By 1919 the British had been doing grand strategy for two centuries. They usually acted on a shrewd and accurate appreciation of their own needs, strengths, and weaknesses. Britain was an island state situated just off the shore of Western Europe. It was also an imperial power with colonial possessions and interests that, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, spanned the globe. British policy-makers understood that their grand strategy had to meet two goals. It had to provide for the physical security of the home islands and their wider imperial interests, and they had to do so at a cost that was acceptable to the dominant political interests within Britain. In the short term failure might cost them votes at the next general election. In the long-term policies that imposed ruinously high costs on British resources were counter-productive, for they would consume the very human and economic capital they were intended to protect. The British Empire was neither monolithic, in the sense that each of its constituent parts enjoyed the same relationship to the metropole as did every other, nor was it hegemonic. The British did not hold the entire non-Western world in their thrall. Rather the empire consisted of a wide range of political, constitutional, commercial, and diplomatic relationships. These ranged from formal colonies where British rule was authoritarian, of which India was the largest, five Dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, and the Union of South Africa) which enjoyed a wide degree of self-government, fortress colonies such as Malta and Gibraltar, protectorates and condominiums, treaty-ports and ‘concessions’ such as Shanghai and Hong Kong, ‘informal colonies’ tied to Britain by close commercial relationships such as Argentina, and finally those regions of the world where the British interfered on a more or less regular basis, such as the Persian Gulf.
This empire was united by a delicate web of political, cultural, and military relationships. It was run on a financial shoestring. British taxpayers were rarely willing to put money into the empire. Rather they expected to extract a profit from it in the shape of cheap imports of foodstuffs and raw materials. Colonies and dependencies had to pay for the costs of their own governments. As British civil servants were expensive, most colonial administrations were staffed by just a handful of expatriates. If government was to function they had to recruit local political actors willing to work with them, and they had to hope that the rest of the population would passively acquiesce in their rule. The British also had to provide for the external defence of their possessions, and the first line of that defence was the Royal Navy. It was supported by a small (by European standards) regular army, which garrisoned a string of naval bases stretching from Portsmouth via Gibraltar, Malta, Cape Town, and Bombay to Singapore and Sydney. Together they gave the navy a global reach unmatched by any other naval power. The British Indian army, composed of locally recruited rank and file led by British officers, contributed to some of these garrisons but also kept watch and ward along the northwest frontier where India abutted Afghanistan.
This system worked because in the second half of the nineteenth century a set of propitious circumstances largely beyond the control of any British government had created an environment within which the empire could flourish. A European balance of power had emerged that ensured that Britain’s own security was not threatened by another great power on its own doorstep or in the Mediterranean. In South East Asia the British were able to ward off any challenge to their position from Tsarist Russia, while in the Western Hemisphere their relations with the USA were sufficiently amicable that they need not fear any serious challenge.1 By the 1890s there were, to be sure, plenty of indications that this happy concatenation of circumstances would not persist forever, and after 1900 the British had to work harder than ever to shore it up. But it was the First World War that marked the real watershed. By the end of the war they faced a situation in which the European balance of power had been shattered, external competitors in the shape of Japan and the USA had emerged in East Asia, and at the same time they faced a growing number of challengers to their rule from inside the empire. By 1919 British policy-makers faced two challenges. They had to rebuild the regional balances of power in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and in Asia upon which the security of the empire had rested before 1914, while simultaneously they had to blunt the threat to their rule from those who wanted to overthrow it from within.
The ostensible reason why Britain went to war in 1914 was to liberate Belgium from German occupation. In reality they were fighting for a much bigger and more selfish reason. Destroying Britain’s global power was central to Germany’s war aims. Had the British stood aloof from the continental war it was conceivable that Germany would have overthrown the European balance of power. German troops would have been in occupation of the Channel ports, France reduced to little more than a German satellite, and British trade would have been excluded from Europe by the creation of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa. The roads to India via Egypt and the Persian Gulf would have been threatened, and with German warships based on the French ports, the Portuguese Atlantic islands, and with bases in Germany’s African and Pacific colonies, Britain and its empire would have been at Germany’s mercy. So determined was the Kaiser to end Britain’s world-power status that he was prepared to contemplate a ‘Second Punic War’ to be fought at some future date and after he had disposed of Russia and France.2 But British war aims were as much ideological as they were strategic. Long before 1914 the British had been suspicious of Germany’s growing military and naval power because it was unchecked by a democratic electorate.3 Once the war began policy-makers conceived it to be a crusade. The British were not fighting to crush the German people and extinguish their national existence. They were fighting to destroy the control of the Prussian military caste over the German state.4 As the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, explained in 1916, ‘The only really satisfactory termination of the war would be brought about by an internal revolution in Germany.’5 This was a coercive grand strategy. The British would reform the German body politic at the point of a bayonet.
But British policy-makers were not just intent on enhancing their security against their enemies. The men who formulated British grand strategy during the war had reached maturity in the late 1870s and 1880s. They had grown up recognizing Russia and France as Britain’s most dangerous imperial rivals. Even in the face of the German challenge they never entirely shook-off that belief. France and Russia had been formally allied since 1894. It was the common threat posed by Germany’s growing assertiveness, which brought the three powers together in the Anglo-French Entente of 1904, and the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907. Even so, tensions between them remained. Not only did many British Liberals deplore the domestic repression of the Tsarist regime, but the agreements had not eliminated their imperial rivalries. The French and British continued to squabble over Egypt and Morocco, while the British and Russians remained deeply suspicious of each other’s ambitions in the Middle East and around the frontiers of India. Once the war began these tensions fed through into the development of British strategy and war aims. By the end of August 1914, with the German army rapidly advancing towards Paris, the Russians were afraid that their main partner in the west might soon collapse and desert them. To avert this, they suggested that each of the members of the Triple Entente should agree not to make a separate peace. The British readily concurred, and the three partners signed the pact of London on 5 September. But they also insisted that their alliance partners agree that when the time came to end the war, all three of them must first reach a common understanding on the details of any peace programme they presented to their enemies. This was symptomatic of the British belief that although each partner shared a common commitment to defeating the Central Powers, their notions of what constituted an acceptable post-war settlement were likely to be markedly divergent.6
The pact ensured that the war would not end quickly. If one ally faltered it could look to its allies for help. But what it did not do was to impose a coherent grand strategy on the Entente, and the terms upon which that assistance was to be given still had to be determined. In August 1914 Britain was ill-prepared to play a major part in a major continental land war. At a time when its allies’ and enemies’ armies were numbered in millions, Britain’s regular army consisted of only about 250,000 men, supported by a similar number of half-trained Territorial Force volunteers. Britain’s major strategic assets were its economy and possession of the world’s largest fleet, and its policy-makers were determined to make the most of these assets. The Royal Navy quickly bottled-up the German surface fleet in harbour, where it remained, despite periodic sorties out into the North Sea, until the end of the war. It gradually hunted down and sank those German surface raiders that were at large, and it maintained an economic blockade of Germany that, although at first imperfect because of the need to placate contiguous neutrals and the United States, eventually played a major part in eroding the Central Powers’ ability to endure a war of attrition. The navy also deterred the Germans from invading Britain and safeguarded not only Britain’s maritime lines of communication with its colonies and its major trading partners but those of France as well.
But the navy alone could not win the war or the peace for Britain. It was Kitchener who devised the grand strategy that could do that. Kitchener’s thinking was informed both by his own experiences in the Sudan and South Africa in the 1890s, where he had defeated first the Mahdists and then the Boers, and by his understanding of the American Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars. Mindful of the mistaken popular belief in 1899 that the South African War would be over quickly, he was sceptical of similar predictions in 1914. Understanding the sheer magnitude of the political issues at stake in a major European war, he did not believe that either the Central Powers or the Entente would be willing to make peace until they were utterly exhausted. He therefore predicted that the war would not reach its climax until 1917. In these circumstances Britain could achieve its objectives at the least cost to itself, and make a virtue out of a necessity, by allowing its continental partners to bear the major share of the European land war. Initially Britain would restrict its contribution to the common cause by sending the handful of divisions that constituted the British Expeditionary Force to France as a token of its commitment to the Entente. Simultaneously, the Royal Navy would blockade the Central Powers, and Britain would make the most of its industrial and financial power by extending economic and financial assistance to its allies. In the meantime, he began to raise the New Armies in the expectation that by late 1916 the armies of all the continental belligerents would be exhausted. But Britain’s army would be unbloodied and in 1917 it would be able to intervene decisively on the continent. After the British army had inflicted a final and crushing defeat upon the Central Powers, British statesmen would be able to grasp the lion’s share of the spoils, and then dictate the terms of the final peace settlement not just to their enemies but also to their allies.7
Kitchener’s suspicions of Britain’s current allies were shared by most of his colleagues. There was general agreement amongst British policy-makers that they had to safeguard Britain’s interests in the Middle East against France and Russia, and that the German menace to Britain’s security had to be removed by the obliteration of the German fleet, the destruction of the German colonial empire, and the exclusion of Germany from the coast of the Low Countries. Their ambitions did not extend to destroying the state that Bismarck had created in 1871 because a powerful, but not over-mighty Germany in the centre of Europe, governed by a democratic regime, would be a key factor in maintaining the post-war balance of power. The alternative, a Germany that had been utterly crushed, might only lead to an over-mighty Russia. As David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the War Council in March 1915, ‘It might eventually be desirable to have her in a position to prevent Russia becoming too predominant.’8 He remained committed to this policy throughout discussions on the peace settlement in 1919, although by then the Tsarist regime had collapsed into revolution, to be replaced eventually by an equally menacing force in the shape of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who had seized power in Petrograd in November 1917.
Kitchener’s strategy promised to enable Britain to reap the utmost benefits from the war by maximising the utility of its major assets, its industrial and financial might and its predominant navy. He had willed the end—a peace settlement in which the ambitions of Britain’s principal enemies (Germany and Austria-Hungary) were stymied, but which would also leave its current allies and erstwhile rivals (France and Russia) so exhausted that they would be too weak to challenge Britain’s imperial power. But this was not a stable foundation upon which to build a successful coalition strategy, for from mid-1915 onwards both the French and Russians began to demand that Britain had to play a greater part in the continental land war. The result was that between 1915 and 1917, at Loos, on the Somme, and during the Third Battle of Ypres, Britain, too, paid the blood tax of a continental land war, and Kitchener’s hopes that Britain could reap the maximum gains from the war while its allies paid the heavier price fell by the wayside. By the end of 1916, the economic cost of not just supporting its own continental-scale army on the western front but extending economic aid to its allies had all but crippled the British economy. Forty per cent of all the money that Britain was spending on the war was being expended in the USA, but Britain’s supplies of gold and foreign currencies were all but exhausted and soon 80 per cent of all allied spending in America would have to be paid for by loans. That placed in the hands of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, a sword of Damocles that he could hold over the Entente. If he chose to advise American bankers to stop lending to the allies, the Treasury predicted that by June 1917 he would be able to dictate almost any terms he chose to the Entente.9 What saved Britain and its European partners from a potentially disastrous situation was the German declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare on 1 February 1917, and the revelation of German plans to encourage Mexico and Japan to attack the USA. These colossal blunders precipitated an American declaration of war on Germany on 6 April. This was an enormous relief to British policy-makers because it enabled them to continue to draw upon American economic resources to support their own war effort. But it also still further complicated the already difficult question of determining their war aims programme. Like Kitchener, Wilson was determined give his new partners only just enough help to prevent their defeat until such time as he could mobilize a large army and so secure a dominant voice at the peace conference. In July 1917 he explained to his confident Colonel House that:
England and France have not the same view with regard to peace that we have by any means. When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands: but we cannot force them now, and any attempt to speak for them or to our common mind would bring on disagreements which would inevitably come to the surface in public and rob the whole thing of its effect.10
Wilson’s aims conflicted with Britain’s in several significant respects. He shared their hostility to Prussian militarism and feared that a German victory would end his hopes for the future reconstruction of the world community on the lines of a League of Nations committed to maintaining a peaceful world based on law and justice. But he also had a large measure of distaste for allied imperialism, including the plans that the British had agreed with their allies in 1915–16 for the division of the Ottoman Empire. He was equally hostile to British ‘navalism’, that is, the right that the British insisted they possessed to use the Royal Navy to impose an economic blockade on their enemies even if it meant preventing neutral ships from trading with them. Wilson deliberately did not commit the USA to the restoration of a European balance of power, nor did he express any sympathy for the Entente’s territorial war aims. ‘We have’, he told Congress on 2 April 1917, ‘no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion’. Instead, he argued, the war should be fought ‘To make the world safe for democracy.’11
