This book has addressed three questions: what was British grand strategy, how did British policy-makers go about devising it, and why were the outcomes so much more successful in the 1920s than they were in the 1930s? Constructing a viable grand strategy was never an easy task. Shortly after the Second World War began a senior civil servant, who had worked closely with Chamberlain, recognized that ‘One thing I know I have realized which I did not realize before, and that is the complexity of things as they confront a Prime Minister. It seemed to me that in this welter of cross-purposes, cross-interests and tangled faiths, hardly any of them wholly bad, the only sure guide is wisdom, maturing by experience, and based upon the conviction that the destiny of man, though obscure, is not ignoble.’1 The ways in which elements of British grand strategy between the end of the First World War and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in June 1940 interacted were indeed complex. But they were not unfathomable. The aim of every government in this period was to ensure the security of Britain and its empire, and the surest way to do that was to work to establish a stable and peaceful world. This realization owed much to the social cohesiveness and even more the intellectual cohesiveness of the politicians, civil servants, and senior officers of the armed services who constituted the policy-making elite. By 1919 British policy-makers had nearly two centuries’ experience of practising grand strategy, and understood their own strengths and weaknesses. Britain was a small island state located off the shore of Western Europe which governed an empire that spanned the globe. That empire was not a single coherent entity. It was a complex series of delicate inter-related political, cultural, economic, and military relationships, and it was run on a financial shoe-string. It had survived because a series of propitious circumstances had come together which were largely outside the control of any British government. After 1815 a balance of power had emerged within Europe that ensured that Britain’s own security was not threatened by another great power, either across the English Channel or in the Mediterranean. In South East Asia the British could contain challenges to their position from Tsarist Russia, while in the Western Hemisphere they were on good enough terms with the USA that they could neuter any challenge from that quarter. However, by the final decade of the nineteenth century this propitious set of circumstances was beginning to crumble, and thereafter the British had to work increasingly hard to maintain it. The First World War therefore marked the real turning point in the empire’s fortunes. By 1919 the British confronted a situation in which the European balance of power had been destroyed, Japan and the USA had emerged as competitors in East Asia, and there were an increasing number of challengers to their rule from inside the empire.
To maintain their position as a global power British policy-makers understood that they had to maintain the physical security of the British Isles and their wider imperial interests, and to do so in ways that were acceptable to the dominant political interests within Britain. In the short term, any government which acted in ways that were unacceptable to the electorate faced the possibility of losing the next general election. Anyone who spends any time reading the minutes of the Cabinet and its committees between the wars cannot but be struck by the consistency with which policy-makers cited ‘public opinion’ as a constraint on their freedom of action. In the longer term, policy-makers understood that pursuing options that imposed ruinously high costs on their own resources would be counter-productive, for they would consume the same human and economic resources they were intended to protect. Taken in the round, this meant that the dominant goal of policy-makers after 1919 was to combine peace with security. Their empire was a delicate construction and if it was to survive and prosper, they had to do whatever they could to keep it at peace. Their preference, therefore, was always to settle international differences with potential challengers by negotiations. In practice this involved employing a combination of three options. They might embark on a simple process of horse-trading to assuage the appetites of their rivals. They might attempt to coerce them into going down another path that was less threatening to British interests, or they might try to deter them from directly threatening what the British themselves intended to preserve.
In order to devise a grand strategy that would achieve these aims, British policy-makers had first to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their own armed forces, supplemented by what they might hope to generate from their colonies, Dominions, and India. They also had to assess their economic, financial, and industrial capabilities, and the willingness or otherwise of the nation to support whatever policies they wished to pursue. Simultaneously they had to identify who were their potential enemies and allies, and to determine those same factors in respect of each of them. Finally, they had to decide how best to resolve potential or actual conflicts: by negotiations and compromise, by deterrence or coercion, or, in the worst case, by war. The successful application of any of those policies depended on good intelligence about the intentions and capabilities of rivals and allies. That was essential if policy-makers were to be able to choose the correct policy options. Any kind of diplomatic engagement, never mind coercion or deterrence, was unlikely to be successful unless the signals that the British were sending to them were unambiguous and unless they were convinced that the British were capable, if pressed, of backing up their words with force.
