In the footsteps of Cromwell: an empire against two evils, 1941–53
Winston S. Churchill: ‘Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?’
Harold Macmillan: ‘Yes, sir, a very great man.’
Winston S. Churchill: ‘Ah, but he made one terrible mistake. Obsessed in his youth by the fear of the power of Spain he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?’
LATE NIGHT CONVERSATION IN CAIRO, 1943 1
Militarily not very desirable. Psychologically inevitable.
EMANUEL ‘MANNY’ SHINWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEFENCE, on the decision to send British troops to Korea, 25 July 1950 2
On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 Churchill memorably told his private secretary Jock Colville: ‘If Hitler invaded hell he would at least make a favourable reference to the devil!’3 In such circumstances was the ‘Grand Alliance’ born. Thus, as the German invasion proceeded, the British government sought to ingratiate itself with Moscow.4 Lothar Kettenacker observed that the approach of anti-appeasers like Churchill and Eden to Stalin resembled nothing so much as Chamberlain’s earlier diplomacy towards Hitler.5 This alliance entailed forgetting about the ‘bad blood’, which was considerable, accrued in Anglo-Soviet relations since 1917.6 This was manageable while Nazi Germany represented a supreme danger, and presented a common enemy,7 but it would be virtually impossible to maintain in the long term.8 Once the war had ended, and the Cold War had descended, the Soviets and British both sought to make political capital out of the others’ dealings with Hitler. The Soviets thus made repeated references to Munich, while the British periodically cited the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Unsurprisingly, both sides remained extraordinarily sensitive to any reference to these two agreements.9 In 1973, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) brief for the then–foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, stressed that ‘the right to say that responsibility for the terms of the Munich Agreement is shared by all four signatories. Mr. Chamberlain, for his part, believed at the time that he secured an honourable settlement.’10 Meanwhile as late as 1988, a leading Soviet historian wrote, in hypersensitive fashion, that: ‘The Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact fully corresponded to all ethical and legal norms.’11
In April 1943, the discovery at Katyń of the mass graves of 22,000 Poles, murdered by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, threatened the fragile unity of the anti-Hitler coalition.12 The Germans, predictably, had revealed Katyń to the world in the hope of sowing disharmony within the ‘United Nations’,13 while the Soviets, equally predictably, immediately denied the killings and blamed them on the Germans.14 Eden had pleaded with the Polish prime minister-in-exile, General Władysław Sikorski, to effectively set aside the Soviet crime. He refused and Moscow inevitably denounced the government-in-exile and broke off diplomatic relations.15 Whatever the truth of the charges emanating from Berlin, attempts to sow discord between London and Moscow were doomed to failure as a policy of appeasement was now firmly directed at Stalin by Churchill and the British government. At a meeting with Sikorski, Churchill identified the affair as a German plot, although he added: ‘I may observe, however, that the facts are pretty grim.’16 Although absent from the official British record, at that same meeting Churchill admitted to Sikorski: ‘Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.’17 Alas, Realpolitik dictated that the British did nothing. After an international commission seemed to have confirmed Soviet guilt, Sir Owen O’Malley, ambassador to the Polish Government-in-Exile, reflected bitterly on matters.
