Summary: In the previous nine episodes of this series we reviewed the circumstances leading up to the start of the Québec Rebellion and the early years of the Front de Libération du Québec(FLQ)’s guerrilla war to gain independence for Québec from the Confederation of Canada. In this chapter we’ll examine how prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s 1972 decision to authorize napalm strikes against the FLQ guerrillas would radically change the tenor of the war for both sides.

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It says volumes about the depth of anti-FLQ sentiment felt by most Canadians in November of 1972 that Pierre Trudeau’s decision to grant the CDF authorization to launch napalm strikes against the FLQ sparked more protests outside Canada than within it. Few if any Canadians had much objection to seeing the insurgents get incinerated by napalm; if anything, the majority of Canadian citizens viewed it as nothing less than what the FLQ deserved. One prominent conservative Ottawa resident wanted to see Trudeau go even further, openly advocating the immediate use of nuclear weapons(which Canada didn’t have) against FLQ positions wherever they were found.

    Nor did Canadian air force pilots need any particular inducement from their commanders to carry out such attacks; if anything, there are at least two dozen known cases on record in the CDF archives in which pilots actually had to be restrained from taking off too soon in pursuit of FLQ targets to drop napalm on. With both sides in the Cold War anxious to avoid a face-to-face showdown and Canada unlikely to be involved in Vietnam anytime soon, the napalm strikes against the FLQ offered the next best option for RCAF personnel wanting to build up a bit of “trigger time”(to coin the phrase).

    Indeed, with rabid anti-FLQ sentiment running at an all-time high just about everywhere in Canada outside Québec-- and a good many spots within Québec for that matter --the chief problem for the CDF when it came to choosing pilots for the napalm strikes was weeding out men who were clearly too psychologically unstable for the job. The last thing Ottawa needed was for some would-be Rambo to take out a farmer’s silo or a school hockey rink in a fit of overzealousness. New psychological screening procedures were set up and old ones tightened in order to be sure such a nightmare scenario didn’t come to pass.

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     The RCAF’s aircraft of choice for carrying out the napalm strikes was the Northrop CF-5A, a variant of the F-5 Freedom Fighter that was prized for among other things speed, durability, and ease of upkeep. A small and highly maneuverable plane, it was ideally made for the CDF’s counterinsurgency needs. The CF-5 could operate from even the roughest of airfields and had far enough range to hit targets as distant as 500 miles from its home base; since CF-5As were already being utilized for photo recon missions and HE(high explosive) bombing attacks, it didn’t take much of an argument to convince the RCAF general staff the plane would also be well-suited to carrying out the napalm strikes. Some of the staff, in fact, had ruled out any plane except the CF-5 for the job at hand.

    The first CF-5 napalm raid on FLQ positions in Québec took place on November 6th, 1972, just 48 hours after Prime Minister Trudeau gave RCAF commanders the green light to carry out such raids. The principal target in the attack was a suspected FLQ weapons cache about two miles east of the town of Saguenay. It only took one bomb to set off the vast amounts of explosives and ammunition stored inside that cache; seven FLQ troops were killed in the resulting inferno. The RCAF pilots involved with the attack suffered no casualties, although one CF-5A did sustain some minor damage from ground fire when a vengeful surviving FLQ fighter let loose a dozen rounds on the jet from his automatic pistol. (That reckless man would pay the ultimate price for his bravado when another CF-5 mowed him down in a strafing run.)

    Outside of Canada leftist groups immediately took to the streets to protest the initial napalm strikes. In New York, for example, just over twenty thousand anti-war activists marched through Times Square calling Trudeau a “butcher” and “Nixon’s puppet”. In Moscow Canadian flags were burned at a Soviet government-sponsored anti-Trudeau rally in the heart of Red Square. In Beijing, Chinese students tried to storm the Canadian embassy but were held off by embassy security guards and had to content themselves with throwing rocks at the embassy windows. In Havana police arrested and deported two of the Canadian ambassador to Cuba’s top aides in retaliation for the expulsion of a Cuban cultural attaché from Ottawa after he was caught wiring money to a Toronto-based pro-FLQ organization. In Hanoi North Vietnamese naval cadets held what was called a “patriotic rally” in order to show solidarity with the FLQ movement. In London gangs of far left student radicals blockaded the Canadian embassy in Britain for almost seven hours before finally being chased off by Scotland Yard police officers.

