THE FALL OF FRANCE
The war with Poland was over almost before it started. Hitler’s armoured formations rolled through the countryside, tearing apart Polish cavalry, infantry, and tank formations, while dive-bombing Stukas machine-gunned and bombed anything and anyone in their path. Still, it was not as stunning or as complete a victory as is sometimes suggested in the history books. Some 14,000 Germans were killed and another 30,322 wounded in battle.1 After the campaign, studies revealed problems with coordinating the attacking forces and numerous communication breakdowns, but the German high command had time to address many of these issues before facing new adversaries.
The Russians entered the battle on September 17, when the Polish were in their death throes; their unambiguous objective was to carve up the corpse of their historic enemy. The non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, as unlikely as it was from an ideological standpoint, forged a powerful alliance. As a harbinger of things to come, thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were rounded up and executed by the occupiers, while 1.3 million others were sent into exile. Tens of thousands of Polish citizens died of starvation or disease in Soviet gulags.2 Hitler and Stalin never blinked an eye at the slaughter, having long perfected the butchering of their own people before taking their terror to others.
Even as British forces were rushed to defend France, the French prepared for the German onslaught against the 700-kilometre-long defensive fortifications they called the Maginot Line. It consisted of dozens of concrete forts and underground tunnels protected by casements, armoured structures, deep pockets of barbed wire, interlocking machine guns, anti-tank trenches, and artillery. The French, having suffered grievously when they sought to regain German-occupied French territory during the Great War, were determined to make their opponents pay a similar blood debt in this war. The Maginot Line was not impregnable—there were significant gaps between the concrete forts—but the German generals were mystified as to how to break it without taking crippling casualties. Hitler’s high command set about finding an audacious solution to the problem, but for months the two opposing sides faced each other in a stalemate that was soon dubbed the Phoney War. The long delay, as Allied soldiers dug in and the Germans brought up reinforcements, bred discouragement and passivity in many of the British and French soldiers who had been rushed to the front only to find that boredom awaited them. The German soldiers, however, were motivated by their nation’s recent victory over Poland, were more thoroughly indoctrinated, and were anxious to reverse the Great War’s humiliating defeat.
In Canada, the Phoney War brought a much-needed respite to allow the nation to build up its military capabilities. Factories retooled and upped their rate of production, but their pace was well short of frenzied, at least partly because Britain was stingy when it came to placing contracts in Canada. Nonetheless, industry picked up steam in late 1939 and early 1940, producing all manner of war materiel—and the rising demand for these goods was putting Canadians back to work. King was also shoring up control, making strong appointments to his cabinet and handing out new responsibilities to his proven political lieutenants. While few envisioned the prime minister as a war leader, he had expertly guided a united country into the war, firm in its support for Britain and France. His minister of finance, J.L. Ralston, was much respected across the country, as was C.D. Howe, who would take control of all war supplies and manufacturing, and would soon be dubbed “minister of everything.” Norman Rogers was a hard-working minister of defence; when he died in an aircraft accident in June 1940, he was replaced by Ralston. The gregarious and bibulous Charles “Chubby” Power, a Great War veteran and efficient party organizer, became minister of defence for air, while Angus Macdonald was plucked from Nova Scotia, where he had been premier, to oversee the navy. J.L. Ilsley, another stern Nova Scotian, would work heroics in finance after Ralston moved to defence. It would be Ilsley who introduced new taxes and war bonds to help pay for the war. Most influential in the cabinet was King’s right-hand man from Quebec, Ernest Lapointe, who served as minister of justice and controlled the Quebec wing of the party.3 King led his cabinet but provided his able ministers with the room to develop their own agendas and find solutions to the complex challenges of the war. While King rarely interfered, he remained aware of nearly everything related to the home front. Cabinet ministers would come and go, exchanging portfolios or resigning under duress, but King remained constant. He grew into the role of Canada’s warlord.
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King shored up his power by forging a talented cabinet and by winning the March 1940 federal election.