If, then, morals have become involved with international politics, if it be the case that a monstrous crime has been committed by a foreign Government – albeit a friendly one – and that we, for however valid reasons, have been obliged to behave as if the deed was not theirs, may it not be that we now stand in danger of bemusing not only others but ourselves . . . If so, and since no remedy can be found in an early alteration of our public attitude towards the Katyn affair, we ought, maybe, to ask ourselves how, consistently with the necessities of our relations with the Soviet Government, the voice of our political conscience is to be kept up to concert pitch.18
If O’Malley expected the crusade that Britain had undertaken against Hitler to yield a new international politics of morality he was to be sorely disappointed. In the autumn of 1943, George Orwell was particularly scathing of the manner in which the Left’s sycophancy towards Moscow was increasingly emulating the Right’s attitude towards Berlin and Rome during the heyday of appeasement. He noted how ‘the intellectuals of the Left’ defended the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 for being ‘ “realistic”, like Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and with similar consequences.’ For Orwell the solution was clear: ‘If there is a way out of the moral pigsty we are living in, the first step towards it is probably to grasp that “realism” does not pay, and that to sell out your friends and sit rubbing your hands while they are destroyed is not the last word in political wisdom.’19 By this stage, the ascendancy of Soviet arms increasingly portended the substitution of German hegemony with Soviet dominion. In March 1944, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden confessed to a ‘growing apprehension that Russia has vast aims, and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean and the “communizing” of much that remains.’20 Yet, as Chamberlain had concluded in the 1930s, the British government decided it had no option but to parley with the strongest power on the continent. On 9 October 1944, Churchill, acting rather less officially than Chamberlain had done at Munich, attempted to divide the states of Eastern Europe with Stalin by means of crude percentages.21 Of this extraordinary agreement, Henry Kissinger notes: ‘Never before had spheres of influence been defined by percentages.’ Yet, by the time of the Yalta Conference in early 1945, the ‘percentages agreement’ was dead. It had been rendered so by the physical control of much of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe by the Red Army.22
Sometime after Munich a politician who had opposed the agreement supposedly asked Chamberlain how he could trust Hitler after the latter had broken so many promises since 1933. The prime minister, then at the height of his popularity, supposedly replied: ‘Ah, but this time he promised me.’23 Churchill attacked such naïveté with regard to Hitler, although he was also prone to the very same brand of wishful thinking when it came to Stalin, and when it was in his interest. Churchill’s attempt to appease Stalin peaked at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, after which he asserted: ‘Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.’24 Frank Roberts, a British diplomat at Yalta, recalled that Churchill bitterly regretted his public professions of faith in Stalin, just as Chamberlain had lamented flouting the ‘piece of paper’ (both symptomatic of what John Charmley termed ‘post-conference optimism syndrome’). In Churchill’s case, Nikolai Tolstoy noted that this marked the culmination of a journey from bitter foe of Stalinism to active connivance with Soviet dominion over Eastern Europe: a ‘bitter irony of history’ brought about by political neccessity.25 On the eve of Yalta, MP Sir Duncan McCallum warned Eden: ‘While most reasonably-minded people agree that appeasement was necessary at the time of Munich . . . H.M. Government is acting on the lines of “peace at any price” with Russia.’ Walter Lippmann noted that the decisions to confirm Stalin’s control of much of Europe reflected the fact that ‘the West paid the political price for having failed to deter Hitler in the 1930s, for having failed to unite and rearm against him’.26 A. J. P. Taylor later wrote: ‘This was exactly what the opponents of Churchill had feared, and even he hardly foresaw all that was involved. Victory, even if this meant placing the British empire in pawn to the United States; victory, even if it meant Soviet domination of Europe; victory at all costs.’27 Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home) gave voice to ‘certain misgivings about certain sections of this Yalta Agreement’ in the Commons, opining: ‘We could never be a party to a process under which a whole range of the smaller countries of Europe was drawn, by a mixture of military pressure from without and political disruption from within, into the orbit of another and a greater Power.’28 The Conservative MP Harold Nicolson observed: ‘Winston is as amused as I am that the warmongers of the Munich period have now become appeasers, while the appeasers have become the warmongers.’29 A. J. P. Taylor later noted how ‘[t]he men of Munich began to re-form’ as twenty-five MPs voted against the motion to approve Yalta, whilst one minister (Henry Strauss) resigned.30 While A. L. Rowse viewed the decision to allow the Soviet Union into ‘the middle of Europe . . . as an historic mistake for which we have to endure the gravest consequences’, British diplomats remained unapologetic. For Gladwyn Jebb, Hitler’s war meant: ‘If there hadn’t been any Yalta conference at all, the result would have been much the same. I think history would have fulfilled itself, Yalta or no Yalta.’31
As well as signalling the demise of the ‘Grand Alliance’, the end of the war also meant the end of political collaboration between the major political parties in Britain. Early in 1945 Konni Zilliacus, who hailed from Labour’s Far Left, wrote: ‘The Second World War is in a very real sense the price paid for the preservation of the capitalist system and almost uninterrupted Tory rule after the First World War.’32 Labour’s campaign for the general election in July of that year developed this theme further and sought to use the legacy of appeasement to undermine the Conservative Party at every turn.33 This involved the repeated invocation of Neville Chamberlain, shameful events such as the betrayal of the League of Nations and the Hoare-Laval Pact and digging up the numerous favourable references to Mussolini and Hitler made by Conservative politicians (including Churchill) in the 1930s.34 Such events were recounted in publications like the Labour Party’s pamphlet, The Guilty Party, as the MP Sir William Jowitt urged his constituents to ‘recall the awful pre-war mess the Tories had made of things . . . Think of “Munich”; appeasement of Hitler; shortage of war weapons; hatred of Russia’.35 The Conservative MP Quentin Hogg argued that the Labour Party hierarchy ignored a whole range of issues in 1945 and concentrated, instead, on Munich.
