Hitler’s “fine speech [as] indicating real leadership in an appalling European situation.”¹⁷

As King reviewed what he regarded as his crucial role in promoting Anglo-German reconciliation, Joan Patteson telephoned him to say that she had heard on her husband’s radio that Anthony Eden had resigned as foreign secretary, disagreeing with Chamberlain over, among many other things, Chamberlain’s inept handling of Roosevelt’s peace initiative and his continuing efforts to appease Mussolini. Public reaction in Britain toward Mussolini had become decidedly negative. It would presumably have been even more so if the unorthodox role of Austen Chamberlain’s widow in Italian-British relations had been widely known. Temporarily resident in Rome, she wrote a private letter to Mussolini in an attempt to persuade him that her brother-in-law, Neville Chamberlain, was ready to put aside the Abyssinian imbroglio in the interest of greater mutual understanding. King, who had condemned Eden as the manipulator of Riddell and the League of Nations itself, welcomed his resignation: “Chamberlain and the cabinet are not favourable to League of Nations control … [and] are looking to more direct relations with Germany and Italy, which … is all to the good.”¹⁸ But King ignored the fact that Eden’s departure contributed to the questions that gradually gathered round Chamberlain’s premiership. Eden’s less than clearly articulated reasons for resigning remained a handicap if he had ambitions to unseat Chamberlain. A.J.P. Taylor for one was not impressed. “Eden, the man of strong words, acquired retrospectively a mythical reputation as a man who favoured strong acts.”

On 21 February, the prime minister appointed Lord Halifax, lord president of the council, as foreign secretary, although some cynics wondered why he had bothered since Chamberlain saw foreign policy as a one-man band and treated the cabinet like lap dogs. Halifax’s qualification as foreign secretary, after a distinguished if occasionally controversial public career in India as well as in Britain, did not impress Duff Cooper, among others. The francophile first lord of the admiralty, wrote,

I am afraid Halifax will be a bad Foreign Secretary. He knows very little about Europe, very little about foreigners, very little about men. He is a great friend of Geoffrey Dawson [the imperialist keep-out-of-Europe editor of the Times] whose influence is pernicious, and I think he is also a friend of Lothian’s [sent by Chamberlain to Washington as ambassador on the eve of the war], who is always wrong. Nancy Astor [the American wife of Lord Astor] is to give a reception for him which is very foolish of him to allow her to do as she and her friends [the so-called Cliveden set] are justly suspected of being pro-German.19

Noel Annan, the lively chronicler of the 1930s, brought Nancy Astor (whom King had first met in London in 1923), Lord Halifax, and the Cliveden set together in a rather different way: “our generation thought her typical of the ruling class: numbed by the fear of communism and hypnotised like rabbits by the fascist stoat. For that was what Halifax appeared to be to the young – not a noble stag at bay but a bewildered, timorous rabbit … insight was not Halifax’s strongest suit. When [in 1940] Churchill felt strong enough to sack him as Foreign Secretary and to persuade him to become ambassador in Washington, Halifax recorded his ‘lively feeling of gratitude to Providence, operating through Churchill …’ His wife, far more fly, knew exactly why Churchill offered him the job” – to get him out of the way.²⁰ Others, however, were not so certain of the shortcomings of the new foreign secretary when he gradually became more skeptical of the dictators than the prime minister. It was he who in 1939 stood up to Chamberlain on such a fundamental question as the guarantee to Poland.*

Amid the international turmoil of 1938, King remained certain of one thing: his favourable impression of Hitler. He wanted desperately to believe in him, the latter-day pilgrim who had become his guide. Nine months after his visit to Hitler, King was especially gratified that “it is no mere chance that I have met him … It is part of a mission … He is a pilgrim … his love of music, of Wagner Opera … strange this bringing together of Hitler and [John] Bunyan, both … meant to guide me at this time to the purpose of my life … which I believe to be to help men to know the secret of the path to peace.”21 He concluded yet again that his letter of congratulation to Ribbentrop of 6 February had somehow – he did not explain how – played a key part in the Führer committing himself to peace and justice for the German people. Equally, in commenting on what he saw as Chamberlain’s wise policy of working for friendly relations with Italy and Germany, he had convinced himself that his visit to Berlin “was the beginning of drawing together … of [Britain and Germany].”²² Chamberlain, however, in a letter of 13 March, reflected his belated and contrary conviction: it had become clear “that force is the only argument that Germany understands … a visible force of overwhelming strength backed by determination to use it.”²³ A week later he added, “You have only to look at the map to see that nothing that France or we could do could possibly save Czecho-Slovakia from being overrun by the Germans if they wanted to do it … Czecho-Slovakia … would simply be a pretext for going to war … That we could not think of unless we had a reasonable prospect of being able to beat her [Germany] to her knees in a reasonable time and of that I see no sign. I have therefore abandoned any idea of giving guarantees to Czecho-Slovakia or to France in connection with her obligations to that country.”²⁴ Of all this King sought no discussion. “The least that is said means the least being stirred up in the Commons and in the Press and in the minds of the people.”²⁵

At the same time, and with Quebec always in mind, King stayed as clear as he could of the League of Nations, the Spanish Civil War, and the persecution of Jews by the Nazis intent upon a “Jew-free” Germany. The Jewish Congress of Canada could be ignored, its membership being small, its influence still limited and most decidedly unwelcome to Quebec. On 29 March, King recorded in his diary a rare reference to the deteriorating plight of Jews in the Third Reich, a plight that had been briefly discussed in cabinet that same day. With Congressional elections, as always, pending in the United States, Roosevelt, at the urging of Jewish organizations and others, had invited twenty Latin American and nine European countries and Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to attend a conference on refugees at Evian on the Swiss-French border (Switzerland had declined to be host). Its purpose was to encourage the invited governments to admit more – or any at all – German and Austrian (largely Jewish) refugees. Unknown to Ottawa, Washington privately described the initiative as intended “to have immigration laws liberalized.”26 In his diary King wrote,

A very difficult question has presented itself in Roosevelt’s appeal to different countries to unite with the United States in admitting refugees from Austria, Germany, etc. That means, in a word, admitting numbers of Jews. My own feeling is that nothing is to be gained by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one. That we must be careful not to seek to play the role of the dog in the manger so far as Canada is concerned, with our great open spaces and small population. We must nevertheless seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood, as much the same thing as lies at the basis of the Oriental [immigration] problem. I fear we would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted numbers of Jews. Also we would add to the difficulties between Provinces and the Dominion [i.e., between Quebec primarily and Ottawa].²⁷

Little came of Roosevelt’s initiative, other than he could now say during pending domestic elections that he had tried. The United States would not increase the numbers of refugees admitted annually, although it would allow those already in the United States on visitor visas – an estimated 15,000 – to remain (among them Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein). But Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, was convinced that “The more intelligent and thinking people in the country looked upon these racial and religious occurrences [in Germany] more as a matter of temporary abnormality.”²⁸ On 6 June 1938, after Canada had reluctantly accepted Roosevelt’s invitation of late April to Evian, Frederick Blair, the director of immigration, sent instructions to the advisory officer at the League of Nations in Geneva, Hume Wrong, who would represent Canada at the conference, along with the Canadian commissioner of European immigration based in London. Blair pointed out that Canada had in the previous six years accepted in proportion to its total population more Jewish refugees than the United States under its quota system.²⁹ He added, however, “speaking generally, refugee immigration has never been popular here and it presents problems beyond that of ordinary immigration.” On 11 June the prime minister agreed, reviewing without comment much of the instructions to be sent to the permanent delegate, but he did add that the government “deeply and genuinely sympathizes with the victims of oppression and will be prepared to consider, as part of any general settlement, to apply its regulations in the most sympathetic and friendly fashion which may be practicable in the circumstance.”30 In other words, as in the case of oil sanctions at the League of Nations, Canada would not take an initiative but would go along with the majority. Skelton was even more wary than King of the Evian conference, since it could increase domestic pressures to do something for Jewish refugees. Both were aware from Lapointe as well as from Quebec newspapers, petitions, and other sources that the province was strongly opposed to any dilution of the stringent refugee policy – or the admission of refugees at all. Lapointe, fully aware of the electoral challenge facing the provincial Liberal Party from Duplessis’s Union Nationale, saw yet another justification for opposing Jewish refugees

As early as September 1933, only nine months after Hitler had become chancellor, the Ligue d’action nationale had reflected the thinking of many Québécois still mired in economic depression. The Ligue, successor to L’Action canadienne française of which the controversial Abbé Groulx had been a director, sent a resolution to Bennett’s government: “That the frontier of Canada should be completely closed … at this time of general unemploy ment … [and] that the Government of Canada should remain completely inflexible in the face of whatever Jewish pressure, national or worldwide … a group [i.e., Jews] which is accused by Germany of Marxism and communism … could not be a useful element for Canada, being on account of its faith, its customs and its unassimilable character, a source of division and dispute.”³¹

The director of the Immigration Branch, housed unobtrusively in the Department of Mines and Resources, was one Frederick Blair, a long-serving official who “mirrored the increasingly anti-immigration spirit of his times. He believed, said one observer, ‘that people should be kept out of Canada instead of being let in.’” Pressure on the part of Jewish people to get into Canada, he wrote, “has never been greater than it is now.”³² Whether Blair, in preparing the instructions for the delegation to the Evian conference in consultation with Skelton, was recommending what he believed the prime minister wanted to hear in light of the anti-Semitism primarily but certainly not exclusively in Quebec, or whether he was expressing his own deep-seated conviction that the prohibition against Jewish refugees was always the right policy to recommend to a particularly receptive prime minister can be left to those who have pursued with understanding that dolorous subject.33 What is inconvertible is that King was ultimately responsible for Canada’s pursuit of an anti-refugee immigration programme.

