At some point during the six weeks he spent at the Canadian No. 1 Neurological Hospital at Basingstoke, outside London, Smythe realized he was likely to live, though whether he would ever walk again was less certain. He felt a surge of relief and gratitude and quickly determined to treat it as a challenge to be overcome: “I made up my mind that, well, I’m hurt, but if I can even progress to a wheelchair I’ll be all right. If Franklin Roosevelt, crippled, can run the United States, I can run Maple Leaf Gardens.”1*
The transfer from France had been a nightmare. He was one of a planeload of badly wounded men attended by a handful of nurses. He was on a lower pallet, beneath a man from his own unit whose blood dripped on him throughout the crossing. Men with head injuries screamed as the aircraft engines droned. He was almost fifty years old, and six weeks after D-Day here he was with a hole in his back and no feeling where his legs should be. He was at his lowest ebb when Stafford managed to get leave and surprise him by appearing in his room at Basingstoke. His son took one look at the damaged little man with the bandages and tubes, drips and wrappings, and fainted dead away. Some reporters also tracked him down and were allowed in for a peek, during which he managed to wave and whisper, “Things look as if they’re going to be okay now, boys.”2
Irene wrote of her joy that he was alive – surely no one else in his life ever addressed Smythe as “Darling sweetie pie” – and described the scene that unfolded when the news of his injury had arrived. She had been sitting outside with Miriam and Dorothea. All three had husbands in uniform. When a military man appeared with a telegram, they knew instantly what it meant: one of their husbands was either dead, injured, captured, or missing. They stared in silence, each wondering what to think, since to hope for safety for their man meant wishing the bad news onto one of the others. They watched in horror as the man opened the gate and walked toward them, finally asking, “Mrs. Conn Smythe?”3
Smythe’s most immediate problem was his inability to relieve himself. The blast had sent a hunk of shrapnel within a hair of his spine, shattering the nerves in his right leg and the nerves controlling his bladder and bowels. Before being evacuated he’d lain in a ward pleading for relief, his bladder swelling ever fatter until a Scottish doctor took pity. He sliced open a section of abdomen and pushed in a tube; Smythe swore the pressure sent forth a geyser that touched the ceiling. But the relief was only temporary and he was still unable to urinate or defecate on his own.
In September he was taken by stretcher to the hospital ship Lady Nelson with five hundred others, bound for Halifax. A reporter found him on arrival and sought his reaction to a recent offer from the NHL to make him league president. Frank Calder had died of a heart attack in 1943 and Red Dutton had been filling in. Smythe saw it as the latest twist in the plot to remove him from the Leafs organization, but held his tongue, declaring his only goal was to get home to his family and catch up on events at the Gardens. His injury had been big news. When the Star learned of Smythe’s injury, it ran his photo on page one, above a report from correspondent Frederick Griffin that read alarmingly like an obituary.
No grander, no nobler soldier left Toronto for this war than Connie Smythe, wearing the pilots’ wings and Military Cross he won as a young artilleryman and as a flier in the 1st war. He came because he felt it was his duty, the duty of all men who could run, walk or crawl, to fight the Germans. He enlisted again for war because he felt keenly that sportsmen should show the way and because he sought to give a lead to athletes.…
That was Connie Smythe as I have known him and as many others have known him better. He had a sense of duty himself that few men have. Simple, direct, honest, ardent, sentimental, he set his course that led him to France. His duty done, his ambition fulfilled, his splendid service ended as he would have wished, fighting Germans.4
It was news again when his train chugged into Toronto two days after leaving Halifax. The papers carried another photo, this time showing an ecstatic-looking Smythe waving and grinning at the camera. He showed reporters his foot-long scar and banged on his leg with his fist. “See that? No life there at all, the nerves are all shot.”
The coverage was effusive. “Conn Smythe came home this morning, as peppery and explosive as the day he left Toronto for overseas 23 months ago,” began another report. “His blue eyes still breathe fire, his cheeks are so bright they belie a two-months convalescence.
“… ‘Glad to be back? [said Smythe]. Listen kid, there’s only one thing any of us ever dream about when we get over there and that’s getting back home. Talk about the romantic cities of Italy and France all you like, they don’t even come close to Toronto. That’s all I ask.’ ”5
As he had in Halifax, he also hinted at something else, a mission he had in mind “for the lads overseas.” He said, “It won’t be long before I’m back in more trouble than you can shake a stick at. We’ve got a great breed of boys fighting for us over there and somebody’s got to fight for them over here. They’re so used to fighting for somebody else they don’t know how to fight for themselves. But they deserve a square deal and we’ve got to get it for them. I’ll have more to say about this.”6
What he had in mind became quickly apparent. From the train he was taken directly to Chorley Park, a magnificent vice-regal manor built in the northern reaches of Rosedale, which for twenty-two years had served as the official residence of Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governors. It had been shut down to save money during the Depression and used as a military hospital since 1940. On the day he arrived, with Irene in attendance, he was visited in his room by George McCullagh, the publisher of the Globe and Mail.
