The inability of British policy-makers in the 1930s to sustain the relatively benign international system that they had done so much to create in the 1920s and which contributed so much to the security of Britain and its empire can easily be explained by one simple fact. The powers challenging that system in the 1930s, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan had a great deal more hard power at their disposal than those which had challenged it in the 1920s, Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, and Kemalist Turkey. In the early 1930s Japan and Italy already had formidable armed forces and no one doubted that when Germany began to rearm it, too, would soon be able to muster a powerful army, navy, and air force. There is, as subsequent chapters will show, much truth in this. But it is not the whole explanation. In the 1920s British policy-makers were confident that they could create a stable, secure, and more prosperous post-war world. Peace and security would rest on two pillars. A carefully managed process of multilateral disarmament would leave Britain with sufficient air, land, and sea power to maintain the security of its empire, while British, and international, prosperity would be built on the restoration of peace and stable international exchange rates. The march of history seemed to be in one direction. The Washington treaties had brought stability to the Pacific. The Treaty of Lausanne and the Mosul settlement had done the same in the Middle East, while Locarno had taken much of the heat out of the most vexed post-war question of all, the relationship between France and Weimar Germany. Britain had returned to the gold standard in 1925, and the Kellogg-Briand pact, the London Naval treaty, and the impending World Disarmament Conference all suggested that the great powers agreed that big armaments and wars should be a thing of the past.
But between 1930 and 1933, at the very moment when Britain’s leaders most needed to feel confident about their power, that sense of confidence evaporated. The Great Depression threatened to undermine the economic basis of the post-war world order. Just days after the fall of the second Labour government and the formation of the National Government Maurice Hankey, who knew a thing or two about crises, decided that ‘We are living just now through the most serious crisis since the war and the future outlook is black.’1 The failure of the World Disarmament Conference made the future seem even blacker. It destroyed the belief that future peace could be ensured if sensible men of goodwill could be brought together to settle their differences by discussion and compromise. The emergence of Japan as a threat to stability in the Far East in 1931 and the advent to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany compelled British policy-makers, for the first time since 1918, to contemplate the possibility that within a finite time they might once again be involved in a great power war. The result was that the confidence in a better future that had so sustained them in the 1920s faded away, to be replaced by a much darker vision of the world. As the former Conservative Cabinet minister, Lord Eustace Percy, wrote, ‘there was no national idea in which we any longer believe. We have lost the easy self-confidence which distinguished our Victorian grandfathers and still distinguishes our American contemporaries.’2
The Great Depression began to engulf the USA, Europe, and most of the rest of the world in the winter of 1929–30. It started with a crash on the American stock market, and then spread so that it rapidly undermined international trade and dislocated the international economy. No country escaped its ramification. Deflation and depression were widespread as commodity prices and the production of manufactured goods dropped sharply, the volume of international trade contracted, business failures increased, per capita incomes fell, and unemployment bounded upwards. The Great Depression ended that brief period of multinational international collaboration signified by Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand pact. Democratic forms of government survived in those countries, France, Britain and its Dominions, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the USA, where they had deep pre-war roots. But elsewhere, in those countries where is had shallower roots dating back only to the post-1918 era, they were extinguished by radical right-wing movements. They offered their people a diet of hope consisting of anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, ethnic nationalism, and economic autarky. Japanese nationalists demanded a crusade against the West and the creation by force of an autarkic Japanese Empire in Asia. In Germany support for the Weimar Republic, which had always been fragile, rapidly fractured. By July 1931 the British ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold, reported that ‘I found an atmosphere which reminded me of the atmosphere in Berlin during the 12 day crisis preceding the outbreak of war.’3 In federal elections held in July 1932 the Nazi party emerged for the first time as the largest party in the Reichstag.
Britain took a different path. Far from splintering, the British political elite moved rapidly towards the centre ground of politics. MacDonald’s Labour government that had come to power in 1929 was committed to constitutionalism, but lacked anything like a realistic social democratic programme. In the summer of 1931 it proved incapable of dealing with the banking and budgetary crisis that engulfed Britain. On 24 August, the government resigned and was replaced by a National Government of Conservatives, Liberals, and a small rump of the Labour party. MacDonald remained Prime Minister, but most of his party, led by Arthur Henderson, went into opposition. The Labour government had already agreed to reduce defence spending as part of its austerity programme.4 The new administration carried that a step further by agreeing to introduce an austerity budget, raising taxes, and reducing expenditure, including spending on the armed forces.5 Wage cuts inflicted on the navy were so badly mismanaged that on 15 September they provoked a short-lived mutiny amongst the crews of the Atlantic fleet at Invergordon. Austen Chamberlain, the First Lord of the Admiralty, admitted that the episode ‘did immense damage to the credit of the country and the standing of the British Navy in the eyes of the world.’6 He was right. The mutiny only worsened the financial crisis, and on 21 September Britain was forced off the gold standard.7 In October, at the insistence of its Conservative members and their supporters who wanted to secure a working majority in the Commons, the National Government went to the country, campaigning on an anti-socialist and patriotic platform, and in favour of tariffs. Taking the decision to go to the country, MacDonald told the Cabinet that:
The purpose of the new government, he pointed out, would be to continue the work of setting the finances of the country in order and putting them on a sound foundation. It must keep certain obligations firmly in front of it, such as the balancing of the Budget, creating a favourable trade balance, stimulating home production, and taking both the domestic and international steps necessary to protect us against a recurrence of our difficulties. It must watch price movements, financial operations which are not in the interests of the whole nation, and even the operation of the cuts, and must have power to deal with problems as they arise. Quite specifically amongst those powers must be that of using a tariff should the industrial and financial conditions require it.8
They won an overwhelming majority, capturing nearly two-thirds of the votes cast and 554 of 615 seats in the Commons. Labour won a mere fifty-two seats. The election thus carried a step further a process begun in 1924, the creation of an anti-Labour majority centred on the Conservative party.9 It also marked the start of a period of Conservative hegemony in British politics that was to last until 1945. The leadership of the Labour party was destroyed. MacDonald and three of his colleagues sat in the National Government’s Cabinet, MacDonald as Prime Minister. Of those who remained loyal to the Labour party, all but one former Cabinet minister lost their seats. The sole survivor, George Lansbury, became the party’s new leader. The 1931 general election was, in many respects, a resounding vote of confidence in the political status quo. Whereas in Germany the collapse of prosperity was followed by an avalanche of voters who threw their support behind either extreme left-wing or extreme right-wing parties, the opposite happened in Britain. In the 1931 general election the parties supporting the National Government gained no fewer than 67 per cent of all votes cast. The Communist Party of Great Britain gained just 0.3 per cent of votes, and did not have a single MP. It did only marginally better in 1935, when a single Communist, William Gallacher, was returned to the Commons.10 The far right hardly did any better. British fascism did enjoy a brief period of success in 1932–4. The support afforded to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) by Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail gave the movement both a powerful mouthpiece and a veneer of respectability. Although it secretly received considerable financial backing from Mussolini, the violence that attended a major BUF rally at Olympia in June 1934 robbed it of any possibility that it might become a mass movement able to pose a realistic challenge to the two-party system that now dominated politics.11
With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that Baldwin and MacDonald were able, as they had been in the 1920s, to continue to make Britain safe for democracy. But the price they had to pay to do so was the need to take extreme care to avoid doing anything which they feared might alienate what they still believed was a dangerously volatile electorate. Even more than in the 1920s, therefore, when policy-makers were making decisions about the course of British grand strategy, they believed that they always had to maintain a weather eye on what they thought the electorate would, or would not, accept. This struck even experienced political observers. After a private meeting with a senior Foreign Office official, W. P. Crozier, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, recorded that ‘I was surprised to find how often in the conversation he suggested that the Foreign Office were afraid of “the country”, meaning sometimes the Daily Express and sometimes questions in the House of Commons, and sometimes a by-election [sic].’12 Insiders agreed. ‘We are a highly democratic nation’, Hankey wrote in 1934, ‘and Governments have to convince Parliament and people that their policy is right.’13
One of the shortcomings of the National Government was that senior ministers lacked both the will and the energy to persuade the electorate that habits of thought and policies that might have been appropriate in the 1920s were no longer so in the 1930s, and that the future course of British grand strategy would have to change if the security of Britain and its empire was to be maintained. The 1931 election was not just a landmark in British domestic politics. It also had a major impact on the future course of British grand strategy. The very magnitude of its majority constrained what the National Government could do, for the government owed the size of its victory in no small part to the fact that many former Liberal voters had switched their allegiance and voted for National Government candidates. But their support was always going to be conditional. In the 1920s many of them had espoused the ideas that underpinned the League of Nations, and they continued to do so well into the 1930s. Furthermore, in 1931 voting had taken place against a background of growing disillusionment with the outcome of the Great War. People had been promised a land fit for heroes to live in. What they had gotten was a land in which millions of unemployed struggled to exist. The message that a whole generation had been duped was driven home by a series of best-selling anti-war books, such as Vera Brittan’s Testament of Youth, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That. It was all too easy for ministers to believe that the outcome of the 1931 election had been a fluke that might not be repeated unless they worked hard to retain the support of those who had voted for them for the first time in 1931. If any were tempted to forget that message, bye-election losses to Labour soon reminded them. Ministers knew that their policies would have to pander to the liberal prejudices of many of their supporters, prejudices which included a marked distaste for going to war except in a very good cause. Consequently, whether they liked it or not, to outward appearances at least, they would have to support the principles of the League, and especially the causes of collective security and international disarmament. This was not always an easy path for them to tread, for there were plenty of backbench Tory MPs and newspaper editors who regarded the League as a sham and a snare that was all too likely to drag Britain into quarrels where its own interests were not at stake. What these critics had in common was a belief that they had to rescue the Conservative party from ‘pacifism’, ‘socialism’, and ‘coalitionism’, coupled with a belief that the League was futile and that the empire should be central to British policy.14 What none of them seemed ready to accept was a return to the balance of power politics of pre-1914 Europe. One reason why the League of Nations retained popularity was that it seemed to offer Britain a chance of avoiding specific security guarantees in favour of the much vaguer commitments enshrined in the Covenant.15 The French casualty toll during the Great War, 1.3 million dead, could be justified in French minds by the need to protect their homeland. The British death toll could not. The British public had gone to war believing they were fighting for abstract ideals, and when those ideals began to sour in their minds in the late 1920s, so they became increasingly disinclined to accept the need to repeat such sacrifices in the future.16 This meant that if political leaders were not prepared to work long and hard to persuade the public to change their minds, their freedom of action was significantly limited. In February 1938 General Sir Edmund Ironside, then GOC Eastern Command, and who two years later was to be CIGS, told an audience at King’s College London that:
A thing that was often forgotten by people who signed treaties was that there was no longer a question of a regular army going and doing what it was told to do. It was a question whether people would fight. The British people would not fight in the cause that was not in their hearts. To-day they had a small Regular Army which required to be reinforced by people who never thought of going into the Army. If they bound themselves by commitments they might find they were doing something which was against the will of the people.17
He was wrong to think that this factor was overlooked by British policy-makers. It was in fact one of the reasons why they were always so reluctant to enter the kind of alliance that the French sought. But what he did not say was that politicians did have the option to try to change ‘the will of the people’, but chose not to take it.
MacDonald was neither physically nor emotionally capable of producing the kind of decisive leadership that might steer his country successfully through the series of international crises that confronted it in the first half of the 1930s. Although he remained Prime Minister, he was effectively a prisoner of the Conservatives, for about 85 per cent of government supporters in the Commons were Tories.18 The 1931 crisis had left him disorientated. ‘I am pulled up by the roots and even what I believe in, in these new conditions, seems dead’, he wrote in his diary in November 1931.19 Deeply hurt by attacks on him from his former Labour colleagues, he was also increasingly prey to ill-health and failing eyesight. By the time he gave up the premiership in 1935 a civil servant who worked closely with him thought that ‘He is physically and mentally unable to compete.’20 He was a sick, lonely, and unhappy old man.21 He had set his hopes on making the World Disarmament Conference a success. Its failure and the resulting need to begin rearmament was a bitter pill for him to swallow. Baldwin succeeded him as premier in June 1935, but even before then he was the real power broker in the National Government. His main concerns remained focused, as they had always been, on domestic politics. The preservation of democratic norms remained his loadstar, and, although with the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that he was successful, that did not diminish the scale of the challenge that he believed he faced. Nor was he confident that he would win. Addressing the Empire Parliamentary Association which met in London in July 1935, he told the assembled delegates that ‘We know ourselves what difficult times we live in, we know equally and we are conscious of the fact, that with us—all of us at home and overseas—rests the responsibility whether this form of government will remain, or whether it will fail.’22 His political strengths also remained the same: his ability to understand and respond to the public mood, and his ability to manage and manipulate his colleagues. Austen Chamberlain, who had worked closely with him in the 1920s, presented an unflattering but essentially accurate portrait. ‘Yes, I should like to write about the real SB,’ he told one of his sisters:
but it is wise not to do so, for the SB whom we know does not fit in at any point with the picture which the public have made of him for themselves. They think him a simple, hard-working, unambitious man, not a ‘politician’ in the abusive sense in which they so often use the word, whom nothing but a stern sense of duty keeps at his ungrateful task, a man too of wide and liberal mind who has educated his party.