At the Evian conference, the chief American delegate – a steel tycoon – limited himself to the declaration that the United States would not increase its already filled German-Austrian quota, but aired Roosevelt’s stillborn idea that a homeland for Jews might be found in one or more of the former German colonies in Africa or in the French colony of Madagascar. The Dominican Republic made a dramatic if self-serving offer of entry for 100,000 refugees, but only 757 had arrived by the beginning of the war. In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht, 9–10 November 1938, which drove many Jews to seek refuge abroad, Britain took many more children. Australia, however, said that it was free of “racial problems” and intended to remain so (although at the end of the year it reversed itself and announced its readiness to receive 15,000 refugees). Since, as had been widely anticipated, no “general settlement” emerged at Evian, King, fearing national divisions and even riots, did not elaborate on what if anything he intended to do. He felt no need to explain what he had meant by applying immigration regulations “in the most sympathetic and friendly fashion.”³⁴

On 20 February 1938, the same day that Eden resigned as foreign secretary, King welcomed news of Chamberlain’s decision to discuss problems directly with Hitler, not through the League of Nations. This “is all to the good … The League of Nations is responsible for most of the situation as it is today. It is a second government trying to control the British and other governments.”³⁵* In the late 1930s, the dismissal of the League as a disaster had become a recurring leitmotif in his diary. Having made up his mind about its hopelessness, “the only real difference of opinion he had ever had with [Ernest] Lapointe was with regard to Canada’s acceptance of the presidency of the League Assembly.” King had opposed it on the ground that “it would stimulate League thought in Canada, tend to lead us more deeply into League affairs and, possibly, foreign commitments.”36 In parallel, Chamberlain told his diary that “the League had failed to stop the [Abyssinian] war or to protect the victims and had thereby demonstrated the failure of collective security.”³⁷ King could not have agreed more, but he never set out in any reasoned way his now unending opposition to the League or what he thought should replace it – if anything. In response to a comment of M.J. Coldwell of the CCF that “oil sanctions ought to have been agreed to,” King responded briefly that they would have led to a war.

With regard to the crippled state of the League, King comforted himself with the thought that as far as communication between national leaders was concerned, there should be “an understanding between minds in different parts of the world without any exchange of correspondence. Certainly that has been the case between Roosevelt and myself … equally the case with Hitler and myself on what he, at heart, has mostly in mind. It relates itself also in a way to sharing in ‘Cosmic Consciousness.’”³⁸ Why “Cosmic Consciousness” was superior to the League of Nations, King did not explain. Its unspecified shortcomings and failings he contrasted unfavourably with the superiority of his own undefined initiatives. The League became a ready scapegoat for his own misjudgments, frustrations, and insecurities. If he had not had the League at hand to castigate at the time of the Abyssinian and Sudetenland crises, he could not have escaped acknowledging that Hitler and Mussolini were much worse fellows than he ever admitted, at least until the beginning of the Second World War itself.

Despite Hitler’s obvious designs on Austria, which Mussolini had earlier valued as a useful buffer state with Nazi Germany, Il Duce entered into a singularly ill-advised Rome-Berlin axis during Hitler’s visit to Rome in May, leaving the French government even more uneasy. In central and Eastern Europe, the local dictatorships offered France no real military counterbalance to German aggression in the West, especially when Stalin’s longer-term ambition was to replace such authoritarian regimes of the right by yet more authoritarian regimes of the left. Left- and right-wing street clashes in Paris and the provinces only increased France’s uncertainties and sense of vulnerability. As King continued to fret about the League of Nations, the German army marched into Austria on 12 March 1938, triggering the Anschluss or merger that had been long and clearly forecast by Hitler. King recorded with astonishment, “The amazing fact of this whole situation is that it is all in complete accord with the book which Hitler himself has written, entitled Mein Kampf.”39

In his diary King kept on grumbling about the League of Nations, instead of reflecting on what Hitler’s ultimatum to the Austrian chancellor meant for the wider world. If the vicious Spanish Civil War was in his view no one’s business but Spain’s, it was no great jump to the conclusion that what was going on in Nazi Germany was no one’s business but Germany’s. King made no public and little private comment on the Anschluss, other than to record that he had felt all along that the annexation of Austria was inevitable. After all, Austrians spoke German, they were part of the Volk, and Hitler himself had been born in Austria. A plebiscite in Austria would, it was everywhere expected, reflect a widespread desire to join the now more prosperous Third Reich. But Lester Pearson, still secretary at Canada House in London, was at one with those such as Leopold Amery who were greatly concerned at the sudden and unilateral overturning of the balance of power in Europe. Pearson recalled, “Though I had for some years felt we should be patient and understanding about the Nazis because Germany would throw off this infection in due course, my views changed after the take-over of Austria. I became convinced that a showdown with Hitler was now inevitable and that if he did not back down (which he was unlikely to do), war could not be avoided. In Ottawa I was considered something of an alarmist.”⁴⁰

King was not alone in regarding the Anschluss as a natural development. “Only the wisdom of not attempting to meet force with force but yielding to an overpowering force has saved war between Austria and Germany today,” a war in which Britain might well have become entangled and which would certainly have overturned the balance of power in Europe. King followed with a non sequitur. Sounding as if he were making a determined effort to convince himself, he dictated that “the sooner the League breaks up altogether as an instrument seeking peace through collective security, the better it will be for mankind. If it had never existed, we would not have had the situation we have in Europe today … it is just appalling the mischief that the League has wrought. It has been a millstone to bring down country after [unspecified] country who [sic] remains adhering with mere pretence to its Covenant … I have the satisfaction of knowing that I spoke out two years ago, at Geneva itself. Had a similar course been taken by Britain whose Ministers really felt as I did but were too frightened to speak for [domestic] political reasons … even now the situation would be very different than it is.” Undeterred he added, “a European war means the end of our present day civilisation in Europe … the break-up of the British Empire … That is too big a price to pay for any attempt to brook the actions of dictators in central Europe … Better let freedom assert itself from within as is the rational way rather than to seek to impose it by force of arms … That is where the League has made its appalling mistake; it was on a false basis from the start.”41 This from King who three years before had called on his fellow Canadians to stand four-square behind the League of Nations, the cornerstone of Canadian foreign policy.

The governor general, the novelist John Buchan, who had arrived in Ottawa at the end of 1935 as Lord Tweedsmuir, was soon convinced that “Canada has never yet thought out her position vis à vis the Empire and international affairs and is monopolised with her own domestic problems … one of my chief tasks is to make Canada a little more conscious of her international obligations.”⁴² But to his sister in England he appeared more relaxed. “I do not myself quite see what there is to fuss about. Austria will be much more comfortable, economically, under Germany’s wing. That should have been done long ago in the Versailles Treaty. The chief trouble will be if there is any real threat to Czechoslovakia; but there again, I think the frontier should be rectified. Surely the Versailles agreement was the most half-witted thing ever perpetrated.”⁴³ Certainly the prime minister tacitly agreed with the governor general’s detached views, as did many in London.

In the wake of the Anschluss, King recorded in his diary that “I am convinced he [Hitler] is a spiritualist – that he has a vision to which he is being true … his devotion to his mother – that Mother’s spirit is … his guide and no one who does not understand this relationship – the worship of a highest purity in a mother – can understand the power to be derived therefrom or the guidance … the world will yet come to see a very great man – a mystic, in Hitler.” King again extolled the simplicity of the Führer’s origins and tastes compared with the corruptions of the “smart set,” repeating that he “will rank someday with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people, and … the deliverer of Europe.”⁴⁴ For Chamberlain’s passive reaction to the Anschluss, King sent hyperbolic praise to Malcolm MacDonald: “I hope you will tell Mr Chamberlain that I cannot begin to express the admiration for the manner in which he has performed a task more difficult … than any with which any Prime Minister of Great Britain has ever been faced. I approve wholeheartedly of the course he has adopted, particularly his determination to get in touch with Italy and Germany … and his exposure of the unreality, and worse, of the situation at Geneva.”45

Following his successful Anschluss with Austria, Hitler next championed the discontented Sudeten German minority in Czechoslovakia, a further step in his hazardous Drang nach Osten. King, concerned that war might result from a Sudetenland confrontation, consoled himself with the thought that Britain was “doing all she can to bring Czechoslovakia to her senses.”⁴⁶ But Czechoslovakia had still not come to her senses on 24 May – as Canada uniquely in the Empire celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday – when it rejected Hitler’s aggressive claims. The subsequent months of 1938 were of dire uncertainty as Hitler pressed his extreme demands. Czechoslovakia sought the support of its 1924 treaty ally, France, while Britain attempted in vain to promote conciliation between Prague and the Sudeten Germans, Hitler’s puppets. In these circumstances, Soviet Russia again sounded the wary British and French governments on how a common front against potential German armed aggression might be formed, given the fact that Poland and Romania had made it clear that they would not welcome Russian forces crossing their territories, any more than Chamberlain was enthusiastic about the Red Army establishing itself in Prague.

Mackenzie King believed that Britain was doing everything possible to avoid a war over the Sudeten Germans by putting pressure on Prague and by Henderson’s appeasement efforts in Berlin. During a brief debate on foreign affairs in the House of Commons on 24 May, he declared, “There is no man in this Parliament who believes more strongly in the British Empire and the part it is playing in the world to-day than myself.” If some Canadians saw that statement as some sort of commitment, King hastened to add for domestic political reasons, “There are no commitments of any kind on the part of this government with respect to any war in which the United Kingdom may be engaged. What may be done will be done as a result of the action of this Parliament.”⁴⁷ In his two statements, he was satisfied that he had offered something for every Canadian.

King had been wary of Neville Chamberlain when he first met him, but now he looked upon him as the one person who could save humanity from another world war – and Canada from division. On becoming prime minister in May 1937, Chamberlain began to give substance to his fundamental conviction that appeasement in the form of “personal diplomacy” could result in restraining Hitler’s vaulting ambitions. Churchill, and the troublesome young members of parliament who supported him, derided appeasement, especially when it was not backed by armed might, but it had few more ardent advocates than King. King set aside his real or assumed decade-old wariness of imperial centralists who in his view had been intent upon foisting upon the dominions a foreign policy of Whitehall’s devising. Chamberlain, on the contrary, gave full expression to King’s own conviction that anything was better than war. Hence King’s praise for him throughout 1938 became almost endless. He compared him to Jesus Christ.

