Betrayed: Scandal, Politics, and Canadian Naval Leadership

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

This is a book that must be taken seriously. UBC Press will not publish
any manuscript unless it has the approval of a number of qualified but
anonymous referees. Professors Barry Gough and Terry Copp of Wilfrid
Laurier University (WLU), two leading authorities in Canadian military
and naval history, advised Mayne as he prepared his Ph.D. thesis, which
has now become this book. Its thesis is that Vice Admiral Percy Nelles,
Chief of Canada’s naval staff from 1934 to 1944, was wrongly and
unfairly dismissed by Angus L. Macdonald, Minister of National Defence
for Naval Services in the Liberal government of Mackenzie King. This
challenges conventional wisdom that Nelles’s performance had been less
than brilliant, and also Macdonald’s assertion that Nelles was going
to Europe to give the D-Day planners the benefit of his experience and
knowledge. That so many distinguished scholars now challenge
conventional wisdom indicates that leadership of the Royal Canadian Navy
(RCN) might well have been less than first-rate at a time when so many
young Canadian sailors were risking their lives. Mayne portrays an RCN
whose senior officers put personal ambition ahead of the war effort, and
an RCN minister (Macdonald) so inept that he listened to the wrong
people.

This is not exactly the interpretation of another distinguished
authority, Roger Sarty, author of a biographical article on Nelles in a
book reviewed elsewhere in this edition of the CBRA (see The Admirals).
Sarty, also a professor at WLU, portrays Nelles as hardworking and
persistent but politically insensitive. According to Sarty, Nelles
wanted a strong RCN that could win the war and did not worry that many
in Quebec doubted the need for one. Nor did he concern himself about
finances. Another controversy was whether to deploy the ships near
Europe or near Canada. Moreover, Canada’s shipbuilding industry could
not meet Nelles’s demands. Eventually his luck ran out, says Sarty.

The best course of action would be to read both interpretations.