And we know him as self-centred, selfish and idle, yet one of the shrewdest not to say slyest politicians but without a constructive idea in his head and with an amazing ignorance of Indian and foreign affairs and of the real values of political life.23
Sir Neville Butler, who had served as one of his private secretaries, agreed that he was indeed ignorant of foreign affairs and that when he spoke about them, ‘he was definitely not at his ease. He did not enjoy talking to foreigners, except such as were personal friends’.24 During his third term in office as Prime Minister his prestige suffered badly because of his mishandling of the Hoare-Laval pact in December 1935. ‘The collapse of the prestige of Baldwin is one of the most remarkable episodes in political history’, wrote one journalist in March 1936. ‘For years he maintained his position by appearing to the populace as the supremely honest man. His mishandling of the Hoar-Laval incident bursts that bubble forever. To-day he is despised and distrusted by his own colleagues and has no moral command over his following.’25 Another observer, a senior member of his own party, did believe that ‘People still regard him with affection and trust him: they consider him “so honest”, etc.,’ but he, too, deplored his handling of foreign affairs, for ‘he has allowed things to drift and what a devilish and dangerous position we are in today as a result of his complacent disregard for what has been going on in Europe during the last 10 years or so!’26
Baldwin remained convinced that another great war would mean the end of civilization, for it would ‘convert Europe once again into a butcher’s shop.’27 What particularly animated him was the possibility that Britain might be subjected to aerial bombardment. In the same speech in which he told the Commons in November 1932 that ‘the bomber will always get through’, he also explained that ‘in the next war you will find that any town which is within reach of an aerodrome can be bombed within the first five minutes of war from the air’.28 In 1932 he told an American diplomatist that ‘the course we were now following was straight towards the destruction of our civilisation and that something radical had to be done about it unless we were all going down together’.29 Four years later his attitude was unchanged when he told a Cabinet Committee examining the state of Britain’s armed forces that:
whilst it was imperative now to see to the reconditioning of our forces, the whole object of our policy must always be the prevention of war. It had often been said that another great war would be the end of our civilisation. The Germans were a great and powerful people and if they and we were to come to blows it would bring down the shutters on Europe for the rest of our lives, and perhaps for all time.30
One criticism made of him was that he accepted too readily the limitations imposed by public opinion on foreign policy in the 1930s.31 As subsequent chapters will show, there is much truth in that judgement.
Baldwin had little time for the minutiae of administration, something that could not be said of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain’s younger half-brother, Neville Chamberlain. Neville Chamberlain was a master of administrative detail and, if he had none of Baldwin’s aura of benevolent paternalism, he was like him a shrewd political operator. But he was also willing to act while others waivered, and he was probably more responsible than any other senior Conservative politicians, including Baldwin, for engineering the creation of the National Government in August 1931.32 Chamberlain evoked very different impressions in those who worked with him. One Foreign Office official, who was certainly not one of his admirers, believed that he entirely lacked Austen’s charm and ‘was quite incapable of making any pleasant personal impression; he is a sort of robot.’33 Hankey agreed, once describing him as ‘a cold fish of a man with very little attraction,’34 while one of Hankey’s assistants thought him humourless and that he wore ‘the smallest bowler hat I have seen on the head of any leading politician.’35 But in others he evoked unbounded admiration. One Tory backbencher, who was one of his admirers, wrote in 1939 that ‘I am quite childish in my fanatical worship of the PM’, and found him ‘calm, self-assured and very amusing….’36 Chamberlain was a technocrat in politics. He saw his role as being first to identify and then to solve problems, and his position as Chancellor gave him a wide field over which to exert his talents. Unfortunately, his mastery of detail was allied to other characteristics which were to have a positively dangerous influence over the formulation of British grand strategy. ‘Chamberlain’, in the opinion of one of the CID’s assistant secretaries who was present during ministerial debates on defence policy in 1933–4, ‘has shown himself strangely obtuse in strategical questions, even ignorant.’37 But he was also ‘persistent, single-minded and very self-confident.’38 Allied to his ignorance was a willingness to interfere in matters outside his areas of real expertise, a narrow and often dogmatic style of decision-making, and a self-belief, amounting to an utter certainty in the correctness of his own opinions, even when they were based on little more than ill-considered prejudices.39
A few weeks after the 1931 general election Baldwin was satisfied that ‘the National Government was ‘welding’ much better than he had imagined possible, that the average ability was higher than in a party government….’40 Several of the ministries that would play major roles in formulating grand strategy were held by his Conservatives colleagues.
The Marquis of Londonderry, who went to the Air Ministry, had served briefly as a regular army officer before winning a Conservative seat in 1906, and succeeding his father as the seventh marquess in 1915. Immediately after the war he had served as a junior minister at the Air Ministry, when his cousin, Winston Churchill, was the Secretary of State. His political advancement was impeded by three things: an exaggerated sense of his own worth, a brittle sense of honour which meant that he took offence too easily, and an overweening faith in his own political judgement which was sometimes not justified. His elevation to the Cabinet owed much to his wife’s ambition and his own wealth. The couple entertained on a lavish scale at their London home, to the extent that Londonderry was accused behind his back of ‘catering his way to the Cabinet’.41 As Secretary of State for Air he showed himself to be politically inept in at least two respects. During the World Disarmament Conference he set himself up against the prevailing view and refused to countenance any suggestion that aerial bombing should be declared illegal. Then, after the collapse of the conference, and at a time when pressure was mounting on the government to begin rearmament, he seemed to be incapable of giving the Air Ministry a firm lead, and his colleagues had little faith in his competence.42 When his patron, MacDonald, was replaced by Baldwin as Prime Minister in June 1935, his time in high office was nearly up, and in November he was a casualty of Baldwin’s post-election reshuffle. But that did not mean the end of his political life, for he soon became one of several prominent upper-class socialites who preached the need for amicable relations with Germany. In October 1935 some of them formed the Anglo-German Fellowship. Not all its members were pro-Nazi sympathizers. But while the organization claimed to be apolitical, it was really a conduit through which the German government could spread its propaganda by encouraging prominent Britons, like Londonderry, to visit Germany where they were fed on a carefully contrived diet of Nazi propaganda.43
The new Secretary of State for War, Viscount Hailsham, who had been wounded and decorated during his service with a yeomanry regiment during the Anglo-Boer War, was a highly successful lawyer. He had served as Attorney-General in the Baldwin administrations in the 1920s and was soon being mentioned as a future Prime Minister. But he ended that possibility in 1928 when he accepted the Lord Chancellorship and a hereditary peerage. Between 1931 and 1935 he combined the offices of Secretary of State for War with the Leadership of the House of Lords. Although popular with the senior officers with whom he worked at the War Office, he had few real achievements to his credit, and was happy to return to his old office as Lord Chancellor, a post he held for three years, under first Baldwin, and then Neville Chamberlain.
The third service minister, the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell, had served briefly as a regular naval officer before marriage to an heiress enabled him to retire from the navy and enter politics as a Conservative MP in 1910. A friend of Baldwin, he served as a junior minister at the Admiralty in the early 1920s before spending eight years as the Conservative’s chief whip. The best-dressed man in the Commons, he was notable for his charm and sociability. He remained at the Admiralty from 1931 to 1936. His main achievement came in 1933, when he replaced the then First Sea Lord, Sir Frederick Field, with the outstanding naval officer of his generation, Sir Ernle Chatfield. His term as First Sea Lord was twice extended, and it was his length of service, as well as his forceful personality and wide grasp of strategic issues, that enabled him to dominate the proceedings of the COS committee in the mid-1930s. Personal relations between the Chiefs also improved markedly with the departure of Trenchard and Milne, with the result that by the middle of 1934, ‘The relationship between the services are a thousand times better now. Largely due to the Chiefs of Staff getting on so well…’ .44 Even so, some points of disagreement persisted, in particular the ‘air versus’ gun controversy over the defence of Singapore.45
The only National Liberal MP who held an office that gave him any significant influence over the formulation of grand strategy was Sir John Simon. He served as the Foreign Secretary until he was succeeded by Hoare in 1935. He had no special credentials for the job, and his period as Foreign Secretary was characterized by his already well-known lack of firm purpose. His bargaining power in the Cabinet was weakened by two factors: as the leader of the small National Liberal party which had defected from the Liberal party in 1931, he had few followers in the Commons, and in any case, MacDonald believed that he knew more about foreign policy than Simon did. He was not held in high regard either by his civil servants at the Foreign Office or by his Cabinet colleagues.46 Sir Robert Vansittart, his PUS, complained that ‘he is not straight, tells him one thing and then does another, goes behind his back, keeps him in the dark and on occasion lies to him.’47 Simon was a supreme logician. He could see every side of even the most complex question, but that very fact paralysed his powers of decision. The American ambassador in London told President Roosevelt that ‘he is not an executive, and is always inclined to fall back on legal hair-splitting, and excessively timid about assuming any kind of responsibility for action.’48 It was an opinion that MacDonald shared.49 It was also believed that he had little interest in disarmament and some officials thought that he would not have been upset if the Disarmament Conference had collapsed.50
Vansittart, who was to play a significant role in the development of British policy, had become the PUS in 1929 when he was only 49 years old. He was promoted over the heads of a large number of more senior members of the Foreign Office because ‘none of the Ambassadors abroad who have had sufficient experience of the home political side of foreign affairs to make them eligible, in addition to which there are apparently no star turns amongst them. Vansittart has been Private Secretary to so many people in high places that he is steeped in the political side—or should be.’51 Hankey continued to fill the multiple rolls of Cabinet Secretary, Secretary of the CID, and Clerk of the Privy Council until his retirement in August 1938. His functions were then divided.52 The two key roles, Cabinet Secretary and Secretary of the CID, were then filled by two immensely able and experienced men. Edward Bridges, the new Cabinet Secretary, had been a prize Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, and a Treasury civil servant. During the war he had served on the western front and been wounded and decorated for gallantry. He succeeded Hankey after spending the preceding four years as the Treasury official with responsibility for the detailed supervision of the funding of the rearmament programme. Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, a former Indian army officer, who became secretary of the CID, also knew the ways of Whitehall, having been one of Hankey’s assistants at the CID between 1925 and 1931, and then serving as his deputy since 1936. The COS welcomed his appointment. They did not believe that a civilian official could ever master the intricacies of the service departments and, as Lord Chatfield said, ‘We want a Secretary who speaks our language.’53 In Ismay they got one.