This was something of the background to King’s reflections on the worrisome state of Europe in 1938, but in his diary there is little about the Spanish Civil War, the growing threat to the small states of central and Eastern Europe, and almost nothing about the mounting persecution in Germany of socialists, communists, outspoken church leaders, homosexuals, Jews, blacks, and other racial minorities. Other than his tirades against the now all but defunct League of Nations, King’s priority through 1938 was to support Chamberlain’s policy of conciliation of the two dictators without uttering a word of criticism of either.

Fifteen years before, at the 1923 imperial conference, King, making a show of opposing imperial centralists for domestic political reasons, had rejected any practical foreign policy collaboration among the dominions and Britain. But by 1938 he was, at least privately, in the vanguard of dominion supporters of Britain, even to the point of beginning to soft-pedal his mantra “parliament must decide,” rightly confident that parliament, with its Liberal majority, would decide as he directed it. Pace Skelton, King was convinced that Canada should be at war when Britain was at war. Skelton had from the 1920s attempted to “stiffen” King in an isolationist stance, but in the end his almost two decades of “stiffening” were to no avail. Yet he persisted to the outbreak of war and even beyond in giving his minister the same basic advice that he had expounded since 1923. In so doing, he departed from the fundamental duty of a deputy minister to offer his minister his best advice (it was never then “her advice”) and, if not accepted, to either loyally carry out the contrary policies of his minister or seek a transfer or resign. Skelton adopted none of these three options. He was throughout a most unorthodox deputy minister.

Jack Pickersgill, one of King’s secretaries, was not surprised at his enthusiastic embrace of appeasement. “Over and over again he said that it was not what a leader accomplished but what he prevented that mattered most.”48 King was not, however, to escape the question so easily of what exactly his government was prepared to do if Britain became engaged in a major war. The question was indirectly but tangibly forced on him by queries from London about whether Canada would manufacture a Czech-designed light machine gun (the notably reliable Bren gun) for the British army and, if it chose, for the Canadian as well. A proposal for the training of Royal Air Force aircrew in Canada arrived at about the same time. King was unsettled by both. George Drew, the prominent Conservative, levelled ill-founded charges of corruption in the Bren manufacture. These were disproved by the prompt appointment of a review commission and the contract was eventually filled without arousing any real concerns in Quebec or elsewhere about Canada being drawn thereby into comprehensive defence cooperation with Britain. Yet the government’s handling of the Bren gun project was marred by equivocation and delay. Even more so was the repeated query from London whether British airmen could be trained in Canada. King procrastinated and discussions about who was to be trained and who was to pay for what training and who was to serve where were strung out over three years, marked throughout by misunderstandings and frustration on both sides. Initially the plan was presented, at least to the naive, as an alternative to a Canadian army expeditionary force. King, at his equivocal worst, still pleaded national unity instead of devising ways in which both the British and Canadian air forces could be best trained to counter the undeniably formidable Luftwaffe. The agreement was finally concluded only upon the declaration of war itself. Once instituted, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan proved to be a huge success.

Amidst these and other uncertainties, King was certain that only he could preserve the unity of Canada. Utterly unmilitary himself, he had long since condemned the use of armed force to settle international disputes. Talk offered a better way. If the League had been simply a place for talk, King might have remained supportive, but he eventually came to the remarkable conclusion that not Hitler but the League and its collective security provisions were responsible for the Second World War.

If King had been challenged in his proclaimed misgivings about the League and sanctions in particular, his candid answer might have included a regret that the League had destroyed the time-honoured “balance of power” that had served from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 at least to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. That elusive concept had never been clearly delineated, but King appears to have concluded that the idealism of the League’s founders had subtracted grievously from Britain’s pre-eminent role in the world and had reduced France to seeking a spurious balance of power by alliances with a doubtful array of central and Eastern European states – including the Soviet Union – as a counterbalance to the menace of Germany’s rapidly growing military and economic power. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia had effectively ended the League of Nations, although King, in his long speech to the House of Commons on 24 May 1938, repeated his statements that “the sanctions articles have ceased to have effect … and cannot be revived by any state … at all.” Accordingly, King reasoned that it was time to line up behind Britain, supporting Chamberlain’s dual policy of appeasement and rearmament. Sounding like Bennett, King concluded that “co-operation between all parts of the Empire and the democracies is in Canada’s interest in the long run … the only possible attitude to be assumed.”49

Skelton finally recognized that his minister had wholly abandoned isolationism, in fact had never embraced it. King was clearly veering back toward the imperial fold, the only haven for Canada with the League all but gone. With Chamberlain embarking upon his ill-fated efforts to appease the two dictators, King became increasingly single-minded in his support of a British – or an imperial – foreign policy. To the isolationist Skelton’s consternation, King had not in fact drawn away from the Empire as he had appeared to do in the early 1920s. He now spoke instead of the triumphs of British diplomacy (Skelton only of its failures) and began to send frequent and fulsome private messages to Chamberlain that Canada supported him to the hilt in his appeasement efforts, reflecting in an aberrant form Laurier’s and Meighen’s “Ready, aye Ready.”

Chamberlain noted with satisfaction Canada’s support, as expressed variously by King, Bennett, and Beaverbrook. He wrote to his sisters, “I had a letter from R.B. Bennett the other day and he says that Max Beaverbrook recently wrote to him, ‘N.C. is the best P.M. we’ve had in half a century. He is dominating Parliament, but the country has not yet taken to him. If he gets Baldwin’s popularity he will be P.M. for the rest of his life. At 69 he works harder than any of his colleagues. His efforts to separate the Italians from Germany will succeed, I think.’ And I also heard from Tweedsmuir … who says ‘I am delighted to see that you have British opinion solidly behind you. You certainly have Canada’s.’”⁵⁰ In King’s view, Chamberlain “merits immortal memory if he saves – as he is doing – the world from a war.”51 Indulging in no false modesty, King saw himself as playing a central role in Chamberlain’s pursuit of the appeasement since “I know of no man who has to the degree that I possess it the confidence of Chamberlain, Roosevelt, and Hitler, and I might add [Prime Minister of France Leon] Blum and also Mussolini and Japan.”⁵²

By May 1938, Czechoslovakia had obviously become Hitler’s next and immediate target. Yet King remained hopeful. “If Hitler holds back I shall always believe that my visit to Germany and my talk with him – more than any other single factor – is responsible … Also the friendship that I have maintained with von Ribbentrop. There is no doubt that there was the beginning of the rapprochement between England and Germany … also that my attitude with Chamberlain helped in relations with Italy, etc.”⁵³ He asked Tweedsmuir “whether it is not agreed that my little visit to Berlin, a year ago, was not helping to inspire a little more in the way of confidence?”⁵⁴ His unique perception of his own key role was only strengthened by his recollection that Hitler was a man “who is abstemious in his habits, and gets into the quiet atmosphere of his mountain retreat in reaching the great decisions which decide not only his own fate and that of his country but one might also say the fate of mankind. I still believe that he will hold to his decision not to permit a general war. His decision, however, may be set at nought should the Czechs become aggressive.”⁵⁵ King added to Joan Patteson, who was helping to keep him informed of what was happening in Europe by listening to her husband’s radio, that he was glad that Hitler “did not drink … loved nature and the quiet … Joan remarked … on the curious circumstance [that while] Hitler was in his home in the country, I was at my retreat in the country, and said to send a thought to him” (presumably by “cosmic consciousness”). King prayed that God’s guidance might be vouchsafed to Hitler. “I pray he may … help the cause of world peace and European appeasement … if he does he will come ere long to be loved as dearly as he is greatly feared … This is his chance – a really great opportunity … he will rise to it for I have faith in him. I have prayed for him in my prayers, for God’s guidance.”⁵⁶ Given these yearnings, it is not surprising that King found reassurance in a long letter from Tweedsmuir, on sick leave in Britain, in which he described how Chamberlain and Halifax were “pretty optimistic. They are finding difficulties with the Czecho-Slovakian Government which is pretty obstinate and they are speaking very candidly to it.”⁵⁷

In parallel with his support of appeasement, King instituted, however reluctantly, a small degree of rearmament, following Chamberlain’s more extensive programme. For the first time King discussed briefly with cabinet colleagues the possibility that war might break out over the Sudeten issue. He finally said to a few of his ministers what he had already said to Hitler and to Chamberlain; that if Britain itself were threatened, Canada would not stand idly by. He had repeatedly proclaimed from the early 1920s that parliament would decide whether Canada should go to war, but now he acknowledged explicitly to his diary that the Liberal majority in parliament would do whatever he told it to do. This had not been clear to the British government at the time. Hoare later wrote “the fact remains that the Commonwealth governments were unwilling to go to war on the issue of Czechoslovakia. Dominion opinion … was overwhelmingly against a world war … As early as March 18, 1938, he had been told South Africa and Canada [and Ireland] would not join us in a war to prevent certain Germans from rejoining the Fatherland.”58

By the end of May 1938, Chamberlain was uneasy about the increasingly aggressive noises that Hitler was making about the Sudetenland. Worse still, Chamberlain deplored an incident on the Czech border as showing “how utterly untrustworthy and dishonest the German Government is and it illuminates the difficulties in the way of the peacemaker.”⁵⁹ But Lloyd George, from the parliamentary sidelines, spoke of Germany being “surrounded by a mob of small states, many of them consisting of peoples who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans.”⁶⁰ As in the case of Austria, the Volk of the Sudetenland should again be one with other Germans. That distortion of the principle of self-determination, so central to the Versailles treaty, did not appear unreasonable to appeasers in a Britain intent above all upon avoiding war, an attitude that King fully shared.

In these worsening circumstances, Roosevelt in effect extended the Monroe doctrine to Canada. The president received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario on 8 August. (This was his second visit to Canada in two years.) He began his acceptance speech by recognizing that “The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire.” More pronounced Canadian isolationists, the former Queen’s University dean Skelton among them, would not have put it quite that way, but they joined in welcoming Roosevelt’s pledge: “I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if the domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.”61 Even an isolationist United States could be counted on, for reasons of its own security, to protect Canada and to support the British Empire to whatever degree possible as a sort of first line of defence, Roosevelt speculating privately that the United States could be bombed by long range German or Japanese aircraft from bases in pro-fascist states in Latin America. In his gratification, King no doubt reflected the majority view across Canada, but in the privacy of his diary, “the American” recorded his reservations about whether the United States could always be trusted.

