6

PEACE

We have got all that we want—perhaps more. Our sole object is to keep what we have and live in peace.

BRITISH FOREIGN OFFICE MEMORANDUM, April 10, 1926

The bomber will always get through.

STANLEY BALDWIN, November 10, 1932.¹

On June 9, 1920, King George V opened the new Imperial War Museum, temporarily housed in the Crystal Palace in South London—a huge long glasshouse originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. “We cannot say with what eyes posterity will regard this Museum,” the king admitted, “nor what ideas it will arouse in their minds.” But he hoped that “as a result of what we have done and suffered, they may be able to look back on war, its instruments, and its organisation as belonging to a dead past.” In other words, this was to be a museum not just of war but for war. Putting war to death, turning it into history, would be the ultimate justification for 1914–18.²

“Never again” was a catchphrase of the 1920s and 1930s. But, as we have seen in earlier chapters, violence was still endemic in postwar Europe: the issue was whether it could be contained in order to avoid another great war across the Continent. We now know that these hopes were in vain but, by exploring attitudes to peace in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly through rituals of remembrance and the antiwar movements, we learn more about how the Great War was understood across Europe, about the singularities of the British experience, and, even more, of the United States. We shall also see that, as war clouds gathered in the late 1930s, “lessons” from the last war would guide planning for the next.

Ten million soldiers had died in the conflict. Twenty million had been severely wounded and eight million returned home permanently disabled. How to commemorate the dead, solace the bereaved, and support the disabled were central issues in the political life of all the belligerent countries, yet attitudes toward commemoration differed widely. Consider a few examples.

The death toll in Russia was around two million, comparable in numbers to Germany’s dead. Yet during the Soviet era (1917 to 1991) there were no official monuments to the Great War. The communist regime dismissed 1914–17 as an imperialist conflict, memorable only because it helped trigger the Bolshevik Revolution. And for the Russian people, two million dead was eclipsed by the nine to fourteen million fatalities over the next five years as a result of the civil war and its concomitant epidemics and famines. It was not, however, inevitable that Russia’s war should be entombed in silence. In 1915–16 the tsarist government developed elaborate plans for a national war museum, church, and cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow, under the patronage of the tsarina’s sister, but this grand project was overwhelmed by the revolution. Although the cemetery did survive, it gradually fell into disrepair and became a convenient dumping ground for the victims of Stalin’s purges. Eventually in the 1950s the site was cleared to build a movie theater, “Leningrad,” named for the “Hero City” of 1941–44. Here was telling evidence of official priorities: although the Soviet regime blotted out any memory of 1914–17, it elevated the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 into the central myth of the Soviet state.³

In Germany the anniversary of the armistice on November 11 naturally held little attraction: instead remembrance focused on “the August Days” of 1914. The right seized on Hindenburg’s victory over the tsarist army at Tannenberg in East Prussia, which became the annual occasion for demonstrations against both the Versailles treaty and the Weimar Republic. The left used the anniversary of the start of the war to mount big peace demonstrations with the slogan “Never Again War” (nie wieder Krieg). In August 1924 the government tried to channel this mood by turning a tenth-anniversary tribute to the fallen into a non-bellicose celebration of the supposed unity of all Germans in August 1914, hoping thereby to promote the unity of the republic. But the event proved a fiasco: some states, notably Bavaria, refused to participate in a “defeatist” and “republican” charade; elsewhere in big cities such as Berlin and Dresden pacifists and communists disrupted the ceremonies with antiwar protests that often led to violent clashes. In 1927, Tannenberg became the site of Germany’s principal war memorial, a vast medieval-style fortress centered initially on the bodies of twenty unknown soldiers and then from 1935 featuring the grave of Hindenburg himself. Tannenberg had long been a site of German “memory,” the place where the Teutonic knights had been cut to pieces in 1410. But now it was the name of a great victory, where Hindenburg’s armies encircled and destroyed the invading Russians in 1914. The monument dramatized the national myth of the war as self-defense, very different from the British and French perception of Germany as the aggressor in the west. Hindenburg’s square, rugged face had been a national icon since the early weeks of the war: a decade later the mythology of 1914 was translated to the silver screen in movies such as The Iron Hindenburg (1929) and Tannenberg (1932)—a nationalist response to Hollywood’s All Quiet on the Western Front.⁴

Although virtually all Germans repudiated the idea of German “war guilt” and yearned to overturn the Diktat of Versailles, the majority in the 1920s wanted to do so by peaceful means. “The foolish call ‘Never again war’ finds a widespread echo,” admitted Hans von Seeckt, chief of the Army Command, in 1922. “Certainly there is in the German people a widespread and explicable desire for peace.” In 1927 the former Prussian minister of war noted that war weariness among the people was “so great” that “parties have to take account of that at election time.”⁵ Although Hitler and the extreme right celebrated the “front experience” (Fronterlebnis) of the trenches, the vast majority of Germany’s eleven million veterans settled back into civilian life in the 1920s rather than mounting militaristic protests. No more than 400,000 joined the rightwing Freikorps. The biggest single organization for war victims was the Reichsbund, founded by Social Democrats, which at its peak in 1922 had a membership of over 800,000 veterans, dependents, and war disabled. The Reichsbund officially declared itself “among the opponents of new wars.”⁶

Hitler’s famous account of his own war experience in Mein Kampf was largely made up. Although he served at the front for most of the conflict, forty-two months out of fifty-one, he was not a trench fighter but a dispatch runner based at regimental headquarters—still a hazardous business but not like the death sentence of a front-line soldier. He was spared most of the battle of the Somme thanks to a leg wound, and his second hospitalization in October 1918—attributed by Hitler to blindness from a British mustard-gas attack—was probably the result of “war hysteria” or shell shock. Hitler’s evocation of the fighting spirit of the trenches was really a later invention in Mein Kampf, after the failure of his 1924 putsch. The cult of the trench fighter did not become mainstream ideology until the Nazis gained power, suppressing the socialists, their veterans’ associations, and the antiwar tradition of remembering 1914–18. Despite a surge after 1929 in nationalist books about the war—partly in reaction to Remarque but also reflecting frustration at the slide into depression—there was little enthusiasm in ’30s Germany for another conflict. The glum public mood was a major reason why Hitler drew back from war during the Czech crisis of 1938.⁷

Germany’s conflicted attempts at memorialization focused on the start of the war in 1914 because there was nothing to celebrate about its ending. The victorious allies, by contrast, naturally featured Germany’s concession of defeat in 1918, usually commemorated on November 11, though the Italians marked it on November 4, when their armistice with the Habsburgs came into effect. The rites of remembrance in Britain, though improvised at the start as we saw in the last chapter, soon gained a set and hallowed form with the Cenotaph and the Silence. In November 1921 the Royal British Legion, newly founded as the country’s primary organization for veterans, ordered 1.5 million artificial poppies from France for sale to help ex-servicemen. Once again public enthusiasm caught the authorities by surprise: the Poppy Appeal, under the patronage of Field Marshal Haig, quickly became another national ritual, with the poppies manufactured by disabled veterans and sold mainly by women. By 1928 receipts exceeded half a million pounds and the wearing of poppies on Armistice Day had become almost obligatory.⁸

In France and the United States Armistice Day was quickly made into a public holiday, thanks to their veterans’ organizations, which were bigger and more politicized than the British Legion and also because veterans’ affairs were handled by a dedicated ministry or bureau—again in contrast with Britain. In both of these countries too November 11 offered the chance for former soldiers to celebrate victory and wartime comradeship. The American Legion’s suggested programs for Armistice Day combined a solemn patriotic service in the morning with sports events in the afternoon and “fireworks and dancing” in the evening. In Britain, however, the idea of Armistice Night dinners and dances was much more sensitive, with a proposed “Victory Ball” (in aid of servicemen’s charities) provoking intense controversy in 1925. The “really astonishing feature of Armistice Day” the following year, noted the Daily Express, was “its pronounced seriousness. As time passes, the sense of jubilation on this day of memory decreases.” In 1927 the newspaper sponsored the first British Legion Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in West London—with community singing and military parades—and this became an annual fixture, providing what was felt to be a decorous element of celebration. In Britain, therefore, Armistice Day was geared much more toward the civilian bereaved than to the surviving veterans.⁹

