Gas Drill, by Canadian artist Molly Lamb Bobak, the country’s only female official war artist during the Second World War, depicts women engaging in a gas-mask drill.Canadian War Museum (CWM 19710261-1603)
Canadians had been warned of the looming Second World War for years. Throughout the mid-1930s, German dictator Adolf Hitler rearmed, threatened his neighbours and annexed vulnerable Austria and Czechoslovakia. An invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, finally forced the hand of Britain and France after years of negotiations and concessions to Germany. The time for compromise was over; the Western Allies declared war.
While the United States remained neutral in the war against the Nazis until December, 1941, Canadian politicians voted to stand as Britain’s ally from the start of the war, along with the other dominions and colonies within the Empire.
Protected by its distance from Nazi Germany, Canada’s initial contributions were limited in scope due to its weak prewar military, although an infantry division was raised to defend Britain, and the Royal Canadian Navy protected naval convoys sailing to Britain.
The war changed radically with the June, 1940, defeat of France by German forces. Britain was also close to surrender. Its army had survived the miraculous evacuation along the coast at Dunkirk in northern France, followed by its defence of the island during the aerial Battle of Britain later that summer, in which 100 Canadian airmen served. Across the Atlantic, Canadians at home were jolted into action.
Limited conscription for home defence was enacted. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians enlisted in the armed forces and Canada’s wartime industries were ordered into a production frenzy. More than a million Canadians worked in essential war services and factories – largely in Ontario and Quebec – producing the weapons and equipment that would help to win the war, including some 800,000 trucks, 16,000 aircraft and 1.7 million small arms.
There was also a massive training of aircrews; 131,000 airmen were instructed in bases across the country in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, a Canadian-led contribution to the Allied war effort. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt called Canada the world’s “aerodrome of democracy.”
The 'Shoulder to Shoulder' poster advertised the many roles of the Canadian Women's Army Corps.Canadian War Museum (CWM 19880069-865)
Some 46,000 women served in uniform in the air force, army and navy, from radar technicians monitoring for enemy aircraft to naval intelligence staff plotting the movement of enemy U-boats, to more mundane jobs as cleaners, cooks and transport drivers. Also in uniform were 4,500 nurses, who cared for the wounded and sick in Canada, Britain and battlefields around the world.
Across the country, any available resources went towards the war effort. From 1941, shortages of supplies forced an intense program to restrict purchases and to “Buy Canadian.” Victory gardens were planted to instill participation in the war and to augment the food supply. Women “house soldiers” or “kitchen commandos” were encouraged to recycle everything they could, including fat, grease and animal bones, and contribute to central repositories, so that nothing was wasted.
On the farms, Canada was an agricultural superpower. While much attention was focused on the fighting forces and the war-industry factories, Canadian farms fed the British people, and by the end of the war, Prairie-grown wheat and flour accounted for 57 per cent of British consumption, while hog farmers exported three billion pounds of bacon. One journalist wrote of the Canadian farmer in 1944: “victory depends on [their] production just as much as it does on the sustained effort of the munitions worker or on the strategy and fighting spirit of the men in uniform.”
Children and youth also played a key role on the home front: Posters encouraged them to pull their weight by raising money or relieving their mothers from the strain while their fathers were in uniform. In some provinces, older children were encouraged to work in farming communities.
A bilingual war poster draws upon the visual of a Canadian soldier asking citizens to Buy War Savings Stamps.Canadian War Museum (CWM 19790385-085)
Whether a family member was enlisted or not, war seeped into the lives of every Canadian. Newspapers covered it overseas in detail, and Lorne Greene’s baritone “voice of doom” read the CBC news every night for Canadians huddled around the family radio. While escapist Hollywood cinema was still popular, the National Film Board of Canada produced films that highlighted the Canadian war effort. This was the first war where those on the home front received direct and sustained reporting from Canadian journalists in the war zone, a revolution in the media and on alerting readers, listeners and viewers of the struggle overseas.
As news of defeats and victories were reported in Canada, with ever-increasing casualty lists, the war became a crusade. In such an environment, civil liberties were curtailed, with censorship and even imprisonment for those who voiced opposition.
The war against Germany ended in total victory on May 8, 1945. Japan surrendered three months later on August 15, after a sustained naval blockade, massive aerial bombardment, battlefield defeats and, ultimately, the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Much of the world was in ruins. Shocking depravity was revealed through the millions of civilian deaths, waves of displaced people and the unthinkable crimes of the Holocaust.
Far from the marauding armies and the armadas of bombers, Canada escaped the worst of the war and emerged more prosperous, industrialized and urbanized. As part of that process, the intertwined war production brought Canada and the United States closer together, forever changing their economic and defence relations. That was an enduring legacy, as was deep state intervention in the lives of Canadians, with a new social security net, starting with the baby bonus and extending to injured veterans’ pensions.
A new Canada emerged from the terrible war, but the country wore its scars deep and grieved for its 45,000 fallen sons and daughters. We can never know the depth of the losses, but a glimpse is captured in the tens of thousands of headstones here and abroad.
Tim Cook is the acting director of research for the Canadian War Museum and author of 13 books of Canadian military history, including his most recent, The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada’s Second World War (Allen Lane, 2020).