As this is the 65th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, let us remember the contribution of Canada to that victory.

Prime minister Mackenzie King was never popular with the Canadian military, especially as he declined to impose conscription for overseas service until very late in the war, out of concern for the response of French Canada. Quebec had been promised in its 1939 provincial election that there would be no conscription. In the ill-conceived 1942 National Plebiscite on Conscription, in which King sought release from that pledge, 70%ofEnglish-speaking Canadians voted approval, and 90% of French Canadians voted negative. The country could not have been more starkly divided.

King deserves great credit for managing to avoid a rending national-unity crisis, and also for insisting that Canadians, having been used as cannon-fodder in Louis Mountbatten's mad Dieppe landing in 1942, be accorded a prominent part in the D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. (The Canadians had one of the five beaches, Juno.) It need hardly be emphasized that Canadian forces distinguished themselves in the European campaigns, in Italy and Northwest Europe. They were well-respected by the Germans, and were the only large aggregation of volunteer forces in all of Europe. Canada's achievement in sending large numbers of volunteers into combat overseas (the equivalent of seven divisions in Europe), when the country was under no direct threat, was unprecedented in the history of warfare (other than by Canada and Australia in the First World War).

The British persisted in trying to have Canadians considered part of their own forces, to make their contingent heftier. The lobbying of King and the generous and diplomatic spirit of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, caused the Canadian Corps, four divisions, to be designated an army, subject only to the command of the northern army group commander, Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, and Eisenhower himself. Thus, Canada's four divisions had the same status as the one British, one French and four American armies on the front, totalling about 90 divisions, 10 to 18 in each army except Canada's.

The British needed such large forces to keep their increasingly fractious Empire together (parts of India were in semi-revolt and Palestine was virtually in civil war) that with forces all along the chain from Burma to India and through the Mediterranean, and 15 divisions in Italy, it could only put 14 divisions on the Western Front. This was less than a fifth of the U. S expeditionary forces and not more than the French and Canadians combined.

It was in the course of this campaign that the United States became unarguably the pre-eminent military power in the West. The British leaders, including Winston Churchill, were afraid of being ground up on the Western Front, as had happened during the First World War. As a naval person, Churchill, as he had been with Gallipoli and Zeebrugge during the First World War, was partial to amphibious attacks around the German perimeter: Norway, Greece, Italy, the Balkans, the Adriatic. FDR and his advisors, especially army chief of staff General George C. Marshall, felt that this was an illusion, that only a frontal assault on Adolf Hitler's occupied Europe would end the war in the West, prevent Joseph Stalin from either making a separate peace with Hitler or overrunning Western Europe -- and, incidentally, secure Roosevelt's re-election, as he, unlike Churchill, did not have the luxury of deferring elections indefinitely.

One of the great strategic triumphs of modern times was when Roosevelt opted to stay in the Soviet embassy in Tehran, during the Big Three Conference

there in November, 1943, ostensibly for security reasons, but really to ensure that Stalin would support Allied landings in France, as opposed to Churchill's plan for landing in the Adriatic at Trieste and then on into Austria. Churchill and his chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Brooke, believed Stalin only favoured landings in France because he thought Hitler's armies would drive the Western Allies into the sea as they had at Dunkirk and Dieppe, distracting Hitler and enabling Stalin to penetrate more deeply into Central Europe from the East. Stalin respected the Royal and U. S Navies, and the RAF and U.S. Marines, but considered the British Army a dubious force that had been defeated almost everywhere, and the American Army to be untested against a serious enemy such as the Wehrmacht.

Roosevelt conceded that this could be Stalin's motive, but disagreed with his military prognosis.

By assuring himself of Stalin's support for the French landings, Roosevelt used America's emerging post-war rival to prevail over its greatest, but in this case, wrong-headed ally, in achieving the reverse of what Stalin sought and Churchill feared. The successful landings cleared France quickly and enabled the West to occupy most of Germany--since Richelieu's time, the traditional grand prize in Europe's general wars.

Whatever Stalin expected, it must be said that at the end of June, 1944, the Soviet leader, who was not renowned for lavishing praise on others, issued a statement that pronounced the Normandy landings incomparable "in all military history" for "breadth of conception, grandeur of scale and mastery of execution." This was nothing but the truth. General Eisenhower has not generally received the credit he deserved for this immensely successful campaign. The selection of the Normandy landing site, the use of George Patton as a decoy for landings at Calais, keeping Allied fuel depots well back from the front during the Battle of the Ardennes, the double envelopment of the Ruhr and the occupation of Germany in March and April 1945, almost as quickly as Germany had occupied France in 1940, were remarkable demonstrations of the soundness of Eisenhower's command decision and of his talents as a soldier-diplomat.

Where Canada drew a short straw was in the Dutch campaign. General Patton and other American strategists favoured an assault directly into Germany and a dagger thrust across Germany to Berlin, rather than a continuous front. Montgomery, whose gamecock manner and titanic ego made him, with the histrionic Patton and the impossibly inflexible Charles de Gaulle, a historic trio of prima donnas for Eisenhower to deal with, also wanted a single thrust, but naturally wanted to lead it himself. Churchill backed Montgomery in a move across the northern end of the front, to take the port of Antwerp and shut down the missile launchers that were raining V-2 rockets down on southern England. This was Montgomery's famous Operation Market Garden (the basis for the 1977 war film A Bridge Too Far). It caused the Canadian Army to be the principal liberator of Holland, but German flooding of the Low Countries forced many Canadian units to squat on rooftops for lengthy periods waiting to be taken off. There was not a breakthrough in the end, and the Germans counter-attacked in the Ardennes, which delayed the final assault on Germany for about two months. This is why it took the Allies from Aug. 26 to March 1 to get from Paris to the east bank of the Rhine.

This was, as Roosevelt said in his radio address on D-Day night, "a mighty endeavour of liberation, to set free a suffering humanity from the apostles of greed and of racial arrogances... and to build a peace that will be invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men." It was a magnificent cause, a brilliant campaign, for noble objectives which were substantially achieved.

Although Canada provided less than 5% of the Allied forces in Northwest Europe, they were among the very best of those forces. It was a great step for a Dominion of only about 13 million people, which had not universally been thought of before the war as an independent country. Canada participated to the limit of its means, earning high praise from our allies. This was expressed as well by de Gaulle as by anyone, when he praised Canada as "a courageous and beloved country." This was a well-earned compliment from almost as grudging a font of superlatives as Stalin (which unfortunately seemed to have slipped his mind when he visited Canada in 1967 and urged Quebec to secede).

Canada liberated the Netherlands from the Nazi murderers of Anne Frank and scores of thousands of other innocent Dutch, and in doing so, emancipated itself from many of the burdens of subordinacy. This is what was being celebrated 65 years ago today, and it remains a fit cause for celebration.

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