WAR MACHINES
THE TRUCKS THAT BEAT HITLER: CANADA’S LITTLE- KNOWN ROLE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR.
Isi tun Canadian to sell fighting vehicles to countries that might actually use them? The $15-billion deal with Saudi Arabia for Canadianmade light armoured vehicles ( LAVs) is proving to be one of the Trudeau government’s first big tests, with the Liberals under fire from many critics for what it supposedly says about our country’s moral character.
Some international law experts claim evidence Saudi Arabia targeted civilians during its recent military incursion into Yemen, as well as well- documented human rights violations against its own citizens — mass executions, gender iniquities, religious and speech restrictions — means the deal violates Canadian law prohibiting military exports to regimes that might use Canadian- built weapons against their own population. A lawsuit in the Federal Court is pending.
“We should not sell arms to a country that engages in a persistent pattern of human-rights violations ,” former Liberal justice Minister Irwin Cotler scolded .“Canadian-made goods will serve to sustain one of the most repressive regimes in the world,” declared Cesar Jarmillo, executive director of the disarmament group Project Plowshares. “Is this how Canada wants to present itself on the world stage?”
Maybe, maybe not. However, the argument that it’s out of character for Canada to send military hardware to repressive governments entails a decidedly blinkered view of our past. This country has long been known around the world for the quality and usefulness of our military vehicles. And as for the moral implications, one of Canada’s greatest contributions to the Allied victory in the Second World War involved shipping Canadian- made war machines to the most murderous and human- rights abusing regime the world has ever seen. It’s part of our history.
If you visit the Canadian War Museum’s famous display of military vehicles in its LeBreton Gallery, one of the first machines you will come across is Valentine tank # 838. It has a story to tell.
The tank began life in May 1943 at Montreal’s Angus railway shops as part of a Second World War production run of 1,400 British- designed Valentines, most of which were sent to Russia through Canada’s Mutual Aid program that provided arms, vehicles and raw materials to our allies. For # 838, the war ended on Jan. 25, 1944, in the midst of a Russian counterattack against the Germans on an icy river near Telepino, a Ukrainian village south of Kyiv. While the tank in front made it across, # 838 succumbed to cracking ice and quickly sank into a bog. There is stayed for nearly 50 years, until a Glasnost- era gesture of goodwill saw it pulled from the swamp and sent back to Canada as a museum piece.
Today, a full and proper appreciation of Valentine # 838’s story requires acknowledging two important but largely forgotten aspects of the Canadian war effort in the Second World War. Both are relevant to the LAV debate.
First is that Canada’s production of tracked and wheeled war machines represents one of our most significant contributions to the fight against Hitler’s Germany. Military vehicles are something of a Canadian specialty.
Canadian factories turned out nearly 850,000 vehicles during the war, including 6,000 self- propelled guns and tanks, such as the Valentine. Of much greater significance, however, were 725,000 trucks. Building trucks may seem a prosaic and modest accomplishment when set beside landings at Dieppe and Normandy or other daring military exploits. But this was arguably Canada’s greatest wartime achievement.
Thanks to a large prewar automotive sector, Canada built more military trucks during the war than all the Axis nations — Germany, Italy and Japan — combined. This prodigious output allowed Canada and its Allies to meet the demands of mobile warfare in the age of Blitzkrieg.
“We put the British army on wheels,” noted Graham Broad, history professor at King’s University College at Western University in London, Ont. The British Eighth Army that famously grappled with German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa ran almost exclusively on the ubiquitous Canadian military pattern ( CMP) truck. As the Allied campaign moved to Sicily, Italy and later France, this progress remained heavily dependent on Canadian trucks. By the end of the war, the Canadian Army’s own vast supply of trucks made it the most mobile in the world: with a vehicle for every three soldiers in the field. The Americans, by comparison, made do with one vehicle per seven GIs.
The CMP was a joint effort between the Canadian divisions of General Motors and Ford to meet British specifications for a sturdy military truck. It was an oddball design. The distinctive angular snub nose was meant to allow efficient packing onto ships. An inward sloping windshield reduced upward glare, cutting down on reflections that might give away its position to enemy planes. So, too, the single blackout headlight. And it was righthand drive, reflecting British demands. Looks aside, however, it was the highly adaptable, standardized chassis that really mattered. The CMP could be kitted out for a dizzying ar- ray of tasks: troop carrier, field ambulance, radio HQ, f uel tanker, recovery truck, welding station or artillery tractor. All were typically built on Canadian production lines, broken down, crated and shipped over- seas, where they were re- assembled in Egypt, Italy, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
After the war, the Canadian Army’s habit of paying off its debts in occupied countries by leaving behind its motor pool gave the CMP an even greater global footprint. To quell post- war colonial uprisings, for example, the Netherlands shipped its CMP trucks to Indonesia, Belgian CMPs ended up in Africa. Those that remain today are popular with collectors in every corner of the world.