One former minister who also spoke their language, but who was excluded from office, was Winston Churchill. His opposition to granting India a larger measure of self-government put him at odds with most of the Conservative party and the policy of the National Government. MacDonald and Baldwin both pursued the same electoral strategy of garnering the widest measure of support by appealing to the centre and moderate opinion. Churchill’s reputation as a right-wing diehard would in no way assist them to do that. When Baldwin succeeded MacDonald, he, too, had no intention of inviting Churchill to return to office, believing that ‘Winston would be a disruptive force especially since foreign relations and defence would be uppermost. Moreover, there was a great feeling in the party about some of his recent activities against the government’s Indian policy.’54
Some things did not change. Policy-makers had lost little of their private distaste for open diplomacy. In 1934 MacDonald told the American diplomatist Norman H. Davis that, prior to the forthcoming Naval Conference, it was ‘essential that the preliminary discussions be most secret in order to avoid arousing prejudices and misunderstandings’.55 His reasons for so recommending were that ‘if you allow the House of Commons to assume that every bit of negotiation between us and other Powers is to be made public, you will get in great trouble, and will find other Powers will not willingly communicate in confidence with you.’56 Neville Chamberlain similarly complained in 1937 that ‘I shall have to speak in the House in the Foreign Affairs debate, which the Opposition have so tiresomely demanded. That is undoubtedly a weakness in democracies which require their Governments always to lay their cards on the table while the dictators can keep there is in their hands.’57 Ambassadors continued to go back and forth between their governments carrying messages that were never made public, and diplomatists generally preferred it that way. In April 1939 Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, insisted that ‘Diplomacy becomes impossible if the press and MPs are to tell us not only of whom we are to see, but when and what we are to say.’58
The basic structure of the government’s decision-making apparatus also underwent few significant changes during MacDonald and Baldwin’s final premierships. The Cabinet remained collectively responsible for taking decisions on major issues, and its decisions continued to be informed by the service ministries and the civilian and military experts who staffed the series of committees spawned by the CID. By the early 1930s the latter had become so large and unwieldy that it could only operate as a clearinghouse for proposals developed by its numerous standing and ad hoc sub-committees. The COS remained the most important of these, but others included the Home and Overseas Defence Committees, the Principal Supply Officer’s Committee, the Defence of India Sub-Committee, and the Oil Board.59 As the weight of business relating to defence and foreign policy increased from the mid-1930s, Baldwin opted to establish ministerial committees to oversee particular aspects of policy so as to relieve the burden on the full Cabinet. Thus, in July 1935 he established the Defence Policy and Requirements Committee, ‘to keep the defensive situation as a whole constantly under review so as to ensure that our defensive arrangements and our foreign policy are in line.’60 A month later it began to oversee British policy during the Abyssinian crisis.61 In July 1936 he established a second ministerial committee, the Cabinet Foreign Policy Committee, to supervise the development of foreign policy on behalf of the Cabinet.62 The growing plethora of committees and sub-committees might have been a recipe for chaos, but for the fact that there was a good deal of overlap between their membership. That, and the fact that each of them was serviced by Hankey’s Secretariat, ensured that there was a clear recognition of the interdependence between defence, foreign, financial, and economic policies, and that the Cabinet could maintain collective political control over the formulation of grand strategy.63 But this system also had drawbacks, not the least of which was that Hankey was often so heavily burdened with Cabinet business that he had too little time to consider purely defence issues.64
There were significant developments in the intelligence collection and assessment machinery. In 1927 the British had lost their best sources of information on events inside Germany when the Inter-Allied Control Commission was wound-up. Henceforth they had to rely on diplomats, journalists, and the SIS. The latter was hampered by several shortcomings, not least by the fact that in 1936 its network based on the Hague was penetrated by the German secret service who then used it as a conduit for spreading deception material. Two years later, in the midst of the Munich crisis, the Germans arrested the head of SIS’s station in Vienna and as a consequence the British shut down their operations in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin.65 To a limited extent, however, these shortcomings were compensated for by the fact that in 1936 the head of SIS had established a separate ‘Z Section’ that operated separately from SIS proper and gathered intelligence on Germany and Italy through emigres, exiles, and business contacts. Furthermore, Germany’s ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe opened up new sources of information in that from 1936 Czechoslovak intelligence passed on to the British information they had themselves received from a dissident Abwehr officer. This gave them not only advanced warning of Germany’s intentions against Czechoslovakia but also warning in the spring of 1939 that Hitler planned to attack Poland.66 But Vansittart was so dissatisfied with the information that the SIS supplied that he established his own private intelligence operation. His most valuable agent was the former British air attaché in Berlin, Group Captain Malcolm Christie. On retiring from the RAF Christie had established himself as an international businessman and maintained excellent contacts in Germany. His sources ranged from open contacts with senior Nazis including Goering, and clandestine contacts with dissident circles, including businessmen and officials inside the German Air and Foreign Ministries.67 But it was probably the case that secret intelligence had little impact in the early and mid-1930s on the emerging consensus in Whitehall that Germany was Britain’s ultimate enemy, for such was increasingly plain from overt sources.68
Like the SIS, GC&CS was never lavishly funded. Between 1919 and 1934 it maintained a staff of about eighty, a figure that rose to approximately two hundred by the outbreak of war. Between 1929 and 1936 its output, measured in terms of the number of deciphered telegrams it circulated to Whitehall, was a fifth higher than it had been in the decade to 1928. However, between 1936 and 1939 its productivity dropped significantly, and while it continued to read Japanese and Italian diplomatic traffic, it could read little Soviet and almost no German traffic, although by late 1938 it was able to glean some indirect light on German intentions through its ability to read Rumanian and Czechoslovak diplomatic ciphers.69 A root cause of GC&CS’s comparative failure to replicate its successes of the 1920s stemmed from the fact that by the mid-1930s it simply did not have enough personnel to attack the traffic of the growing number of Britain’s potential enemies.70 This was significant because it meant that, as the revisionist powers grew in strength and confidence, the British found themselves bereft of much of the information they needed to assess what they would do next, and so were hamstrung when they tried to make timely preparations to counter their initiatives. Matters did begin to improve in the spring of 1939 when it began to break into some high-grade Red Army traffic, some low-grade German diplomatic traffic, and, by reading Italian and Japanese telegrams, it could keep the Foreign Office well informed on German, Italian, and Japanese diplomacy. Gathering intelligence on Japanese intentions and capabilities was particularly problematic. Not only was Japan a strictly controlled police state, but in the early 1930s British intelligence operations in the Far East remained focused on the threat posed to imperial security from the Comintern.71 It was not until 1934 that a conference of senior naval officers meeting at Singapore concluded that something had to be done to rectify the dearth of reliable intelligence about Japan.72 The result was that in November 1934 a combined services intelligence and cryptographic organization, the Far Eastern Combined Bureau, was established in Hong Kong. This new tri-service organization soon demonstrated its ability to collate information from a variety of sources to provide a comprehensive picture of Japanese activities in the region. By 1938 the British were decrypting Japanese consular and the diplomatic telegrams, the communications of Japanese naval attachés, and several of the imperial Japanese navy’s operational codes, although they had much less success in reading the traffic of the Japanese army.73
The physical security at some British embassies abroad remained lamentable in the 1930s. The most egregious instance of leakages of information occurred during the Abyssinian crisis in 1935–6. Mussolini obtained a great deal of secret material from the British Embassy in Rome, and his knowledge of British weakness was one reason why he was so unwilling to compromise. After the conclusion of the Anglo-Italian ‘Easter Accords’ in April 1936, the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, could write gleefully in his diary of the British ambassador, that ‘Perth has been a friend. We have dozens of his reports which we obtained proving this.’74 It was only in 1937, after a diamond necklace belonging to his wife had been stolen, that the ambassador realized that something was amiss. When the Deputy Head of SIS inspected security at both the Rome and Berlin embassies he was appalled at the laxity he found.75 There was also one major leakage from the Foreign Office where a clerk in the Communications Department sold information to the Italian, Soviet, and German embassies.76
Nor did the British always make the best use of the intelligence that they did have, for it was not until the second half of the 1930s that they began to develop the machinery that would allow them to produce all-sources estimates of their opponents’ capabilities and intentions. In 1931 the CID had spawned the Industrial Intelligence Centre, an organization to gather and assess intelligence about the vulnerability of potential enemies to air attack or economic blockade, as well as their ability to expand munitions production in wartime and to uncover any economic preparations they might be making for war. This quest for industrial and economic intelligence reflected the central role that economic blockade had played and would play in any future British war effort. Blockade would be a substitute for the continental-scale army they did not have, and which they never again wanted to have to raise. But it also reflected British fears that the next war would be ‘total’, and that they needed the maximum possible warning in order to make their own preparations.77 But it was not until 1936 that policy-makers decided that this was not enough. The Abyssinian crisis persuaded the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence that there was a need to establish a Joint Intelligence Committee to become the channel through which the JPS obtained the intelligence they needed to prepare their plans. However, the new organization took some time to function effectively.78 It spent most of 1937 and 1938 analysing the lessons of the Spanish Civil War and the war in China, particularly as they might affect air power. But whatever ‘lessons’ might have been learnt, neither the RAF nor the Royal Navy allowed the information gathered from these wars to alter their core beliefs. The RAF continued to believe in the efficacy of strategic bombing, and the Admiralty remained convinced that capital ships manoeuvring at high speed and concentrating their combined anti-aircraft fire, would suffer little from air attack.79
Only in March 1939, when the Germans occupied to the rump state of Czechoslovakia and the British issued a guarantee to Poland, did the COS establish a Situation Report Centre. Placed under the chairmanship of a senior Foreign Office official, it had the job of pooling and processing all items of intelligence that seemed to require a quick decision. This was the first organization at the heart of Whitehall that could at a time of crisis, obtain, collate, assess, and circulate intelligence received by the Foreign Office, the service departments, MI5, MI6, and other government departments.80 By the end of May the centre was circulating both daily and weekly situation reports. But the machinery had significant shortcomings. The Situation Report Centre dealt with the collation of information only on a daily or weekly basis. It did not prepare the broader appreciations that the COS needed. That remained the task of the JIC, but it was hamstrung because it had no Foreign Office representative. The solution was to merge the two organizations. The new JIC, which was established in July 1939, had a Foreign Office representative as chairman, assisted by the three service directors of intelligence or their deputies. It continued to issue daily and weekly situation reports, but it also produced broader appreciations for the Joint Planners and the COS.81 Even so, such were its growing pains, that it had little impact on policy-making until 1940.
In the absence of any fully functioning staff machinery to produce all-sources intelligence assessments, ministers and senior officials were left to do the job themselves. Frequently overburdened with other tasks, it was easy for them to allow stereotypical notions of how others might behave to colour their conclusions. Thus even Vansittart, noted for his commitment to close Anglo-French relations, was once driven in exasperation to complain that the French ‘were a race that has never known the meaning of loyalty.’82 Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary between 1938–40, believed that the French were, ‘never ready to face up to realities, they delighted in vain words and protestations.’83 Sir Eric Phipps, ambassador to France between 1937 and 1939, had an equally low opinion of the French politicians with whom he worked. ‘Veracity’, he wrote in September 1938, ‘is not, I regret to say, the strongest point of the average French politician….’84 Sir Eric Phipps, ambassador in Berlin from 1933 to 1937, believed that the German people were ‘industrious, efficient and courageous, not to say pugnacious’, and had an ‘innate love of discipline and military training’.85 The Italians apparently had none of these qualities. In 1931 the CIGS decided that they were ‘essentially unmilitary’ and that ‘Much of the Fascist regime, the military organization and display, the flamboyant speeches, the encouragement of sport, the intensive military training of youths have been directed to the sole purpose of breathing into the Italian that virility and military ardour which he so conspicuously lacks’. The result was that although the Italians might initially put up a good fight, it was likely that their morale and with it their war effort, would quickly collapse.86 Sir Neville Henderson, successively Minister at Belgrade and Phipps’s successor at Berlin, thought that there was such a thing as ‘the Slav mentality’ and opined that ‘All Slavs require a ruler, whether it is the Tsar or Stalin, Masaryk or Pilsudski. They must have some rock to rely upon when their hearts fail them as they so often do.’87 Two years later, after he had been transferred to the Berlin Embassy, he concluded that, ‘It may be argued that the Germans are lamentably deficient in common sense. I believe this is true.’88 But Germans and Britons were representatives of a superior race, and if Germany was to be defeated in another war, it ‘would merely serve the purposes of inferior races.’89 The further east one went, the more difficult British observers found it to understand the people with whom they had to work. Simon believed that ‘one always had a feeling in dealing with Eastern peoples that they were wearing a mask, behind which they might be conducting a policy of their own. It was always difficult, to know what was going on inside the anthill.’90 The Japanese were seen as being industrious, disciplined, and thrifty.91 In 1932 Sir Victor Wellesley, a Far Eastern expert, believed that Japan and China presented two faces to the world, in that they ‘have a cosmopolitan aspect (much in evidence at Geneva) and also a purely oriental aspect. This latter is inscrutable to us Europeans, but is quite easily comprehensible to the two nations immediately concerned. This oriental aspect, both of Japan and China, appears to us to be puerile, deceitful, cruel and savage.’92 The Japanese apparently possessed some of the characteristics which made the Germans seem such a threat. They, too, were inherently aggressive and militarist. In 1926 the Foreign Office had concluded ‘that Japan is still essentially autocratic and militarist by origin, tradition and social structure, with a common people that is intensely conservative and easily rallied to the standard.’ Although there was no immediate likelihood of their doing so, it was quite likely that at a favourable moment they, too, would return to a policy of conquest.93
Stereotypical thinking about Germany played an especially important part in determining British policy-choices in the 1930s. In his study of the French intelligence assessments of German capabilities and intentions Peter Jackson showed that French perceptions of their own problems and apparent weaknesses were just as important as intelligence reports about German military power in shaping their understanding of the wider strategic situation that confronted them. The result was that until the autumn of 1938 French policy-makers entertained an inflated sense of German power which was in part the product of their own acute sense of France’s multiple weaknesses.94 Much the same was broadly true for the British. They already entertained a stereotype of the Germans as being inherently aggressive and militarist. Even Lord Londonderry, who in the 1930s was more willing than most British policy-makers to seek an accommodation with Hitler, believed that ‘the Prusso-German, the type which dominates the Germany of to-day,’ were ancestors of the Wends, a Slavic race which had settled in Germany in the sixth century, and that ‘every student who has studied the subject realises that they will always respond to the same call—the call to arms for the assertion of German power.’95 Allied to their inherent aggression were three qualities which made them especially dangerous, their innate efficiency, their docility and willingness to follow their leaders unquestionably, and their capacity for hard work.96 Finally, all this was coupled with the advantage that totalitarian governments enjoyed over democracies. ‘Whether you are considering Germany or Italy, the USSR or other lesser countries with a somewhat similar system of Government in peace’, Desmond Morton, the head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre, told the students at the Imperial Defence College in 1938:
you find one great similarity in their national mobilisation plans, namely that the organisation in time of war is, broadly speaking, identical with that existing in peace. In so far as the Higher Command and the Higher administrative machine is concerned, the nation is permanently mobilised. The framework does not change.