On 31 August 1938, in the wake of Roosevelt’s visit, King took a rare initiative. He told two of his ministers, Chubby Power of Quebec and Ian Mackenzie of Vancouver, that if war came as a result of the mounting German pressure on Czechoslovakia, “I would stand for Canada doing all she possibly could to destroy those Powers [Germany and Italy] which are basing their action on might and not on right, and that I would not consider being neutral … for a moment.” Power responded to King’s unwonted candour that in such circumstances “some of the Quebec men [would consider] leaving the Party.” King bluntly replied – no circumlocutions this time – that Quebec cabinet ministers should realize “that it would be the end of Quebec if any attitude of that kind were adopted by the French Canadians in a world conflict … They, as members of the Government [and not the prime minister himself], ought to lead the Province in seeing its obligation to participate, and making clear the real issue and what it involves.”⁶² Ironically, the same might have been said of King himself at the time of the Abyssinian crisis.

Publicly, King remained wholly committed to Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. It could appeal to both English and French Canada, Quebec supporting appeasement as a means of avoiding another devastating war – and possible conscription – while much of English Canada supported it since it would help to preserve the position of the British Empire in the world. The British economy and imperial trade and, more basically, domestic democratic traditions and institutions were not to be jeopardized for the sake of a small state in central Europe. For this and much else, King took some of the credit for Chamberlain’s efforts. “I shall never cease to be grateful enough or to believe that it was other than providential that I was the first to give Hitler any faith in Chamberlain and telling him that I believed Chamberlain could be relied upon to see that what was fair and right was done.”63

On 6 September, King was able to send to Chamberlain a direct message of encouragement via Hamar Greenwood, his old classmate at the University of Toronto, rather than having to rely on transatlantic telegrams or surface mail. Viscount Greenwood, his wife, and two of their children called on him at Kingsmere, following the conferring of an honorary doctorate upon Greenwood by his alma mater. “We had been talking about my visit to Hitler and of what I had said to him about not destroying anything, not to be tempted to acts of destruction, but to carry on with his works for the people … I told him to tell Chamberlain by all means to keep on keeping the nations out of war; that he was adopting the Christian attitude of non-resistance in the face of great provocation. That that was appealing strongly to the people and that if action [i.e., fighting] were precipitated, the Empire might be torn into shreds.”⁶⁴ King’s message to Chamberlain via Greenwood was heartfelt.

On 8 September, two days after seeing Greenwood, King turned his mind to “the renewed unfortunate happenings in Czechoslovakia” (“unfortunate happenings,” not German aggression). Again, King did not condemn Hitler, instead defining the Sudetenland seizure as “the sort of thing that Hitler had said so often might lead to a beginning of hostilities beyond his control … The only hope I see now is pretty much Chamberlain and Hitler being brought in as direct touch with each other as possible in a manner which will ensure solution of the larger German problems and cordial relations with Germany.”⁶⁵ Although Chamberlain, unlike King, now regarded Hitler as “utterly untrustworthy and dishonest,” he nevertheless pressed on with his additional attempts to appease him.⁶⁶

King could not deny himself another unedifying broadside at the League of Nations, perhaps in an effort to convince himself of the correctness of the nonsense that he kept repeating to himself. “It was the League of Nations’ policy which led to Britain’s disarmament … the League of Nations had been responsible for the present world condition … The absurd way with which the League people talk of collective security always exasperates one.” He concluded that Hitler “has made clear that if the problem of the Sudeten Germans is not settled, he will go to their assistance and solve it.”⁶⁷ King had set out the correct route to peace in his long book on labour relations, published two decades before, with the basic theme that conciliation was better than coercion. Its turgid ambiguity, which opens it to almost any interpretation by King or anyone else, was in his mind as much an argument for international as for industrial conciliation and avoidance of conflict. “The more I think of the world’s problems today … the more I believe that in my Industry and Humanity will be found the fundamental truths with respect thereto … I wish that I had spent part of my years preaching the Gospel; only a sort of sensitiveness … in the way of publicity has prevented me from doing that.”68

Skelton, in a long memorandum, again argued that Canada must be isolationist, sheltering under the umbrella of the United States. King rejected this, convinced that “our real self-interest lies in the strength of the British Empire as a whole, not in our geographical position.”⁶⁹ On the same day in London, Massey, although once an appeaser himself, put his view of Hitler more succinctly in his diary. “It is a ghastly thing that our fate rests in the hands of a demented paperhanger,”⁷⁰ but from Paris there arrived a reassuring letter from Philippe Roy, the long-serving Canadian minister in France and sometime delegate to the League of Nations, reflecting the now desperate optimism in Paris that Hitler might yet be appeased. Sounding like King himself, Roy wrote to him, “The impression prevails in Europe that war is inevitable [but] as I hold Hitler for an intelligent man, my opinion is that peace can be preserved … the German Chancellor will not take the risk of spoiling his wonderful achievements in Germany.”⁷¹

Hitler, in King’s sympathetic view, had good reason to deplore the rumoured intent of Britain and France to make a deal with Stalin, which Churchill was urging as a “Grand Alliance.” Hitler “has made out a strong case in reference to democracies against dictatorships when he said that the chief ally of France and England was Russia, the worst of all dictatorships. Hitler has spoken out like a man. Exposed fearlessly some of the current hypocrisies. It looks as though pressure will be put on Czecho-Slovakia to have matters settled by a plebiscite.”⁷² Hitler himself was doing no wrong. It was the obstinate Czechs who were so difficult in supporting the intransigent Edvard Beneš. King wrote to Charles Dunning, the minister of finance, on 3 September that “My mind is wholly clear as to the course we should pursue … I have tried to anticipate what might be necessary … with regard to the summoning of Parliament, most important of all would, of course, be the question of our participation in the event of Britain going into the war.”⁷³ King repeated his conviction to Norman Rogers, the minister of labour and, rare for King, something of a convivial protégé. Rogers agreed with him that “it was a self-evident national duty, if Britain entered the war, that Canada should regard herself as part of the British Empire, one of the nations of the sisterhood of nations, which should co-operate lending every assistance possible, in no way asserting neutrality.”74 King’s timely if not belated elaboration of his pledge to the 1923 imperial conference was wormwood for Skelton, who had wasted more than a decade vainly attempting to wean his minister away from strengthening the British Commonwealth of Nations toward embracing North American isolationism and even neutrality.

The reaction of London and Paris to the Sudetenland crisis included variously confusion, anxiety, fortitude, and appeasement. As fear of another world war became more prevalent, massive Anglo-French pressure was put on Prague to accede to even the most extravagant German demands. For example, on the same day that King and Rogers spoke about Canada’s self-evident national duty, Duff Cooper, first lord of the admiralty, recorded in his diary, “There were a lot of Foreign Office telegrams to read, including one admirable one instructing Henderson [the British ambassador in Berlin] to make it quite plain to the German Government where we should stand in the event of war [over the Sudetenland]. In reply to this there was a series of messages from Henderson which seemed to me almost hysterical, imploring the Government not to insist upon his carrying out their instructions, which he was sure would have the opposite effect to that desired. And the Government [despite Foreign Office advice to the contrary] had given way.”⁷⁵*

Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler, so welcomed by King, were not based on the simple proposition that Hitler might somehow be bought off. During 1937 and 1938 the British cabinet, with few exceptions, rightly feared that neither the army nor the air force was prepared for a major conflict on the continent, let alone across the Empire. At the end of 1937, the chiefs of staff had endorsed a fundamental consideration: “We cannot exaggerate the importance … of any political or international action that can be taken to reduce the numbers of our potential enemies and to gain support of political allies.” Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, put the case against France, Czechoslovakia’s ally, going to that country’s assistance; “it was hopeless if she chose to do so and it accordingly behoved us to take every step that we could and use every argument that we could think of to dissuade France from going to the aid of Czecho-Slovakia” (thereby triggering a continent-wide if not world war). Halifax then raised the central question: whether it was “justifiable to fight a certain war in order to forestall a possible war later.” Duff Cooper, in referring to the Anglo-French idea of a plebiscite in the Sudetenland, correctly put Halifax’s question on its head: “the choice was not between war and a plebiscite, but between war now or war later.”76 With the League of Nations undermined by the failure of Britain and France to act on Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, Chamberlain and Halifax, although agreeing that Hitler was “probably mad” or at least “half mad,” continued to cast about for some peaceful way to avoid Nazi Germany’s seizure of the Sudetenland by force, even if confronted by Czechoslovakia’s exceptionally well trained and equipped army.

Chamberlain launched his personal diplomacy with a dramatic message to the German chancellor. “In view of the increasingly critical situation, I propose to come over at once to see you, with a view to finding a peaceful solution … am ready to start tomorrow.”⁷⁷ The next day, 14 September, the British high commissioner in Ottawa informed Skelton of Chamberlain’s offer to fly to Germany to discuss “the Sudeten problem.” On 15 September, the British prime minister landed in Munich on what was to be the first of three visits within a fortnight. King recorded his huge gratification at Chamberlain’s sudden initiative. In a press statement he declared, “the whole of the Canadian people will warmly approve this striking and noble action on the part of Mr Chamberlain.”⁷⁸ Privately to his diary he was both enthusiastic and certain that he had played a key part in bringing about Chamberlain’s dramatic decision.