Meanwhile, politics and the manoeuvring for power within and among the provinces never stopped. Only days into the war in September 1939, Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis charged that the King government would bring in conscription and called a snap election. Duplessis was hoping to secure power early in the conflict by inciting deep fears in Quebeckers. Only his government, claimed Duplessis, would prevent King from forcing French-Canadian youngsters against their will into a European war. King was horrified by Duplessis’s lies, and he believed that if the premier won on the strength of his fear-mongering, then Ottawa could never mount an all-out war effort for worry of alienating Quebec and tearing the country apart along linguistic lines. This was political war. King’s Quebec ministers—in particular Lapointe and Power—led the charge against Duplessis. By hook and by crook, the federal party poured money into swing ridings and threatened openly that if Duplessis was re-elected, the French-Canadian ministers in Ottawa would resign, thereby leaving Quebec without representation in an anglophone cabinet. An outmanoeuvred Duplessis was stunned by the federal intervention. He also underestimated the support among Quebeckers for the just war against Hitler. Quebec opted for the Liberal Party and Duplessis was voted out.
King also politically manhandled a long-time enemy in Ontario. The unstable premier, Mitchell Hepburn, launched an imprudent personal attack on King with the passage in the Ontario legislature, on January 18, 1940, of a resolution that said King had not “done his duty by his country and he never will.”4 A wounded but wily King, who had last faced the voters five years previously, called an election and ran on a war record that, although brief, was quite strong. He guessed that the Phoney War in Europe could not last much longer and sought to win a new mandate before the shooting war resumed. With the Conservatives demanding a more committed war effort, which was interpreted in Quebec as a call for conscription, and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) labelled as a party of pacifists and socialists, King guided the Liberals down the centre. In the March 1940 election, he won a majority of seats in the House of Commons and so ensured that he would remain prime minister for the duration of the war.5
THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT actively discouraged enlistment in late 1939 for fear of the army dragging the nation into greater and uncontrollable war commitments. Major-General Andrew McNaughton nonetheless breathed much vigour into the mobilization. Combining both professional and volunteer soldiers, his 1st Canadian Infantry Division included, on the one hand, recognizable Permanent Force infantry formations such as the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR), the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), and the Royal 22e Régiment, and, on the other hand, historic militia units such as Vancouver’s Seaforth Highlanders, the West Nova Scotia Regiment, and the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. As in the previous war, the first contingent of soldiers sent overseas was mainly white and Anglo-Saxon: there were few francophones other than those in the Royal 22e Régiment, and almost no First Nations or ethnic Canadians. With thousands aching to enlist, recruiters were able to take their pick. The average rifleman sent overseas was twenty-three years old, stood about five foot seven, and weighed less than 140 pounds (although all men later put on considerable weight in training), and more than half had left school before grade seven.6
Tens of thousands of Canadians enlisted for overseas service in 1939. Some were away for six years; others never returned to their loved ones.
“The reputation Canadians earned in the last war has not been forgotten,” intoned the British War Office, as the first of the Canadians arrived in England in December 1939.7 The 20,000 servicemen who landed in England personified Canada’s commitment to mother Britain, and their arrival was seen as an important boost for morale—though it was understood that the newly raised division would not immediately have a military impact. Felix Carrière of the PPCLI remembered that the British people were “good to us because here we were, the heroic Canadians … back again after twenty years.”8 But gratitude did not always equate with understanding, and some popular misconceptions about Canadian soldiers were carried forward from the Great War. It was widely believed, for instance, that the Canadians were a martial race drawn from the outer reaches of the frozen Dominion. Canucks were born in snow banks and lived in igloos, or were raised in the bush to become voyageurs. One English paper gushed, “The [Canadian] contingent as a whole has been selected in proportion from every Canadian district: lumbermen from up-country, fishermen and farmers from the Maritime Provinces, artificers and drivers from the cities, large numbers of French-Canadians from Quebec. A negro sergeant led the band. There were fair heads, black heads, brown heads, red heads—and Red Indians too; one of them from Aklavik in the Arctic Circle.”9 The Canadians were pictured as a different, exotic breed of warrior, despite the fact that most volunteers came initially from urban centres where the majority of Canadians lived, and where the militia and regular units were established. In fact, the “hearty men of the north” found the English winter damp and miserable. At Aldershot camp, the Canadians huddled together for warmth, swore at the slush that emerged from the taps (when they weren’t plugged), and devoted time and energy to liberating coal or clandestinely converting park benches into kindling.