Thus from one point of view, the authoritarian State starts war with a great advantage over a democratic country. National mobilisation should be very rapid. Confusion at the top shall be reduced to a minimum and the nation be ready to strike with the full force at its command, economic and national as well as military, with the briefest possible delay.97
This made Morton and those who thought like him easy targets for Nazi propaganda. In reality German industrial mobilization was characterized by inadequate leadership, chaotic planning that failed to lay down clear production priorities, and constant infighting between the Nazi party, the military, and civilian interests. But this was hidden from British (and French) observers, and Morton’s contention that the democracies were handicapped by the need for the government to persuade its people to make the necessary sacrifices to prepare for war in peacetime was widely accepted.98 ‘The dictators, bent on aggression’, wrote a senior British civil servant deeply involved in defence preparations in the late 1930s, ‘have no need to consider Parliamentary or public opinion, or to worry about the effect which vast expenditure on defence will exercise on the national economy. If they decide that guns must come before butter, there is no one to say them nay.’ The British and French enjoyed no such advantage. ‘If their Governments propose a large increase in expenditure on defence before the practical certainty of war is generally recognized, they are criticized for dislocating the economic and industrial life of the nation, and accused of endangering the prospects of peace by starting a race in armaments.’99
The reference to ‘dislocating the economic and industrial life of the nation’ reflected the fact that the British, like the French, were acutely aware of their own weaknesses, and that awareness was as important as their mistaken perception of German strength in determining their own policy choices. The ability of its economy to generate wealth had been a main pillar of British power since the eighteenth century. But in September 1931 Britain was forced off the gold standard. In a speech that he drafted but apparently did not give, Lord Reading, who served briefly as Foreign Secretary in MacDonald’s first National Government, reflected on the impact of the financial crisis on British power and influence in the world. Since 1919 Britain, he claimed, had much of which to be proud. ‘It is we’, he insisted:
who in a very material world have kept alight the torch of idealism, which was lit in the first enthusiasm of the peace. If others have since wavered, we have always affirmed our belief that international policy could and should be now based on principles of co-operation, arbitration and disarmament. Maybe the visible signs of success of this policy are still scanty. I am prepared, however, to assert that, had it not been for the influence and persistence of successive British Governments in advocating in and out of season this new dispensation, the States of Europe would have insensibly returned to the sterile struggle for national supremacy and to that it shifty [sic] balancing of the Powers one against the other, which we knew and suffered from all too well before the war.100
The British had been able to do this because of the strength borne of the wealth they had accumulated over two centuries. ‘It is thus that London has become the money market of the world, and it is largely because of the strength thus acquired that H. M. Government have up till now been able without the exercise of armed pressure to play that great and independent role in international politics which is the envy of other Governments whose strength lies solely in armaments.’101 But the financial crisis meant that the day was fast approaching when:
we can no longer look our creditors in the face; the day when we can no longer be of assistance to the world; the day when foreign nations begin to doubt our financial stability and our capacity to make the necessary sacrifices in order to maintain it; that day we will realize that in spite of her Navy Great Britain has suddenly shrunk to a small island in the Atlantic, which in its dealings with foreign nations will have to humour and perhaps submit to the prejudices and ambitions of those who are stronger financially than she is. No longer will our foreign policy be independent and moulded by our own views of what is right and wrong; no longer will the lesser nations turn to us as the one great disinterested Power, for our interests will be in the keeping of our creditors and our influence will be circumscribed by our financial necessities and fluctuate with the fluctuations of our currency.102
It is easy to see why he never gave the speech, for little good would come of advertising the fact that one of the pillars of British power was crumbling. The abandonment of the gold standard had effects both at home and abroad. J. H. Thomas, the Colonial Secretary, warned the governments of every colony and dependency that they too, ‘are face-to-face with a common peril. You will realise how narrow has been the margin by which a great catastrophe has been averted, and how pressing is still the need for sustained effort to prevent a recurrence of the danger.’103 The crisis ended any hope of returning to the free-trading world economy as it had been in 1914. In its place, at the Ottawa conference in 1932, the British government, in cooperation with the Dominions, created a system of imperial preference, introducing tariffs on imports but with lower rates for goods imported from the empire. This became the core of a new trading bloc, the sterling system, which attracted to itself those countries, such as the Scandinavian states, Argentina, Egypt, and the whole of the British Empire, who either held their currency reserves in London or whose own currency was based on sterling. This did not represent a British retreat into imperial autarchy. By the middle of the 1930s half of Britain’s export trade and two-thirds of its imports were with countries outside the empire.104 At home the Bank of England could reduce interest rates, thus removing an important constraint on industrial growth, and producing a boom in private housebuilding. Those in employment began to see their real incomes rising. However, that growth and prosperity was concentrated in the new consumer industries of southern and central England. Unemployment, which aggregated 9 per cent of the insured population in 1936, remained stubbornly high in those areas, such as south Wales, the central belt of Scotland and north and northeast England, where the old staple industries, shipbuilding, heavy engineering, mining, and textile manufacturing, were concentrated. This did not merely weaken the economic underpinning of British power. It also represented a blow to the self-confidence of many members of the policy-making elite. The security and stability of their world already seemed to be under threat in the decades before 1914. Events thereafter had only added to the sense that the world was changing in ways that they neither fully understood nor welcomed.
Consequently British policy-makers, like their French counterparts, saw German power through the prism of their own weaknesses and were alarmed when reports reached them that the Germans had embarked upon a serious rearmament programme. And when this was added to the knowledge (in the French case) of their own demographic inferiority, and the slow pace of their own rearmament programme, it bred a powerful inferiority complex that reached its nadir at Munich. Some such ideas were already present in the minds of British policy-makers even before Hitler’s advent to power as was made apparent in a lengthy memorandum Hankey penned for the incoming National Government in October 1931. In the nineteenth century, ‘Our position was secured by our sea-power, and we were able to build up our Empire and our manufactures, our world-wide commerce and our gigantic banking system comparatively undisturbed by the troubles that beset the continent of Europe. We were regarded, in the words of M. Paul Cambon, as “intangible”.’105 It was that status that had enabled the British to exert their influence by throwing their support behind one side or the other in the European balance of power, and it was that status that Hankey lamented that it had now lost. ‘The War, and post-war developments,’ he explained to MacDonald:
however, have tended gradually to shake this reputation. By the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty, the Washington Treaties, et cetera, we have (to some extent inevitably) become entangled in world politics and in the European system to a greater degree than before. We have undertaken engagements which, though vague, if they mature at all, are liable to involve us as a Sea Power in any part of the world. Our political insularity is a thing of the past.106
To make matters worse, the armed services lacked the capability to fulfil these new obligations, and Britain’s rivals knew it.
The British policy-making elite thus entered the 1930s with some of their old ways of looking at the world intact, but with their confidence in the future basis of British power and its place in the world severely dented by the collapse of the liberal economic system that they had worked in the preceding decade to restore. What was left of that confidence soon sustained a further series of shocks as they had to confront three developments that dealt further blows to their world view: Japanese aggression in Manchuria and China, the collapse of democracy in Weimar Germany, and the failure of the World Disarmament Conference to deliver the goal which many of them cherished, security through multilateral disarmament.
