“The Valour and the Horror”— Canada looks at itself and Churchill’s war

“The Valour and the Horror”—
Canada looks at itself and Churchill’s war
By Vivian Bird and John de Nugent

The late and revered Vivian Bird, a Royal Army veteran, resided in Devon, England. Here are some of his books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Books-Vivian-Bird/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AVivian%20Bird) John de Nugent, a former U.S. Marine, completed, updated and amplified his story.

In 1992 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (and the BBC) showed a three-part television documentary by two Canadian brothers, Brian and Terence McKenna, about Canadians fighting in World War II, “The Valour and the Horror.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valour_and_the_Horror

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It caused an immediate uproar, so much so that a subcommittee of the Canadian Senate carried out what The Montreal Gazette called “a witch-hunt” against the heretical filmmakers because of their criticism of the Canadian government and military. But the principal targets of the film about the involvement of Canadians in World War II were the Britons Winston Churchill and Air Marshal Sir Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris.

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Official hostility caused directors of the government-controlled CBC to panic. In what the Gazette called a “craven abdication of responsibility,” CBC tried to placate the witch-hunters (Britain-lovers and German-haters) by refusing to stand by the McKennas and declaring that in the future it would strive to ensure “greater journalistic balance.” In other words, this won’t happen again.
Attempts in Canada to get the showing of the film banned also involved a lawsuit against the CBC. A special “Bomber Harris Trust” representing certain WWII Canadian airmen claimed Canadian bomber crews had been slandered by the film, which supposedly portrayed them as war criminals. This suit ended in abject failure after a protracted legal battle. However, Canada’s Senate went so far as to hold hearings to establish whether the McKenna brothers had “Nazi sympathies.” The row about the film continued for years.

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Many of the film’s exposés were already well-known in Anglo-American historical and media circles, such as the fact that the royal colony of Hong Kong had been left hopelessly unprepared by London for a Japanese attack, and that the Allies had “carpet-bombed” civilian neighborhoods full of workers, old people, women, children, hospitals, churches and schools, what the Allies euphemistically called “areas.” American pilot Charles “Chuck” Yeager (who later broke the speed of sound) wrote in his autobiography that after a day strafing farm girls on bicycles and school kids in school yards he told colleagues: “We had better win this war, because otherwise we are in trouble.”

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The film dropped a bomb of its own by revealing the cynical role played by Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt in forcing Canada to send 2,000 completely untrained, raw young recruits to reinforce the British Hong Kong garrison in 1942. They preferred this to using experienced, trained and well-equipped British troops that Churchill was saving for other campaigns. Churchill put massive pressure on Canadian military chiefs to send these two regiments, which had been declared unfit for combat by their own superiors, against the Japanese Empire’s finest.

[SIDEBAR: THE GIN-DRINKER’S LINE

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In October 1941, at the request of London, the “British Dominion” of Canada sent two infantry battalions (1,975 personnel) to reinforce the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong garrison, arriving Nov. 16. They were not fully equipped: a ship carrying all their vehicles toward Hong Kong was rerouted to the Philippines when war began. The soldiers were still undergoing training and acclimatisation. The major Canadian units involved in the defence of Hong Kong were the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada.

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On December 7, 1941 the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which resulted in the United States of America declaring war on the Japanese. The following day Japanese aircraft attacked the Royal Air Force contingent based at Kai Tak airfield on the mainland of Hong Kong, which destroyed all of the dated aircraft available. This air attack was a prelude to a land invasion of Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland that resulted in the capture of the Colony and the entire garrison within eighteen days.

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British resistance was based on a defense line knows as the Gin Drinker’s Line because its western flank rested on Gin Drinker’s Bay. The plan was that this line was to hold for three weeks during which the defenses of Hong Kong Island could be completed and the invading forces subjected to delay and attrition. The Gin Drinker’s Line was a string of defense points, primarily pillboxes and trenches surrounded by wire and situated on various hills separating Kowloon from the New Territories. The terrain along the Gin Drinker’s line is rugged with some steep volcanic hills and dense jungle undergrowth. The Japanese had excellent intelligence sources and are believed to have built a mock-up of the Shing Mun Redoubt to practice their assault tactics.

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The outbreak of war in Europe resulted in many of the better Hong Kong troops being sent to Europe, with less capable personnel being left in the colony. In November 1941 the garrison was only thought to be sufficient to hold Hong Kong Island itself, but two Canadian Battalions arrived in Hong Kong one month before hostilities commenced and this led to old plans being re-introduced to hold the Gin Drinker’s Line until help arrived.

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The Hong Kong garrison comprised 15,000 British, local Hong Kong Chinese, Indians and Canadians and faced off against 40,000 battle-hardened Japanese regulars who had been fighting the Chinese for half a decade. Unfortunately for Churchill’s Empire, it had a racist and general contempt for the fighting ability of the Japanese and thus inadequate preparations were taken to defend Hong Kong from its determined and capable attacker.