Between 1919 and 1921 the British followed the same path as every other great power and demobilized the bloated armed forces they had created during the war. But the services did not stop thinking about the next major war. It would be a ‘total war’ that would involve not merely armed combatants, but also the whole civil populations of each of the belligerents. But that nightmarish scenario lay in the indeterminate future. In the immediate aftermath of the war the main guide-lines of British grand strategy were laid down by the adoption of the so-called ‘Ten-Year Rule’ in August 1919, and the report of the Churchill Committee in February 1922. Their conclusions were underpinned by political and strategic logic. Britain was confronted by no obvious enemies making it imperative to spend large sums of money quickly to prepare the armed forces for war in the immediate future. Indeed, doing so might be counter-productive. It would mean pilling up masses of stores and equipment that would be obsolete when war did come. Politically, there seemed to be few votes to be had in spending large sums on defence and politicians of all parties believed that the public would not easily swallow the message that they must be taxed to pay for another war so soon after the horrendous losses of the last one. Instead of opting to generate large and expensive armed forces and keep them immediately ready for war, the electorate, or rather those pressure groups who claimed to speak for them, opted for a surrogate defence policy in the shape of collective security and the League of Nations. No leader of any political party was prepared to propose an alternative vision, and to recommend reverting to the pre-war pursuit of the balance of power, a policy widely held to have caused the outbreak of war in 1914.
This was not a high-risk policy in the 1920s. By the middle of that decade British diplomatists had played a major part in creating a relatively benign international order that enabled them to ensure the security of Britain and its empire at comparatively low cost and in ways that were consistent with the public will. This did not happen overnight. In the short term the Treaty of Versailles did diminish Germany’s power, but it did not destroy its foundations, and it left many Germans with grievances that could only be assuaged by treaty revisions. But the French would not countenance that, and it was something that the League of Nations, despite the hopes invested in it, could not deliver. The settlement in the Middle East was also far from perfect. The Soviet Union and the Turks had both been excluded from meaningful participation in the process of peace-making, and both also rejected the legitimacy of the terms that the victors had forced upon them. The British were more successful in overcoming threats to their rule from inside their empire. This was only partly because they were relatively much stronger than their challengers, although they were. Their success also owed a good deal to their acceptance that they could not afford, in both financial and political terms, to maintain their rule by brute force. Once they understood this, it was but a short step to accept that only negotiation and horse-trading would produce a sustainable long-term settlement. In none of these instances did the British appease their internal rivals. Rather they pursued Lord Salisbury’s dictum of how to conduct negotiations: they were willing to surrender relatively unimportant points but retained control of what really mattered to them.
In was the same policy that they pursued in the mid-1920s to overcome some of the imperfections of the immediate post-war settlement. Lloyd George’s formula of ‘adroit diplomacy’, did indeed enable the British to manage most of the threats to their empire, although after 1922 he was no longer in a position to oversee the process himself. At Washington, the British contained the American threat to their naval predominance, and the Japanese threat to their regional security in the Far East. When it fixed the ratio of capital ships the Washington treaty also ended the possibility of a ruinously expensive battleship arms race that the British would probably have lost. It brought the British Empire security at a price the British could afford. At the regional level, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance had lapsed, but it was replaced by a new Far Eastern security system which extended to both China and the Pacific. It also ensured the maintenance of imperial unity by removing the conflict of interests over relations with the USA between Canada on the one side and Australia and New Zealand on the other. The British public also wanted arms limitations agreements, and at Washington the government gave them what they wanted. But they cleverly did so in a way that enhanced, rather than degraded, the security of the empire.
The British were similarly successful in their attempts to stymie efforts that threatened the stability of Europe and the Middle East. By 1922 the Rapallo treaty and the Russo-Turkish treaty meant that the three major revisionist powers, the USSR, Germany, and Turkey, had come together in a potentially dangerous grouping intent on destroying the post-war settlement that the British had help to construct. It took the British four years to blunt this threat by negotiating a series of agreements that either superseded or supplemented the diktats that the victors had imposed on the vanquished in 1919–21. Taken together the Treaty of Lausanne, the Dawes Plan, the Locarno pact, and the settlement of the Mosul dispute destroyed the unity of the revisionist powers and created, at least temporarily, the stability and security that the future of the empire demanded. It was the failure of their successors in the mid-1930s to repeat this success when they were faced by a second revisionist alliance that was to confront them with the insuperable problem of how to deter three hostile powers in widely differing parts of the world simultaneously.