Anglo-Japanese relations had entered a period of relative quietude after the Washington conference. Thanks to the ability of GC&CS to read Japanese diplomatic traffic, the British were well informed about the direction of Japanese foreign policy in the 1920s. Intercepts showed that both the Japanese government and private individuals were distancing themselves from Indian revolutionaries whom they had supported during the First World War, and the first pan-Asian conference, held at Nagasaki in 1926, had achieved little of practical value.107 Some policy-makers continued to regret the passing of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, and hoped that if it could not be revived it could at least be replaced by an unwritten entente.108 But most Foreign Office officials believed that there was no real scope to turn the clock back. Wellesley noted a distinct change in the Japanese attitude towards China. ‘In place of their bullying attitude, which was so much in evidence during the War they now try to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese and pose as China’s champion as against the rest of the world.’ However, he did not believe that their ultimate objective had changed. ‘Japan’s big idea is still the eventual reduction of China by some means or other, to a position of vassalage to Japan.’109 He was correct. The focus of Japanese policy in Asia in the late 1920s and early 1930s was northern China because, as the British ambassador in Tokyo reported in 1924:
They have committed their nation to an industrial and mercantile career but to make that career a success they must have raw materials to work upon and markets to exploit. The country produces (apart from silk) practically no essential raw materials and recent experience has shown that under free competition they cannot compete with other industrial powers in most of the world’s markets. In China they see a vast and undeveloped repository of raw materials, such as iron ore which they badly need, and a market with the advantage of propinquity.110
Japan had a larger economic stake in China than any other country. At the beginning of the 1930s it sent 25 per cent of its exports to China, compared to Britain which sent only 5 per cent of its exports. China also absorbed nearly four-fifths of Japan’s foreign investments, compared to only 6 per cent of Britain’s. Furthermore, barred from emigrating to Australia, Canada, or the USA, Manchuria seemed to be the only outlet for Japan’s surplus population.111 Japan was no more immune from the impact of the Great Depression than any other country. When it struck other powers opted to protect their own economies by raising tariff walls, thus discrediting those Japanese politicians who had hitherto promoted cooperation with the western powers as the road to prosperity. Right-wing nationalist politicians in Tokyo and the leaders of the Kwantrung army in Manchuria were convinced that the western liberal economic and political model could not save Japan from ruin. Salvation, they believed, could only come about if they annexed Manchuria and Mongolia. Staunchly anti-communist, they believed that this would secure for Japan access to the raw materials it needed so that later in the decade it would be able to fight and win a war against the USSR, a war which they believed to be inevitable.112 On 18 September 1931 a bomb exploded in the town of Mukden in Manchuria, sparking a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops. Japanese diplomatic traffic intercepted by GC&CS showed unequivocally that the bomb had been planted by the Japanese and that they had used it as a pretext to act. The same sources also showed that the Tokyo government had little control over the Kwantung army, and that while in public the Japanese foreign ministry appeared to be conciliatory, in private they supported the army’s policy of aggrandisement.113
In 1926 the Foreign Office had defined Britain’s goal in China as being to maintain what they called ‘commercial security’, and that ‘this can best be gained by a policy of conciliation, but firmness, awards China; the maintenance, by international co-operation, of the Washington guarantees for her protection and for equal commercial opportunity for all nations; and a policy of friendliness but watchfulness towards Japan, giving her no excuse for aggression, while affording her the maximum scope compatible with world interests for her economic development.’114 But by late 1931 maintaining this course had become problematic. When the crisis erupted the National Government was wrestling with the consequences of Britain’s departure from the gold standard, and ministers initially left the Manchurian question to the Foreign Office. There, responsible officials had some sympathy for Japan. Sir John Pratt, one of the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern experts, believed that ‘in Manchuria the Japanese, as regards the fundamental issues at stake, had a great deal of right on their side. The Chinese were almost entirely in the wrong. By their corruption, incapacity and blind conceit they were reducing to ruin one of the wealthiest regions in the world, thus going a long way towards undoing the good work of the Japanese who had made prosperity possible by keeping Manchuria free from civil war.’115 The British ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Francis Lindley, fond as he was of insisting that the only thing worse than a military defeat was a diplomatic victory, was never likely to urge his masters in London to take a firm line against the Japanese. They, he insisted, would be bitterly opposed to any French, American, or British interference with their freedom of action in Manchuria.116 Furthermore, throughout the crisis British policy-makers were haunted by the possibility that if they made a wrong move the Chinese would turn to the Soviets for assistance. These competing needs dictated that the British had to do their utmost to remain neutral.117
The Cabinet quickly ruled out the imposition of economic sanctions on Japan, and even Lord Robert Cecil, now the principle British delegate to the League’s Assembly and a member of its Council, remained equivocal about adopting such a policy.118 What the British hoped to do was to placate the Americans, the Chinese, and those supporters of the League in Britain who were incensed by Japanese actions, and yet avoid alienating the Japanese. ‘In a word’, the Cabinet decided in November 1931, ‘The policy of the United Kingdom representative should be one of conciliation, with an avoidance of implied threats.’119 That was never going to be easy. The Chinese had appealed to the League, claiming that Japan had violated the terms of the Kellogg-Briand pact. The Council responded by calling on the Japanese to withdraw, and despatched an investigatory commission led by the British diplomatist Lord Lytton to report on the situation on the ground.120 But ministers also understood that standing by while the Lytton commission did its work, a task that was expected to take as long as nine months, would represent a fatal blow to the League, because it ‘would have failed in its immediate object of putting an end to the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory, and would have to look on while its own summons was ignored. It would have to realise that it had failed to enforce the fundamental principle that a State may not, without prior recourse to the recognised means of peaceful settlement, take the law into its own hands.’121
Thus the Japanese could make the running. They did so in January 1932 when they opened a peripheral front at Shanghai in an effort to divert western attention away from the real focus of their own operations in Manchuria.122 Hitherto, with a handful of exceptions, British policy-makers had been broadly sympathetic towards what they took to be the Japanese aims, even if they disapproved of their methods.123 But Shanghai was the centre of British economic interests in China, and that sympathy now evaporated, to be replaced by something close to an impending apocalypse.124 Even Pratt accepted that:
If Japan continues unchecked the British will have to retire altogether from the Far East. If it is decided that we must check Japan certain preliminary measures could be adopted—such as rupture of diplomatic and economic relations—but in the end Japan can only be checked by force. Ultimately, we will be faced with the alternatives of going to war with Japan or retiring from the Far East. A retirement from the Far East might be the prelude to a retirement from India.125
That raised two issues. To what extent was the USA willing to stand side by side with the British in containing Japan, and to what extent were the British themselves able to act?126
The Japanese had established a puppet state in Manchuria, Manchuko. The US Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, responded by announcing what became known as the Stimson Doctrine: the American government would not recognize any territorial or political changes in China brought about by force. The League of Nations Union, like the official spokesmen of the Labour party, lobbied Simon to work with the Americans, and threaten to impose diplomatic and economic, but crucially not military, sanctions on the Chinese and Japanese if they did not agree to a ceasefire. The LNU’s Executive Committee told the Foreign Secretary that ‘The time is critical for the League of Nations and for the maintenance of peace based upon the Covenant, the Pact of Paris and other collective treaties. If, in the first case of a really serious issue between two Great Powers, this system does, in fact, fail, the peace of the world will be imperilled, and all belief in the validity of collective treaties will be undermined.’127 Stimson later claimed that the British had rebuffed his policy and refused to cooperate with the Americans. At the time, however, there were close parallels between British and US policies. Both were antagonistic towards the Japanese, but neither was willing to do more than issue protests. Foreign Office officials recommended two opposing policies. Vansittart thought it was at least possible that the Americans might be persuaded to act against the Japanese. But Wellesley, the Foreign Office’s leading Far Eastern expert, disagreed, cleaving to the common belief in the Office that American policy was mercurial and that the Americans were not to be trusted. Ever since the US Senate had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, American isolationism was a fact that British policy-makers had to take account of and live with. ‘The United States Government is quite capable’, he wrote, ‘of backing out after we had agreed to give our support, leaving us to clear up the resultant mess.’128
The attitude of the US press seemed to support his view. Initially there was general support for the strong line that Stimpson seemed to be pursuing, and the Japanese were harshly criticized for their intransigence and brutality. But it soon became clear that there was an equally strong current of isolationist opinion insisting that the USA must stay out of any Far Eastern war.129 When Simon and Stimson met at Geneva in April 1932 Simon asked him ‘what did Stimson envisage as the practical result of the protests which he had made and wanted to make? Did his policy contemplate any step beyond protest and would protests change the Japanese course? Stimson replied lamely that he recognized that nothing beyond protest could be done.’130 Furthermore, while it was possible for the USA, which was not a member of the League, publicly to condemn Japanese policy, the British, who were members of the League, could hardly do so while the Council, through the Lytton Commission, was still investigating what had happened.131 The episode opened a breach in Anglo-American relations in the Far East that was to last for the remainder of the decade, a breach that the Foreign Office, despite manifold efforts, was never quite able to close. ‘We have to remember (what America is less concerned with),’ Simon told the Cabinet, ‘that Japan is the strongest Power in the Far East. And America always leaves us to do the difficult work vis-à-vis Japan. But we cannot afford to upset the United States of America over this, and I do not mean to do so.’132 Ultimately, however, British policy-makers decided that the need to contain the immediate Japanese threat outweighed the need to pursue American goodwill. They opted to avoid provoking Japan through supporting sanctions because they feared they would lead to a war they could not win. Wellesley believed that:
Japan, in the Far East, is unattackable by sea or land. This was accepted and endorsed by Great Britain and the United States in the Naval Treaty of Washington (1922), when the United States abandoned the further fortification of Guam Island, her advanced base in the Pacific, and Great Britain declared that she would add nothing further to the inadequate defences of Hong Kong—about the same time Great Britain, United States, Japan and France guaranteed (in another treaty) each other's insular possessions in the Pacific. These treaties gave an effective guarantee of security to Japan, and the power to do what she liked in China.133
The CID’s Advisory Committee on Trade Questions in Time of War also supported a policy of masterly inactivity. Sanctions would not work. Neither the USA nor the USSR were likely to support them, lesser powers would evade them, Britain alone was incapable of imposing them, and they would rebound adversely on British trade.134 In any case Japan might prefer to fight rather than back down. And if the Japanese did fight, Britain was not ready to meet them. Since the early 1920s British war planning in the Far East had rested on the assumption that when the fleet arrived in Far Eastern waters it would be based on Singapore, but Singapore was still not ready to receive it.135 As Baldwin told the CID in June 1932 ‘If the Japanese ever “ran amok”, we would, in present circumstances, be helpless, and they would be in a position to capture Hong Kong and Singapore without difficulty.’136 Thus when the British were forced to choose, Simon’s goal of trying to placate China and the USA while not provoking Japan collapsed. The former was now firmly subordinated to the latter.137
Although the Japanese did their utmost to impede the work of the Lytton commission its report was ready by the autumn, and the League’s Council considered it in November 1932.138 The Japanese responded by threatening to leave the League if they were criticized, and they made good their threat in February 1933. Much as they deprecated alienating Japan, ministers agreed they had no option other than to support the report.139 In becoming the first major power to leave the League, Japan was also the first to turn its back on the post-war world order. The fact that it did so at a moment when the World Disarmament Conference was tottering on the edge of deadlock and collapse, represented a double blow both to the League and to the post-war settlement that had done so much to buttress British security in the preceding decade. China was left to settle its differences with Japan as best it could and alone, and in May 1933 it signed the Tangku treaty, acquiescing in Japan’s seizure of its territory. The Manchurian crisis shattered the regional balance of power that the British had helped to establish at Washington in 1921–2. At the London Naval Conference in 1930, the British believed they had tied Japan once again into the post-war settlement. Events in China proved they were wrong. The crisis showed that even had they wished to do so the British did not have sufficient naval and military power to intervene unilaterally in the Far East to check Japanese ambitions. They could neither coerce, deter, nor negotiate with the Japanese from a position of equality. But that should not hide the fact that in 1932–3 what was happening in the Far East was only a secondary consideration in the eyes of British policy-makers. In due course Japanese aggression in Manchuria would become part of the mythology of the 1930s. If only, so the story went, Britain had stood up to Japan, history might have taken a different course. The principle of collective security maintained through the League would have been upheld, and other powers, notably Italy and Nazi Germany, might, in their turn, have thought twice about embarking on their policies of aggression.140 But at the time few observers thought that the peace of the world was bound up with events in the region and that Britain could or should fight. That was an opinion shared even by Gilbert Murray, the chairman of the LNU, who questioned whether going to war to stop Japan was practical, at least in the absence of major allies. ‘If America and France will act with us,’ he wrote in February 1932:
Japan cannot openly resist. If they won’t, I am prepared to believe that we must submit to the naval superiority of Japan. But then we should say so, and not attempt to cover our humiliation by hypocritical defences that deceive no-one. We can say without much loss of dignity, ‘Japan has broken all her treaties; she ought to be coerced’; but in this particular part of the world the League cannot act without America. An attempt at coercion would only mean a long and perhaps indecisive war. We therefore call attention to Japan’s repeated breach of the treaties, and announce that we do not recognise any gains that she may make by her illegal action.141
A year later he believed that although the Executive Committee of the LNU would support an embargo on government loans and the sale of arms to Japan, it was not prepared to see Britain go to war, particularly if it had to fight alone, to uphold the Covenant.142 In any case by then it was apparent that the real focus of the threat to world peace lay in Europe, not the Far East. In May 1933, the Foreign Office warned the CID that ‘In the Far East Japan is in complete, though illegal, occupation of four Chinese provinces…. But in spite of its very great importance for one part of the world, the Sino–Japanese dispute is not that which at the moment threatens world peace and delays world economic recovery. The political causes of our present distresses are to be found in Europe.’143
In May 1930 Vansittart wrote a verbose memorandum, full of literary flourishes that probably drove busy ministers to distraction. But it contained an element of uncomfortable truth, for he warned that Europe was divided:
between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, between France and her entourage on the one hand, and on the other Germany and the ex-enemy States, with Italy tending to replace Germany as their leader. At this rate, in the future there may be three candidates for the hegemony of Europe: (1) France, who might be described as the holder of the cup; (2) Italy; and (3) Germany, who will be strong runners-up as soon as they have trained into form at home. There will also be during this period continual play with the idea of combinations between two of the three candidates, complicated by threats already uttered, and the possibility of bringing Russia in for a foursome.144
Inside Germany and under growing right-wing pressure Heinrich Brüning’s government became increasingly insistent in its demands for Gleichberechtigung—that is, equality of status and rights in armaments. The War Office continued to gather information that Germany had embarked on a secret rearmament programme, had recreated a General Staff, was training large numbers of men through various patriotic associations, and was using foreign firms to manufacture the kinds of war material forbidden to Germany by Versailles.145 MacDonald drew the same conclusion that his predecessor had done, that ‘in the event of any breakdown in the negotiations of the Disarmament Commission, Germany might claim the right to rearm on the grounds that other nations had failed to fulfil their part of the bargain….’146 The Preparatory Commission concluded its work in December 1930 when it presented a draft treaty to the League. The draft represented a series of compromises in an effort to gloss over the issues that still divided the powers. Service manpower was to be limited, but no provision was made for the inclusion of reserves. Naval armaments were to be limited by categories, but there were also concessions made to French and Italian demands in respect of particular types of vessels. Budgetary limits were to be placed on land and naval armaments, but not on spending on aircraft. The possibility that civil aircraft might quickly be converted to military use was largely ignored. Air forces were to be controlled by limiting numbers of aircraft both in service and in immediate reserve, and by placing limits on the total horsepower of their aeroengines. Although there was to be a Permanent Disarmament Commission to supervise the implementation of the convention, British and American objections prevailed, and no provision was made for on-site inspections. Finally, the terms of the 1925 Geneva Convention outlawing chemical and bacteriological warfare were reaffirmed, although the manufacture of chemical agents was not prohibited.147 What was lacking was any attempt to include specifics. Rather, the text contained a series of blank tables. Filling them in was to be the job of the conference itself. The League Council accepted the draft treaty in January 1931, agreed that the Conference would begin on 2 February 1932, and appointed Arthur Henderson, who had played a major role in persuading the Preparatory Commission to accept the draft treaty, to be its president.148
The participants now had a year in which to make their own final preparations. Henderson had no illusions about the issues at stake, reminding his Cabinet colleagues that:
3. The German Government have repeatedly said, through their representatives at Geneva, that they insist on a real reduction, in the absence of which they will consider that the other Governments have broken their pledges, and, in such a case, Germany will consider herself freed from her own obligations in the matter of disarmament.