McCullagh was a brilliant but erratic man who had bought the Globe for $1.3 million and the Mail and Empire for $2.5 million and combined them into one. He was a big, outspoken, alpha male who liked to mix things up, which in the newspaper trade was always good for business. At the time he launched the renamed Globe and Mail he’d been a big supporter of Ontario’s Liberal premier Mitch Hepburn, but – as tended to happen with Hepburn – the two parted ways and McCullagh moved to the Conservative camp. Now he had the passion of the converted and nothing would make him happier than a chance to wage war with Mackenzie King. Smythe, having been back in the city a matter of hours, promptly gave him the opportunity.
Lying in a collection area for casualties the night he was wounded, Smythe had struck up a conversation with a major on the next stretcher. He was from a Quebec unit and had been wounded fighting near Caen. He complained of being chronically short of men, and of sending untrained soldiers into battle under inexperienced officers because reinforcements were scarce and those that arrived had little seasoning. Smythe commiserated with him and wrote down his name. In the ensuing weeks he collected more such stories and wrote down more names. He interviewed each new arrival in his ward and talked to officers and to ministers, who put him in touch with more men with similar stories. Some told him they’d gone into battle with only 60 per cent of their usual strength. Injured men were hustled back into the front lines again and again to plug holes. Soldiers worn down by years in Europe were returned to battle when they should have long since been withdrawn because there was no one to replace them.
“It was pitiful, some things that were happening,” Smythe recalled. “The Army was combing all the lesser trades, trying to make infantry reinforcements out of clerks, switchboard operators, people who had been rejected for frontline duty before. One boy who had been working on telephones for two years, and who talked to me because he was a Leaf fan, was taken that way and wound up paralyzed in the same room with me, only a few weeks later.”7
Smythe relayed it all to McCullagh,. “If you’re sure, that should be published,” McCullagh responded. “I’ll publish every word you say.” Smythe immediately dictated a statement and the next morning it appeared on the front of the Globe. The headline read, “UNTRAINED TROOPS HAZARD AT FRONT, SMYTHE COMPLAINS.”8
It was a no-holds blast at King, charging that brave Canadian men were dying because of his refusal to adopt conscription.
During my time in France and in the hospitals of France and England, I was able to discuss the reinforcement situation with officers of units representing every section of Canada. They agreed that the reinforcements received now are green, inexperienced and poorly trained.
Besides this general statement, specific charges are that many have never thrown a grenade. Practically all have little or no knowledge of the Bren gun, and, finally, most of them have never seen a PIAT antitank gun, let alone fired one. These officers are unanimous in stating that large numbers of unnecessary casualties result from this greenness, both to the rookies and to the older soldiers, who have the added task of trying to look after the newcomers as well as themselves.
He suggested James Ralston, the defence minister, was ill informed, that money was being wasted on troops at home while those overseas went wanting, and that the government was defying a 1942 referendum that had given it the authority to impose conscription. “The relatives of the lads in the fighting zones should ensure no further casualties are caused to their own flesh and blood by the failure to send overseas reinforcements now available in large numbers in Canada.”
The statement was just 276 words, but it went to the heart of Ottawa’s effort to satisfy English Canada’s desire to do its duty while respecting Quebec’s ambivalence about the war. If the goal had been to antagonize King and ignite the hostility dividing English and French Canada, he couldn’t have done better.
Mackenzie King in late 1944 thought he was doing a magnificent job of shepherding Canada through the war. He was almost seventy years old, had been leader of the Liberal party since 1919 and prime minister for nineteen years, and one of his great achievements as leader had been his ability to hold English and French together in relative harmony, having healed the divide caused by the imposition of conscription during the First World War. To prevent a similar division during the second war he had engineered one of the great compromises of Canadian history, agreeing to conscript soldiers and train them for battle, but with no intention of ever using them.
As a result the army now had sixty thousand trained men in Canada, about 40 per cent of them French-speaking, who were safe from going to war unless Hitler invaded Canada.9
They were known as “Zombies” because they were a dead army, still breathing but unavailable to fight. Meanwhile, a separate army of volunteer soldiers was fighting and dying in Europe in large numbers. It was a policy that had proved greatly beneficial to King, whose party had won 64 per cent of the vote in Quebec in 1940, but was rife with danger should English Canada become disgruntled with the situation. And that’s exactly what Smythe’s plan set out to do. He was implicitly accusing the government of putting the lives of soldiers in danger to satisfy Liberal political interests. Smythe was telling mothers and fathers in English Canada their sons’ lives were being risked for want of reinforcements, and all to protect young men in Quebec and ensure they continued to vote for the Liberals in overwhelming numbers.
For King, Smythe couldn’t have struck at a worse time. He believed the war was almost over, and was already contemplating his victory election. Just days before, he had informed Churchill at a meeting in Quebec that he was determined to limit Canada’s role in the Pacific once the European war was won, and told Louis St. Laurent, the senior figure in his Quebec caucus, that he would consider resigning if opposed in Cabinet. He was also deep into the strange world of spiritualism that was so much a part of his being, and of which Canadians remained blissfully unaware. He spoke regularly to dead relatives and acquaintances, and was constantly being seized by visions he considered direct communications from the beyond. At the time Smythe launched his conscription crusade, King was beside himself in anticipation of a new portrait of his mother, due to arrive at any time.10 Thus the initial response to Smythe’s accusations was left to Ralston, the senior of the three men who held defence portfolios in King’s cabinet. A First World War veteran himself, he had a son fighting in Belgium and shared Smythe’s concern over reinforcements, but doubted the situation was as bad as Smythe claimed.