What Chamberlain is doing is entirely the right thing … I recall how my last words to Hitler were that he would like Chamberlain, that he could trust him, he was a man he could deal with, that he was truly anxious to bring about better relations between Germany and Britain. Hitler said to me that he was pleased to know this. That will be remembered at this time … It is the most momentous meeting between two men that has ever been held in the history of the world. Each of them has peace at heart … It is well for Chamberlain that he was born into this world, and for the world that he was born into it. His name will go down in history as one of the greatest men that ever lived … I believe that his [late] father and brother have been at his side in every move and that they and all the forces above them have been directing his course … I know each of them, and I have talked to each of them about the other, and there is sufficient confidence between the three of us to cause me to feel pretty sure as to what the outcome will be … Chamberlain and I and Hitler have figured in a relationship that has been exceedingly significant … My life’s efforts to further peace between classes and races and, in particular, between Germany and Britain are being answered to-day, and I have been used as an instrument to help toward that great end.79

To help toward that great end, King immediately sent a telegram to Ribbentrop in Berlin, asking him to tell Hitler “how thankful I am that he and Mr Chamberlain are to meet each other tomorrow … and how sincerely I believe their joint efforts may … further the peace of the world.” In a separate en clair telegram to Henderson in Berlin, King asked him, if he thought it helpful, to convey a similar message to Hitler.⁸⁰ He cabled Chamberlain his “profound admiration for the vision and courage shown in your decision to have a personal interview with Herr Hitler.”⁸¹

Following Chamberlain’s arrival at the Munich airport on 15 September, a special train took him to the chancellor’s beloved mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler described the unendurable suffering of the Sudeten Germans under despotic Czechoslovak rule. If Prague did not immediately cede the Sudetenland to Germany, Hitler would seize it by military force. Chamberlain undertook to place Hitler’s decision before his cabinet and the French government. Both London and Paris agreed in turn to put to Prague the stark choice of either accepting the outrageous German demands or being left to fight Germany alone.

Before his departure for Germany, Chamberlain had told one of his sisters that the chancellor was a lunatic, “entirely undistinguished. You would never notice him in a crowd and would take him for the house painter he once was.”⁸² According to the United States ambassador in London, Chamberlain returned from his first encounter with Hitler with an “intense dislike [of him] as cruel, over-bearing … and thoroughly convinced … that he would be completely ruthless.” But Chamberlain recorded that he nevertheless wanted to believe well of Hitler and his intentions. “It was impossible not to be impressed with the power of this man. He was extremely determined; he had thought out what he wanted and he meant to get it.” He also deluded himself into believing that “Hitler’s objectives were strictly limited.” Of course they were not. Chamberlain and the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, despite French treaty obligations, acquiesced to Hitler’s demand for the cessation of the Sudetenland, on the specious justification of self-determination for the Volk in the Sudetenland. “The alternatives are not between abject surrender and war. Acceptance of the principle of self-determination is not an abject surrender.”83 Several of Chamberlain’s cabinet, however, saw the Berchtesgaden meeting as an abject surrender.

Chamberlain justified his efforts at appeasement at a second meeting with Hitler on 23 September at Bad Godesberg on the grounds that the dominions were opposed to any confrontation with Hitler, among other reasons. The British prime minister “may well have been influenced by the knowledge that the Dominions would not view a struggle to keep certain Germans under Czech control as a good and sufficient cause for which to launch a European war.”⁸⁴At best the Commonwealth, like British public opinion, would be divided. But Duff Cooper for one disagreed. “As for the Dominions, could we expect that they would even all be united on the prospect of coming into a European war? They were not necessary to us for the conduct of the war … If we were now to desert the Czechs or even advise them to surrender, we should be guilty of one the basest betrayals in history.”⁸⁵ But Chamberlain again gave way to Hitler. The British and French forced Prague to cede the territory – and with it Czechoslovakia’s formidable border defences – to Germany.

In this King rejoiced. “Somehow I feel that at last a way out is going to open. Hitler might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world … He was looking to Force, to Might and to Violence as means to achieving his ends, which were … the well-being of his fellow-men … Chamberlain will be known as much if the present conferences open a path to peace. He has thought nothing of himself and his life, not for the men of his own race alone, but for the world’s peace. There has been nothing finer in the Christian era.”⁸⁶ In one of his rare statements to the press, Mackenzie King stated that he regarded Chamberlain’s decision to fly to Germany as a truly noble act.

Highly gratifying to King was the thought of the instrumental part he had played in bringing Chamberlain and Hitler together. “My message to Chamberlain will be helpful. It will be helpful to Chamberlain. It will be helpful to Hitler. I know each of them, and I have talked to each of them about the other, and there is sufficient confidence between the three of us to cause me to feel pretty sure as to what the outcome will be.” After reviewing for his diary every step in his relationship with Ribbentrop, including his 1937 Christmas greeting “with a word direct to Hitler” and the steps he had taken to provide Göring with additional bison, King concluded, “I have been used as an instrument to help towards that great end … unseen forces have unquestionably been working together in using me … in the great purpose of the preservation of peace.”87 As he wrote to Tweedsmuir, “You may recall how strongly I urged those personal contacts. While it is not yet clear war will be avoided, it is altogether certain that but for Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler we should have been in the throes of a world war today.”⁸⁸ From London, Churchill, still dismissed by some as a militarist warmonger, could not have disagreed more. In a press release of 21 September, he proclaimed, “The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to England nor to France. On the contrary, it will place these two nations in an ever weaker and more dangerous situation.”⁸⁹

In recording again his unbounded enthusiasm and gratitude for Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler, King reverted to his conviction that “If there is to be war … and Canada is to be in it, it is much better that we should come in as a united country, and that we should not be hopelessly divided before war itself takes place. I am still hoping, and believe, that war will be avoided.” In reviewing his role “as representing Canada as a really significant Dominion of the Empire,” King dictated to his secretary his special gratification that a second Chamberlain-Hitler meeting would be “half way [between Berlin and London], Hitler suggested [Cologne] and the third meeting, would have Hitler himself coming to London.”⁹⁰

Ivone Kirkpatrick, the first secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin who accompanied the prime minister on all three visits to Hitler, saw clearly enough the man whom Chamberlain was attempting to conciliate. He told Harold Nicolson that

to meet [Hitler] socially, and when he is host in his own house, he has a certain simple dignity, like a farmer entertaining neighbours. All very different from the showy vulgarity of Mussolini. But that once one begins to work with him, or sees him dealing with great affairs, one has such a sense of evil arrogance that one is almost nauseated … Evil and treachery and malice dart in Hitler’s mystic eyes. He has a maddening habit of laying down the law in sharp, syncopated sentences, accompanying the conclusion either with a short pat of the palm of his hand upon the table or by a half-swing sideways in his chair, a sudden Napoleonic crossing of his arms, and a gaze of detached but suffering mysticism towards the ceiling. His impatience is terrific.91

Yet Chamberlain recorded a positive impression of Hitler that at least for the moment approached King’s conviction: “here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”⁹²

When Prague, with understandably the greatest reluctance and foreboding, agreed to the Anglo-French “advice” to cede the Sudetenland to Germany, Chamberlain made his second flight to Germany, to confirm to Hitler Prague’s agreement. To his consternation, Hitler now demonstrated that he certainly could not be relied upon when he had given his word. At Bad Godesberg he raised the ante by telling a disconcerted Chamberlain that Prague’s acceptance of the German demands as pressed on it by France and Britain would take too long and was no longer sufficient. German forces would immediately occupy the Sudetenland up to new borders to be drawn by Germany alone, not to be negotiated with Prague. He added that Poland and Hungary also demanded their pound of flesh: the cessation to them of certain areas of Czechoslovakia where their nationals formed a substantial minority. Acceptance of the Bad Godesburg demands would, in the apt words of the Daily Telegraph, render Czechoslovakia militarily indefensible, economically broken, and politically subjugated completely to German domination.⁹³ Skeptics regarded Chamberlain’s effort at appeasement as “a clever plan of selling your friends in order to buy off your enemies.”⁹⁴

King concluded in a monumental understatement that the second meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain, who “has been fighting the battle of those who wish to avoid war at all costs, … has not been too good.”⁹⁵ He nevertheless had found time on 20 September to write to the governor general about Asia, imaginatively proposing that he himself lead an undefined mission to Japan, which had invaded China a year before (he told his diary he would draw on his experiences of thirty years before to explore appeasement of Japan’s various ambitions across Asia). Tweedsmuir’s reply, if he made one, is unknown.96

In an extraordinary diary entry of 23 September, dictated in several stages, King concluded that the League of Nations and not Nazi Germany was responsible for the Sudeten crisis. The League, once the only hope for the world, had in his mind become “a curse to the world … unsettling nations in the direct management of their own affairs and substituting talk for reality, ‘gibber’ as Hitler calls it.” King repeatedly reviewed whether “paganism or Christianity is to be the basis of civilisation … Whether might or right is to control. Whether materialism is to triumph over spiritualism.”⁹⁷ In his diary dictation, he was reassuring himself that he was on the right course in developing phrases for a public statement advising Canadians to keep calm (although not yet to dig), to have confidence in their government, etc., etc. The isolationist Skelton was predictably “avert [sic] to anything of the sort,” but King kept dictating phrases of commitment to Britain before calling a cabinet meeting in the late afternoon to which he candidly put as the essence of his position that if the United Kingdom were to be involved in war over Czechoslovakia, Canada would be as well. He would issue a public statement: “The world might as well know at once that Canada will not stand idly by and see modern civilization ruthlessly destroyed if we can by co-operation with others help save mankind from such a fate.” With that, King finally abandoned his familiar mantra of parliament will decide.