In the spring of 1918, the Germans mounted their last major offensive in France, and it briefly appeared that they might split the allied armies and capture the Channel ports. But the allied line held firm, and in the summer and autumn their forces mounted a series of counter attacks which drove the Germans back to the positions from which they had begun their offensive. But in the meantime, they also prepared plans on the assumption that the war would not be won until 1919 or perhaps even 1920. As late as mid-October Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the BEF, still did not believe that the German army was so badly beaten that it could not continue the war into 1919. Consequently, when news that the Germans were seeking an armistice through President Wilson’s good offices reached the War Cabinet, they had to find quick answers to several pressing questions. Was it desirable to continue to fight into 1919, to invade Germany and inflict a Carthaginian peace upon the German people, or would such a settlement produce a vengeful Germany and an over-mighty France? Would the British people be willing to continue fighting for another year? How could they devise armistice terms which would prevent Germany from gaining a breathing space after which it could resume fighting, but which at the same time would not be so harsh that its government would reject them out of hand? The decisive factor that impelled policy-makers into accepting an armistice in the autumn when the German armies were still on French soil was the likely cost of continuing the war into 1919. In June 1918 the Australian Prime Minister, W. M. Hughes, was not contradicted when he told the Imperial War Cabinet that ‘A steady continuance for two years of the losses of the last few months would leave the Empire crippled, whether the war were won or lost.’ It was essential that, at the Peace Conference and afterwards, ‘we should not be exhausted and in a position that our policy should be dictated to us by the United States or anyone else.’12 Four months later another member of the Imperial War Cabinet, the South African soldier-statesman Jan Smuts, wrote that, ‘If peace comes now it will be a British peace, it will be a peace given to the world by the same Empire that settled the Napoleonic wars a century ago.’ However, if the war continued until Germany was invaded and utterly broken, Britain ‘would have lost the first position; and the peace which will then be imposed on an utterly exhausted Europe will be an American peace.’ The USA would be the world’s dominant military and financial power, and that would not be in Britain’s interests. As he reminded his colleagues, ‘our opponents at the peace table will not only be our enemies; and the weaker we become through the exhaustion of war, the more insistent may be the demands presented to us to forgo what we consider necessary for our future security.’13 These arguments proved to be decisive and on 26 October ministers opted for a quick end to the fighting on the grounds that they were more likely to secure good terms sooner rather than later. They also insisted that the armistice terms had to be such as would cripple Germany on land and at sea so as to ensure that they would not be able to take advantage of any lull in the fighting to regain their strength.14 Consequently the Germans were required to surrender large numbers of guns, aircraft, and railway rolling stock, to allow their fleet to be interned, evacuate all allied territory, and permit the allies to occupy bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine.15
For all their sometimes-muddled thinking about how to fight the war, British policy-makers had not lost sight of the reason they were fighting it. Their goal was not just to come out on top in the fighting, but to win the peace, and that meant that they were willing to quit when they were ahead. But that is not to say that discussions on determining the armistice terms were without rancour. In January 1918 Wilson had announced his Fourteen Points, the broad outline of his war aims programme. The British found much of it unobjectionable, and indeed some of it had been presaged by Lloyd George himself just three days earlier in a speech on British war aims he had delivered to the Trades Union Congress. But when the terms of the armistice were thrashed out in a series of meetings in Paris beginning on 29 October, Lloyd George made it clear that there were two issues where he parted company with the President. He was not prepared to surrender Britain’s most powerful weapon by accepting Wilson’s interpretation of the ‘freedom of the seas’, and he insisted that it must be set aside for further discussions at the peace conference; and, like the French, he demanded that the European allies must have the right to extract reparations for the damage that Germany had inflicted upon them.16
The extent to which the British could win the peace was determined at the peace conference which assembled in Paris in January 1919. The delegates confronted an enormous task. The international state system they had known in 1914 no longer existed. A new great power, the United States, had emerged. Four others, Germany, Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, had collapsed. Nor did the fighting stop with the signing of the German armistice on 11 November 1918. Much of Eastern and Central Europe remained mired in violence for several years thereafter as the governments of new successor states sought to establish themselves in power.17 Pre-war patterns of thinking were also under challenge. Liberal democracy was threatened by the new ideology of Bolshevism. Many of the practices of pre-war international relations, be they military alliances, arms races, or secret diplomacy, had been discredited and condemned as causes of war. It was widely believed that Wilson was right when he insisted that the future peace of Europe would depend on putting into practice the principle of national self-determination. Consequently, Britain’s post-war grand strategy would have to be formulated in a very different environment from the one within which policy-makers had operated just five years earlier.18 The British did not go to Paris with a clearly defined plan outlining everything they wished to achieve. The sheer size and the varied interests of the constituent parts of empire made it impossible to produce a single overarching vision that could be applied across the globe. Rather, since 1917 three bodies of ‘accepted wisdom’ had emerged that formed the basis for Britain’s negotiating positions.19 What all shared was the common goal of maintaining Britain’s global power and influence. ‘Europeanists’ believed that Britain had to give priority to the restoration of peace, security, and a balance of power in Europe. But they also distinguished between Western Europe and the rest of the continent. Proximity meant that the stability of Western Europe was a pressing and immediate concern. By contrast although they hoped that Central and Eastern Europe would enter a period of peace and stability, its remoteness meant they could not, and indeed did not, need to intervene directly in its affairs. ‘Atlanticists’ hoped that Anglo-American cooperation would create a new, stable, and peaceable world order. Finally, ‘Imperialists’ believed that British power in the post-war world would depend on strengthening ties between Britain and its overseas possessions, and that Britain could and should minimize its involvement in Europe. That said, it was quite possible for individuals to espouse two, or even all three positions, sequentially or even simultaneously.20
Lloyd George led the British delegation, and the settlement he sought represented a conflation of all three visions. The German threat to Britain’s security was eliminated when the High Seas Fleet scuttled itself at Scape Flow in June 1919 and when Britain and its Dominions were granted mandates to retain control of the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific which they had occupied during the war. Indeed, so confident were the British that their maritime communications were now secure that, except for a new base at Singapore, they felt little need to spend money on modernizing the defences of their ports and coaling stations until the 1930s. But a stable, peaceful, and prosperous Europe was equally vital. Not only had Europe been Britain’s most important trading partner before 1914, a situation to which Lloyd George was anxious to return, but it was only from Europe that the security of the British Isles itself could be directly threatened. In Western Europe, Britain’s goal was to re-establish a balance of power so that no power could dominate the region and once again threaten its security. They also hoped to do much the same in those other regions of the world where they had special interests. The Mediterranean and Middle East were a strategic unity, for they represented the main cross-roads of the empire, as through them ran the routes linking Britain with its African and Far Eastern possessions. The Middle East also had a growing inherent importance as a source of oil. This was an increasingly essential strategic raw material as the navy switched from coal to oil-powered vessels, and as both the RAF and the army demanded increasing amounts of petroleum products.21 Finally, the western Pacific was important, not only because of the significance of its markets, particularly in China, but also because of its proximity to Britain’s dominions in Australia and New Zealand. If they could achieve their objectives in all three regions, and if they could also ensure the security of the maritime lines of communications that linked them, the British would be able to construct a peace settlement which would secure them against external threats. The British therefore sought to use diplomacy to create regional balances that would, in combination, place their security needs on a basis they could afford.
Lloyd George did not go deliberately go out of his way during the 1918 general election campaign to stir up a mood of jingoism that would give him a mandate for imposing a punitive peace on the Central Powers. Rather he believed that the settlement should strike a balance between establishing a new international framework of democratic states based on the principles of national independence and self-determination, and the need to extract some kind of appropriate recompense from their wartime enemies.22 He wanted a peace settlement with Germany that was harsh, but just, and one which the Germans would accept freely and which would not have to be imposed on them by force.23 This immediately set him at odds with the French. When British and French representatives met in December 1918 to discuss peace terms, Marshal Foch, the French generalissimo who had led the allied armies to victory on the western front, was insistent that Germany had to be left permanently weakened. Bismarck’s Reich had to be broken up by detaching the Saar and the Rhineland from Germany, and its subjugation assured by the maintenance of a permanent defensive alliance embracing not only France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but also Britain. The allies should also maintain a permanent military presence on the Rhine.24 Lloyd George sympathized with the French in their search for security, but the British had not fought a war to prevent Germany becoming the hegemonic power in Western Europe only to see the French achieve the same objective at the peace conference. In any case the dismemberment of Germany would be a mistake. Not only would it create an Alsace-Lorraine problem in reverse, but such would be the strength of German resentment that it could only be enforced if the British themselves maintained a large army permanently on the continent to enforce it, something that neither the British electorate nor the Dominion governments would ever permit.25
This set him at odds with the French premier, George Clemenceau. Long-term demographic and economic trends seemed to be moving strongly in Germany’s favour. Every post-war French government recognized that British participation in the war, and American assistance, had been essential factors in encompassing Germany’s defeat, and everything indicated that in any future war their help would be just as important.26 Lloyd George was right to believe that ‘the French are terrified at a repetition of 1914. They cannot believe that Germany is defeated, & feel that they cannot have enough guarantees for the future.’27 Having been invaded twice by the Germans in the space of a generation, the French sought cast-iron guarantees against a third such occurrence.28 Conscious of the narrowness of the allies’ margin of victory in 1918, and the extent to which France depended on its partners, Clemenceau sought a Carthaginian peace that would keep Germany down for generations to come, buttressed by a tripartite alliance that would commit both Britain and the USA to come to France’s aid if it was once again attacked by Germany.29 Clemenceau had little time for Wilson’s internationalist prescriptions to achieve lasting peace. What he wanted was a European balance of power tilted decisively in favour of France and against Germany. The result was that by March 1919 the conference was deadlocked over the West European settlement. It was left to Hankey and Lloyd George’s secretary, Phillip Kerr, to highlight the dangerous implications of Clemenceau’s policy for the future stability of Europe, and to sketch out what they hoped would be a more acceptable alternative. This became the Fontainebleau memorandum which Lloyd George presented to the leaders of the other national delegations on 25 March. The British agreed that the Germans had to be punished—for they had few doubts that Germany was guilty of starting the war—but they also wanted to engineer a settlement that safeguarded Britain’s own security by restoring a balance of power, that met what they judged to be the minimum legitimate rights of their allies, but that did not leave the Germans thirsting for revenge. They were to discover that this was tantamount to crying for the moon. Lloyd George feared that if the victors tried to impose terms on the Germans that were too harsh, if they impeded a return to economic prosperity, or if anywhere in Europe they left large numbers of people of one nationality living under alien rule, there ‘is a danger that we may throw the masses of the population throughout Europe into the arms of the extremists whose only idea for regenerating mankind is to destroy utterly the whole existing fabric of society.’30 Within this framework the British had no difficulty in agreeing to French demands for the restoration of Belgian’s independence, for a great power in control of the ports of the Low Countries would be a standing threat to Britain’s own security. Nor did they object to French demands for the retrocession of Alsace and Lorraine, the two provinces that Germany had taken from France in 1871. Lloyd George was also willing to allow the French to have control of the coal mines of the Saar valley. But he adamantly opposed French plans to weaken Germany by detaching the Rhineland and making it a French satellite.31 Clemenceau only budged when, as an alternative to detaching the Rhineland from Germany, the British and Americans offered him the prize that he most wanted, an Anglo-American security guarantee.32 The Rhineland would remain an integral part of Germany, but it would be demilitarized and jointly occupied by allied troops for the next fifteen years, and their phased withdrawal would be conditional on Germany fulfilling the terms of the peace treaty and meeting its obligations to pay reparations. The Saarland would be placed under the administration of the League of Nations, and its future would be subject to a plebiscite to be held in 1934. In the meantime, its coal mines would be leased to France.33 The demilitarized Rhineland represented the most important guarantee of peace in Europe. The very fact that it was demilitarized would make it impossible for the Germans not only to attack the Low Countries or France, but also any of their other neighbours, for if they did so they would have no means of stopping the French from mounting a retaliatory invasion of western Germany. In any case Germany would have too little power even to try to do so, as the treaty ensured that it was to have only a miniscule fleet, no air force, and an army of just 100,000 long-service professional soldiers. An inter-allied Control Commission was also established to carry out on-site inspections to ensure that the Germans complied with the disarmament clauses of the treaty.
The Germans were also to be forced to pay reparations for the cost of the war, although the allies could not agree on how much. A Reparations Commission was established and told that it must fix the final total by May 1921. Lloyd George, anxious to restore Germany to prosperity so it could once again be a valuable trading partner and contribute to Britain’s own post-war economic recovery, initially wanted to set them at a total that could be paid off within a generation. But he subsequently allowed the British claim to be inflated to cover, among other things, the cost of war pensions. The French, who saw in reparations another means of ensuring Germany remained weak, wanted a much higher figure. It was an indication of the speed with which British and French attitudes towards Germany diverged that less than a year after the treaty was signed Foch told a British official that ‘now the war was over, it was the business of each of the allies to look after its own interests, which were not any longer necessarily identical. He said that Germany was so exhausted that she could not pay reparations and the only thing to be done was to take what we could.’34 Reparations remained a bitter bone of contention between Germany and the victor powers for the next decade. They contributed mightily to poisoning the international atmosphere in general and helped to undermine Anglo-French solidarity in particular.35 It was on the basis of this agreement that the French decided to join the League of Nations, but only on condition that Germany was excluded from it for the foreseeable future.