The popular song “Roll Out the Barrel” was sung with gusto by the Canadians wherever they went during the fall, but as winter settled in, the glamour turned to gloom and the choristers complained. The food was gruel-like and Canadians grumbled that they would starve to death before they ever met the enemy. The Dominion’s soldiers revealed in letters home that they were homesick, and one Canadian military headquarters report based on intercepted and read mail observed that a high proportion of soldiers “warn their friends and family not to join the army.”10 A bright spot was the comfort offered by the British people, especially the women. The first marriage between a Canadian soldier and a British bride took place on January 28, 1940, a mere five weeks after the 1st Division arrived.11 With close to half a million Canadians eventually “invading” Britain, nearly 48,000 marriages would follow in the coming six years.
Even in early 1940, after the world had witnessed the successful German blitzkrieg tactics in Poland, much of infantry training drew on what had been learned in the Great War, with emphasis on marching, bayonet work, and digging trenches. Shortages of small arms ammunition made rifle firing a rare occurrence. Brigadier E.W. Sansom wrote in January 1940, “We have so many visits to arrange programmes for that it is very difficult to get down to the real work of organizing and training the Division.”12 It was not until mid-March that the division began collective training, with night-time and tactical exercises, and even then it was rare for the infantry to work with artillery, armour, and engineers. Few Canadians saw a tank, much less learned how to fight alongside the lumbering beasts or to stop one in battle. Sergeant F.D. Thompson of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada recounted, “We have learned more than we knew there was, but principally we have learned how little we first knew.”13
THE PHONEY WAR CAME TO AN END ON APRIL 9, when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Hitler struck because he coveted those countries’ natural resources and because he needed to control vital trade routes. Both over-matched nations fell quickly, although again the German generals gnashed their teeth at logistical breakdowns and at the challenge of coordinating their fighting forces. There were also painful defeats. In the Norway campaign, the German navy provided fire support to amphibious forces and paratroopers who quickly overran key objectives, but the powerful Royal Navy, with Norwegian assistance, was murderously effective as it sank three German cruisers and ten destroyers. While the British army sent to throw back the enemy bungled its operations, the German high command was shocked at the decimation of its navy, the Kriegsmarine. Going forward, the Germans were increasingly cautious about engaging in offensive naval operations.
The Nazi forces marched on the West in April 1940. Through a series of stunning victories, France was driven from the war in June 1940, and most of Western Europe occupied.
The Royal Navy still had teeth, but the German army now demonstrated that it was the hardest-hitting in the world. For the main assault against Britain and France, the German high command had initially planned to sweep through Belgium and northern France, and then drive southward behind the Maginot Line, smashing it from north to south, while other forces moved from west to east in a giant pincer operation. But this was exactly what the French, Belgians, and British expected, and it was similar to the sweeping Schlieffen Plan of the Great War that had failed to deliver victory. A rerun of 1914 seemed to offer little hope for a rapid end to the battle, especially as the bulk of the French divisions already were committed to the northern border. Hitler sought a more daring plan and was persuaded to adopt a proposal put forward by a handful of his generals, notably commander of Army Group A, General Gerd von Rundstedt, and his chief of staff, Erich von Manstein. Instead of a northern sweep, von Rundstedt suggested, the panzer divisions should strike through the Ardennes Forest. The notion initially horrified much of the German high command, who feared that the dense terrain would be impassable for German tanks and vehicles. But because the French thought the same, they guarded the area only lightly.
On May 10, aggressive German formations spearheaded by tanks manoeuvred through the forest, while strong attacks launched to the north convinced the French that the primary blow would fall on Belgium. Panzer generals such as Erwin Rommel, a decorated Great War veteran, epitomized the fervour of the hard-driving armoured divisional commanders as he personally led his men across the Meuse River under heavy fire. The French defenders in the Meuse and Somme region were overrun. It was no rout, however, and at several positions along the front, outnumbered French garrisons made the Germans pay dearly for their advance.