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The attempt to defend the Gin Drinker’s Line on the Mainland spread Empire Forces too thinly. With only three battalions (1,800 men) to defend 10 miles of front designed to be held by six battalions, they suffered a spectacular early defeat from which they never had a chance to recover.

These soldiers were so untrained that during their voyage to Hong Kong they had to be instructed literally how to use a rifle and even how to load a bullet. When they arrived in Hong Kong, the Canadians were told that the Japanese would not attack Hong Kong with any more than 5,000 men. When the dreaded day came, it was 40,000 Nipponese, many of whom had been fighting in China for years, against these poor “greenhorns.”

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It was also said that the Japanese would not attack at night because their “slit-like eyes ma[d]e it impossible for them to see at night.” Mocking Churchillian Britain’s mendacious racism, the Japanese did attack at night, on December 8, 1941, eight hours after Pearl Harbor. The Hong Kong garrison held out until Christmas Day.

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It was claimed they would not attack across the water from Kowloon because “racially the Japanese [were] liable to seasickness.” However, they did attack over the water, in fact singing lustily as they arrived in Hong Kong harbor.

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The Canadians resisted bravely but were soon overwhelmed. Many Canadian hospital wounded were killed by the Japanese. The white nurses were raped, and in many cases slaughtered. Only a few Canadian veterans survived.

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After the war ended, the Japanese responsible for these atrocities were hunted down and tried as war criminals but virtually all of them had their death sentences commuted to imprisonment. With the rapidly changing political and economic climate after the Korean War began, when communism was the new enemy, they were released.

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Some of these war criminals long headed postwar Japanese companies, which used Western, white POWs as slave labor. Surviving Canadian POWs are even today still awaiting compensation from the Japanese government for their maltreatment. But the Canadian government has turned a blind eye to their pleas. This, as much as the attacks upon Churchill and Harris, was likely a major reason for the vicious attitude of the Canadian authorities toward this factual film about valor and horror.

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In England, executives of Channel 4 TV in Britain received a carefully orchestrated barrage of letters complaining about the portrayal of poor civilian-murderer Harris and even indirectly from that decayed totem pole of Britain’s morally corrupt and increasingly unpopular royal family, the senile, yet still German-hating “Queen Mum.”

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But all to no avail. The documentary “cat” is out of the bag in both Canada and Britain, clarifying for millions the truth about Allied saturation bombing of German cities and the appalling incompetence and cynicism of the Canadian brass. The [London] Times reviewer was among the many who praised the film highly. He even insisted that it be seen by every schoolchild and young person in Britain.
There can be no doubt concerning the brutal facts of the bombing campaign masterminded by Harris, with the backing of Churchill and other guilty parties, against German cities. Harris is quoted in the film as saying: “What we want to do in addition to the horrors of fire, is to bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boches [French, meaning “Krauts”], to kill Boches, and to terrify Boches.” Therefore, Harris requisitioned high explosives as well as fire bombs.

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The intrepid McKennas quoted another infamous Harris-ism: “A policeman stopped me speeding. He said: ‘Sir, you could have killed someone!’ I replied: ‘Young man, I kill thousands of people every night.’“

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The CBC documentary also revealed that:

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Sir Arthur had insisted on pursuing civilian bombing even after it became possible to precision-bomb military and industrial targets.

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Only on direct orders did he divert his bombers from German civilian areas to support D-Day.
Harris deliberately concealed the huge losses suffered by his own airmen and the real nature of their campaign.

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He was also responsible for sending his bombers on suicidal missions such as a disastrous March 30, 1944 raid on Nuremberg. It was a night known to Harris to be utterly cloudless and moonlit. Of 795 Anglo-Canadian bombers that went out, 94 bombers were downed and 71 badly damaged, causing serious aircrews losses.

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Many cantankerous Anglo-Canadian (and American) airmen said later that the Germans had started the war and so deserved the holocaust of their cities. [Paul, I have a fantastic photo of Berlin from the second Degrelle video.] This is a blatant lie of British propaganda. The British, French and Poles started the war using August 1939 Polish atrocities against 7,000 German civilians at Bromberg in West Prussia and Polish threats to march to Berlin and annex half of Germany. It was the British and French who after these atrocities declared war on Germany, not vice versa. Hitler had advocated friendship or even alliance with the British Empire ever since the publishing of his Mein Kampf in 1924, as Reich Chancellor made numerous diplomatic overtures to England well before 1939 and during the war as well, notably in July 1940, after defeating Britain in his victorious French campaign, had left the British escape with their lives at Dunkirk, and according to General Leon Degrelle and others, was, with extreme secrecy and total deniability, behind Rudolf Hess’s daring peace mission in May 1941.