The Washington and Locarno treaty systems signalled an all-too-brief period of international stability that enabled the British to achieve their goal of maintaining tranquil relations between the major powers. In the aftermath of Locarno Britain was the world’s only global power. In the Mediterranean and Middle East policy-makers had forged a settlement that was to endure until it was threatened by Mussolini’s ambitions in 1935. The USA had the money to challenge British predominance but it lacked the sustained political will to do so. Britain’s attitude towards Europe remained equivocal. They did not seek to act as a European hegemon. Rather Austen Chamberlain transformed the League of Nations into a second Concert of Europe. He did not use it to pursue collective security, but Britain’s more traditional policy of working to preserve a balance of power between its continental neighbours.
In each of these instances the British owed their success to no one single cause. In the 1920s they may have alienated most of their wartime allies, and relations with France, the USA, and Japan were hardly cordial. But except for the Soviet Union, none of them had become enemies. On the contrary, the British showed that they could cooperate with the USA and Japan at Washington. They were anxious to work with the Germans, if for no other reason than they believed that a prosperous Germany meant a prosperous Britain, and although relations with the French were distinctly frosty in view of the refusal of the British to offer them the kind of military security guarantee they so anxiously sought, Locarno marked a distinct improvement in cross-Channel relations. Secondly, taken in the round, in the mid- and late 1920s Britain possessed more hard power than anyone else. No one could generate as much naval and maritime power as the British. The Washington treaty had fixed the ratio of capital ships to their advantage, the Royal Navy maintained more cruisers than any other navy, and it had a world-wide system of naval bases that no other power could match. Britain’s spending on its navy was exceeded only by that of the USA, and the British spent more on their navy than Japan, Italy, and France combined. The British also spent more on their air force than any other power, although they had rather fewer aircraft than France or the USA. But that hardly mattered. The latter was too far away to bomb Britain, the former, despite British fears, maintained a large air force to fight the Germans, not the British, and the RAF was developing a system of imperial air routes that gave it a mobility unrivalled by any of its potential opponents. The British also spent more on their army than anyone else, although because of their adherence to voluntary recruiting, their spending generated fewer soldiers than any other power except the USA. But again, that was of little import. The British Empire was a maritime empire. The main task of the army in the 1920s was to police the frontiers of that empire, something it was wholly successful in doing. British prestige, and British diplomacy, therefore, had the backing of credible armed forces, and thanks to the work of its highly professional diplomatists and the code-breakers of GCHQ policy-makers frequently enjoyed an intelligence superiority that their rival could not always match. This was especially important because they had to walk a narrow tightrope as they tried to combine policies that would both maintain and enhance the security of their empire while meeting what they perceived to be a public demand for arms limitation agreements.
That they were generally successful enabled them to meet another of their goals, to achieve security at a cost that was acceptable to the electorate. Policy-makers, and in particular politicians, could work with the grain of public opinion, and were not confronted with the difficult task of trying to persuade voters that security and arms limitations were incompatible, and that they could either have one or the other, and not both. The consequence of all this was that British governments had sufficient hard power, public support, and self-confidence to meet the Americans on equal terms at Washington, to deter the Japanese at Singapore, and the French in the air over the Channel (not that the French really needed deterring) and to cajole the French and Germans into composing their difference at Locarno. In Asia they could wage a cold war against the Soviets and project their power into China to protect their most prized asset, Shanghai. The only instance where they reluctantly opted to appease a rival came over an issue in which possession of adequate hard power was irrelevant, the settlement of their war debts to the USA.