4. If such a situation should arise, it is obvious that a major crisis will be produced, and the question, therefore, apart from its purely technical aspects, has the gravest political implications. It is consequently of great importance on general political grounds that we should secure the largest reductions for which agreement can be obtained.149
But before the British could persuade other powers to agree to ‘the largest reductions for which agreement can be obtained’, they first had to secure agreement within their own ranks. MacDonald’s government did not command a majority in the Commons, and to ensure that Britain spoke with a single voice at the conference, he and Henderson co-opted leading members of the Liberal and Conservative parties onto a Cabinet committee charged with determining British policy.150 Its report, which was ready in July 1931, represented a broad consensus about aims and means. All powers were obliged by the Treaty of Versailles, the League’s Covenant, and the Locarno treaties to reduce their levels of armaments down to the lowest levels consistent with national security and the enforcement through international action of their shared obligations. Britain had already disarmed down to that level, and if it was to undertake any further reductions, they must be part of a multilateral agreement. If the conference failed to achieve this, the British might have to reconsider their own position. They hoped to bring about the reconfiguration of armed forces so that they could not be used by an aggressor to deliver a knock-out blow. But even that might not suffice to satisfy the French, who had twice been invaded within a generation, or the Germans threatened by their more powerful neighbours. Consequently, some unspecified allowances would have to be made for them. They believed that the surest means to do this would be to adopt the system of disarmament embodied in the peace treaties, and to supplement it by budgetary limitations, a policy that ‘should not involve the increase of the fighting strength of the disarmed Powers, but rather the reduction of the armaments of others.’151 If the British secured the outcome they hoped for, the Royal Navy would be able to maintain its existing one-power standard, the RAF would secure a one-power standard in the air, and the army would be sufficiently large to meet its obligations at home and to police the empire. Disarmament would not, therefore, undermine British security. In reality, of course, as Cecil understood, the British position amounted ‘to little more than saying: we have disarmed as much as we can, let others imitate us.’152
The fact that the resolutions were the product of a three-party conference meant that the fundamentals of British policy did not change when those same parties, although shorn of most of their Labour members, formed the National Government in August 1931. But it was unlikely that the British proposals would be a recipe for success. As Simon’s private secretary minuted ‘This is exactly the position of all of the Powers who will be represented at the Conference, and experience has already shown that our contention cuts no ice, when all the other Powers to which reduction of armaments is to apply maintain the same thesis.’153 The French government, alarmed that German proposals for a customs union with Austria represented a first step towards the Anschluss forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles, declared that they had already reduced their armaments down to the lowest level consistent with their national safety.154 They did not think that disarmament by itself would enhance European stability. That, they believed, could only be done by creating a system that could, if necessary, enforce it.155 In the absence of such a system they were determined to rely on the military security afforded to France by the Versailles settlement, and to maintain a European balance of power tilted in their favour. Their reading of Germany’s intentions was correct. Germany’s claims to equality of status were no more than a shrewd political strategy designed to win concessions for their on-going policy of secret and illegal rearmament which would, they hoped, in time lead to the wholesale revision of the Versailles settlement. The French answer was the same as it had been in 1919, ‘definite pledges of effective mutual assistance in case of aggression.’ What that meant in practice was that unless the British gave them such a pledge, there could be no disarmament.156 What they did not do was to look to their own defences. At the very moment when Hitler’s regime was embarking on its new rearmament programme, the French did exactly the opposite. Under pressure to retrench government expenditure because of the depression, French defence spending fell by more than a quarter between 1931 and 1934, thus giving the Germans a critical head start in the race to rearm.157
Looking forward to the conference Hankey opined that ‘I do not think serious people are at all hopeful of achieving much disarmament. The real question is, as to whether you can avoid such a clash between the Germans and the French as will virtually disrupt the League.’158 But if insiders were not optimistic about the likely outcome of the conference, the British public were. The conference evoked widespread hopes amongst the British people in late 1931 and early 1932 and they literally prayed for its success. On 15 December 1931, the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed a national intercessory service at St Paul’s Cathedral, telling the congregation that:
The claim of the old evil maxim, ‘If you wish for peace you must prepare for war,’ has been forever shattered. The lesson of the Great War has been written large—literally in letters of blood—that great armaments can only lead to war. It is as certain as anything can be that it was the enormous growth of armaments, and the sense of insecurity and fear which they caused, which made the Great War inevitable. Most rightly, therefore, the nations, our own included, who signed the Covenant which is part of the Treaty of Paris, declare that, ‘the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations.’159
It was the first of many services held up and down the country which voiced public support for the conference.160 The government itself stoked these hopes when the Board of Education asked Local Education Authorities to issue a message in every school to mark the opening of the conference.161
There were many reasons why the conference failed. In the first place the foundation document of the inter-war quest for international disarmament, Article 8 of the League’s Covenant, begged more questions than it answered when it decreed that ‘the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety’. But who was to define where the ‘lowest point’ lay or what constituted ‘national safety’.162 The League had also set itself an unrealistically ambitious goal, to get agreement amongst fifty-nine states on their level of armaments on land, at sea, and in the air.163 And critically, the British refused to do enough to assuage French fears of Germany. Vansittart predicted that the Disarmament Conference would usher in a period of Anglo-French recriminations, and he was right. Although they were the only two major European powers in favour of the status quo, they disagreed fundamentally over how to maintain it.164 From Berlin Sir Horace Rumbold reported that the early evacuation of the Rhineland by allied troops had only whetted German appetites for further revisions of the Versailles settlement. All German political parties were united in wishing to see Germany rearmed and to bring about a revision of Germany’s eastern frontier.165 In response to this some of Simon’s officials were willing to make a greater commitment to French security. ‘We do not minimise the risks of involving Great Britain yet further in the fate of a Europe’, they insisted, ‘torn by dissension and undermined by financial decay; but we believe that we are already committed by our geographical position and by the extent of our economic relations.’166 It was idle to believe that by standing aloof from continental entanglements Britain would somehow contribute to European stability and peace. Britain was bound to be involved in any major European war and, according to Sir Walford Selby, Simon’s principal private secretary, ‘Knowledge of our intention in advance is, I believe, the greatest security against the recurrence of such a war and the best guarantee of the ultimate interests and safety of our country.’167 Selby and others understood that Britain faced a clear choice. It could either back France and give her the security guarantee they wanted, or it could refuse to do so, and accept that Germany would renounce the Treaty of Versailles.168 They ended with a stark warning. ‘People in this country seem to be unaware of the extent to which the future of “civilisation” depends on what happens in Germany in the course of the next six months and of the grave doubt as to whether the upshot will be peace or war, recovery or collapse.’169
Others disagreed. They believed that the French deliberately exaggerated the extent of German rearmament both to strengthen their own position in the disarmament negotiations, and to convince the British that they faced a real threat to their security.170 They were right that French intelligence was apt to exaggerate the pace and scale of German rearmament, but the reason they did so was to protect the French defence estimates from the depredations of politicians anxious to make savings.171 In December 1931 the British Cabinet came down on the side of the sceptics. They emphatically decided that they would not pay the price that the French demanded, ‘some form of guarantee, over and above Locarno, under which, in conceivable circumstances, British forces might be engaged in war on the Continent of Europe, even in respect of the Eastern frontier of Germany.’172 But in the absence of such a guarantee there was every likelihood that the Disarmament Conference would fail, and that much of the blame for failure would stick to the National Government. That could not be allowed. Ministers recognized that disarmament was popular in Britain and were determined that, if the conference should fail, none of the blame would stick to them. They therefore asked officials to consider the merits of a ‘Mediterranean Locarno’ which, by offering France a security guarantee against Italy, might facilitate at least a degree of air and naval disarmament.173 The officials were not enthusiastic, for it would involve ‘military commitments, probably of an extensive nature. In return we should be unlikely to receive any adequate quid pro quo, either in the general cause of disarmament or in giving us any increased security of any kind.’174 Ministers agreed. Even the realization ‘that the failure of the Disarmament Conference would be a disaster, the effects of which can hardly be measured’, did not move them. The kind of guarantee that the French wanted would be deeply unpopular with the British electorate, the Dominions would not support it, a guarantee to France might invite an Italian attack on Malta, and a guarantee to Italy might invite French air raids on London. ‘Therefore’, they concluded, ‘a Mediterranean Locarno would increase the risk of Britain being drawn into a European war’ and ‘the additional commitments, superimposed on commitments for Imperial Defence which even today we are barely able to meet, would involve additional expenditure.’175
If the French and Germans were not prepared to bury the hatchet, and if the British were not prepared to offer France a more substantial security guarantee than Locarno, the practical proposals that the British delegation were authorized to support on the eve of the conference, were distinctly limited: the abolition of submarines, limitations placed on the size and armaments of capital ships, an end to chemical warfare, the abolition of conscription, limitations on the size of artillery and numbers of aircraft, measures to prevent the conversion of civil aircraft to military uses, the establishment of a permanent disarmament commission, and the pursuit of further disarmament through budgetary limitations, were all measures that would effectively enhance Britain’s own security while reducing the size of its defence budget.176 But, as Simon admitted, they ‘fall short of the full hopes of many who have not had to study the technical aspects of the matter or the special needs of the British position. The recommendations, standing by themselves, may well be considered not to “fill the bill.”’177 However, MacDonald was determined to put the best possible face on the British case, telling his colleagues on the eve of the conference that he:
did not share the view that had been expressed on the previous day that the United Kingdom’s case at the Disarmament Conference was ineffective. It might be lacking in positive new proposals, but the sentiment and the intention behind were excellent. The Delegation ought to emphasise the fact that we had not waited for the Disarmament Conference to begin disarming, and to describe the situation which had been reached as the result of our efforts. In this respect we had a magnificent case. Whether other nations believed us or not was not very material, provided that the whole case were put and reached our own public.178
The search for a multilateral disarmament agreement therefore took second place to a domestic public relations exercise in which the government’s paramount objective was to ensure that none of the blame for the likely failure of the conference stuck to them.
The conference proceeded through four stages. The period from February to July 1932 was largely taken up with technical discussions and the political issues that divided the main participants were ignored. In August, the Germans withdrew in protest that no progress had been made towards meeting their demands for equality. This led to a series of private negotiations between the major powers and the Germans were persuaded to return in December. There was then a second substantive session of discussions during which the British presented a draft convention in March 1933 and which culminated in Germany’s final withdrawal from the conference in October. After further inconclusive discussions the conference finally collapsed in July 1934.
