[1914 - 1945] A Nation Forged in War

In the summer of 1914, the world caught fire, and Canada, a young nation still tied by law and loyalty to the British Empire, was instantly plunged into the inferno. When Britain declared war on Germany, so too did Canada. There was no debate in its Parliament, no independent choice. A wave of patriotic fervor swept the country. In towns and cities, from the rocky shores of Newfoundland to the newly settled prairies, young men rushed to enlist, caught up in a spirit of grand adventure and imperial duty. They were promised glory and a swift victory, home by Christmas. Few could imagine the grim reality that awaited them in the muddy, blood-soaked fields of France and Belgium. The initial optimism quickly dissolved into the brutal reality of trench warfare. This was a new kind of conflict, one of attrition, poison gas, and the relentless thunder of artillery. Canadian soldiers, initially equipped with the domestically produced and often-jamming Ross rifle, soon learned the harsh lessons of modern combat, eventually adopting the more reliable British Lee-Enfield. They carved out a reputation as formidable shock troops, a reputation paid for in blood at Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele. But it was on a grey, cold Easter Monday in April 1917 that Canada’s sacrifice coalesced into a symbol of nationhood. At Vimy Ridge, a heavily fortified German position that had resisted previous Allied assaults, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together for the first time. They achieved a stunning, decisive victory where others had failed, capturing the ridge in a matter of days. The cost was staggering—over 10,600 casualties—but in the smoke and chaos of that battle, a new sense of Canadian identity was born, distinct from its British parentage. Back home, the war effort strained the nation's fabric. Women poured into munitions factories, their hands assembling the shells that their brothers, husbands, and sons fired on the front lines. The demand for more soldiers led to the Conscription Crisis of 1917, which bitterly divided French and English Canada, a wound that would fester for decades. That same year, the war struck home with devastating force when two ships, one laden with explosives, collided in Halifax Harbour, causing the largest man-made explosion prior to the atomic age, leveling a huge portion of the city and killing nearly 2,000 people. When the guns finally fell silent on November 11, 1918, Canada had paid a terrible price. Over 66,000 of its finest were dead out of a force of some 620,000 who served—a staggering number for a country of only eight million people. The returning soldiers came home to a nation that was more confident, more industrialized, and insistent on its own voice. Prime Minister Robert Borden successfully demanded Canada have its own seat at the Paris Peace Conference and in the new League of Nations. The decade that followed, the “Roaring Twenties,” brought a deceptive prosperity. Jazz music spilled from dance halls, hemlines rose on flapper dresses, and the automobile began to reshape urban landscapes. It was also a time of social progress. In 1929, the “Famous Five,” a group of determined women from Alberta, won the landmark Persons Case, legally establishing that women were indeed “persons” eligible to be appointed to the Senate, a crucial step in the long fight for gender equality. Yet, beneath the surface of this new modernity, old tensions remained, and a new catastrophe loomed. The bubble burst in October 1929. The crash of the New York Stock Exchange sent a shockwave across the globe, and Canada, heavily dependent on the export of raw materials like wheat and lumber, was hit with brutal force. The 1930s became a decade of despair, the Great Depression. On the Prairies, the economic collapse was compounded by a devastating drought that turned fertile farmland into a vast, wind-swept Dust Bowl. Families abandoned their homesteads, their dreams turned to dust along with their topsoil. In the cities, factories fell silent. Men who once took pride in their work now lined up for bread and thin soup, their faces etched with a quiet desperation. Thousands of unemployed, single men were sent to government-run relief camps, performing hard labour for a paltry 20 cents a day. In 1935, their frustration boiled over into the “On-to-Ottawa Trek,” a protest journey by train that was violently broken up by police in Regina. The decade was a crucible of hardship that tested the will of the Canadian people, forcing them to rely on community and resilience to survive. As the world drifted once more toward war, Canada stood as a more independent nation. On September 10, 1939, a week after Britain, Canada’s Parliament, under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, made its own, sovereign declaration of war on Nazi Germany. The country transformed itself into the “Aerodrome of Democracy.” Through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, vast stretches of Canadian prairie and farmland became home to airfields that trained over 130,000 Allied pilots, navigators, and gunners. Canadian factories, dormant during the Depression, roared back to life, churning out ships, planes, and vehicles in astonishing numbers. On the unforgiving North Atlantic, the Royal Canadian Navy, which began the war with only a handful of ships, grew into one of the world's largest, its small corvettes escorting vital convoys and hunting German U-boats in a desperate, unending battle. The path of this war was also marked by tragedy and triumph. The disastrous raid on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942 saw thousands of Canadians killed, wounded, or captured in a few short hours, a brutal lesson in the complexities of amphibious assault. Yet, they persevered. Canadians fought their way up the boot of Italy in a grueling campaign and, on June 6, 1944—D-Day—the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division was tasked with its own stretch of Normandy coastline: Juno Beach. They stormed ashore through heavy fire and formidable German defenses, punching further inland on that first day than any other Allied force. On the home front, the war effort was total, but it came with a dark stain. Fearing espionage, the government forcibly removed over 22,000 Japanese Canadians from the coast of British Columbia, seizing their property and interning them in camps for the duration of the war, a profound injustice born of racism and wartime paranoia. By the time victory was declared in 1945, Canada had enlisted over one million citizens. More than 45,000 did not return. The nation that emerged was not the same one that had entered the war in 1939, let alone the dominion of 1914. It was an industrial power, a respected middle power on the world stage, its identity profoundly shaped and scarred by thirty years of war and depression. The foundation of modern Canada had been laid, cemented by sacrifice and a hard-won sense of self.