The Anglo-American guarantee of March 1919 was not worth the paper it was written on, for indeed Lloyd George and Wilson had not put it in writing, and no one kept any minutes of their meeting with Clemenceau at which the bargain was apparently struck. Lloyd George had made the offer to Clemenceau to overcome the impasse that was blocking progress at the conference, and as a lever to persuade the French to adopt a more moderate policy towards Germany. But by insisting that the British part of the guarantee would only become operative once the treaty had been ratified by the American legislature, he also made sure that Britain would never have to fulfil its part of the bargain. Ten days before he made the offer, he had told his Cabinet that ‘the President would not hear of any entangling alliances, as he put his faith in the League of Nations.’36 The British were no more prepared to go it alone in Europe without American support than the French were willing to do so without a guarantee of British support. The British pledge evaporated in March 1920, not because of Wilson’s objections, but because the US Congress refused to ratify the peace treaty in its entirety. It was a decision that also destroyed at a stroke Clemenceau’s imaginative vision of a trans-Atlantic post-war security system. The result was a legacy of French disillusionment and distrust of their cross-Channel partner. As early as November 1920 one British diplomat working in the Paris embassy claimed, somewhat hypocritically, that while the British did their utmost to maintain cordial relations, the French ‘appear to adopt quite other methods and to make little or no effort to restrain their own press.’37 And even if Congress had ratified the treaty, and even if British policy-makers had set to one side their own distaste for setting up France as the European hegemon, Lloyd George would have faced the utmost difficulty in persuading his own countrymen to accept a post-war French alliance. Suspicion of French motives and ambitions had resonated throughout British political culture for centuries before 1914, and the war did little to diminish it. Notions that the pursuit of the balance of power, and the belief that Britain had been drawn into the war in 1914 because of secret diplomatic agreements of which parliament and the public knew nothing, were commonplace. In January 1919 the Manchester Guardian, mouth-piece of a broad range of liberal opinion, castigated Clemenceau for his commitment to ‘the old diplomacy and the old doctrine of military alliances and the Balance of Power’. What was at stake were two opposing views of how the international state system should be organized. On the one hand there was ‘the policy of armed alliances, of mutually opposing aggregates of force, ever on the watch, standing in eternal fear, plotting to anticipate a threatening attack by a yet swift counter-attack, and that other policy to which the whole world is tending which puts all the great nations, so far as possible, in line, pools their interests, and establishes a common machinery for safeguarding them as a whole and preventing conflicts.’38 Suspicion of what the French were trying to do died hard, one Foreign Office official writing in 1933 that some of his compatriots believed that ‘the victory of 1918 turned Frenchmen into Germans, and marked in the history of France the opening of another of those attempts to dominate Europe, attempts which were made with equally disastrous consequences by Louis XIV and both Napoleons.’39 Just a day after the French government had signed an armistice with the Germans in June 1940, Hankey showed no sympathy for them when he railed that ‘To my mind the French are more responsible for our present troubles than anyone else. They have been our evil genius from the time of the Paris Peace Conference until to-day. I need only mention the rigidity of the attitude at the Peace Conference; their post-war policy towards Germany; and their insistence on “collective security” and other impracticable projects of the kind.’40
In Eastern and Central Europe the British hoped that from the chaos that had attended the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires a series of strong and stable states would emerge that would be capable of acting as effective barriers against both Bolshevik Russia and a resurgent Germany.41 They were little interested in the precise delimitation of the frontiers of the new states with the exception of Poland and the Polish ‘corridor’, a stretch of land designed to give Poland an outlet to the sea at Danzig. The corridor loomed large in Lloyd George’s calculations because its creation meant that several million Germans would be placed unwillingly under Polish rule. That was contrary to the peace that he sought, a peace which would embody ‘such terms for the Germans to sign that we shall feel justified in insisting upon them, & if the Germans refuse to sign them, then the people—our people—will back us up. To add this corridor to Poland is simply to create another Alsace Lorraine.’42 Again he ran into French opposition, for the French wanted to build up the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the hope that an enlarged Rumania and Serbia, and the newly created Czechoslovak and Polish states, would combine as a counterbalance against both Germany and Bolshevik Russia. By and large they got their way, if only because the peacemakers at Paris had little real control over events unfolding on the ground in Eastern and Central Europe.43 The result was that on the ground the demands of nationality and ethnicity often had to bow down before those of strategy.44 Ethnic groups in Eastern and Central Europe were simply too intermingled to make it possible to create compact and secure nation states. To think otherwise was naïve, and the fact that when competing claims collided the victor powers gave the benefit to their allies (the Poles, Czechs, South Slavs, Greeks, and Rumanians), but not to their enemies (the Germans, Austrian-Germans, Turks, Bulgarians, and Hungarians) merely stored up trouble for the future.45 A second and equally important source of long-term instability was that individually none of the new states was sufficiently strong to challenge a resurgent Germany. They needed a powerful external guarantor if they were going to survive, a role which the French were quite willing to fulfil. The result was that Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania became bound to each other and to France in the early 1920s by a series of alliances, the Little Entente. But this was always a precarious arrangement, not least because the signatories viewed their agreements in such different ways. The French saw the alliance system as being primarily directed against Germany, while the other signatories sought to reassure themselves against threats from Austria, Bulgaria, or Hungary. For their part the British maintained an attitude of aloof detachment, quite content to see the smaller East European states band together, but determined themselves not to underwrite their arrangements. They had hoped that the frontiers of the new states would, where possible, run along ethnic lines because such a settlement was most likely to satisfy their overriding aim for the region, the promotion of stability and peace. But the furthest they were willing to go in the early 1920s to promote those ends was to offer, albeit with some hesitation, assistance to help some of the new states to stabilize their economies.46 Even here there were limits as to what they could afford to do, for, as a Foreign Office official intimated when the possibility that the British might offer a loan to Poland was mooted at the end of 1919, ‘I am afraid there is not a very much prospect of the Treasury being prevailed upon to grant anything in the nature of a loan. We have put enormous sums of money into every corner of Europe, none of which there seems any immediate prospect of getting back, and in view of the present closeness of money and desperate need for economy at home, the Treasury are determined to call a halt.’47
Lasting stability was to prove elusive, and irredentism was to haunt Europe for decades. Lloyd George recognized something of this danger, writing in March 1919 that:
I cannot conceive of any greater cause of future war…than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land.48
By the time he signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 Lloyd George had achieved much of what he had set out to achieve. Indeed, the French were quickly describing the settlement as ‘La Pais anglaise.’49 But his muted satisfaction with the settlement was not universally shared and its legitimacy was quickly called into question both in Germany and in Britain. The enthusiasm with which many Germans had greeted the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and its replacement by a democratic republican regime quickly waned when people learnt of the terms that the victors had forced them to swallow. They had supposed they would be asked to take part in peace negotiations based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Instead, they were confronted by a dictated settlement which seemed to violate many of Wilson’s prescriptions, and threatened with a resumption of the war if they did not sign.50 Henceforth the Weimar Republic was inescapably associated in the minds of many Germans with the treaty, an association which did much to rob democracy in Germany of its legitimacy. But it was not only in Germany that the treaty was seen as being fundamentally unfair. In the early 1920s in Britain, too, a growing number of critics insisted that Germans had been treated unfairly. Less than six months after it was signed John Maynard Keynes, a former Treasury official and member of the British peace delegation, published a devastating critique of the treaty. But he only said in public what several other members of the British delegation thought in private. Germany had a good moral case when it objected to the imposition of an astronomical reparations bill, when it objected to the fact that the settlement would leave millions of Germans living under foreign rulers, and when Germany was denied membership of the League of Nations. Many British policy-makers therefore left Paris with mixed feelings about the settlement, convinced that some parts of it would have to be revised if the peace they wanted was to be secured.51 The fact that most French policy-makers did not share such qualms was to set Britain and France at odds for much of the post-war period. As early as March 1920 Hankey noted that the British and French were already at loggerheads about how to execute the terms of the treaty. ‘The fact is that they wanted a stiffer treaty and we wanted an easier one. Moreover, from the first, we always intended to ease up the execution of the Treaty if the Germans played the game. With the French, the exact opposite is the case. They are always trying to stiffen the Treaty.’52 The treaty was too benign to safeguard French security, and too harsh to gain German acceptance, and as such it could not create the foundation of a stable post-war, international security system.53
The European settlement that the victors negotiated amongst themselves in Paris was probably the best that could realistically have been achieved, given their multitude of conflicting aims. But they had not pacified Europe, or created a stable post-war security structure, and nor had they dealt a fatal blow to German power. In the short term the decision to end the war in November 1918 saved a great many lives. But it also meant that the reality of defeat and the real bankruptcy of their hopes of establishing their hegemony over Europe was not brought home to the German people in the most direct manner possible, that is, by an allied invasion of their territory culminating in a victory parade by the allied armies in Berlin. What the allies had done was to leave many Germans feeling cheated, vengeful, and intent on revising the settlement at the first available opportunity. Germany’s military defeat and the armistice and peace terms were not of their making, but in the eyes of many Germans it was the republican regime established in the wake of the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy that was to blame for Germany’s humiliation. German right-wing politicians sought not only to overturn the peace settlement but to tear up the very fabric of the Weimar constitution. Germany had lost territory to most of its neighbours, but it was not partitioned and it was still potentially the dominant power in Central Europe.54 In view of that fact European peace would depend on whether or not it was possible to reintegrate Germany into the community of nations, and that in turn would mean that the French would have to be given sufficient assurances that Germany would not yet again turn against them, assurances that the British were deeply averse to offering.
The sanctity of international treaties was a fundamental principle of British policy. ‘Unless Treaty faith is maintained’, Lloyd George insisted in 1921, ‘an era of disorganization, increasing misery and smouldering war will continue, and civilisation may very easily be destroyed by a prolongation of that state of things.’55 But that did not mean that treaties, including those that ended the First World War, were inscribed in tablets of stone, and a second principle that underpinned Britain’s post-war policy was that treaty revision was possible, provided it was brought about by negotiations and the agreement of all parties concerned.56 In 1919 the League of Nations was the great hope of those who believed that revision of the Versailles settlement was essential. Woodrow Wilson was not the only begetter of the League for the idea also had a good many supporters in Britain, but he was its most powerful exponent, and it was he who insisted that it should be the centrepiece of the peace settlement. Even so, it was only on the eve of the conference that he fleshed out his ideas about its precise structure.57 It was to be the foundation of a peace based on the disarmament not only the vanquished, but also the victors. It would establish two new mandatory standards of international relations. All member states were obliged both to settle their disputes peacefully and to have a collective responsibility to come to the aid of the victims of aggression. Underpinning Wilson’s commitment to disarmament and collective security was his deep-seated belief that there was a more powerful force in the world than armies and navies: the moral force of international public opinion. That, when properly mobilized, would force governments everywhere to do what was right and just.58 A minority of British policy-makers, most notably Lord Robert Cecil, shared his faith in full measure. But Cecil was ‘regarded rather as a fanatic on the subject of the League’.59 Most wanted to believe that the world was as Wilson saw it, but they doubted that it was. They continued to place their faith in the pursuit of the balance of power, although they were usually careful not to say so in public. Lord Birkenhead, a former Lord Chancellor and future Secretary of State for India, was one of only a few who was prepared to be dismissive of the League in public, telling a by-election audience in 1923 that ‘There is not going to come a moment in the history of the world when there will not be wars. Does anyone really believe that all the controversies of the future are to be disposed of by the League of Nations? If you lend yourself to this folly you will be where the Liberal Party was before the war, in which they were the blind leaders of the people.’60 Most ministers were more prudent, recognizing that the League was enormously popular, and that they would suffer if they were seen not to be supporting it. Lloyd George underlined this when he told his colleagues that:
if it were not set up as the result of the Peace Conference, there would be profound disappointment in this country, and even profound anger. This, he felt sure, was the mind of a people who had suffered and endured in this war. They regarded with absolute horror the continuance of a state of affairs which might again degenerate into such a tragedy. Hence any Government that dared to set up a League of Nations that was not real would be sternly dealt with by the people, and sooner rather than later. If the League of Nations did not include some provision for disarmament it would be regarded as a sham. Without some check on armaments there would be the greatest disappointment among the people.61
At the Paris Peace Conference delegates agreed that the League would have an executive council, which, although it would include representatives of the smaller powers, would be under the control of its permanent members, the USA, France, Britain, Italy, and Japan. All members would meet periodically in its Assembly, and their work would be facilitated by a permanent secretariat based in Geneva. The League’s Covenant, which was incorporated into each of the peace treaties, obliged members to respect the territorial integrity and independence of all other members. Disputes between members were to be settled by arbitration or judicial agreement at a newly constituted permanent court of international justice. If a member state was the victim of unprovoked aggression, it could expect the support of all other members. Imperialism and arms races were identified as two factors likely to cause future wars, and so the League promised to curb the worst excesses of both. The victor powers were not to be permitted to pick up the territorial spoils of war and govern them as they thought fit. Instead, they became their trustees. Under a system of mandates supervised by the League, they were required to report regularly on their efforts to bring the peoples of their mandated territories towards ‘civilization.’62 Secret diplomacy would be a thing of the past. International agreements were to be hammered out at conferences taking place in the full glare of publicity, and then registered at the League by their signatories.63
The Covenant of the League of Nations promised to revolutionize the conduct of international relations. Idealists hoped that it could maintain peace through a combination of guarantees and sanctions.64 When Viscount Grey went to Washington as the British ambassador in September 1919, Curzon told him that ‘Her Majesty’s Government believe that the League of Nations can be made the means of achieving greater good.’65 Similarly, Balfour told the delegates at the 1921 Imperial Conference that:
if the League of Nations reaches its full strength and stature, if it be supported by the great moral forces of the world, peace and national independence will be secured without resort to arms. If in the future there should again arise a Power greedy of domination, it will find itself confronted not merely by defensive Alliances between a few interested States, but by the organised Forces of the civilised world. If that hope is to be accomplished, it can be only by a League of Nations; and when I consider the services already rendered or in the course of being rendered, to the cause of International co-operation by the League, mutilated though it is by the absence from its membership of some who might have been among its most powerful supporters, I cannot doubt that few calamities would be greater than the abandonment of the great experiment to which we have set our hand.66
Balfour’s remarks were designed for public consumption. In private many ministers held rather different views. In August 1919 Lloyd George described the League as ‘a humbug and a sham.’67 It was ‘more likely to become a centre of intrigue than a real benefit to the peace of the world’.68 He continued to place his faith in the British Empire as more likely to promote peace. Wilson’s original draft Covenant had stated that any transgressor state would automatically find itself at war with all other members of the League. But other powers were not prepared to accept such an abrogation of their national sovereignty over the fundamental issue of war and peace. The result was that although Article 16 of the Covenant declared that any state that broke the Covenant would be deemed to have committed an act of war, it allowed each member state to decide for itself just what action it would take, thus immediately devaluing the ability of the League to provide security for its members. No one dissented when, in 1936, the COS reminded ministers that one of the cardinal features of British policy must always be that ‘we should not undertake a liability to engage in any war in which our vital interests are not affected.’69 What most British policy-makers hoped was that the League would evolve into a permanent conference system, a re-energized Concert of Europe, where statesmen could come to resolve their differences peacefully, but where each would be bound to be guided by their perception of their own national interests.70