Notwithstanding the myth of German blitzkrieg, and our tendency to view history with hindsight, France’s defeat was neither preordained nor inevitable. The German tanks were far from unstoppable, and their French counterpart—the Char B, a 32-ton behemoth (then the heaviest in the world)—was as good as the German, if not better. The French, moreover, had more tanks, about 3,200 to the Germans’ 2,500.14 The difference in armies—and in combat effectiveness on the battlefield— was that the French defenders lacked a suitable doctrine for absorbing blows and then counterattacking aggressively.15 At the same time, as the Germans massed their forces against Allied weakness, the French generals had thirty-six divisions entombed in the Maginot Line: they were unable to wield effectively what was left of their army in the south.16
Attackers have the advantage of choosing the time and place of battle and of being able to concentrate their forces; defenders are almost always numerically inferior, but they fight with the benefit of prepared positions that use terrain and firepower to maximize destruction. Germany’s army tipped the balance of battle by hurling itself forward relentlessly, refusing to be slowed when confronted by dug-in defenders, which were soon screened and bypassed, to be dealt with later by follow-on units. At the front, the German infantry, down to the section level of a dozen or so soldiers, showed initiative and resourcefulness, finding ways to overcome resistance, slip through weak points in defences, and attack from the vulnerable rear—or simply to keep driving forward. Above the battlefield, dive-bombing Junker Ju 87s unleashed high explosives on French strongpoints and closely supported the ground forces. Soon the French defenders and their vaunted forts were behind enemy lines, communication was cut to the rear, and panic set in. The French commanders were particularly inept at responding to the battle that unfolded before them, ponderously giving orders to units that were already overrun, captured, or surrendered, and proving consistently unable to match the Germans’ decision cycle.
The French nation stared uncomprehendingly and impotently as the defeat was transformed into a monumental debacle. A nation that had fought so long, so tenaciously, and so proudly during the four long years of the Great War, and then spent the better part of two decades preparing for the battle on its frontier, collapsed within a fortnight. By May 20, the Germans had occupied the ancient town of Amiens, a logistical hub for rail-lines and roads, which allowed them to mass their formations even more swiftly for disruptive attacks and to launch pre-emptive strikes against slow-forming French counterattacks.17 Despite fatigue and shortages of food and fuel, the Wehrmacht kept on going, cleaving and hacking its way north towards the English Channel to cut the country in half, aiming either to kill or compel the surrender of the 1.7 million defenders in the north before turning southward for the final blow.
Lieutenant Patrick Nixon, serving at this time on board the destroyer HMCS St. Laurent, remembered that when the message arrived that Germany had invaded France, his captain, Lieutenant-Commander Harry DeWolf, remarked with casual gravitas, “Now, we got a war on our hands.”18 The St. Laurent was one of three Canadian destroyers sent by Mackenzie King in response to a plea made by the British on May 23 for all possible contributions to a defence against a cross-Channel invasion. In an act that signalled the British army’s desperation, the Dominion also sent 75,000 Ross rifles—the Canadian-made rifle that had failed miserably in battlefield conditions in the Great War—for use by the Home Guard. A gravely concerned King felt he had to come to Britain’s aid, but he was aware that in doing so he would leave Canada vulnerable to attack.19 He sent the destroyers. Three others, then undergoing refit, would follow, as well as most of the nation’s modern aircraft and trained pilots. Canada denuded itself of its most effective forces to protect Britain.
On land, the defeat achieved monumental proportions. In late May, the British and French armies retreated to Dunkirk, a town on the Channel coast in northwestern France, and held off the Germans in a shallow perimeter. The Allied armies were bombed from the air relentlessly by the Luftwaffe, and seemed ripe for one final armoured thrust by panzer divisions. But now, two and a half weeks into the campaign, the panzer divisions—tank-heavy formations with supporting infantry that were mechanized to move with speed—were slowed by fatigue, weakened by casualties, and in need of a respite. Hitler ordered a temporary stop as he believed that the British and French were cornered and he sought to marshal his forces for future battles. The Luftwaffe could pummel the cornered army until it surrendered. To the Germans’ detriment, it was a grave error that allowed the Royal Navy to organize a mass evacuation beginning on May 27. Warships, merchant and pleasure vessels, and almost anything that could float, made the trip across the Channel. The resilience of the sailors and soldiers on the beaches was remarkable, but wars are not won by evacuations. Six British destroyers were lost, several more were damaged beyond repair, and some 200 smaller vessels were sunk. And yet, when the perimeter finally collapsed on June 4, some 224,686 British and 129,942 French had been pulled off the beaches.20 Hitler might have ended the war had he pushed his panzers a little harder. Instead, the battered British army lived to fight another day.