If there be such a thing as a High Command among the Left, it is evident that the order has gone forth that the word ‘Munich’ should become a legend, a battlecry, or scalping knife for Tories, anything but a subject for sober reflection . . . To be a member of the party of Churchill and Eden is to be a Man of Munich, and to be a Man of Munich is to commit political suicide.36
ILLUSTRATION 1.1 Opening session of the Potsdam Conference in Potsdam, Germany, 17 July 1945. Cadogan, Eden, Churchill, Attlee et al. face Stalin and Truman. On the same day the conference opened Eden minuted Churchill: ‘I am deeply concerned about the pattern of Russian policy, which becomes clearer as they become more brazen every day.’
The Labour Party duly went on to win the general election of July 1945 with a huge overall majority of 146 seats. Harold Macmillan later famously lamented: ‘It was not Churchill who lost the 1945 election; it was the ghost of Neville Chamberlain.’37 Attlee himself later asserted that the memory of Munich had played a significant role in the crushing Conservative defeat.38 Nevertheless, whatever the effectiveness of the invocation of appeasement in the campaign of 1945, its prominence foreshadowed any number of postwar debates on foreign policy.
After the Potsdam Conference ended in early August 1945, the new Labour government of Clement Attlee found itself increasingly unable and unwilling to continue the appeasement of the Soviet Union.39 The traumatic experience of Chamberlainite appeasement made the decision to stand firm against the Soviets a very natural one for most policy makers.40 This was especially the case with Ernest Bevin, the new foreign secretary, who had talked of ‘left speaking to left in comradeship and confidence’,41 but who now embraced anti-Sovietism with all the zeal of the convert. Such attitudes were encouraged by the rapid hardening of US attitudes as the likes of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal dismissed the idea of approaching Stalin with ‘understanding and sympathy’ as ‘[w]e tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement.’42 The lesson of the recent past only underlined the need to reject appeasement given the pattern of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe as Stalin, like Hitler, was seen to have broken his word repeatedly while expanding his dominion state-by-state.43 The idea that the USSR had to be opposed resolutely was accompanied in London by a belief that Britain remained a global power to be reckoned with. After all, Stalin was but the latest tyrant seeking hegemony on the continent of Europe (following Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Hitler).44 It had been resistance to such a pattern of domination that had laid the foundations for the modern European state system.45 Policy makers in London therefore maintained that Britain, traditionally in the lead in the denial of the notion of a continental hegemon, still had a role to play. Ernest Bevin outlined matters thus in 1947:
We regard ourselves as one of the Powers most vital to the peace of the world, and we still have our historic part to play. The very fact that we have fought so hard for liberty, and paid such a price, warrants our retaining this position; and, indeed, it places a duty upon us to continue to retain it. I am not aware of any suggestion seriously advanced, that, by a sudden stroke of fate, as it were, we have overnight ceased to be a great Power.46
As a corollary of this belief in the continuing relevance of British power, and following an awkward and humbling meeting with US Secretary of State James Byrnes,47 Bevin famously declared that he wanted to see the atomic bomb ‘with a bloody Union Jack on it’.48 And, although Bevin did not live to see it, Britain duly tested its first atomic bomb in 1952 (and its first H-bomb in 1957). The drive for nuclear weapons signified that appeasement was but a distant memory. Negotiation itself was now seen as dangerous and General Sir Brian Robertson, military governor in Germany, warned: ‘if we keep on talking indefinitely, we might wake up some fine morning to find the Hammer and Sickle already on the Rhine.’49 The resolution demonstrated by the West, and by the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, in its confrontation over Berlin in 1948–950 led directly to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This secured a permanent American commitment to the defence of Western Europe,51 and institutionalized the rejection of a policy of appeasement towards Moscow. In 1972, Robert Skidelsky noted the ‘transatlantic motive for buttressing the conventional wisdom’ on appeasement. This arose because, after 1945, the United States had inherited Britain’s world position ‘and with it a Commitment to preserve the status quo against a new challenger, Russia’. And, in both the United States and Britain, ‘“Munich” became synonymous with “appeasing Communism”’.
