The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Canada and the U.S. Worked Together in WWII

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Military historian Tim Cook takes readers through key moments for Canadians during the Second World War as prime minister Mackenzie King and president Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a new relationship to help Britain and the allies. His book is called "The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At the time the Second World War began, the relationship between Canada and the United States was still fairly divided and characterized by mutual suspicion and rivalry. But over the course of the war, Canada's Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King and the U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned to negotiate and strategize to help Britain and the Allies win. Military historian Tim Cook takes readers through key moments for Canadians at war and at home in his book, The Good Allies, How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War. He's also chief historian and director of research at the Canadian War Museum.

And Tim Cook joins us in studio for more. Welcome. Thank you so much. All right. With many previous Canadian military books under your belt, I think we're nearing 20 at this point. That's right. Yeah.

All right, why write about the Canadian-American relationship now? Yeah, why write about it? Well, I guess I wanted to explore something different. And as you said, it's 19 books. So there's a lot there. And I've had people ask me, is there anything left to say about the Second World War, World War II?

But one of the things that really interested me was the relationship between Canada and the United States. And that hadn't really been explored in great detail. So I thought now, you know, I started this about two years ago. I had a sense if I could get it out before the election, it might be a time for Canadians to better understand the relationship with the United States, but maybe also with our American friends, to have a sense of what Canada did and how we stood by our allies during the Second War, this crucial war against fascism, against the Nazis, this desperate period where 1.1 million Canadians served in uniform from a country of 11 million, so about one in ten.

And often, you know, I had been down in the U.S. and occasionally I would talk about my books or something, and Americans very goodheartedly, but I think honestly said, had no idea, didn't even know Canda was in the war. So that had happened enough times where I thought, okay, maybe it's not up to the Americans to tell this story. Maybe it's up to we Canadians. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a product of the public school system here in Ontario.

Not just the Americans, maybe it doesn't surprise us that Americans don't know this story, but are you surprised that Canadians may not know a lot about this story? I suppose I'm not surprised. I think most Canadians would understand we served in the Second World War. We stood by Britain after the disaster and the catastrophe of when France fell to Hitler's forces. But we're moving on, many generations now, and I'm very lucky to work at the Canadian War Museum. And we've had discussions there about young people and that we're going to have to work harder to talk about Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism, because that's a long time ago.

We've had a lot of history between now and then. So don't blame yourself, and I don't blame others. But I do think this is an important story to tell, partially because I think we're in a bit of a dark time now with our own history, with the world around us, with major wars happening in Gaza, in other places, in Ukraine, great instability, tremendous conflict, Canada's armed forces gearing up and in multiple places.

It's good, I think, to reflect back on where we have come from. And this is a period, 1939 to 1945, where Canada really punched above its weight. Maybe we'll have a chance to talk about some of those contributions. But it really is quite staggering. And I think most Canadians probably don't know

that full history. All right. Well, let's go back in time. Let's go 1939, set the stage. What was Canada well, let's go back in time. Let's go 1939. Set the stage. What was Canada and the US relationship like at that time? Not great. Not great.

And we were a small country next to the United States. The United States had already surpassed Britain as an economic power. It wasn't the military power. And yet, Canada emerging from the Depression poor, really quite pathetic, in fact. And rightly, we had let our military wither away, even with the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and Japan

invading China in 1937, or even before that, 1931, if you think about the war and conflict there. The world is a roiling, unstable, dangerous place. But North America is secure, even though Canada and the United States really don't have much of a security or defense pact or alliance of that. And I thought, isn't that amazing? And as part of my research, I found these invasion plans.

In the 1920s, both countries had invasion plans. Canada was supposed to cross over the border, seize a number of key cities, wait for the Royal Navy to sail across. Even Australia was supposed to send an expeditionary force to invade California and then retreat back. And the Americans had a more developed plan. They were going to capture Victoria. Winnipeg.

Yeah, Winnipeg, right? A Doce Halifax and chemical weapons and march on Ottawa. Now, that was unrealistic. But it gives you a sense of some of the tension here. But as you mentioned from the top, Mackenzie King, our prime minister, our longest serving prime minister, when he comes back to power in 1935, he understands he needs to work hard with the Americans.