But the London naval treaty was the last success for the liberal international order that British policy-makers had worked to create after 1919. Between 1929 and 1933 what was from the British point of view a benign international system collapsed. The world economy entered the Great Depression, Britain was forced off the gold standard, and the failure of the World Disarmament Conference signalled the end of the search for security through multilateral arms control agreements. The supine response of the League of Nations to Japan’s aggression in China and Germany’s departure from the League highlighted its limitations as a body tasked with maintaining international security. On the positive side the National Government did ensure the survival of liberal democracy in Britain, something that ministers believed contributed significantly to Britain’s international prestige. But in almost all other respects the events of 1929–33 represented a hammer blow to their confidence in Britain’s power and ability to take the initiative in shaping the international environment. And this happened at the very moment when they needed all their confidence in British power to resist the ambitions of a far more powerful trio of revisionist powers than they had confronted in the 1920s. By the end of 1931 ministers felt themselves confronted by an international crisis of epic proportions and they lacked the confidence of their predecessors in the early 1920s to overcome it. The latter group had steered Britain through the traumas of the First World War. During the opening months of 1918 Britain had seemed to be dangerously close to defeat, and they knew that the margin between defeat and victory had been perilously narrow. But the very fact that Britain had emerged victorious convinced them of the continued reality of British power, and that they need not be overly dismayed when everything seemed to be collapsing around their ears. But by 1931 the men who had been at the very top of government in 1918 and who had master-minded Britain’s recovery from the near military disaster of March and April 1918, and then turned the situation around in the summer of 1918, had departed. Bonar Law, Curzon, and Balfour were dead. Lloyd George and Churchill were out of power. Austen Chamberlain had retired to the backbenches. Their successors, Baldwin, MacDonald, Simon, and Neville Chamberlain had not shared the same experiences, and did not draw the same lessons from them. Rather than being convinced that the war had demonstrated the residual strength of British power, they were haunted by images of British weaknesses.
This was the mind-set with which policy-makers approached the need to conduct a major reappraisal of British grand strategy. It was one which was ill suited to enable them to deal with the challenges posed by the three rival powers, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan, that emerged in the mid-1930s. In the 1920s, British policy-makers had needed to pay little attention to the ways in which differing ideologies drove the ambitions of other powers. The ambitions of all their rivals, with the exception of the USSR, were governed by a combination of the pursuit of national interests as traditionally conceived, their leaders’ personalities, and the interplay of different factions within their policy-making elites. But the leaders of Germany, Italy, and Japan were now driven by ideological assumptions that were quite foreign to most British policy-makers. British political culture valued a willingness to give and take and compromise. In the arena of international relations that implied a willingness to work within the existing international system grounded on Wilson’s New Diplomacy. But that was the very system that the fascist powers were bent on destroying. The British sought peace and thought of war as an option of last resort. That was not true of Britain’s rivals, none of whom deemed peace as being a necessarily desirable situation. They repeatedly insisted that their aims were peaceful, while giving the lie to their peaceful intentions by expanding their armed forces.
In the 1920s British grand strategy had been both realistic and successful. Their commitment to pursuing security through multilateral arms control agreements coupled with a modest level of naval and aerial rearmament, was consistent not only with the reality of the threats facing Britain, but also with their own resources, and with what the public would accept. But between 1930 and 1933 the Great Depression meant that the international context, which had appeared so promising just a few years earlier, became much more menacing, and faced MacDonald’s National Government with a serious dilemma. They had been elected to lead Britain out of the Slump. That was something which they considered could only be done if they pursued orthodox economic policies and balanced the budget at the lowest possible level. But they also recognized that British security was under growing threats from Japan in the Far East and Germany in Europe, and that to meet those threats it would be necessary for them to rectify some of the armed services’ deficiencies. The DRC’s report saw the start of a shift in emphasis in British grand strategy as it moved away from the pursuit of security through a search for multilateral arms limitation agreements, and towards seeking the same goal through a modest degree of rearmament. It was also intended to form the basis of a new grand strategy and to ensure that by 1939, the British would be able meet the new range of threats facing them in the Far East and in Europe. But the officials who prepared it knew that none of this would be possible unless British politicians primed the British public to make the necessary sacrifices.