In May 1919 Lloyd George had told one of Wilson’s advisers that ‘as long as America, England and France stand together, we can keep the world from going to pieces.’71 What served to undermine the League was the fact that the three powers did not stand together. The November 1918 Congressional elections had returned Republican majorities to both Houses of Congress, and they soon gave expression to their opposition to Wilson’s foreign policy. Their hostility was partly a product of partisan party-politics, but it was also the product of what one British diplomat described as the fear amongst Republicans that Wilson was driven less by cold reason than by ‘an undigested idealism.’72 In March 1920 the President’s critics gave effective voice to their doubts when the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant. Wilson subsequently told Hankey that he was ‘extraordinarily bitter against his opponents, and said he was ashamed of his fellow-countrymen for throwing over the League.’73 But they did throw it over and the USA, which had done more than any other power to create it, never became a member. The British were left angry and resentful. Lloyd George had hoped that by supporting the League he would ensure that cooperation between Britain and the USA would endure into the post-war world. Britain might then be able to turn American power to its own purposes, whilst simultaneously curbing any American tendency to act in ways inimical to British interests.74 The Senate’s decision left him, and many other policy-makers, bitterly disappointed. The Americans might be full of honeyed words, but they could not be relied upon to keep their promises.75 What was worse was that they had left Europe with what many British policy-makers thought was a seriously defective peace settlement. ‘Our present troubles in Europe’, Baldwin insisted in 1923, ‘were to a very great extent due to the withdrawal of America. The drafting of the Treaty postulated America’s co-operation. A wholly different Treaty would have been drawn up on the opposite assumption.’76 It was, therefore, little wonder that Sir William Tyrrell, the PUS of the Foreign Office between 1925 and 1928, still placed his faith in the old diplomacy: ‘[T]he League has not taken the place of the Balance of Power’, he insisted in 1926. ‘There will be peace in Europe as long as the four major powers agree, and discord or worse when they disagree, the League notwithstanding—at any rate until such time as the League reaches far greater powers than it now possesses.’77
German resentment at what they regarded as the unjust terms imposed on them at Versailles was only one cause of the instability that characterized international relations in the immediate post-war period, and Germany’s deliberate exclusion from the League ensured that the latter could not act as a vehicle to remedy this problem. British policy-makers were equally unable to produce a stable settlement in those parts of the world where the new Bolshevik regime, which had come to power in Moscow in November 1917, abutted the British Empire, and here again the absence of a major revisionist power from membership of the League meant that the latter could do nothing to help. It was bad enough that Lenin had not only abandoned Russia’s allies, made a separate peace with the Central Powers, and preached that the war could only be ended if the workers of the world rose up in revolution. But he also repudiated the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 which had temporarily ended Anglo-Russian rivalry around the frontier of India, repudiated the debts incurred by the Tsarist regime to the Western powers, and in December 1917 threatened the internal stability of the European empires by offering support to indigenous nationalists trying to overthrow their colonial rulers. Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had been sent to Russia by Lloyd George as his unofficial envoy to the new government, reported that the Bolsheviks had ‘established a rule of force and oppression unequalled in the history of any autocracy’, and that ‘The avowed ambition of Lenin is to create civil warfare throughout Europe.’78 A few weeks later Francis Lindley, the British Consul-General in Russia, and a diplomat who had a reputation for writing pungent despatches in which ‘a spade was invariably called a spade’, told Balfour, ‘No promises on the part of the Bolsheviks to leave other countries alone are worth the paper they may be written on, for the essence of the movement is its international character.’79 Their political masters in London needed little convincing. ‘Bolshevism was’, according to Lord Milner, a War Cabinet minister, ‘the greatest danger of the civilised world.’80 Russia was hardly mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles, probably because no one had much idea about who was likely to control the Tsar’s former empire in the future. By 1918 the Tsar’s dominions had descended into a bitter civil war fought between the Bolsheviks, various White counter-revolutionary groups, and several nationalist movements bent on establishing their own independent states. The Coalition government had sent small numbers of troops and ships to the fringes of the Russian Empire to bolster those Russian forces whom they hoped might still be willing to fight the Central Powers. After the November 1918 armistice they used those same forces to try to create a cordon sanitaire against the spread of Bolshevism by offering support to a variety of White Russian forces who opposed the Bolsheviks. Shortly before Christmas Churchill, a fervent anti-Bolshevik, hectored his colleagues, saying that ‘we must make up our minds either to allow the Russians to murder one another without let or hindrance, or, in the name of order, to interfere and do it thoroughly.’ He preferred the second option. To achieve it ‘action by small contingents of troops could do no good. If action was to be undertaken, it must be done thoroughly with large forces, abundantly supplied with mechanical appliances, and, if this was to be done, the country must be stirred up and a large voluntary army collected.’81 Two months later he returned to the same theme. ‘As long as Russia is in chaos there will be no peace in Europe and no economic revival. Without Russia, the League of Nations is a farce and no Peace Treaty can be anything but provisional.’82 Hankey considered him to be ‘quite balmy [sic] in his enthusiasm for the anti-bolshevists.’83
But armed intervention was never likely to succeed for the pre-requisites for success were just not available. Russia was enormous, the White forces were widely dispersed, and their efforts poorly coordinated. Britain and its allies did not have ‘large forces, abundantly supplied with mechanical appliances’ to send, and, most policy-makers realized, there was no public support for stepping up the scale of Britain’s commitment.84 Lloyd George was right to believe that ‘Our citizen army was prepared to go anywhere for liberty, but they could not be convinced that the suppression of Bolshevism was a war for liberty.’85 The Central Powers, who had been able to deploy over a million troops in Russia, had been unable to control the country, so there was little chance of the British, even with their allies, doing so with far smaller forces. The War Cabinet roundly rejected Churchill’s pipe dream, a joint campaign of intervention conducted with the support of the United States and Britain’s major European allies to sweep aside the Bolsheviks and ‘use force to restore the situation and set up a democratic Government’.86 In 1919 the most that the British could do was to mount a series of disjointed interventions on the fringes of the former Tsarist Empire as they lent some strictly limited support to White armies under the command of Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin.87 But they acted with little real commitment or enthusiasm, and as early as March 1919 Lloyd George wanted to run down British forces in Russia. By the end of the year the British had persuaded their allies that the only practical policy was to contain the Bolsheviks, ‘to keep the Bolshevists in a ring fence; not to send further support to Denekin and the other anti-Bolshevists beyond what is already promised.’88 By early 1920 British ministers also accepted that ‘There can be no question of making active war on the Bolsheviks, for the reason that we have neither the men, the money, nor the credit, and public opinion is altogether opposed to such a course.’89 Between January and March 1920 the two remaining White Russian armies, commanded by Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin, collapsed, marking the end of the Whites’ counter revolution. But in the meantime, a border dispute between the Poles and the Soviets had escalated into a full-scale war which saw the Poles invade the Ukraine. The British had no intention of supporting Polish imperialism, and when their representative in London asked Lloyd George if his government could expect any British assistance, he replied that although Britain was friendly towards Poland it had determined that ‘The border states must take responsibility themselves concerning war and peace. HMG could not advise war since it would incur responsibilities which it could not discharge.’90 They were almost compelled to reverse this policy when a Soviet counter-offensive took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw and threatened to spark the Europe-wide Bolshevik revolution that Lenin sought. In July Lloyd George despatched Hankey and the British ambassador in Berlin, Lord D’Abernon, to Warsaw to try either to persuade the Poles to accept an armistice, or, if the Soviets proved intransigent, to advise on what help the British might give Poland.91 Lloyd George and Curzon were prepared to send war material to Poland and threatened to send the Royal Navy into the Baltic if the Soviets did not come to terms.92 Fortunately they did not have to do so, as the Poles unexpectedly repulsed the Red Army without British help, and in March 1921 signed a peace treaty that saw the Ukraine and White Russia partitioned between the USSR and Poland. By then British forces had already left North Russia and Siberia. In June 1920 ministers finally agreed to the evacuation of all British troops from the Caucasus.93 What the Foreign Office had predicted then came to pass, and by the spring of 1921 the Soviets had reincorporated into their empire most of the former borderlands of the old Tsarist Empire. Once again, as in the days of the Tsar, the British had to confront what they perceived to be a Russian threat to their empire.94
But now the nature of the threat was different, for whereas the Tsarist regime might have constituted a military threat to British imperial security in Asia, the Soviet threatened to subvert it by ideological means. Meeting in Moscow in March 1919 the Third Communist International, the Comintern, promised to incite revolutionary violence across the developed world. What was especially worrying for the British was the zeal with which the Bolsheviks directed their efforts against their empire. In September 1920 the chairman of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev, called on the Soviet-convened Congress of Peoples of the East held at Baku to mount a ‘world revolution’ and a ‘holy war…against imperialist Britain.’95 Henceforth British policy-makers were apt to see the hidden hand of Bolshevism, working against them throughout the Middle East and Asia.96 Across the broad swathe of territory stretching from the Sudan, through the former Ottoman Empire and northwards to Persia, Afghanistan, and the northwest frontier of India, British intelligence agencies feared the coalescence of an unholy alliance between Bolsheviks, pan-Islamic conspirators, seditious Indian students in Europe, the Egyptian Wafd party, the Caliphate movement, Sharifian princes, and Turkish nationalists, all bent on challenging Britain’s imperial position. In August 1922 a committee of senior officials who had been asked to examine the various subversive forces threatening the empire based its analysis on the assumption that there was a ‘spirit of restlessness’, afoot. It was generated by nationalist sentiments that had their origins before 1914, but it had been encouraged by a combination of the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, economic hardship, and the commitment to a peace settlement based on the principle of national self-determination embodied in Wilson’s Fourteen Points.97 From India the Viceroy sent disturbing reports of Bolshevik intrigues in Afghanistan intended to stir up trouble for the British on the northwest frontier and in Persia.98 Faced with the problem of trying to understand why the Arabs of Mesopotamia had revolted against British rule in 1920, Gertrude Bell, who had worked as a political officer and senior official in the British administration in Mesopotamia since 1916, insisted that:
There is no lack of evidence to show that a league of conspiracy, organised by the Bolsheviks in co-operation with the Turkish Nationalists, had been long in touch with extremist Arab political societies, with the object of exploiting the common ground of religion—the only unifying bond between these various elements—in order to undermine the British position in the Middle East.99
The General Staff agreed, reporting in September that the outbreak was the product of ‘a general strategic plan directed, ostensibly from Moscow, against France and England, more particularly the latter’. That meant that ‘As long as the Moscow Direction [sic] survives to absorb into the organisation, thrive on and exploit agencies of local discontent, Nationalism will be the instrument of [Bolshevik] Internationalism, and until the International Monster has been starved, or severed at the neck, its various heads will have to be dealt with in detail when and where they rise’.100 What was especially worrying was the possibility, as reported by the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army, that the Soviets and the Germans had thrown in their lot and were working together in a de facto revisionist alliance, for ‘There is evidence that German brains are behind this alliance.’101 Their fears were exaggerated. A handful of the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress which had governed the Ottoman Empire since 1914 did try to work with the Germans and Soviets to undermine British imperial rule in the hope of fulfilling their dream of a pan-Turian empire. But Germany was in no position in the early 1920s to lend significant support to anyone and the Soviets were ambivalent, for although they, too, wanted to topple the British Empire, they had no desire to encourage the spread of pan-Islamism or pan-Turkism in Central Asia. For his part the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement, Mustapha Kemal, had no love of Bolshevism, but was ready to use the threat of Turkish-Soviet cooperation as a lever to extract better peace terms from the allies.102 But much of this was concealed from the British. All they knew was that the Comintern was bent on destroying their empire.103 What they now had to do was to decide how best to respond. Military intervention to crush the Bolsheviks had failed. Their hopes of creating a cordon sanitaire in east Asia had crumbled. All that was left was to reach some form of uneasy coexistence with the new regime in Moscow.
What made the Bolshevik menace appears to be so threatening was that it added yet another layer of complication to the already complex problems of establishing a peace settlement in the Middle East. It was not only their different conceptions of how to establish an effective security regime in Europe that drove Britain and France apart in 1919. As their wrangling over how to dispose of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire showed, they were also rivals in the Middle East. The importance of the peace settlement there was lost on no one. Sir Edward Carson, the chairman of the Cabinet’s Eastern Committee which oversaw British policy in the region, knew that ‘Upon the fate of these territories, and the way in which our case is presented to the Peace Conference, and the form of administration to be set up, will depend not only the future of the territories themselves, but also the future of the British Empire in the East’.104 But work on the Turkish settlement had been effectively put on ice until after the treaty with Germany had been signed, a fact that Hankey lamented in October 1919 because it meant that ‘we have to retain large forces in Turkey, and in Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as these countries as well as India will remain in a state of great unrest until the Turkish settlement is complete. This involves heavy expenditure.’105 The focus of British policy was to ensure the safety of four key points on the route to India. They were the Straits, where throughout the nineteenth century they had worked to bottle-up the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, the Suez Canal, which had fallen under British control when they occupied Egypt in 1882, and the Persian Gulf and Persia itself, where British predominance had been assured before 1914 by the Royal Navy and a series of protectorate treaties with local rulers.106 A mainstay of their position in the region had been the continued existence of the Ottoman Empire, for as long as it was in being it acted as a buffer, blocking both German and Tsarist expansion into the region. But British policy-makers had to conduct a radical reshaping of these policies following Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914. During the war they relied on an Anglo-Russian cordon sanitaire running from Egypt, through southern Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Afghanistan, to defend India. But they also looked to the future and signed a series of secret agreements with other powers to divide up post-war spoils. In April 1915 they offered Italy territorial concessions in Anatolia as part of the price for the Italians entering the war, an agreement they confirmed in 1917 in the Treaty of St Jean de Maurienne which promised Italy an enclave around the port of Smyrna. In a series of letters exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, and Sharif Husein of Mecca, they promised to establish an independent Arab kingdom at the end of the war. In May 1916, the Sykes-Picot agreement divided the northern Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain. Finally, in November 1917 they issued a separate policy statement, the Balfour Declaration, promising to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine.
When the sudden end of the war in the autumn of 1918 left them with a strong military presence throughout the region it might have been tempting to ignore these agreements and simply retain control of everything they held. That was precisely what the French suspected they were trying to do when, in late October 1918, the War Cabinet ordered Admiral Calthrope, the Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, to exclude his French colleague from the negotiations of the Turkish armistice. When the French objected, Lloyd George was incensed. ‘The French are becoming quite intolerable. The third power in point of strength, they want to create the impression that they are the first in point of authority. We cannot allow our men to be ordered about in the East, where prestige is more essential to us than in any other quarter of the globe.’107 It was only when it became apparent that their own military power was melting away, and when public support for a policy of military imperialism began to evaporate, that the British opted for more subtle means of securing their interests.
