The nature of the Empire

The Versailles Settlement after the First World War made the British Empire even larger than it had been in the 19th century. But the Empire was not united. There was no coherent system of government, no coordinated defence structure and no common economic policy. In the words of historian Michael Howard, the Empire had 'become a brontosaurus with huge, vulnera­ble limbs which the central nervous system had little capacity to protect, direct or control' (The Continental Commitment, 1972).

The Dominions

In the 19th century Britain had begun the process of transforming the Empire into the Commonwealth. In 1867 Canada was granted dominion status, which allowed her complete self-government in domestic matters although London retained control of her defence and foreign policy. Dominion status was granted to Australia in 1901, New Zealand in 1907 and South Africa in 1910. The commit­ment of the Dominions to the Empire remained strong, probably because most of their white settlers were recent immigrants from Britain. Their contribution to the Allied cause in the First World War was enormous. More than a million men from the Dominions served in the various theatres of war, and 140,000 of them were killed. This debt had to be acknowledged. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 granted the Dominions complete independence.

The Dominions remained well-disposed towards Britain, but they could not be relied on for unwavering support. Disagreements over trade policy sur­faced at the Ottawa Conference in 1932. The Dominions were happy to see their exports entering Britain without paying tariffs, but were not prepared to extend the same privilege to industrial goods imported from Britain because they wished to develop their own industrial capacity. The most they would agree to was an increased tariff for non-British goods.

Australia and New Zealand were the most loyal of the Dominions. Britain was their principal trading partner and source of capital. For defence, they relied on Britain's oft-repeated promise to send the British fleet to the Far East when necessary. This spared them the expense of building their own armed forces. In 1939 Australia had an army of just a few thousand soldiers supplemented by a voluntary militia whose members trained for only 12 days a year. There was no air force to speak of and the navy comprised six cruisers, five First World War destroyers and two sloops.

At the Imperial Conference in May 1937, the Canadian Prime Minister suggested that public opinion in his country recommended Britain to 'leave the Germans and French to kill each other if they wanted to' but he also added that 'there would be great numbers of Canadians anxious to swim the Atlantic' to help Britain in war. All the Dominions disliked Britain's European commitments and did not want to see her drawn into another European war, but they exercised little influence over British policy. When war came in 1939, Australia, New Zealand and Canada joined Britain immediately. In South Africa, the pro-British premier had to overcome the hostility of Afrikaaners who remembered the Boer War before he could secure parlia­mentary approval for a declaration of war

The Middle East

After the First World War Britain took control of Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine from the defeated Turkish Empire. Britain granted Iraq independence in 1932 but Palestine was to prove difficult and costly to govern. In 1937, Britain's pro­posal to divide Palestine between the indigenous Arabs and the immigrant Jews provoked an Arab revolt. At the height of the Czech crisis in the autumn of 1938, Britain had more than 20,000 troops tied down in Palestine.

Ireland

Both Catholic and Protestant Irishmen fought as volunteers in the British army during the First World War. This was remarkable because Ireland was on the verge of civil war in 1914 over Britain's plans to grant the country home rule -in effect, dominion status. In 1919 militant Catholic nationalists declared Ireland independent and set up their own government in Dublin. Three years of vicious fighting with the British authorities followed. In 1922 southern Ireland was granted dominion status as the Irish Free State. The six counties of protestant Ulster remained under British rule and Britain retained the right to use three ports in the south. Relations between the Free State and Britain were frosty principally because of the Ulster issue, and from 1932 the two countries were engaged in a tariff war. By 1938, with war in Europe looming, both sides were keen to settle their differences. The tariff war was ended and Britain gave up her right to use the three ports. This was a high price to pay for Irish neutrality because the ports would have been invaluable in the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War. But had Ireland been sympathetic to Nazi Germany, the consequences might have been worse.