The opprobrium attached to appeasing the dead dictator in Berlin was [now] attached to appeasing the living dictator in Moscow; to affirm Munich was to deny NATO. In this way the lessons of the 1930s were drawn in the context of the Cold War; and it was essential to these lessons to portray Hitler as bent on world conquest, and appeasement as a fatal mistake which had almost enabled him to achieve it.52
As noted above, one of the leading proponents of a firm policy towards the USSR was Ernest Bevin. The foreign secretary played a crucial role in the process of constructing the Western security architecture with which to resist the Soviets. This represented a decisive repudiation of the diplomatic methods that had characterized the era of appeasement.53 As Alan Bullock later noted: ‘The Berlin experience . . . confirmed [Bevin’s] view that there would be no recovery in Europe until confidence that neither a Russian occupation nor a war was inevitable was restored.’54 Another historian similarly noted that, from the start of the Berlin Crisis, Bevin ‘set his face firmly against any retreat under Soviet pressure and any compromise which smacked of appeasement. The lessons of Munich a decade earlier conditioned his whole approach to the Berlin crisis.’55
In a speech that is often heralded as one of the landmarks in the foundation of NATO, Bevin told the House of Commons in 1948 that Yalta had made sense at the time, although subsequent Soviet actions had transformed the situation. ‘It therefore matters little how we temporise, and maybe appease, or try to make arrangements . . . all the evidence is that [Moscow] is not satisfied with this tremendous expansion.’56 Once the Berlin Blockade was underway Bevin therefore declared that ‘His Majesty’s Government and the Western allies can see no alternative between that and surrender, and none of us can accept surrender.’57 The shadow foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, concurred: ‘If ever there was a time to stand firm, it is now: if ever there was a cause in which to stand firm it is this.’58 In Cabinet Bevin made it clear in an obvious reference to Munich that further concessions would lead ‘to further withdrawals . . . and in the end war’.59
The disillusion with the notion of appeasing the Soviet Union, which had rapidly accelerated from 1945 onwards, was finally completed when Communist North Korea invaded its southern neighbour on 25 June 1950. The Cabinet resolved that ‘[i]t was the clear duty of the United Kingdom Government to do everything in their power, in concert with other members of the United Nations, to help the South Koreans to resist this aggression’.60 This time, in contrast to the 1930s, ‘aggression’ was to be resisted. Churchill’s argument that, in the 1930s, ‘the weakness of the virtuous’ had been exploited by the ‘malice of the wicked’61 was particularly popular with those US policy makers who had embraced a policy of ‘Containment’ towards the global Soviet threat.62 This policy sought to avoid the mistakes of the past and steer a middle way between appeasement and war.63 In this climate, the outbreak of the Korean War immediately led US President Harry S. Truman to reflect on the lessons of the 1930s.64
In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act, it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen and twenty years earlier . . . If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors. If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on a second world war.65
Regardless of his personal feelings, Truman would have had little option but to adopt a hard-line over Korea, as his Republican opponents in Congress, already demanding an answer to their mantra ‘Who lost China?’66 now engaged in populist outbursts about the necessity of avoiding appeasement. On 26 June 1950 Senator William F. Knowland (R-CA) told the Senate: ‘Korea today stands in the same position as did Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria and Czechoslovakia of an earlier date. In each of those instances a firm stand by the law-abiding nations of the world might have saved the peace.’67 Such rhetoric and historical references resonated with British policy makers. The British prime minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee, had been a staunch opponent of Munich from the start (and, unlike Churchill – who abstained – Attlee had actually voted against the agreement in the Commons).68 Attlee, in common with Bevin, had long harboured suspicions of the Soviet Union.69 The British government therefore committed British forces to the UN operation to defend South Korea (indeed it was a British resolution, carried by the UN general Assembly on 7 October 1950, that called on UN forces to cross the 38th parallel, restore ‘stability throughout Korea’ and hold elections).70 Attlee and Bevin embarked upon this path in the belief that it was Britain’s destiny, in common with the United States, to safeguard democracy against the global threat from Moscow. In any case, the sending of troops to Korea would surely enhance British influence over American policy in the Far East.71 Churchill, now in Opposition, stood foursquare behind the decision to fight in Korea.72
