The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (84 page)

The most subtle exponent of British grand strategy in the 1930s was Basil Liddell Hart, the leading writer on the theory of war. His main achievement was to reconcile the contradictions in British public opinion: horror at the prospect of another ‘great war’; confidence in Britain's ‘manifest destiny’ as a global power. He denounced the continental campaigns of the First World War as a disastrous departure from Britain's ‘historic strategy’. The ‘British way of warfare’, he argued, was to combine all the elements where Britain was powerful to defeat the threats to her global system. A small professional army would use amphibious mobility to throw the enemy off balance – not engage in the brutal combat of the Western Front. Sea-power would throttle a landlocked aggressor. Economic warfare would demolish its civilian morale. ‘Moral war’ would subvert its self-belief and ideology. The aim was to avoid a new Armageddon, one decisive battle on which all would turn. The ‘indirect approach’ (Liddell Hart's key concept) was intended to dissuade an aggressor as much as defeat him. A cold war of diplomacy and suasion, on the Byzantine principle of ‘watch and weaken’, could be waged indefinitely at sustainable cost. Its central virtue in the political climate of the 1930s was to make the defence of empire compatible with mass democracy.
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The unanswered question as war drew nearer was whether it would be enough to save Britain's system from catastrophic defeat.

The uncertain state of British public opinion was a major influence on policy. For a time, the political and practical limits to rearmament seemed to argue against a futile attempt to hold on to everything. Perhaps the profligate sweep of Britain's possessions and spheres (expanded still further after 1918) was too vast to defend. Perhaps some retrenchment was wise. It was widely acknowledged that seizing Germany's colonies after 1918 had been an act of injustice. Some colonial concession might pave the way for a European détente.
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The same might have been said for the imperial ambitions of Italy and Japan. At a time of depression, Britain lacked both motive and means to finance the progress of her ‘undeveloped estates’. A more equitable share-out of the colonial world might improve diplomatic relations and curb the costs of defence. But, for all their agonising over how to protect them, British leaders showed little desire to shrink their global commitments. Indeed, the whole logic of their policy – and of the resort to appeasement – was a tenacious defence of Britain's worldwide claims.

The paradox perhaps is more apparent than real. Returning Germany's lost colonies to a Nazi regime raised awkward questions about their status as mandates. The attempt to do so would have roused humanitarian outrage. Some of them, anyway, were not Britain's to return. Nor was it easier to practise partition diplomacy on the few sovereign states that survived in Afro-Asia – the obvious lesson of the Ethiopian debacle. Any acknowledgment of Japanese claims in China (as opposed to outlying provinces like Manchuria) would have faced similar protest and the intimidating prospect of American hostility. A further objection was the uncertain reward for such painful concessions. Hitler showed no disposition to trade a European settlement for colonial small change. There was no serious chance that Tokyo's army-dominated governments would agree a limit on their deepening involvement in mainland China. British leaders had to bear in mind that to acquiesce in more than modest adjustments to the post-war treaties would ruin their claim to represent legality and order in international affairs. This inhibition was closely connected to another constraint no less powerful for remaining implicit. Governments in London were all too aware that their imperial system was in a delicate stage of constitutional transition. The dominions’ independence had been formally ceded in the Statute of Westminster. India's promotion to (qualified) dominion status was clearly foreshadowed in the 1935 Act. Imperial devolution made it harder to be sure of the dominions’ support for British commitments in Europe, of which their governments had always been wary. But it also placed a premium on British prestige as the
primus inter pares
of the ‘British nations’. Any public admission of Britain's military weakness, or of her reluctance to defend all her worldwide interests, might weaken her grip on dominion loyalty. Official doubts about the navy's ability to reinforce Singapore in a Far Eastern crisis were carefully concealed from the dominion premiers at the Imperial Conference in 1937. Similar arguments about imperial prestige applied with even greater force in India, Egypt and the Middle Eastern states.

