Military History
Dispatches: Backgrounders in Canadian Military
History
CANADA AND NATO
Dr. Dean F. Oliver
The end of the Second World War in 1945 found Canada a major military
and economic power, but not one rushing headlong towards greater
international responsibility. While some Canadians believed the country
could no longer afford the quasi-isolationist foreign policy of the
1930s, the post-war Liberal government of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie
King continued to move cautiously on the world stage. In a January 1947
speech, Secretary of State for External Affairs Louis St. Laurent
acknowledged that to protect its interests Canada must entertain
external defence commitments. It was a form of pragmatic activism not
universally shared in Canada, though support for it was growing
stronger. Many influential Canadian officials already believed that an
aggressive Soviet Union needed to be 'contained'.
Subsequent events appeared to confirm their fears. In February 1948,
Czechoslovakia's Communist party seized control of the country's
government and suppressed dissent. The following month, five West
European states concluded a mutual defence pact (the Brussels Treaty),
hoping desperately that the United States would soon join; several days
later, Canadian, American, and British representatives discussed mutual
security in Washington, D.C. That autumn, the secret talks
expanded to include several other European states proceeded
against the backdrop of a Soviet attempt to coerce French, British, and
American forces to leave Berlin, then jointly occupied under mutual
agreement.
The West's response to the Berlin Blockade a sustained
British-American airlift which ultimately forced Moscow to back down
was one of the defining moments of the Cold War. Canada, upset at
London's presumption of automatic Canadian support, did not participate
but the enthusiasm of Canadian diplomats for a formal defence pact
continued.
Canada sought military security in the Washington talks, but also a
balanced Western response to the Soviet challenge encompassing political
dialogue, economic cooperation, and the development of shared values.
Involving the United States formally in Western defence, while balancing
its influence within a multinational framework, was critical to the
project. Canadian officials like Hume Wrong and Lester B. Pearson
negotiated successfully for an article in the treaty on nonmilitary
cooperation but, reflecting the preferences of most other participants,
the resulting text rested primarily on a guarantee of mutual military
assistance in response to external threats. Twelve nations signed the
North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,
Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the
United Kingdom, and the United States.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Pearson, who had replaced St.
Laurent as secretary of state for external affairs when the latter
became prime minister in November 1948. noted that Canadians "feel
deeply and instinctively" that the treaty is "a pledge for peace and
progress". For the first time in its history, Canada had joined a
peacetime military alliance.
The treaty provided the legal and contractual basis for the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but not the military strength to
back it up. Communist aggression in Korea (June 1950) forced the issue
by persuading Ottawa and all Western capitals that the USSR was moving
into a new and dangerous phase.
NATO
created an integrated military force under American General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, the first supreme allied commander in Europe (SACEUR).
Canada, already helping to defend South Korea, now raised troops
simultaneously for service in Europe. In November 1951, for the third
time in less than forty years, Canadian troops again crossed the
Atlantic. By the following year, 10,000 of them were based in West
Germany and France. An infantry brigade group of 6,670 troops, an air
division of twelve squadrons (up to 300 aircraft), and some forty
warships constituted Canada's strong commitment in these early years,
plus more dedicated as reinforcements in the event of war. These
commitments were largely responsible for defence spending accounting
for 45 per cent of the federal budget.
Nevertheless, the efforts of Alliance members were modest compared to
the troops available to the Eastern Bloc. An outnumbered
NATO soon
relied heavily on tactical nuclear weapons to deter Soviet attack,
conventional forces acting merely as a 'trip-wire' to a possible nuclear
response. The admission of a rearmed West Germany in 1955 accentuated
the political necessity of 'forward defence', or defending Alliance
territory as far to the east as possible. and entailed a significant
military disadvantage: concentrating
NATO's
limited military resources in almost linear fashion close to the border.
Tactical nuclear weapons at least guaranteed that any Soviet
breakthrough could be countered by superior firepower. From the early
1960s, Canada provided an important part of this nuclear punch. A
protracted dispute with the United States kept Canadian forces from
acquiring access to nuclear warheads for several years, but for a decade
thereafter Canadian fighter-bombers and surface-to-surface missiles
trained to meet the Soviet threat with a storm of nuclear warheads.
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By the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union's growing nuclear arsenal had
begun to undermine the credibility of the West's nuclear deterrent. In
1966, France, openly sceptical of American promises of nuclear support,
withdrew from
NATO's
integrated military structure (though not from the Alliance) and ordered
Canadian and American bases there closed. Pearson, then prime minister,
wondered sarcastically whether Canada should also bring home the bodies
of its 100,000 dead from two world wars, many of whom were buried in
France.
NATO's new
'flexible response' strategy, adopted in 1967 after years of American
lobbying, envisaged responding to Soviet threats at all possible levels
of conflict, including conventional forces which therefore had to be
strengthened. An expensive option, flexible response did not always
coincide with the fiscal priorities of member governments.
Canadian attitudes towards
NATO were
also changing. By the late 1950s, some Canadians believed that
participation in a military alliance dominated by the United States was
unwise; others believed that Canadian interests could best be secured
through the United Nations, or even through renewed isolationism.
