The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  [8] ​For a more detailed assessment of the Washington Treaty see Annex 3.

  [9] ​I’ve approached this problem solely in terms of money, but in considering alterations to the warship building programs of the powers Japan presents a difficult case. Britain, the US and France all had low defence budgets between the wars and consequently increasing them for a piece of fiction is a matter of changing political will. But Japan was spending all it could on armaments and there is no room for financial manoeuvre. (Italy presents a similar problem but not quite so acute.) Therefore, to afford to build their capital ships, other parts of the Japanese naval budget would need to change. To see how this might be done I looked at the costs of various types of warships in the USN, the RN and the various incarnations of the German Navy in the dreadnought era. I have been unable to find more than random bits of information on the building costs of the other powers but the three navies in the sample all show roughly the same trends and from this I was able to get a rough idea of what the IJN would need to give up to get the battleship Tosa and the two Amagi class battle cruisers (Note here that OTL Tosa was launched and the guns and mountings for Tosa and all but one of those for two of the Amagi class had been completed. Eight of these turrets were installed in the battleships Nagato and Mutsu when they were reconstructed in the 1930s and six were transferred to the Army. Three of the turrets for the Army were installed in land based forts to cover the southern entrance to the Sea of Japan at Iki, Tsushima and Pusan and three were kept in reserve).

  [10] ​In OTL this more than tripled to 91,052 tons by 1932, but the plan that provided for this explosive growth was not submitted until 1924. It was at first rejected by parliament but remained a policy goal and the submarine part of it at least seems to have been largely completed. In TTL the French, having foregone a large submarine fleet, will have ample resources to build the new capital ships they were permitted under the OTL (and TTL) Washington Treaty.

  [11] ​Freed resources permit the completion of the battleship Caracciolo. In OTL Italy’s submarine construction program did not begin to gain momentum until after the French began to expand theirs. It would seem that they might have just been trying to keep up with French building.

  [12] ​Examples of every class of vessel that was built in OTL will be built in TTL – though many at a reduced number of units – so the overall level of technology will not be greatly changed.

  [13] ​In OTL Hipper was through the swept channel by 13:05.

  [14] ​In OTL he turned east on the assumption that the Germans must have got past him.

  [15] ​As they did OTL

  [16] ​The OTL version reads; ‘In all the war there is perhaps no action which gives deeper cause for reflection on the conduct of operations at sea… Two of the most efficient and powerful British squadrons, with an adequate force of scouting vessels knowing approximately what to expect, and operating in an area strictly limited by the possibilities of the situation, had failed to bring to action an enemy who was operating in close conformity with our appreciations and with whose advanced screen contact had been established.’

  [17] ​The OTL version quoted in Marder’s From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow Volume II reads; “There never was a more bitterly disappointing day as the 18th (16th) we were within an ace of bringing about the complete destruction of the enemy cruiser force – and failed. There is no doubt whatever that his (Goodenough’s) failure to keep touch with and report the presence of the Enemy Cruisers was entirely responsible for the failure…”

  [18] ​As he was OTL.

  [19] ​In OTL the stimulus for action was the visit of a Swedish naval officer to the wardroom of HMS Lion two months after the Battle of Jutland. The officer had been the Swedish naval attaché in Berlin and told the British officers flatly that their shells didn’t work.

  [20] ​In OTL a committee under Dreyer was set up four days after the Battle of Jutland. Its purview was somewhat generalised and a subcommittee presided over by Vice Admiral R. B. Farquhar did not begin work until more than two more months had passed. Farquhar was a poor choice for this assignment, as a former Chief Inspector of Naval Ordnance he had a vested interest in showing that British shell was not substandard. The final report of the committee was not received until March 1917. Worse than this, the report seems to have been essentially a fudge and it was not until Admirals Beatty and Jellicoe took matters into their own hands that firm action was undertaken.

  [21] ​In OTL there was no widespread general concern over shell performance at all until after the Battle of Jutland. Unfortunately the First Lord and First Sea Lord at this time were not decisive men like Churchill and Fisher.

  [22] ​In OTL it took twenty months from the final report of the committee until 100% of the ships of the Grand Fleet were re–equipped with ‘Greenboys’ (the name given to the new shells deriving from the fact that they were painted green) in October 1918. In TTL the process is 80% accomplished in 14 months.

  [23] ​All quotes in this book are genuine (i.e. they were said by the person they are attributed to in OTL) unless otherwise stated.

  [24] ​I am indebted to Ed Thomas and his excellent book A Greater Britain (Sea Lion Press, 2017) for showing how Oswald Mosley could have become the leader of the British Labour Party. What’s set down here by me owes much to his work but lacks the level of detail he achieves in A Greater Britain. (See the Acknowledgements)

  [25] ​It was in OTL too – the following are all genuine quotes: ‘Your speech was the best I have ever heard in the House, and I imagine must be one of the best of parliamentary performances.’ – Brendan Bracken. ‘The best and most constructive speech I have heard in the House. It was fair and it was splendid.’ – Clement Davies. ‘It was, I suppose, the greatest parliamentary tour de force this generation will hear.’ – Robert Boothby. ‘A really great parliamentary performance ... I was enormously impressed by it... I don’t believe there is anyone else in this House who could have done it.’ – Violet Bonham–Carter.