With so few concessions to make, and no reliable clues as to where Germany's, Italy's and Japan's ambitions might lead, there was little alternative but to strengthen the base of British military power as quickly as possible. From 1936 onwards, the strategic debate became more and more fraught. The ‘Anti-Comintern Pact’ signed between Berlin and Tokyo in November 1936, despite its avowed purpose, warned that the two main ‘revisionist’ powers might combine their assault on the Eurasian peace settlement of 1919–22, and its main champion, Britain. Deterring Japan, insisted the Admiralty, meant sending the ‘Main Fleet’ to Singapore. But sending the Fleet east would leave the Mediterranean defenceless for an indefinite period, exposing Malta, Suez and Egypt. By May 1937, the planners were saying that the Fleet could only set out if Germany and Italy had declared their neutrality in an East Asia war – an unlikely scenario.
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A ‘new standard navy’, matching the sea-power of Germany and Japan, would not be enough if Italy entered the war. Nor could it defend Britain against what seemed the greatest danger of all, not a cross-Channel invasion but a ‘knock-out’ blow from the air. To counter the threat of such a German attack, the Defence Requirements Committee insisted on ‘air parity’ with Germany: a heavy bomber force; 2,000 planes with the vital reserves; and the industrial capacity to match Germany's effort. When the Treasury came to add up the bill, the figures were daunting. The maximum sum that could be spent safely over the following five years, Cabinet ministers were told, was barely enough for the navy and air force, let alone the army as well.
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Thus, by the time that Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937, the strategic outlook had become suddenly bleaker and was getting much worse. In July, full-scale war broke out between China and Japan. In August, there was fierce fighting in Shanghai, and, by September, a Japanese blockade of the China coast. Japan's invading army would soon be more than a million strong. In November 1937, Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact to affirm solidarity with Germany and Japan. Meanwhile, in what was Britain's most likely outside source of supply, the American Congress passed the Neutrality Act to bar the sale of munitions of war to any belligerent. The raising of loans there (a major recourse in the First World War) had already been blocked by the Johnson Act three years earlier. But Chamberlain was a strong and self-confident leader whose administrative ability and careful stewardship of public finance since the 1931 crash had earned him his name as a safe pair of hands. Like most mainstream opinion, he was strongly against a continental commitment for the British army, or an alliance with France that might drag Britain into an East European war. He also opposed too fierce a response to Japan's advance into China, preferring the ‘indirect approach’ of giving the Kuomintang government some financial assistance. On this, and on his eagerness to bury the hatchet with Italy, he was at odds with Anthony Eden, his Foreign Secretary.
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Unlike Eden (and the Admiralty), Chamberlain saw little point in challenging Japan to win American goodwill,
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and privately disparaged Washington's diplomacy as no more than words. In early 1938, he resisted Roosevelt's proposal of a peace initiative as untimely, pushing a discontented Eden into resignation.

Chamberlain took what he considered a realistic view. He favoured the build-up of naval strength, though not on the scale that the Admiralty wanted. But he regarded the deterrent of air power as a greater priority. With a heavy bomber force at Britain's disposal, there would be almost no danger of a German ‘knock-out blow’, since the RAF's retaliation would be swift and devastating. With the ‘knock-out blow’ ruled out, Hitler would have to reckon on a ‘long war’, if he aimed to fight a war at all. In a ‘long war’, almost all experts agreed, German chances were slender. There would be stalemate on the Western Front, where France was defended by the Maginot Line, and stalemate in the air. The longer war went on, the tighter would be the British blockade on a German economy that was already overstrained. And the more likely it would be that the United States would relax its prohibition on providing cash and supplies. With every month that passed, the Western Powers would grow stronger and Germany weaker. In light of this, it seemed very unlikely that Hitler would be rash enough to risk a second German defeat. The best he could hope for was some territorial gains, a colony or two and an informal hegemony in Southeastern Europe. So the centrepiece of Chamberlain's grand strategy was to inveigle Hitler into a European settlement. Once that was done, the ‘brutal friendship’ between Rome and Berlin would quickly fade. When Europe was restabilised would be the time to deal with Japan's opportunistic imperialism. There was a wide consensus (that included Churchill) that Japan would not dare to attack British interests directly unless Britain had already been defeated in Europe.