So he begins to set up great trade deals, economy, and how we will protect North America in case of war. As we know, war will come in September of 1939, or at least it'll come for Canada. Well, let's talk about that in your book You mentioned you know for Canada stand with Britain. It has to lean into that relationship with the US How did King balance that and I know that you had Access to this diary. Yeah, that had kind of delved into the character of King and got to understand You know how he made some of these decisions

He didn't have a lot of people to talk to or bounce those ideas back. But how did he balance that relationship? Yeah, great question. William Lyme McKenzie King, our longest serving prime minister, was our prime minister before the war, coming back to power in 35, and then through the war. If we go back to education, you were probably taught, as I was taught, McKenzie King, this strange, sad old man who never married, had no kids, deeply lonely, who was a spiritualist,

engaged in seances, table wrapping. He took advice from the dead, prime ministers, his mother, even his dog. And he's been a bit of a joke in history. And yet, of course, he's our longest serving prime minister. You don't become that by being a joke, right? So he was a, he was a shrewd political operator as well. And I think we really have to give a lot of credit to Mackenzie King for forging

this alliance with President Roosevelt, which helps Canada achieve its strategic aims during the war. Now we should remember when Nazi Germany invades Poland and that starts the second war in Europe, which brings in Britain and France. The decision is Canada. What will we do? We control our foreign policy. There's a debate in the House of Commons and we decide to go to war at Britain's side on the 10th of September.

But everybody is looking to the South. What will the Americans do? And of course they are neutral. And Roosevelt understood that Americans did not want to fight in this war. They didn't have the same connections to Britain as we did. And yet that's devastating. Right? I mean, think about now if one country was at war in North America and the other

was not, then the great doomsday scenario for the United States is that Nazi Germany will invade Canada and be on the border of the US. So really, the Americans, it's a long story, I recounted it in the book, but they begin to support us in Canada. They support us through our wartime industry, which becomes an astonishing output. They support us other ways as well. They do so, I think, we shouldn't

mistake this. I mean it's not out of full altruism, right? They want to secure Canada. But Mackenzie King, he understood that and I think it helped him achieve the war aim, which is the war aim of Canada, which is support Britain, which is on the front lines. But we can't do that without a secure North America and largely historians, I think, up to this point, haven't paid much attention to that. Much more comfortable writing about D.F. or the Battle of Hong Kong or the Battle of the Atlantic.

And I've done that. I'm guilty of that in books. And yet you need a secure North America before you can send armies and navies and air forces abroad. Can you help shed a little light on the reluctancy of the US to enter the war? It was a couple of years until. But what was it initially that had them sitting back, which is unusual to think of now? It is, yeah.

Great question, right? We know when the Americans come in. It's December 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brings Canada into war with Japan as well, because we have forces that are attacked in Hong Kong. And in a little interesting aside, we declare war on Japan before the United States. But your question is a great one.

Why aren't the Americans there? Well, of course, our greatest shield is our geography. It's the Atlantic in protecting against the war with Germany. And Americans simply did not want to go to war again. They had fought in World War I, coming in late to that in April of 1917. Canada had been there from the start, of course, of August of 1914. We had paid a terrible price in that war. 66,000 Canadians killed. and yet we know the Great War

propels Canada forward, a new sense of identity, national sense of who we are. But the Americans, they're simply, they don't have the same ties. And so one of the key things I was going through, the Roosevelt papers, his archives, fascinating to see, at the start of the war, only 2.5 percent of Americans, not 25 percent, 2.5 percent think they should come into the war.

And so it takes time to build that consensus and momentum. And Roosevelt understands he has to stand by the Western allies. But after the fall of France in June of 1940, the retreat of the British army from Dunkirk, that is a catastrophe. And of course that's when Canada really rises to become the ranking power to Britain, our wartime industry churning out weapons of war. And yet we couldn't have done it without the Americans. I want to talk about some of the deals and policies primarily around security and finance that got hammered out.

Tell me a little bit about some of those important deals that happened. Yeah, that's part of, I guess, McKinsey King's genius. There's all kinds of machinations. And the White House initially, when Britain is driven off the continent and its army is saved, as we know, from Dunkirk, but it leaves behind all of its tanks and artillery and trucks and weapons, then it's Canada that has to

rise up to supply our allies and we do that. It's just astonishing our wartime industry. A lot of it fueled by American support. The auto sector, you know, converts to making tanks and we produce 16,000 aircraft and 850,000 trucks, which is quite remarkable. But to do all of this, we need the financial support of the United States and that security element. And so this is McKinsey King and Roosevelt doing, engaging in, I guess, what we'd call summit diplomacy, where the two of them are talking. And Roosevelt, interestingly, and I was surprised to find this, he is in his White House, he

has all kinds of advisors who don't want to help Canada. They want to squeeze Canada financially, as they are doing to Britain, even with things like lend-lease, which, you know, begins in early 1941. But I think it's Mackenzie King's quiet genius. He was not a charismatic person, as you had mentioned before. He's kind of a sad character and a chance to read his diary, which is 30,000 pages long. He kept it his whole life.

