Canada was a founding member of the United Nations in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. It was “the dawn of a new era in the history of the world,” said Prime Minister Mackenzie King. No longer would governments rely on power, war, and armed diplomacy to secure their interests. If mankind wanted peace badly enough, he could “beat swords into plowshares,” and universal brotherhood would be just around the corner.
Canada had been a respected auxiliary power in the war, first within the British Empire and then in the wider Anglo-American alliance led by the United States.
The Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy) were defeated, but the war left the British Empire weaker while dramatically strengthening the United States and the Soviet Union. It was those two Great Powers that called the shots from 1943 to 1945, even though the five-member U.N. Security Council in 1945 also included Great Britain, France, and China.
Ritchie could see past the smoke that, for one thing, “the Russians had installed themselves in Prague and in Vienna”—great Habsburg cities that were supposed to have been liberated. Instead, Stalin was pushing to get a Russian port on the Adriatic Sea and bases on the Dardanelles.
What were the Soviets doing in Prague and Vienna, let alone Warsaw, Budapest, and so many other great capitals? Had there been some terrible mistake?
From 1943 onward, Roosevelt and Churchill’s policy, Fuller wrote, could only “render abortive every victory,” “bring the Slav back to the Elbe,” and “replace Hitler by Stalin.”
That is because their overall political strategy was a disaster.
How had this happened?
The strategy, declared when Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca in 1943, was known as “unconditional surrender.” What it meant was that America and Britain would accept only a crushing victory over the Axis powers, with little thought to the after effects.
Behind the president’s bull-headed “macho” stance was a romanticized idea deep in the U.S. psyche. Essentially, American bigshots like Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson craved the aura of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War.
(Both Roosevelt and Churchill lied afterwards. The president claimed he had spoken off the cuff, when in fact he had written the phrase in his speaking notes three times; Churchill later admitted in his memoirs that he was only surprised by the president’s timing.)
Unconditional surrender strengthened Hitler’s hand and gave the Germans no choice but to fight to the end. It prolonged the war by at least a year. It assumed that all Germans were Nazis, even though there was a significant opposition movement in Germany, including much of the General Staff.
Unconditional surrender also strengthened Stalin’s hand.
By that time Roosevelt’s right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, had convinced the president that Stalin was not really a communist, but instead a Russian nationalist whom the allies must support in every way.
Churchill had rightly rejected the British appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and again in 1940, but from 1943 to 1945, the tables turned and the pre-war anti-appeaser became a co-appeaser of Stalin.
Partly to save face, the Canadians launched another myth about themselves.
Together with the United Nations myth of peace, there was a twin myth about Canada’s role in the world—the myth of the middle power. Canada was not a great power, nor was it a nonentity. But Canada was the leader of middle powers such as Australia and Brazil, punching above its weight.
The middle power myth took hold at Canada’s External Affairs Department. According to certain Canadian diplomats like Escott Reid and Lester Pearson (a future prime minister), Canadians became great movers and persuaders behind the scenes. Canada called itself the “helpful fixer.”
King, like Pearson, was the kind of man who needed to be loved. Pearson “above all, wanted to be helpful and to be liked.” Chapnick says insightfully that Canadians as a people also “like to be liked.” This proclivity lent itself to the national myth of helpful fixer and middle power.
The “unconditional” victory of 1945 had a tragic side—the tragedy that consigned millions of Hitler’s victims to Stalin. The United Nations helped cover that up.
At home, the Canadian media seem to love myths. Newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts in the 1940s, as well as many politicians, reporters, and professors since then, all joined the “Ottawa Men” in spreading the myth of Canada’s “great influence” and “the voice of the middle powers” in the new order. Which goes to show: Canadians have a surprisingly inflated idea of their own importance.