  [26] ​In OTL, under Labour’s block vote system, it was defeated 1,046,000 for, to 1,251,000 against. In TTL Mosley’s greater authority and status in the Party make the vote closer.

  [27] ​In OTL Mosley founded the imaginatively named “New Party” at this time. In TTL he thinks he has a better chance of gaining power by staying with Labour.

  [28] ​In OTL it was £120 million, Churchill’s decision to keep the pound ‘off gold’ greatly improves, but does not entirely remedy the situation.

  [29] ​In OTL the 1931 election was a Conservative landslide and a Labour rout. The Labour vote was split (Macdonald ran with National Labour, a separate party from Labour) and election pacts designed to keep Labour out of office were rife.

  [30] ​In OTL there was also disagreement within the National Government on the question of trade protection, but the Liberal advocates of free trade were vastly outnumbered by the enormous intake of new Tory MPs. Here, the coalition cannot endure without them.

  [31] ​In OTL Churchill was merely injured.

  [32] ​In OTL he decided to get the pound back on the Gold Standard at the pre World War One rate. Churchill’s decision, announced at the budget on 28th April, was to return to gold. It was greeted by cheers in the House of Commons but John Kenneth Galbraith has described it as; “Perhaps the most decisively damaging action involving money in modern time.” Sir Robert Boothby said of it; “With the exception of the unilateral guarantee to Poland without Russian support, this was the most fatal step taken by the country.” D. E Muggeridge in British Monetary Policy 1924 – 31 (1932) speculates that the balance of (visible) trade would have been better off by £80 million (1.8% of GDP) and 750,000 jobs might not have been lost. The return to gold was certainly one of the causes of the General Strike of 1926, contributed to the rise of trade’s union militancy in Britain and was a factor in the start of the Great Depression. The main beneficiary of the UK’s return to gold was the United States. Stabilisation under the gold standard
offered American capital the chance to begin an economic invasion of Europe.

  [33] ​In OTL Keynes was not on form and failed to make convince those present, he may even have been ill.

  [34] ​In OTL it went from 11% to 12.5% in 1926 and to a catastrophic 22.5% in 1932.

  [35] ​The world recession will be shorter and less deep in TTL, particularly for the UK.

  [36] ​In OTL Rothermere endorsed Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1934.

  [37] ​This TTL legislation will be close in spirit and intent to OTL’s Import Duties Act. However it will be more comprehensive and will introduce higher tariffs. See Annex 3.

  [38] ​In OTL the British settled for a much poorer deal making more generous trade concessions to the Dominions than they made to her while receiving fewer benefits in return. Exports to the Dominions fell in 1934–8 by 22% compared to 1925–9, a poor result for British exporters. Net imports from the Dominions actually rose from £183m to £189m in the same period. Trade with India and the crown colonies demonstrated a similar trend. Exports from Britain to India and the crown colonies declined by 44% in 1934–8 compared to 1925–9.

  In foreign policy terms, Mosley is very much an Empire-centric figure, and the Empire is at the heart of his conception of Britain as a Great Power. His policies ITTL don’t only support Imperial preference, but also the establishment of strong ties between Britain and the Dominions. See Annex 3 for an appraisal of what these changes might have meant to the British economy.

  [39] ​In OTL, instead of taking any direct action, the British appealed to the League of Nations. The renegotiation resulted in slightly better terms for the Iranians but there was no show of force from the British government.

  [40] ​The the reaction of the British government towards the German demand is consistent with Mosley’s stance towards disarmament in OTL.

  [41] ​As it was OTL.

  [42] ​In OTL Harold Nicholson was a diplomat, author, diarist and politician. He was also the husband of the writer Vita Sackville-West and for a time one of Mosley’s cronies. He joined Mosley’s New Party in 1931 and edited the party newspaper ‘Action’ but ceased to support Mosley when he formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932. In OTL Nicolson did not enter the House of Commons until the 1935 election when he became the National Labour MP for Leicester West. He was one of the small number of MPs who voiced concerns over the threat of Fascism and supported rearmament.

  [43] ​Just as he did OTL.

  [44] ​In OTL even as Philby was accepting the plaudits of The Royal Geographical Society, the Tamini affair (in which it was revealed that Philby had stolen secret Foreign Office files with the intention of undermining British policy in the Middle East) had come to light confirming the already serious doubts that existed regarding Philby’s loyalty. This theft was discovered in 1917 but, absurd and negligent though it seems, the affair was swept under the carpet to avoid a scandal.

  [45] ​This was well known OTL also.

  [46] ​St John Philby, who met his son’s circle of Cambridge friends including Burgess, MacLean and Blunt describes them in his diary as being ‘Pretty second-rate’.