He convened a gathering of military aides to deal with the statement the morning it appeared.11 They prepared a brief rebuttal, professing bewilderment at the charges, and reassuring Canadians that troops were perfectly well trained. “With regard to overseas, special inquiries are being made, but no complaints whatever have been received from the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of insufficiently trained reinforcements.”
As a slap at Smythe, it added, “It is deeply regretted that stress may have been caused in many thousands of homes in Canada by the suggestion that casualties have been increased on account of insufficiently trained reinforcements. There is nothing whatever which is known which would provide the slightest justification for that conclusion.”
Ralston also sent off an urgent message to Gen. Kenneth Stuart, chief of staff at Canada’s military headquarters in London, requesting an assessment of the charges. General Stuart replied promptly with the hoped-for assurances that everything was just fine. He included figures indicating recruits were using up plenty of Bren gun bullets in their training and had fired off thousands of PIAT rounds. The Bren was a light machine gun used by Canadian troops, along with the traditional Lee-Enfield rifle. A PIAT gun was a variation on the U.S. bazooka.
The dismissive tone reflected the government’s assumption it was dealing with one disgruntled hockey manager. But Smythe had hit a nerve. The press was overwhelmingly on the side of conscription and would spend the next six weeks pounding Ottawa mercilessly on his behalf. On the day his statement appeared, the Toronto Telegram produced a stinging editorial arguing that the policy of training men but keeping them in Canada was a giant government sham:
Major Smythe’s statement blasts the argument of those who have loudly asserted that the Home Defense Army was preparing adequate and fully trained reinforcements who could be available at any moment they were needed by the mere stroke of the Government’s pen ordering conscription. The actual situation as exposed by Major Smythe shows that the country has been lulled into a sense of false security by propaganda put forward to oppose any pressure upon the government for conscription.12
The Telegram also reported Ottawa was looking for a way to discipline Smythe. The Globe quoted an unnamed government spokesman, warning that “Major Smythe’s action was contrary to army regulations, and, in making it, he subjected himself to disciplinary measures.”
Unidentified officials suggested Smythe had made his charges for political purposes and planned to run for the Progressive Conservatives in the next election. Although he had considered running for office in the past, and pondered it again when King finally called a general election in June 1945, it seems unlikely political ambition was behind his charge. He couldn’t walk, pee, or empty his bowels, and was hardly likely to have spent time contemplating the joys of life in Ottawa while recuperating in his bed in Basingstoke.
He was far more concerned with shoring up his position at the Gardens and fending off a campaign to kick him upstairs into the NHL presidency.
He had been receiving feelers about his interest in replacing Dutton as NHL boss since early in the year. Dutton had replaced Calder on an interim basis after Calder’s heart attack, but league governors were divided over his suitability on a permanent basis. Jim Norris may have been the first to formally raise the issue with Smythe, but he already knew it was coming thanks to an alert from Selke, who didn’t appreciate the warning bells it would set off.
“There was a move on foot at the last NHL meeting to put Red Dutton in as NHL President for the duration,” Selke had written in January. “Patrick, Adams, Tobin and Gorman were for. Toronto and Boston against.” The Leafs and Bruins had blocked the move, he said, adding, “I keep rooting for you or Walter Brown [manager of Boston Garden].”13
In many ways Smythe made perfect sense as a candidate. He had been telling everyone how to run the league for years anyway, so why not just give him the job? Besides, he was part of an old guard that was starting to disappear. Calder was dead. Lester Patrick had quit coaching in 1939 and handed the job to Frank Boucher. Chicago’s Major McLaughlin died in December 1944. Ross was nearing the end of his active days in Boston. The Americans, Maroons, and Senators were all out of business.
Smythe would undoubtedly have attacked the league’s problems with relish. The question was whether anyone would have listened. The NHL was replete with big egos, and Smythe wasn’t renowned for his diplomatic skills. Even while promoting Smythe’s candidacy Selke recognized this, noting that as acting president, Dutton “is in the same unhappy position of having to call on others before being authorized to make a decision. Why he would put himself in that position in spite of the fact he is wealthy enough to be independent is beyond me.”14
Nonetheless the momentum increased in the wake of his wounding, as news spread of the extent of his injuries. In an August 29 letter addressed to Smythe in Basingstoke, Selke encouraged him to give serious consideration to stepping aside.
The drums are starting to beat for [George Dudley, an amateur hockey executive] as a temporary man – Conny Smythe as a permanent appointee. They meet in Montreal next Friday and if they talk about it again I will ask them to make a definite offer.… We are fixing up your office preparatory to your return but if they pay you well enough you might take the other job. Certainly the league could do with a real leader after the beating it has taken from within during the last three or four years.15
Although he didn’t realize it, there was probably nothing Selke could have done to raise doubts about his loyalty in Smythe’s mind more than to write those words. Lying helpless and in pain in a British hospital, the last thing he wanted to hear was a suggestion from his appointed lieutenant that he consider stepping aside. For Selke to note that Bickle and MacBrien favoured his departure only made it worse, as it confirmed – as far as Smythe was concerned – that he now faced a cabal of disloyal interests working against him within the very heart of the Maple Leafs organization.