India

Britain had been preparing India for dominion status since   1909, when Indians were allowed limited participation in the legislative process. Further concessions were granted after the First World War in which 1,200,000 Indians I had served and 62,000 had died. Limited self-government was introduced in I 1919 and extended in 1935. Indian nationalists were not content with these cautious   measures   and   demanded   immediate   independence.   Britain's attempts to contain Indian nationalism were unsuccessful - the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which British troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd and killed 379 people, and the frequent arrests of leaders such as Gandhi served only to enflame the situation.

The issue also threatened to divide the Conservative Party in Britain. Churchill sat on the back benches for most of the 1930s because he loathed the government's Indian policy. For him the Indians were 'humble primitives' for whom 'democracy is totally unsuited'. At times he mobilised significant support within the Conservative Party. The future of India was unresolved when war broke out in 1939, and the loyalty of India's population to Britain's cause could not be guaranteed.

 

The legacy of the Treaty of Versailles

Britain and the Treaty

The peace settlement at the end of the First World War appeared to give Britain everything she wanted. The German fleet - the creation of which had been largely responsible for Britain joining the war in the first place - lay scuttled at Scapa Flow. The German overseas empire was confiscated and her colonies were divided among the victorious allies. Britain's Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, successfully insisted that Britain should receive some of the reparations payments that Germany was required to make. All of this meant that when other issues arose concerning the treatment of Germany, Lloyd George tended to be magnanimous. British appeasement of Germany began at Versailles.

France and the Treaty

The French could not afford such generosity. Despite victory in 1918, they were all too conscious of their weakness. The north-eastern corner of the country had been devastated and France had lost perhaps as many as 1,500,000 dead and 700,000 wounded in the war. These losses were smaller than Germany's, but the consequences for France were more serious. Her population was only two-thirds the size of Germany's and her birth rate was stagnant. In the words of Professor Jacques Nere, 'for the French and Germans in 1919, the ratio of men of an age to bear arms was 1:2. Moreover, in the case of heavy industrial potential, even after reconstruction of the devastated French areas, the ratio was 1 A' (The Foreign Policy of France from 1914 to 1945, 1975). Furthermore, revolution in Russia had deprived France of the alliance that could pressure Germany from the east.

To the French it was essential that the Treaty of Versailles should permamently disable Germany's potential for aggression. French leaders hoped to detach the western bank of the Rhine from Germany and either annex it to France or create an independent buffer state. Pressure from the United States and Britain forced them to abandon these hopes. Instead, the Allies decided to keep troops on the left bank for 15 years. A zone on both sides of the river was created. This was to be permanently demilitarised - in other words, the Germans could neither fortify it nor station troops there. The French also received an Anglo-American guarantee against any unprovoked aggression by Germany. But this became worthless almost immediately because in November 1919 the American Senate, determined to have nothing more to do with Europe, refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.

Disarmament

German disarmament

The Treaty of Versailles demanded the immediate disarmament of the defeated powers; the needs of French security required nothing less. The German army was reduced to the size necessary to guarantee internal order, a mere 100,000 men, but was not permitted tanks, heavy artillery or an air force. Her navy was reduced to being a coastal defence force. Pious statements about Allied disarmament were made at the peace conference, but nothing concrete was achieved.

The Washington and London Naval Conferences

In 1921 the Americans invited the major powers to a conference on naval limitation. The five-power treaty signed by the USA, Britain, Japan, France and Italy in December 1921 established a fixed ratio for the size of their respective fleets of capital ships (battleships and battle cruisers) of 5 : 5 : 3 : 1.75 : 1.75 Britain, realising that she could not afford an arms race with the United States, had signed away her naval supremacy. She also bowed to American pressure to abandon the alliance with Japan, first signed in 1902. Nationalists in Japan were outraged that their delegates had agreed to permanent inferiority, the more so when the Washington ratios were applied to cruisers as well at the London Naval Conference in 1930. For some historians, the origins of the Second World War in the Far East can be traced to Washington. 'The British, by ending the Japanese alliance, helped to strengthen those in Japan who wished to follow more chauvinistic and aggressive policies. Ties with Japan were weak­ened with no compensating tightening of relations with the United States' writes C.J. Bartlett (British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century, 1989). Yet it is difficult to see what realistic alternative was open to Britain.

