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| The World War period | ||
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Canada and World War I
The new Conservative government, headed by Robert Laird Borden, had the responsibility of rallying the nation to Britain's side in World War I. Had Canadians remained as divided as they were at the end of Laurier's term, this might have been a difficult thing to do. But Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium in 1914 forged a unity of Canadian sentiment and a demand for participation in the conflict. The first Canadian contingent, numbering 33,000, reached England soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, and it was in the thick of the fighting on the continent a few months later in the second battle of Ypres. By 1916 the Canadians had formed four divisions, with a fifth to provide reinforcements. The four divisions of the Canada Corps earned an outstanding reputation as a fighting force. More significant, however, was the fact that Canada was playing a respectable role on the world stage, a role that would soon help undo its colonial status. Before the war ended in 1918, more than 619,000 officers and men had enlisted, including some 22,000 who had served in the British Royal Air Force. More than 60,000 Canadians were killed in action or died of wounds, a terribly heavy toll in relation to the country's population. Over 66 million shells were produced in Canadian factories. The gross national debt soared from 544 million dollars in 1914 to almost 2 1/2 billion dollars in 1919, most of the money being raised in Canada itself through public war loans. The Canadian forces at the outset were made up wholly of volunteers. Casualties and the rapidly accelerating pace of the war made the bitter question of conscription a major issue by 1917. Borden met it by forming a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberals, though Laurier refused to join the coalition. In the election of that year, Quebec was almost unanimous in its opposition to the conscription policy that was supported elsewhere across the country. The political solidarity of the province during the next 25 years was largely derived from its memory of that episode. On the battlefronts in France and Belgium, Canadians of both nationality backgrounds made magnificent contributions to the final victory. They faced with heroism the first poison-gas attack in the history of warfare during the second battle of Ypres in 1915. Other engagements in which Canadian forces earned the admiration of all the Allies included the battles of Mount Sorrel (1916), the Somme (1916), and Vimy Ridge (1917). The victory of Passchendaele Ridge in the autumn of 1917 alone cost 16,000 Canadian casualties. In 1918 during the closing months of the war, Canadians again saw heavy action at Amiens, Cambrai, and Mons.  At the end of 1919 the Canadian government acquired the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and the Canadian Northern Grand Trunk and merged them to create the publicly owned Canadian National Railways. Upon Borden's retirement in 1920, Arthur Meighen succeeded as prime minister. The election of 1921 brought the Liberals back into office under a new leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King (see King, Mackenzie). Because the government had a bare majority, it depended upon the support of the Progressive (Farmer) party members. After four years of timid Liberal leadership, a new election strengthened the Conservative representation but not quite to the point of giving the party control of Parliament. This was accomplished in 1926, when a scandal in the Department of Customs and Excise cost the Liberals their majority in the House. By political shrewdness, however, King forced Meighen's second government to go to the people for an election within a matter of days; and the Liberals were once more returned to power. The 1920s were marked everywhere by a spiraling expansion of business. Technical and industrial advances paced the rising standard of living. In the summer of 1929 industrial production began to slow significantly. In October of that year the stock market crash heralded unemployment and financial ruin across Canada, as it did elsewhere in the world. Defeated in the 1930 elections, King made way for the Conservatives under Richard Bedford Bennett (later Viscount Bennett). Bennett thus had the unenviable responsibility of dealing with the Great Depression. His inability to deal with the crisis, coupled with the severe drought in the prairies, led Canadians to desert the Conservatives. The election of 1935 brought the Liberals back into office, a position they were to continue to hold without interruption for 22 years. The period between the wars brought the culmination of Canada's growth to independent nationhood within the British Commonwealth. Prime Minister Borden had been included in the Imperial War Cabinet in London. He piloted through the Imperial Conference of 1917 a resolution that the dominions "should be recognized as autonomous nations of an imperial commonwealth." To both the 1919 Peace Conference and the League of Nations Canada sent its own delegates. The Imperial Conference of 1926 confirmed in its Declaration of Equality that the United Kingdom as well as the dominions had become "autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another." They were, however, "united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations." These resolutions were confirmed by the British Parliament in 1931 in the Statute of Westminster. The statute provided that no law passed in the future by the United Kingdom should extend to any dominion "except at the request and with the consent of that Dominion." Canadian sovereignty thus had been achieved by a long process of peaceful constitutional evolution. This was vividly demonstrated by the independent decision of its Parliament that Canada enter World War II at the side of Britain, which it did within a week of the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939. Within three months an entire division of the new Canadian Active Service Force had been transported to the United Kingdom, and an agreement had been announced for a British Commonwealth Air Training Plan to be centered in Canada. This project alone trained more than 131,000 aircrew personnel for the Commonwealth. Canada contributed 72,800 pilots, navigators, aerial gunners and bombardiers, and flight engineers. These Canadians saw service in almost every theater of war. The Royal Canadian Navy was increased from fewer than a dozen vessels to more than 400. It served primarily as an antisubmarine and convoy force in the North Atlantic. Some of its units were deployed from time to time as far away as the Mediterranean and the Pacific. The forces under the command of Gen. A.G.L. McNaughton were required to spend a long and frustrating period on vital guard duty in Britain throughout the period of greatest threat of German invasion. Elsewhere abroad, two Canadian battalions sent to Hong Kong in 1941 were overrun when the colony was captured by the Japanese at the end of that year. The first engagement of the enemy by Canadian forces based in England occurred in 1942 in a courageous, but terribly costly, commando-type raid against Dieppe. In the summer of 1943 Canadian troops were sent into action with the British in the successful assault against Sicily, whence they carried the campaign to the Italian mainland. Early in 1945 the Canadians were withdrawn from Italy to permit reunification of the Canadian Army in northwestern Europe. The climax of the war had already come, however, with the Normandy landings in June 1944, in which the Canadian Army played an important part. Instrumental in the capture of Caen, which followed, the Canadians won another major victory in the closing of the Falaise gap later the same summer. In the costly and difficult battle of the Scheldt estuary that autumn, the Canadians cleared the sea passage to Antwerp, already in Allied hands. In the bitter battle along the Hochwald Ridge in February 1945, Canadian losses were extremely heavy. This battle opened the final attack across the Rhine, which was a prelude to the unconditional surrender by Germany on May 7, 1945. All persons over 16 years of age were required to take part in a national registration for war service, and compulsory military service for home defense only was introduced. Prime Minister King had assured the nation that there would be no conscription for overseas duty. As the war wore on, however, it became increasingly clear that the government needed to be released from the commitment. King accomplished this by a national plebiscite. All the provinces except Quebec voted in favor of conscription for overseas service if necessary. In 1944, after the Normandy invasion, the drain on manpower became so severe that draftees were sent overseas for the first time as reinforcements for the troops in Europe. The losses in the war overseas were complemented by economic gains on the homefront. War productivity effectively ended the Great Depression and greatly increased the labor force. Canadian workers produced raw materials, farm products, and manufactured goods needed to fight the war; and this was all done in a volume unprecedented in Canadian history. Industrialization was thus rapidly advanced, through both investment of capital and striking advances in technology. |
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