The British were equally brutal in their direct dealings with the Turks. Conservative opinion before 1914 had generally favoured maintaining the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against Russian expansion. But that support had ended with the failure of the Gallipoli campaign and Turkish atrocities in Armenia in 1915. When a Turkish delegation waited upon Balfour in June 1919, he told them that they had no capacity:
to rule over alien races. The experiment has been tried too long and too often for there to be the least doubt as to its result. History tells us of many Turkish successes and many Turkish defeats: —of nations conquered and nations freed.…Yet in all these changes there is no case to be found, either in Europe or Asia or Africa, in which the establishment of Turkish rule in any country, has not been followed, by a diminution of material prosperity and a fall in the level of culture: nor is there any case to be found in which the withdrawal of Turkish rule has not been followed by a growth in material prosperity and a rise in the level of culture.108
Liberal and Labour opinion had been strongly anti-Turk since Gladstone’s agitation against their mis-rule in Bulgaria in the late 1870s, and Lloyd George had inherited this loathing in full measure. It was a loathing that was reinforced by the tenacity with which the Ottoman army had fought in defence of its empire. ‘The Turks nearly brought about our defeat in the war’, he remarked in 1920. ‘It was a near thing. You cannot trust them and they are a decadent race.’109 Never again were the Turks to have the opportunity to undermine Britain’s supremacy in the Middle East, either by political subversion or military action. Turkey was to be deprived of its territories in the Arab lands and Armenia, so that it would no longer have access to Persia and the Persian Gulf. They were also to be ejected from Constantinople so they could no longer control either the Straits, or the Caliphate, with its supranational authority over the Muslim world.110 But if the British were no longer to rely upon the Turks as a regional ally, they needed to find a substitute. Lloyd George believed he had found one in the Greeks, who, in his estimation, were ‘a rising people’. He therefore threw British support behind the Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, and his ambitions to achieve the Greek ‘megali idea’, that is the unification of the Greek diaspora by establishing Greek rule over Anatolia.111 In April 1919 Italian forces had landed troops at Adalia to lay a claim to territory they believed had been promised to them by their allies. However, neither the French nor the British wished to see an expansion of Italian power in the Eastern Mediterranean, and in May Lloyd George persuaded Clemenceau and President Wilson to agree to the Greeks sending troops to Smyrna. This was done on the pretext of protecting the Greeks inhabitants who were allegedly suffering from Turkish persecution.112 Lloyd George hoped that the Greeks would act as Britain’s proxies in imposing a punitive peace on the Turks. But by their behaviour—British observers on the spot reported that far from carrying out a civilizing mission, the Greeks were behaving like crusaders—all they succeeded in doing was outraging the Turks and fanning a nationalist revolt against the allies.113 Observing the conduct of the Greek army, a senior British naval officer reported that, ‘Hellenic policy is so far misdirected that fire and sword are regarded as the universal cure for opposition.’114 In November 1919 the British High Commissioner at Constantinople, Admiral de Robeck, reported that:
At the time of the armistice Turkey was so cowed that she would have accepted almost any terms; but between then and now the Turks have had time to pull themselves together. Above all, the Greek occupation of Smyrna has stimulated a Turkish patriotism probably more real than any which the war was able to evoke. That this patriotism has enabled Mustapha Kemal to raise a force which, if he decides to resist the peace terms, might cause the Allies considerable embarrassment.115
Both the India Office and the Indian government warned against imposing harsh peace terms on Turkey for fear that they would alienate India’s Muslim community.116 At the same time the War Office cautioned that the rapid demobilization of the army meant that the British no longer had the military wherewithal to do as they pleased in the Middle East. In August 1919 Churchill told Balfour that since the armistice he had maintained 40,000 men at Constantinople and on the shores of the Black Sea but:
The strain of this upon our melting military resources is becoming insupportable. I hope, therefore, that it will be possible to arrange Peace with Turkey of a kind which will enable us to close down and bring home all British military establishments in Constantinople by the end of October at the latest, and that the peace negotiations with Turkey will be conducted in the light of this fact. I know how great your difficulties are, but I trust you will realise that the length of time which we can hold a sufficient force at your disposal to overawe Turkey is limited, and that I have not got the legal power, nor the financial means, nor the political support necessary to extend those limits.117
In January 1920 British ministers agreed, much to the annoyance of Curzon, who had replaced Balfour at the Foreign Office in October 1919, to some softening of their draft peace terms. At the behest of the Government of India who were concerned that the expulsion of the Caliph from Constantinople would anger their Muslim population, the Sultan and his government were to be allowed to remain in Constantinople. However, the city and the region around the Straits were to be garrisoned by an international force which would include British troops. That would ensure that not only would the Royal Navy have a free passage into the Black Sea, but the Sultan and his government would be ‘under our guns’.118 Turkey was deprived of all of its non-Turkish territories and peoples. Smyrna and the surrounding region were placed under Greek administration for five years, following which there was to be a plebiscite on its future. The Italians gained most of the Dodecanese Islands, with the remainder of Turkey’s possessions in the Aegean passing to Greece, and Armenia was recognized as an independent state. Turkey was shorn of its Arab provinces, and with Turkish influence excluded from the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea, it could no longer threaten Britain’s imperial communications to India. Iraq and Palestine became British mandates, and Lebanon and Syria French ones. These terms, which seemed to meet all of Britain’s desiderata, were imposed on the Turks by the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920.119 But in imposing such a drastic peace treaty on the Turks the British soon discovered that what they had actually done was to store up trouble for themselves, and ensure Turkey joined Germany and the Soviets as revisionist powers.
At the very moment when they were trying to reconfigure their relations with the Turks British policy-makers also found that they had to place their relationship with some of the peoples inside their own empire on a new footing. In 1919 the British faced full-scale rebellions in India, Egypt, and, in 1920, Mesopotamia. The precise local causes of each revolt were different, but underlying them was a common factor: the demands of the war had caused the British to place such heavy demands on local resources that their burden had become intolerable. The subsequent course of events also followed a common trajectory: revolt, followed by military repression, followed by a recognition that brute force could not be the foundation of a stable post-war polity. This culminated in a political settlement that saw the British devolving a degree of power to local elites while retaining in their own hands control of what would ensure the future security of their empire.
The Suez Canal was a vital link in the chain of waterways and naval bases that connected Britain to India and its Far Eastern possessions.120 The British had secured control of the canal in 1882 when they occupied Egypt, although Egypt remained formally part of the Ottoman Empire until the British declared a protectorate over it when they went to war with Turkey in November 1914. During the First World War Egypt became the main base from which the British projected their military power across much of the Middle East.121 But discontent with British rule had been simmering throughout the war, and in November 1918 a delegation—‘Wafd’—led by Sa’d Zaghlul, demanded their independence, only to be met with a blank refusal. Had discontent with British rule being confined to a small patrician elite the contempt with which the British dismissed Egyptian demands would hardly have mattered. But it was not only the Egyptian elite who wanted to rid their country of the British. Zaghlul could mobilize a popular coalition uniting Egyptians of all classes, and when the British deported him in March 1919 they sparked a rebellion. The British invoked martial law and in the following months nearly eight hundred Egyptians were killed and many others wounded.122
The British were similarly clumsy in their handling of unrest in India. In the nineteenth century a handful of British administrators could govern India because their governance pressed only lightly upon the backs of their subjects. But during the war a combination of the fear of unrest at a time when the sub-continent had been stripped of British troops, the loss of imperial prestige occasioned by defeats in Mesopotamia culminating in the surrender of an Anglo-Indian division at Kut in April 1916, and ominous signs that both Muslim and Hindu nationalists were prepared to sink their differences, led the British to announce a new constitutional dispensation for India. In August 1917 Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, told the Commons that henceforth the goal of government policy was ‘the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the Empire.’123 India would one day, in the indeterminate future, achieve Dominion status within the British Empire. But any positive impact that the declaration might have had was soon undermined. After the armistice Indian Muslim opinion was increasingly concerned about the apparently anti-Muslim trajectory of British policy in the Middle East. The British hoped to contain their concerns by perpetuating into peacetime much of the wartime emergency legislation that had permitted the courts to try offenders without juries and gave provincial governments the power to intern suspects without trial. But all they did achieve was to cross the Indian religious divide and unite both the Muslim and Hindu communities in opposition to the government. The British response was both inept and heavy-handed, culminating in the massacre of 379 unarmed civilians at Amritsar in April 1919. Within weeks the British were confronted by a second threat, war on the northwest frontier. The British now faced the nightmarish possibility that unrest inside India might coincide with an Afghan offensive across the northwest frontier.124 The actual involvement of the Afghan army in the Third Afghan War lasted for barely a month before the government in Kabul made peace. But fighting between British and Indian troops and Afghan tribesmen continued until early 1920.125
It was fortunate for the British that Indian unrest had effectively ended before rebellion broke out in Mesopotamia. In November 1918 the British and French had issued a declaration which seemed to promise Mesopotamia a large measure of self-government, leading eventually to independence.126 But any independence was to be heavily qualified because the British had every intention of staying put. The Admiralty valued the large reserves of oil around Mosul, and Mesopotamia could provide a vital air and rail link on the route from Cape Town to Cairo and thence to Karachi, thereby strengthening Britain’s hold over its Indian Empire.127 By late 1919 the British had put in place an administration on the Indian model, run by British district officers, and with very little local participation. In April 1920 the League of Nations appeared to ratify their right to do so when it granted Britain a mandate to govern Mesopotamia. But three months later a revolt broke out. ‘I am convinced’, wrote Sir Aylmer Haldane, the local army commander, ‘that the rising is an anarchical and religious move initiated on [a] political basis, and peace can only come by the sword.’128 The Cabinet agreed, and poured reinforcements into the country. The re-conquest of Mesopotamia became the largest British military campaign of the inter-war period.129 A force equivalent to four divisions took nearly six months to end the revolt, at a cost of nearly 1,500 British and Indian casualties and a bill that rose to £600,000 per week, a price that London could ill-afford.130
It was not only in the Middle East that the British faced violent efforts to repudiate their domination. The same phenomenon happened closer to home in Ireland. Between 1911 and 1914 Ireland had been rent by a Home Rule crisis that by 1914 threatened to erupt into a civil war. The European war came just in time to prevent that, but subsequent events destroyed the thin veneer of unity created in the autumn of 1914. The heavy-handed repression of the Easter Rising of 1916 alienated once and for all large numbers of Irishmen living outside Ulster from British rule. Sinn Fein MPs bent on creating an independent Ireland swept the board outside Ulster in the December 1918 election. Refusing to take their seats at Westminster, in January 1919 they established their own parliament in Dublin, Dáil Ḗireann, and proclaimed an independent Irish Republic. On the same day the first shots were fired in what became the Irish War of Independence, when insurgents belonging to the Irish Republican Army assassinated two policemen at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary. Rebellion in Ireland represented a double threat to British interests. If Ireland became independent, it could establish a dangerous precedent and might lead to the disintegration of the empire. But Ireland was also of strategic importance. During the war the German U-boat offensive against British merchant shipping had underlined the importance of its ports and naval bases for the defence of Britain’s maritime lines of communication. In Curzon’s words ‘Absolute independence is impossible; the creation of a hostile naval base on the Irish coast is impossible; an Alliance or union of Ireland with a hostile Power is something that no nation in the position of Great Britain would tolerate.’131 His colleagues agreed, insisting that ‘the experience of the recent War showed that the bases on the coast of Ireland were essential to the protection of our trade and that their occupation or use by an enemy Power might be disastrous.’132
In 1919 and 1920 IRA attacked police and coastguard stations in remote rural areas, and assassinated police informers.133 Lloyd George had few qualms about using physical repression to crush the rebels. In April 1920 he and his ministers agreed that the insurgents had to be beaten, and that until they had been Ireland could not be given home rule. ‘The Prime Minister said that the disorder must be put down at whatever cost. If there were a truce it would be an admission that we were beaten and it might lead to our having to give up Ireland. It was very probable that the number of troops was inadequate but whatever was necessary the Irish Government should get.’134 The new Irish Secretary, Hamar Greenwood, agreed, and wanted permission to shoot rebels on sight.135 Henry Wilson suggested that the names of known Sinn Feiners should be pinned to church doors, and that every time a policeman was killed, five Sinn Feiners, chosen by lot, should be shot as a reprisal.136 More troops were to be sent to Ireland, and their numbers supplemented by raising an Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary.137 In June 1920 the Prime Minister told the head of the Royal Irish Constabulary that, ‘When caught flagrante delicto you must shoot the rebels down. That is the only way.’138 Lord French, the Viceroy, was ‘quite convinced that “force” is the only power that will ever solve the Irish question; and I am equally convinced that if applied at once and efficiently it would solve the question in a very short space of time.’139 In August the policy of ‘force’ was given legal underpinning by the passage of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act, and by the autumn the Irish administration in Dublin thought that the army and police were getting on top of the situation.140 Lloyd George was so confident that on 9 November he told the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London that ‘we have murder by the throat!’141 He was soon proven wrong. Just four days later the IRA assassinated fourteen British intelligence officers in Dublin, and a week later they ambushed a police patrol at Kilmichael in County Cork and killed a further eighteen members of the security forces. Lloyd George concluded that whereas earlier IRA operations had taken the form of terrorist assassinations, what happened at Kilmichael ‘partook of a more definitely military character’. The Cabinet’s response was to declare martial law over much of southern Ireland.142
IRA terror bred British counter-terror, as troops and police began to take the law into their own hands.143 Even before the Kilmichael ambush Churchill had reported that:
Very strong representations are being made to me by the military authorities that reprisals within certain strictly defined limits should be authorized by the Government and regulated by responsible officers of not less than Divisional rank. Complaint is made that the troops are getting out of control, taking the law into their own hands, and that besides clumsy and indiscriminate destruction, actual looting and thieving as well as drunkenness and gross disorder are occurring. In consequence of this, a number of courts-martial are being held upon soldiers, yet the position of the troops, always liable to be murdered by the Sinn Feiners, is such that it will not be possible to restrain their anger when outrages occur in their neighbourhood.144
Initially his colleagues hesitated to agree.145 But three further serious incidents of unofficial reprisals, at Balbriggan near Dublin, at a Gaellic football match in Croke Park, Dublin, and at Cork, persuaded them that unless they did agree discipline amongst the security forces would collapse. Consequently, in early 1921 reprisals became part of the government’s official policy. IRA terrorism had ignited a campaign of British counter-terrorism.