J.L. Ilsley, the minister of national revenue, and Ian MacKenzie, the minister of national defence, were for making such a public statement immediately. In the absence of Lapointe, at the League of Nations in Geneva, Power assured his cabinet colleagues that Quebec was much less antagonistic than he had hitherto thought. Quebec’s leaders were impressed by the “extent to which Britain and France had humiliated herself [sic] and … seemed to feel that Hitler could not be allowed to go farther.” Cardin, the minister of public works, agreed with Power. On the other hand, Euler, the minister of trade and commerce, agreed with Lapointe’s message from Geneva that no “statement should be issued and was not sure that a war would yet come about.”⁹⁸ Lapointe had cabled – in King’s words – that “he was very anxious nothing should be done till Parliament meets.” With apparent strong feeling, Lapointe had concluded, “I do not see how I can advise any course of action that would not only be opposed to personal convictions and sacred pledges to my own people, but would destroy all their confidence and prevent me from carrying weight and influence with them for what might be essential future actions.”99

King, regarding Lapointe’s telegram as tantamount to a threat of resignation, reversed himself, deciding that no public statement need be issued immediately; better to wait to hear from London what exactly Chamberlain had concluded at Bad Godesberg. He felt like a “cad” for not issuing his original statement, but he did clarify, once and for all, how he proposed to proceed, opposition of Lapointe notwithstanding. “There never was a clearer issue or one that demanded that all who love peace should be prepared to sacrifice their lives … to see that it is maintained … if Germany goes too far, the struggle will not end until those who put their reliance on force are well-nigh exterminated.”¹⁰⁰ On 27 September, King issued a watered down press statement to satisfy Lapointe, restoring “Parliament will decide.” The government “is making preparations for any contingency and for the immediate summoning of Parliament if the efforts which are still being made to preserve the peace of Europe should fail. For our country to keep united is all-important. To this end, in whatever we say or do, we must seek to avoid creating controversies and divisions that might seriously impair effective and concerted action when Parliament meets.”¹⁰¹

Chamberlain returned to London from his second meeting faced with the stark choice of war or acceptance of Hitler’s additional demands. On 26 September Massey reported that after an hour-long meeting of the high commissioners with the prime minister – on this occasion King did not respond by likening the meeting to an imperial council – “My impression is that he and his Government feel that they have exhausted every means of avoiding catastrophe and they are none too confident that it can be averted.”¹⁰² The next evening Chamberlain began a BBC broadcast with a remarkable sentence that would plague him for the few years of life that remained to him: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and fitting gas-masks because of a quarrel in a far away country between peoples of whom we know nothing,” adding, “I would not hesitate to pay even a third visit to Germany, if I thought it would do any good.”¹⁰³ King promptly announced that he was in “complete accord with the statement Mr Chamberlain has made to the world to-day.”¹⁰⁴ That same evening Chamberlain told a suddenly ecstatic House of Commons that Hitler had delayed his invasion of Czechoslovakia to allow time for a conference in Munich the next day. Chamberlain flew to Munich for his third confrontation with Hitler at a hastily cobbled together “last effort.”

King was thrilled to receive word from London “that Hitler had agreed to meet Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini at Munich tomorrow.” No news could have been better, replete as it appeared with promise for a peaceful future. It also countered a wrong impression in Quebec left by King’s statement of the day before. “It did not occur to me that the Province of Quebec might regard the [statement] as indicating a determination to participate [in a war] … I confess to a relief indescribable.” But King was quite clear to Skelton that Canada would participate if war came. Parliament would decide “that if Britain was at war … we would have to accept the view that Canada was also at war … I do not agree with S[kelton]’s view that it would be sympathy for Britain that would be the determining factor for Canada going into war … the determining factor would be the determination not to permit the fear of Force to dominate the affairs of men and nations.”105 Skelton was left with a full year before the war to ponder the failure of his obstinate attempts to convince his minister that perfidious Albion would seek to drag Canada into a war which was European in essence and had nothing to do with Canada’s interests, moral or otherwise: “This is not our war,” Skelton continued to say, although to no avail. King had effectively sidelined him.

At Munich on 29 September Hitler, to his annoyance, did not gain all of Czechoslovakia at one fell swoop, but he did acquire the Sudetenland without firing a shot. Britain, France, and Italy endorsed his immediate occupation of the Sudetenland. Poland and Hungary took those areas of Czechoslovakia that they coveted. What then was left of Czechoslovakia was guaranteed – for the moment – against unprovoked aggression, a guarantee that proved meaningless when six months later Hitler seized the remainder of the country. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor analyzed Chamberlain’s final meeting with Hitler in terms of Realpolitik. “Appeasement had begun as an impartial consideration of rival claims and the remedying of past faults. Then it had been justified by the French fear of war. Now its motive appeared to be fear on the part of the British themselves.”¹⁰⁶ Chamberlain went to Munich not to seek justice for the Sudeten Germans or even to save the French from war; he went, or so it appeared, to save the British themselves from air-attack. Elsewhere Taylor added, “Munich sprung from a mixture of fear and good intentions. In retrospect, fear dominated.”¹⁰⁷

King rejoiced in the Munich agreement, as did huge crowds in London and Munich itself, freed from the fear of war. Lady Diana Cooper, Duff Cooper’s wife, later described how “The Prime Minister called at the Palace to announce his so-called triumph to the King and Queen. They were photographed on the balcony on each side of him (a photograph that I saw the next day torn and burnt in the fireplace by a man of principle). The Mall and Whitehall I could imagine from the noise held millions of joy-mad people, swarming up the lampposts and railings, singing and crying with relief that it was peace … Duff and I sat … holding hands … That evening he resigned.”108 The popular relief was hardly less pronounced in Canada. The Toronto Star on 30 September reported that “men and women … [were] frozen in their tracks until news of the agreement had been digested. Their eyes alight, faces gleaming, arms around each other they danced happily off to celebrate the lifting of the curtain of death which hung like a black, heart-stopping pall over their lives.”

As Mackenzie King was happily contemplating the post-Munich Hitler “as one of the saviours of the world,” Chamberlain himself thought of the dictator quite otherwise. Duff Cooper recorded Chamberlain as telling the cabinet that at Munich, Hitler had struck him “as the commonest little dog he had ever seen, without one sign of distinction, nevertheless he [Chamberlain] was obviously pleased at the reports he had subsequently received of the good impression that he had himself made. He told us with obvious satisfaction how Hitler had said to someone that he had felt that he, Chamberlain, was ‘a man.’” In fact, Hitler spoke of Chamberlain and Daladier as “small worms.”¹⁰⁹ Göring did not come out of the crisis intact, as a result of urging upon a highly excited and impatient Hitler a delay in invading Czechoslovakia. Ribbentrop had been the hawk, and a violently anti-British one at that. But those were details. For people across the globe, Munich was seen as an unmitigated triumph of the will for Hitler.

On 29 September King wrote in his diary, “What a happy man Chamberlain must be, and what an example he has set the world in perseverance of a just cause … I … knelt down and thanked God with all my heart for the peace that has been preserved to the world.”¹¹⁰ The following day King did a most unusual thing for a head of government or even a secretary of state for external affairs. He called upon the heads of mission in Ottawa of three of the four countries represented at Munich (Germany, Italy, and France), but as the British high commissioner reported with some amusement to London, “his visits failed to include one to this office,” King seeing himself as communicating directly only with the British prime minister, the dominions secretary, or the governor general.111 With Hitler himself, King sought to share his exhilaration. He asked the German consul general to wire him “how relieved and delighted I was that the four-power agreement had been reached.”¹¹²

Munich was later seen by some as having bought a valuable year for Britain to accelerate its rearmament, but that leaves unanswered the question of whether in the Anglo-German arms race the relative strengths of the two countries had in fact changed substantially in Britain’s favour between Munich and the beginning of war. Churchill was certain that he knew the answer. “It is probable that in this last year before the outbreak, Germany munitions at least doubled, and possibly tripled, the munitions of Britain and France put together … They were, therefore, getting weapons at a far higher rate than we … the year’s breathing-space said to be ‘gained’ by Munich left Britain and France in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany than they had been at the Munich crisis.”¹¹³

What was indisputable was that Munich was a triumph for Hitler. Britain and France, the victors of the First World War, had kowtowed to the chancellor of the defeated Germany. The Sudetenland, with boundaries to be drawn by him alone, was to be Germany’s by 10 October. Czechoslovakia as it had been created at Versailles would no longer exist. The only real democracy in central or Eastern Europe had been dismembered. Whatever the price, the relief in Western countries was palpable, a near hysterical outpouring of relief and thanksgiving. Too bad about Czechoslovakia, which in the eyes of some had in any case been awkwardly and artificially cobbled together twenty years before. A world war had been avoided, thanks to the tenacity of the blessed peacemaker Chamberlain. On 29 September King made public his message of gratitude to the British prime minister: “The heart of Canada is rejoicing tonight at the success which has crowned your unremitting efforts for peace. May I convey to you the warm congratulations of the Canadian people, and with them, an expression of their gratitude that is felt from one end of the Dominion to the other? My colleagues in the Government join me in unbounded admiration at the service you have rendered mankind. Your achievements in the past month alone will ensure you an abiding and illustrious place among the great conciliators which the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth of Nations and the whole world will continue to honour.”114

But Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler’s demands – still called appeasement – was soon seen by increasing numbers in Britain as a profound defeat, as Churchill, its most vocal opponent, characterized it. “The German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.”¹¹⁵ Clement Attlee, the Labour leader of the opposition, in moving his party toward support for rearmament, spoke for many when he said to the House of Commons on 3 October, “The events of the last few days constitute one of the greatest diplomatic defeats this country and France have ever sustained … it is a tremendous victory for Herr Hitler … He has overturned the balance of power in Europe … He has successfully defeated … the forces that might have stood against the rule of violence.” The next day Amery from the government backbenches denounced Munich in similar terms as “a triumph of sheer naked force, exercised in the most blatant and brutal fashion.”¹¹⁶

Privately King was aware that not everyone agreed with his adulation of Chamberlain and his relief at the Munich agreement, but he spoke of him wholly sympathetically. “The storm against Chamberlain for having yielded to Hitler will be very great. Liberals and Labour will say he has again sold out the League and collective security. He can afford to let them say what they like. It is now clear that he has saved a world war, and nothing he or others could do could be comparable to that … [There is a] beginning of bitter resentment at Chamberlain who was a brave man in facing it.”¹¹⁷ To the House of Commons, King praised at great length Chamberlain’s performance at Munich. To his diary, he returned repeatedly to his admiration for him. “Chamberlain must be going through an agony like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, his own countrymen turning against him, public meetings being held, even in many of the Dominions; also America critical of his whole attitude.”¹¹⁸ Canadians generally shared in the widespread relief that greeted Munich, but at least in Winnipeg it never occurred to Dafoe to compare Chamberlain to Jesus. Having published far more of Churchill’s warnings than any other Canadian newspaper, he wrote a scathing editorial, “What’s the Cheering For?” with its memorable concluding paragraph: “The doctrine that Germany can intervene for racial reasons for the ‘protection’ of Germans on such grounds as she thinks proper in any country in the world which she is in a position to coerce, and without regard to any engagements she has made or guarantees she has given, has now not only been asserted but made good; and it has been approved, sanctioned, certified and validated by the governments of Great Britain and France, who have undertaken in this respect for the democracies of the world. This is the situation and those who think it is all right will cheer for it.”119 Ian Kershaw, in his biographer of Hitler, with advantage of hindsight, was even more succinct. “None but the most hopelessly naïve, incurably optimistic or irredeemably stupid could have imagined that the Sudetenland marked the limits of German ambitions to expand.”¹²⁰

King continued to hope against hope for peace, but he also began to phase out his repeated public statements of “no commitments” and “Parliament will decide.” The now retired R.B. Bennett was, however, not alone in remaining skeptical of King’s apparent change of heart. In his continuing ambiguities, King “seems to have gone to extra lengths to avoid committing himself in any way, even to the extent of leaving important cables from the British Government unopened for days, and of refusing to say whether Canada would permit the export of munitions to Britain in the time of war! He … would in the event of war have had a plebiscite as to whether Canada should take part, relying on the French and foreign votes to secure a satisfactory result.”¹²¹*

King felt called upon to send a message of thanks to Roosevelt as well, although what he was thanking him for is unclear, the president not having been involved in the events of that momentous month except to exhort any and all to keep the peace. He did, however, send a post-Munich telegram to Chamberlain simply saying “Good man!” Perhaps by expressing publicly his gratitude to Roosevelt as well as to Chamberlain, King was attempting to foster the impression that Munich had the support of the whole English-speaking world, including the United States.

