Reluctant Neighbor: Canada, the U.S.A. and the Korean Crisis

By Darryl Hurly

Canada and the United States have been neighbors since colonial times. For 250 years their relations were mired in conflict. In the second third of the 19th century, a neighborly rapprochement with the US began to evolve – primarily economic down to WWII, which saw the armed forces of the two nations work in unison to defeat the AXIS.
Canada and the US were thrust upon the world stage by their exceptional participation in WWII. As the Cold War settled over the globe with the rise of the Soviet Union and Red China, both nations stood together within a UN umbrella to repulse a North Korean invasion of South Korea. The creation of NORAD to provide hemispheric defence against manned bombers carrying nuclear payloads symbolized the apogee of their strategic cooperation
Whereas the US was propelled to center stage as leader of the Western World in opposition to Communist expansion, Canada found it difficult financially to live up to its status as a major supporting player in an expensive arms race. Unable to keep pace while the world teetered on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, it scrapped the CF-105 Avro Arrow supersonic jet project, and rearmed its homeland security force with relatively inexpensive ex-US CF-101 Voodoos, plus the SAGE computer and Bomarc missile systems. It equipped its NATO contingent with CF-104 Starfighters.

Canada’s emasculated aerospace industry devolved temporarily into an aeronautical industry, producing STOL transport planes like the Cariboo, and doing subcontract work for Boeing in return for the RCAF’s purchase of Chinook helicopters. Later reinvigorated, it built the Northrop F-5 (CF-116) interceptor under contract, and designed the famous ‘Canadarm’ for use in space.

As Canada watched the US get drawn into the controversial Vietnam war, its views regarding military commitment abroad on behalf of the Free World diverged from its neighbor’s. Canadians began to question the policy of superpowers maintaining buffer states against one another, seemingly in defiance of, or at least indifferent to, the trend of nationalist inspirations within the countries involved.

Content to be a junior partner in hemispheric defence, Canada continued to march to a US drumbeat in NORAD, while scaling back its NATO commitment to defend Western Europe against Soviet aggression. With the collapse of the USSR, Canada focused on UN counter-terrorist campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where Canada’s military played minor but significant roles in combatting the new threat of violent Jihadism. Having since eschewed its combatant role and shrunk its UN commitment to minor supporting roles, it contents itself with peacekeeping and humanitarian aid.

But the resurgence of North Korea under a roguish despot with his peace-threatening, nuclear and missile capability finds Canada at a crossroads. In 1950 Canada dutifully sent army, navy and air force units to help the UN repel an invasion of South Korea by the North. Today its meagre military permits little room to aid a US-led campaign to keep North Korea in check.

Worse, North Korea’s growing missile and ICBM threats to South Korea and the US, discussed herein, find Canada naked in crosshairs targeting North America. The US and North Korea face off belligerently; China’s loyalty wavers; the UN, Russia and Japan urge sanctions and dialogue to avoid catastrophe.

Unable to urge Canada to rearm with a sophisticated missile system to counter North Korean ICBM or sub-launched missile threats, the US was forced to separate continental defence into Canadian and American zones. It no longer feels obliged to defend Canada against ICBM or ballistic missile attack.

Canada’s military remains in NORAD’s early-warning system, but Ottawa is shirking its duty to acquire modern jets and rockets to bring its weaponry into the 21st century, without which it can’t uphold its end in continental defence. Sooner or later Canada must face the musi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darryl Hurly
• Release date: Sep 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995978829

Darryl Hurly

Darryl Hurly has penned some two dozen articles under his own name on various subjects for biographical compendiums, magazines, historical and technological society publications, and newspapers. After a trip to the South Pacific, he co-authored with his eldest son Operation KE, a historical monograph about the Guadalcanal campaign in World War II, which was well received by the military history community when published by US Naval Institute Press in 2012. After serving in Canada’s armed forces he obtained an MA in history, an EMBA in transportation, and pursued a variegated career that included middle- and senior-management positions in large corporations, and the managing directorship of a major transportation museum. He subsequently operated a successful family business from which he and his wife have now retired. In academia, he taught secondary school, and then lectured part-time in history, transportation, marketing and small-business management at the collegiate and university levels.

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Reluctant Neighbor

Canada, the U.S.A. and the Korean Crisis

By

Darryl Hurly

(Revised and Updated, Winter 2018)

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Table of Contents

Chapter I – Canada in the Cold War

Chapter II – Canada Winds Down Its Commitments

Chapter III – Russian Roulette: North Korean Style

Chapter IV – Canada, NORAD and Homeland Security

References

Chapter I – Canada in the Cold War

Both the United States and the Dominion of Canada were propelled concurrently onto the world stage, thanks to the prominent roles each played in winning WWII. The U.S. emerged as the leader and bulwark of Western democracy in a new global community. Canada took on a degree of recognition as a world power that far outstripped her demographic size.