The relative weakness of the British Legion needs to be underlined. In Germany, by contrast, there was a plethora of veterans’ groups, all politically polarized and enjoying mass support. The Reichsbanner, for instance, was linked to the Socialist Party, while the Stahlhelm was identified with the extreme right. Each inflated its numbers for propaganda effect—the Reichsbanner boasted of three million members in 1925, whereas its active membership probably never exceeded one million—but this was still an impressive figure, probably double the size of the Stahlhelm. In further contrast with Britain, these German organizations were also paramilitary in nature and often vehemently opposed to the Weimar Republic. The Reichsbanner was a partial exception: it did not idolize the figure of the soldier and was formed to defend the Republic against the Freikorps, but its existence reflected Weimar’s failure to establish a monopoly of armed force. In France political divisions and militaristic tendencies were less intense among veterans’ groups than in Germany but, of France’s two biggest organizations, the Union Fédérale (UF) was distinctly more leftist than the Union Nationale des Combattants (UNC). The UF advocated links with like-minded German veterans, whereas extremists from the UNC were involved in the dramatic street demonstrations of February 1934 that toppled Édouard Daladier’s government.¹⁰

By contrast, the British Legion, formed from four previously rival organizations, was firmly controlled and directed by former officers. Its ethos was therefore conservative but not partisan or militarist. The Legion was much stronger in the south and west of England than in the urban north or Wales, drawing its strength mainly from English villages and market towns. The Legion’s paid-up membership peaked in the 1920s at 312,000 (1929), before falling in the depression, and then recovering to 409,000 in 1938. This meant that it never amounted to more than 10 percent of the ex-service community, whereas French veterans’ associations in the 1930s recorded some three million members, roughly half of all surviving ex-soldiers and nearly a quarter of the electorate. “As a unified, national movement with no overt political affiliations and a low percentage of the total ex-service community within its ranks, the Legion was unique in Europe,” observes historian Niall Barr.¹¹

The ineffectiveness of the Legion as a direct veterans’ lobby is strikingly illustrated by the fraught issue of war pensions. Since the Crimean War, support for disabled British ex-servicemen had traditionally been left to private philanthropy; this reflected liberal predilections for a limited state and for a small, balanced budget. In the Great War the pensions issue was much more problematic—at least a million British soldiers returned home disabled—yet volunteers and philanthropists again took the lead through institutions with the Poppy Appeal, the St. Dunstan’s homes for the blind and the Roehampton center for artificial limbs. In late 1920s Britain war pensions of various sorts accounted for less than 7 percent of the government’s annual budget, whereas in Germany the proportion was nearly 20 percent. Not only did the Weimar Republic create Europe’s “most comprehensive programs for disabled veterans,” it also eliminated almost all rival private charities in a deliberate effort by the socialist SPD and the center parties to strengthen the legitimacy of the contested state by making it the main social provider. A similar attitude underpinned Weimar’s generous support for young people, women, and the unemployed. The policy failed in its primary aim—veterans’ organizations simply lobbied for more money—and there was an outcry when welfare payments were cut back during the depression, further eroding Weimar’s authority and strengthening Nazi support. British veterans, who never expected much from the state, were not disappointed and they never turned against the government, even though personally paying “a high price for the country’s stability and democratic survival.”¹²

The veterans’ lobby was particularly powerful in the United States thanks to the Civil War of 1861–65, in which 620,000 died. By the 1890s nearly a million ex-soldiers and their dependents were receiving government pensions, accounting for more than 40 percent of the federal budget. This scheme was based on a very generous definition both of war service (only ninety days in uniform) and of disablement (from any cause, during or following the war). Building on this precedent, the American Legion (founded in 1919) successfully lobbied for similarly generous treatment of the country’s four million Great War veterans. With more than one million members in 1931, and 10,000 posts across the country, it could bring intense pressure to bear on Capitol Hill, which was hard to resist. One lobbyist told recalcitrant congressmen, “If you don’t support this bill, your successor will.” And so benefits expanded piecemeal in what became known as the “veterans’ racket” until, in 1933, spending on veterans accounted for 26 percent of the federal budget, even though this benefited a mere 1 percent of the population. Whereas only 500,000 of Britain’s two million wounded from the Great War received disability allowances in that year, the figure for the United States was 776,000, yet a mere 234,000 Americans had been wounded! It took both the depression and a strong president to impose significant cuts. Even so, the issue was in doubt on Capitol Hill until Franklin Roosevelt judiciously announced that, once Congress had passed the economy bill in March 1933, he would ask it to repeal Prohibition—observing with a smile, “I think this would be a good time for beer.”¹³

The American Legion provides an interesting counterpoint to the veterans’ scene both in Britain and on the Continent. In 1920 it was one of several rival ex-soldier organizations in the United States. But the radical “World War Veterans,” which claimed 700,000 members in 1921 and whose demands included the distribution of “idle acres” to “the soldiers who are conceded to have saved civilization at $30 a month,” was destroyed by the Red Scare of 1919–20. The Veterans of Foreign Wars survived but its membership never exceeded 300,000 in the 1920s or 1930s. Unlike Germany, therefore, the American Legion became the country’s predominant veterans’ organization and it also achieved its ends through democratic rather than paramilitary means, especially pressure on Congress. In contrast to the British Legion, however, the American Legion had an extensive political and social agenda, not least promoting “one hundred percent Americanism.” The director of its National Americanism Commission, Henry Ryan, declared in 1921: “The beginning and end of our work is nationalism, to create a national consciousness.” The Legion played a central role in the Red Scare, used by state governments in Illinois, Massachusetts, and elsewhere to help confront the radical threat. One of its foes was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formed during the Great War to combat patriotic intolerance, and the Legion sometimes tied itself in knots over the issue of freedom of speech. “We don’t mind open discussion of forms of government,” a Legion spokesman declared when advocating a loyalty oath for teachers, “but every safeguard must be taken to prevent advertising any form of government except our own.” To advance Americanism at the grass roots, the Legion funded school essay competitions, Boy Scout camps, and, most successfully, Junior Baseball, which involved 500,000 boys in all the states by 1930. The Junior World Series, said one Legionnaire from Nebraska, had “solved the problem of approach to the red-blooded American boy who has no time for preachments or studious appeals to the doctrine of good citizenship.” Across the Atlantic, the British Legion was certainly patriotic, but the strenuous inculcation of “Britishness” was no part of its agenda.¹⁴

Although the British veterans’ lobby was weak compared with those of other belligerents, in the 1930s the country nurtured the strongest peace movement in the world. As we have seen, the flurry of books and films about the war after 1928 reshaped public attitudes. Exposés of the war’s origins and conduct had questioned the wisdom of British politicians and generals; revelations about war propaganda and profiteering left a nasty taste. The demoralizing onset of the slump and the election in 1929 of a Labour government led by prominent wartime pacifists also encouraged debate about the meaning of the conflict. It was now that H. G. Wells’s dictum about “the War that will end War”—originally a 1914 propaganda slogan against Prussian militarism—caught the popular imagination as a statement of faith. The tragedy and loss of the war, its grubbiness and incompetence, could still be justified in the language of sacrifice—at times almost Christlike in tone. “The millions of dead speak with one voice,” declared Sir Fabian Ware, head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, in an Armistice Day broadcast in 1932, “and they say to the statesmen of the world: ‘You have failed to achieve your ends by other means than war, and we have expiated your failure—fail not again, accept our atonement and give faith and life to the world.’” Moments like the two-minute Silence were “a mockery,” claimed the writer Ralph Hale Mottram, unless they led to “some purification, some definite resolution that such wholesale mechanical slaughter will never happen again.” By the 1930s the war for civilization had been transmuted into a war for peace—and that became the main rationale for remembrance. In November 1933 the cover of the British Legion Journal featured a statue of a mother holding the body of her dead son, with the word “disarm” on the plinth.¹⁵ And so at Thiepval and Ypres, at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and at hundreds more memorials across Britain, people enacted an annual ceremony of remembrance that “managed to remain ambivalent”—a “death cult which idealised the young ‘fallen’ as patriots but which also underlined the new idealism: ‘Never again.’”¹⁶