It was one thing to repress a rebellion by force. But continuing to govern at the point of a bayonet was both financially and politically expensive. In 1919 the government had hoped that 900,000 troops would suffice to meet Britain’s immediate post-war obligations. This was seriously over-optimistic. ‘Industrial unrest in Great Britain, incipient rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in Egypt and revolt in India’, Wilson told the Cabinet in April 1919, ‘added to the latent hostility on the part of the Turks throughout the Middle East, all result in urgent demands for reinforcements which are too well-founded and too insistent to ignore.’146 Wilson’s solution was simple. ‘[A]ll military commitments not vital to the British Empire should be cut down with a view to concentrating all available troops at the essential points.’ They had already withdrawn their troops from Italy and the Balkans, and he now wanted to pull back from the Caucasus and Syria, while ensuring that the eventual peace settlement with Turkey ‘should be framed as far as possible to spare the religious susceptibilities of our Mohammedan subjects in India. It will be remembered that one of the ominous signs reported by the Viceroy is the fraternization of Hindus and Mohammedans, and the unrest caused amongst the latter by the threatened extinction of Turkey as a Sovereign State. This same phenomenon’, he warned, ‘occurred before the Indian Mutiny.’147 The Mesopotamia revolt only encouraged the service leaders to return to the same theme.148 In June 1920 Wilson and Sir Hugh Trenchard, the CAS, told ministers that:
the military forces at the disposal of Great Britain were insufficient to meet the requirements of the policies now being pursued in the various theatres. An immediate curtailment of British responsibilities was indispensable if grave risk of disaster was not to be incurred. Should the Cabinet decide to continue the attempt to maintain simultaneously our existing commitments at Constantinople, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, the possibility of disaster occurring in any or all of these theatres must be faced, and the likelihood of this will increase every day.149
Whereas in 1914 the army had needed the equivalent of ten and two-thirds infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions to fulfil its obligations, it now needed twenty and two-thirds infantry divisions and four and one-third cavalry divisions.150 But it was not just numbers that were lacking. Men who had learnt the trade of soldiering during the war had been released, to be replaced by poorly trained young conscripts. The result, as Churchill told the Cabinet, was that the fighting power of the army was seriously deficient because:
composed of young boys and raw recruits, sprinkled with war-worn men and encumbered by an exceptional proportion of administrative personnel engaged in winding up the war establishments and training and creating the new peace units, the battalions and batteries of the new Army have certainly not yet reached the standard at which they could be safely committed to any serious military enterprise or have any great responsibility thrown upon them, either at home or abroad.151
But even if more and better trained soldiers had been available, the political will to use them was rapidly being eroded. The experience of the war had not only convinced many people that secret diplomacy and continental entanglements were a dangerous mistake. It also caused them to question in what circumstances it was right to use military force to further national interests. The British had fought the war to end the naked brutality of Prussian militarism.152 In the post-war era the government’s critics were quick to insist that what they were doing in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ireland was horribly reminiscent of what the Germans had done in occupied Belgium and France. They had not endured the horrors of a world war merely to see some of those same horrors replicated within their own empire.153 ‘You cannot preach to the people of the rest of the world’, one backbench Labour MP asserted in April 1920, ‘that you are in favour of the greatest possible franchise and the right of small nationalities to decide their own destiny, and at the same time say to four and a quarter million people in Ireland under your very noses that you are going to use the same Prussian methods you have been fighting for five years to destroy.’154 C. P. Scott, editor of the liberal Manchester Guardian, simply described government policy as ‘indefensible.’155 Some ministers viewed events in a similar light. In July 1920, when he presented the results of an enquiry into events at Amritsar to the Commons, Montagu publicly denounced what had happened as a shameful act liable to bring the British Empire into disrepute. ‘Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness’, he asked MPs, ‘or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian Empire?’156
In the absence of overwhelming physical force and the political will to use it, goodwill and cooperation mattered, and they could only be bought by political agreement. The agreements that the British sought with their rebellious subjects followed a common pattern. A degree of power over purely local affairs was devolved onto indigenous elites, while the British retained control of those issues that mattered most to them: external relations, trade policy, and defence. In the case of India Lloyd George insisted in both public and private on ‘the determination of the British Government to maintain British rule in India and to meet any challenge to our supremacy with all the forces at our disposal.’157 But he also understood that the government had to implement the Government of India Act in 1919 in the hope that by doing so they would win over to their cause moderate nationalists, isolate those who entertained a more radical programme, and thereby re-establish their rule on firmer foundations.158 In the short term it worked. But the search for a settlement in Egypt proved to be more tortuous. In December 1919, a mission under Lord Milner arrived in Cairo in the hope of reaching agreement with the nationalist leaders. He offered to recognize Egypt as an independent state governed by a constitutional monarchy. The Egyptians were to ally themselves with the British, to assist them in wartime, and give them free access to Egypt’s harbours, aerodromes, and railways. The British would also have the right to safeguard the interests of foreigners in Egypt, and to maintain a garrison to protect the Suez Canal. The British Minister in Cairo was to take precedence over all other foreign representatives in the country, and no foreign power would enjoy the same privileges that the British had. The Sudan was to be excluded from any of these provisions on the grounds that it was ‘physically, ethnically and historically quite distinct from Egypt, and in some respects presents a sharp contrast to it.’159 To Milner the advantages that the British might to reap from an agreement freely negotiated with the Egyptians were obvious. ‘He thought that everyone would admit’, he told a meeting of ministers in November 1920:
that if Egypt were a friendly and allied country which was decently governed and able to stand on its own feet, and if it were prepared to give us of its own accord a strategic base at all times and to place its harbours, railways, and other means of communication at our service not only in time of war but even in time of peace, it would be better, from the purely British point of view, than if Egypt were to be a British Possession, kept in subjection by force and requiring in time of peace a large permanent garrison.160
This pleased no one. In Egypt Zaghlul wanted real independence, not the kind of veiled protectorate that Milner was offering, and their discussions led nowhere.161 In London the service ministers and their professional advisers, Montagu in his capacity as Secretary of State for India, as well as the Australian government, protested that an independent Egypt would no longer be a secure link in the chain of imperial communications, and Milner’s terms would encourage nationalists in other parts of the empire to agitate even more loudly for independence.162 Milner’s response was to remind his colleagues of some political realities. The cost of remaining in Egypt without the consent of the Egyptians would be high. Not only would the existing army of occupation have to be maintained for an indefinite period at something like its present strength, but the hostility of the Egyptian public ‘threatens to paralyse the administration.’163 When a second round of negotiations failed to remove the deadlock, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Edmund Allenby, decided that the only way out of the stalemate was for the British to impose a settlement.164 Confronted by an intransigent High Commissioner who threatened to resign, and an equally intransigent nationalist movement in Cairo, the Cabinet capitulated. In February 1922 they issued a unilateral declaration ending the protectorate and placing Egypt on a new political path. Henceforth Egypt was to be a constitutional monarchy with its own parliament. But the country’s new-found independence was to be circumscribed by four reservations, each designed to ensure that in the future the British could maintain control over those aspects of Egyptian policy that mattered to them. They would remain responsible for the defence of Egypt against external aggression, they would exercise control over foreign interests inside the country, they would continue to govern the Sudan, and they would maintain forces inside Egypt to safeguard the Suez Canal.165 The declaration did bring an end to the immediate crisis, but it was to be another fourteen years before the British secured what they really wanted, an Anglo-Egyptian alliance that would place their interests on a secure and permanent footing.166 In the meantime they continued to maintain, as Amery insisted, that ‘Egypt isn’t England and that if the Egyptians want its own government it must be on terms of co-operating with us.’167
The British were more successful in finding local collaborators willing to work with them in Mesopotamia and Palestine. In December 1920, the Cabinet agreed that a new Middle Eastern Department should be established within the Colonial Office which would be responsible for the administration of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Aden, and policy towards other Arab areas within the British sphere of influence. The Foreign Office would remain responsible for relations with Egypt, Syria, Persia, and the Hijaz.168 Three months later Churchill, now the Colonial Secretary, was sent to Cairo and Jerusalem, with instructions to re-order the way in which the British ran their Middle Eastern empire so as to reduce its cost.169 The British had promised the Arabs independence during the war, and unless they made good their promise it was unlikely that the Middle East would ever become the peaceful bastion of the empire that the British sought.170 In Iraq his solution was to place a Hashemite prince, Feisal, on the throne as a client ruler. Faisal had originally been earmarked as the Arab ruler of Syria but had been unceremoniously bundled out of Damascus by the French in the summer of 1920.171 The suggestion that he should be placed on the throne in Baghdad was first made by Sir Arnold Wilson, the British High Commissioner in Baghdad, but even he recognized that ‘The difficulty was that Feisal was not only a Sunni but a foreigner. The Sunnis, though forming only one-third of the Arab population, the remainder being Shiahs, constituted the most vigorous and advanced elements, but it was doubtful if the Emir Feisal would secure the support of the Kurds, who were Sunnis and numbered about 400,000 in the mandatory area.’172 But the British could find no one better, and as his installation promised to allow a large reduction in the size and cost of the garrison, they went ahead with his candidacy.173 He was proclaimed king in August 1921, the British circumventing French objections by the specious insistence that he had been offered the throne in Baghdad by the popular demand of the Iraqi people. In reality it was a ‘demand’ which the British had themselves manufactured. Once he was installed, the British lost no time in signing a treaty with the new government. Iraq was an independent Arab state but one that existed under the auspices of the League of Nations, and during the period of the League of Nations mandate its government would be bound to accept the recommendations of British officials and the High Commissioner.174 In signing the treaty the British were in effect reverting to the Ottoman policy of allowing the Sunni Arab minority of Iraq to govern the rest of the population. Feisal stayed loyal to the British, because he knew that, in the eyes of the people he ruled, he was tolerated, but not loved. As the British army commander in Mesopotamia told a visiting officer, Feisal had the backing of the ‘desert chiefs…because and for as long as, he has the support and good will of the British.’175 In return the British could control Iraq’s foreign and defence policies, they could maintain military bases in the country, and they could place ‘advisers’ in key ministries to ensure that they maintained control over the oil deposits around Mosul and safeguarded the route to India.176 Even after Iraq became a full member of the League of Nations in 1932, its sovereign independence remained circumscribed by the extensive military and economic concessions it was compelled to make to the British.177
Pursuing a similar policy in Palestine was complicated by the fact that in November 1917 the British had issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine. They could not, therefore, establish an Arab client state to govern the whole country. So, in 1921 they bisected it. Palestine west of the river Jordan was put under direct British rule, but Feisal’s brother, the Emir Abdullah, was placed on the throne of a new state, Trans-Jordan, in that part of the former Ottoman province that was east of the river. The cost of empire would be reduced because there would be no British troops in Trans-Jordan. Like his brother, Abdullah was also to be guided by the advice of British political officers, and he was to raise a force of local levies, the Arab Legion, who would be commanded by British officers and paid for by a British subsidy. Otherwise the only direct British military involvement in the country would be the establishment of several aerodromes from which an RAF squadron would be able to conduct policing operations as necessary.178 Churchill assured his colleagues that his arrangements with Abdullah ‘had been made with the express intention of excluding any extension of Zionist activity into Trans-Jordania.’179 But that did not prevent the outbreak of serious intercommunal rioting in Palestine in May 1921 when Arabs demonstrated against the continuation of Jewish immigration. The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, responded by announcing that henceforth Jewish immigration would be restricted according to the economic capacity of the country to absorb new settlers.180 Churchill then asked the Cabinet to review its policy on Palestine. The British garrison cost £3.3 million annually, and ‘It cannot be doubted that this expense is almost wholly due to our Zionist policy.’181 They had two choices. They could either withdraw the Balfour Declaration, end, or at least slow down the pace of Jewish immigration, and establish an Arab national government in the country. Or they could carry on as they were. The choice was between which ethnic group they believed was most likely to be loyal servants of Britain’s imperial interests, and they opted for the Zionists.182 Two years later the Baldwin government agreed that Britain had to retain control of Palestine not because they were committed Zionists, but because they were committed imperialists. The Air and Naval Staffs feared that if a hostile power occupied Palestine, they would be in a position to sever one of the most vital arteries in Britain’s lines of imperial communications.183 Only the General Staff dissented, warning that Palestine might actually be a source of weakness by increasing Britain’s commitments and making calls upon the Egyptian garrison. But even they admitted that while relations with Ankara were uncertain and much of Arabia remained in the state of unrest, the British should remain. Ministers agreed. If the British withdrew either the French, the Italians, or the Turks would replace them, and any such development would be injurious to British interests.184 There were further internal disturbances in Palestine in 1929, but the country remained manageable with a tiny British presence until the Arab population lost patience with continued Jewish immigration and mounted a major revolt against British rule between 1936 and 1939.