Chamberlain had consistently ignored or rejected the reports of M16 about what to expect before and following Munich. King went even farther. He had long since declined to receive British intelligence reports. But Gladwyn Jebb, later a distinguished senior diplomat, recalled that M16, although notoriously underfunded, “did warn us of the September [Munich] crisis, and they did not give any colour to the ridiculous optimism that prevailed up to the rape of Czechoslovakia, of which our official reports did not give us much warning.”122 More specifically, one M16 agent in central Europe “supplied not only excellent information about Germany’s order of battle and mobilisation plans … but also advance notice of Germany’s intervention in the Sudetenland from the summer of 1937, for action against Czechoslovakia from the spring of 1938, for the seizure of Prague in the spring of 1939 … and for the attack on Poland … Whitehall obtained during the Munich crisis the schedule of Germany’s original mobilisation plans.”¹²³

None of this Ottawa accepted, King having rejected British reports, analyses, or intelligence, whatever the source. During the interwar years, London offered Ottawa a Special Monthly Secret Intelligence Summary, a monthly Confidential Intelligence Summary, a weekly Secret Intelligence Summary from India, and periodic reports from the other dominions and Singapore and Hong Kong and from military attachés at a range of British missions abroad. King had consistently refused to sanction the appointment of service attachés at Canada’s few posts abroad. As the history of Canada’s military intelligence records, “Unfortunately, Dr Skelton had such a deep and lively suspicion of British intentions that he was often reluctant to accept reports from [all] such sources.”¹²⁴

On the foreign policy attitudes of the dominions more generally, Malcolm Macdonald, echoing Asquith and Curzon before the First World War, wrote to cabinet colleagues that he “had never favoured our adopting a particular foreign policy merely in order to please the Dominions.” Over a British commitment to Czechoslovakia, however, “the British Commonwealth might well break in pieces,” especially since Canada and South Africa “would see no reason whatever why they should join in a war to prevent certain Germans from rejoining their Fatherland.” ¹²⁵ That was also the impression of Geoffrey Dawson, the imperialist and strongly pro-appeasement editor of the Times, who was indefatigable in urging the high commissioners to extol appeasement to their governments. He later wrote to Chamberlain, “No one who sat in this place, as I did during the autumn of ’38, with almost daily visitations from eminent Canadians and Australians, could fail to realise that war with Germany at that time would have been misunderstood and resented from end to end of the Empire.”¹²⁶ Dawson was given to over-simplification and his understanding of dominion attitudes was no exception, but Robert Self, a biographer of Chamberlain and editor of his voluminous diary-letters to his sisters, analyzed the situation accurately.

Undeniably, Dominion attitudes were mentioned regularly in Cabinet, in negotiations with the French and even in Parliament, but for Chamberlain such references were essentially parenthetical additional justifications for a policy he had infinitely more compelling reasons to pursue. Rather than redirecting Chamberlain’s policy or limiting his freedom of manoeuvre, Dominion alarm was exploited … as one of several convenient battering rams with which to overcome opposition in his own Cabinet, in much the same way as he later used it in his isolated fight against the Cabinet’s desire for negotiations with the Soviet Union during May 1939 and his resistance to widespread press clamour for Churchill’s admission to the government. Conversely they were not consulted over issues where their known policy positions conflicted with Chamberlain’s own, as over Roosevelt’s peace overtures in January 1938 and the Polish guarantee in March 1939. Unquestionably, Chamberlain’s unflagging efforts for peace helped to educate the Dominions away from isolationism and into support of Britain, but this was essentially a satisfactory by-product of his personal diplomacy rather than its principal purpose.127

That was not the way King saw it. Over tea at Laurier House in Ottawa, Burgon Bickersteff, the young warden of Hart House at the University of Toronto, listened as the prime minister went carefully through his reaction to the

Czechoslovak crisis. He was convinced after Parliament had been summoned on the outbreak of war, this country would have responded without any serious dissentient voice. He of course informed Chamberlain as to his position in Canada … He also described the preparations made to deal with the emergency created by an outbreak of war. We were far further on in our preparations than was generally supposed.

He was very caustic about Australia’s and New Zealand’s widely published expressions of loyalty and readiness to support Great Britain during the crisis. Lyon Savage [prime minister of New Zealand], he said, made these speeches in public, while privately telephoning frantically to their [sic] High Commissioner in London instructing him to urge the British Government to keep out of war at all costs.128

King had sensed that Chamberlain would face a storm in London. In the three-day parliamentary debate over Munich – during which Duff Cooper was the only minister in an increasingly uneasy cabinet to resign – Churchill, Chamberlain’s bête noire, expressed in a single brief sentence what Munich really was: “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.” He was nevertheless fair about Chamberlain’s good intentions: “No one has been a more resolute and uncompromising struggler for peace … Never has there been such intense and undaunted determination to maintain and secure peace … [but now] all is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.”¹²⁹ In the wake of Munich, Halifax finally recognized “the unwisdom of having a foreign policy with insufficient armed strength.”¹³⁰ And with Munich went any lingering idea that, pace Skelton, Canada could attempt to stand aside from the darkening events in Europe. Pearson from London said so bluntly to Skelton: “would our complete isolation from European events (if such a thing were possible) save us from the effect of a British defeat; and, even if it did, could we stand by and watch the triumph of Nazism, with all it stands for, over a Britain which, with all her defects, is about the last abode of decency and liberty on this side of the water?”¹³¹

Amidst the uncertainties following Chamberlain’s three meetings with Hitler, Mackenzie King was much gratified to learn of Roosevelt’s positive response to the proposal that King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their daughters should visit New York and Washington during the four-week royal tour of Canada in the late spring of 1939. This visit would help cement ties among the United States, Britain, and Canada. The president wrote to the king inviting the royal family to the United States at some point during their tour of Canada. The invitation was at once accepted for the king and queen, but the princesses were deemed too young for such a demanding trip, the first by a reigning monarch to North America.

After all the alarums of Munich, King also felt able to absent himself on holiday from Ottawa. He sailed from Halifax on a three-week cruise to the Caribbean with his deputy minister. Skelton did not want to let King, whom he now described as “belligerent,” out of his sight, and King wanted to keep his eye on the isolationist and self-centred Skelton. In Kingston, Jamaica, on the 24 October 1938, King dismissed in his diary Skelton’s repeated claims that an isolationist Canada would be secure under the umbrella of the United States. “I do not like to be dependent on the U.S. … There was more real freedom in the British Commonwealth of Nations, and a richer inheritance.”132

King had had enough of the endless efforts of his deputy minister to set government policy. After their return to Ottawa, he reflected on his Caribbean conversations with Skelton, condemning to his diary his “republican attitude … his negative viewpoint and inferiority complex in so many things – a real antagonism toward monarchical institutions and Britain – a sort communist sympathy … an isolated Canada which I cannot accept. It … raised a sort of wall of separation between us. He seeks to dominate one’s thoughts, is intellectually arrogant … I must control policy and be the judge of my own conduct … to lead and not be controlled.”¹³³*

For most ministers, recognition of such arrogance in a deputy minister would be more than enough reason to seek a new one. King, anxious at all times about public “misunderstandings” of his various manoeuvrings, kept Skelton on, but with “a sort of wall” between them. O.D. Skelton – called by some wags in Ottawa “Odious Skelton” – gradually faded away into isolated isolationism. With the declaration of war, King repeated his regrets that he had not proclaimed in earlier speeches, against the advice of his deputy, the “probability of war and of Canada’s probable part in any conflict that related to aggression.”¹³⁴

Munich was the pinnacle of King’s appeasement hopes. It was also the turning point in his prewar thinking. He continued to pray that Hitler had meant what he had said when he had declared that Czechoslovakia “is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe.” Not surprisingly, many have since decried the policy of appeasement as illusory if not downright cowardly. A few, however, continued to see it not as an ignoble surrendering of the rights of small nations, but as an initiative to meet legitimate German complaints arising from the misguided Treaty of Versailles. “Far from carrying its later connotations of weakness, fear and retreat in the face of bluff, it suggested accommodation, conciliation, and the removal of just grievances.”¹³⁵ And as the Guardian, for example, concluded, “Chamberlain was not a weak and ineffectual leader, but a strong-willed, realistic and able politician who saw that Britain and France were in no position economically or militarily to keep order in the world and wanted Britain to retain its independent power and influence within the world power system, which he thought could be achieved only if a second world war could be avoided.”136