Reports in the sports pages only added to his alarm. Andy Lytle revealed that Smythe could “write his own salary ticket” if he took the job. League governors were “practically unanimous” in viewing him “not only as the most logical successor … but as the standout figure for the position, head and shoulders above the herd.”16
A few days later he added that “no one except Conn Smythe would be even briefly considered” for the job and that Bickle, Black Hawks director Bill Tobin, and Lester Patrick were all in favour. “If Jim Norris … okays that, Smythe is as good as in … a nod given from Norris to the NHL is like being given the King’s accolade.”17
Smythe defused the campaign the first chance he got. “That they should offer to pay me a large sum of money annually for service they can get from me for nothing, doesn’t make sense,” he said after summoning reporters to his hospital bed. He insisted he was “perfectly happy” in his old job as managing director.
“I’m content to take up where I left off, that is if I still have my old job,” he said. “You might ask Ed Bickle about that. Right now I don’t know where I stand.”18
The remark produced the expected response. “The job has always been his. You can’t make that too strong or too emphatic,” Bickle insisted. “I have merely been filling in for him. What’s the matter with him, anyway?”
While Smythe was dousing that fire, his conscription crusade was heating up. McCullagh’s Globe had responded vehemently to the claim Smythe had political ambitions, and was quickly gathering allies, reprinting articles from newspapers across the country that backed his position. The Ottawa Journal wrote that Smythe’s charge “cannot be dismissed as the complaint of a junior officer, unfamiliar with his subject. It is the considered, written statement of a man who is well known to Canadians, who is a veteran of the last war, and who won the Military Cross for valor.… No official brush-off can dispose of these charges by Major Smythe. They are either true or they are not true. If they are not true, the public has a right to expect of the Government that it prove they are not true; to show where, why and how they are false. If they are true, with the Government unable to produce facts to the contrary, then the country has a right to feel that our men overseas and the whole war effort are being betrayed, and to demand that those responsible for the betrayal be punished.”19
The furor ultimately got through to Ralston in Ottawa. Letters began arriving from the wives, mothers, and fathers of volunteers, worried that the government was taking needless risks with their sons’ lives. They were supported by friends, relatives, veterans, and ordinary Canadians, making clear that a significant portion of the country doubted Ottawa’s assurances that everything was fine.
“I have no heart to help the war any more in any way,” wrote a mother from Smith’s Falls whose son received five months’ training before being sent to Europe and was killed a month later. “I am a very unimportant person in this world but I am a mother and Major Smythe has put in words the thoughts that have been in my mind. How could my boy be trained in modern warfare in that time?”20
Another woman wrote: “Mr. Ralston says the boys are well trained not only in Canada but also in the United Kingdom. I’d like to ask him how much training our son received … He landed in England on July 30, on Aug. 13 he was in France. On the 28th of the same month he was wounded.”21
Just a few days after Smythe’s initial statement he gained a powerful ally when Ontario’s premier, George Drew, returned from a trip to Europe and called a press conference. “There is no doubt about the accuracy of [Smythe’s] charges,” he said. “I know them to be true. Canadians have been sent into action without experience in handling grenades and the Bren and the PIAT anti-tank guns. I know that from my own knowledge gained in contacts with the troops on this trip. I haven’t seen Major Smythe’s statement but, knowing him I know he would not make a statement that was not right. No man in the services is held in higher regard than Major Smythe.”22
Drew’s intervention in the debate upset Ralston enough that he contacted the government’s chief censor to inquire whether the premier had violated any wartime security restrictions. The censor replied that it was not policy to tell provincial premiers what they could say, adding helpfully that he had investigated Smythe’s remarks as well, but no rules had been broken.23
It was obvious the government was looking for a way to shut Smythe up. Soon after the Telegram’s warning, he had been visited at Chorley Park by a staff officer who informed him he was about to be court-martialled. Smythe was delighted, figuring he’d have a chance to make his case in court.
“I said, ‘That’s the best news I’ve ever had,’ ” he related. “I waved the list I had assembled over the last two months. ‘You court-martial me and I’ll publish every one of these names, the regiments they are with, the number of men they were short when they went into battle, and what it cost in casualties.’
“He just looked at me. I told him to get out.”24
The court martial didn’t happen, though the possibility was revisited again as the crisis grew. Ralston appears to have put it on hold as he prepared for a trip to the battlefield to see for himself. The trip had been long planned and wasn’t a reaction to the growing protest, but there were signs he suspected Smythe was closer to the mark than he wanted to admit. At a meeting before his departure he hinted to cabinet colleagues that recent recruitment figures for the infantry were troubling, especially against the sunny predictions he’d been receiving from his generals. He was also wary of the military’s tendency to treat civilians like dunderheads, incapable of appreciating the fine art of military planning. But neither Smythe nor any of his allies knew of his misgivings, and when Ralston set off for Europe in the last week of September he could have been forgiven for feeling the pressure. King’s government could probably have stared down one angry major, even if he did run the country’s favourite hockey team. It might also have managed to dismiss the tandem of Smythe and George McCullagh, since McCullagh’s newspaper rarely had anything nice to say about the government anyway. But Smythe, McCullagh, and Drew together, backed by most of the province’s biggest newspapers, was something else, an axis of anger with plenty of clout and the resources to implement it, firmly grounded in the solid conservative soil of Tory Toronto, where the organizers of the outcry were all within easy reach of one another.
