Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

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  Naval affairs dominated the conference. But air matters were also much on the minds of its delegates and in the midst of business the prime ministers were invited to the London suburb of Croydon, site of the recently opened London air terminal. Commercial flight was still in its infancy, but already there were daily passenger flights to Paris and Brussels. Whatever their differences over tariffs, trade, or the Anglo-Japanese alliance, the prime ministers were unanimous about the need for better inter-Imperial communications and intrigued by the enticing prospects of travel by air. All had been present at the annual dinner of the Royal Colonial Institute on the eve of Dominion Day to hear the Prince of Wales declare, to cheers, that a united Empire depended almost more than anything else on personal connections and that ‘the future of rapid Imperial communications lies in the air’. As a former trainee pilot himself at Croydon, the youthful heir to the throne was a committed flying enthusiast. He went on to say – again to cheers – that he hoped delegates to the next Imperial Conference would be able to reach London thanks to Imperial air routes. Turning to New Zealand’s Massey and Australia’s Hughes, he noted that each had travelled over 12,000 miles to take part in the Conference. ‘I am sure,’ he smiled, ‘that Mr. Hughes will be happier the day he leaves the Old Country when he knows that it will take him 10 days instead of six weeks to arrive at his destination.’16

  Hughes certainly would. The Australian prime minister was feisty and opinionated and strongly opposed – as was Arthur Meighen – to a plan put forward by Smuts for a federal Imperial Constitution, ‘constitutional tinkering’ as he caustically dismissed it. Nonetheless, he strongly favoured improved communications to bind the Empire together and believed that Australia’s best and indeed only future lay within it. ‘What should we be outside the Empire?’ he asked rhetorically. At Croydon, he caught a glimpse of how that future might look.

  Officially receiving the Dominion leaders at the Croydon airfield was Freddie Guest, now the Secretary of State for Air in succession to his cousin. They watched aeroplanes taking off and landing, and listened in to their pilots communicating with ground control on their radios. But the highlight of the visit for Hughes came when he clambered up an inside stairway to the top of a tall wooden mast where a giant airship, numbered R33, was firmly moored. The Prince of Wales’ vision of a ten-day journey between Australia and Britain had been of travel by airship, not aeroplane. These giants of the air had been developed as weapons of war, the dreaded Zeppelins of the First World War. Now they were serious candidates for inter-continental commercial flight. Just two years before, the giant British airship R34 had made the first ever transatlantic round trip by air, completing the westbound journey to New York in just over four days. Some of the Dominion prime ministers had already been taken on a short flight on a sister airship, the R36, and three days into the conference banner headlines broke the news that the successful maiden flight of the world’s largest airship had taken place over southern England. This was the six-engined R38. Fully loaded with 30 tons of petrol, the almost 700-feet long dirigible was capable of flying at a cruising speed of 60 miles per hour at an altitude of 25,000 feet for 6,500 miles, roughly the distance from England to Tokyo.

  It was little surprise that Hughes was captivated by the potential of airship travel, nor that he was quick to put an enthusiastic case for an Imperial airship service officially before the conference. But here he ran head on into an opponent who could be as bull-headed and opinionated as himself. Churchill, who had reluctantly given up the thrilling speed of piloting an aeroplane only after the passionate pleadings of his wife, knew his mind about airships. He was against them, whether for civilian or military use. Unlike their winged rivals they were slow, vulnerable, and unmanoeuvrable. ‘Had I had my own way,’ he declared in The World Crisis, ‘no airships would have been built by Great Britain during the war.’ But after he left the Admiralty, he deplored, ‘forty millions of money were squandered . . . in building British zeppelins, not one of which on any occasion ever rendered any effective fighting service’.17

