Talk:C Force

A.E. Grasett

Might the A.E. Grasett mentioned in this article be the Lt-Gen. Sir Arthur Edward Grasett, KBE, CB, DSO, MC in the article on the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey?
User:Brenont 00:18, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the Grasett in this article and the Grasett who served as the lieutenant governor on the isle of Jersey are and the same man.--A.S. Brown (talk) 06:17, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Political context

Just to make a suggestion here, but this article is notably lacking in the political background, which explains the very reason for C force. The first concerns deterrent diplomacy on the part of Churchill. In the second half of 1941, there were increasing worrisome signs coming in that Japan was planning to invade Britain's Asian colonies. Contrary to what conspiracy theorists like to claim, this was not at all welcome to Churchill who embarked upon a course of deterrent diplomacy meant to scare off the Japanese such as reinforcing the garrisons in Singapore and Hong Kong while dispatching the Force Z consisting of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to Asia. The problem with Churchill's deterrent diplomacy was that Britain was fully engaged in the war with Germany and could not dispatch to Asia the level of forces that might truly deter the Japanese. But Churchill did not see that way. Churchill was born in 1874 and his values were those of the Victorian age. A leitmotiv of his thinking was a deep contempt for Asian armies-as late as 1950 he was predicating that it would not matter if China intervened in the Korean war because would be the chances of "2 million pigtails" as he called the Chinese army against the mighty U.S. Army? In 1941 Churchill genuinely believed that Force Z built around one battleship and one battlecruiser, a force that was hopelessly outnumbered by the Imperial Japanese Navy's ships would be enough to deter Japan. His decision to reinforce the Hong Kong garrison was motivated by the same sort of thinking that one white man was the equal to ten Asian men, and that moreover the Japanese also understood and accepted this. Churchill did not know about Japan, and the little that he did was a stereotypical Victorian view of the Japanese as "little yellow men" who could beat Russians and Chinese, but were no match for Anglo-Saxons. It goes without saying that this was not the Japanese self-image at all. The Japanese saw themselves as part of the "great Yamato race", an uniquely virtuous and holy people whose mission was to spread the Emperor's "love and benevolence" to the "eight corners of the world". The fact this "holy war" seemed to involve using innocent people for "bayonet practice" escaped the Japanese, but there is no doubt that inspired by their fierce code of Bushido ("the way of the warrior") that the Japanese fought ferociously. For them, to fight and die for their emperor whom they revered as a living god was the greatest honor. One can argue about whatever or not this is sensible and rational, especially since it should apparent that the Showa Emperor was not a god, but that is besides the point.

Which brings us to a popular conspiracy theory promoted by Canadian nationalists that the Canadian forces in Hong Kong were cynically sacrificed by the British. It is true that the Imperial General Staff under Field Marshal Sir John Dill had told Churchill that Hong Kong was indefensible and that most a garrison in Hong Kong could do was delay the inevitable. To start with, merely having information is not the same thing as digesting information and taking it in. Throughout World War Two, the Imperial General Staff told Churchill all sorts of things, and only some of the information he received was actually taken in. There were a quite few times when Churchill simply ignored the information he was presented with. But more importantly, the purpose of reinforcing the Hong Kong garrison was not to fight a battle in Hong Kong, but rather to deter Japan from attacking it in the first place. Churchill genuinely believed that a bigger and stronger Hong Kong garrison would scare the Japanese off. So in short, the British decision to ask Canada for troops was not because of a cynical disregard for Canadian troops as expendable "colonial" troops, but rather because of the high regard for the fighting reputation of the Canadian Army earned in the First World War.

Which brings us to the role of William Lyon Mackenzie King. There are two sorts of explanations in diplomatic history. There is the primat der aussenpolitik school, which sees everything as motivated by a small elite playing the game of nations, competing for power and influence against other nations. And there is the primat der innenpolitik which sees foreign policy as merely the projection of domestic politics abroad. Of course, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive and are in fact complementary. Some things can be better explained by the primat der aussenpolitik school while others by the primat der innenpolitik school. In the case of the foreign policy of Mackenzie King, the primat der innenpolitik theory works much better. In 1917, the Liberal Party had been split into two between its English-Canadian and French-Canadian wings over the issue of conscription. Afterwards, in 1919 the Liberals held the first ever political convention in Canada to reunite the party as feelings between the MPs were too poisoned to elect a leader. In 1917, King had tried to join the Union government as a cabinet minister and had been rebuffed. In the 1917 election, King ran as an anti-conscription Liberal and had been defeated. In 1919, unaware that King had initially tried to join the Union government, the Liberal delegation from Quebec solidly backed King, whom they believed was a friend of Quebec, and was it largely because of the support of delegates from Quebec that King was elected Liberal leader. King never forgot it was the support of Quebecois Liberals made him Liberal leader and throughout his political career he was always very deferential to la belle province. And it that was not enough. Quebec made up 35% of the population and thus had 35% of the seats in the House of Commons. Since people in Quebec back in those days voted as a bloc for the Liberals, that in effect gave the Liberals an arm-lock on power. After the winning the majority of the seats in Quebec, the Liberals could usually pick up enough seats in the rest of the country to form a majority government. To form a majority government, all one has to do is 37% or 38% of the vote, so winning the majority of the seats in Quebec put the Liberals way on their way to winning a majority. Much of King's longevity in power and his status as Canada's longest serving prime minister was due to this simple electoral arithmetic. It was very hard for the Conservatives to win enough seats in the rest of Canada to counterbalance. Indeed it was only done once, and that was in the election of 1930, which was an outlier owning to the Great Depression.