Chamberlain's design had a seductive coherence. His critics disliked his political tactics but they found it hard to gainsay his strategic assumptions – in public at least. It was widely assumed that the ‘have-not’ powers could not sustain their huge military budgets for much longer without drastic damage to their civilian economies. The chances that they could agree upon war aims and synchronise their strategies against a set of great-power enemies that might include the United States and the Soviet Union as well as Britain and France, seemed remote. It seemed more likely that, after huffing and puffing, a new equilibrium would emerge in Europe. In the short term, it was vital to avoid an ‘accidental’ conflict. Thereafter, the greatest danger that faced the British system was of bankrupting itself by overspending on defence and risking a new financial crisis on the scale it had faced in 1931. If that were to happen, the Chamberlainites might have argued, the British world-system would disintegrate anyway.

Chamberlain's ideas were soon to be put to the severest of tests. In March 1938, the German army marched into Austria to impose the
Anschluss
– Austro-German unification – to wild local enthusiasm. Two months later, Hitler opened the campaign for the separation of the German-speaking Sudetenland from the main body of Czechoslovakia, with the transparent intention (after the
Anschluss
) of absorbing it into Germany. The Chamberlain policy now came to its crisis. It seemed hard to oppose in principle the right of self-determination for the Sudeten Germans. It was even harder to see in practice how Britain could prevent the outcome Hitler wanted, without forming an alliance with France and the Soviet Union.
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The danger to Chamberlain's policy was that, if Hitler imposed his will without regard to Britain and France (and then annexed the dismembered Czech state), their prestige would collapse, and with it the leverage they needed to make Hitler agree to a general settlement. This was the issue on which the crisis turned. Britain and France had already agreed to the Sudetenland's ‘return’ (in actuality it had never been part of Germany) when Hitler demanded (at the Godesberg meeting on 23–24 September) the immediate military occupation of the Sudeten areas to ensure ‘stability’. Chamberlain's own inclination was to press the Czech government not to resist. But a Cabinet revolt on 27 September, led by Halifax and Simon, his two colleagues in the Inner Cabinet dealing with the crisis, brought matters to the brink. The next day, the Royal Navy was mobilised. But a further appeal to Hitler, and intervention by Mussolini, prepared the way for the Munich Conference. At the fateful meeting on 30 September, Hitler agreed to delay occupation and allow an international commission to supervise the sovereignty transfer. But, far more important, from Chamberlain's viewpoint, was his agreement that all future change in European affairs should be settled peacefully between Britain and Germany. Hitler, it seemed, had lost his nerve. It was this piece of paper that Chamberlain flourished to such huge acclaim on his return to London, and with which he all but demolished his domestic critics.

The euphoria was pardonable. All roads had led to Munich. The Admiralty view had been strongly against a premature confrontation with Germany before the new fleet was ready.
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British intelligence about the bomber threat (badly flawed in practice) assumed that Germany enjoyed decisive air superiority
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and that Britain was still in the danger zone of the ‘knock-out blow’. Despite French belligerence, British leaders were highly sceptical of the French will to fight or their capacity to do so. It was widely doubted that British opinion would support a war to keep the Sudetenland Czech. A grand alliance with the Soviet Union and France, even had it been possible, would have courted the risk of a European war with an aftermath worse than after 1918. The fly in the ointment had been Hitler's last brutal demand and the angry reaction it evoked in Cabinet. The astonishing outcome had seemed the best of all worlds, the vital first step down the road to a settlement. Hitler had even reiterated the naval promises made in June 1935.
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But, as even Chamberlain himself may have sensed, it was too good to be true. Hitler's negative intentions soon became clear. And less than six months after the Munich accords he occupied Prague and added the rest of Czechoslovakia to the German Reich.
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The defence of empire had been based on the hope of a European peace: now it must be built on the virtual certainty of a European war.