In February and June 1932 first the French, and then the Americans, put forward their own pet plans. The French wanted to establish an international police force under the League’s control, and for all members of the League to accept compulsory international arbitration in all disputes. President Hoover suggested that the powers should make massive quantitative and qualitative cuts in their armaments. After the establishment of a ‘police component’, all armies should be reduced by one-third, the Washington treaty numbers and tonnage of battleships and submarines should also be reduced by a similar proportion, other classes of vessels and aircraft by a quarter, and no power was to be allowed to possess bombers, chemical weapons, tanks, or large mobile artillery.179 In both cases the British response was driven by a combination of policy-makers’ determination to do nothing that might threaten their own security coupled with a wary eye on how their response would play in the court of public opinion. They rejected the French proposals because, like the Americans and Japanese, they had no intention of allowing the League to take control of their fleet, any more than they were willing to underwrite French security.180 But public expectations that the Conference would produce a real measure of disarmament meant that the British had to be seen to make a positive response.181 Simon’s counter-proposals were designed to provide that, whilst also postponing discussions of the thorny issue of ‘the German claim for “Equality of Treatment” and the French insistence on the sanctity of the Treaty of Versailles’.182 Rather than attack these fundamental issue head-on, the British tried to steer discussions in the direction of pursuing ‘qualitative’ disarmament. Baldwin hoped that this could be achieved by persuading the powers to agree to the complete abolition of bomber aircraft.183 But he was overwhelmed by the weight of arguments raised by his colleagues, by the Air Staff, the Government of India, and by Conservative back-benchers who believed it would undermine Britain’s defences. The bomber had become an integral and essential part of Britain’s system of imperial policing, providing a cheap and effective way of managing threats on the margins of the empire in the Middle East and on the northwest frontier of India. Nearer to home retaliation in kind was thought to be the only way to protect London from air attack. Furthermore, the abolition of bombers would be pointless unless at the same time some way could also be found of preventing the conversion of civil aircraft into bombers.184 The British then suggested that the powers agree to limit the size of large tanks, heavy artillery and capital ships, and chemical weapons, all of which were deemed to be ‘offensive weapons’.185 In the air their suggestions focused not on precise practical proposals but merely consisted of a vaguely expressed willingness to begin negotiations for a convention governing the conduct of aerial warfare.186 But it soon became apparent that one country’s offensive weapons were another country’s defensive weapons, and in any case the French continued to insist that although they would consider the British proposals in detail, they remained adamant that ‘the extent of disarmament depending upon adequate measures to ensure further security.’187
The Germans rejected both sets of proposals because they did not give them the equality of armaments that they sought. They regarded the French plan ‘as little more than a bad joke.’ In April 1932 Brüning threatened that, ‘unless something came out of the Disarmament Conference, he would have to announce to the German people that they could no longer regard themselves as bound by Part V of the Versailles Treaty and then the fat would be in the fire.’188 A month later his government collapsed and it was replaced by a new administration under Franz von Papen. In July, the Papen’s Cabinet secretly agreed to a new and more ambitious rearmament programme, and ten days later the Germans declared that they would not return to the conference unless their demand for the principle of equality was conceded.189 The French were adamant in their determination to stand firm. The British were not. They could either sit back and see Germany rearm, untrammelled by any international agreements, or they could try to exercise at least a measure of control over the pace and extent of German rearmament by agreeing to modifications of the Versailles regime.
‘No third course’, Simon believed, ‘such as that Germany should be held to the Treaty and “not allowed any variation of it,” appears to me to be practicable.’190 The French might wish to cling to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but the British believed that was no longer an option, because ‘the real choice before France is between (i) making an arrangement with Germany now which is sufficiently reasonable for Germany to keep, and (ii) refusing to make such an arrangement, with the result that Germany does what she likes in disregard of the Treaty.’191 Unless Germany was persuaded to return to the conference it would collapse and ‘A Conference which began by aiming at general disarmament will end in increased armaments and the probability of a renewal of war. Our own country may keep out of it, but, even so, we cannot expect our own burdens in the matter of armaments to be reduced, and they will probably have to be increased. And a new war in Europe will shatter economic recovery.’192 Initially the British therefore proposed to grant Germany the moral right to rearm, but simultaneously insist that the limitations imposed on German rearmament at Versailles should remain in place until they were adjusted by mutual agreement.193 Unsurprisingly, the Germans rejected this and the British therefore had to try again. Simon now proposed:
Not everyone willingly followed his lead. Hankey, Lord Hailsham, and the General Staff insisted that Germany was utterly determined to recover the territory they had lost to Poland in 1919. Talk of their moral right to ‘gleichberechtigung’ was a sham. They wanted greater armaments not because they believed they had a moral right to defend their frontiers, but because they wanted to extend them, by force or the threat of force if necessary.195 Hailsham believed that Simon’s insistence that any aggressive tendencies on the part of the German government would be constrained by the force of public opinion was naive. ‘He [Hailsham] doubted if Germany cared at all about the mobilisation of world opinion. Other nations had flouted world opinion: for example, Italy in the Corfu incident, and Japan in Manchuria. The real key to the situation was that Germany alone desired her armaments not for defence, but for aggression. No other nation in Europe had any aggressive purpose. If Germany was given the opportunity completely to re-arm after an interval of five years, it would make war certain a few years later on when Germany had re-armed.’196 Even so Simon won his case, in no small part because, despite the huge majority they enjoyed in parliament, ministers believed that they could not ignore the strength of extra-parliamentary opinion. Hankey believed that ‘our Government have “got the wind up” badly owing to the threat of the pacifists, Bishops and Free Churches, et cetera over the coming failure of the Conference, which has been certain from the first.’197 Simon argued that the public were ‘demanding (l) that Great Britain should “give a lead”, oblivious of the practical lead, we had already given; and (2) that Germany should not be prohibited from the “kind” as distinct from the “quantity” of arms that were allowed to other countries.’ MacDonald was also insistent that such pressures could not be ignored. ‘A position was being created’, he claimed, ‘that would overwhelm the Government if it was not met. On the following day he had to meet several Deputations on the subject, and a few days ago he had received an impressively sound Address, appended to which were the names of leaders in many branches of our national life. A position had been reached where the Government could not base its decisions on the advice of Experts only, but must take public opinion into account.’198 Shorn of its technical details, the essence of Simon’s plan was, as MacDonald explained, ‘to make clear that we were prepared to make the moral gesture of a declaration of German equality but expected that Germany should undertake to do nothing that would be a new cause of unsettlement in Europe.’199
The British then had to sell the plan to the other powers, of whom France was bound to be the most reluctant. In a wide-ranging analysis of the European military balance Sir George Milne intimated that they were bound to ask in return for the kind of definite security guarantee from the British that they had sought since 1919.200 But he hoped that the government would stand firm on their refusal. The services were in no position to put such a guarantee into effect, and standing aloof might give the British a larger measure of control than if they committed themselves firmly to the French. In a classic statement of how policy-makers hoped they could manipulate the European balance of power, he argued that:
If we stand out and join neither one group nor the other and refuse to tie our hands with further pacts, our strength and our influence will be immeasurably increased. Ability to mediate, to apply pressure, even to threaten at a time of crisis, gives us an infinitely stronger hand to play in the interests of peace than if our military support were mortgaged in advance in a quarrel which was not ours and in which the aggressor was decided by international committee. The maintenance of peace requires that a nation can use its influence in this cause in proportion as it is sufficiently respected and sufficiently strong to act effectively. It is no secret after the experience of the last War that the side on which the United Kingdom throws its weight must win. So long, therefore, as we keep clear of entanglements we may be able to act as a balancing force to maintain peace.201
The Simon plan was announced on 10 November. When the American threw their weight behind it, the French saw themselves as isolated, and reluctantly fell into line. Efforts to bring Germany back to Geneva culminated on 11 December when the French, Italian, and British governments, with the approval of the Americans, issued a Joint Declaration promising that Germany would be granted equality if its armed forces did not have weapons that would enable them to take the offensive. The French had, therefore, been forced to accept the imminent prospect of German rearmament without the corresponding security guarantees they had been seeking since 1919.202 Exhausted by their collective efforts to persuade the Germans to return, the conference then adjourned, and discussions were not resumed until 31 January 1933. With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that the conference had now gone beyond the point at which it could achieve anything positive.
Two events in late 1932 and early 1933 now ensured its eventual collapse. On 24 February 1933, the League Assembly accepted the Lytton report, and the Japanese responded by withdrawing from the League and the disarmament conference. In the meantime, on 31 January, and just a day before the conference reconvened, Hitler succeeded von Papen as the German Chancellor. In public the new Chancellor spoke of his peace-loving intentions.203 In private, he preached precisely the opposite. On 3 February he held a private meeting with the leaders of the Reichswehr at which he laid out his stall. He intended to re-educate the German people by sweeping away all traces of Marxism and pacifism, imbuing them instead with a strongly nationalist and militarist ideology. He would reintroduce conscription and rebuild Germany armed strength. Germany would have to pass through a danger period as it rearmed when her neighbours might be tempted to mount a pre-emptive strike before her own forces became too powerful. But once that had passed, he would use Germany’s expanded armed forces for ‘the conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanization.’204 Living space in Russia would provide Germany with the raw materials and arable farmland it needed both to dominate Europe and act as a springboard for world domination. Hitler’s plans and ideology mixed the traditional pan-German goals of expansion to the east with a virulent racism and crude social Darwinism that made his policies more extreme than even the most committed conservative extremists of Weimar Germany. There were also close parallels between Hitler’s objectives and those of Mussolini’s Italy and the Japanese in the 1930s. The leaders of all three powers glorified war and were ready to use force both at home and abroad to create an authoritarian alternative to the liberal political order established at Versailles, and to the Bolshevik regime that Lenin and his comrades had created in the USSR. All three were also determined to revise the 1919 peace treaties in their own interests and sought to establish their own autarkic empires. And all three also shared a common belief in the racial superiority of their own peoples and the racial inferiority of the peoples of those countries they were determined to dominate.205
Much of this remained hidden to casual visitors to Germany. Some were attracted by the activism of the new regime, while others were alarmed by those aspects of the new Germany that smacked of militarism.206 Some British politicians who visited Germany after 1933 were utterly repelled by what they found. Others went in the belief that Nazism was the inevitable product of the fact that Germany had been unjustly treated by the victors in 1919 and that it was imperative that the peace treaty be modified to assuage their legitimate grievances. In any case, they believed that Nazism was the business of the Germans and should not preclude amicable relations between Britain and Germany. In his early years in power that was a delusion that Hitler, conscious of the weakness of his own regime, was only too happy to foster. Others eagerly swallowed Hitler’s insistence that Nazism had saved Germany, and by extension, the whole of Western Europe, from the spread of communism.207
Some observers who had spent more time in the country were better informed about the new Chancellor’s intentions. In April 1933 Sir Horace Rumbold, who had served as ambassador in Berlin since 1928, prepared a memorandum that soon became known as his ‘Mein Kampf despatch’, which was widely circulated in the Foreign Office and to Cabinet ministers. It presented a starkly accurate assessment of Hitler’s aims. His peaceful protestations were a smoke-screen designed to conceal his real intentions. His first priority was to consolidate his power inside Germany, and that entailed ‘the revival of militarism and the stamping out of pacifism. The plans of the Government are far-reaching, they will take several years to mature and they realize that it would be idle to embark on them if there were any danger of premature disturbance either abroad or at home. They may, therefore, be expected to repeat their protestations of peaceful intent from time to time and to have recourse to other measures, including propaganda, to lull the outer world into a sense of security.’208 Hitler’s world view was based upon a combination of Social Darwinist and metaphysical thought which dictated that those nations that were not willing to fight had no right to exist. His conception of both international and domestic politics was driven by a virulent racism which ensured that his foreign policy would go far beyond merely revising the terms of the Versailles settlement. He aimed at the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft, that is a racially pure and militarized community capable of waging the wars of conquest for living space that he believed would alone ensure the future survival of the German people, a survival intimately bound up in his eyes with the destruction of European Jewry.209
Such beliefs were light years distant from the convictions of British policy-makers that war should only ever be entered into as a policy of last resort. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that many of them found it so difficult to formulate a coherent response to Hitler’s actions.210 Rumbold’s analysis was fundamentally correct, but it did nothing to persuade ministers that it was pointless to make yet another effort to salvage something from the disarmament conference. Public support for disarmament in both Britain and France meant that neither government could allow the conference to collapse without further efforts to reach agreement, for to allow the conference to end ignominiously was to accept that war was inevitable. That was something that the men who had done so much to construct the post-1918 international order, and who had invested so much emotional commitment to the preservation of liberal internationalism, could not contemplate. Furthermore, the fact that Germany had been persuaded to return to the conference based on equality of status made it doubly important to do so, for if the conference were to collapse, Germany would proceed to rearm without let or hindrance, and the other powers, including Britain, would have to follow suit.211 As well as shouldering much of the blame for the failure of the conference, Britain would then also have to confront a series of disagreeable realities, including:
