Our Legacy is not ‘Peacekeeping’
by John Thompson
02/23/04
A new year, a new PM, a new budget and no hope for the military’s future. Despite our annual recitations of "In Flanders’ Fields", the torch handed down by John McCrae in WW-1 has just about guttered out.
In forty years of our Armed Forces’ death of a thousand cuts, there was another refrain instead of the plea from doomed soldiers to hold their torch high — the argument that we didn’t need new weapons, more personnel, or adequate rations and ammunition, because our military was for ‘peacekeeping’.
Repeat a lie often enough, and liars come to think it is true. The idea that Canada’s military legacy is that of peacekeeping, particularly under UN aegis, is a persistent one — a notion that has survived the demise of UN peacekeeping in the early 1990s. It says much that those who maintain this view cannot see that the world has changed.
Our real military legacy has nothing to do with peacekeeping or the UN. Our first legacy consisted of frontier warfare (skirmishes, massacres and arson) in the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Our second period of legacy-making activities spanned the 19th Century: Guarding our territory from Fenians, American Whiskey traders, and quelling the Metis.
However, the first period is too remote and the second period involved too few people and too little effort to qualify as a legacy (an argument that also covers peacekeeping). Our real legacy began with the deployment of thousands of Canadians to South Africa, where it became apparent they were ruthless, practical and effective battlefield killers. This reputation grew enormously in the World Wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45.
The Canadian Corps in 1916-18 emerged as the most innovative, powerful and efficient corps on the Western Front. Its four divisions met and destroyed 26 German divisions as it spearheaded the British drive into Belgium in the last 100 days of the war, and killed or captured as many Germans as the entire 1st US Army (eight times their size) did during the same period.
The Canadian Army in Europe was equally dreaded by the Germans — and for good reason. In Sicily in 1943, the Germans mistook the 1st Canadian Division (in battle for the first time) as a veteran elite mountain unit. The Canadians took on Hitler’s finest troops in that horrific Normandy summer of 1944 and savaged them; fought through the waist deep mud of the Scheldt Estuary to clear Allied supply lines that autumn and broke the back of the last German Army in the West the next spring.
While the Canadian Army established a tough, practical and aggressive legacy, Canada’s sailors and aviators built a similar legacy in the North Atlantic and over Europe. Even today, some scant traces of that heritage remain — despite years of under-funding, shortages of personnel and failing equipment.
UN peacekeeping was an anomaly, something that only happened during the Cold War, and Canada, while a frequent participant, never committed most of our military to it. The main preoccupation of the Cold War years was collective defence, of the continent in full partnership with the US and with NATO in Europe. Our early successes were built on the leadership and practical spirit engendered in WW II. Later participation was made possible by the professionalism of the Regular Forces and reservists with adequate training — two conditions that are much endangered today.
Peacekeeping under the baby blue beret only sometimes demanded that our soldiers be ready to fight and to kill — which they did when necessary. However, the UN screwed up its missions in the early 1990s, often prolonging or exacerbating wars that were supposed to be cooling off.
The Canadian peacekeepers in Bosnia and Croatia were there under the UN flag, and often had to fight like their forbearers did in wars-past. Where they couldn’t fight and damn well wish they could, the UN left them holding the bag… talk to General Romeo Dallaire about the disaster of Rwanda where the UN let 800,000 people die (an event which led directly to another five million deaths).
UN peacekeeping is finito, over, extinct, gone and done. It is too slow, too clumsy and too fragmented to see to international security. Since the early 1990s, most of the missions around the world have been run under other auspices than that of the UN. Canada did not bomb Serbs in Kosovo, board ships in the Persian Gulf or shoot Taliban machine gunners in Afghanistan under the UN flag.
So forget peacekeeping. We have a real legacy, and maybe we can fan its last embers into a light that can beat back the darkness.
John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca
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