The British government’s actions in defence of South Korea were not, however, enough for many in the United States who, having stood by while Hitler sought to undermine the European state system in the 1930s, had embraced anti-appeasement (albeit of Communism) with great enthusiasm. Life magazine criticized the fact that the Attlee government, which had recognized Red China, ‘was publicly on its knees to the Communist aggressors of Peking’.73 Although Bevin would hardly agree that he was obsequious in its dealings with Red China, he had told Cabinet that:
The Nationalist Government were our former allies in the war and since the war they have been a useful friend . . . [but] they are no longer representative of anything . . . British interests can reap no advantage from continued recognition of this shadowy Government, since they lie almost entirely within Communist control . . . For the time being the Communist Government of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] is the only alternative. The Communists are now the rulers of most of China. The fall of Canton has brought them to the Hong Kong frontier.74
Although the British had essentially pursued Washington’s line while the Chinese Civil War raged,75 the aftermath saw a divergence of policy between London and Washington.76 Once Chiang had been defeated, the British priority was the security of Hong Kong. Such self-interested logic would have been familiar to those who had supported British recognition of the Franco government in 1939.77 After all, for the British government Hong Kong was the equivalent of Berlin in Asia. Attlee had told the Cabinet in May 1949 that a failure to ensure Hong Kong’s security would seriously damage British prestige in Asia. In order to achieve this a policy of mutual tolerance with Red China was essential.78 The British felt even more justified in pursuing this because of their belief that the United States was erroneous in simply regarding Red China as a puppet of Moscow.79 But the realities of power nevertheless meant that the United Kingdom would have to appease Mao Zedong without alienating the United States to an unacceptable degree. The British goal was to avoid escalation in Korea at all costs – for that would necessitate adhering to US policy to the bitter end.80 In London the secretary of state for war, John Strachey, warned Bevin that any escalation would be nearly as ruinous to Britain as a lost war. Strachey feared that aggressive ‘recent American policies . . . threaten to involve us in early and general war [that would be] almost certainly fatal, in the most literal sense of that term, to this country . . . [as no] degree of rearmament which is humanly possible to achieve in two years [could] alter this situation’.81 The Korean War therefore exerted a paradoxical effect on Anglo-American relations whereby the unity of purpose engendered by the Communist threat was matched by very real differences in strategy.82 Indeed, in the same Cabinet where it had been agreed to commit fully to the defence of South Korea, the British government asked
whether it was expedient publicly to attribute responsibility for this aggression . . . The announcement which the United States Government were proposing to make, by linking this up with Communist threats in other parts of Asia, would present a major challenge to the Soviet Government; it would bring into controversy other issues which had not yet been brought before the Security Council; and its reference to Formosa might . . . even provoke that Government to attack Hong Kong or to foment disorder there.83
