Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  When a man who has been an officer becomes the military correspondent of The Times … and given a room and access to papers in the War Office, it leads one to think that that gentleman does not always write what he really thinks to be true …7

  No one denied this. As a journalist, Repington could have penned a sensational scoop. He didn’t. Why? Was he a consultant, a reporter or a placeman for the Secret Elite in the guise of both? Did he continue as the unofficial mediator between the French and British military staff? What did he do to deserve the Legion of Honour from France and be made a Commander of the Order of Leopold by Belgium? Why has his real role been airbrushed from history? Clearly he was much more than just a humble journalist.

  Haldane quickly introduced his plans for the formation of a highly trained, professional army to fight alongside France. Joint military planning was so intense and detailed that by 1906 senior officers believed that war with Germany was inevitable.8 Top-secret Anglo-French military preparations entailed British and French staff officers reconnoitring the ground in France and Belgium upon which the forthcoming battles would be fought. Britain’s director of military operations, Sir Henry Wilson, spent the summer months of 1906 reconnoitring the Belgian countryside on his bicycle, taking careful notes on the lie of the land, canals, railway crossings and church towers that would one day serve as observation posts. A gigantic map of Belgium, indicating the routes armies might follow, covered the entire wall of his London Office.9 Sir Henry Wilson and the French general staff shared their deepest secrets. He was sure that war would come sooner or later and for years laboured to ensure that Britain was ready to act immediately.10

  In addition to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Haldane set up the Territorial Army, the Officer Training Corps, the Special Reserve and the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which provided the fledgling aircraft industry in the United Kingdom. By 1910, he had achieved a complete revolution in the organisation of the British Army.

  Haldane, Grey, Asquith and Esher retained an iron grip on the Committee of Imperial Defence and created within it an able secretariat. Sir Charles Ottley of the Naval Intelligence Department, one of Fisher’s placemen on the CID, had been named secretary in 1907, and he in turn appointed as his assistants Maurice Hankey and Sir Ernest Swinton.11 Hankey was Esher’s chief protégé,12 and the two were in constant communication. He later became a member of the Secret Elite and close to the inner circle. Swinton likewise became a member but belonged to one of the less central rings.13 It is beyond any question of doubt that these Secret Elite agents ran the CID.

  In 1906, the British electorate had voiced an overwhelming desire for peace and substantial reductions in spending on armaments, but the Secret Elite turned pacifism on its head through an age-old weapon: fear. Fear was required to stir the complacency of Edwardian England and counter the anger of workers on poverty wages evidenced in strikes and walkouts in mines, factories and shipyards across the land. Fear generates doubt and suspicion. Fear is the spur that has the masses demanding more and more weapons to defend homes and families, towns and cities. It has always been so. Generation after generation has been gulled into paying for the tools of destruction that are, in turn, superseded by yet more powerful weapons.

  From the beginning of the twentieth century, the Secret Elite indulged in a frenzy of rumour and half-truths, of raw propaganda and lies, to create the myth of a great naval race. The story widely accepted, even by many anti-war Liberals, was that Germany was preparing a massive fleet of warships to attack and destroy the British navy before unleashing a military invasion on the east coast of England or the Firth of Forth in Scotland.14 It was the stuff of conspiracy novels. But it worked. The British people swallowed the lie that militarism had run amok in Germany and the ‘fact’ that it was seeking world domination through naval and military superiority. Militarism in the United Kingdom was of God, but in Germany of the Devil, and had to be crushed before it crushed them. When the war ended and all of the plans and events that had taken place were analysed and dissected, were there any naval records found of secret German plans to invade England or for the secret building of more dreadnoughts? No. Not one.

  Rarely have statistics been so thoroughly abused. The Secret Elite, through an almighty alliance of armaments manufacturers, political rhetoric and newspaper propaganda, conjured up the illusion of an enormous and threatening German battle fleet. The illusion became accepted, and historians have written that as ‘fact’ into contemporary history. These were the weapons of mass destruction of their time, but they could not be hidden from view. In the decade prior to the war, British naval expenditure was £351,916,576 compared to Germany’s £185,205,164.15 Had politicians such as Grey and Haldane been truly determined to ‘crush militarism’, there was plenty of work for them at home. The Triple Entente spent £657,884,476 on warships in that same decade, while Germany and Austria-Hungary spent £235,897,978.16 The peacetime strength of the German army was 761,000, while France stood at 794,000 and Russia 1,845,000,17 yet the claim that militarism had ‘run amok’ in Germany was presented as the given truth.

  Fuelled by newspaper reports of massive increases in German warship building, of articles on the danger to ‘our’ sea routes, of exaggerated reports in Parliament that the German fleet would soon overtake British naval supremacy, the construction of more and more warships was demanded with patriotic zeal. A strong navy was never a party issue, for food supplies and the coherence of the Empire depended on the British fleet’s ability to control sea routes against an enemy.18 Whatever the cost, Britain had to outbuild Germany. In reality, the subsequent vast increases in naval spending were a response not to a perceived threat but to the ‘vicious chauvinism’ of those bent on the destruction of Germany.19 What made it all so incredible was the fact that Grey, Asquith and Haldane drove the Liberal government into massive naval overspending at the very point where its express purpose was to alleviate poverty and introduce social reform. It was a breathtaking achievement.