Unlike WWI, Canadians rallied not for ‘King and Empire’ but for ‘King and Country.’ In support of the U.S. and Britain, Canada played a role in defeating the Axis in WWII that was out of all proportion to its comparatively small population. Canadian troops undertook the first large-scale incursion into Festung Europa in 1942, although the Dieppe raid wasn’t successful, through no fault of the Canadian troops. Two years later a separate Canadian Army landed on its own beachhead – ‘Juno’ – on D-Day, and proceeded to help liberate Holland before fighting its way into Germany.

In the early phase of the Battle of the Atlantic, an undermanned RCN fought nearly alone against Nazi U-boat wolf packs that preyed on Allied convoys; and its destroyer and corvette escorts continued to play a significant part alongside RN and USN units in winning the final victory at sea. In the air, Canadian pilots and aircrew helped man forty-four RAF squadrons, plus fifty all-Canadian squadrons, and racked up an impressive record of air combat, bombing and ground support missions, not to mention enemy planes shot down. In Canada the RCAF trained thousands of British Commonwealth and Allied pilots and aircrew.

After the United States and Great Britain, Canada made the greatest contribution both to the war effort in Europe, and after the States, to Allied war production during the conflict. The wealth of Canada’s industries and farmlands poured across the Atlantic to support the Allied war effort – a virtual avalanche of materiel and foodstuffs.

WWII was also the pivotal event that brought Canada and the U.S. closer than ever before in cooperative efforts to coordinate and maximize war production, train their armed forces, and defend North America from AXIS threats. Perhaps the ultimate expression of their wartime cooperation was the building of the Alaska Highway.

The humble beginnings of a joint effort to undertake the defence of North America against hostile attack from the air occurred in August 1940 with the signing of the Ogdensburg Agreement. A Permanent Joint Board on Defence was created which will consider in the broad sense the defence of the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. Subsequently, the need to establish a common defence against Soviet conventional and nuclear air attack during the 1950s resulted in the evolution of the PJBD into a joint North American Air Defence (NORAD) organization.

In the post-WWII era, mainstream Canadian baby boomers, their parents and grandparents found much to admire about and considerable common ground with their mainstream American cousins. Both nations jointly congratulated themselves on the mutual trust and goodwill symbolized by an undefended border, even during the war years. Unlike Canadian multiculturalists today, most Canadians felt no need to distinguish themselves entirely from their American cousins; back then, they weren’t ashamed to admit they shared similar political systems, economic interests, and a common cultural heritage of British and European descent.

Canadians recognized and welcomed the strong commonality in national identities they shared with Americans. They regarded this as an incentive to sustain a unique international solidarity within North America during the uncertainties of the early Cold War years; a bulwark against Communism based on shared moral values and liberal/democratic principles.

With the defeat, first of Fascist Italy, then, of Nazi Germany, and finally, of Imperial Japan, the three superpowers that would dominate global politics in the post-war era moved onto center stage: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Communist China.

As WWII wound down, the Western Allies’ worst premonition came to pass. The USSR refused to free any of the territory it had captured during the war; instead, it forcibly imposed on countries like Poland and Hungary puppet Communist regimes, creating of Eastern Europe a Soviet bloc of socialist satellites around which it built an invisible, psychological barrier – impenetrable to Western liberal, democratic ideology.

But Russian dictator Josef Stalin’s imperialist ambitions didn’t end there; his goal was to nibble away at Western Europe. He began this next expansionist phase by trying to muscle the Western Allies out of occupied Germany.

After its downfall, Berlin, the centerpiece of the Third Reich, was temporarily (so it was thought) divided into four parts to be administered by the Allies – the U.S.A., the USSR, Britain and France – until it could be rebuilt physically and economically, reunited geographically, and reconstituted politically. Germany itself had been administratively cut up in like manner with the same goals in mind.

Then, in June 1948 the Soviets closed off all access to their sector of Berlin and proceeded to lay siege to the Allied sectors of the city by shutting down all rail and road access through East Germany in a bid to force the Allies into abandoning Berlin altogether. Without food, medical supplies, fuel and other materiel crucial to support a large urban population, West Berliners and their occupying forces would soon be facing a crisis situation. But Allied military and Western civil aviation came to the rescue by launching a round-the-clock shuttle of transport aircraft to keep the Allied sectors of Berlin supplied with the necessities of life.

The Soviets found themselves in a quandary. The only way the Red Air Force could interdict this airborne lifeline would be to shoot down the planes themselves. With a nuclear-equipped U.S.A. poised to retaliate, such an initiative wasn’t an option. The best Soviet fighter interceptors could do was to patrol over East Germany and harass passing transports on their way to/from beleaguered Berlin. After nearly a year, the USSR admitted defeat and called off the blockade in mid-May 1949.

The West’s jubilation was immediately cut short, however, by the defeat of Nationalist China’s Chiang Kai-shek regime by Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in that same year. Chiang’s ousting and retreat to the offshore island of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) came as a colossal shock to the Free World as the huge expanse of the Chinese mainland succumbed to Communism.

Barely one year later, the Cold War turned hot.

The Korean War of