In a curious exercise in psychological second-guessing, the Life editorial of 4 December 1950 carried an imaginary question and answer session with General Douglas MacArthur in which ‘his’ opinions were stated in the third person.84 Thus, ‘[h]istory demonstrates unmistakably that yielding to unjustified international pressure leads inevitably to war. A recent precedent is the Munich settlement of 1938 and the German expansion which followed.’ It was noted that the State Department’s publication Postwar Foreign Policy Planning had asserted: ‘The Crisis occasioned by the German occupation [of Austria] in March 1938 was followed by the Munich Crisis in September, when the weakness of peaceful efforts toward just settlements on the face of determined aggression was unmistakably demonstrated.’85 And, in spite of the recent policy of the United States, ‘General MacArthur feels that this concept is as valid now as when the State Department formulated it. There is no reason to doubt its validity.’86 Life’s editorial was right inasmuch as British policy towards the Far East was cautious. And this was, indeed, anathema to MacArthur as he viewed even the ‘limited’ war in Korea as an act of appeasement.87 Attlee famously flew to Washington to seek an undertaking from Truman that the United States would not use nuclear weapons in Korea.88 The US Joint Chiefs of Staff duly recommended that Attlee be told that Washington had ‘no intention’ of using nuclear weapons in Korea (except in the event of a forced evacuation by UN forces or to stave off a ‘major military disaster’).89 Attlee was therefore given an assurance that the United States would not use nuclear weapons without consulting the United Kingdom and Canada.90 Attlee appreciated the pressures under which Truman was operating.91 When visiting Washington in December 1950 Attlee stressed that the British were dead against concessions in Korea, as ‘[w]e all know from our own bitter experience that appeasement does not pay’.92 Attlee nevertheless had no problem simultaneously defending his government’s recognition of the PRC on the grounds that the Reds already ruled the mainland!93 In contrast with the British position, US policy explicitly linked the defence of South Korea with a refusal to recognize Red China. On 27 June Truman stated:
The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war . . . In these circumstances the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area.94
This heralded the beginning of a new phase of uncompromising American anti-Communism. Appeasement was out as a policy option – even where it made sense to recognize the strength of an opponent and compromise. Of course, there was far less incentive for the Americans, as opposed to the British, to do this given the huge power disposed of by the United States after 1945. One of the bitter ironies of the Korean War was that the MiG-15, which was used in large numbers against the UN forces in Korea, powered the VK-1 engine, a composite copy of the Rolls Royce Nene and Derwent engines – which the Labour government had authorized for export to the USSR in 1946.95 This attempt to boost exports and improve relations with the Soviets by this aeronautical diplomacy by trusting Moscow’s assurance that they would not copy the British engine was, to say the least, rather naïve. (When Stalin was first told that the engines were advertised for sale, and should be bought, he supposedly exclaimed: ‘What kind of fool will sell you his secrets?’)96 It certainly induced consternation in Washington – whose aviators (and, indeed, those of the Fleet Air Arm) had come to greatly respect the MiG-15 in the skies over Korea.97 The episode foreshadowed one of the great on-going debates of the Cold War: namely at what level did trade with the Soviet bloc cease to be profitable and of utility in promoting understanding?98 These debates flared up at intervals during the Cold War (over, for instance, the sale of British Leyland trucks to Cuba in the 1960s,99 and the construction of the Siberian gas pipeline in the 1980s).100
Attlee’s reasoning vis-à-vis the recognition of Red China was not at all the way the Americans saw things. The issue of the recognition of China, the export of jet engines to the USSR and Attlee’s concerns regarding nuclear weapons foreshadowed one of the central justifications for British ‘pragmatism’ (or appeasement’) during the Cold War: namely the idea that one should go to almost any length to avoid major war because of the existence of nuclear weapons. Yet, as Campbell Craig notes, the fact that thermonuclear war can end life on earth plays a very small role in the history of US thinking about international politics.101 This, no doubt, was part of the process whereby policy makers and military figures thought ‘about the unthinkable’.102 This was often the case in Britain with one notable exception – when the threat of nuclear war was employed as de facto justification for appeasement.