The Disarmament Conference 1932-34

Attempts to limit the size of national armies proved even more difficult, and revived Anglo-French discord about how to treat the Germans. The French were, as ever, worried about their security, but the British believed that the inferiority imposed on Germany at Versailles could not be maintained for ever. After a good deal of stalling, the Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva on 2 February 1932. The Germans walked out in September because they had not been granted equality. Although French concessions persuaded them to return three months later, Hitler withdrew Germany permanently from both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in October 1933. It became an objective of British foreign policy over the next few years to try to tempt Hitler back into the League. In 1934 the Disarmament Conference broke up without agreement.

 

The impact of the Depression

The Wall Street Crash and the Depression

When the American stock market crashed in October 1929, it triggered a world­wide economic depression that lasted until the mid-1930s. Thousands of American investors were ruined and so demand for goods suddenly dropped. At the end of the 1920s much economic activity in the United States had been financed by credit. This explains why the Wall Street Crash so rapidly ruined businesses and produced high unemployment. The American response was to protect her ailing industries by imposing high tariffs on imported goods. These damaged the economies of those countries that relied on exporting their goods to the United States. Exporters of primary products such as food and raw materials were particularly badly hit because the glut of the late 1920s had already forced down the price of their exports. American investors also called in their loans to Europe, which worsened the problems. This particularly affected Germany, where the fragile recovery of the 1920s had been financed by American investment.

The political impact of the Depression

The severity of the economic crisis made the system of reparations payments unworkable, and they were duly cancelled at the Lausanne conference in 1932. This concession was not enough to save the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 because the Depression paralysed both the German economy and its political system. Once he had established his dictatorship, he set about destroying the Versailles Settlement and re­establishing German power in Europe.

In Britain, economic problems destroyed the Labour government in 1931. A National Government was formed with sufficient electoral support to ride out the storm. But the crisis made the governments of the 1930s reluctant to spend money on rearmament in case the problems of 1931 returned.

France was unscathed at first, but by 1932 France too was in difficulties with rising unemployment and political instability. During the 1930s French politics became increasingly polarised between right and left, making a coherent national response to the threat of Germany almost impossible.

 

The impact of the First World War

The war to end all wars

Britain suffered 722,000 dead and 1,676,000 wounded in the First World War. These losses were unprecedented and created a widespread feeling that carnage on such a scale should never be allowed to happen again. The war inspired a flood of literature that graphically described its horrors and rein­forced public perceptions that the sacrifices of trench warfare had been futile. Modern warfare, it seemed, was so shattering and terrible that no nation could benefit from it. When the novelist H.G. Wells called it 'the war to end all wars', he believed that no-one could possibly contemplate such destruction again.

The outbreak of the war was blamed on the alliance system and the arms race. It was widely believed to have been an accidental and avoidable conflict, not the product of aggression and malevolence. This implied that future wars could be averted by disarmament and open diplomacy conducted in the League of Nations.

The wrong sort of war

Until 1914, Britain's method of fighting had remained essentially the same for two hundred years. It was the job of the Royal Navy to gain mastery of the oceans. The British Army was little more than an Imperial police force, and if fighting on the European continent was necessary, it would be done by Britain's allies whose armies might be supplemented by small contingents of British soldiers. With the brief exception of the Crimean War, no British troops had seen action in Europe since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. This strategy allowed Britain to remain unique among the major powers in recruiting its armed forces entirely from volunteers. The total strength of the Army in 1914 (including the Regular Army, Reserves and Territorial Forces) was 733,514. This was very small by European standards.