Creation of the North American Air Defence Agreement (NORAD) in 1957-58,
a joint Canadian-American arrangement, bolstered the continent's
defences against Soviet bomber attack but, despite Canadian assurances
to the contrary, was seen by allies as largely irrelevant to the
Alliance's primary line of defence in Europe and the North Atlantic. In
the mid-1960s, even Pearson, who had helped negotiate the
NATO
treaty, expressed doubts about the future of Canadian commitments in
light of Washington's preponderant influence and Europe's reluctance to
spend more in its own defence.
By 1968, many Canadians believed the risk of Communist aggression in
Europe less immediate than the need for improved social programs and
economic and cultural protection against foreign, especially American,
influence. United States policies in Vietnam appeared to some as further
proof that the real antidemocratic force in world politics lay much
closer to home. The Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led compact of Eastern
European states created in 1955 in response to West German rearmament,
invaded fellow member Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the latter's
flirtation with Western style democratic reform. The attack reminded
Canadians that Soviet Communism was hardly a benign force. Still, for
most of the following ten years détente, or relaxed tensions,
greatly influenced Canada's relations with Moscow and its satellites.
Canada used the opportunity to reduce further its defence budget and
armed forces, encourage nuclear and conventional arms control, and
reorient its defence priorities towards protecting Canadian
sovereignty.
In 1968-69, Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau even toyed with the
idea of pulling out of
NATO
entirely. Cabinet opposition stayed his hand, but Trudeau's conviction
that NATO
had grown too important in Canadian policymaking was difficult to refute
at a time when nearly all of Canada's military personnel trained mainly
for a future war against the Warsaw Pact. Trudeau halved the army's
commitment to Europe, eliminated the nuclear strike role, and downplayed
suggestions that Canada's actions would limit its political influence
with NATO
members.
In 1970, after nineteen years with the British Army of the Rhine in
northern Germany, Canada's brigade group moved south from several bases
around Soest to Lahr, a small town in the Black Forest region of
southwestern Germany. Renamed the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group
in 1968, defence cuts had reduced the formation to less than 3,000
troops by the early 1970s. Canada's air force commitment, now just three
squadrons instead of the earlier twelve, concentrated at nearby
Baden-Soellingen. At a time when
NATO
doctrine placed increasing emphasis on the need for robust conventional
forces, unhappy allies complained bitterly that Canada was not pulling
its weight. Despite the purchase of new weapon systems like the Leopard
C1 main battle tank and McDonnell Douglas CF-18 Hornet fighter-bomber in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, Trudeau's tenure had left Canada's
NATO
commitment at a low ebb.
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In the 1980s, staunchly conservative governments in several Western
countries embarked on military spending programs to counter what they
perceived as the Warsaw Pact's growing military advantage. In Canada, a
Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney, elected in
1984, attempted in its 1987 defence policy review to strengthen Canada's
military and its commitments to
NATO,
pledging more troops and aircraft to Europe than at any time since the
early 1960s. As
NATO's
capabilities improved, economic problems and social unrest within the
Warsaw Pact produced several reformist governments eager to compromise
with the West to secure stability at home. Mutual arms control
agreements and political reforms heralded a wave of democratic upheaval
which spelled the end of the Warsaw Pact. After substantial military
reductions, early in 1992 Ottawa announced that the last of its ground
and air formations in Europe would be coming home.
As Canadians welcomed the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s,
they also witnessed the transformation of
NATO.
Previously a collective defence organization preoccupied with defending
its members against external aggression, the Alliance now assumed a
broader range of security responsibilities. With the Soviet military
threat ended,
NATO
supported United Nations' efforts to secure peace in the Balkans and
accepted three former Warsaw Pact adversaries (Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech Republic) as members in 1999.
Canada strongly supported both
NATO's
enlargement and internal reform, arguing that
NATO had
now become the embodiment of those ideals first enunciated in Article 11
of the treaty: a forum for nonmilitary cooperation and dialogue from
which security, and a true sense of North Atlantic community, might
gradually emerge. Not all
NATO
observers concurred in this slightly selfserving assessment, but
Canada's strong military participation in
NATO's air
campaign against Serbian forces in and around Kosovo (1999) appeared to
indicate that Ottawa's renewed faith in the organization extended well
beyond rhetorical commitment. In 1999, after fifty years of membership.
Canada seemed ready to move into the next century as a proud and
contributing member of the Atlantic Alliance.
Further Reading
- Eayrs, James, In Defence of Canada, Volume Four: Growing Up
Allied, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1980.
- Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War
History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997.
- Granatstein, J.L. and Robert Bothwell, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau
and Canadian Foreign Policy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto,
1990.
- Lyon, Peyton, NATO as a Diplomatic Instrument, Atlantic
Council of Canada, Toronto, 1970.
- Maloney, Sean M., War Without Battles: Canada's NATO Brigade in
Germany, 1951-1993, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Toronto, 1997.
- Rempel, Roy, Couterweights: The Failure of Canada's German and
European Policy, 1955-1995, McGill-Queen's University Press,
Montreal, 1996.