  Eventually his successors at Admiralty House had reached the same decision and abandoned airships, and as Secretary of State for War and Air he had closed down the Royal Air Force’s airship division, cancelled airship construction and trials, and sold off existing machines. Indeed, by the time of the R38’s headline-catching maiden flight, it had also been handed over to the American government for use by the United States Navy, which remained keen to exploit its potential for military or commercial purposes. It now had an Anglo-American crew readying to fly it across the Atlantic to Lakehurst in New Jersey for a journey expected to take some 90 hours. Freddie Guest was as ruthless about airships as his cousin, and before the conference opened had announced that the government would wash its hands of all airships at the beginning of August. Hughes fought a powerful rear-guard action to reverse the decision, and the conference set up a special committee to explore commercial schemes that might still keep airships in the air. But the odds were stacked against the Australian prime minister. Guest was the chairman of the committee, and Churchill spoke powerfully against the whole idea of Imperial airship travel as being impossibly expensive. An airship cost £320,000 to build, against £10,000 for an aeroplane, and three or four would be needed for an effective service. In addition, the five or six mooring masts needed to dock the airships would each cost £300,000. In all, he explained, they would be looking at a cost of some 3 million pounds. Even if Britain could afford to pay half the bill, the Dominions would have to find the other half; and it was doubtful whether they would, or could. No decision was made by the time the conference ended, which effectively put an end to Hughes’s scheme. Churchill also successfully opposed another ambitious plan by the Australian to build a network of powerful radio transmitters in each Dominion to improve communications. Instead, he offered a cheaper version of his own. In both cases, he vetoed the plans on the grounds of cost.18

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  But what really finished off the hope of airships as the future of Imperial travel was the catastrophic fate of R38. On the morning of Tuesday 23 August the gigantic airship left its mooring mast at Howden aerodrome in Yorkshire with a mixed British and American crew for its final trials over the North Sea before leaving for New Jersey. After a flight lasting thirty-five hours, much of it in thick fog, it was returning to its base when two violent explosions ripped it in half over the city of Hull. It crashed in flames into the River Humber, killing all but five of the forty-nine people on board. The disaster was a massive setback to hopes of future airship travel. The New Zealand prime minister put a brave face on the news by repeating his faith in the prospects. Nonetheless, he had to admit that ‘we have to face things as they are and it means a long setback’.19

  The tragedy also prompted an outpouring of national mourning on both sides of the Atlantic. In early September a memorial service for the victims was held in Westminster Abbey, where the national anthems of the United States and Great Britain were played by the Band of the Royal Air Force and the congregation sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Simultaneously, the Stars and Stripes-draped coffins of the American victims were solemnly transported to Devonport, escorted by a Royal Air Force guard of honour, to be placed on board the British light cruiser HMS Dauntless and taken home to the United States. Eddie Marsh represented an absent Churchill for the service in the Abbey while in New York Freddie Guest, who was on a private visit to America, attended the funeral service for the American victims. The elaborately choreographed ceremonies were testimony to a new-found sense of Anglo-American kinship that appeared to underpin the grandeur of the nation’s post-war global reach.20

  THIRTEEN

  ‘I WILL TAKE WHAT COMES’

  The fallout from the Cairo Conference kept Churchill busy over the summer and he rapidly descended into gloom about the prospect of reconciling Jews and Arabs. ‘I do not think things are going to get better, but rather worse,’ he told the Cabinet.1 He h
ad a head-on collision with Chaim Weizmann, who insisted that the Balfour Declaration presumed an ultimate Jewish majority in Palestine, and later in the summer at a meeting with a Palestinian delegation of Muslim and Christian Arabs in London he encountered a different brick wall – their demand that the Balfour Declaration be repealed and a point-blank refusal to talk directly with the Zionists. Even before the delegation arrived, he confessed to the Cabinet that the situation in Palestine was causing him ‘perplexity and anxiety. The whole country is in ferment,’ he lamented, ‘both Arabs and Jews are arming, ready to spring at each other’s throats.’2