The First World War transformed Britain's strategy. At the time of the armistice, there were l,794,000 British soldiers serving on the Western Front alone. More than five million men served in the Army during the war, and 47% of them became casualties. The Royal Navy was reduced to a secondary supportive role, and conscription was introduced in 1916 to feed the insatiable demand for manpower After 1918, when the wisdom of fighting in France was questioned, Britain endeavoured to return to its traditional strategy

The Ten Year Rule

This thinking was strongly reinforced by economic realities. In August 1919 the Cabinet agreed that: 'It should be assumed... that the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years, and that no Expeditionary Force is required for this purpose.' This became known as the Ten Year Rule, and it justified immediate cuts in Britain's armed forces. Expenditure dropped from £692 million in 1919-20 to £115 million in 1921-22 and it did not rise again until 1934-35. Conscription was abolished in 1920, and manpower in the armed forces sank to below pre-war levels.

In 1928, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, in order to keep the spending estimates of the service ministries in check, decided that the Ten Year Rule should be annually renewed. It was only abandoned in March 1932 as a result of the Manchurian crisis but, because the Disarmament Conference was still in progress, British rearmament could not begin until 1934.

 

Britain's fighting services

Strategic difficulties

Between the wars there were constant arguments between Service chiefs and politicians about how best to use Britain's limited resources to defend the United Kingdom and the. Empire. There were three inter-related issues:

♦  Which territories were most under threat and from whom?

♦  Was the Army, Navy or Air Force best suited to respond?

♦  How did the developing technology of warfare affect the way the armed forces should be used?

These were both strategic and diplomatic questions which became particularly hard to solve in the 1930s when Britain faced simultaneous challenges from Germany, Japan and Italy.

The RAF

The First World War created exaggerated fears of the destructive potential of air power in any future conflict. In 1922, the Committee of Imperial Defence advised that, in the next war, 'railway traffic would be disorganised, food sup­plies would be interrupted and it is probable that after being subjected for several weeks to the strain of such an attack the population would be so demoralised that they would insist upon an armistice.' It followed that the only way to prevent destruction was to build a bomber fleet large enough to deter an enemy attack.

The importance of bombing dominated strategic thinking about the role of air power until the late 1930s. But it did not mean that the RAF received any more money from the Treasury. The Ten Year Rule implied that there was no urgency to build a major bombing fleet, so the RAF suffered cuts along with the other two services. It was used as a cheap and effective method of policing far-flung Imperial territories.

When the government concluded in 1934 that Germany was Britain's 'ultimate potential enemy', priority was given to rebuilding the RAF as a effective deter­rent. The Defence White Paper of March 1935 declared that the 'principal role' of the RAF was 'to provide for the protection of the United Kingdom and particular­ly London against air attack.' In the various expansion schemes produced between 1934 and 1938, priority was given to the production of bombers whose role in war would be to attack German cities in retaliation for any air assault on Britain. This strategy underpinned the government's reluctance to send the Army into Europe again - if we could bomb the Germans into submission, we "would not need to send soldiers to fight them.

 Strategy changed in the late 1930s. The development of the Hurricane and the Spitfire meant that Britain possessed two new monoplane fighters with the speed and manoeuvrability to shoot down bombers. At the same time, a chain of radar stations, which could detect the approach of enemy aircraft, was being built across the south and east of Britain. The Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, Sir Thomas Inskip, challenged the bomber offensive strategy in a report presented to the Cabinet in December 1937 and suggested that priority should be given to the production of fighters. Strategy remained essentially defensive and dovetailed with Chamberlain's diplomatic objective of appeasing Germany.

Despite developing greater confidence that an enemy air assault could be warded off, British planners continued to believe that German bombers could inflict terrible losses (see Table 2 on page 47). In September 1938 the Luftwaffe (German air force) was thought to be capable of dropping 945 tons of bombs on England in a single day. The Air Raids Precautions department estimated that there would be 50 casualties per ton. This explains why the Ministry of Health was expecting 600,000 deaths- and 1,200,000 wounded from air raids alone in the first six months of war. In fact, German bombers did not have the range to reach England until their armies captured the Low Countries and northern France in 1940, and the total number of civilian deaths in Britain during the whole of the Second World War was 60,000.