    In Canada itself, however, popular sentiment was overwhelmingly pro- Trudeau following the first napalm attacks on the FLQ. What few protests did take place were small, pathetic affairs compared to the massive anti- Trudeau rallies held overseas; the largest demonstration staged in Canada drew a paltry five hundred protesters in Hamilton, Ontario-- and that slim number soon dwindled to an even paltrier one hundred and twenty thanks to heavy rains which erupted midway through the rally. Even in Québec, few if any people showed much interest in criticizing the napalm strikes. In fact public opinion at that point among most Québecers, French-speakers as well as English-speakers, viewed the napalm raids as nothing less than what the FLQ deserved given the misery it had caused since launching its guerrilla war against the Trudeau administration.

    Twenty-four hours after the Saguenay napalm raid, RCAF jets struck at FLQ training camps on Québec's northern frontier. This time the attackers encountered considerably tougher resistance than they had at Saguenay; at least two CF-5As had to turn back because of hits sustained to their wings and fuselage as a result of heavy FLQ ground fire, and one CF-5 pilot had to bail out over an icy river rather than risk being captured(and, in all likelihood, killed) by the insurgents. But the FLQ decidedly got the worst of the trouble in the border raids--  the training camps were obliterated and most of the guerrillas in those camps were killed. To this day one can still occasionally find traces of ash in the areas where the border napalm strikes happened, and the wreck of the downed CF-5 has since been salvaged and put on display at Canada's principal aviation museum.

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    While there was little opposition within Canada to the CDF's napalm strikes against the FLQ, the opposition that did exist centered to a major extent around Canada's influential religious community. Among the earliest and most staunch foes of the napalm campaign was Canada's Mennonite faith; being pacifists to begin with, the Mennonites rejected all war as immoral, and in their eyes the napalm strikes represented one of the worst examples of that immorality. The leaders of Canada's largest Mennonite sect issued a statement shortly after the Saguenay air strikes which condemned them as "barbarity of the worst kind"(to quote the statement's opening paragraph) and urged the Trudeau government to immediately initiate cease-fire talks with the FLQ insurgents.

    The Mennonites' sentiments were shared to a significant degree by some segments of Canada's Roman Catholic congregation. Even before the Trudeau government's decision to use napalm against the FLQ forces, a good deal of the younger Catholic clergy had expressed reservations about the morality of Trudeau's aggressive policies for dealing with the separatists; the way they saw it his hard-line stance towards the FLQ insurgency had opened the floodgates for a potential humanitarian disaster the likes of which Canada might never recover from. The napalm campaign itself only heightened their anxieties on this score: a young priest at Montreal's second-largest Roman Catholic parish devoted much of his sermon for the first week of Advent to warning his parishoners the very existence of Québec was endangered by the use of napalm against the rebels. An editorial in the official Archdiocese of Montreal newspaper quoted a nun teaching at one of the city's parochial schools as saying her students were "terrified" they might become refugees in their own country.

     The leadership of Canada's Jewish community was somewhat ambivalent in its stance regarding the napalm strikes. While on one hand they largely backed the pro-Israeli Trudeau government, on the other hand they had deep reservations about the morality of using napalm bombs on fellow Canadian citizens-- even if those citizens happened to be participating in a revolt against the very administration the Jewish leaders were supporting. Making things even more complicated on this score was the fact a number of key CDF personnel taking part in the napalm strikes were themselves Jewish; some of those personnel still had family back in Israel and were, to say the least, appalled by the anti-Semitic views espoused by some elements of the FLQ insurgency. At least one such individual had told the National Post that he regarded the insurgents as no better than the Nazi thugs who ransacked synagogues in Germany on Kristallnacht; in some ways, he went on to suggest, they might actually be worse(a sentiment with which the rebel leaders took umbrage when they read his comments).