intensive competition in armaments in Europe, especially in the air, and intensification of all the leading political controversies—between France and Germany, between Germany and Poland, between Italy and Yugoslavia, between France and Italy, and others. In such conditions political and economic confidence will wane to vanishing point; economic nationalism will become even more rampant; there will be, therefore, a long setback to the hope of economic revival; and the consequent reaction on our relations with the United States is bound to be serious. For our own taxpayers there will be burdens necessitated by reconsidering our own safety. We should have to prepare for the possibility, if not of a war of defence, at least for an armed neutrality. It would be essential that our relations with France should be of the closest kind, and if we cannot be friends with both France and Germany, we shall end by having to be friends with France alone, keeping in with the U.S.A. as far as we can.212
British policy-makers therefore prepared proposals that they hoped would be acceptable to the other powers, safeguard British security, and not require Britain to give the French the firm security guarantee they wanted.213 Their efforts culminated on 16 March 1933 when MacDonald, now a tired old man searching desperately for a way to counter the threat of Nazism without doing violence to the beliefs of a lifetime, went to Geneva. He proposed a disarmament convention that would entail a five-year transition period to allow Germany to achieve equality with the other European powers, and which included, for the first time, figures for the military manpower, armaments, and aircraft for each of them. Heavy artillery and heavy tanks, both reckoned to be offensive weapons, were to be prohibited, and the Washington and London naval treaties were to remain in force until 1935, when a new Permanent Disarmament Commission would call another disarmament conference. The air forces of each of the powers were to be reduced to the same size as the RAF, and, despite the strenuous and repeated objections of the Air Staff, bombing from the air was to be prohibited, except in outlying regions for ‘police’ purposes.214 But Hitler’s accession to power had only hardened French official opinion against making any further concessions to Germany.215 From Paris the Times reported that ‘Nearly all shades of French opinion are agreed that further concessions in the matter of armaments cannot be made by the French Government without tangible guarantees of French security.’216 The French would only agree to the MacDonald plan if a strict regime of international supervision was put in place to ensure that the Germans did not cheat.217 But the plan contained no such guarantees, and discussions quickly became mired in disagreements.218
By May 1933 the Foreign Office understood how much the situation had changed, for ‘Whereas up till a year ago the difficulty in the way of world appeasement might speciously, although not altogether justly, be declared to be the attitude of France, who seemed determined to maintain her military and political predominance in Europe, the difficulty in now uncontestably the threatening and provocative attitude of Germany, who is once more, both spiritually and literally, appearing in her true colours.’219 Hitler’s fears of foreign intervention meant that he preferred to spin-out the negotiations until his regime’s hold on power was more secure.220 British policy-makers did consider applying diplomatic, economic, and even military coercion to persuade the German government to be more amenable, but they found plenty of reasons not to do so. In September 1932 Hankey had suggested that if Germany showed itself to be aggressive, ‘it might be necessary to consider a much more drastic policy: not war, or the use of force, but steps such as bringing her before the Hague Court and exposing her attitude to the force of the League’s main weapon, namely, the full glare of the public opinion of the world.’221 That fell a long way short of advocating a coercive strategy of a preventive war. Eight months later, and after Hitler had come to power, Colonel A. C. Temperley, the head of the War Office section to the British delegation at Geneva, suggested that it was indeed time to take bigger risks, but he too argued for diplomatic coercion, not a preventive war. ‘There appears to be one bold solution’, he insisted. ‘France, the United States and ourselves should address a stern warning to Germany that there can be no disarmament, no equality of status and no relaxation of the Treaty of Versailles unless a complete reversion of present military preparations and tendencies takes place in Germany.’222 But he then gave at least two reasons why such a policy was impracticable. The powers would have to apply the threat of force over a number of years, something that they could not afford to do, and in any case there was no chance of the USA joining such a coalition. Furthermore, coercion would require a unanimous vote by the League’s Council, something that was unlikely to be forthcoming.223 Vansittart raised the possibility of applying military coercion to Germany in August 1933 but he, too, recognized that there were powerful political and strategic arguments against doing so. Before British public opinion could be persuaded to accept such a policy it would be essential to exhaust ‘the procedure for the pacific settlement of international disputes embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations and other instruments [which] must be followed to its conclusion, and the same would hold good in the event of an infraction by Germany of her disarmament obligations.’ The members of the League could only mount an invasion of Germany if the German government refused to submit the dispute to peaceful arbitration and if the Council were unanimously in favour of such a policy. Finally, the CID concluded that an economic blockade of Germany would only be successful after a prolonged struggle which would impose considerable costs on the blockading powers, and on Britain in particular, and it might indeed spill over into armed conflict.224 Simon and his colleagues therefore had plenty of reasons for not taking strong action.
As Rumbold had reported, Hitler was playing for time while he consolidated his position inside Germany, and once he had done so he, too, followed the Japanese example. The Disarmament Conference had adjourned at the end of June, and by the time it reconvened in October Hitler decided that the moment had come. On 14 October Germany formally withdrew from the Conference, placing the blame squarely on Britain and France because of their unwillingness to disarm and thus accept Germany’s claim for equality.225 Germany simultaneously left the League of Nations. Its departure, combined with that of Japan, dealt the League a near fatal blow, and thereby undermined what had since 1919 been one of the main pillars of British grand strategy. In January 1932 MacDonald and his colleagues had recognized that should the Disarmament Conference fail it would cripple the League of Nations which:
will no longer provide the safeguard of peace that for many years has been held by successive Governments to justify the assumption underlying our defensive preparations, that there will be no war for 10 years from any given date, and the consequential low scale of armaments to which the three Defence Services had been reduced. The country will then be faced with the situation in which the choice will lie between the rehabilitation of armaments at a cost which we cannot afford and which British public opinion might be slow to authorise, and acceptance of a situation in which France, fully armed, exercises hegemony in Europe.226
In 1919 Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George had tried to map out a new world order in which the enforced disarmament of the defeated powers would be followed by the voluntary disarmament of the victors, and would in turn lead to an era of enhanced security and peace. The failure of the World Disarmament Conference demonstrated that the allied powers had failed to win the intellectual and moral argument to persuade most Germans that their enforced disarmament in 1919 was not merely designed to impose a humiliating revenge on them for the crimes they had committed during the world war, but that it was part of a genuine attempt to enhance European security. It also represented a major threat to the security of Britain and its empire. The combination of the Great Depression and its repercussions in the form of the Manchurian incident, the collapse of democracy in Germany and the coming to power of the Nazi regime, and the failure of the World Disarmament Conference meant that the liberal international order that the British had helped to fashion in 1919, and then to reshape in ways more to their liking between 1923 and 1926, had crumbled away.
Ministers believed that the fact that the National Government did manage to preserve liberal democracy in Britain at a time when it was collapsing in so many other countries contributed in no small measure to Britain’s international influence. In 1935 Simon was struck by ‘The admiration which is so frequently expressed by foreigners at the spectacle of a country which has faced its difficulties so resolutely and is coming through them on the basis of full political liberty and deep devotion to the Throne, is one which every English man must feel proud.’227 This did, however, sometimes lead to complications in the conduct of international affairs, but it was a complication that ministers were prepared to live with. In April 1937 the Italian ambassador in London complained to the Foreign Office about the tone of British press reports on recent Italian reverses in Spain, and one of Simon’s successors as Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, himself was worried that an Opposition motion in the Commons critical of Italian operations in Abyssinia might sow discord between London and Rome.228 During a visit to Berlin in November 1937 Lord Halifax was assailed by his hosts because of the critical tone of much British newspaper commentary on events in Germany, and he promised to do whatever he could to curb them. Outright censorship was, of course, out of the question, but behind the scenes guidance was not. Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador between 1937 and 1939, was advised to keep in close touch with British journalists in Berlin ‘so that by personal appeal of man to man rather than that of Ambassador to Press correspondents, you would prevent them taking lines that might give offence’, while Halifax himself promised to approach the proprietors of two of the offending newspapers, the Daily Herald and the Daily News. But he admitted that ‘I haven’t as yet devised any approach that is satisfactory to Low, who draws the pictures in the Evening Standard, and these I expect are the most troublesome of any.’229 Furthermore, there were limits beyond which he could not, and did not, want to go. ‘I hope’, he told Henderson, ‘you will do everything you can to get into the heads of your dictator friends that we still, unhappily from their point of view but happily from our own, are a free country.’230
But that could not conceal the fact that the certainties that had underpinned successive governments in the 1920s had been delivered a series of hammer blows by the Slump, the abandonment of the gold standard, Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the collapse of democracy in Weimar Germany, and the failure of the World Disarmament Conference. The result was to leave policy-makers disorientated and lacking the intellectual ballast and tools they needed to understand the new world that they faced. In May 1931 Vansittart warned that:
the world-wide economic depression of last year has had all over the world its political repercussions, and, however different these may be in individual countries, it may be confidently asserted that everywhere they fanned the flame of nationalism, and spread a vague feeling of fear throughout Europe, which in turn extended even to South America. For the first time since the peace people talked of war, foolishly, no doubt, as of a thing no longer unbelievable and impossible. It became once again a possibility in the mind of man, and from what is possible to the next epithet is but a step for imagination. This frame of mind, in so far as it has been induced by economic causes, may pass again when those causes are removed. Meanwhile it has been doing daily mischief, undermining the hopes and ideals of the last decade, and tempting one Government after the other to turn for security to the old weapons of militarism and alliances, to tariff walls and industrial isolation.231
MacDonald shared this view, telling his Foreign Secretary on the eve of a visit to Paris in November 1931 that ‘every day is a day nearer to a very serious crash in which every European nation will be involved, not only financially, but politically. Unless we can keep things going, the whole of the political and economic fabric of Europe will be cracking and crumbling as under an earthquake.’232
But ‘keeping things going’ proved to be problematic, not least because MacDonald and his colleagues in the National Government lacked much of the confidence that they and their predecessors had exhibited in the 1920s. Britain had emerged as one of the victor powers in 1918, but only just. In the winter of 1917–18 policy-makers in London had considered what then seemed to be the very real possibility that the war might end in a stalemate which would have seen Germany dominant on the continent. In October 1918 they opted to end the war quickly for fear that if it continued into 1919 the USA would be so powerful that Woodrow Wilson be able to thrust his unpalatable peace terms down the throats of allies and enemies alike. Speaking to the Imperial Conference in June 1921 Lloyd George reminded his listeners, many of whom had themselves taken part in the deliberations of the imperial War Cabinet in 1918, of ‘how narrow the margin was between victory and defeat’.233 The very fact that they had emerged victorious in 1918 gave the men who guided British policy in the 1920s confidence in the continued reality of British power, and in their own ability to use it to achieve their ends. However, the men who had master-minded Britain’s victory had, by the late 1920s, largely passed from the scene. Lloyd George was in the political wilderness, and after 1931 Churchill followed him. Curzon, Bonar Law, and Balfour were dead, and by 1932 Austen Chamberlain had retired to the back-benches. Their successors, MacDonald, Baldwin, Simon, and Halifax, had not themselves gone through the searing experience of sitting atop the government in 1917–18, looking defeat in the face, and successfully staring it down. Whereas the war had left their predecessors with a residual belief in Britain’s continued strength, it left them with a haunting fear of their country’s weakness. On 23 August 1931, MacDonald had ‘warned the Cabinet of the calamitous nature of the consequences which would immediately and inevitably follow from a financial panic and a flight from the pound.’234 On the day that the National Government was formed Baldwin wrote to his wife that, ‘My word. What a mess! The exchanges are nearly bust today and, if we save the situation, it will only be by the skin of our teeth.’235 There was, as one Foreign Office official put it in 1932, ‘the wide-spread feeling that the foundations of civilisation can no longer be taken for granted as they could before the war—in fact the instability of the capitalist system [sic].’236 Baldwin himself expressed the same fears when he told the Commons that ‘What the world suffers from—and I have said this before—is a sense of fear, a want of confidence, and it is a fear held instinctively and without knowledge very often.’237 This was the mind-set, a combination of fear, uncertainty, and lack of confidence in their own powers, with which British policy-makers in the 1930s tried to salvage what they could from the world order they had helped to create in the 1920s.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press. © David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0006