Women were central to the peace movements of the 1920s and 1930s, expressing their activism as newly enfranchised citizens. Although women became a majority of the electorate after 1928, the number of female Members of Parliament during these decades never exceeded 15 (out of a total of some 550); in the 1920s there was a backlash against feminism and an assertion of “domesticity.” Yet women’s organizations—even “conservative” elements such as the half-million-strong Mothers’ Union—energetically encouraged women to use their votes and voices by agitating for gender equality (for instance, reforms to divorce and property laws) and for the promotion of world peace.¹⁷ They claimed a special interest in disarmament by virtue of their double position as mothers of the fallen and as historic victims of male violence. “Because women produce children,” observed the pacifist intellectual Vera Brittain in 1934, “life and the means of living matter to them in a way that these things can never matter to men.” She insisted that “a civilisation in which military values prevail is always hostile to women’s interests” because “militarism and the oppression of women are both based on force.” In the vanguard of peace agitation was the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WIL), formed in 1919 from wartime peace movements and capitalizing on the recent granting of votes for women in Austria, Britain, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Russia, and soon the United States. Although the WIL remained a minority organization—by 1926 its membership was only 50,000 women from forty countries—it proved very effective at mobilizing opinion. These efforts peaked during 1931 in advance of the World Disarmament Conference. The WIL secured more than three million signatures for its disarmament petition, half of them from Britain, soliciting support via a network of women’s organizations across the country.¹⁸

The disarmament conference, six years in the making, finally convened in Geneva in February 1932 with 59 nations represented. Millions of men and women signed pro-peace petitions all over the world. Even in Germany, which was demanding “equal rights” with the other great powers, more than 600,000 people attended rallies organized by the trade unions in support of the conference. The desire for peace was sharpened by the spiraling costs of armaments at a time of global depression. Over the next year and a half the twists and turns of the Geneva disarmament conference became the focus of international hopes and fears. Every country created problems: what was for one a legitimate means of defense was, for others, a blatant instrument of aggression. In a speech in 1928 Winston Churchill neatly captured this dilemma with his fable of a zoo. The rhino declared that the use of teeth was “barbarous and horrible and ought to be strictly prohibited” while insisting that horns were entirely defensive weapons. Not surprisingly the buffalo, stag, and porcupine supported the rhino but the lion, tiger, and the other big cats strenuously disagreed. The bear differed from them all, wanting to ban both teeth and horns: he argued that “it would be quite enough if animals were allowed to give each other a good hug when they quarrelled”—at which “the Turkey fell into a perfect panic.” In Churchill’s fable, the zookeepers were eventually able to calm the animals down but in Geneva the keepers were the animals themselves, each with its own interest; all too easily, the law of the jungle could prevail.¹⁹

In late 1931 the British Foreign Office succinctly summed up the issues for the conference: “World recovery (the aim of our policy) depends on European recovery; European recovery on German recovery; German recovery on France’s consent; France’s consent on security (for all time) against attack.” Germany had invaded France twice in less than half a century and its population was 50 percent larger, so French leaders would not reduce their armaments before achieving firm guarantees of security, above all from Britain. “England needs only say ‘If Germany attacks France I shall be at your side,’” the French Foreign Minister told British diplomats in 1934.²⁰

But this was the one thing that successive British governments would not do, after the experiences of 1914–18. Recurrent French demands for a formal alliance were rebuffed, likewise requests to join France’s network of security treaties with the new states of eastern Europe—intended as a surrogate for the Franco-Russian alliance that had encircled Germany in 1914. In 1925 Austen Chamberlain, the most Francophile of British foreign secretaries between the wars, did broker the Locarno Treaty, under which France, Germany, and Belgium accepted their existing borders and Britain and Italy promised to act against any “flagrant violations.” But direct commitments to France remained anathema and, by the early 1930s, the mood among politicians and public in Britain had become distinctly isolationist. The idea of a Channel Tunnel, touted in 1929–30, was rejected very firmly by the government: “so long as there are great military establishments in Europe, the Tunnel, if not adequately defended, becomes a potential danger; if it is properly defended, a military commitment is incurred, in which considerable forces would be locked up and immobilised.” Even Sir Robert Vansittart, the Francophile head of the Foreign Office, remarked in early 1932 that France had “virtually attained the very thing that we have traditionally sought to avoid in Europe, hegemony, if not dictatorship, political and economic.”²¹

So at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Germany’s demand for equal rights immediately and France’s insistence on security before disarmament left matters deadlocked. Once Hitler gained power in 1933 he soon walked out of the conference and also left the League of Nations. With German rearmament now public knowledge, Britain began its own buildup in 1934. This escalating arms race, alarmingly reminiscent of Europe before 1914, turned the British peace movement into a major political force.

At the heart of this movement was the League of Nations Union (LNU). The League of Nations had inspired voluntary societies in many member states but none of them matched Britain’s LNU in size, scope, or political connections. Founded in 1918 with cross-party support, the LNU secured a royal charter in 1925 and all subsequent prime ministers accepted the position of honorary president. Its leader was Lord Robert Cecil, scion of one of the country’s great political families but also an instinctive reformer, who loved fighting for unlikely causes. Cecil was an early champion of women’s suffrage and a long-serving president of the Pedestrian Association, which helped bring in the driving test and a 30 mph speed limit in towns. But a league for international peace became his greatest passion after 1918, convinced that the Great War was “the greatest catastrophe that has perhaps ever occurred.”²²

Cecil was the LNU’s driving force in the 1920s and 1930s. But the organization’s real strength lay in the depth of its membership. At its peak in 1931 the LNU had 407,000 members in more than 3,000 branches across Britain, though support was strongest in London, the Midlands, and the Home Counties. It also had some 4,400 “corporate affiliates,” ranging from trade unions to Boy Scout Troops and Women’s Institutes, with especially deep penetration of the Protestant churches. By contrast, French supporters of the Societé des Nations numbered only 127,000 in 1927. The LNU’s broad reach reflected its belief that the disaster of the Great War showed the need to abandon narrow nationalism and give citizens more of a say in the making of foreign policy. Hence the priority given to promoting internationalism in schools and universities: “There is no reason why the ‘international sense’ should not become part of the stock-in-trade of the ordinary man,” observed professor Alfred Zimmern. “A hundred years ago, it was regarded as equally inconceivable that the ordinary man should become literate, or capable of reading a map.” The LNU was therefore an expression of the increasingly “democratized” political culture of Britain after 1918.²³

Hitler’s coming to power encouraged the growth of isolationist sentiment in Britain, both on the right, especially the Beaverbrook press, and also on the left: the Labour Party conference in October 1933 passed a resolution that Britain should “take no part in war.” In response Cecil and the LNU organized a national canvass of public opinion in 1934–35, culminating in a triumphant rally in the Albert Hall in London in June 1935. A total of 11.6 million people (38 percent of the UK population) responded; even more striking, half a million volunteers were mobilized to deliver ballot papers to individual households, with the majority of this “door-knocker parade” being female.²⁴ Women often used their place within the local community to secure trust and interest. “I discovered that the little shop in the neighbourhood was a good place to say exactly what the ballot was for,” recalled one volunteer. Schoolteachers, both male and female, were particularly active proselytizers. A Leeds headmaster wrote to his MP about the importance of the ballot: “I held my Armistice Service at school this morning. I faced 450 lads who may be involved in the ‘next war.’” That was why, even though the voting age was twenty-one, the ballot was open to anyone over eighteen: the age for conscription.²⁵