The programme that the DCM and Cabinet accepted in July 1934 was not the one that the DRC had proposed. Ministers had re-written it not merely in the light of what they believed to be pressing economic constraints, but by what they thought the electorate would or would not tolerate. The DRC had asked the National Government to educate public opinion in the new strategic realities that now confronted Britain. But instead ministers preferred to offer the electorate what they believed they wanted, rather than what they needed. In so doing they placed their own electoral ambitions before the needs of imperial defence. Measures to prepare even a small regular field force to go to the continent were postponed because they believed it would be deeply unpopular. By contrast the creation of an air force bigger than even the Air Staff wanted or thought practicable was agreed by ministers because they thought it was what the voters wanted. Their ex post facto justification, that to have done otherwise, in view of the pacifist inclinations of the electorate, would have handed victory to a Labour government who would have done even less to rectify Britain’s defence deficiencies, does not stand up to scrutiny. The Peace Ballot did not demonstrate that the great bulk of the British people were pacifists. In the 1930s outright pacifists were in a tiny minority. The great majority of the British public were pacificists. They hated war, preferred peace, and would not go to war unless they were persuaded that Britain’s interests were under real and immediate threat. In the mid-1930s the notions that the First World War had arisen from a combination of the pre-war arms race and the division of Europe into competing alliance systems died hard. These constraints were not immutable, but if the public’s mind-set were to be changed, it would require a major effort by their political leaders to do so. That was something the leaders of the National Government were not prepared to do.
By the second half of 1934 Neville Chamberlain’s vision dominated Cabinet thinking about British grand strategy. It placed the defence of the British Isles against a knock-out blow from the air delivered by the German air force, an operation that the Luftwaffe was in no position to deliver before the fall of France in the summer of 1940, ahead of either the demands of the Far East, or of the need to create an expeditionary force of sufficient size and power to ensure that France did not fall. The focus on home defence and the creation of an aerial deterrent, at the expense of both the Far East and any commitment to the land defence of France and the Low Countries, were to remain pillars of British grand strategy until the spring of 1939. It is impossible to be categorical in claiming that if Baldwin and his colleagues had taken a decisive stand in public and brought home clearly the threats confronting Britain and its empire, and the need to rearm more rapidly, that the electorate would have supported them. But what is clear is that they barely tried to get that message across. Instead, they contented themselves with focusing on those parts of the defence programme—that is, creating a powerful aerial deterrent—that they thought would most readily command public support. It is equally plain that by 1936 British grand strategy was going down a blind alley. The British had badly miscalculated the effect that their policies would have on their rivals. The Japanese rejected British blandishments and refused to do as Chamberlain had wanted, and to curb their ambitions in the Far East. Hitler was equally unwilling to play the part that the British hoped he would. The Stresa front was intended to be the lynchpin of a strategy to contain Germany and encourage Hitler to return to the conference table. But the British themselves then started its unravelling. The increasing tempo of German rearmament, coupled with the increasing need to ensure that the fleet would not be tied down in European waters if it was needed at Singapore, encouraged them to seize Hitler’s offer of an Anglo-German naval arms limitation agreement. This was a misstep which began the disintegration of the Stresa front. The second, and fatal, blow came in October 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Henceforth Italy could no longer be regarded as a friend but had increasingly to be seen as a potential enemy. The central premise of the grand strategy that the British had adopted in July 1934, that Britain faced only two potential enemies, was redundant. Now policy-makers had to decide how best to confront not only Germany in Western Europe and Japan in the Far East, but also Italy in the Mediterranean.
The remilitarization of the Rhineland may or may not have been the last opportunity to stop Hitler in his tracks short of a major war, but there was never any possibility that the Baldwin government would seize it. The British public could see no good reason for going to war, and in France politicians were gearing themselves up for what would be a deeply divisive general election. Locarno was dead, France had been humiliated, and its strategic position had been significantly weakened for never again would it be able to come to the aid of its East and Central European allies by invading Germany across its undefended western frontier. Conversely, Hitler’s prestige had been enhanced, the warnings of his own generals that Germany lacked the power to carry off such a coup had been shown to be hollow, and an image of British weakness had been created in the minds of German leaders that persisted down to 1939. The result was that when the British did finally signal their determination to oppose rather than appease Germany in 1939, it was easy for Hitler to disbelieve them. For the next year British grand strategy drifted. Baldwin failed to give a decisive lead in any direction, and ministers were at such a loss that they even forbore from publishing a Defence White Paper in early 1937 lest the public grasp that those at the top had no very clear idea of what they were doing. The decision to limit the size and speed of the rearmament programme by ensuring that it must not interfere with the normal course of trade meant that although rearmament was happening, it was happening too slowly. Making that fact public would only diminish Britain’s capability to deter, coerce, or negotiate with its rivals.