  Great ships were built and launched in Germany but not in the numbers bandied about in the British press. Quite apart from the Triple Entente, Britain alone held such an enormous lead over Germany that any question of a meaningful race was ludicrous. The notion that Britain had somehow fallen behind its capacity to protect her Empire was a convenience set to frighten politicians and the people. Like every other modern country with a blossoming mercantile fleet trading across the globe, Germany was perfectly entitled to protect itself. Chancellor von Bülow had stated in the Reichstag that Germany did not wish to interfere with any other country:

  but we do not wish that any other Power should interfere with us, should violate our rights, or push us aside either in political or commercial questions … Germany cannot stand aside while other nations divide the world among them.20

  Von Bülow correctly noted that Italy, France, Russia, Japan and America had all strengthened their navies and that Britain ‘endeavours without ceasing to make her gigantic fleet still greater’.21 Without a navy, it would have been impossible for Germany to maintain a viable commercial position in the world. Britain, however, ‘ruled the waves’ and viewed Germany’s growing fleet as an impudent challenge.

  In June 1900, Admiral von Tirpitz had steered the second of two naval bills through the Reichstag to permit an expansion of their navy. He proposed the construction of 38 battleships over a 20-year period to protect Germany’s colonies and sea routes. That’s less than two per year. Keep this in mind.

  What set alarm bells ringing within the Secret Elite was not German warship construction but their engineering innovations in merchant shipping that emerged from the dockyards of Hamburg, Bremen and Wilhelmshaven. German superiority in the commercial sea lanes could not be tolerated. The rapid growth of the lucrative commercial fleets of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-America lines was outshining liners built in Britain. For a brief period, the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the largest and fastest liner on the Atlantic Oce
an. This was followed by SS Deutschland III, which crossed from Cherbourg to New York in five and a half days, with a new speed record of 23.61 knots. International prestige was slipping from British-built liners. In 1907, the Lusitania regained the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing, outstripping the Deutschland III by 11 hours and 46 minutes. ‘Bigger, Better and Faster’ became watchwords for national one-upmanship.

  The rough guide to Admiralty practice had long been based on the notion of a ‘two-power standard’: a navy capable of effectively out-gunning the combined strength of the two next-strongest naval powers. Admiral Jacky Fisher played this navy card to great effect. A conveniently timed Admiralty Report ‘disclosed’ that no matter what number of ships Britain built, they could not guarantee the safety of the United Kingdom from aggressors ‘on the opposite side of the North Sea’ without a change in the quality of design and firepower. In 1905, this spawned the first of the dreadnoughts and an order to scrap old vessels. Entire classes of warship were condemned as useless. Around 115 vessels that had cost between £35 million and £40 million were scrapped. Astoundingly, thirty-four of these were only five years old.22

  Fisher wrote confidentially to King Edward in 1907 that the British fleet was four times stronger than the German navy, ‘but we don’t want to parade all this to the world at large’.23 The Secret Elite clearly knew that British naval superiority far exceeded the two-power ratio, but by encouraging Fisher in his manic obsession, the shipbuilding and armaments industry conspired with them to reap a rich dividend.

  This was a falsely portrayed race Britain had to win to survive, and the only way of winning it was to stay further and further ahead of Germany. It was a media coup wrapped in a shipbuilder’s dream. No one but a traitor could doubt the need to be fully armed against the kaiser’s ambitions. Individuals who questioned the validity of the naval scare were dismissed as grumbling pacifists ‘who neither knew what love of country meant, nor ever felt the thrill of joy that all the pomp and circumstance of Empire brings to men who think imperially’.24 Bully-boy tactics turned honest concern into disloyalty in a blatant attempt to crush opposition to the crippling waste of increased naval expenditure.

  In the midst of this paranoia, a scare story was concocted about a secret German naval building programme. On 3 March 1909, Mr Herbert Mulliner, managing director of the Coventry Ordnance Co., was brought to Downing Street to dupe the Cabinet. He told them that in the course of his job he had visited shipyards and armaments factories in Germany, and it was ‘an accomplished fact’ that an enormous and rapid increase in armaments production and naval construction had been taking place there over the past three years. Ten days later the revised 1909–10 Naval Estimates were published. The allocation was increased by £2,823,200 to £35,142,700.25

  Despite this concession, the Conservatives under Arthur Balfour moved a vote of censure against the Liberal government’s naval spending. The proposed increases were insufficient. The armaments lobby wanted even greater spending. Balfour warned the House of Commons that the margins between the British and German navies would be so reduced that it would result in a great blow to ‘security which, after all, is the basis of all enterprise in this country’.26 Balfour carried the banner for the Secret Elite and wrapped increased spending in words like ‘security’ and ‘enterprise’. He insisted that Germany would have twenty-five dreadnoughts by 1912, whereas in reality she had nine. Time and again Balfour pounded home the Secret Elite message: more had to be spent on dreadnoughts.27 Naval spending from 1901 to 1912 in Britain was £456 million compared to £179 million in Germany.28