The Royal Navy

After the First World War the Navy resumed its place as Britain's principal service. Its peacetime functions were to protect Britain's sea-borne trade route and defend the territories of the Empire. But its effectiveness was progressively eroded by government financial limitations and by international treaties. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22 (see also Chapter 2, page 12) the Navy had to accept equality with the Americans. Given that the likelihood of war against the USA was negligible, the Treaty at least ensured that Britain's navy was considerably larger than that of any potential rival. The Washington signato-| ries also agreed not to build any new battleships or battle-cruisers for ten years. At the London Naval Conference in 1930 this ban was extended for a further five years, and Britain also agreed to limitations on the rebuilding of her cruiser and destroyer fleets.

For most of the inter-war period the Royal Navy regarded Japan as its most likely potential enemy. This was welcomed by the governments of Australia and New Zealand, who relied on the British fleet to defend them. It appeared to be endorsed by the British government as well because, in response to the Manchurian crisis, the rebuilding of the base at Singapore was finally resumed in June 1932 after the postponements and delays of the 1920s. However in 1934, the threat posed by Hitler pushed Japan into second place in Britain's list of enemies.

 The Navy's strategic plans met a formidable obstacle in the shape of Neville Chamberlain (left), who was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 until 1937 and then Prime Minister. He was convinced that Britain could not afford to do anything other than ignore Japanese expansion. By 1939 Japan had slipped to third place behind Italy in the list of enemies, and the Chiefs of Staff accepted that whether or not the fleet could be sent to Singapore would 'depend on our resources and the state of the war in the European theatre'. The commitment to defend the Far East had been tacitly abandoned.

It was not just Treasury penny-pinching and government strategic priorities that weakened the Royal Navy. Its tactical thinking was somewhat conserva­tive. Naval planners continued to underestimate the vulnerability of warships to air attack, and insufficient emphasis was given to the construction and deployment of aircraft carriers. When the war began in 1939 Britain possessed only six aircraft carriers, four of which were converted warships.

The Army

The number of territories the Army was expected to defend had increased but, after 1918, its size was rapidly cut and by 1920 there were fewer men serving than there had been ten years earlier. The government's enthusiasm for cost-cutting coincided with a widespread feeling that the commitment of a huge army to fight in France had been a terrible aberration. British people remembered the costly losses of the battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele rather than the spectacular victories of 1918. It was assumed that only generals who were insensitive, ignorant and out of touch could have sent so many men to their deaths on the Western Front. When the cartoonist David Low wanted to invent a character to be the archetypal voice of pompous, reactionary stupidity, he made him an army officer- Colonel Blimp.

To some extent the Army reinforced these negative images. Its officers continued to be drawn from a narrow upper-class social group who prized sporting rather than intellectual achievement. During the 1930s the British Army managed to squander the early lead in the use of machines and vehi­cles that it had established over its continental rivals. In the words of historian Edward Ranson, 'Britain entered World War Two without an effective armoured force, lacking clear ideas about tank warfare, and with vehicles with severe design and operational limits' {British Defence Policy and Appeasement between the Wars 1919-1939, 1993). These failings were the result partly of government financial stringency and partly of squabbles between senior officers about the role of mechanised units in modern warfare. But they were also the product of confusion about the strategic role the British Army was expected to play.