Neville Chamberlain’s greatest achievement was to end the drift that had characterized the final months of the Baldwin government. He was absolutely determined to do whatever he thought was right irrespective of what his critics might say. Those policies were not imposed upon him by force of circumstances. They were the product of choices he made when he was faced by possible alternatives. Appeasing Mussolini or Hitler were not the only alternatives he could have taken. He could have chosen Eden’s programme of hastening rearmament and cooperating with other powers to contain the dictators. His choice not to do so was deliberate, but he was not the only man who wanted to go down the path he chose. The conviction that Germany was right to claim that it had been badly treated at Versailles and that it had genuine grievances extended far beyond Chamberlain and his kitchen Cabinet. It cut across class lines and political boundaries, just as did the fear that the next great war would see the destruction of European civilization. Chamberlain gave focus to all of these belief and fears when he took control of British grand strategy and steered it down the road he believed was correct. But in turning his back on Eden’s plan Chamberlain was also rejecting a policy that had served Britain well over the preceding two hundred years. Britain emerged as one of the great powers in the long eighteenth century not merely because it was strong, but because it augmented its strength by working with other powers with whom it shared at least some common interests. The British may have had the luxury of shunning alliances for much of the nineteenth century, but their ability to do without allies after 1815 was an optical illusion. It was born out of the fact that until Bismarck unified Germany no other great power was trying to establish its hegemony over the European continent. When that benign situation deteriorated at the end of the century the British were quick to mend their fences with the two powers, France and Russia, which shared a common interest in containing the ambitions of the Second Reich. In the 1930s the British were faced by a similar threat to their security, albeit one that extended beyond Europe to encompass their interests in both the Mediterranean and the Far East.
But to suggest that they were unable to successfully ward off these threats because their power had ‘declined’ is an error. Rather, by adamantly refusing to seek potential allies, Chamberlain demonstrated that he did not know how to wield it. Under his premiership the pursuit of Collective Security, of which Eden was the symbol, was a thing of the past. Running after the French or the Americans, he believed, was pointless. The former were too weak and divided, and the latter too unreliable. Neither could be trusted to offer support in a crisis. More rearmament was necessary, but its shape and speed still had to be constrained by what the country could afford; and until the programme had made a great deal more progress, Britain lacked the strength to wage war simultaneously in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. British policy therefore had to be both pro-active and pacific, and Chamberlain had the self-confidence to believe that he had the negotiating skills to deliver it. Underpinning his pursuit of appeasement was the belief that war would not only shake the empire to its foundations, but it would also undermine the domination of British domestic politics that the Conservative party had enjoyed since the middle of the 1920s. The immediate consequences of this were that Chamberlain abandoned any pretence of maintaining a balance of power in the three key regions of the world, Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, and the Far East that mattered most to Britain. Instead, he opted to turn Britain into a fortress. He did so on the assumption that what he regarded as a massive spending programme on rearmament, coupled with evidence of Britain’s ability to sustain such spending over a prolonged period, would show the dictator powers that Britain would not tamely surrender to their demands. The ‘fourth arm of defence’, Britain’s financial and economic staying-power, would constitute a deterrent that would convince them that they could not win a war, and that they had more to gain by negotiating than by fighting. The continued presence of large Italian forces in Spain, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in China, the Anschluss, the Munich conference, and Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland all suggested that he had miscalculated. That miscalculation became even more obvious after Hitler unilaterally repudiated the Munich agreement and occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. That was accompanied by a chorus of rumours that his ambitions were not confined to the expansion of German power and influence in Central and Eastern Europe, but that he might soon unleash his growing might against Britain itself. Together they produced a revolution in British grand strategy. A continental commitment, the preparation of an army to go to the defence of France and the Low Countries, guarantees to Poland, Greece, and Rumania, staff talks with the French, preparations of joint war plans, all things that had seemed inconceivable just six months earlier, now came to pass. With varying degrees of reluctance policy-makers accepted that Europe mattered, and that if a power or combination of powers hostile to Britain dominated Europe, Britain’s own security might be in mortal danger. Hitler’s ambitions had to be curbed by a combination of deterrence and containment. But these things happened despite rather than because of Chamberlain.