     In early December of 1972 a group of prominent church leaders and laypeople met in Halifax, Nova Scotia for a two-day conference to draft a policy statement clarifying their stance on the use of napalm against the FLQ forces. A Catholic priest from Alberta who’d been tapped to act as recording secretary for the first day of the conference would later be moved to call it “the most important ecumenical event since Vatican II.” The policy statement, known today to historians as "the Halifax Letter", called the napalm raids "an insult to common decency" and urged Trudeau to put an end to them at the first possible moment. When it was released to the press on December 5th, it sparked a wave of angry reactions among Canadian citizens who'd lost loved ones to the insurgents. The president of an Ontario police offficers' assocation mocked the Halifax Letter as "absurdly naive"-- and that was the kindest thing its critics said about it. In other quarters the people who'd written and signed the letter were called "traitors", "scum", "whores", and worse. The Archbishop of Ottawa was swamped with letters and phone calls denouncing him for taking part in the conference that produced it; at one point, he even needed police protection against assassination attempts.

     Trudeau himself had little to say publicly about the Halifax Letter, but in private he admitted to a close friend he was "deeply disappointed" by its signatories' criticism of his actions. In his mind the napalm raids were a tragic yet unavoidable necessity; for anyone to suggest he had made the decision to launch such raids lightly, he told his friend, wounded him to the quick. A week later, when he visited Washington for a trade summit with U.S. President Richard Nixon, Trudeau was still voicing great dismay over the attitudes expressed in the Halifax Letter; Nixon, who was himself facing growing criticism of his Vietnam policy, could easily relate to the Canadian prime minister's discontents. He told Trudeau that he completely supported Trudeau’s decision to launch the napalm strikes against the FLQ forces and even offered to lend some of the U.S. Air Force’s own aircraft to assist him in the operation.(Fortunately for both men, Trudeau declined Nixon’s offer.)

      With the except of a brief interval around Christmas, the RCAF kept up the napalm raids throughout the rest of December of 1972 and well into January of 1973. A long spell of typically Arctic winter weather forced a second lull in the napalm raids, but when the temperatures started going up again so did the jets. The same day Nixon was inaugurated for his soon- to-be-abbreviated second term in the White House the RCAF mounted perhaps its biggest napalm strike of the war, simultaneously attacking four dozen known and suspected FLQ bases throughout Quebec. The insurgents lost much of their ammunition and weapons supplies in this attack, and for a time it looked like the rebels’ causes was finished once and for all. Certainly the raid dealt an overwhelming blow to the FLQ’s hopes of mounting major strategic operations against the CDF during the late winter and the early spring of 1973; another wave of defections thinned the group’s ranks after the January 22nd napalm strikes.

    In response to this crippling-- some thought fatal --blow the FLQ once again went on the defensive. Rather than make any further effort to defeat the CDF in conventional battles, the insurgents forces opted to return to the guerrilla tactics for which their organization was better suited. This retrenchment prompted the Canadian media to declare for a second time that the FLQ uprising was on its last legs; those familiar with the FLQ's style of waging war were understandably skeptical of that assertion. As the next few weeks' events would demonstrate, there was good reason for skepticism.

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     The last RCAF napalm strike against the FLQ was made on January 25th, two days before the cease-fire agreement ending U.S. involvement with the Vietnam War took effect. Between the napalam raids and the latest round of defections by disheartened FLQ fighters, it seemed like the civil war was at least in its final days. Convinced that they had broken the back of the rebel army, the Trudeau government commenced preparations to trim back the size of its armed forces-- but events in early February would abruply kill the hope that the war might finally be winding down....

To Be Continued