The vision of a nuclear war causing catastrophic damage at a global level was the atomic age equivalent of the interwar maxim: ‘the bomber will always get through’ (derived from a 1932 speech by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin).103 This line reflected a widespread belief that war would bring cataclysmic levels of destruction upon civilization.104 This was derived from a fear that modern science was the harbinger of doom for humanity. The pacifist cleric Norman Maclean wrote in 1934 of the ‘fear of poison gas; [the] fear of bombing planes; [the] fear of bacilli; [and the] fear of blight that will blacken the harvest fields’.105 Once Ernest Rutherford had split the atom in 1917, the potential of the ‘mighty atom’ developed none of the positive connotations associated with nuclear energy and the like. Indeed, Rutherford himself wrote in 1933: ‘Anyone who says that with the means at present at our disposal and with our present knowledge we can utilize atomic energy is talking moonshine.’ Even prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a ‘nuclear culture’ of quite extraordinary pessimism existed in Britain. As the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane opined: ‘If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.’106
Of course, to advocate avoiding nuclear war (or mass bombing, for that matter) is an entirely rational and morally laudable course. Yet, such ambiguous British attitudes to the use of force (in the guise of bombers, atom bombs or whatever) were at variance with the deterrence theories that successive governments effected to subscribe to. That is, deterrence would only work if the enemy believed that you had every intention of using the ultimate weapon. Thomas Schelling, an American economist and scholar, termed this ‘the threat that leaves something to chance’. Schelling posited that: ‘The key to these threats, is that, though one may or may not carry them out, the final decision is not altogether in the threatener’s control’. This would mean that any weakening of resolve, if communicated or detected by the enemy, would lead to a situation where war was more and not less likely. This would lead to a situation where ‘only the enemy’s withdrawal’ would remove the danger to both sides.107 Given this, it is small wonder that the doublethink involved in deterrence theory was something that British politicians sought to avoid being scrutinized upon, although the 1930s had taught them to avoid speeches employing language in the vein of Chamberlain’s infamous reference to quarrels in far-off places between peoples ‘of whom we know nothing’.108 But the core of Chamberlain’s appeal had been his ability to place the pursuit of peace at the heart of his agenda. Towards the end of his life A. J. P. Taylor recalled that even he was rendered rhetorically impotent during the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938.
I suppose I addressed half a dozen meetings on the theme of stand up to Hitler. They were terrible. I tried every argument: national honour, anti-Fascism, Hitler’s weakness and the certainty he would back down. Always came the reply, ‘What you are advocating means war. We want peace’.
Those who think the British people were ready for a strong stand in 1938 were very mistaken, at any rate to judge from their feelings around Manchester.109
In the nuclear age, the word ‘peace’ was an even more powerful rhetorical device than it had been in the interwar era.110 Its invocation represented a powerful and emotive lever against opponents. Only days after the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945, the Royal Navy’s Rear-Admiral Robert D. Oliver, Assistant Chief of Naval Staff, noted ‘that the price worth paying for peace is now very much higher, and . . . the main function of our armed forces should be the prevention of war, rather than the ability to fight it on purely military grounds’.111 Bernard Brodie, the first and perhaps the greatest of all nuclear strategists,112 summarized the logic of deterrence: ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.’113 The mistaken impression that Attlee had stopped the United States using nuclear weapons in Korea nevertheless proved a very valuable one for the Labour Party in the 1951 general election. The Labour Party peddled the nuclear myth relentlessly, and simultaneously tried to paint the Conservative Party as being the party of war via a campaign slogan asking: ‘Whose finger is on the trigger?’114 Churchill and Eden, naturally objecting to being cast as warmongers,115 inserted a clause in the Conservative manifesto that proposed safeguards against profiteering in military contracts. Ironically, this was very close to Chamberlain’s abortive 1937 National Defence Contribution, which sought to tax excessive profits from military contracts, and of which Churchill had been a vocal critic.116 Churchill, like Chamberlain before him, was learning that the maxim ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ had electoral, as well as spiritual, benefits. During the 1951 election campaign, Churchill was thus robust in his rebuttal of the warmonger charge that had been made against him repeatedly.