  A crowded meeting at the Guildhall on 31 March 1909 heard Arthur Balfour address several hundred shareholders of the armaments rings, the bankers and city investors.29 They drank in his every word with dizzy approval. His rhetoric was filled with urgency, alarm and the dire consequences of indecision:

  You must build without delay, without hesitation, without waiting for contingencies, for obscure circumstances, for future necessities. You must build now to meet the present necessity. For believe me the necessity is upon you. It is not coming in July or November or April next … it is now that you must begin to meet it.30

  Balfour’s exhortation had a truly apocalyptic ring to it. It was an end-of-the-world prophecy designed to excite panic. The Secret Elite press, especially The Times and the Daily Mail, had fired the opening salvos in creating the ‘German naval scare’, and their propaganda swept the country off its feet. The summer of 1909 echoed to the cry of ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’. The propaganda machine turned a catchphrase into an axiom of national insistence. The public demand for more dreadnoughts became so vehement that the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, who, like most of Asquith’s Cabinet, was unaware of the Secret Elite, gave way. He accepted that by concealing its activities Germany might reach equality in naval power with Britain. McKenna stated that work on four extra British dreadnoughts would begin almost immediately. As a result, the Admiralty was prepared to lay down eight dreadnoughts in 1909. Few stopped to ask how this would affect social reforms and the eradication of poverty. From 1909 onwards, ever-greater sums poured into armaments production, and preparations for war speeded up.

  The entire scare was a sham. Mulliner had been lying. It was ‘one of the most disgraceful, cooked-up conspiracies’ ever known in Britain.31 What made it so utterly disgraceful was the fact that Asquith, Grey and Haldane knew he was lying yet invited Mulliner to Downing Street to convince the Cabinet that huge increases in naval spending were necessary. The statistics and so-called ‘margins’ between the British and German navies were grossly misrepresented. Winston Churchill later admitted that ‘there were no secret German dreadnoughts, nor had Admiral von Tirpitz made any untrue statement in respect of major construction’.32 When Mulliner threatened to go to the press and reveal his role in the scare, he was bought off and retired to obscurity. Sir Edward Grey was eventually obliged to admit that every line Mulliner and the government had peddled was wrong, but the job had already been done. It was a shameful scandal that was quoted in Parliament many times over the next three decades as an example of just how far the armaments lobby would go to promote their own interests.33 And Mulliner? He was easily replaced34 and airbrushed from history, but the naval race is still peddled as a historic event. There was no race. Germany wasn’t competing.

  The massive rise in naval and military spending resulted in an equally massive increase in profits for the shareholders in armaments companies. Only the occasional lone voice braved the ridicule of a raging press. Lord Welby, former permanent secretary to the Treasury, saw what was happening, though he had no knowledge of exactly what or whom he was up against. He protested:

  We are in the hands of an organisation of crooks. They are politicians, generals, manufacturers of armaments, and journalists. All of them are anxious for unlimited expenditure, and go on inventing scares to terrify the public and to terrify ministers of the Crown.35

  Lord Welby all but named the Secret Elite. These were indeed the men who planned and colluded to wage war on Germany … and made a profit on the way.

  The average citizen in Britain considered the chief armaments firms to be independent businesses, competing in a patriotic spirit for government contracts, but this was far wide of the mark. They were neither independent nor competitive. These firms created monopoly-like conditions that ensured their profit margins remained high. In Britain, this armaments ring, or ‘Trust’ as it was known, consisted primarily of five great companies: Vickers Ltd; Armstrong, Whitworth and Co. Ltd; John Brown and Co. Ltd; Cammell, Laird and Co.; and the Nobel Dynamite Trust, in the last of which the family of Prime Minister Asquith’s wife, Margo, held a controlling interest. The ring equated to a vast financial network in which apparently independent firms were strengthened by absorption and linked together by an intricate system of joint shareholding and common directorships.36 It was an industry that challenged the Treasury, influenced the Admiralty,
maintained high prices and manipulated public opinion.

  Competition amongst British armaments firms had been virtually eliminated by 1901. Across Europe and the United States, armaments makers colluded in an international combine called the Harvey United Steel Co. to minimise competition and maximise profits. The five British armaments giants joined forces with Krupp and Dillingen of Germany, Bethlehem Steel Company of the United States, Schneider & Co. of Creusot in France, and Vickers-Terni and Armstrong-Pozzuoli of Italy.37 Harvey United Steel provided a common meeting ground for the world’s armament firms and accumulated royalties from those nations sufficiently civilised to ‘construct armour-plated slaughter machines’.38 It was highly successful in maintaining the demand for armaments that were bought by rival governments on the basis that they could not afford to be less well armed than their neighbours.39

  These trade practices were shameless. Charles Hobhouse, Asquith’s Treasury minister, wrote in his diaries that an armour-plating ‘ring’ of munitions manufacturers was robbing the Admiralty of millions of pounds of public money by collusion and malpractice. The group charged the Admiralty from £100 to £120 per ton for steel that cost them £40 to £60 to produce.40 He knew but, like many other shareholders in the armaments industry, did nothing to stop it.