A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  The Myth of Collective Security

  In the end, Versailles delivered two titanic failures. The first, as we have seen, was the inability to impose or sustain democratic republics amid the national hatreds and ethnic animosities of Europe. But the second, related failure, involved the collapse of collective security in which the world’s nations would enthusiastically restrain any aggressor. From 1922 through 1930, a steady succession of agreements, treaties, compacts, and pacts emerged from the Europeans, all with the goal of ensuring permanent peace. Not only did they fail, but the nature in which they did so provided abundant lessons in the folly of believing that nations with no stake in a fight other than the intangible principle of “peace” would willingly send men to die.

  Perhaps the most notable of these examples is the 1932 World Disarmament Conference at Geneva organized by the League of Nations. According to a modern definition, this was an effort to “actualize the ideology of disarmament.” It had begun as a preparatory commission in 1925 and by 1931 held preliminary meetings under the leadership of former British foreign secretary Arthur Henderson, foundering almost immediately on the question of whether certain weapons were “offensive” or “defensive.” Moreover, the conference seemed impotence incarnate when it sat idly through 1935 while Hitler was rearming Germany, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, and the Italians waged aggressive war against Abyssinia. The unwillingness of the Europeans to dispatch troops around the world to fight a growing Japanese empire in the netherworld of China was one thing, but it was entirely another for the League to ignore a weak Italian army, whose assault on the backward Ethiopians could have been scotched in a few weeks by the interposition of the Royal Navy and the French fleet.

  Historical timing is always a subject of keen interest: what would have happened if Kennedy’s motorcade schedule had been moved up? If an equipment malfunction on an airplane had delayed one of the flights on 9/11? If Archduke Franz Ferdinand had dallied at his speech longer? On a broader scale, historical events take on a determinism that never exists in the moment. Hitler was aided in his rise by economic circumstances in Germany, was given a further boost by American trade laws, and benefited from the fact that up until that point the fascist model had not proven a failure anywhere. No economic dislocation, however, proved potent enough by itself to produce the powerful dictator he became, and nothing contributed more to his success than the unwillingness of Britain and France to enforce the peace they had just won at great cost.

  If anything, the two victorious powers cooperated less than ever. Despite the alliances, so easily knotted in 1919, Britain, France, and Poland found the threads unraveling under the strain of divergent and conflicting goals. There were personality issues. Not only did Raymond Poincaré, the French prime minister after the war, and the British foreign secretary, Lord George Curzon, detest each other, but the entire British ruling hierarchy deemed the French paranoid over the prospects of German revival. England wanted Germany to recover economically to become a trading partner once again—their only issue was that Germany should never again threaten the Royal Navy’s command of the sea.

  There was a recent history between Britain and France as well. France had withdrawn troops from Chanak in 1922, leaving Britain holding a small zone on the Dardanelles. In the humiliating aftermath—following a long harangue by Poincaré to Curzon—Canada refused to back Britain (accelerating her own move to independence) and David Lloyd George’s government collapsed. Of course there were temperamental differences between the two nations, with France still clinging to the illusion of European leadership and “great power” status, but beyond that, practical budgetary pressures dictated a sympathetic view to German rehabilitation if a nation needed funds for social projects, as France precisely did.

  All along, the issue was not reparations (which, as we have seen, may have been distasteful but actually drew Germany closer to the United States and, hence, stability), but rearmament. Well before Adolf Hitler embarked on a massive remilitarization of Germany, the Weimar Republic was already encouraging weapons makers to set up holding companies abroad, from Rotterdam to Oslo. Substantial work was shipped to the USSR, including the joint manufacture of tanks, the training of crews, military exercises, and the development of planes and pilots. French leaders suspected as much and saw the Rapallo Treaty of 1922, in which both Russia and Germany renounced World War I territorial claims against each other, as a cover for more dangerous secret agreements, which it was. Four months later, on July 29, a confidential addendum was signed that essentially voided the military clauses of Versailles.