 

Strategy and diplomacy

The Defence Requirements Committee

In 1922 the Cabinet told the Army that its responsibilities for the foreseeable future were home security and Imperial defence. Throughout the inter-war period there were more British troops in India than anywhere else in the Empire outside the United Kingdom. In 1933 the government established a Defence Requirements Committee (DRC) to advise on strategy and rearma­ment. Its first report, produced in February 1934, identified Germany as the 'ultimate potential enemy against whom our "long range" defence policy must be directed'. The DRC recommended rebuilding all three services, including the preparation of a small Expeditionary Force of the British Army to fight on the Continent. It pointed out that the Low Countries were now more vital than ever to British security, because possession of their airfields would allow German bombers to reach industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North. The Cabinet, dominated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, disagreed. Chamberlain wanted to deter the Germans, not fight them. He insisted that priority should be given to rebuilding the bombing    , capability of the RAF. The notion of equipping an army to fight in Europe was dropped. The Cabinet believed that public opinion would not accept it.

Avoiding a continental commitment

The DRC reported again in November 1935. The scale and pace of German rearmament was alarming, and the Abyssinian crisis (see Chapter 4, page 28) had transformed Italy from a potential ally into a Mediterranean menace. The DRC report emphasised the fundamental problem facing British strategy and diplomacy: 'It is a cardinal requirement of our National and Imperial security that our foreign policy should be so conducted as to avoid the possible devel­opment of a situation- in which we might be confronted simultaneously with the hostility of Japan in the Far East, Germany in the West, and any power on the main line of communication between the two.' The Cabinet scarcely needed reminding of this, but it reinforced Chamberlain in his hostility to the idea of preparing an Army for fighting in Europe, even though the DRC still recommended doing so. When the Arab Revolt broke out in 1937 the need to send more troops to Palestine pushed the 'continental commitment' even further into the background.

Economic problems

The impact of the First World War on Britain's economy

The First World War did immense damage to Britain's economy and acceler­ated the decline that had begun in the late 19th century. During the war Britain was less able to supply her pre-war export markets. As a result, coun­tries either produced their own goods or bought them elsewhere. Lancashire, which before the war had dominated the world market in cotton textiles, found itself undercut by Japan and India, whose labour costs were lower. Britain's cotton exports to India declined by 53% between 1913 and 1923. Clydeside, which built a third of all the world's ships in 1913, faced post-war competition from the USA and Japan. Britain's export markets for coal were similarly devastated. The number of unemployed in Britain between the wars never fell below a million.

The First World War also saddled Britain with huge international debts. During the conflict Britain lent £1,419 million to its allies, mainly France and Russia, and borrowed £1,285 million, chiefly from the United States. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 the new communist government refused to honour the debts it had inherited from the Tsarist regime, but the Americans contin­ued to demand repayment of the money owed to them by Britain and France: A large slice of government revenue in the post-war years was devoted to paying off Britain's war debt to the United States.

'The fourth arm of defence'

The Wall Street Crash in the United States in 1929 caused serious economic problems in Britain. Exports fell, unemployment rose to triree million and, in 1931, Britain was forced to abandon the Gold Standard - a cherished symbol of the strength and stability of the pound. The politicians who dominated the National Government, which had been formed in 1931 to deal with the crisis at its worst, were haunted by the fear that rash economic policies would cause the problems to recur.

During the 1930s the Treasury maintained that Britain's economy was 'the fourth arm of defence'. They argued that, as a country dependent on imports for food and many industrial raw materials, Britain needed to maintain a healthy balance of payments. They argued that rapid rearmament would cause a balance of payments deficit because the normal pattern of trade would be upset. If factories switched to war production they would not be producing export goods but would still consume imported raw materials. Britain's balance of payments problems would cause foreign investors to sell the pound and a crisis on the scale of 1931 would recur. The Treasury nightmare was that Britain would enter a war with a weak pound and few reserves, and so would be unable to survive a major war without becoming bankrupt after a few months. Britain, it seemed, faced a dilemma. Rapid rearmament to keep pace with the dictators would bankrupt the British economy. Slow rearmament, based only on what the nation could afford, might mean that the country's armed forces were not strong enough to cope with an enemy attack.