British policy-makers had always shaped their grand strategy with one eye on the international environment. But what also remained the case was that they had also done so according to their reading of what the British public wanted or would at least tolerate. In the 1920s and early 1930s they believed that the public did not want greater armaments or a military commitment to Europe. What they did want was a peaceful and stable Europe, and so they gave them Locarno and the promise of disarmament held out by the World Disarmament Conference. After he became Prime Minister, and even after Munich, Chamberlain’s reading of what the public wanted remained unchanged: they were pacific, and they did not want war. This was the driver that impelled him to operate through backchannels and behind the backs of his colleagues in his continual efforts to seek a general settlement with Hitler. It was because a growing number of ministers, led by Halifax, had a different understanding of what the British public wanted that government policy could and did change in the spring of 1939. While Chamberlain continued to hanker after a negotiated settlement with Germany, he was dragged reluctantly down the road of making commitments to European powers, acquiescing in the expansion of Britain’s own armed forces, and threatening Hitler with war if he attacked Poland. But the very fact that the British seemed to be pursuing deterrence in public, and conciliation and appeasement in private, only ensured that both policies would fail.
Chamberlain’s apologists have argued that his grand strategy was successful as in September 1939 Britain had to go to war against only one enemy, Germany, and not a combination of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and that it did so with an ally, France, and with a government and people united in the belief that war was inevitable. This argument has some credibility. But it also ignores the obvious point that the fact that Britain was at war with Germany represented a defeat for Chamberlain. He had never wished to go to war with anyone and he and his colleagues now opted for a war-fighting strategy that they believed would deliver a victory of a kind at minimal cost. In 1939 policy-makers hoped they could avoid defeat in a short war and were confident that they could win a long war. When the German offensive in the west that they expected did not happen, they opted for a Fabian strategy. They began to mobilize their own resources, while at the same time trying to deny Germany the resources it needed to wage a long war. This looked like a supremely rational grand strategy. It would permit Britain and its allies to gain the maximum benefit from the advantages they enjoyed—a large empire, superior maritime power, and access to world-wide sources of supply—while minimizing the likely human cost of the war. Simultaneously, the British sought to keep the three potentially hostile powers, the USSR, Japan, and Italy, neutral, while at the same time wooing the most important friendly neutral, the USA. Coercion, not conquest, was the goal of British grand strategy. What they sought was not the destruction of Germany and its break-up into smaller and weaker successor states. They did want to eliminate Hitler but they were then prepared to talk to a successor regime that would offer them real, albeit ill-defined, assurances that Germany would not again threaten European peace and the security.
However, fighting a limited war for limited aims was only possible if both sides were committed to doing so, and Hitler was not. Hitler agreed with the French and British that time was not on his side. But instead of inducing him to submit to their pressure, it made him determined to gamble everything on a final effort to destroy the anti-German coalition. He would have acted in the winter of 1939–40, but bad weather and the reluctance of his generals stopped him. Ministers in London also overestimated the patience of their critics, both inside and outside parliament, to suffer the sacrifices imposed on the British public for the sake of the war effort at a time when there was little evidence that the government was any closer to delivering victory. The manifold difficulties of enforcing the blockade, growing evidence of Britain’s own economic difficulties, and the very fact that Germany had not mounted an offensive in the winter to bring the war to a rapid conclusion seemed to show that time was not on the allies’ side. It looked as though Germany, not Britain and France, was growing relatively stronger as time passed. By the end of the year a growing number of policy-makers recognized that something had to be done to bring victory nearer, and to persuade parliament, the public, and their allies that the government knew how to do so. In short, the war effort had to be galvanized.