In Ireland the government had two choices: either to impose Crown Colony government and martial law or talk to the rebels. Lloyd George did send troop reinforcements, but they were meant to be part of his bargaining position, a threat that he could hang over the insurgent leaders.185 His bluff worked. The two sides agreed a truce which came into operation on 11 July and opened the way for formal negotiations. Once again, the British clung to those parts of the status quo that were vital to their imperial security, while being flexible on other issues. Southern Ireland was given Dominion status, but Ulster was not to be coerced into joining it, and the new Irish Free State was forbidden from erecting tariffs against British goods. The Cabinet insisted, ‘From the point of view of the naval and military security of these Islands there must be no separate Irish Navy, Army, or Air Force, and the Irish harbours and creeks must remain under British control’.186 The terms the British negotiators offered their Southern Irish therefore included the stipulation that:
The common concern of Great Britain and Ireland in the defence of their interests by land and sea shall be mutually recognised. Great Britain lives by sea-borne food; her communications depend upon the freedom of the great sea routes. Ireland lies at Britain’s side across the seaways north and south that link her with the sister nations of the Empire, the markets of the world and the vital sources of her food supply. In recognition of this fact, which nature has imposed and no statesmanship can change, it is essential that the Royal Navy alone should control the seas around Ireland and Great Britain, and that such rights and liberties should be accorded to it by the Irish State as are essential for naval purposes in the Irish harbours and on the Irish coasts.187
Negotiations began in the middle of October 1921 and by the time they were concluded in December the British had got what they most wanted. The unity of the empire was maintained by admitting the Irish Free State as a Dominion. British strategic interests were safeguarded by allowing the British to man the fixed defences of Lough Swilly, Belfast Lough, Queenstown, and Berehaven.188 When the anti-treaty faction broke into open rebellion in Dublin in an effort to overturn the settlement in June 1922, British ministers insisted that ‘the Provisional Government must be supported in every way’, and agreed to provide its troops with field guns and ammunition to suppress the rebels.189
The war had also compelled the British to reconfigure their relationship with their Dominions. Since the late nineteenth century each Dominion had been responsible for its own internal security, and from 1911 Dominion governments had the right to be represented at the CID when issues touching their interests were discussed.190 This policy was continued after 1919.191 But before 1914 there had been strict limits to the British government’s willingness to consult them. This was never more clearly demonstrated than in August 1914, when the London government declared war on their behalf without any prior reference to them. During the war they gave unstintingly of their wealth and manpower. By 1918 three-quarters of a million Dominion soldiers were serving in the imperial army, and a greatly enlarged Indian army, numbering over a million men, bore much of the burden of defeating the Ottomans in the Middle East. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada also funded their own war efforts without British support. This gave British propagandists ample scope to paint a picture of the empire as united in a common cause, and many senior British officials hoped that this degree of cooperation could be perpetuated after the war. Since 1909 the Admiralty had been pursuing the goal of creating a unified Imperial Navy to which the Dominions would make a major contribution and in May 1918 the Admiralty prepared an ambitious scheme to create a unified post-war navy under the centralized command, both in peace and war, of the Admiralty in London.192 The army and air force hoped to follow a similar path. Sir Frederick Sykes, the first CAS, told the Imperial War Cabinet that in any future war the very existence of the British Empire would depend primarily on its air force, and so it behoved them to create a unified imperial air force.193 Following the disaster at Kut the General Staff in London had been given a large measure of control over the disposition of India’s forces, a state of affairs they hoped to perpetuate in the post-war world. They would then have a permanent call on a greatly enlarged Indian army, paid for by Indian taxpayers, to garrison Britain’s new empire in the Middle East.194
These plans to flew in the face of new imperial realities. Demographic, cultural and economic links and strategic dependence did keep the Dominions tied to Britain both before and after the war.195 But the very fact that the Dominions had, since the middle of the nineteenth century, been given a large degree of domestic autonomy, with the government in London only retaining control over matters relating to defence, constitutional changes, and external relations, had also allowed them to develop their own provincial identities within the larger British world, and the war hastened that process. By 1917–18, spurred on by their own sacrifices, Dominion leaders were increasingly reluctant to follow London’s lead blindly. They demanded a bigger say over the empire’s policy. Lloyd George, anxious to extract still more resources from them, had to accede to their wishes by summoning an Imperial War Conference which met twice, in 1917 and 1918. In 1917 the British accepted that their relations with the Dominions would have to be placed on a new footing. They would be given a new status as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth, and that new arrangements would have to be put in place so that they could be continuously consulted about, and given a proper voice in, formulating the empire’s foreign policy.196 Just how seriously Lloyd George took this declaration is debatable, for when it came to negotiating the armistice in November 1918 he ignored the Dominions, and it was only after fierce protests from Prime Ministers W. M. Hughes of Australia and Sir Robert Borden of Canada that the Dominions were given representation on the British Empire delegation at the peace conference. This ensured that at least a facade of imperial unity was maintained during the conference, and that South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand secured League of Nations mandates over those German colonies their troops had occupied.197
When proposals to maintain more nearly unified imperial armed forces were aired at the Imperial War Cabinet in June 1918, the Dominion Premiers gave them a cool reception. They had vetoed the idea that their troops should be absorbed into British formations, insisting that they must be organized into independent formations, serving alongside rather than under their British counterparts. In August 1918 they also made it plain that they would not surrender control of their own ships to an Imperial Naval Authority based in London.198 The most that they were willing to do was to accept a visit by a senior British naval officer, and to discuss with him how to maintain unity in such matters as training, administration, and organization.199 In 1919 Lord Jellicoe was sent on a tour of the Dominions and India, and as a sweetener the British offered surplus vessels free of charge to any of the Dominions who wanted them.200 But the bribe was not enough. In the post-war world political developments within the Dominions called into question the strength of links with London. Wartime governments, often of a distinctly Conservative hue, were swept aside in the post-war economic slump by politicians and parties committed to asserting their national independence and, like the British, intent on reducing defence spending in the hope that it would facilitate their own economic recovery.201
Similar forces were at work in India. The 1919 Government of India Act gave India a new constitution. The Viceroy remained responsible to the Secretary of State in London, but the appointed members of his Executive Council now included three Indians. The pre-war Legislative Council was replaced by a Legislative Assembly whose members were elected on the basis of a property qualification. It had considerable powers over domestic issues, including voting supplies, but control of key matters, including foreign policy and defence, were retained in the hands of British officials, although the Assembly could pass resolutions on them. In December 1920 Montagu warned that ‘in India, no less than in the United Kingdom, a point has been reached when economy in every branch of the administration is essential.’ High taxation was particularly dangerous in India because taxes were not imposed with the agreement of the representatives of the people and ‘a high level of taxation maintained for purposes which India strongly argues are not in India’s best interests, forms a ready weapon for the extremist agitator in his campaign for fomenting racial hatred and can only form a grave political danger.’202 Thus the British knew that if they were to retain the loyalty of the Indian political classes, they had to contain military spending. But if they did so, and if they acquiesced in reductions in the size and limited the roles of the Indian army, India would lose much of its strategic value. These issues were worked through in discussions surrounding the recommendations of a report on the post-war Indian army prepared by Lord Esher. Esher, rightly seen as the eminence grise behind many of the reforms that had transformed the Edwardian army, wanted India’s military resources to be placed under the War Office’s control.203 But Montagu and the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, understood that, as long as the Indian taxpayer paid for the Indian army, doing that would fly in the face of political realities.204 In September 1920 Chelmsford warned that:
the great bulk of educated opinion in India is opposed to our undertaking extensive obligations in regard to overseas garrisons, and the subject has already attracted considerable attention in the Press and on the platform. The Turkish Peace Terms are universally unpopular, not only among Mohamedans, but among Hindus. Further, moderate opinion, including many Europeans, considers India is being exploited in being asked to provide for service outside India an unreasonably large proportion of troops now employed for Imperial purposes, since it is clear that no similar demand has been made on the Dominions, and that all British troops were demobilised as quickly as possible, with the inevitable result that, in case of trouble, the increased demands must be met from India and not from home.205
His warning was soon justified, for when the Assembly met for the first time in March 1921 it lost no time in passing a resolution that henceforth the army in India should not as a rule be employed outside of the sub-continent except for purely defensive purposes, with the consent of the Viceroy and in a grave emergency, or if the British taxpayer footed the bill.206 The Indian government bowed to this reality, and June 1922 a CID sub-committee examining India’s defence requirements agreed that ‘the Indian Army cannot be treated as if it were absolutely at the disposal of His Majesty’s Government for service outside India’.207 Indian troops deployed as imperial garrisons outside India would have to be paid for either by the British taxpayer or by the colonial government concerned. India was no longer ‘an inexhaustible reservoir from which men and money could be drawn towards the support of Imperial resources or in pursuance of Imperial strategy.’208
The March 1921 resolution also included the stipulation that henceforth Indians should be allowed to serve as commissioned officers alongside Europeans. The pace and extent of the Indianization of the Indian army proved to be a recurrent source of discord throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1857–8 British rule had been shaken almost to its foundations by a revolt of disaffected sepoys. Ever since then the British had ensured that they maintained sufficient British units in India to deal with any similar rising. ‘The disposition and layout of the [army’s] cantonments’, Churchill insisted in 1919 ‘must be conceived from the same point of view, i.e., to make the small British forces with their powerful weapons secure from a mutiny of the Indian or local troops, to enable them to dominate the country in ordinary times, and to hold out in an emergency until they are relieved.’209 Indianization might threaten that bastion, and, the British concluded, it therefore behoved them to go very slowly. In 1922 the C-in-C of the Indian army, Sir Henry Rawlinson, proposed that the process should begin in 1925, and proceed in three stages, each lasting for fourteen years, and be completed by 1967.210 Lloyd George and Curzon thought even that was too much, too soon. Curzon, a former Viceroy, insisted that ‘If these proposals were given effect to, our military position in India would be permanently impaired. The establishment of an Indian Army officered by Indians would be a challenge to our rule in India, and we had no intention of surrendering it.’211 The most he would accept was the Indianization of four units as an experiment and that ‘no promise should be made of further Indianisation unless and until that experiment has proved successful.’212 This figure was later increased to eight units, and in 1927 ministers agreed to a corresponding increase in the number of Indians to be admitted to the officer cadet colleges in Britain.213 But these proposals were intended to delay, not hasten, Indianization. Ministers and officials in London and Delhi agreed that ‘there should be no further extension of Indianization until the results of Indianizing the eight selected units could be estimated. As this would take some 25 years, the proposals of the Government of India were probably the least objectionable that could be devised.’214 They knew that such limited measures would not satisfy Indian aspirations, ‘But we shall be keeping the ground fully occupied, and we shall be able to reply with truth for many years to come that we are doing our best to meet Indian susceptibilities.’215 They were right to think that these measures would not satisfy Indian aspirations. Indian critics of the Raj interpreted them as a symptom of their general insincerity when they spoke about working to help India to achieve self-government.216 In 1931 Indian nationalist representatives at a Round Table conference in London which had been called to consider future constitutional developments in the sub-continent, wanted a further reduction in the size of the British garrison. The C-in-C, Sir Philip Chetwode, was dismissive. The northwest frontier still had to be garrisoned and ‘Events in India during the past two years belie the view that, by reason of the Reforms, the activities of the more ardent politicians will be directed more towards the development of self-government than towards agitation against British rule; and with the best will in the world it cannot be truthfully said that the internal situation has not deteriorated during the past decade.’217 The Government of India endorsed Chetwode’s view, but did so reluctantly. They knew that the taxation needed to support the army constituted a big stick with which their nationalist opponents could beat them. This produced a situation ‘in which a painfully heavy burden of taxation is accompanied by an extremely meagre standard of expenditure on beneficent activities. Such conditions may well render the middle and lower classes in this country, already showing signs of restlessness, dangerously susceptible to revolutionary and subversive propaganda.’218 But for the time being the status quo could be maintained.