This is a cruel and ungrateful accusation. It is the opposite of the truth. If I remain in public life at this juncture it is because, rightly or wrongly, but sincerely, I believe that I may be able to make an important contribution to the prevention of a Third World War and to bringing nearer that lasting peace settlement which the masses of the people of every race and in every land fervently desire.117
Such arguments reflected the manner in which the fear of nuclear war now vied with the detestation of appeasement in the popular mind. The danger that a fear of war might now reinvigorate appeasement caused veterans of the campaign against its Chamberlainite variety to take a hand in matters. No less a personage than Lord Vansittart118 told the House of Lords in 1951:
Litvinov said that Peace is indivisible. That sounded very clever, and the phrase caught on. But, like a great many of the clichés that have come prancing and rumbling down to us, it is not true. There are many kinds of peace, including the brand that we are now enduring, and many of them are highly divisible . . . I think that the minds of the Government and the Foreign Office . . . seem to be assuming that all Communists are not our inveterate enemies. But, in fact, they are. Thus, the Chinese Communists have never had any intention of coming to a settlement in Korea until they had satisfied themselves that they could get the better of us by no other means . . . it is our duty to prove to them that they cannot get the better of us by any means. It therefore follows, logically, that peace, if and when it does come, must not be too easy, otherwise it will prove deceptive.119
The invocation of Litvinov (whose former master, Stalin, was now the West’s leading antagonist) was designed to indicate the ascendancy of morality in international affairs. Lord Jowitt, the lord chancellor, welcomed Vansittart’s intervention in the House of Lords stating ‘that there must be no appeasement, if by appeasement is meant weakening on this particular issue . . . we are not fighting Communism or Communist China; we are fighting aggression . . . We are perfectly ready to have a cease-fire – and that is not appeasement at all.’120 In October 1951 Churchill was returned to power by the electorate and found the war in Korea as intractable as had his predecessor.121 By 1953 the populations of the United States and Britain were tired of the Korean War which, once the People’s Republic of China had become involved, seemed likely to drag on in bloody stalemate. In the event, the death of Stalin in March 1953 paved the way for the signing of an armistice agreement on 27 July (although the British acceded to an American demand that it be made clear that any violation of the armistice by the Communists would lead to a resumption of hostilities).122 The British had committed nearly 100,000 men to the war and cemented the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States as the cornerstone of Britain’s global foreign and security policies. Yet, despite initial hopes in London that it could act as the ‘guide’ to American policy,123 by the war’s end it was clear that the British had exerted very little influence over the Americans.124 The anti-appeasement model was in the ascendancy in Washington and flexibility was in short supply as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the British that if Red China ever got control of Formosa, ‘that would be a real Munich’.125 At Bermuda in December 1953 Churchill, recognizing the dominant mood of US policy makers, even conceded to Eisenhower that the US government would be well within its rights to use nuclear weapons if the Chinese and the North Koreans abrogated the ceasefire!126 Despite their possession of nuclear weapons, in matters of war and peace it was now clear that the British were no longer masters of their own destiny.
In 2008, Michael Lumbers concluded that ‘if the lessons of Munich demonstrated the imperative of containing the PRC, the example of Chinese intervention in the Korean War underlined the risks of confronting the mainland’.127 Thus, a delicate balance between simultaneously avoiding major war and desisting from being seen to engage in appeasement had come about. The Korean War demonstrated that there could be no absolute victory for even such a result could well lead to disaster for the victors as well as the defeated. Nuclear weapons meant that there could be no victors in total (nuclear) war, and ‘[t]he living would envy the dead’. And yet, for all this, the business of international politics and brinkmanship continued apace in a manner that would have been wholly familiar to any nineteenth-century statesman. This, more than any other single factor, would present the supreme challenge to British policy makers.