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And it was the British who first established an independent bomber force, a “Bomber Command” and built the heavy, four-engine Lancaster and Halifax bombers designed to crush cities.

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On the other hand, the German Luftwaffe, was always intended as a combat adjunct to the soldiers and tanks of the Wehrmacht on their strictly military missions, which never deliberately targeted civilians except in two cases: French refugees by the millions hopelessly blocking all roads as the German Wehrmacht advanced into France (a cause for light strafing to get them off the roads), and bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam after the Polish and Dutch governments had begun turning these cities into fortresses and handing out serious weapons to all civilian comers. (See the September/October 2005 Barnes Review for Spanish historian Joaquín Bochaca’s article “Civilian Insurgents of WWII,” available for $7.00.)

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(The “blitz of London” was a response to British bombings of southwest Germany. The German bombing of Rotterdam came after the Dutch had refused to surrender the hopelessly surrounded city and insisted on arming the civilian population against all the rules of war; the same applies to Warsaw. See Joaquin Bochaca’s masterful article on “Warsaw and Rotterdam” in The Barnes Review, Sept. Oct. 2005, available for $7.)

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During a series of colonial rebellions inside their empire, the British had already perfected their civilian bombing technique using incendiaries in order to exert, as Churchill at the time described it, “a moral effect.”

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Harris was one of the principal exponents of this terror by firebombing and played a very active part in it. While many commanders had a thinly concealed distaste for the barbarity of their operations, clinging to the remnants of the ideal of the fair-playing British gentleman, Harris was apparently never troubled by his version of a conscience. Serving as an RAF squadron leader in the 1920s, a fellow officer described him as having “a great weakness for government fireworks.” His men knew him as “Butcher” Harris for his brutality, short temper, and bullying manner.

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The Canadian film also effectively refutes Harris’ claim that there was no proof that more women and children than men suffered in the bombing. According to the film, 160 women died for every 100 men in the 1943 attack on Hamburg and 8,400 of the 42,000 victims were children. During what the Germans called a Feuersturm [“firestorm”], many small children had their feet glued to the melting tarmac of the streets while their mothers, in the same state, looked on in unspeakable horror. “This was the worst battle in our [Canadian] history,” claims Brian McKenna. “It was a catastrophe and its morality and effectiveness have never been debated.”

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Another of the allegations in the film is that Canadian airmen were not told of a switch in policy from targeting industrial centers to saturation bombing of German civilians. When, later, these airmen realized how they had been tricked, many were sick in their hearts at what they had been made to do.
Those who wavered at the prospect of murdering more women and children were described by their commanders as “lacking in moral fiber,” as cowards.

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As the film also reveals, a large number of Canadian soldiers had joined the Canadian army in the starving 1930s Great Depression years not out of any great desire to fight for freedom and for the British Empire, but rather for a job and food. British WWII propaganda then represented them as having eagerly enlisted to fight in Europe and the Far East for democracy and as subjects of the British Empire. (Canadian passports, until after WWII, stated: “The bearer of this passport is a British subject.”)

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The McKenna brothers showed no regrets about making this courageous film and said if a remake were ever done they would be even more outspoken.

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Other remarkable highlights of the film are:

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The reference to the total destruction of the beautiful Norman city of Caen in Normandy by a force of nearly 500 Allied bombers, pounding them for one week, when there was not a single German left in the city and when despite Allied propaganda about “clearing out the last Germans” not one German body was found in the ruins.

*** Caen

Caen was the capital of the Duchy of Normandy, ruled by William the Conqueror, who invaded England in 1066. He built this massive castle.

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Yours truly in 2004 in this once very beautiful city

Eisenhower pounded the city with bombs

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This did not conceal for long the rotting bodies of nearly 1,000 French men, women and children. This beautiful medieval city, once splendidly built up by the great William the Conqueror and his queen, was laid totally in ruins. Local inhabitants have not forgotten this act of “liberation,” which, as the Canadian film wryly notes, was better described as “liquidation.”

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In a recent visit to this city, tacky cinderblock buildings with painted-on historical features now stand where Europe’s finest architecture has been on display for 900 years.

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In June of 2004, on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, the major French daily Le Figaro produced a magnificent color magazine commemorating this invasion, with astounding color war maps, photos and eyewitness descriptions by French, German, American and British participants.