The three men shared a number of characteristics: they were friends, they were conservatives, they were anglophiles, and they felt the war was a patriotic duty rather than, like King, an unfortunate necessity.
Like Smythe, McCullagh and Drew were both self-made men. At age nine McCullagh was a penniless boy selling newspapers on the streets of London, Ontario. He had just six months of high school, but was a millionaire by age thirty and at thirty-one was named the youngest governor of the University of Toronto. He had initially been an ally of King, but the ardour had cooled over time and by 1939, King was avoiding his calls and accusing him of trying to start a Fascist Party of Canada.25 In 1942 King had actively encouraged a change of ownership at the paper, indicating he’d be willing to accept ownership by U.S. interests if it would free him from McCullagh’s attacks.26
Drew shared Smythe’s passion for all things military. A year younger than Smythe, he had attended both Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, and been badly wounded by a piece of shrapnel in 1916.27
Drew and King loathed each other. After Canadian troops were routed in Hong Kong in 1939, Drew made similar charges to those now being levelled by Smythe, claiming Ottawa had shipped under-trained men to defend the colony, a hopeless task that ended with half of Canada’s 1,975 soldiers being either killed or wounded. Drew was charged under the Defence of Canada Act with making statements likely to prejudice recruiting, but the charges were withdrawn in the face of a public backlash.28 So Drew had won round one and was now back for round two.
Two weeks after returning from Europe, Drew delivered a fierce speech in support of Smythe, tearing a strip off King and his government. D-Day, he reported, had so depleted Canadian reserves that the army was scouring other services for replacements, seizing men with little or no training and rushing them into action.29
He read a number of letters he’d received from Canadian fighting men, decrying the situation and the lack of skilled replacements. In each case, Drew noted, the authors had been killed soon after.
It was a powerful assault, but Smythe wasn’t in any condition to appreciate it. After managing a short walk in the hospital garden on the day of the speech, he suffered a relapse and was ordered to bed with no visitors. He was, recalled his son Hugh, in “much worse” shape than was generally known. Part of his treatment in England had been eleven days on a penicillin drip. “These were in the early days of penicillin and it was very crude and he had an allergic reaction to it.” He was also given plasma, contracting viral hepatitis from a virus that was in the plasma, “so when he arrived at Chorley Park he was as yellow as a duck’s foot.”30
As some sense of life returned to his limbs he struggled to relearn how to walk. A nerve in his right leg had been cut, causing it to shrink and the toes to curl under. The pain was constant, and he had developed an intense sensitivity to cold. Most frustrating was his continued lack of control over his bowels or bladder, a situation that would never be permanently repaired. He began receiving a daily enema, a routine that would go on the rest of his life. He was told he would also be able to urinate only through a tube, a situation he was determined to avoid. “I … could stand at the toilet holding on to support bars, and did that for hours every day, telling the urine to come,” he recalled. One day he was distracted by a couple of squirrels having a battle outside the bathroom window. Suddenly the urine began to flow. He yelled for the nurses. “Look at that! Look at that!” he cried, pointing at his penis.
“I’ve seen better,” one of the nurses remarked.31
He did short turns around the bed, then across the room, until finally he was able to hobble for short distances. He made progress, though slowly. It would be three months before he could muster enough strength to visit the Gardens for a gathering of players’ wives. It would be two more months before he could attend a hockey game. One after another, his battery crew wrote him letters with news from the front. Ted Reeve wrote touchingly: “On guard the other night I was thinking of what a hell of a gap in sport and in the routine of us sports scribes there would be without you around. The Gardens would still be having their 13,742 paid on hand but would nonetheless be rather empty as far as many of us were concerned.”32
Patricia also wrote, inquiring when he’d be home and wondering, “Do you think you could play marbles with me? I am now in grade four.” Patricia was special; in an earlier letter she shared a prayer she’d composed: “Dear heavenly father I thank you for the world so sweet and for the food we eat and for the birds that sing and everything sweet in this world a men.”33 On the back Irene scrawled a note: “Hello Darling Dad. Please come home and see us. We want our Daddie very much and need more affection and love.”34
Patricia sent him more cards with girlish poems; when Irene brought her to see him for the first time she hurled herself across the room and into his bed, explaining to the alarmed nurses: “I had to kiss my Daddy.”
Weakened as he was, Smythe and his allies would have been cheered if they’d known the effect they were having in Ottawa, where Mackenzie King was increasingly disenchanted with his cabinet. Ralston was off in Europe, and King already had intimations he would be returning with bad news. Meanwhile his air minister, Chubby Power, had fallen off the wagon. It was a recurring problem that was becoming difficult to ignore. On October 5, King complained to his diary that Power had gone on a bender, then made himself available to the press, and “obviously went so far that all could see that he was the worst for liquor. Efforts had to be made with the press men to hold back some of the things he had said.”35
With Ralston gone and Power out of commission, King was stuck with a cabinet he found increasingly irksome. His navy minister, Angus Macdonald, persisted in resisting the prime minister’s efforts to minimize Canada’s role in the Pacific War. His finance minister, James Lorimer Ilsley, couldn’t make up his mind whether a larger navy was a patriotic necessity or an undesirable expense. “He is not a good finance minister,” King stated bluntly.36 King eventually grew so annoyed with their equivocations he abruptly marched from the room partway through a meeting and vowed to quit sharing his thoughts. “I have made up my mind not to discuss policy any further beyond laying it before the Cabinet as a whole as I did before,” he fumed. “It is unpardonable for these men to act this way.”