  [47] ​Not a genuine quote.

  [48] ​Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross are the infamous ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring. The Cambridge Five all worked for MI5 in OTL WW2 and ran the most successful penetration of the West’s intelligence service by the Soviet Union, passing atomic and other secrets to the Russians that probably saved them five to ten years in atomic weapons development. In OTL Kim Philby died in 1988 in Moscow having defected in 1963. Donald MacLean died in Moscow in 1983 having defected in 1951, Guy Burgess also defected in 1951 and died in Moscow in 1963. Anthony Blunt stayed in England and became Master of the Queen’s Pictures. He confessed in 1964 and was exposed publically in 1979. He died in London in 1983. John Cairncross made a full confession in 1963 but was never prosecuted. The confession was given in Cleveland, Ohio, and thus was not made within British jurisdiction or under Police caution so was ineligible in court. Cairncross moved to Rome and worked for the UN as a translator. In December 1979, a journalist named Barrie Penrose confronted him and he confessed again. His confession was corroborated by Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB defector but he was never prosecuted. He retired to the south of France and died of a stroke in 1995 at the age of 82.

  [49] ​In OTL, Huey Long did not survive the assassination attempt. Vidrine knew from the first that an operation would be necessary, but he had hoped to delay it until Dr. Urban Maes and Dr. Russell Stone, more experienced surgeons than he, could arrive from New Orleans. Long had asked for these two as well as Dr. E.L. Sanderson to be sent for and his associates had chartered an aeroplane to bring them. Maes decided that he could reach Baton Rouge more quickly by car than by taking the aeroplane but on the trip he had an accident that caused a long delay. He only arrived after Vidrine had finished operating on Long and his questioning revealed that Vidrine had failed to catheterize the bladder to see if it contained blood. When this procedure was done it was found that a renal duct to the kidney had been hit by the bullet, and the patient was experiencing internal haemorrhaging from the injured kidney. But all the doctors agreed that in his weakened condition another operation to tie off the kidney would be fatal. Long died shortly after.

  ​The speech given by Long before the operation is adapted from a passage in the biography Huey Long written by T. Harry Williams. This speech (or its import) is attributed to Long after the operation as he lay dying. I have used it here for effect.

  According to the generally–accepted version of the assassination, on September 8, 1935, Huey Long was shot once by Dr. Carl Weiss in the Capitol building at Baton Rouge. Weiss was then shot dead by Long’s bodyguards, but a stray bullet from one of them also hit Long. Long died two days later from internal bleeding following an attempt to close the wounds by Dr. Arthur Vidrine. However it seems likely that the two wounds were an entry and an exit wound, suggesting that he was only hit once. The walls of the capitol hallway are still nicked from the bullets fired in the shootout.

  [50] ​The quotes in this section are all genuine, though they were said at different times.

  [51] ​Long created the Share Our Wealth program in 1934, with the motto “Every Man a King,” proposing extreme income redistribution measures in the form of taxes on large corporations and the wealthiest individuals. He had been advancing this programme in his Senate speeches since 1932. It was completely unworkable and derided by anyone who understood the workings of the American economy, nevertheless it gained him significant support. There is evidence that even Long came to realize that wealth could not be as easily dispersed as he thought.

  [52] ​The possibility of a Long-Coughlin alliance had been a topic of increasing political discussion during 1935. If it had come about, it would have had a significant effect on the election of 1936, bringing together as it would, two masters of radio oratory. Most commentators doubt that Long and Coughlin could have joined together and even if they had succeeded, they were two men of overbearing personalities and would have found it difficult to work together. Nevertheless they were known to be personally friendly. Long always denied that he and the priest had an alliance but admitted that they were fighting for “the same general objectives.”

  [53] ​German agents were using subterfuge to try and influence the Republican’s choice of candidate. The conspiracy was not made public until 1956 when the State Department declassified captured documents of the German Foreign Ministry. Hitler’s spies had been working for months to bring about the defeat of Franklin Roosevelt and the election of an isolationist President. These efforts were directed by Dr. Hans Thomsen, Germany’s chargé d’affaires, in Washington. The plan had been conceived by George Sylvester Viereck, the most enterprising and dangerous German spy in America. His cover was as Washington correspondent for a Munich newspaper, but he was, in fact, the chief of intelligence at the German embassy. Viereck establi
shed working relationships with many isolationist senators and congressmen and even managed to get paid German spies on some of their payrolls.

  [54] ​In OTL he managed to get the amendment approved.

  [55] ​Franklin Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third (and fourth) term as president was not technically illegal at the time but went against a precedent established by George Washington that a President should serve only two terms. In March 1947 OTL Congress approved a 22nd Amendment to the US constitution that specifically forbade any individual to run for a third Presidential term. It took until February 1951 to get enough states to ratify the amendment

  [56] ​In OTL these three declared for Roosevelt but in New York and New Jersey the margin was less than 4% and in Pennsylvania less than 6%.