  That did not mean that France did not bully Weimar when she could. When Germany halted reparations payments in January 1923, the French sent troops (including Africans, whom the Germans particularly detested) to occupy the Ruhr and extract German coal for their own use. Germans needed no further incentive to hate the French, but Poincaré certainly provided it, alienating Britain and the United States in the process. Prior to the war, Germany had lacked self-esteem, or at least saw the rest of Europe as unappreciative of Teutonic contributions to civilization. Now, it was France’s turn to feel unappreciated. The stark facts were that since 1870, France’s borders had been successfully penetrated twice, and that except for dogged early assistance from England and later reinforcements from America, France would have lost World War I. Britain may have created the melancholy myth of the great “lost generation” taken by war, but in France’s case it was true. Britain, on the other hand, jealously guarded and aggressively protected her dominance on the waves.

  Idealism at Sea

  Britain never faced a serious threat of invasion during the war, and, after Jutland, the German High Seas Fleet no longer even ventured out to do battle with the Royal Navy. U-boat warfare took a monstrous toll, but submarines could not project power, attack land targets, or put ashore large bodies of men. For that, a surface navy was still needed, replete with big battleships and heavy cruisers. It was natural, then, that postwar Britain concerned itself with future threats from the oceans, where two potential new rivals had emerged since 1910: the United States and Japan. Both the United States and Britain expressed concern about Japanese claims on China, but the sentiment for disarmament in both nations was strong. In the Senate, the arms control lobby headed by William Borah of Idaho, the Great Opposer, led the revolt against the proposed postwar naval buildup. He finagled a six-month freeze on naval construction in 1921, then convinced House members to support a low naval appropriations bill six months later over the objections of President Warren Harding and with uniform disregard for the opinions of professional naval officers. Boxed into a corner, Harding had to call a conference on naval arms limitations in November 1921 involving especially those powers having interests in the Far East. Japan participated out of a desire to obtain recognition of her interests in China but also to achieve a measure of equal standing with the “white nations” and secure a naval treaty with the United States and Britain.

  Limitations on battleships and heavy cruisers absorbed much of the delegates’ attention. The Washington Naval Treaty (also called the “Five-Power Treaty”) resulted in the “5:5:3 ratio”—an agreement on the tonnage of capital ships that the signatories could build: 525,000 tons for the United States and Britain, 315,000 tons for Japan, and 175,000 tons each for France and Italy. No ship could exceed 35,000 tons; no ship could have a gun larger than sixteen inches; but only moderate limitations were put on aircraft carriers as their potential was still largely unrecognized. That the Japanese were unable to achieve a better bargain in the Naval Treaty was in part due to American intelligence having broken the Japanese code outlining their bottom-line negotiating points.

  Immediately, the nations involved looked to circumvent the treaty in other ways. In short, they cheated. Japan, for example, got around the restriction that it have only twelve cruisers with eight-inch guns by building the “B” class of cruisers which had armor capable of withstanding heavy shells and whose triple s
ix-inch turrets could be switched out to eight-inch guns in short order.22 In turn, this forced the United States to build Brooklyn-class cruisers and all nations to consider building classes of ships that were not optimal, but which fit within the treaty. Gun size on surface ships might have been limited, but numbers of guns were not, and speed and new armor systems were developed that would not be affected by the treaty. Italy simply lied about its tonnage, and in 1936, Japan withdrew entirely, already in the process of building the battleship Yamato, which violated the treaty displacement limits by 95 percent and featured eighteen-inch guns that made a mockery of disarmament terms.23

  Planned battleship and cruiser hulls were converted into aircraft carriers as naval aviation advanced. In fact, since the upper limit of carriers was 27,000 tons but the upper limit of carriers converted from other ships was 33,000 tons, numerous ships were switched over. By encouraging nations to construct carriers, the Washington Conference pushed all the modern countries away from obsolete battleships, a status as yet unrecognized, and into the deadlier carriers.