  He could barely conceal his exasperation with the Palestinian demands. Shortly after the end of the Imperial Conference he met privately with Shibley al-Jamal, the delegation’s head, but made no headway. A week later, he spent the morning receiving the entire delegation. As he had already explained to Shibley al-Jamal, he had no power to change the Balfour Declaration, nor could he agree to an elected assembly for Palestine, which would inevitably place the Jews in a permanent minority and certainly impose a ban on any future immigration. He used blunt talk about the Palestinians’ refusal to compromise. ‘Do you really want to go back to Palestine empty-handed?’ he asked, and appealed to them – ‘without any great hope’, he admitted – to be more flexible. That was all he could do. The Palestinians remained obdurate. The Cabinet, not surprisingly, had no solution either for Palestine. All that his equally exasperated ally Birkenhead could offer was the idea that the mandate should be offered to the United States.3

  Things were looking brighter in Iraq, however, where Churchill’s driving concern remained cost-cutting. To Sir Percy Cox, his consistent message was the need for economies. It was essential that Faisal and a stable Iraqi government be installed in Baghdad as soon as possible – and that the Royal Air Force officially become the primary keeper of order in the desert. As the Imperial Conference was winding up in early August, Churchill laid out his plans to the Cabinet. Thanks to Cox’s heroic (not to say Machiavellian) efforts in buying support for the British choice for the throne across the country, Faisal was gaining acceptance as the country’s first monarch. This meant that Britain could look forward to an independent native state casting ‘hardly any burden’ on the Empire. The country would be run by ‘the same cheap, makeshift machinery which the Colonial Office have successfully employed . . . in East and West Africa,’ he promised. There would be no Imperial troops stationed at great expense outside Baghdad, and instead the RAF would keep order. Iraq, he told them, was a ‘vexatious country’, and spending any more on it would be a misapplication of resources. As he insisted personally to Lloyd George, the Colonial Office should be given full control over War Office expenditures in the country. This was agreed, and two weeks later he happily announced that Faisal had finally been chosen by the people as their ruler after a referendum that produced a literally incredible 96 per cent approval for the Hashemite King.4

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  ‘The first duty of the Royal Air Force is to garrison the British Empire,’ Churchill had impressed upon the House of Commons in 1919, and at Cairo he made clear that this new arm of war would play the major role in policing Iraq. By then even the army had come to admit their rival’s value in quelling disorder across the new country’s sprawling terrain. While he was enthusiastic about what air power could do, he also remained cautious. The sudden appearance of airplanes dropping bombs from the sky could have an enormous deterrent effect. But with British troops becoming thinner and thinner on the ground, such actions might increasingly be seen as a bluff, and hence perhaps dangerously discounted. Air power should be used with circumspection, he cautioned Sir Percy Cox after one such episode in July on the Lower Euphrates. With that proviso, he assured the High Commissioner, he was a great believer in its legitimate use.

  What did he consider legitimate? Quelling disturbances and enforcing order met the test, but supporting measures such as the collection of taxes did not. That same month, he was shocked to learn that Royal Air Force planes had fired on women and children taking refuge in a lake. ‘By doing such things we put ourselves on the lower level,’ he berated Sir Hugh Trenchard. ‘Combatants are fair game and sometimes non-combatants get injured through their proximity to fighting troops, but this seems to be quite a different matter.’ He was surprised, he told the Chief of the Air Staff, that the officers responsible had not been court-martialled. Yet his reprimand appears to have had no effect on the ground. A year later, the same RAF officer whose report had so shocked him wrote with gusto about a hundred bombs having been dropped on a village that formed ‘a hotbed of malcontents’, after which it had been burnt to the ground by troops.5

  Razing a village full of ‘malcontents’ was a brutal but not unusual aspect of colonial policing. Far more controversial is Churchill’s alleged use of poison gas against Iraqi rebels. The charge has been widely accepted by many of his critics. Yet it is far from accurate, largely because of Churchill’s own confused use of the term ‘poison gas’ when he was actually referring to non-lethal tear gas and not the far more deadly chlorine or phosgene gas. ‘It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell,’ he had declared as Secretary of State for War and Air, ‘and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.’ This was not the view of the Cabinet, however, which held that Britain should only use gas in warfare in retaliation against its first use by others. Besides, the League of Nations was actively discussing the idea of banning chemical weapons altogether. For Britain to use any sort of gas with talks under way would cause serious political and diplomatic complications.