Even in the months after Munich, King did not acknowledge publicly any disillusionment with appeasement or for that matter with Hitler. He still spoke occasionally about challenges to Canadian unity. But echoing his statements to the 1923 and 1926 imperial conferences, he now took the major step of making it clear to his colleagues that Canada had “a self-evident national duty” to join in any war against Hitler. Lapointe might assert that increased defence spending was greatly disliked in Quebec, but King disregarded that as an irrelevancy. In Jamaica he had declared to his diary, “I must control policy and be the judge of my own conduct.” Thereafter he specified that “my business was to tell Canada of her dangers, not of theories that could not save the lives of the people.”¹³⁷ Ministers from Quebec said that this attitude would “probably cost us many seats in Quebec,” but sounding a little like R.B. Bennett in his support for the League of Nations, he pledged, “If it would cost the [Liberal] Party its whole existence, I would much rather pay that price for what I know to be right.”¹³⁸ And he later added, “the Quebec ministers should realize that it would be the end of Quebec if any [isolationist or neutralist] attitude … were adopted by the French Canadians in a world conflict such as this one would be. They … ought to lead the province in seeing its obligations to participate, and making clear the real issue and what it involves.” If they did not, they would be dropped from the cabinet. “It might be necessary for some of them to consider whether they could do better in the way of steadying people in their own parts [of the province] by being out of the cabinet, rather than in it.”¹³⁹

Soon after Mackenzie King’s return to Ottawa from Jamaica, he went to Washington for trade talks arising in part from the near expiry of the Canada-US bilateral trade agreement of three years before. On 15 November 1938, King participated in the conclusion of two separate but related agreements, further liberalizing trade among Britain, Canada, and the United States. The eight months of negotiations had, as King had sought, protected Canadian preferential tariff rates in the British market, but had lowered tariffs among the three countries. Even more important in King’s eyes, the successful negotiation had brought the three English-speaking countries closer together in the post-depression era. In rather flowery terms, King spoke at the signing ceremony in Washington of Canadian satisfaction “that in facing the problems of today, the two countries, with whose fortunes those of Canada are so closely linked, have effectively strengthened the friendly relations which have long prevailed between them … The stability of the civilisation we cherish depends more than ever on the friendly association of the great English-speaking nations of the old world and the new.”140 The signing of the Canada-US text in November 1938 was for King one of the very few bright spots in a generally gloomy year, with Laurier assuring King from the Great Beyond that Roosevelt “is very fond of you.” King agreed, knowing where the credit for the successful negotiation was due. He told his old British friend and financial benefactor Violet Markham, “I can honestly say that but for the stand which … I took pretty courageously … neither of these agreements would be in existence today.”¹⁴¹

What the self-styled courageous King had not foreseen was that Roosevelt would take the occasion of the signing of the trade agreements to raise again the question of safe havens for refugees from Germany and Austria. King speculated to himself that only the existence of powerful Jewish influences surrounding Roosevelt could explain the president’s frequent references to what other countries were doing – or not doing – for Jewish refugees, but he would have found it more difficult to ascribe to “powerful Jewish influences” the concurrent concerns of Chamberlain, who said, “I am horrified by the German behaviour to the Jews … Nazi hatred will stick at nothing to find a pretext for their barbarities.”¹⁴² Before his departure for Washington, King, relying largely on news reports, had described to his diary that “The sorrows which the Jews have to bear at this time are almost beyond comprehension … Something will have to be done by our country.” It would be “difficult politically” (i.e., opposition mainly from Quebec), but additional Jewish refugees should be admitted. That would be “right and just, and Christian,” but on the other hand it could not be allowed to jeopardize national unity.¹⁴³

In Washington, King listened to Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, the secretary for state, discuss possible aid for refugees and the difficulties of providing any relief, but said little himself. Upon his return to Ottawa, he told Tweedsmuir that Canada must, with the example of Britain in mind, allow more refugees to enter than the handful currently being admitted. However, despite popular demand for more to be done, on 21 November the cabinet decided that a proposal to allow more refugees needed additional study. “The problem was that Lapointe, speaking for Quebec, was adamantly opposed to any increase, as were Cardin and Rinfret. Rogers, Gardiner and Thomas Crerar were in favour, revealing a split in cabinet that might in time contribute to national disunity.”144

On 24 November, after King had met in Ottawa with representatives of Jewish organizations, he called on his cabinet to adopt a “liberal attitude … to act as the conscience of the nation … although it might not be ‘politically most expedient.’” But some in the cabinet continued to fear domestic “political consequences of any help to the Jews.” Lapointe again warned him that accepting Jewish refugees – as well as increased defence spending – posed electoral dangers in Quebec. King thereupon decided not to “press the matter any further.”¹⁴⁵ King and certainly Lapointe may well have known in advance the stance that the Conservatives would take. Their leader, Robert Manion, was ready to do or say almost anything in attempts to recover lost ground in Quebec. Supported by his French-Canadian wife, Manion collaborated to a degree with the provincial Union Nationale, reassuring Quebec about the opposition of the Conservative Party to any immigration whatever as long as any Canadian remained unemployed.

On 15 November Massey had written to King from London, “The anti-Jewish orgy in Germany is not making Chamberlain’s policy of ‘appeasement’ any easier.” He was referring to the shock and disbelief that had followed the Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria the week before when Nazi thugs destroyed Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues and killed several score, injured thousands of others, and incarcerated an estimated thirty thousand in concentration camps. Massey continued, “Chamberlain will not [however] be deflected from the course which he has set himself to obtain a European settlement. In fact, the other day … he told me that his determination to arrive at a stabilization of Europe was too deep-rooted to be affected by the disappointment of the last few weeks.”¹⁴⁶ King agreed. He replied to Massey on 3 December, “the post-Munich developments have made appeasement difficult and positive friendship [with Hitler] for the moment out of the question. That is no reason, however, why the effort should be abandoned.”¹⁴⁷

Between 1937 and 1939 King had moved from his dual foreign policy to a single if ill-defined policy: the British policy of appeasement. Yet with Mussolini’s seizure first of Abyssinia and later of Albania and with Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria, his occupation of Czechoslovakia, and his mounting threats to Poland, any British policy of attempting to appease the two dictators was in effect at an end. At Westminster a young Conservative MP, Ronald Tree, who actively supported Eden and Churchill despite the unrelenting pressures of the whips, recorded the drama as seen from the backbenches. “It was not until those … disasters occurred that the Government finally took the decision to rearm totally and introduce a Bill for Conscription. Although rearmament had been underway since 1935 and strides had been made in certain directions, the ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ policy on which it had been conducted to avoid interfering with our export trade had resulted in many serious deficiencies … The rape of what remained of Czechoslovakia, followed by Mussolini’s invasion of Albania, finally lifted the veil from Chamberlain’s eyes and of those around him. At long last it was realized that the solemn promises of the Dictators were not worth the paper they were written on.”148

King, however, persisted in his hope that appeasement might somehow still succeed. At the same time, Hume Wrong, who had exchanged his post as counsellor at the legation in Washington with Riddell as permanent delegate in Geneva, wrote a masterfully trenchant seven-page analysis of just how little foreign policy Canada had in the wake of the Abyssinian debacle and in the mounting evidence of the futility of appeasement. Wrong was right, convinced that whatever foreign policy Canada had was still, faute de mieux, shaped by British foreign policy. In these circumstances, he contended in his overview that “It is undoubtedly open to us to be more prolific in advice, and it is probable that Canada could exert a considerable influence at times on the foreign policy of the United Kingdom … more frequent consultation … is better than silence which may mean acquiescence.” To enable Canada to analyse and formulate its own thinking on international affairs, the undramatic but essential enlargement and reorganization of the Department of External Affairs was essential. From the day in 1909 when the department had been established and especially after the First World War and the Balfour Declaration of 1926, an effective foreign service should have been recruited and organized. Such an expansion might have crowded King, jealous of his own self-appointed if not divinely ordained leading foreign policy role. And Skelton, for fourteen years a self-inflicted overworked deputy minister, chose to conduct what was close to being his own one-man band. Further, as Wrong contended, not only were additional missions required, but under Skelton “the existing offices abroad are not now utilised as fully as they ought to be, and that no plan of expansion will be effective which is concentrated only on additional Canadian representation in other countries.” Even at headquarters in Ottawa, the few foreign service officers were not fully used.149 That was acceptable to King who always sought to avoid any involvement in foreign ventures that might conflict with the highest good of all, not national leadership but national unity. In short, King and Skelton, if not for the same reasons, had prevented any real expression of an autonomist foreign policy partly by severely limiting the size of the Department of External Affairs. It was in these circumstances that Pearson was soon to sum up the department as simply being “in a mess.”

*The measure of Halifax’s success in demonstrating leadership and foreign policy understanding to many who remained wary of Churchill’s adventurism was reflected in the fact that in May 1940 when Chamberlain resigned as prime minister he was seen as the only possible alternative to Churchill.

*Almost a decade after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Hoare-Laval pact had in effect ended the League of Nations, King could still not leave it alone. In May 1944, when he went with Churchill to view the Normandy invasion fleet in the south of England, he said that “he did not believe there would have been a war if the League of Nations had never existed. He [Churchill] defended the League stoutly. He claimed that if action had been taken promptly when Hitler went to invade the Ruhr [sic], things would not have got any further” (King diary, 13 May 1944).

*One month before, the attorney general of Australia and future prime minister, Robert Menzies, on visiting Berlin, had a different impression of Henderson from that of Cooper. In addition to noting how highly Chamberlain and Halifax were thought of in Berlin, he wrote to his prime minister, “Henderson is an extremely clear-headed and sensible fellow with a frank and even breezy method of putting the British view to the Germans. The Czechoslovakian government, on the other hand, was being difficult over the Sudetenland and a very firm hand by the British will be required in Prague” (Menzies to Lyons, 6 August 1938, in Meany, Australia and the World, 438).

*In a vain attempt to appeal to Quebec, Arthur Meighen, as leader of the Conservative Party, had in 1920 embraced the wholly impracticable idea of having an election before any declaration of war.

*King’s surprising condemnation of Skelton as a communist sympathizer may have arisen from an oubliette of his memory, recalling that Lenin, writing from Zurich in 1917, had congratulated Skelton on his doctoral thesis, published as Socialism: A Critical Analysis (Crowley, Marriage of Minds, 39).