  Submarines, not covered by the treaty, could be built in unlimited numbers. Germany’s U-boats had proven deadly during the First World War. (It was estimated that the Germans had only thirty to fifty operational U-boats at any given time but were able to sink 1.4 million tons of shipping in a single four-month stretch.) England decried the decidedly “un-British” weapon that symbolized “organized barbarism and brutality,” but at the Washington meeting could find no allies willing to ban submarines.24

  The Law of Unintended Consequences applied to the Five-Power Treaty in numerous other ways. Undertaken as an “arms control” agreement, the effect failed to advance the cause of peace. Even though Japan agreed to the naval limitations, the fact that Japanese capital ship levels were below those of the “white” superpowers stuck in their craw. As soon as Japan felt ready, it would abandon the treaty. As the Japanese general staff warned, “failure to obtain [the desired 10:7 ratio of capital ships with the United States] would fatally compromise the naval security of the empire.”25 Already the Japanese government had announced its goal of eight super-dreadnought battleships by 1927, along with eight super-heavy cruisers. This would give Japan twenty-five state-of-the-art capital ships in an era when battleships were still viewed as the ultimate weapon. In 1918, Japan’s Admiral Tomosaburo Kato declared that “the last word in naval warfare rests with the big ship and the big gun.”26 This supposed universal truth died hard. Aside from a few squeaky wheel air-power advocates such as Isoroku Yamamoto and Shigeyoshi Inoue, big-ship dogma dominated Japanese naval thinking as late as 1934, when the 64,000-ton Yamato, with its eighteen-inch guns, was laid down. Whether this was, as some argued, the result of deeply held Japanese concerns about raw materials scarcity, or whether it was the fruit of a Japanese imperialist vine that was growing daily, will be discussed in the following chapter. Suffice it to say that in 1921–22, Japanese leaders were torn between their desire to exert power in their own backyard and the need to placate the much larger and technologically adept Western republics.

  Of course, that was the view from the Japanese side of the Pacific. American planners, analyzing a future war in Japanese waters far from any repair bases, would require a U.S. advantage of close to 66 percent or more; and even at that, there was an excellent opportunity for Japan to concentrate her naval forces to thwart an American attack. As U.S. Navy leaders concluded, “relatively, therefore, the Japanese Navy is very much stronger than a mere computation of its ships and men would suggest.”27 That introduced the issue of overseas bases back into the equation, making ships and overseas territories inseparable items in the negotiations.

  One result of the Washington Conference—the alienation of Japan and the severing of the Anglo-Japanese understanding in the Pacific—was completely predictable and inevitable. England ultimately had to choose to ally with the United States or Japan, and there was never a choice, although Britain continued to see the Americans as myopic. Austen Chamberlain, representing the typical European view at the time of the conference, described the Americans as living “in a different world [of] insularity, blindness, and selfishness….”28 But as American bases extended across the Pacific, including Midway, Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Island, England knew that it must take sides. To add urgency, Canadian demands in the Atlantic meant that Britain could not afford even a semihostile major sea power on her flank.

  Meanwhile, the Japanese were focused on achieving great power status, a quest that dominated their actions at the conference.29 Despite the obvious advantages to siding with America, the finality of the Anglo-Japanese divorce shook Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary, so much that one observer could “see in profile, motionless and sober, the distinguished head of Mr. Balfour. As the last sentence sounded and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance publicly perished, his head fell forward on his chest exactly as if the spinal cord had been severed.”30 Such a perception was remarkable, given that many Americans thought they “had been had” in the negotiations, and that England was the winner. In fact, neither Britain, nor America, nor Japan fully appreciated the directions the Washington Conference would take them.

  The Washington agreement was followed by a host of binational treaties and pacts, each pledging peace and nonaggression. Germany promised to observe French and Belgian borders and in the Locarno Pact (1925) all relations between the Allied powers in World War I (except the Russians, who had already signed a separate treaty at Brest-Litovsk) and Germany were restored. Weimar Germany was thus admitted back into the family of nations a mere six years after assuming full blame for the worst conflict in human history. In 1928, French foreign minister Aristide Briand, seeking to solidify an American alliance with France, suggested a compact between the two nations. Americans, however, remained wary of future interventions in Europe, and the U.S. secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, turned the proposal into a blanket prohibition of war as “an instrument of national policy.” The ensuing Kellogg-Briand Pact enlisted sixty-five nations that signed an agreement outlawing war. It proved utterly irrelevant in stopping the Japanese invasion of Manchuria three years later, or in affecting the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, or in restraining in any way a single national aggressive move in the 1930s.

