Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
09 December 2011
War Profiteering from
World War I to Iraq
War is a great opportunity for profit; product has
to be created only to be destroyed and created
again and confusion leads to creative accounting
While young men and women fight and die for ideals there is never a shortage of people who see war as an opportunity for profit.
America’s first President understood this when, in 1778, he remarked, “There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]…that it is enough to make one curse their own species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism.”
Canadian soldiers in the trenches of World War I would have understood; they had
to struggle for two years with a weapon that was sub-
Colonel Sam Hughes (right) was Canada’s Minister of Militia and Defence from 1914
to 1916.
As CBC reports in a People’s History page, “Profits for Lives,” “He insisted on equipping the army with the [Ross] rifle. Hughes granted a subsidy of $18 million to Charles Ross, the Canadian manufacturer of the rifles.”
Not incidentally, perhaps, Ross and Hughes were friends.
The Ross rifles jammed, their bayonets fell off, and sometimes the bolt flew backwards into the face of the soldier firing the gun.
Hughes stubbornly refused, against the advice of many experts, to withdraw the rifle from service. It was finally ordered out of action, not by Hughes, in 1916, by which time Ross had made a fortune.
Sam Hughes and Military Procurement
From his ministerial position, Hughes was in charge of procurement for Canada’s military, and the Ross rifle was not the only shoddy item he bought.
As Ian Miller points out in his book Our glory and our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 2002), Sam Hughes “awarded contracts to powerful friends, often accepting inferior products for Canadian troops.”
One result of this is recorded by canadiansoldiers.com reports: “Canadian pattern boots issued early in the First World War were, like many items of Canadian dress in 1914, not equal to the rigours of service life. The soles of these early boots were prone to dissolving in wet conditions.”
For his services to the war effort Sam Hughes was honoured by being made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, in August 1915.
Joseph Flavelle Replaces Hughes
After the fiasco of the Ross rifle and a general air of 
corruption and profiteering
surrounding military procurements, Joseph Flavelle (left) was brought in to clean
up the mess.
An able businessman, having made a fortune in meat packing, the Canadian Encyclopedia
writes that as “Chairman of the Imperial Munitions Board in WWI, Flavelle converted
a scandal-
But, Flavelle came unstuck when one of his companies was labelled a war profiteer by Saturday Night magazine over selling canned meat to feed Canadian soldiers.
CBC records that “The accusations arose from the fact that Flavelle’s pork-
Joseph Flavelle insisted he was innocent and, though an inquiry exonerated him personally, the sordid affair stuck to his reputation.
War Profiteering now on a Grand Scale
Corporatewatch maintains scrutiny on war profiteering in the modern age. On its website it reports that “within days of the American occupation of Iraq, Bechtel of San Francisco, California, was hired to repair the power system, telephone exchanges, and hospitals.”
This happened just a few weeks after the company’s main shareholder, Riley Bechtel, became a member of President George W. Bush’s Export Council “to advise the government on how to create markets for American companies overseas.”
And, globalexchange.org reported (June 2004) on the activities of a Halliburton subsidiary, the company of which Vice President Dick Cheney had been CEO: it “had overcharged the U.S. government some $61 million for fuel deliveries from Kuwait to Iraq.
“In January, Halliburton admitted to the Pentagon that two of its employees took
up to $6 million in kickbacks for awarding a Kuwaiti-
As long as there has been war there has been profiteering; it continues today but with bigger numbers.
Image credit
Library and Archives Canada
Sources
“Profits for Lives.” CBC, 2001.
“Our glory and our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War” Ian Miller, University of Toronto Press, 2002.
“Sir Joseph Wesley Flavelle.” J. Lindsey, Canadian Encyclopedia.
“Call Congress: Raise Hell about Halliburton’s War Profiteering!” Global Exchange, June 16, 2004.
“Fighting War Profiteering, Truman-
© Canada and the World, December 2011
All rights reserved
In the fall of 1916 Joseph Flavelle went to view the First World War battle conditions for himself.
He was shown the area where the Battle of the Somme had been fought. It was a sea of mud and rotting corpses.
Flavelle was deeply moved by the devastation and said “My God! What have these poor men done? What have these men done that they must be punished in this way?”
THE PLANE THAT COULDN’T FLY
During World War Two U.S. Senator Harry Truman (later President) lead a team of investigators uncovering war profiteers.
In 1943, the team got wind of stories the Curtis-
An article in the St. Louis Post-
Airmen died when the engines failed in flight.
Senior people at the company were fired and one general ended up in prison.
“War is a racket -
“It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
U.S. General
Smedley D. Butler in a speech in 1935.