The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  As we have noted, the First World War saw the first use of submarines, on both sides. The Germans earned the condemnation of the world in the spring of 1915 when they began to sink ships on sight without warning, regardless of whether they were warships or unarmed vessels. The sinking of the transatlantic liner the Lusitania in May 1915 at the Old Head of Kinsale off Cork, with the loss of 1,201 lives, some of whom were mothers with babes in arms, created extraordinary revulsion. Many of the Lusitania’s passengers were Americans, and by chance some were friends of President Woodrow Wilson. Alarmed by an official US protest, for America was strictly neutral, Germany announced that henceforth she would attack only warships.

  America remained outside the war until April 1917 when she came in on the allied side. It was just in time, for the eastern front collapsed when the Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia that autumn. There were powerful pro-German influences at work in America. As in the War of 1812, much of American opinion continued to see Britain as the enemy. Moreover, Britain’s blockade of Germany violated the principle of the freedom of the seas, and Americans believed that it was typical of Britain’s imperialist desire for world domination. They also objected to the British navy searching neutral ships and seizing contraband. Nevertheless, as a sign of the even-handed United States attitude to both sides, by the end of 1916 President Wilson was suggesting that he should broker a negotiated peace.

  This angered the allied powers. They did not like being seen as the moral equivalent of Germany: they too wished for a negotiated peace but one based on victories over Germany. However, it was expedient to bring America’s overwhelming financial and industrial weight into the war on the allies’ side and to end the stalemate, so Wilson’s ideas could not be treated brusquely. Discussions with the Americans about war aims had to be couched in terms that would please the then strongly anti-imperialist American people and their leaders in Congress. A doctrine of national self-determination for small countries began to be evolved which had not been the original purpose of the war at all.

  The entry of America into the war on the allied side became more certain at the beginning of 1917, up to which point she had continued trying to get food to Germany via Scandinavian ports. The German high command was now desperate to take Britain out of the war and believed that it could be done by starving the British into submission. Unarmed civilian shipping was no longer to be excluded from submarine warfare; instead on 1 February 1917 a campaign of ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ was begun against any vessels visiting British ports. With a hundred U-boats operating in British waters the German high command reckoned that Britain would be forced to pull out of the war after five months. In the face of this threat Lloyd George, who had become prime minister of the coalition government the previous December, once again showed his peerless executive qualities. He overrode the Admiralty and revived the convoy system which had been a feature of the Napoleonic Wars. Royal Navy destroyers accompanied merchant shipping and enough food got to Britain to keep her going despite the lethal creatures lurking off her coast.

  And help was now at hand from across the Atlantic. Wilson had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February because America could not approve unrestricted submarine warfare. And on the 23rd a telegram intercepted by British Naval Intelligence from the German foreign minister, Dr Alfred Zimmermann to the German embassy in Washington revealed that Germany was negotiating with the two threats to America’s backyard, Japan and Mexico. Mexico was asked to invade the United States if the Americans declared war on Germany. Coming into the war on the allied side, as an independent or associated power, and thus not subject to allied command, was made easier for Wilson when in March the first stage of the Russian Revolution began. The reactionary tsar abdicated and was replaced by a republic which the American republic could support.

  The advent of America into the war in April 1917 boosted the sinking allied morale; it also considerably shortened the length of the conflict. The British Empire’s blockade of Germany was no longer being breached by America. That in the end would bring Germany to her knees, just as the prospect of unlimited manpower from North America meant that the allies must eventually defeat the central powers in the field. The arrival of 300,000 American recruits in the spring put fresh strength into the allied armed forces.

  However, the second Russian Revolution of October 1917 almost undid all the advantage to the allied cause that America’s entry had brought. The communist-inspired Bolshevik Revolution orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin persuaded the starving Russian soldiers to desert their theatres of war to return home from what they called the capitalist war and seek ‘bread, peace and land’. The central powers therefore no longer needed half a million men stationed on the eastern front. But the Bolshevik Revolution rekindled the old revolutionary ideas which had been so prevalent in Europe before the war. Strikes increased in Britain as blue-collar workers were reminded of their historic antipathy towards their masters. In a moment of great danger for France, anti-war revolutionary propaganda and the army’s carelessness with soldiers’ lives in the Nivelle offensive on the Aisne in 1917 persuaded perhaps as many as 100,000 soldiers in the French army to mutiny. They were overcome only with difficulty.

  Fortunately England’s government was in the deft hands of Lloyd George, who with the help of the Labour MPs managed to surmount the political and industrial unrest in the country. Though there were calls for peace, and one with ‘no annexations and no indemnities’, the support of the trade unions–which under Lloyd George enjoyed what was in effect a partnership with government–ensured that these voices never amounted to much.