  However, the next year during a rebellion across Iraq, Sir Aylmer Haldane appealed for the use of gas to be considered – both from the air and by ground troops. Trenchard’s view was that gas dropped in bombs from the air was probably far less effective than regular high-explosive bombs. But Churchill authorized Haldane to use whatever gas shells he had; and when it was discovered that there were none available in Iraq, he gave him permission to acquire 5,000 rounds of sixty-pound SK chemical (tear gas) shells from stocks in Egypt. Now, just days before Faisal was officially enthroned as Iraq’s new monarch, Haldane told Churchill that he was ‘arranging to do some bombing by moonlight’. Then he added: ‘I wish that we could have authority to use gas bombs, but the air ministry are [sic] awaiting for the Cabinet’s decision in the matter. I am allowed to use them from my guns – but where the guns can go they cannot use gas shells with advantage – but in the hilly country of the Kurds gas would be far more effective than in the hot plains where the gas is very volatile.’ From this it is clear that gas bombing from the air was not being carried out, because it was unauthorized. Nor was shelling using tear gas being deployed, even though permitted, because of the terrain. This appears to have remained the case for at least the rest of 1921.6 Despite her support for Trenchard at Cairo, Gertrude Bell realized the limits of what bombing could achieve. Shortly before Christmas she told her father that ‘between ourselves, aeroplanes are no good in mountainous country. You can’t so much as see a Kurdish mountain village from the air; its’ [sic] flat mud roofs look like a part of the hillside. And even if you do locate it you can’t do much harm. The people take refuge under any convenient rock and your bombs are comparatively innocuous. Oh for peace.’7

  As for tear-gas bombs dropped by air, Cox discussed their use with King Faisal in November that year and gained the Iraqi monarch’s consent – ‘provided they were not lethal or permanently injurious to health’. Buoyed up by this, shortly after Christmas Churchill agreed to the supply of such bombs to the air force in Iraq. No sooner had he done this, however, than he revoked the order. Ironically, this was thanks to a decision by the disarmament conference in Washington whose meeting he had so warmly supported. Article 5 of its Disarmament Treaty prohibited the use of ‘asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases’. Faced with a major political embarrassment if his decision became public, he lost no
time in beating a retreat and the order was quickly countermanded. Similar instructions were sent to the army.

  In short, Churchill would gladly have approved using tear gas in Iraq if circumstances had permitted. But thanks to a combination of practical, legal, and political obstacles, he never did. Otherwise, his enthusiasm for policing by air remained undimmed for so long as he remained Colonial Secretary. Subsequently the Royal Air Force suppressed several Kurdish insurrections, ensured that Faisal’s writ ran effectively across his kingdom, and also kept Abdullah on the throne of neighbouring Transjordan.8

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  No one this summer could accuse Churchill of not doing his best to follow the Cabinet’s determination to pare military expenditure to the bone. Ironically, his relentless search for cuts contrasted sharply with his never-ending personal desire to spend more. Using his Garron Towers estate inheritance, he increased Clementine’s household allowance by a third. He also visited his bank manager to discuss arranging a new consolidated loan of £30,000. Then, the day after the ‘game of notes’ with Curzon round the Cabinet table, he met with Sir Reginald Cox, the senior partner of Cox and Co., to discuss his financial affairs. As soon as Parliament rose for the summer recess, he promised, he would produce a detailed blueprint of his plans. He was true to his word. Early in August, after providing a list of his outstanding loans and an overdraft totalling £35,000, he asked whether they could be consolidated into a single loan to be paid off slowly over eleven years. At this, however, the bank baulked. Instead, it agreed to a small overdraft and a loan of £30,000, to be reduced ‘substantially’ in the following year. Meanwhile, Churchill pressed on with his search for a grand country home. Clementine’s confession of her desire to lie in the sun and ‘eat a mouse caught by someone else’ came the day after he attended the meeting at Chequers where the Cabinet accepted President Harding’s proposal for the Washington Conference.9