The Ten Year Rule also left an unfortunate legacy. When the government did decide to rearm, it found that the munitions industry, starved of orders since 1918, had shrunk in size and capacity. The biggest problem was the lack of skilled labour. Although there was a vast pool of unemployed workers, few of them had the skills to operate machine tools or train others in their use. The government ruled out compelling skilled workers to transfer from consumer industries to armaments factories because, as the Cabinet concluded in 1936, 'any such interference would adversely affect the general prosperity of the country and so reduce our capacity to find the necessary funds for the Service programmes. It would undoubtedly attract Parliamentary criticism.'

Economic appeasement

Treasury officials, like their Foreign Office counterparts, were keen on appeasement and believed that the government should do everything in its power to reduce the number of Britain's potential enemies. Some officials argued that economic difficulties in Germany explained why the Nazis were so aggressive. As a Foreign Office memorandum put it in January 1936, 'If ... we believe that nazism is in reality a symptom and not a cause, then it is logical to deal - or at any rate attempt to deal - with it by attacking the cause itself. And what is the cause? Obviously, economic distress.'

Neville Chamberlain, who played an important part in shaping Britain's foreign policy even when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, believed that economic policy was vitally important to the solution of Europe's diplomatic problems. He shared the Treasury view that German aggression stemmed from economic difficulties. He maintained that the Versailles Settlement, by robbing Germany of important industrial territories in Europe and her overseas colonies, had made the Germans determined to recover them, by war if necessary. If, thought Chamberlain, British diplomacy could help to secure their return, the Germans would have no need to go to war, or even build up armaments in preparation for war.

Chamberlain and the Treasury officials were fortified in this view by a mistaken, but understandable, interpretation of German internal politics. They believed that Hitler was receiving advice from two rival sets of advisers. One group, whom the British thought to,be 'moderates', included men such as Schacht, the German Economics Minister, and was believed to share the British view of how to solve Germany's problems. The other group, designated 'extremists' by the British, was thought determined to make Germany stronger by conquest and war. Chamberlain hoped that judicious concessions to Germany would increase the power and influence of the 'moderates'. This would not only make it unnecessary for Germany to continue her preparations for war but would also reduce international tension. Even as late as February 1939, Chamberlain argued, in a speech in Birmingham, that a mutually benefi­cial Anglo-German economic agreement could help avoid recession and rising unemployment in Britain.

Unfortunately for Chamberlain, although there were 'moderates' in Germany, their influence was negligible after 1936 when Hitler demanded that the German economy should be ready for war by 1940. Schacht, who dominated German economic policy in the first years of the Third Reich, resigned from the Economics Ministry in 1937 because he could not restrain Hitler from ignoring economic realities in Germany's rapid rearmament programme. Chamberlain's mistake was to assume that Hitler was a rational leader Economic appeasement failed because Hitler did not want to be appeased.

 

Popular opinion

The Franchise Act of 1918 increased the electorate from just under eight million to over 21 million, and gave women over 30 the vote for the first time. After 1928 Britain could be described as truly democratic because all men and women over the age of 21 could vote. This meant that politicians were much more conscious of public opinion in shaping their policies.

Hostility to rearmament

Finding out exactly what the public felt about foreign policy issues was difficult because the first opinion polls in Britain were not established until 1937. However, there did appear to be some widespread assumptions that politi­cians were reluctant to challenge. The first and most important of these was the belief that another conflict like the First World War could be avoided if the nations of Europe cut down their armaments. Spectacular evidence of this seemed to be provided by the East Fulham by-election of October 1933. The Conservative candidate, defending a majority of more than 14,000 votes, advocated rearmament. He was defeated by nearly 5,000 votes by his Labour opponent, who supported disarmament. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulham_East_by-election,_1933) The result had a considerable influence on the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, who became convinced that rapid rearmament would mean defeat at the polls in the next general election. Faith that the League of Nations could settle international disputes without recourse to war was another widely-held belief. At its peak in 1931 its British supporters' club - the League of Nations Union - could boast more than 400,000 members. In 1935 the Union published the result of its 'Peace Ballot' of more than 11 million people, which appeared to give a ringing endorsement of the League and its principles, including international disarmament. The rapturous reception given to Chamberlain when he returned from Munich (see Chapter 5) suggests that, even as late as September 1938, many people in Britain were anxious to avoid war and actively supported the policy of appeasement.