On October 8, King directly addressed for the first time the storm that was brewing around conscription, noting that he’d read “with great interest an article by Mrs. Blois” questioning Smythe’s charges.
Mrs. Blois was Edna Blois, whose husband, Lt. Kenneth Blois, had been killed in action in France. She had been featured on an October 3 broadcast on CKEY Radio in Toronto, offering “My Opinion of Major Connie Smythe’s Charges!” Her views were repeated the next day in the Toronto Star, which was doing its best to counter the outpouring of vilification from other less government-friendly publications.
“Frankly, my first reaction to Maj. Smythe’s charges was one of momentary alarm,” recounted Blois. “He is a Canadian sportsman who has public standing. Then I asked myself, ‘Why did Maj. Smythe as an army officer see fit to make these charges public before taking them up with his superior officers? Could it be that the charges flowed from some political motive?”
After suggesting Smythe was just acting as a front for Drew, she complained about the lack of detail to back up his claim. “If a serious man had knowledge of the lives of our soldiers being needlessly thrown away on the field of battle, he would state when, where and how this crime occurred. Major Smythe carefully avoids giving us one single fact to back up his charges. Not one single fact!”
Smythe had, in truth, offered all the details Blois demanded, waving his collection of affidavits at the officer who’d turned up in his hospital room threatening a court martial. The information, he realized, was highly dangerous. Any of the men who had spoken to him could be charged with violating military regulations, and disgraced. The fact they’d provided their names and outfits anyway underlined how seriously they viewed the situation. Smythe wasn’t about to make his evidence public unless forced to do so, and thus far the government had proved reluctant to press the issue. Nonetheless, Blois worked herself into a state: “You cannot go about Toronto charging anyone you don’t like with vague but horrible crimes,” she complained. “Maj. Smythe is doing something much more serious. He is casting suspicion upon our military command; he is undermining public confidence in our military and war leaders by charges unsupported by a single fact that he is prepared to vouch for. And he is doing this from the hospital bed of a wounded officer, thus placing those against whom he makes the charge in a most unfair position.”
She was correct in noting the advantage Smythe enjoyed: it was difficult for the government to turn their guns on a wounded war hero. Nonetheless, when he was up to it Smythe sought to answer the complaints against him, writing letters refuting intimations he was motivated by anything beyond concern for the troops. “Canada never produced and never will produce anything finer than these young men. If the country loses them she’s lost everything, and we don’t have to get them killed to lose them – get that straight. We can lose them for keeps by forgetting them, or letting them think we have. And that’s what we’re doing now, letting them think we’ve forgotten them while we sit here squabbling like a bunch of lousy politicians over whether it will or won’t be good for our unity to send them the help they need.”37
On October 13, the campaign took a crucial turn. King, who had been complaining frequently of fatigue and a need for rest, awoke “burning with fire inside.” Just before entering cabinet, he received a cable from Ralston in Europe with clear indications of trouble ahead. He requested an early meeting with the cabinet as soon as he returned, to which he intended to bring General Stuart from London. King immediately guessed what he had in mind. Ralston had gone over to the Smythe gang.
“All of this I can see means that he is coming back prepared to urge that the situation has become so much more serious than contemplated and that drastic steps will have to be taken to secure the necessary number of trained men,” he wrote. “All of this of course will be an effort to have the NRMA men serve overseas.”
Ralston had indeed gone over. On October 3, from London, he’d accused Smythe of stirring up trouble for political reasons. But even then he’d been halfway into the conscriptionist camp. He no longer had complete faith in his generals. He suspected they were out of touch, too tied to headquarters, and too determined to tell him what they thought he wanted to hear. When Ralston arrived in Europe, General Stuart was still insisting there wasn’t the slightest truth in any of Smythe’s allegations. He had responded to Drew’s October 5 speech with a twenty-four-point memo disputing his claims and insisting, “The truth is that, up to date, there has been no overall deficiency in reinforcements.”38
Ralston, however, had discovered that Smythe’s claims were accurate. In Italy, where Canadian men were engaged in a fierce effort to tie up German forces, he was told the situation was dire. The number of casualties was outpacing replacements by a ratio of two or three to one. That didn’t include the sick and injured, which pushed the required number of replacements to beyond five hundred a day. If the fighting continued at the current level of ferocity, the available supply of men would be exhausted within days.39 At the same time, he learned from the commander of the British Eighth Army that the fighting was expected to go on for weeks, and Canada would play a leading role, which meant continued casualties at an elevated rate.
Ralston flew to Belgium, where he was met by Col. Richard S. Malone, a former Winnipeg newspaperman who had served as Ralston’s staff secretary early in the war. Malone had gone on to serve in Sicily, was assigned as a liaison to Britain’s Gen. Bernard Montgomery, and later still directed Canadian public relations for the landing at Normandy. Malone hadn’t seen Ralston in a year and noticed a stark change. The minister looked haggard and preoccupied and could think of nothing but the reinforcement problem. With good reason: the situation, Malone reported, was “desperate,” with many units undermanned and wounded soldiers being sent back repeatedly to the front lines. The trickle of replacements sent to support them was simply not adequate.