  In the failure of those treaties and the numerous other compacts entered into during the 1920s, the concept of collective security ignored the most salient point. Collective security can work if—but only if—the participants have a direct stake in the outcome. A classic example of this was the American “Wild West,” where it was long thought that bank robberies were common. In fact, however, they were extremely rare…due to collective security. While every town had a sheriff, it was the armed citizens who acted as a collective security force. Any bank robbers had to effect their escape from the middle of a town (the normal location of a bank) through the gunfire of almost every citizen—and depositor—between them and the outskirts of town!31 Such was not the case in post–World War I Europe, where collective security failed because at no time could European nations (or America) see clear interests in fighting wars in remote places that were not their own.

  Command of the Air

  In its attempt to limit weapons at sea, the Washington Conference produced one of the more remarkable unintended consequences of the post–World War I era by accelerating the rise of air power as a strategic tool. Naval air power, of course, was relatively new, but the advances in aircraft design were obvious to all. Between 1912 and 1920 alone, average aircraft speeds had increased from 126 mph to 171 mph. Although the controversial Italian general and central director of aviation at the General Air Commissariat, Giulio Douhet, had written his influential Command of the Air (1921), for which he was jailed (it constituted a scathing attack on Italian war leadership for failing to properly prepare for war in 1915), only a handful of visionaries truly understood that, when correctly used, aircraft could carry out important tactical and strategic aims. American aviator Colonel
Billy Mitchell met with Douhet in 1922 when he visited Europe, thereafter circulating an excerpted translation of Douhet’s book. By then, Mitchell had already stunned the Army and Navy brass with his “Project B” bombing demonstration in 1921. Secretary of War Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had agreed to hold trials to test Mitchell’s highly public claims that he could sink ships at sea with land-based bombers.32 Mitchell was particularly critical of the (in his view) misallocated spending in which a thousand bombers could be built for the cost of a new dreadnought.

  Mitchell’s claims that land-based bombers could sink capital ships ruffled feathers among the admirals, who could nevertheless not ignore a genuine aerial threat. They agreed to the demonstrations, but a week before the test Mitchell was dismissed from the project, only to be reinstated by the new secretary of war John Weeks, in part because of Mitchell’s public support. Assembling a group of Martin, Handley-Page, and Caproni bombers, Mitchell trained the crews in antiship bombing techniques, aided by Alexander de Seversky, a Russian who had attacked German shipping in World War I. In July 1921, Mitchell’s planes hit their targets with bombs after two unsuccessful tries, “sinking” the German battleship Ostfriesland according to the rules of the experiment. Navy officials insisted the test meant nothing, but Mitchell and an influential young officer named Curtis LeMay, who would perfect long-range bombing during World War II, were convinced otherwise.

  Mitchell seemed to tromp into a puddle of controversy with every new step. After a tour of Hawaii and Asia, he returned with a report that anticipated a war with Japan and the attack on Pearl Harbor.33 Following a demotion to colonel, which was not an entirely unusual postwar rank adjustment, Mitchell found himself in an obscure posting in remote Texas. Some suspected this was due to his criticisms of the Army before the congressional Lampert Committee. His constant lobbying for weather stations at all air bases seemed prescient when the Navy dirigible Shenandoah went down in a lightning storm, killing fourteen crewmen. An incensed Mitchell accused the top brass (and President Calvin Coolidge, by inference) of “almost treasonable administration of the national defense.”34 Coolidge could not allow such insubordination to stand unchallenged, and Mitchell was court-martialed, found guilty, and reduced in rank. He resigned rather than accept punishment.