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One of the shocking side stories was about General Eisenhower’s order that all the Normandy coastal cities be bombed on the evening of June 5, 1944 into rubble, killing 50,000 Norman civilians. These handsome half-Viking, half-French inhabitants died to achieve Eisenhower’s goal of creating rubble from their homes, schools and apartment buildings to slow German panzers. Cities such as Le Havre lost their entire medieval center. Le Figaro also stated openly what all French know, that 7,000 Norman girls were raped by American GIs—and that an irate De Gaulle found out on the eve of D-Day, when Eisenhower tried to “order” him to read an American decree on BBC radio, that Eisenhower had formed an “A.M.G.O.T”—Allied Military Government-Occupied Territory—to occupy France as an enemy country just like Germany. (The excuse was that all French supported Vichy.) At Roosevelt’s orders, billions of fake French francs, shaped and designed exactly like US dollars, had been printed to help establish American rule and control of the economy. While it is not true that the French hate Americans, they are keenly aware of these events and what they seem to suggest about attitudes toward their country. The one bright spot in this was that French farmers paid all their back taxes in the new Yankee francs just days before De Gaulle pulled them from circulation.]

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The CBC/McKenna series also proved that heavy Canadian losses during the Normandy landings were deliberately concealed. Early on in the battle, a number of Germans who had surrendered according to the Geneva Convention were driven behind sand dunes where some Canadians slit their throats in order to get German helmets. Evidence was given from both the German and Canadian side of orders issued by Canadian generals that no prisoners were to be taken.

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When German troops learned about this, there were isolated acts of retaliation although Gen. Kurt Meyer, the SS tank commander, was unaware of these violations of his own orders not to retaliate in kind. At the end of the war Meyer was accused of having permitted the very atrocities that some Canadians had begun; he was sentenced to death, but there was so much sympathy and admiration for him on the part of Allied officers that his sentence was commuted.

[Sidebar: One chivalrous Canadian

Many Canadians, however, behaved chivalrously toward the enemy. One Doug Hester, of the Queen’s Own Canadian Rifles, found a prayer book on the body of a German named Ernst on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Stunned that an “evil Nazi” bore into battle a Christian prayer book similar to his own, he kept this and other precious personal items of the fallen enemy, and after the war located his bereaved parents and sent these effects to them with a kind letter. He received the following letter which made him glad he had written this bereaved old couple, whose plight spoke volumes about the war:

February 24, 1950

Dear Mr. Hester:

We were deeply moved when, yesterday, your letter box, papers and photos of our unforgettable son Ernst arrived here. Take many thousand thanks. How are we able to reward you, that you let us have our boy’s last belongings. By our office of the Wehrmacht we formerly learned that our boy was probably killed on June 6, 1944 near Bernières-sur-Mer. They could not exactly inform us. We, my husband and me, are nowadays old people. We lost five children, Ernst was our last, who was going to take care of our living. We always hoped, that he would saved us and that our Lord let him come home from that terrible war, but we have to leave this hope too. Today we are old and nobody takes care of our living, and the war took all that we possessed. In particular my husband was terribly moved losing five children. In this letter you find a photo of my son.

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Formerly, when we were informed of his death we made celebrate a mass for him. Take this as a souvenir of a German comrade, whom you saw only dead, but who was, in the deep of his heart, never been your foe. I should be heartly grateful to you. When you reply write me in complete details. Was he heavily wounded? Had he lost his arms or legs, or how has he been killed? You can write in English or French as I have found someone to translate the letters.

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You can hardly imagine what it means to us to know how our poor son died. He was our last consolation, our last hope, in short, all that remained of our five children.

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And now, my husband and me thank you heartily once more and beg you to answer us pretty soon and tell us all about our son.

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Take in advance many hearty thanks for your kindness.

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Sincerely,
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Frau Johanna (surname withheld)

P.S. Hester wrote the couple back to say that their son had fought bravely, died quickly and without being torn apart.

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Dear Mr. Hester
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After the bloody failure of the 1942 Anglo-Canadian raid on Dieppe on the French side of the English Channel — a Churchill brainstorm as disastrous as his WWI Gallipoli debacle, immortalized in Mel Gibson’s early movie “Gallipoli”—came Canada’s worst defeat ever (represented by Allied propaganda as a “great victory”), the fruitless assault by the elite Canadian Black Watch upon Varrières Ridge, on the road to Caen [Caen/Normandy map]. These Black Watch solders [photo], without being provided with artillery support, were ordered to advance, incredibly, in parade marching formation across open ground where they were cut down by scathing machinegun fire from the highly trained and well-equipped Hitler Youth Division of the Waffen-SS. Two elite groups met; one was terribly led. Of the 400 parade-stepping Canadians, only 15 made it back to their own lines.

The SS, appalled at the massacre, ceased firing upon the retreating survivors as they laboriously carried back their wounded.

Canada, today, like Australia, is poised to break away completely from the “mother country” and all connections to the discredited British monarchy. Canada, unlike the United States, never had its own revolution, with Britain merely “granting self-rule” to this Dominion. It needs to take further steps toward its own liberation and fulfill the words of the new national anthem, which speak of Canada as “the True North, proud and free.”

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