King's foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s was a quasi-isolationist policy in which he sought to avoid being involved in the outside world as much as possible. Canada was a member of the League of Canada, but King ensured that Canada played only the most minimal role in the League. And the reason for this is quite simple. King did not Canada to be involved in another war that might entail making a difficult decision about conscription that in turn might split the Liberals into two as the conscription issue did in 1917. And that was especially the case as King's power largely rested on the fact he had the solid support of French-Canada despite the fact that he didn't speak any French. For the same reasons, King was an ardent supporter of appeasement as appeasement meant avoiding another war with Germany. Anyhow, King was a very strange character, a man with an obsessive, borderline incesteous love for his mother (he never married because he never found a girl who could match his mother) together with a very strong interest in the occult. This is a guy who used to hold seances where he would talk to his dead, stuffed dog in order to contact his dead mother for political advice. King's estate at Kingsmere is something to be seen. The gardens are full of doorways with no walls while inside the rooms are painted with all these weird occult symbols. In many ways, King's inward-looking, dark, gloomy and occult-obsessed worldview matches at least in general the mood of Canada at the time (maybe not the occult part, which was King's own eccentricity). George Orwell made a brilliant observation in 1933 when he was living in Paris as he leafed through a French fascist magazine and he was impressed by the number of occult-related ads in the magazine. Orwell noted that an interest in the occult is a sign of elitism as occultists believe that they are in contact with supernatural forces that don't deign to show themselves for ordinary people. And further noted that an obsession with the occult is a sign of something in decay as people have to resort to the occult to prove that they are socially superior. It is not for nothing that in the last decades of both Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia that elites in both those empires became obsessed with the occult while elites in both of the more self-confident societies of Britain and France did not. King's obsession with the occult, which besides for the rather obvious need to stay in touch with his beloved mother after she died, reflects both his need to elevate himself above everybody else and a reflection of the fact that he knew the values of Victorian Canada that he had grown up were fading away.

When King's favorite fortune-teller Rachel Bleaney who was easily his most influential political adviser told him in 1937 that her reading of the astral plain showed that Hitler was a force for peace and there would be no World War Two, King rushed off to Berlin in June 1937 to tell der Fuhrer this important news. King was born in 1874 in Berlin, Ontario (modern Kitchener), at the time a largely German-speaking town, so he spoke fluent German and didn't need a translator when he met Hitler. Despite what his admirers have tried to claim, there is no doubt based on reading King's diary that he liked and admired Hitler-his account of meeting Hitler speaks at a great length what a great guy he is and how much he meeting der Fuhrer confirms what Miss Bleaney had told him about what a great force for peace he was. There is no doubt that if there was some way that King might had declared neutrality in 1939 that he would had done so. The problem for him was that in 1939 English-Canadians (the vast majority whom at the time were of British descent) favored entering the war to help the "mother country" as Great Britain was known at the time in Canada. In Toronto at the time, 86% of the population came from families that originated in the British isles. Given the demographic realities at the time, there was a marked tendency for English-Canadians to identify with Great Britain, which was literally the "mother country". There had been a massive wave of British immigration to Canada in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and for quite English-Canadians at the time either they're parents or grandparents talked with a British accent. It was hard for the Conservatives to win support in the other 8 provinces (Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949) to defeat the Liberals, let alone form a majority government, which is why King was PM from 1921-1926, 1926-1930 and from 1935-1948. But being seen to be abandoning the "mother country" gave the Conservatives for another 1930 win, where they won enough seats in the 8 provinces to counterbalance the advantage winning Quebec usually gave the Liberals.

So to keep the support of English-Canada, King reluctantly declared war on Germany on 10th of September 1939. But declaring war on Germany was not the same fact as fighting a war with Germany. In December 1939, King tried very hard to get a declaration from the British government that the Commonwealth Air Training Plan represented the most that Canada could do in the war and no Canadian Expeditionary Force to Europe was required. King consistently tried to limit Canada's role in the war to the air and the sea, which involved lesser losses and kept the Canadian Army from fighting. It is very easy to understand King's thinking. No battles on land, no heavy losses, no need to make a decision about conscription. The Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941 was the first battle that the Canadian Army fought in World War Two. However, there were lots of people back home in Canada who worried that while everybody's else armies were fighting, Canada was not. In 1940 and 1941, any Canadian reading the newspapers would have read how troops from the rest of the "Commonwealth family" were all fighting somewhere in the world as the newspapers carried reports about British, Australian, New Zealand, South African and Indian troops seeing action. Canadians were conspicuously absent from the fighting on land. As 1941 went along, King started to attract some domestic criticism about how he was keeping the Canadian Army out of action. It is actually a logical question. What is the point of Canada having an Army if the prime minister is not going to let the Army fight in the war? Thus, when in late 1941 when King heard that Britain wanted Canada to send two battalions to Hong Kong as part of deterrence diplomacy against Japan, King jumped at the chance. Sending the C Force to Hong Kong would allow him to say that was doing something to help Britain and at the same time, the whole point of C Force was to deter the Japanese, not actually fight them.

But the problem with the deterrence diplomacy is that the deterrence failed. The Japanese had concentrated overwhelming forces in the form of 23rd Army, which had vastly exceeded the size of the Hong Kong garrison, which was cut off by the fact that the Japanese had command of the sea and air. All C Force was do was to fight and die in Hong Kong, which is precisely what happened. I think some background of the political reasons for sending C-Force to Hong Kong is in order.--A.S. Brown (talk) 06:17, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Paragraph Length and Excessive Non-encyclopedic Detail

The article is difficult to read due to the many long paragraphs in it. Someone should break it into shorter paragraphs. It also has excessive non-encyclopedic detail on individual soldiers. I'm not going to edit this article but I hope someone else does. My mother was Canadian and both my uncles served in the Canadian forces during the war so I do have some connection to the topic. Seki1949 (talk) 08:26, 15 January 2021 (UTC)