Although known to posterity as the “Peace Ballot,” the official title of the survey was the “National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments.” The Beaverbrook press dubbed it the “Blood Ballot.” Its real object was to combat the isolationists by pushing the government to take an active role in European peacemaking. The result was definitely not a random sample of public opinion: opponents of the LNU were underrepresented, because either they did not return a ballot paper or were not asked to do so. Nevertheless the results showed a clear nationwide pattern, with 90 percent or more affirming Britain’s continued membership in the League of Nations and supporting international agreements to reduce armaments and ban the manufacture and sale of arms for private profit. There was also overwhelming support for economic and nonmilitary sanctions against an aggressor nation (87 percent). But, critically, on the use of force (Question 5b), opinion was much more divided: 59 percent said yes, 20 percent no, but another 20 percent offered no answer. The results of the Peace Ballot therefore require careful interpretation. In his memoir The Gathering Storm (1948), Winston Churchill claimed that the responses to Question 5b demonstrated a strong readiness “to go to war in a righteous cause.” But it would be more accurate to say that the results showed public support for the principle of “collective security” against the proponents of isolationism, while also suggesting considerable doubts about rearmament and the use of force against the dictators.²⁶

The climax of the Peace Ballot coincided with Mussolini’s brutal invasion of Abyssinia. Its political impact was evident in the cabinet’s reluctant imposition of economic sanctions on Italy and then the resignation of foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare after his secret deal with Italy was exposed. In both cases the government, though keen to buy off Italy because of the greater threats from Germany and Japan, felt obliged to take account of the public mood. But Hitler’s annexation of the Rhineland in March 1936 and the onset of the Spanish Civil War a few months later exposed the latent tensions within the British “peace movement,” already evident in responses to Question 5b, with those willing to use force to maintain collective security separating from overt pacifists who opposed military action in any form. Absolute pacifists found their champion in Rev. Dick Sheppard, a charismatic Anglican priest and pioneer “radio parson,” who established the Peace Pledge Union in May 1936. Previously no overtly pacifist society had secured even 10,000 members in the UK but by the end of 1936, PPU membership had reached 118,000. This was still only one-third of the support for the LNU but the latter’s membership was now in decline, falling to under 200,000 by 1939. Despite the adherence of national figures such as Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell, much of the PPU’s spectacular growth was due to the appeal of the founder, who combined an aristocratic manner with striking intellectual humility: after his death in October 1937, PPU members were likened to “sheep” without “a Sheppard.” But the bifurcation of Britain’s peace movement from 1936 showed that the growing threat of war posed tough questions about how far people were willing to use force in the interests of collective security. “Ultimately it is a clash between two religions,” observed the journalist Kingsley Martin in 1938. “In a crisis people find out what they are.”²⁷

On the Continent there was nothing comparable to either the LNU or the PPU. The German peace movement (Das Deutsche Friedenskartell) was suppressed by Hitler, but even at its peak in 1928 it boasted at most 100,000 members (probably far fewer), fragmented across twenty-two different organizations. In France the peace movement was even more “balkanized,” with some two hundred organizations in 1936, and it was also in decline, not growth, during the 1930s. The French equivalent of the PPU (the Ligue Internationale des Combattants de la Paix) had fewer than 7,500 members in 1935; the Association de la Paix par le Droit (APD), an organization of elite intellectuals, only about 5,300. The APD was rooted in a distinctively Gallic approach to peacemaking, through international law and arbitration. “The Anglo-Saxon,” declared politician Pierre Cot in 1919, “tours the world with his Bible and the Frenchman with his code. We have a conception of peace which is more juridical than mystical.”²⁸

Cot was pointing to the distinctively religious roots of British peace movements, going back to seventeenth-century Quakers with their unconditional commitment to nonviolence. Such was the strength of this tradition that when the Asquith government introduced conscription in 1916, it affirmed the right to be a “Conscientious Objector” and some 16,000 men were registered as COs during the conflict. This right of conscience was alien to Continental countries, where the obligation to military service was deemed central to citizenship: Germany, for instance, had only a few hundred COs in the Great War. Traditional British reliance on a regular army meant that conscription was a momentous innovation in 1916, bringing home to every family the distinction between peace and war. In the mid-1930s the National Government’s repeated pledge, for political reasons, not to introduce conscription complicated rearmament until it was abandoned in April 1939 after Hitler devoured all of Czechoslovakia.

The respectability of conscientious objection to war was a major reason for the distinctive strength of the British peace movement. But equally important was Britain’s geopolitical position. On the Continent, where land borders were porous and ever-changing, pacifism was deemed a dangerous political luxury, eroding the country’s capacity for self-defense. Britain, by contrast, enjoyed the benefit of a twenty-one-mile-wide “moat defensive,” in Shakespeare’s picturesque phrase, between itself and continental enemies. The “English Channel” was broad enough to foster a sense of security but not so wide as to engender complacency, as invasion crises such as 1588 and 1804 made clear. In consequence Britain felt a historic interest in maintaining the continental balance of power to deter potential aggressors: hence the commitment to France and Belgium in August 1914 to prevent Germany gaining control of the Channel ports. The novel element in the 1930s debate about British security was the threat of bombing by long-range aircraft. “Since the day of the air,” Stanley Baldwin warned the Commons in July 1934, “the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover, you think of the Rhine.” To shouts of “Hear, hear” from MPs, he continued: “That is where our frontier lies.”²⁹

The problem was not just the enlargement of Britain’s security perimeter but the country’s new vulnerability. Baldwin offered this morbid diagnosis to the Commons in November 1932. “What the world suffers from,” he asserted, “is a sense of fear, a want of confidence,” and “there is no greater cause of that fear than the fear of the air” because aerial bombing had made women and children as vulnerable as front-line soldiers. Baldwin continued with chilling candor: “I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” This was also the view of military planners. In October 1936 the Joint Planning Committee (JPC), representing the three services, warned that, in any future war, Germany would seek a quick victory before Britain’s superior economic strength could be brought to bear: “The concentration, from the first day of the war, of the whole of the German air offensive against Great Britain would be possible. It would be the most promising way of trying to knock this country out.” The JPC noted that “our civilian population has never been exposed to the horrors of War,” unlike the Continentals, and that the Germans “may believe that if our people and particularly our women and children were subjected to these horrors . . . the majority would insist that surrender was preferable.” There had been some ugly antiwar protests in London during the Gotha raids of 1917–18 and casualties in the next war were likely to be much worse. The planners predicted 20,000 casualties in the initial twenty-four hours of air attack, rising to perhaps 150,000 by the end of the first week.³⁰

The JPC report was toned down before circulation in Whitehall but it expressed widely held ideas—a point that should be underlined if we want to understand British attitudes in the 1930s. First, the concept of a “knockout blow”: when policymakers and the public spoke of a future war in the 1930s, this was the scenario that they assumed—an immediate and devastating attack on Britain. In fact, the Germans did not try this until after the collapse of France, nearly a year into the conflict. Second, it was assumed that the human losses would be utterly appalling. To put the JPC body count in perspective, we should note that Britain sustained fewer than 150,000 casualties from all forms of aerial bombing during the whole of the Second World War, including the Blitz and the V-weapons. As Harold Macmillan admitted, looking back from the 1960s after being prime minister during the Cuban Missile Crisis: “We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today.”³¹

It was an apt comparison. In the mid-1930s the threat from the air was sensationalized in films, novels, and political tracts. After only one air raid, predicted the philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1936, London “will be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease,” and the government “will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then the enemy will dictate its terms.” The following year the architect John Gloag foresaw “a new age of architecture: future civilizations may call it the Funk-hole Age. It may be the prelude to another Dark Age in which our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will live amid ruins.” Gloag even suggested building “special shelter cities” for the survivors to “enable at least a nucleus of civilization to be preserved in the event of a general breakdown.”³² Such fears were particularly acute in late September 1938, when it seemed that war with Germany was inevitable. The historian Arnold Toynbee tried to evoke the mood a little later, after the Munich agreement, in a letter to an American friend:

It is probably impossible to convey what the imminent expectation of being intensively bombed feels like in a small and densely populated country like this. I couldn’t have conveyed it to myself if I hadn’t experienced it in London the week before last (we were expecting 30,000 casualties a night in London, and on the Wednesday morning we believed ourselves, I believe correctly, to be within three hours of the zero hour). It was just like facing the end of the world. In a few minutes the clock was going to stop, and life, as we had known it, was coming to an end. This prospect of the horrible destruction of all that is meant to one by “England” and “Europe” was much worse than the mere personal prospect that one’s family and oneself would be blown to bits. Seven or eight million people in London went through it.³³

Of course, the shadow of the bomber hung over all of Europe in the 1930s, obscuring the conventional distinction between soldier and civilian. In France, like Britain (but not Germany), the capital city dominated the country’s political, financial, industrial and cultural life and Parisians entertained a similar obsession about bombing. In the words of one journalist, they expected “towns destroyed in a few hours by a rain of bombs, toxic gas capable of destroying in a few minutes every kind of life in a great city such as Paris, millions of children, women, men slaughtered together.”³⁴ But for the French in the 1930s the fear of bombing was essentially an intensification of historic anxieties, with the Luftwaffe accentuating the Wehrmacht’s threat to northern France, whereas for Britain the bomber created a totally new sense of insecurity. The 1930s air panic was therefore particularly acute in Britain and this helps explain the unprecedented support for antiwar movements such as the Peace Ballot and the Peace Pledge Union.³⁵

The bomber also shaped British diplomacy. In March 1933, a few weeks after Hitler gained power, Baldwin told the cabinet’s Disarmament Committee that two things frightened him most. “The first was the liability of this country to air raids and the second was the rearming of Germany.” Convinced that “the air was the first arm which the Germans will start to build up,” he insisted that “we must have a convention prohibiting bombing.” This was Baldwin’s main objective during the World Disarmament Conference, shared by the Foreign Office and indeed senior Army and Navy officers. “Only the Air Ministry wants to retain these weapons for use against towns,” fumed one admiralty memorandum, calling it “a method of warfare which is revolting and un-English.” Even after the conference collapsed, the Foreign Office pushed hard for an agreement among the great powers, but the French would not separate an anti-bombing pact from a general settlement with Germany. For them, as we have seen, the Luftwaffe was one facet of the overall German threat; across the Channel it was the Achilles’ heel of British security.³⁶

Baldwin was seeking a multilateral European agreement, but in 1938, as war clouds gathered over Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain decided to deal directly with Hitler. Today Chamberlain is usually stereotyped as a credulous old fool, but for most of the 1930s he was seen as the truly dynamic force in the National Government, first as chancellor of the Exchequer and then from 1937 as premier. His three visits to Germany over two weeks in September 1938 to negotiate with the Führer were a high-risk bid to avert war over Czechoslovakia. He used a plane not merely to save time but in order to seize the initiative: a meeting in London or on the North Sea “would not have suited me,” he told his sister, “for it would have deprived my coup of much of its dramatic effect.” Photos and film of Chamberlain climbing into a small propeller plane for his first real flight, aged sixty-nine, hit the headlines around the world. He was taking to the air to avert the threat from the air, deliberately using the vehicle of mass destruction as an instrument of peace. Neville had lost his cousin and closest friend, Norman, in the Great War; now, as premier, he was haunted by the responsibility of taking Britain into another conflict that could prove to be Armageddon. After his second visit to Hitler he spoke movingly about his feelings as he flew home up the Thames and looked down over the East End of London. According to the cabinet minutes “he had imagined a German bomber flying the same course. He had asked himself what degree of protection we could afford to the thousands of homes which he had seen stretched out below him, and he had felt that we were in no position to justify waging a war to-day in order to prevent a war hereafter.”³⁷

The climax of Chamberlain’s summit diplomacy was his third meeting with Hitler at Munich. There he sacrificed the security and much of the territory of Czechoslovakia, but what counted for most British people was the famous piece of paper signed by the two leaders stating that Britain and Germany would never go to war again. “Ce n’est pas magnifique,” remarked the pundit Cyril Joad drily, “mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”³⁸ The Munich agreement was greeted ecstatically by people in both countries. On September 30, Chamberlain’s car was mobbed by Munich crowds before he flew home—evidence, according to one contemporary, of how the Prime Minister had made himself “the mouthpiece of the horror with which millions of men and women . . . regard the brutish devilries of modern war.” In London it took him ninety minutes to drive the nine miles from Heston Aerodrome to Whitehall, so thick was the cheering throng; people jumped onto the running board trying to shake his hand. King George VI took the remarkable step of inviting Chamberlain onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the acclaim. Finally back at 10 Downing Street the prime minister, carried away by emotion and exhaustion, waved the piece of paper again and declared “I believe it is peace for our time.”³⁹

These images from September 30, 1938, would shape public memory in years to come. Any politician soaring so high was clearly riding for a fall, and the collapse of Chamberlain’s reputation was truly vertiginous. Munich soon became a synonym for craven surrender, likewise the term “appeasement” which had begun the 1930s as a perfectly respectable diplomatic term signifying the peaceful settlement of grievances. This sad denouement was partly because Chamberlain proved an inept negotiator, failing to understand Hitler’s mind or the art of hard bargaining. He also got carried away by the hubris of power, telling his sister that as premier “I have only to raise a finger & the whole face of Europe is changed.” Arrogance aside, however, Chamberlain’s high-wire summitry was a direct response to the panic about bombing in 1930s Britain—evoked so movingly in Toynbee’s letter. The perceived extremity of the danger elicited a response that was unique in British diplomatic history. Never before or since has a prime minister staked so much of his personal credibility on a bid for peace.⁴⁰

The bomber overshadowed British strategy as well as diplomacy. Once Germany began to rearm, it was inevitable that Britain must follow suit, even though still seeking international agreement on arms control. When the Defence Requirements Committee was set up in November 1933, it initially proposed a balanced program of rearmament to remedy deficiencies in all three branches of the service in the face of threats from Germany and Japan. It agreed that Germany was the ultimate potential enemy and that the government should be ready, in the event of war, to deploy another British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of five divisions and a tank brigade on the Continent. The DRC proposed a five-year program of some £97 million, with £40 million allocated for the Army. But these proposals were radically reshaped by Chamberlain and the Treasury, alarmed at both the cost and the public paranoia about bombing. They proposed cutting the total budget to £69 million, with only £19 million for the Army, while the air component was increased from 52 squadrons to 80. Mindful of public memories of the Western Front, Chamberlain warned that the proposed Army spending would “give rise to the most alarmist ideas of future intentions and commitments.” Instead, he argued, rearmament should concentrate on areas “in which public interest is strongest,” namely the RAF proposals for home defense. Britain’s best protection, he insisted, “would be the existence of a deterrent force so powerful as to render success in attack too doubtful to be worthwhile. I submit that this is most likely to be attained by the establishment of an Air Force based on this country of a size and efficiency calculated to inspire respect in the mind of a possible enemy.” ⁴¹

This concept of deterrence lay at the heart of British defense policy throughout the 1930s. As Baldwin argued in 1932 when warning that the “bomber will always get through,” “the only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.” Although in 1934 Baldwin dissented from the imbalance of Chamberlain’s proposals, he did not deny that “from the political point it was necessary to do something to satisfy the semi-panic conditions which existed now about the air and for obvious reasons.” Hence his reiterated pledge that the National Government would not allow British airpower to be “inferior to any country within striking distance of our shores.”⁴²

The defense debate in 1933–34 established the parameters for subsequent rearmament. Budgets came and went amid the ever-changing international situation, but the RAF remained on top, with a future BEF always at the bottom of the priority list. This reflected the public’s other phobia, about a second bloody land war on the Continent. No nation “would stand the losses we went through again for another 100 years,” warned Gen. Sir George Milne: “civilisation itself would go to pieces if a war similar to the last one were fought.” Mindful of the public mood the cabinet banned the term “Expeditionary Force” even in secret papers—“Field Force” being used instead—and concluded that “the time was inopportune for a resounding Declaration of our concern in the integrity of Belgian territory.” Army planners tried to rebut claims that in a future conflict airpower would be decisive and that Britain could adopt a “limited liability” approach to continental commitments: “If war with Germany comes again,” noted Col. Henry Pownall in 1936, “we shall again be fighting for our lives. Our effort must be the maximum, by land, sea and air.” But Chamberlain disagreed: “I believe our resources will be more profitably employed in the air, and on the sea, than in building up great armies.” In December 1937 the cabinet instructed Army planners to assume that Britain would not commit a Field Force to any European war at the start of hostilities.⁴³