If India were now on the road to Dominion status, there was some disagreement as to just what meaning could be ascribed to its ultimate destination. When he learnt of the security guarantee that the British and Americans had offered France in 1919, the South African Premier, General Louis Botha, suggested that some of the Dominions might prefer to withhold their agreement and remain neutral if it ever became operative. That, Botha insisted, ‘is inevitable, and flows from the status of independent nationhood of the Dominions’.219 Lloyd George was ‘greatly staggered’ and Balfour believed that neutrality would be a constitutional impossibility, because:
it is within the admitted right of every free parliament to vote war estimates or not to vote them, to raise armies or not to raise them. But unless and until they formally desert the Empire all the Dominions must, in the matter of peace and war, share its international status. South Africa can no more be at peace when Great Britain is fighting, than Great Britain can be a peace when South Africa is fighting. If one of us is attacked, all are threatened.220
But post-war politics in some of the Dominions called Balfour’s dictum into question. South Africa and Canada were both divided on ethnic lines. They were, according to one senior Foreign Office official, ‘mixed grills’, in contrast to Australia and New Zealand, the ‘ “all-British” dominions.’221 South African society was bitterly divided and not only on ethnic lines, for in 1914 elements within the Afrikaner population had rebelled rather than support the war effort. In Canada the division was between the French and Anglophone communities, and in 1917 there were riots in French-speaking Canada when the government tried to impose military conscription. In both countries after the war leading ministers knew that they had to tread a delicate line between loyalty to the empire and subservience to the government in London.222 Leading Canadian politicians, and in particular William Mackenzie King, Prime Minister between 1921 to 1930 and 1935 to 1948, hated the waste and suffering of war, and knew that nothing was more likely to tear Canadian society apart than involvement in another European war at Britain’s behest, and in which it was not clear beyond all doubt that Canada’s own security was at risk. King was not an isolationist, and his priority was not to keep Canada neutral in any war. But he knew that he had to do his utmost to support those who were working for peace so that Canadians would not be faced by the awkward choice of whether or not to follow a British lead.223 Canada’s attitude towards the British connection was aptly summarized by its permanent representative to the League of Nations, when he told an Australian diplomat in 1926 that ‘the Canadian’s slogan is “Equal partnership status within the British Group”’.224 Any Canadian politician who demanded less would quickly be disowned by his own people.225
Neither Australia nor New Zealand experienced the same tensions that beset Canada and South Africa, and both were more willing to cooperate with the British government, not least because they realized that ultimately their own security rested upon the Royal Navy, just as their economic prosperity was dependent on their trade links with Britain. After visiting both countries in 1928 Leopold Amery, the Colonial and Dominions Secretary, believed that ‘If Imperial sentiment is strong in Australia, in New Zealand it is a passion, almost a religion.’226 But that did not mean that they were willing to be subservient to Britain, not least because there were some aspects of British policy that seemed to run contrary to their own regional interests. In 1921, contrary to their wishes, the British abrogated the Anglo-Japanese treaty. A year later they failed to consult them during the Chanak crisis. In 1923 they were similarly ignored during the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Lausanne, and in 1924 they were not consulted when the Labour government decided to stop work on the Singapore naval base. But what especially annoyed them was the realization that, whether they were consulted or not, they were so dependent on the British connection that on major issues they had no option other than to follow London’s lead.227
The 1921 and 1923 Imperial Conferences, and the intervening Chanak crisis in 1922, fixed the pattern of Anglo-Dominion defence cooperation for the remainder of the inter-war period. Balfour had assumed that constitutional niceties would trump political realities. The Dominion’s response to the Chanak crisis showed he was wrong. They would no longer blindly follow the British lead. In September 1922, the British seemed to be on the point of going to war against Turkey. Without any prior warning or briefing, they asked the Dominions for military support. All but New Zealand temporized or refused.228 The limits to which the Dominions were prepared to go were explained by Hughes. ‘The Empire’, he asserted:
ought not to be pushed into a war. The Dominions ought not to be asked whether they will associate themselves with Britain after Britain has in effect committed them. And above all they should not be asked to join in an unnecessary or unjust war. Once the war is begun, no one can say where it will end. We are a peace-loving democracy. We have been through a dreadful ordeal in which we hope that you and the world will agree we played our part worthily. In a good cause we are prepared to venture our all; in a bad one, not a single man. In our own defence and in that of the Empire we are quite ready to fight, but we must know where we are going.229
The 1921 and 1923 conferences determined the limits of what they were prepared to do by way of defence cooperation. The 1921 conference accepted that each Dominion must be free to make up its own mind about the size and cost of its own defence forces. But within that framework they would try to create forces that were equipped and organized on the same lines as their British counter-parts, and that were trained to operate on a common doctrine to facilitate cooperation in any future war if their government chose to join the British in a common imperial war effort. This became a staple of future discussions every time imperial defence cooperation was aired at future conferences.230 Dismayed by the fact that they had not been consulted during either the Chanak crisis or during the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Lausanne, at the 1923 Imperial Conference the Dominions asserted their right to accept or reject any foreign policy decisions brokered on behalf of the empire by the imperial government in London. That marked the end of British attempts to dictate a common foreign policy to the Dominions. Instead, the conference reflected the more limited notion of strategic cooperation that had been expressed by Hughes. As the published account made clear, it was ‘a conference of representatives of the several Governments of the Empire; its views and conclusions on Foreign Policy, as recorded above, are necessarily subject to the action of the Governments and Parliaments of the various portions of the Empire, and it trusts that the results of its deliberations will meet with their approval.’231 In deference to Canadian pressure the conference accepted that the Dominions had the right to make bilateral treaties when their own particular national interests were concerned.232 The conference also passed a series of formal resolution that underpinned imperial defence policy down to 1939. To provide for the adequate defence of the empire, delegates agreed that cooperation between its various components was essential, but it also ‘expressly recognises that it is for the Parliaments of the several parts of the Empire, upon the recommendations of their respective Governments, to decide the nature and extent of any action which should be taken by them.’ Subject to that overriding provision, the organization and maintenance of the empire’s defence forces was to be based on four principles: each part of the empire was responsible for its own local defence. Adequate provision had to be made to defend the sea-lanes linking the empire together and it was also, therefore, necessary to maintain an adequate number of naval bases and facilities to repair and refuel the fleet. Each Dominion was also expected to do whatever it could to develop its own air force, and, as far as practicable, ensure its compatibility with the RAF.233 What that meant in practice was that the Admiralty had abandoned any idea of establishing a single unified imperial navy, and accepted that:
With the growth of the Dominions in national status and sentiment, the only system of Naval cooperation which can command sufficient permanent goodwill and support is one under which each Dominion possesses and controls its own naval Forces. The Admiralty whole-heartedly endorses this principle, not only on political and constitutional grounds, but also because it will develop new centres of Naval strength, and new bases for the Navy of the Empire which are essential to the strategy of the future.234
They presented proposals that Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa should maintain, or in the case of Canada create, small squadrons of light cruisers as a step towards protecting their own maritime trade.235 In 1921 the Air Staff had emphasized that if cooperation across the empire was to be possible in wartime, the air forces of Britain and the Dominions should seek to standardize their training, doctrine, and equipment to the greatest possible extent.236 In 1923 they went further and prepared for each of the Dominions detailed plans outlining the ideal shape and size of their peacetime air forces.237 These were never circulated to the Dominions, presumably because they looked too much like a British diktat.238 Instead, they encouraged commonality by agreeing to train Dominion personnel in Britain.239 Privately, Trenchard still hankered after greater unity of effort, telling the Australian External Affairs liaison officer in London in 1925 that he was:
a little grieved at the fact that none of the Dominions has ever yet invited a Senior Air Force Officer to visit them and discuss their Air Force or Air Defence generally in the same way as Kitchener, Jellicoe and others had done in the past from the Army and Navy point of view.
His idea is that eventually there will be an Imperial Air Force run on much the same lines as the Navy, with Far Eastern, Indian, Near Eastern and Mediterranean Air Fleets. Units would be mobile and will be moved about in the same way as Fleet units are now moved. He deprecates the permanent telling off of a certain air unit or formation to the specialised defence of a certain area.240
The creation of a single imperial defence and foreign policy had been comparatively simple during the war when the different parts of the empire confronted a common enemy and a common danger. It became far more difficult when that enemy and that danger had disappeared. After 1919 Dominion nationalism, the isolationism of the non-English-speaking communities in Canada and South Africa, and the barely concealed hostility of the people of Southern Ireland, pulled in one direction, whereas British ministers and the British service departments pulled in another. Achieving even a degree of agreement on imperial grand strategy meant that the British government would first have to come to terms with Dominion nationalism. After a visit to Canada in 1926, the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Esmé Howard, concluded that ‘We cannot pretend indefinitely to keep a country of the size of Canada, with 10 million inhabitants and vast potential resources, in a condition of political inferiority. Personally, I don’t know why we should want to, but there are always men in London who look upon any move towards political equality by the Dominions as an act of treason to the Empire.’241
Ultimately British policy-makers disposed of the problem with some finesse. ‘The more one sees of it’, Hankey concluded in 1922, ‘the more certain one becomes that the British Empire can only work on a basis of goodwill.’242 By 1926 they had re-created the basis of that goodwill. They accepted that never again would they be able to command Dominion resources, but they did believe that with care and patience they could manage them. Relying on the fact that whatever the constitutional niceties were, the Dominions would continue to be bound to Britain by a combination of shared cultural assumptions, emigration and family ties, and economic and military dependence, in 1925 and 1926 they took two significant steps to accede to Dominion susceptibilities. As early as 1907 some Dominion politicians had asked Whitehall to liberate them from the demeaning over-lordship of the Colonial Office. What they wanted was a separate ministry that would reflect their status as self-governing components of the empire. In 1925 the Baldwin Cabinet finally agreed to do so.243 A new Dominion Office was established so no longer were they to be subordinate to the Colonial Office, although that said, the reality was that until 1929 the same minister, Leo Amery, served as both Colonial and Dominions Secretary.244 A year later the 1926 Imperial Conference issued a declaration, composed with great care by Balfour. It was designed specifically to meet the demands of South Africa, Canada, and the Irish Free State, each of whom wanted a public declaration of their autonomous status, a declaration that they needed to quieten domestic divisions in their own fragile communities. Balfour gave them what they wanted. The British government now publicly conceded that the Dominions were autonomous communities which were in no way subordinate to the British government, and that their association with the empire was a voluntary one.245 Five years later the Statute of Westminster granted each Dominion formal independence and constitutional equality by renouncing the right of the imperial parliament to legislate for them except at their explicit request.246 This did not presage the imminent break-up of the British Empire. Rather it meant that, at one and the same time, the Dominions could support the cause of imperial unity, expressed through their allegiance to the monarchy, assert their own separate nationhood, and continue to enjoy the benefits of access to British markets for their exports, to British finance for their capital investments, and to the protection afforded them by the Royal Navy.247 It also meant, as Austen Chamberlain understood, that ‘The conduct of foreign affairs in present conditions presents indeed an entirely novel problem. In matters of this importance Great Britain can no longer act as the spokesman of the Empire unless with the individual assent of the other governments.’248 The bonds uniting Britain and the Dominions were now those of sentiment and self-interest.
As the declarations agreed at the 1923 Imperial Conference had made clear, it was up to each Dominion Parliament to decide how much, or how little, it should spend on defence. Each chose to spend very little. In 1925–6, whereas the British were spending 51s 1d per capita on defence, Australia was only spending 27s 2d, New Zealand, 12s 11d, Canada 5s 10d, and South Africa just 2s 6d.249 The result was that none of the Dominions could boast armed forces on the same scale as those of India. The closest was Canada, whose militia had a nominal establishment of 130,000, although in peacetime it recruited only half that number. The Australian field force could in theory muster 180,000 men, but in peacetime it maintained a nucleus of just 45,000 men. The South African forces were also far stronger on paper than in reality. Their land forces had a notional strength of 192,000 all ranks, but only the 7,158 men of the Active Citizen Force were permanently embodied, and the largest force that the Union was likely to be able to despatch beyond its frontiers was a single brigade.250 At sea only the Australians made anything like a significant contribution to the empire’s naval forces. In 1926 the Royal Australian Navy had three cruisers, three destroyers, three sloops, and a repair ship in commission, and a cruiser, a flotilla leader, eight destroyers, and a sloop in reserve. New Zealand paid for two cruisers, and Canada had just two destroyers, both of which were so badly maintained that the Admiralty had written them off as having no further fighting value.251 South Africa had no naval force as such, but it had agreed to take over responsibility for the landward defence of the naval base at Simonstown. By contrast, the Royal Navy furnished twenty-two battleships and battlecruisers, four aircraft carriers, forty-two cruisers, 160 destroyers, and fifty-five submarines.252
This did not mean that there was no cooperation between the British and Dominions armed forces. It meant that cooperation was closest where it was cheap. It focused upon the adoption of common forms of organization and doctrines, disseminated through a common system of staff training and military education above the level of officer cadet colleges, supplemented by some limited exchanges of personnel.253 The 1926 Imperial Conference reiterated the defence resolutions of the 1923 conference, but they fell a long way short of creating a unified imperial grand strategy for the empire. Each Dominion was responsible for its own local defence, but none of the resolutions agreed in 1923 or 1926 made any ‘mention of collective responsibility for Empire defence, and the inference, undoubtedly drawn by many of the Dominions, is that the United Kingdom would automatically shoulder the bulk of responsibility for the defence of the Empire in a major war. This has resulted’, the COS concluded in 1929, ‘in Imperial Defence arrangements being widely regarded as arrangements by the United Kingdom for the Defence of the Empire.’254 The political leaders of the Irish Free State, South Africa, and Canada were insistent that never again would they allow their countries to be committed to war solely at the behest of the government in London.255 They would only fight alongside the British if their own parliaments had voted to do so when the time came.
That did not mean that the British could not count on their support. But it did mean that British defence planners could not make plans in the sure and certain knowledge that, whatever the circumstances, they would be able to command Dominion men, money, and materials.256 When Hankey took up the issue in 1928, he accepted that it would be a mistake to assume that the Dominions would automatically agree to despatch forces overseas to take part in offensive operations beyond their own frontiers in wartime. But he did want the Dominions Office to try to persuade their governments to agree at the very least to protect the ports and coaling stations upon which the mobility of the fleet and ultimately the defence of the empire, rested.257 The Dominions Office thought that even this would be a step too far. Their priority was not to plan for some hypothetical war which lay in the future, but to placate nationalist tendencies in the Dominions by avoiding trying to enforce unpopular obligations on them.258 Baldwin put a temporary end to the debate by effecting a compromise. The Dominions would not be forced into military arrangements in peacetime, but British planning for war would proceed on the assumption that they would maintain their own security and cooperate with the British in wartime.
In the absence of any immediate and pressing threat, neither the Dominion governments nor Indian nationalist politicians were willing to increase their defence efforts, or to see control of their resources pass to London. For their part ministers in London played a long game. They avoided making demands on their imperial subjects that they knew, in the short term, would arouse their resentment and bring them only marginal immediate gains. They did so in the hope that when a real threat to imperial security did emerge, India and the Dominions would indeed offer them the help they needed. India and the Dominions represented a great reserve of strength which the British expected to be able to draw upon in a great imperial emergency, provided they did not alienate the governments and peoples by arrogantly insisting that they had the right to do so without let or hindrance. The inability of the British government to secure control of the Dominions military and naval resources after 1919 did not represent a ‘decline’ in British power. Rather it signalled a return to the pre-1914 norm. Although the Dominions were willing to configure their armed forces in ways that would facilitate cooperation with the British in wartime, they were no more willing after 1919 than they had been before 1914 to allow the British government to take control of their naval and military resources in peacetime. Thus, in 1913, for example, the Canadian parliament had rejected outright a bill proposed by their government to build dreadnoughts for the Royal Navy.259 After 1919 the Dominions remained, as they had been before 1914, a latent resource that the British government would be able summon to their aid provided they could persuade their governments, and through them their electorates, that the cause for which they were called upon to help was one that was worth fighting for.
By l921 British policy-makers had met with very mixed success in their efforts to create a new world order that would ensure the peace and security of their empire. Germany’s power was, for the time being, much diminished, but its fundamental basis had not been destroyed, and the Versailles settlement had left many Germans with a real sense of grievance that could only be assuaged by wide-ranging treaty revisions. But that was something that the French would not countenance, and it was something that the League of Nations was, in any case, and despite the hopes invested in it, unlikely to be able to deliver. The settlement in the Middle East was similarly imperfect. Two other powers who had effectively been excluded from meaningful participation in the process of peace-making, Turkey and the Soviet Union, also rejected the legitimacy of the terms that the victor powers had imposed on them. The British were much more successful in overcoming challenges from within their empire. This was partly because they were relatively much stronger than those groups who were challenging their paramountcy. But it also owed much to the fact that after they had tried and failed to maintain their position by brute force, they had the good sense to accept that dictation would not produce a long-term and viable settlement. That could only be achieved through negotiations. It was a lesson that eventually they were able to apply elsewhere. The next chapter will consider how and why the British were able to overcome the imperfections in the peace settlement they had engineered by the end of 1921 and will begin by turning first to the third region of the world where they were anxious to establish a new regional balance, the Far East.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press. © David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0003
TNA CAB 23/46/43(23). Cabinet Conclusions, 31 July 1923.
N. Helmer, ‘Defence and ideology: the Anglo-Canadian military alliance in the 1930s’, International Journal, vol. 33 (1978), 596–7; D. C. Watt, ‘Imperial defence policy and imperial foreign policy, 1911–1939—a neglected paradox?’, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 1 (1963), 275.