EVEN AS THE BRITISH RETREATED FROM DUNKIRK, the French fought on in the south. Sometimes they showed an unexpected tenacity and inflicted local defeats on the Germans, who took casualties at a rate of around 5,000 per day—double the numbers of the previous month.21 But the French defence fell somewhere between a glorious last-ditch stand and a spasmodic death rattle. In the vain hope of shoring up the French defences, the British ordered the Canadians across the Channel in early June. General Andrew McNaughton must have been nervous at his division’s prospects against the battle-hardened Nazis, for he told at least one group of officers, “it’s going to be a sticky business, you must be absolutely ruthless … tell the men we are not particularly interested in prisoners.”22 The 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade, around 4,000 soldiers and gunners, landed in Brest on June 8. One Canadian eye-witness observed that the French soldiers were elated to see the Canadians, and were soon passing out wine and “singing French songs” in appreciation.23
But less than a week after landing, the Canadian brigade was ordered to return to England; they hadn’t fired so much as a single shot. Rumours of approaching panzers led to orders from the British high command that all guns, trucks, and supporting equipment were to be left behind. This was lunacy, as the Germans were more than 250 kilometres away—but panic had set in. One commander in the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, Lieutenant-Colonel J. Hamilton Roberts, disobeyed the order and managed to save two dozen of its newly issued 25-pounder artillery pieces. Others, however, obediently burned and destroyed their new equipment, and heaps of abandoned kit littered the disembarkation zone, including 217 vehicles—signalling the start of what Private Arthur Wilkinson described as a “run for our lives.”24 Upon their return to England, investigations were mounted into lost payroll funds, breakdowns in discipline, the scuttling of trucks, and even a newspaper account that claimed the Canadians had “fled” from France, all of which amounted to little more than whistling in the wind while a hurricane was gathering on the horizon.25
A triumphant Hitler stands as the occupier of Paris, France, and all of Western Europe.
Yet even with one brigade gutted of most of its equipment, the Canadian division in England was one of the few formations left to defend Britain against the expected coming invasion. It was designated as a mobile strike force to be thrown against any German landing. Winston Churchill’s famous fighting speech of June 4 promised that the British people would “fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds…. we shall never surrender,” but it was the 1st Canadian Division and a handful of other formations, including the soon-to-arrive 2nd Infantry Division, that prepared to defend southern England behind anti-tank ditches, machine-gun nests, and barbed wire obstacles. That summer, the Canadians were moved so many times in response to invasion alarms that one wit labelled the Canadians “McNaughton’s Travelling Circus.”26
The Western world reeled at France’s humiliating capitulation on June 22. The Nazis, incredibly, now occupied much of Central and Western Europe. A bloodied Britain was threatened with invasion by a seemingly unstoppable military power. The British people saw themselves as standing alone against the Nazi tide, but they were, of course, backed by the British Empire, covering one quarter of the world and standing 500-million strong.27 Britain was battered but not broken, and it had a new, inspiring leader. Neville Chamberlain, who had tried to appease Hitler in the late 1930s, had stepped aside on May 10 to allow for the pugnacious sixty-five-year-old Winston Churchill to take the reins. Soldier, adventurer, journalist, best-selling author, and experienced politician, the cigar-chomping Churchill growled heroic words of defiance. There would be no talk, no compromise, and no surrender. Even as Hitler believed that Britain was broken, Churchill stiffened the backbone of the British people, on the island and throughout the Empire.
Much to Canada’s shock, the Dominion was now Britain’s ranking ally, since the United States remained neutral. Without the backing of the powerful US economy, Britain’s defeat seemed not only possible but perhaps inevitable. King’s cabinet, up to this point adamantly committed to a limited commitment, almost immediately passed the National Resources Mobilization Act that gave sweeping powers to the government, including the conscription of manpower for home defence and even the imprisonment of suspected seditious troublemakers without trial.28 A desperate and scared citizenry accepted such intrusions on their civil rights virtually without protest. Canada was now on the front lines, separated from them only by the Atlantic Ocean. To keep Britain in the war, the lifeline from North America had to be kept open. Soon everything would depend on the Allies winning the Battle of the Atlantic. First, however, the British people would have to survive a Nazi invasion from the air.