The RAF reigned supreme in the budget battles all through the 1930s, but with a significant change of emphasis. By late 1938 it no longer seemed inevitable that the bomber would always get through. One reason was the development of fast, monoplane fighters—especially the Hurricane and Spitfire—capable of destroying enemy bombers before they reached their targets. But equally vital was the concomitant development of radar (then known as Radio Direction Finding), thanks in considerable measure to political and financial support secretly provided by Baldwin in 1934–35. In the winter after Munich the government rushed to complete the Chain Home system of radar stations around England’s southeast coast, linked by secure command and control phone networks to the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command. The Air Ministry, now with a strong vested interest in the bomber force, continued to insist that “counter-attack still remains our chief deterrent and defence,” but one heavy bomber cost the equivalent of four fighters, so the Treasury threw its weight behind the new concept of home defense. Radar provided a crucial ten-minute warning of enemy attack—just enough time to get the Hurricanes and Spitfires airborne, as would become clear in 1940. With these new electronic eyes, it seemed that the white cliffs of Dover could still serve as rampart to Britain’s moat defensive.⁴⁴

Hurricanes, Spitfires, and radar are all reminders that, in the two decades after 1918, Britain remained a major military power, often at the cutting edge of new technology. During the 1920s, Britain probably had the highest warlike expenditure in the world in absolute terms; by the mid-1930s it was no longer top of the table but this was due to heavy spending by Germany, Japan, and other powers rather than to British cuts. Historian David Edgerton notes, “The Royal Navy out-built all other navies in nearly all periods of the interwar years and in nearly all classes of warships.” Even though its investment in battleships seemed outmoded during the war of 1939–45, the Navy was also at the forefront of the vital new weapons system of aircraft carriers. In 1939, Britain had seven carriers, America and Japan six each, and Germany none. British sea power rested on a vast naval-industrial complex embracing the Clyde, Mersey, and Tyneside as well as the Royal Dockyards, which also drew on the steel-mills of Yorkshire and the machine-tools factories of the Midlands. Although slimmed down after 1918, this complex was sustained through the 1920s and 1930s so that relatively little investment was needed to gear up for war. The aircraft industry, still largely craftsman-based rather than utilizing mass production, did need substantial funding but this, too, was a major industrial operation at the vanguard of new technologies—notably the Spitfire fighter and the Lancaster bomber. And until the early 1930s, Britain was the largest overall arms exporter in the world, often cornering a quarter of the market; thereafter it shared leadership of the international arms trade with France. Contrary, therefore, to the familiar stereotype now of Britain as an emerging “welfare state” whose liberal values inculcated an anti-militarist ideology, the country in the 1930s can be described in many ways as a “warfare state” with a military-industrial sector that certainly kept pace with its rivals.⁴⁵

Britain also managed the hazardous economics of rearmament more effectively than its neighbors. For good or ill Chamberlain and the Treasury exerted a controlling hand over the process, establishing priorities within arms spending and restraining the worst inter-service rivalry. At a deeper level, they also insisted that rearmament must not undermine the fundamentals of Britain’s economy against those, like Churchill, who demanded more rapid rearmament. “I do not believe that [war] is imminent,” Chamberlain wrote in late 1936. “By careful diplomacy I believe we can stave it off, perhaps indefinitely, but if we were now to follow Winston’s advice and sacrifice our commerce to the manufacture of arms we should inflict a certain injury upon our trade from which it would take generations to recover, we should destroy the [business] confidence which now happily exists, and we should cripple the revenue.” These concerns ruled out increased taxation and also, in a pre-Keynesian age, heavy borrowing. Chamberlain’s policy was intended not just to satisfy peacetime exigencies but also as part of future war strategy. It was axiomatic that Britain’s financial and economic health was the country’s “fourth arm”—as vital for a future conflict as the three armed services. “At the present moment,” wrote Sir John Simon, Chamberlain’s chancellor of Exchequer, in March 1938, “we are in the position of a runner in a race who wants to reserve his spurt for the right time, but does not know where the finishing tape is. The danger is that we might knock our finances to pieces prematurely.” The Treasury maintained this position until the spring of 1939, after Hitler seized all of Czechoslovakia: Simon was then forced to admit that “other aspects in this matter now outweigh finance.”⁴⁶

Across the Channel, there was no such coordination of rearmament. In France arms policy became politicized in 1936–38 in the frenzied left-right battle over the Popular Front and its package of social benefits, with one ministry following another in quick succession. It did not help that French rearmament got going seriously in 1936 just as financial crisis and depression began to bite, whereas British rearmament from 1934 coincided with recovery from the slump. As a result France was still converting its Air Force to fast monoplane fighters in 1940 as the “phoney war” came to an end.⁴⁷

Germany’s rearmament, driven by Hitler’s megalomaniac vision, was even more chaotic, leading by 1936 to acute pressure on the budget and balance of payments. Overriding the efforts of Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht to coordinate the process in a Chamberlain-esque manner, Hitler decreed in September 1936 that “the German army must be operational within four years” and the economy made “fit for war” within the same time frame. Germany’s payments crisis worsened and, by the time of Munich, the shortage of raw materials and food threatened not only continued rearmament but also domestic stability. The Reichsbank frantically warned that Germany was “already on the threshold of inflation”—dread word from the 1920s—whose consequences “would be almost as dangerous” as war. But Hitler saw the dilemma differently: with British and French rearmament now gathering pace, it made sense, at least according to his mad logic, to use Germany’s army sooner rather than later, in a desperate bid to revise the European balance of power before the external pressures became overwhelming. The Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, though making nonsense of earlier ideological pronouncements about mutual hatred, was an inspired act of political opportunism, allowing Hitler to attack in the west without fear of an Eastern Front, but going to war was still an enormous gamble.⁴⁸

In September 1939 the anguish of Chamberlain and millions of British peace activists about the failure of their hopes must be set against the fact that Whitehall was essentially optimistic about Britain’s prospects in the coming war. Thanks to Chamberlain and the Treasury, it seemed that the country had managed to rearm without undermining the economy or sterling. Chances of surviving Germany’s initial onslaught, the dreaded “knockout” blow, had vastly improved due to the new air defense system. And policymakers assumed that France’s army could take care of any attack on the Western Front. In August 1939, Pownall, now the Army’s senior planner, was confident that if war did come, “we can’t lose it. Last September we might have lost a short war. Now we shouldn’t, nor a long one either.”⁴⁹ Today such confidence seems ludicrous but, as we shall see in the next chapter, the dramatic German victory in May 1940 astounded Berlin as much as London and Paris.

Confident or not, by 1938–39 the British were thinking about war again. Already one can sense a change in basic perceptions. Consider two verbal snapshots. In 1932, Sir Alexander Cadogan, a senior British diplomat, mused about what he considered the “fundamental question” facing the disarmament conference in Geneva:

Are we to try to keep the present Europe by force, by maintaining the restrictions imposed on Germany by the peace treaty, or are we to bring to an end the “post war” period, allow Germany to resume her place and rights as a great power on equal footing with the others, and trust that the reluctant removal of her grievances coupled with the security offered by the Covenant of the League will initiate a period of real peace? French policy plainly cannot be maintained for ever . . .⁵⁰

In 1932 Cadogan was determined to move on from the “postwar” years but, like Keynes in the epigraph to chapter 4, he was unsure what would replace them. Five years later the future seemed clearer but also more like the past. In 1937 the Welshman David Jones published In Parenthesis, an epic prose poem about an English soldier in France in 1915–16. Jones was, unusually, a war poet writing years after the war—and it showed in the double meaning of his title. First, for young men called up as soldiers “the war itself was a parenthesis”: Jones added, “how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18.” Secondly, he wished to convey a feeling that “our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.” The word “here” may have been intended existentially—to signify our life between birth and death—but I think it reveals Jones’s looming fear by 1937 that he was living in parenthesis between one great war and another. So we catch here an early intimation of the 1920s and 1930s not as the “postwar” years but as the “interwar” era.⁵¹

The passion for peace was equally intense in 1930s America. What happened there helps put the British story into sharper perspective.