And I've read it all through the war years. And it's filled with fascinating insight. I mean, just as an aside, imagine if Trudeau or Harper kept a diary that we could read today. Maybe they have. Maybe the historians of the future will have access to that. I suspect not.

But Mackenzie King's diaries are available. I read through them. They show both a political operator who understands he has to work with the Americans. Sometimes he has to ingratiate himself. It's a little painful for a Canadian nationalist. At other times he's agonizing over all kinds of minor things. And yet he gets the job done. And so as you alluded to there, the financial part, the Americans agree, in short, to buy our war supplies,

even as we are buying their war supplies. We send our raw minerals south. Maybe one of our greatest contributions is aluminum. You don't see that in the history books, but we pull out something like 3,000, three billion pounds of it, and we send it south as we do nickel as well, all of which is essential in the war weapons and this is where you know in addition to eight

hundred and fifty thousand trucks and hundreds of thousands machine guns I began to think of Canada differently I mean we think usually of the 1.1 million Canadians in the fighting forces but you, you know, with the United States, there is this incredible trade that goes on. And, you know, we're forever changed by that. We become a much more industrialized nation. We become entwined with the United States as well, or entangled, as some might say.

But that's part of the Defense Pact in 1940 and the Financial Pact in 1941. And frankly, you know, the Americans need us to come back to that point of security. They need us to help them defend the East Coast and the West Coast and the North. And that's maybe a lesson among many in this book that we often think we're much smaller, we're less wealthy, we don't have the same military powers as the United States, but we are defending North America together. All right.

I want to read a little snippet from your book. It reads, and this is in regards to King, Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill being three distinct leaders. Ever the conciliator and compromiser, King was careful with every step he took, while Churchill burst forward demanding action this day, and Roosevelt maneuvered relentlessly as the cheerful master manipulator of the Washington Carnival, with spotlight on him for full effect. King could never match the spirit and verve these two titans.

But as a leader with Little Flash, King was always tougher than his few friends and many foes gave him credit for. You know, after playing such a key role in this alliance, King may have found himself kind of left out in a lot of the strategizing. How did that happen? Yeah, and thanks for reading that. You read it nicely. And I remember writing that over and over again and trying to think about it.

Because there's an interesting stat I have in the book, or story at least, where Canadians, when they talked about their war leaders, they often talked, they meant Churchill and Roosevelt. And that was really painful to Mackenzie King, because he was, of course, our war leader. But he didn't have the same charisma. And these two titans, we know Churchill and Roosevelt still

to this day. Films are made about them. There must be a history book coming out every three weeks. And Canada pushed aside. And Mackenzie King, I think he understood that while we were an important ally, we didn't rank with Britain or the United States. And I don't make that argument or case either.

We need to understand our role. It was a significant one in all kinds of areas. But when Britain and the United States really begin to forge their military alliance in early 1942. So this is after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler insanely declares war in the United States. So the United States is in a two-front war and really that relationship with Britain is crucial. King does get elbowed out of the room and he's always attempting to find a way back in and I recount that.

And we were very lucky to have phenomenal diplomats and incredible soldiers. And one of the things we do is we send some of our best to London, but we send our best also to Washington. Lieutenant General Maurice Pope, a bilingual decorated soldier from the First War, he is there as our military attache. A number of very good diplomats, including Lester B. Pearson, future prime minister in Canada. So just like today, we sent our best to Washington

because we had to figure out a way to negotiate and engage in that delicate dance. And one of the ways we could have a presence with the Americans was in the defense of North America and that wartime industry. So we weren't able to really engage in setting wartime strategy. But we were there with the Americans because they understood they needed Canada. And frankly, when the Americans are drawn into the war in late 41, early 42, the German U-boats are already on the East Coast and they just,

they savage the American merchant ships, which aren't sailing in convoys. They're deeply unprepared. They have an incompetent commander in my mind, and they're being sunk in horrific numbers on the East Coast. And it takes the Royal Canadian Navy to sail south to help the Americans on the East Coast. And it takes the Royal Canadian Navy to sail self to help the Americans on the West Coast when the Americans are in a frenzy over Pearl Harbor and fearful of a Japanese invasion. It's Canada that stands up. That we send a division there. We send some of our best naval assets even though

the Atlantic is going very badly. we send four squadrons to Alaska. We stand up. And McKinsey King realizes we have to do this. We even allow the Americans to build the Alaska Highway, which is really scary for Canada, because on a map, it looks like it's going to split Canada in two, and it connects to Alaska. Another wartime legacy.