  There was better news, too, from the Middle East by 1917. The Ottoman Empire fragmented rapidly under the impact of the British army based in Egypt. Jerusalem was captured under the enterprising cavalryman General Allenby. Hussein the hereditary Grand Sharif of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, had already brought the desert tribes on to the allied side with great effect, getting the Arabs to rise against their Turkish overlords whom they had detested for six centuries. The high commission at Cairo was run by scholarly and romantic orientalists. One of them, an archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence who was soon to become famous as Lawrence of Arabia, became the military adviser of Hussein’s son Prince Faisal.

  Lloyd George might be able to encourage the British to pull together by attending to the soldiers’ needs, by promoting managerial improvement in industry, and by introducing universal suffrage in February 1918 for men over the age of nineteen and women over thirty. But the generalship of the war on the western front continued to create anxiety. The hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties and the absence of results seemed to mean nothing to Haig. On 31 July 1917 he began another offensive in Flanders, known as Passchendaele, intended to make up for the catastrophic French campaign earlier that year and free Belgium. It lasted until 6 November and only compounded his unpopularity.

  By moving north-west the British were to fight out of the Ypres triangle through Passchendaele, reach the Belgian coast and then turn on the German army. Haig had been given warnings about drainage problems in the area. He chose to ignore them. The wettest August for years turned the countryside to mud. The ‘mud of Flanders’ was an all-too literal expression to describe conditions which made it impossible to move forward at all. Even the new weapon, the tank, did not work. It sank. The offensive died in the mud, along with 240,000 British casualties. The pessimistic War Cabinet, whose members were anxious that there should not be a second Somme, had asked Haig to cancel the campaign if its first efforts showed no likelihood of success. But Haig persisted with the Passchendaele offensive for three long months, before he would accept that it was pointless.

  There was discontent at home with food and fuel shortages; rationing would be invented in the last year of the war. The consensus in the national government was breaking down, and only Lloyd George’s adroit management kept Labour in the Cabinet. The Italians were roundly defeated by the
ir old enemy the Austrians at the Battle of Caporetto, so French and British troops had to be diverted from the western front to help them. By now Britain was blithely lending her allies huge sums of money to finance the war, and no less blithely borrowing similar quantities from America. In many countries the war effort was in danger of faltering completely. British convoys made sure the allies got food while the Germans began to starve.

  The beginning of 1918 was Germany’s last chance to achieve a breakout on the western front and overrun France. For three months the dice were loaded in their favour: the need for an eastern front had come to an end in March 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war. Though units of the central powers’ forces remained behind to supervise the transfer of food and oil supplies from the important Romanian oilfields, the surplus eastern front troops would reach the western front long before the American troops landed to replenish the sagging allied lines.

  On 21 March 1918 German troops began a massive offensive along a huge front of four miles, almost destroying an entire British army, the Fifth, in the process. But, although the line of the western front was pushed in, gallant troops under an excellent French commander-in-chief, General Foch, who now had sole command of allied troops, rushed in to fill the gaps. Eventually in July and August a counter-offensive was begun by the British and French, whose efforts were better co-ordinated now that the two armies were united under a single command.

  As the summer drew to an end, the British in the north began to push the German armies back. It was the end of trench warfare. In late September the British finally broke through the Hindenburg Line. In the Middle East Allenby’s victories in Syria and Palestine continued. The British army had not only reached Mosul but was marching west towards Constantinople to be joined by troops from Aleppo. Meanwhile victories in the Balkans allowed the allies based on Salonika to fan outwards like a plume. Bulgaria had surrendered on 30 September. Allied forces reached the lower Danube, the Hungarian Plain and central Europe further west, as well as threatening Constantinople. Caught in a pincer movement the Turks signed an armistice on 30 October. That same month Austria–Hungary, which was rapidly disintegrating into ethnic groups, was defeated by Italy. She surrendered on 3 November. Germany’s armies were still undefeated in the field, though they were beginning to crumple under the vigour of the American troops. But at last the German high command concluded that Germany could not continue, with her armies and people at the end of their tether. As well as being exhausted and demoralized, the German people were starving as a result of the British blockade.

  On 3 October the German government had asked President Wilson to dictate the terms for peace. As the war went on, an increasing number of Social Democrats in Germany voted against the government being allowed to prosecute the war any longer. The Fourteen Points Wilson had suggested as a fair basis for peace in January were accepted by Germany on 23 October. On 7 November envoys passed through the lines to accept the armistice document from the British and French military representatives Admiral Wemyss and General Foch who were seated together in a railway carriage. The terms required the German armies to retire behind their pre-1914 borders.

  But there was now a mutiny in the German navy at Kiel that signalled the end of the old regime. In early November, imitating Russia, councils of soldiers and workmen established themselves all over northern Germany and overthrew their militaristic rulers. The kaiser fled to Holland. Despite calls for him to be hanged, the Dutch government refused to give him up. The Republic of Germany was announced in Berlin, and on 11 November, early in the morning, the new republican and socialist German government signed the armistice in the Forest of Compiègne. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent and the First World War came to an end.