Like in Britain, American antiwar movements had their roots in Christian traditions of nonviolence, especially among the Quakers and the Mennonites: the American Peace Society was founded as early as 1828. Secular forms of pacifism were a product of the twentieth century, especially the Great War, during which nearly 4,000 men were registered as “conscientious objectors,” borrowing British terminology.⁵² After 1918 peace groups proliferated in America, as in Britain, with newly enfranchised women playing a leading role. “War is in the blood of men; they can’t help it,” declared the veteran suffragette leader Carrie Chapman Catt. “They have been fighting ever since the days of the cavemen.” The New York branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom declared in 1919 that “by aiding men to release themselves from bondage to violence and bloodshed, we shall also free ourselves, for women can never know true liberty in a society dominated by force.”⁵³ Influenced by the ideology of the progressive era, many peace activists in the 1920s hoped that the carnage of 1914–18 and the advance of democracy would persuade nations to “outlaw war.” The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was partly a product of this agitation. Concluded initially between America and France, who both formally renounced war as an instrument of national policy, the treaty was eventually signed by more than fifty nations, including Britain, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—in fact, most of the countries who would be at each other’s throats a decade later. The pact was, actually, a shrewd tactical move by the State Department to deflect French pressure for a real security treaty while appeasing America’s peace movement. This balancing act reflected the basic dilemma of American policy after 1918: a commitment to peace in principle but not to any mechanisms for its enforcement.

Because the US Senate had rejected the League of Nations in 1919–20, the country was left outside the main international structure for peace, and this had important consequences for the American peace movement. In Britain, as we have seen, the League of Nations Union enjoyed mass support and was closely intertwined with the political elite. By contrast the League of Nations Association (LNA) in the United States, though rooted in the Eastern Establishment and having close ties to Washington, remained small-scale (peaking at 19,000 members in 1931). The lack of popular appeal was partly because it concentrated, like the French APD, on legal issues, but the root problem was simply that the LNA’s main objective, American membership in the League of Nations, was politically a non-starter after 1920. By contrast the pacifist element of the peace movement was stronger in America than in Britain, coordinated by the National Council for the Prevention of War. Peace groups under its umbrella proved very effective both in mobilizing mass support and in influencing congressmen. In 1931 they led the petitioning for the World Disarmament Conference; their Emergency Peace Campaign of 1936–37 has been described as “the greatest unified effort made by peace advocates until at least the Vietnam war.” It began in April 1936 with half a million high school and college students going on strike from their classrooms to attend demonstrations.⁵⁴

Pacifists were also in the vanguard of America’s very distinctive witch hunt against the “merchants of death.” A key figure here was Dorothy Detzer, the dynamic executive secretary of the WIL. A Midwesterner with only a high-school diploma, her background was very different from that of traditional women’s leaders like Catt—mostly college graduates from wealthy East Coast families. She became a committed pacifist after her beloved twin brother died from poison gas in the war. In 1932–33, following the failure of the Geneva disarmament conference, Detzer toured Capitol Hill pressing for an inquiry into the international arms trade. Eventually Sen. Gerald P. Nye, an austere progressive Republican from North Dakota, sponsored a resolution. Its passage was assisted by lobbying from peace groups and by publication in the spring of 1934 of several sensational indictments of the “blood brotherhood” of arms manufacturers. Their creed, according to an article in Fortune magazine, was “when there are wars, prolong them; when there is peace, disturb it.”⁵⁵

The Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, aka the Nye Committee, was dominated by progressives and isolationists, deeply suspicious of the Eastern Establishment and of Great Britain. Nye, its chairman, had not been outside the United States or even east of Chicago until entering the Senate in 1926, and he never visited Europe.⁵⁶ Under his crusading leadership the committee’s ninety-three hearings between September 1934 and February 1936 ranged far beyond the arms trade to scrutinize America’s whole involvement in the Great War. Such is the authority of congressional committees that titans of business such as the banker J. P. Morgan felt obliged to testify, under the glare of intense media scrutiny (plate 17). Although the Nye Committee found extensive evidence of bribery and insider dealing, it failed to substantiate its big claims about an international arms ring that was bent on fomenting wars. But the sensational headlines seemed to confirm the late 1920s revisionism about the Great War. “It is almost a truism,” noted journalist Raymond Gram Swing in 1935, “that the United States went into the World War in part to save from ruin the bankers who had strained themselves to the utmost to supply Great Britain with munitions and credits.”⁵⁷

Intent on applying the “lessons of history” to shape the future, the Nye Committee was a prime mover of the Neutrality Act of August 1935. In any future war the president would be obliged to impose a mandatory embargo on sale of munitions to any of the belligerents and also prohibit the carriage of munitions on American ships. The following February, after Italy’s war in Abyssinia, new legislation added a ban on American loans to belligerent countries and in May 1937 a third Neutrality Act banned American citizens from traveling on passenger vessels owned by belligerent countries. Critics joked that these laws were a belated attempt to stop America from entering the war of 1914–18. Considered more broadly, they were also a reversal of the traditional American policy of freely trading with all belligerent countries in time of war so that, as Thomas Jefferson memorably put it, the New World could “fatten on the follies of the Old.”⁵⁸ America’s commercial and financial reach, seen in the 1920s as a mark of international influence, was now deemed a source of vulnerability. “In my view,” declared Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a member of the Nye Committee, “we want an American neutrality which quarantines us against the wars of others to the last possible practicable and realistic extent. It cannot be done under the old rules which subordinate peace to commerce.” In his view, “the loss of incidental commerce is infinitely less important than a maintenance of American peace.”⁵⁹ The attitudes that shaped the Neutrality Acts were a product of the depression, emblematic of a nation that had lost confidence in its ability to shape world events. “Of the hell broth that is brewing in Europe we have no need to drink,” wrote novelist Ernest Hemingway. “We were fools to be sucked in once in a European war, and we shall never be sucked in again.”⁶⁰

Similar words emanated from the White House. “I have seen war,” declared President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1936. “I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed . . . I hate war. I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation.”⁶¹ Roosevelt’s lurid language, though partly electioneering, shows how far even internationalist Americans had moved since 1919. Despite serving as assistant secretary of the Navy during the Great War, FDR was never a wholehearted supporter of Wilson’s agenda. He believed that the United States should play an active role in world affairs but considered Wilson’s conception of the League of Nations too rigid for American interests. He also learned profound lessons from the president’s failure to persuade political and public opinion. “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead,” he once observed, “and to find no one there.” Aide Robert Sherwood reckoned that “the tragedy of Wilson was always within the rim of his consciousness.” Wilson’s stroke, brought on by his frenetic tour of the country in 1919, left him an invalid for the rest of his life. This drama of personal and political paralysis was particularly vivid for Roosevelt, unable to walk unaided after contracting polio in 1921.⁶²

In 1935 it was actually FDR who encouraged the Nye Committee to consider neutrality legislation, possibly hoping to divert them from more muckraking about the munitions industry. But Roosevelt also shared the belief that America’s emotional and economic entanglements with the Allies from 1914 had limited Wilson’s freedom of action and helped suck the United States into the war.⁶³ He wanted to avoid another outcry reminiscent of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, when 128 Americans were lost after a U-boat torpedoed a British passenger liner that was secretly carrying munitions. Once Nye got the bit between his teeth, however, the result was legislation that went far beyond what FDR had desired and that would shape US diplomacy for the rest of the decade.