And as I recount in the book, there's another wartime legacy. And as I recount in the book, there's this continual challenge of how we will lean into the Americans so that we can help the British but not lose our sovereignty. And that's not easy. And of course, it's probably the same thing that every Prime Minister, you've covered so many of these stories, and cabinets have had to do, and of course it continues to this day. The United States is our most important trading partner,

most important security partner. We are talking about NATO, we're involved in NORAD, and yet we have to put in that time and effort to keep that relationship going. And as I was writing the book and researching it, which it firmly set in The Second World War, with a chapter looking at the legacy of it, I kept seeing today the contemporary elements.

And I think sometimes that's an interesting part of being a historian. You're writing about the past. You're trying to situate it in the past. You're trying to understand the history and the stories and the characters and personalities about the past. You're trying to situate it in the past. You're trying to understand the history and the stories and the characters and personalities within the past. But I live in the present. I live in the contemporary.

And so one is always careful about how you write these things. Yeah. We have a couple of minutes and I want to make sure we talk about film. You had mentioned film. And I want to talk about the National Film Board. Played a key role in keeping Canadians informed on the war and keeping them and supporting them.

I want to show a clip from a series, Canada at War in 1942. Let's have a look. We gotta buy war bonds to finish the war. We gotta buy more bonds, we've done it before. Every single dollar that we lend, brings us one day closer to the end. We've got to buy war bonds, it's more than a song. We've got to buy more bonds, speed victory along.

Don't spend it, lend it, help to end it. Come on, come on! Bye, Vaughn! That's a nice little jingle to it, doesn't it? Tell me a little bit, that was just a snippet of what was happening there. But in the few minutes that we have, why were these films and these messages important when we talk about the cultural scene that was happening? Yeah, the cultural scene and mobilizing ideas. And we think of propaganda, and I think that's pretty good propaganda, catchy tune.

Of course, our cities, there are war posters everywhere. The war on the home front, Canadians are encouraged to do their bit and contribute. But one of the things I looked at was the emergence of the National Film Board, of course, which we have a film industry before the war, but it's really the war that propels the NFB and the CBC forward. The CBC is reporting overseas. The NFB is taking a lot of that footage, often captured by combat cameramen, and creating

films for Canadians. And so, unlike the First World War, where we get most of our news through the newspapers, the Second World War, it's almost live, right? The footage that we see there, the creation of these films, radio, it's really quite staggering. So it connects Canadians to this war and their loved ones. I mentioned the 1.1 million Canadians in uniform. So it's really quite staggering. So it connects Canadians to this war and their loved ones. I mentioned the 1.1 million Canadians in uniform.

There are some poignant stories that I uncovered of mothers who saw their sons on film. It creates that connection because otherwise they could have been gone three, four, five years. And one of the things, just to come back to the book then, is that we create these films both as sword and shield. Shield to protect us from American culture, sword to carve out our own sense of identity, especially with the Americans.

And we do a really good job. And I talk about this in the book, the films that go to the US to tell our story about the war. That's important because I think after the war, we go through a period of forgetting and apathy. And we don't build a separate World War II national monument. And veterans are everywhere. They reintegrate back into society.

But we really didn't focus a lot on the Second War until quite recently. And I argue that's done some damage to our own sense of self and what we have done as Canadians. And this is a prime example, I would argue, of how we stepped up and how we punched above our weight and how both the Americans and the British needed us. And frankly, the Soviet Union,

we sent tens of millions of dollars of supplies to them after they become our unlikely allies in June of 1941. And all of this, I think, is a story that Canadians, I think, can be proud of. I think I'm not, again, a stand behind the flag, hand on your heart historian. There are a lot of mistakes made in war. Forty-five thousand Canadians killed in service, 55,000 wounded. And yet, this was a time when we really step up and we cement that important alliance with the United

States. And I do hope that there will be some Americans who watch this, maybe want to pick up the book and have a better sense of this, because this history matters. Tim, we're going to leave it there. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for, just wish I had you as a historian or a history teacher when

I was in school. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you.