All eyes turned to Scandinavia, but instead of being a short-cut to winning the war, their efforts to undermine the German war economy by mounting an expedition to Norway and Sweden was both a military fiasco and, for the Chamberlain government, a political calamity. The claim that Chamberlain can be absolved for the military disaster that overtook the British and French armies in France and the Low Countries is hard to sustain. He can indeed be absolved from responsibility for the state of the French army. But he cannot so easily escape responsibility for the state of the British army, and for Britain’s failure to prepare for a continental land war. In the 1930s the refusal of successive governments, of which he was a leading member and later leader, to prepare the army for a continental role undermined any confidence that potentially friendly European powers might have had in British strength, limited Britain’s own foreign policy options, and assisted Hitler in his efforts to overturn the European balance of power in 1938–9. Nor can the fact be ignored that in 1940 Britain’s generals could only fight with what the governments of the 1930s had given them, and that was far too little.
Chamberlain’s demise and Churchill’s assumption of power coincided with a second, and even greater blow to the long-war grand strategy that the British and French had conceived in the spring and summer of 1939. Since the end of the First World War British policy-makers had always assumed that if they ever went to war against Germany again, they would do so with France as an ally, and with at least the active assistance, if not the actual participation, of the USA. But by June 1940 France had collapsed, and Italy had entered the war against them. Furthermore, and despite Churchill’s hopes, American assistance was not forthcoming. Even so ministers and officials opted to continue the war rather than seek a negotiated peace on German terms. They had good reasons for believing that they could make Britain safe from invasion, but less good ones for believing that they could win the war. Any terms that Hitler offered would have brought peace of a kind, but it would have been a peace bought at the expense of Britain’s security and independence. In refusing to do a deal on those terms, policy-makers showed that the aims of their grand strategy had remained consistent. They were as they had been since 1919: the pursuit of peace, but not peace bought at the expense of their security.
In trying to devise a grand strategy that would enable them to maintain peace and security in the 1930s, MacDonald, Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain undoubtedly faced a more challenging international environment than their predecessors had done in the 1920s. By the middle of the decade Germany, Italy, and Japan were, relatively-speaking, more powerful than they had been a decade earlier. But what was even more important, their leaders had come to reject the liberal international order that the British had helped to create after 1919 and wanted to replace it with something that would directly threaten British security in Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, and in Asia. But Britain’s problems were compounded by another factor. In the 1920s those at the top of the British policy-making elite had been confident that they had at their disposal the power and prestige they needed to shape the international environment in ways that would serve their interests. In the 1930s too many of their successors were not steeped in that same self-confidence. Whereas in the 1920s Lloyd George, Curzon, and Austen Chamberlain had been infused with a sense of Britain’s power, MacDonald, Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain saw only Britain’s weaknesses. But those weakness were not pre-ordained. More resources could have been mobilized, and different policy-choices could have been made. In the 1920s British policy-makers had enjoyed the luxury that they could shape a realistic grand strategy that would safeguard the security of the British Empire within the constraints placed upon them by public opinion. In the 1930s their successors enjoyed no such luxury. As the 1934 DRC report made clear, a realistic grand strategy would require the government to embark on an expensive rearmament programme to prepare all three services for a future war and Britain would also have to accept that isolation from Europe was impracticable and unrealistic. Like it or not, Britain’s own security depended on the preservation of the independence of France and the Low Countries, and the only way to ensure that they survived was to work with them as continental allies. But doing either of those things went against the grain of public opinion, at least so far as the politicians at the top of the National Government understood it. They would, therefore, have had to take the electorate into their confidence, and to convince them why change was necessary. As the behaviour of the National Government during the 1935 General Election demonstrated, this was a challenge they shunned. The result was that Britain stumbled unprepared into war in September 1939, and paid the price of that unpreparedness in the summer of 1940. Dunkirk may have been a deliverance but, as Churchill understood, it was not a victory. Rather it was a defeat for those who believed that Britain and Europe did not share a common destiny, and that Britain could be secure and prosperous if it simply ignored what was happening just twenty miles away across the English Channel. The successes and failures of British grand strategy between 1919 and 1940 showed that the wider world mattered to Britain, but that Europe mattered a whole lot more.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press. © David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0012