The official British history of the Second World War considers the CMP to be one of this country’s most important additions to the overall war effort. “Without these vehicles, the war would have looked very different,” said Andrew Burtch, an historian at the Canadian War Museum. “To meet the needs of modern mobile warfare, it was essential to have lots and lots of trucks. The contribution of the CMP was truly significant.”
The second modern storyline arising from Valentine # 838 is that Canada’s wartime manufacturing prowess was not offered up solely to the benefit of democratic, English- speaking armies fighting the bad guys. A significant and vital portion of our military production went to support Joseph Stalin’s equally evil dictatorship.
Under president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lead- Lease program, the United States sent the Soviet Union 13,000 fighter planes and bombers, 6,000 tanks and 430,000 trucks, jeeps and other wheeled vehicles, along with vast supplies of raw materials. While most of our production went to British and Commonwealth armies, Canada also played a significant role arming the Soviets. We gave Russia almost our entire supply of Valentine tanks, along with more than 1,300 tracked weapons carriers and several thousand of our useful CMP trucks, including 1,500 of the biggest six- by- six variant specially upgraded to Arctic conditions. And we repaired for free the Russian freighters needed to transport all this matériel. Of the $ 32 billion ( 2016 dollars) Canada handed out in Mutual Aid, Russia received the second- largest share after Britain.
The ability to put Russian troops and supplies on the road was an incalculable advantage on the brutal Eastern Front. Despite its reputation for lightning warfare, the German army was perpetually short on transport. “When they invaded Russia in 1941, they brought nearly half a million horses with them to pull their equipment,” said Broad. Every truck or tank supplied to the Soviets tilted the balance further against horsedrawn Nazis.
During the Cold War, however, i t was standard Communist cant to downplay the significance of Lend- Lease and Mutual Aid in the Motherland’s glorious victory over the fascists. Russian propagandists frequently claimed Western wartime supplies amounted to a mere four per cent of overall Soviet production. These claims l ater proved bogus. Post- Soviet investigations have shown Western deliveries constituted 15 per cent to 25 per cent of the country’s wartime capacity. In some cases, Allied shipments accounted for half the available supply of crucial military items. This is the case with the Valentine tanks, when a few early arrivals from Britain played a critical role defending Moscow in December 1941, when most of Russia’s existing tanks had been destroyed and the war was still going well for the Germans. The importance of “large- scale military technical assistance from the Allies, especially the U. S. but also the U. K. and Canada ... cannot be overestimated,” Oleg Budnitsky of Moscow’s National Research University said in an interview last year with the online news service Russia Beyond the Headlines.
Given the current excitement over the LAV deal, it seems necessary to recall that Stalin was arguably the cruelest and most repressive leader in modern history. According to historian Robert Conquest, he was responsible for killing — at a bare minimum — 20 million of his own people through bloody purges, massive prison camp archipelagos, forced starvations and a general program of domestic terror. In 1939, Stalin further shocked the West when he signed a non- aggression pact with Hitler in order to grab a chunk of Poland. Yet when Hitler decided to overlook centuries of military wisdom and attack Russia, Stalin was immediately transformed from blood- thirsty tyrant to vital ally. And so, in a remarkable feat of moral flexibility and realpolitik, Canada built tanks, trucks and vast quantities of other war matériel and packed them off to Russia with our best wishes — at no charge. The enemy of my enemy, and all that.
Considering its many human rights abuses, it is similarly worth noting that Saudi Arabia is a key partner in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a longtime Western ally and an important bulwark against an aggressive and dangerous Iran. Plus, they’re paying customers.
WE GAVE RUSSIA ALMOST OUR ENTIRE SUPPLY OF VALENTINE TANKS, ALONG WITH MORE THAN 1,300 TRACKED WEAPONS CARRIERS. — PETER SHAWN TAYLOR THANKS TO A LARGE PREWAR AUTOMOTIVE SECTOR, WE BUILT MORE MILITARY TRANSPORTS DURING THE WAR THAN ALL AXIS NATIONS COMBINED — CRITICAL IN THE AGE OF BLITZKRIEG.