“Many of the men who had recently arrived from Canada were from the bottom of the barrel and would never be fit for frontline service,” Malone recalled.40 “The depots at home were scraping the bottom and had simply shipped many of these chaps over to complete the quota on a draft.” Although wounded men sent back to their units were counted as available for fighting, “many would never see active service again.” And, as in Italy, it was likely to get worse. At the same time Ralston was in Belgium Canadian forces were heavily engaged in clearing German troops from the Scheldt estuary, the approach to the vital port at Antwerp. On October 13, the day Ralston sent his cable to King, the Canadian 5th Infantry Brigade’s Black Watch Battalion had been all but wiped out. Ralston discovered Canadian forces were also slotted to face what was expected to be fierce resistance when the Allied campaign reached the Rhine.
Before he left Brussels, Ralston was invited to dine at headquarters with Gen. Harry Crerar, commander of the 1st Canadian Army. The minister left his food untouched and seemed in a daze. On the way out he invited Malone to his darkened trailer, where he sat on the edge of his bunk, talking despondently until after 3:00 a.m. while Malone huddled in his coat against the cold.
“I am not very popular at home now,” he told Malone, recounting the attacks he’d been under. But Ralston sympathized with the troops as much as Smythe did. He saw his first responsibility as ensuring the men were supported to the fullest extent. And it was clear from what he’d seen that the standard wasn’t being met.
“His mind was completely made up,” Malone recounted. “He would either force the government to bring in full conscription on his return or he would resign.”41
It was the key moment in the brief but intense contest Smythe had set in motion. As King was aware, Ralston had the sympathy and support of other ministers, considerable clout within the military, and the overwhelming backing of English Canada. When Ralston landed back in Ottawa with Stuart in tow, Mackenzie King had a divided cabinet and a full-fledged crisis on his hands.
He had no intention of flinching. The next two weeks would be a prolonged test of endurance between the prime minister and his defence minister, neither willing to abandon principles each felt were too fundamental to compromise. King was unconvinced the manpower situation was as critical as portrayed, distrusted the military, and was increasingly fed up with his ministers. “Ralston has been a thorn in my flesh right along,” he complained after receiving his cable.42 He began to fill his diary with fevered visions of civil war between French and English. Conscription, he wrote, would be “a criminal thing” that would break up Canada and lead to demands for “complete independence, if not annexation to the U.S.” It would doom Britain’s empire, which “can only endure by there being complete national unity in Canada,” and undermine the war effort by giving aid and comfort to an enemy sure to be cheered by signs of discord. The coming push against Japan, he worried, would be lost before it began.
He insisted conscription couldn’t be imposed without recalling Parliament and putting the question to a vote. If the government fell, it would mean a bitter and contentious campaign in the midst of war. He feared he could very well lose the election, which might put the dreaded socialists in charge, since the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, precursor of the New Democratic Party, was enjoying a surge of support.
Ralston was just as determined not to cede ground. From the time he returned to Canada on October 18 and the peak of the crisis on November 1, he and King faced off in a series of increasingly fraught sessions – at gatherings of the war committee, in meetings of the full cabinet, before the Liberal caucus, and in private talks during which King sought alternately to soothe and bully his unyielding minister. The prime minister wanted to try other alternatives: a new campaign for volunteers, for instance, or a reduction in recruiting standards. Perhaps there should be fewer or smaller units. He snidely asked Ralston if he thought he could form a government if he departed.
The conflict veered from drama to farce on October 25 when the cabinet learned that – in addition to the 60,000 unused Zombies – the military had 120,000 general service troops in Canada and another 90,000 in England, who could have been dispatched to the front without any of the political or national unity implications. The ministers were dumbfounded. “My God,” blurted Power, “if that’s the case, what are you talking about getting more men under conscription?” But the generals insisted the men were either ill trained or ill suited for infantry duty and would take too long to whip into shape. King found it hard to believe the army couldn’t scrape together 15,000 reinforcements out of 210,000 available soldiers.43
King began to imagine a conspiracy against him. The same ministers who were demanding conscription had been the most fiercely opposed to many of the social reforms he had championed. He decided they must be in league with one another and with the bankers and other commercial powers who were out to preserve their wealth and stymie his plans. There was no evidence for any of this. The Conservative leader, John Bracken, didn’t have a Commons seat and struggled to control his own caucus; he was hardly the man to organize a national conspiracy. And there was no money for the bankers in conscription.
Feeling a boost from Britain’s prime minister might help get his cabinet back in line, King cabled Churchill to confirm his claim the war was almost won. Churchill replied that fighting could continue into the summer of 1945, and Canada’s forces would certainly be needed. Having got the wrong answer, King kept the information from his cabinet.