British domestic politics

The political landscape in Britain had been altered by the First World War. By 1922 the Labour Party had emerged to challenge the Liberals as the principal opposition to the Conservatives. The rise of the Labour Party - which had adopted an explicitly socialist constitution in 1918 -worried the Conservatives. Tory leaders believed that only moderate, unadventurous policies would be sufficiently popular to win over former Liberal voters and keep themselves in power. Defeat might deliver the nation into the hands of the wild men of the left thought to be lurking behind the leadership of the Labour Party. As it happened, similar calculations were being made by the Labour leaders, who were convinced that they could only achieve power and pick up their share of former Liberal votes if their party adopted responsible and cautious policies. The result was a political consensus in which both main parties aimed to control the middle ground of British politics and avoid policies, particularly concerning foreign and defence issues, that courted electoral unpopularity. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s, summed up this thinking when he opposed more money for the Navy because he could not 'conceive of any course more certain to result in a Socialist victory.'

Spending priorities

The First World War and the advent of democracy altered government spend­ing priorities. As Table 4 on page 47 shows, expenditure on welfare took a much higher proportion of the government's budget in the 1930s than it had done in the days before the First World War. After the sacrifice of the war, the demands for extensions to the welfare responsibilities of government were irresistible. War pensions, more generous dole payments and extensions of the scope of National Insurance all added to the demands on the Exchequer in the post-war years, and no government, much less one striving to hold the middle ground, could contemplate irreversible cuts in these benefits in order to finance rearmament.

 

The impact of Hitler

 

Hitler as Chancellor

There was little alarm in Britain when Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933. The Daily Mail even rejoiced that Germany had 'a stable govern­ment at last' and welcomed Hitler, with his 'good looks and charming personality', taking on 'the mantle of Bismarck'.

In speeches and interviews during 1933, Hitler stressed his peaceful ambi­tions and emphasised his desire, first expressed in his autobiography Mem Kampf, for an understanding with Britain. The British government responded cautiously. While anxious to reach agreement with Hitler, they were exasperated by his behaviour. Soon the evidence of German rearmament in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles was plentiful, and in July 1934 the murder by Austrian Nazis of Chancellor Dollfuss briefly excited fears of a German invasion of Austria.

The Stresa Front, April 1935

German rearmament in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles became public knowledge when, on successive Saturdays in March 1935, Hitler announced the existence of the Luftwaffe and the reintroduction of conscription. This alarmed Italy, France and Britain so much that their heads of government and foreign secretaries met, on Mussolini's invitation, at Stresa in Italy. The Stresa Conference produced an impressive declaration that the three powers would 'act in close and cordial collaboration' to oppose 'any unilateral repudiation of treaties which may endanger the peace of Europe'.

But the unity of Stresa was bogus. None of the three was prepared to act without the support of the others, and there were plenty of issues to divide them. Mussolini was already moving troops through the Suez Canal in prepara­tion for his invasion of Abyssinia in the autumn. The lack of any British protest led him to believe that he had tacit approval for his invasion. He had already secured the secret support of the French, who were anxious to keep him as an ally against Hitler. The British Cabinet had agreed, before the conference began, 'to take no action [against Germany) except to threaten her'

The Anglo-Cerman Naval Agreement, June 1935

The emptiness of the Stresa declaration became apparent two months later when Britain signed her bilateral Naval Agreement with Germany. Without prior consultation with France or Italy, Britain agreed to allow the Germans to build a fleet of up to 35% of the size of the Royal Navy.