  After the armistice, discussions about how the world should be reconstructed in the wake of the Great War took place at the Paris Peace Conference which began in January 1919, attended by seventy delegates representing the thirty-two allied and associated powers. But drawing up the separate peace treaties for the defeated central powers was mainly the work of the Big Four, as they were known: Lloyd George for Britain, whose national coalition had been re-elected at the end of 1918, Prime Minister Clemenceau for France, Prime Minister Orlando for Italy and President Wilson.

  Peacemaking and the Rise of Fascism (1918–1936)

  As Sir Edward Grey had predicted, the lights of European civilization had been practically extinguished. The old pre-war European world lay in ruins. France and Belgium were devastated. Farmland everywhere was smoking or abandoned, so there was not enough food. Millions of servicemen and ex-servicemen were trying to get home, men who had lost whatever idealism had first inspired them to fight. Many of them had become fairly barbaric after what they had seen. Many of them were half starved or ill.

  The Dominions had lost huge numbers of their citizens. Although no request for help from the Dominions had been made by the British government, of their own volition they had sent hundreds of thousands of men to fight. There were 60,000 Australian war dead–indeed, one in ten of Australia’s total male population had been killed or wounded; and 56,700 Canadians had been killed and 150,000 seriously wounded–one in twenty of the male population.

  The fields of north-eastern France and Belgium were as unusable as if they had been annexed by a foreign power. They were a kingdom of two million dead. All over Europe there was chaos. The great railway lines running across France, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had brought soldiers so swiftly to every front were buckled and broken. The manufacturing output of everyday goods in Britain was almost nonexistent after the switch to an all-out war economy. Many of the frontiers and signposts of the continent had been changed, as territories were gained and lost by the endless tramp of different armies advancing and retreating.

  Everything, not just millions of people but the familiar landmarks of the pre-1914 world, seemed to have vanished and been swallowed up in the cataclysm. The 700,000 horses Britain had imported into France had become redundant in the course of the war, which transformed tank and air warfare–they belonged to an old-fashioned, more chivalrous time. The post-war world was strange and often unnerving. Four empires came to an end as a result of the Great War, three of which had been the earth’s permanent furniture for centuries: the Russian, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the German. Before 1914 the British Empire, with its investments all over the world, had been the biggest creditor nation and the United States the biggest debtor nation. Now, it would emerge after the war, the positions had been reversed.

  The Russian Empire had lost Poland, the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, all acquired in the eighteenth century, so it no longer reached the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea and ceased to be a great power. Communist ideas and workers’ councils, which had taken root in Russia, threatened revolution in many European countries, most of all in Germany and Italy where their simple solutions appealed to people exhausted by the misery of war; there was anyway a vacuum as religious belief faltered in the face of the widespread horrors. The nature of Russia’s internal revolution was so antipathetic to the existing structure in the rest of the world that the Soviet government had withdrawn from the world’s councils–it had no interest in participating in a world order it wished to see abolished by a universal workers’ revolution. Russia had always had an enigmatic quality for the rest of Europe. When, from 1919, she developed an instrument for exporting revolution, the Communist International, or Comintern, she became a dangerous enemy.

  Unfortunately for the permanence of the peacemaking process, the conflict had been too overwhelming and too many people had died for it to be arranged in the disinterested fashion it should have been. Around the world ten million soldiers had died in the Great War. Seventeen million soldiers were wounded, of whom five million would live out the rest of their lives as chronic invalids. These were numbers almost beyond the capacity of human beings to understa
nd. The effect of losing one-third of the young men of the next European generation was as devastating demographically and psychologically as the Black Death.

  There were four million European widows; in France, whose population had been hit hardest by the war, one in four children were fatherless. The period which succeeded the war could not help but be one of sorrow, suffering and pessimism. The British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans in Brussels, had become a wartime heroine to the British. Her most famous words, inscribed on the statue erected to her in London, were ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone,’ but the French had little room for anything else. Even though a government was in place in Germany which had thrown off her militaristic leaders, she was treated as if she were still ruled by Prussian autocrats and she continued to be blamed for the world catastrophe. All of this was compounded by a pandemic of the influenza known as Spanish flu. Originating in South Africa and hitting half a million German soldiers in June 1918, Spanish flu swept through the war-weakened populations killing another ten million people. It was a time of the darkest gloom.

  The vindictive and punitive peace imposed on Germany by France to ensure that her old enemy could never threaten her again ruined beyond repair what before 1914 had been the dynamo of the European economy. But it also destabilized the entire structure of German civilization. As in all European countries, ordinary life in Germany was already tottering because of the hardship of the war. The Versailles Treaty with Germany, signed at the Paris Peace Conference on 28 June 1919, paved the way in the post-war period for a desperate people to seek desperate solutions. Germany was being treated as a pariah. Economic misery and despair over her reduced status meant she soon became an aggressive pariah threatening the post-war settlement.