Canada's Plan to Torch St. John's During the Second World War: Upper-Canadian Arrogance Or Tabloid Journalism (Research NOTE‪)‬

IN MAY 1998, JOURNALIST Daniel LeBlanc of the Ottawa Citizen created something of a stir when he published a series of articles exposing "Canada's plan to torch St. John's" during the Second World War. LeBlanc based this claim on the then newly declassified documents which supposedly revealed that, in the event of an invasion, military authorities planned to bum St. John' s to the ground rather than let the Germans occupy it. Indeed, the centrepiece of the plan was, apparently, to dump the fuel in the large tanks overlooking St. John's into the harbour and ignite it. This would produce, "a mushroom of fire and smoke over the city," and transform St. John's into a "version of hell." Even more scurrilous, according to Leblanc, neither the Newfoundland public nor their government was to be informed until the very last moment. (1) Not surprisingly, the Ottawa Citizen articles, reprinted in the St. John's Evening Telegram, caused an uproar in Newfoundland's capital city. (2) St. John's mayor Andy Wells, a self-avowed anti-Confederate, considered it "Upper Canadian arrogance at its best." (3) Well-known Newfoundland historian Patrick O'Flaherty suggested that it was typical of Canada's attitude towards Newfoundland, and that Canada's "interest in the place was really only to defend Canada." (4) Over the next several days, letters and editorials appeared in several local and national newspapers either justifying Canada's "Scorched Earth Policy" or condemning it. (5) Eventually, the uproar subsided but not the belief in the charge that Canada secretly planned to burn St. John's. In fact, this belief most recently appeared in a book on the wartime Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. (6) This essay shows that, while military planners did develop a plan to deny the Germans military facilities and supplies if they captured St. John's, not only did Canadian authorities have absolutely no intention of destroying the city in the event of an attack, but the very idea for such a plan actually originated with the Newfoundland government. The winter of 1942 was one of the darkest periods of the Second World War. The Japanese had smashed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and were advancing unchecked throughout the western Pacific. Rommel had the British on the ropes in North Africa, and Hitler's U-boats had moved across the Atlantic and were now sinking ships within sight of land from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. By this time, Newfoundland was an armed camp; it hosted both American and Canadian forces. Through an August 1940 agreement, Britain gave the United States the right to construct bases on British territory in the Western hemisphere in return for fifty surplus destroyers. As an attachment to this agreement, Britain also offered the us bases in Bermuda and Newfoundland, "freely and without consideration." Ultimately, the United States stationed forces at St. John's, Torbay, Argentia, Gander, Stephenville and eventually Goose Bay, Labrador. The first Americans arrived in St. John's aboard the Edmund B. Alexander in January 1941. By war's end, tens of thousands of American servicemen had been stationed in Newfoundland and Labrador, and hundreds of thousands of us military personnel and passengers had passed through the various us facilities throughout the colony. (7)