To understand what was at stake we need to distinguish between two sets of legal matrices. First, arms embargoes and other bans could be either universal or discriminatory in scope, in other words applying to all belligerents or only against aggressor states. Secondly, they could be either mandatory or discretionary in application, depending on whether the president had leeway about when and how to invoke the law. Roosevelt wanted legislation that was discriminatory and discretionary, allowing him the freedom to apply it against aggressor states. The peace movement, backed by isolationists deeply suspicious of the president, sought mandatory, universal legislation that would insulate the United States from all sparks of war, and they got their way in 1935. But the 1937 act gave Roosevelt more of what he wanted. Although including mandatory and universal bans on arms, loans, shipping, and travel, the president now had discretion to allow non-arms trade with belligerent countries if he believed this necessary for the peace and security of the United States and if that trade was on a “cash and carry” basis. This phrase was popularized by Bernard Baruch, former chairman of Wilson’s War Industries Board: “We will sell to any belligerent anything except lethal weapons, but the terms are ‘cash on the barrel-head and come and get it.’” Cash and carry would preserve the profits of neutral trade while minimizing the risk of involvement in war. Yet it would also benefit nations with large financial reserves and merchant fleets, preeminently Britain. In this way, Roosevelt hoped, the United States could assist in the containment of Hitler without being dragged into another war. He spoke publicly in October 1937 of the need to “quarantine the aggressors”—not, like Vandenberg and his ilk, quarantining America from the contagion of war. “We don’t call them economic sanctions,” he told his cabinet later, “we call them quarantines. We want to develop a technique which will not lead to war.”⁶⁴

America’s contorted debate in 1935–37 over the Neutrality Acts replicated the split that opened up in the British peace movement after the Peace Ballot of 1935 between proponents of collective security, willing to use sanctions to enforce peace, and those intent on avoiding war at all costs. But there were significant national differences because the United States was outside the League of Nations and because of the intensity of American revisionism about the Great War. American revelations about the “merchants of death” did stimulate British agitation for a similar inquiry into the activities of Vickers and other British arms manufacturers, but the government managed to avoid a Nye-style witch hunt. It created a Royal Commission—a familiar way to bury a controversial issue by taking minutes and spending years. Although more than two million Britons submitted views and opinions to the commission in 1935–36, the whole process was a sop to the public outcry about the arms trade and served to divert attention from national rearmament—whereas the Nye Committee led directly to legislation that cramped US government policy.⁶⁵

American fear of war was intense yet abstract: three thousand miles from Europe, there was no equivalent of the British panic about bombing. But FDR was ahead of his countrymen in thinking about the implications of air warfare. During October 1938 he mulled over the lessons of the Czech crisis, absorbing reports from his ambassadors in Europe. This helped the president to understand the gut-wrenching fear of massive airborne destruction that had gripped Paris and London during the crisis. Helping them redress the air balance, in the long-term interests of American security, became his preoccupation during the winter of 1938–39. He told his military advisers that “the recrudescence of German power at Munich had completely reoriented our own international relations” and that America must therefore immediately create “a huge air force so that we do not need to have a huge army to follow that air force.” He considered that “sending a large army abroad was undesirable and politically out of the question.” FDR also saw rearmament as a form of diplomatic leverage: “when I write to foreign countries I must have something to back up my words. Had we had this summer 5,000 planes with the capacity immediately to produce 10,000 per year, even though I might have had to ask Congress for authority to sell or lend them to the countries in Europe, Hitler would not have dared to take the stand he did.”^66*

Roosevelt’s conception of air rearmament in 1938–39 was similar to Chamberlain’s in the mid-1930s—an alternative to a large army and an instrument of diplomacy. He told leading senators privately that Hitler was a “nut”; that Germany, Italy, and Japan were developing “a policy of world domination”; and that the Congress must now recognize that “the first line of defense in the United States” was “the continued independent existence” of key nations in Europe, particularly Britain and France. But, he warned, their chances of defeating Germany and Italy in a future war were only “fifty-fifty” because of the Luftwaffe’s air supremacy. Once dominant in Europe, Hitler could apply economic and political pressure on Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American countries, building up air bases that could threaten American interests. Miami was less than three hours’ flying time from Venezuela; planes based in Colombia could attack the Panama Canal in less than an hour. In essence, Roosevelt was arguing that to keep America at peace in the air age meant keeping the peace in Europe.⁶⁷

This remarkable outburst by the president was full of exaggerations—especially about German air strength and the vulnerability of Latin America—but it reflected his genuine belief that America’s cherished conception of a separate and defensible Western Hemisphere was no longer tenable. Airpower called into question not only the insuperability of the English Channel, as Baldwin had warned, but even the vast wastes of the Atlantic. Once war broke out in Europe the changed international situation gave FDR the necessary leverage to push through a new Neutrality Act in November 1939. This retained the mandatory bans on loans, travel, and shipping but placed all trade with belligerents, including armaments, on a cash-and-carry basis. The administration insisted that this was a “peace” measure, Roosevelt even arguing that “by the repeal of the arms embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace than if the law remains as it stands today.” His critics saw through the double-talk. “I hate Hitlerism and Naziism [sic] and Communism as completely as any person living,” Senator Vandenberg wrote in his diary. “But I decline to embrace the opportunist idea—so convenient and so popular at the moment—that we can stop these things in Europe without entering the conflict with everything at our command, including men and money. There is no middle ground. We are either all the way in or all the way out.”⁶⁸

Vandenberg’s critique was apt. Roosevelt’s bid to shape the war while remaining at peace would soon prove untenable. But his casuistry pushed the peace lobby further into the hands of conservative isolationists, led by “America First,” who urged a Fortress America policy of “Hemisphere Defense.” Whereas FDR’s tortuous efforts at collective security gradually sucked the United States into war, his opponents ended up advocating peace at any price.

The peace movement was hugely influential in both Britain and America in the 1930s—far more than on the continent of Europe—but the contrasts between these two countries are also important. What mattered for Britain, it has been argued, was the country’s “moderately secure strategic position and its moderately liberal political culture”—with “moderately” the operative word.⁶⁹ A feeling of extreme insecurity, normal on the Continent in the 1930s, encouraged the idea that peace movements were inherently traitorous. Conversely a strong sense of security, evident among most Americans in the 1930s, fostered the feeling that, if necessary, the country could insulate itself from world war. America’s oceanic barrier was three thousand miles wide, whereas Britain’s was barely twenty: this generated some sense of security for the British but not enough in the air age to foster escapism—hence both the Peace Ballot and also Chamberlain’s frantic appeasement.

Britain’s “moderately liberal political culture” reinforced the effects of geopolitics. Continental countries had a rooted tradition of military service and were intolerant of conscientious objection. This was evident in Germany and also in France, where the Catholic and republican traditions alike encouraged a keen sense of national conformity. By contrast, the Protestant dissenting tradition was central to Anglo-American liberalism and to its peace movements. But America’s lack of political pluralism, especially the weakness of socialism and the strength of its patriotic creed as the New World at odds with the Old often served to channel American liberalism into a crusading idealism, as happened during the Great War and the Red Scare. In Britain, however, the strong conservative tradition, on the one hand, and the rise of the Labour Party on the other fostered a more diverse political culture in which peace movements could flourish, especially in the 1930s.

In the spring of 1939 the director of the Imperial War Museum in London submitted his annual report. Leslie Bradley was a war veteran, wounded at Ypres, and he alluded with feeling to King George V’s words when opening the museum in 1920 about turning weapons of war into relics from the past. Although 1938–39 had been the museum’s best-ever year, with more than 450,000 visitors, many of them had actually been seeking lessons from the last war about how to face a future conflict. Their very practical concerns included the construction of trenches and air-raid shelters, defense against gas attacks, and methods of effective camouflage. These, declared Bradley indignantly, were “not the functions which the Museum was founded to perform.” It was established, he insisted, to “show the futility of war”—to “make an historical record of the war ‘that was to end war’” rather than to record “the first of a series of world wars, each more terrible than the last.”⁷⁰

The director of the Imperial War Museum submitted his report on April Fools’ Day, 1939. Exactly five months later Hitler invaded Poland.

* The comment about selling or lending planes to Europe strikingly prefigured Lend-Lease in 1941.