He began to consider replacing Ralston and approached General McNaughton, the man Smythe had championed as near-dictator of Canada’s war effort. Unbeknownst to Smythe, who had taken for granted the general would support conscription, McNaughton was opposed to forcing the Zombies to serve if they didn’t want to. He had been recalled the year before and had been at loose ends for months, supposedly on medical leave as the government looked for something appropriate for him to do. King had decided to make him Governor General – the first Canadian-born appointee to hold that job – and McNaughton had agreed. But before the appointment could be made, King asked whether he would be willing to serve as defence minister in Ralston’s place instead.
Replace the man who had humiliated him? You bet he would. McNaughton incorrectly blamed Ralston for his recall. He assured King he could raise all the reinforcements needed without resorting to conscription. He was certain the additional volunteers would be no problem for a man of his prestige.
Thus armed, on November 1 King staged one of the most dramatic moments in Canadian cabinet history. He told McNaughton to be prepared to take Ralston’s place immediately. Then he visited the Governor General – who would be required to do the swearing in – and told him to be ready. He contacted a number of key ministers and advised them against acting rashly in response to what was about to happen. Then he entered a planned cabinet meeting, reminded his ministers Ralston had offered to resign over another matter two years earlier, and announced he had now decided to accept it.
King’s cabinet was thunderstruck. “This is the most cold-blooded thing I’ve ever seen,” remarked Colin Gibson, the minister of national revenue.44 King recalled in his diary that there was “intense silence” following his ambush. Finally, Ralston spoke quietly, declared that of course he would stand down if the prime minister required it, and immediately gathered up his papers to leave the room. He shook hands with King, and – as King recalled – thanked him for giving him the opportunity to serve. The other ministers stood and formed a circle to shake his hand. But King, not finished, intercepted him on the way to the door and explained that he’d like to have McNaughton sworn in as soon as possible. “I asked him if it would be possible to let me have his resignation that night.” But Ralston wasn’t about to be hustled out of town on the first train and told the prime minister he’d have to wait a day. “It was a scene I shall never forget, nor will those who were present,” King confided to his diary.
He was correct on that. The newspapers responded with shock. McCullagh’s Globe noted that Ralston had formed his view on conscription after personally touring the battlefront, while McNaughton had been away from the army for a year. On November 7 it charged: “The government is wickedly sacrificing young men’s lives to retain its governing power in Quebec.” There was an outpouring of sympathy for Ralston, and something less than an ecstatic welcome for McNaughton. Smythe gave Ralston his due: “The record shows that he laid it right on the line for the cabinet. But King, to my mind, was the greatest traitor of all time.”45 He now had no time at all for McNaughton, the man he had once considered suitable to serve as virtual czar. “[McNaughton] should have been ashamed of himself for the rest of his life for turning his back on the Army he had helped to form, and taking out his personal dislike of Ralston by siding with King against the best interests of the Canadian army.”
Many other veterans agreed. McNaughton’s efforts to raise a host of volunteers quickly fizzled. Ralston’s allies in cabinet became restless and, seeing another plot, King again threatened to resign. He was saved from carrying out his threat when McNaughton, shaken by events, abruptly declared that conscription would be necessary after all. King convinced himself he was facing a revolt by his generals and, using McNaughton’s retreat as cover, reversed his position on the spot. “This really lifts an enormous burden from my mind,” he wrote.
It was a momentous victory for Smythe and his supporters, though he felt he never received adequate credit for bringing it about. “I’m sort of the unseen presence,” he wrote of the episode. “There is no official record that I can find stating that I was the one who finally blew the lid off of the Army reinforcement scandal.”46 When King’s official biographer addressed the situation more than fifteen years later, he couldn’t bring himself to even name the men who had besmirched King’s legacy, referring to them only as “alarmists and troublemakers who were generally considered to be unreliable,” while acknowledging that “events proved, however, that the gloomy prophecies of this group were only too accurate.”47
Once the conscription order was given, none of the horrific consequences King had foreseen actually occurred. The country endured, the war was won, and the Empire survived. King, in fact, managed to turn his about-face into an enduring victory. By making clear his willingness to go to the wall for Quebec, he had won French support for the Liberal Party that would endure for a generation and more, while dooming the Conservatives to repeated failure. In the 1940 general election, King’s Liberals had captured every province in the country. When the 1945 election was held in June, he lost Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Ontario, but was rescued by Quebec, which gave him forty-seven seats, 40 per cent of his total. The Tories won one.
King believed he was under attack by forces hostile to the very soul of the country, motivated by political and material ambitions. But Smythe had never sought anything more than what he urged in the beginning: that Ottawa use its healthy supply of trained men to take the strain off the badly pressed volunteers on the front line. In that he succeeded, though by the time the government got around to sending the conscripts Hitler was in his last days and only about twenty-five hundred men were sent.
Drew and others had been agitating for conscription through much of the war without making a dent in King’s resistance. Not until Smythe entered the argument did it make any headway. Drew was premier and head of a minority government. Smythe was a war hero, with an ability to tap into the emotions of average Canadians in a way Drew never could. McNaughton certainly recognized that and continued to press King to court-martial Smythe. King acknowledged the troublesome little major should have been “dealt with” in the early stages, but was too wise a politician to send the boss of the Toronto Maple Leafs limping up to a courthouse to make his case.48
* Smythe made this declaration in his memoirs thirty-five years after the event. However, very few people knew of Roosevelt’s handicap while he was still alive and it was only later that people came to realize how difficult his last years had been.