Prestige counted most at a local level, particularly among those races in the Middle and Far East who had grown up in a world in which Britain was accustomed to getting its own way. Everyone knew what to expect; if the lion’s path was crossed, it roared, bared its teeth and, when this was not enough, pounced. Prestige always carried with it the threat of force and so, ultimately, it was inseparable from the ability of Britain to square up to its enemies and beat them. Early in 1942, the reaction of Pathans on the North-West Frontier to the news that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese was ‘one of disdain that so grave a reverse should have been suffered at the hands of such foes’.4 Hitler agreed with them, and wondered if the world had grossly overestimated Britain’s prestige during the past twenty years.5
Others were not taken aback by this turn of events. In 1934, a Japanese staff officer, reflecting the thoughts of many of his countrymen, stated that, ‘The British empire is already an old man.’6 His counterparts in American military and naval staff colleges were being encouraged to think in the same way.7 Some inside Britain also concurred. The feebleness of Britain’s response to affronts suffered by her subjects at the hands of Japanese troops in Tientsin in June 1939 dismayed Admiral Lord Chatfield, the First Sea Lord. Such incidents, he wrote, ‘would have made a Georgian or Victorian statesman issue violent ultimatums’.8 So they would, had the offending nation been unable to defend itself; but this point, well understood by former practitioners of gunboat diplomacy, was seldom appreciated either by subsequent statesmen or historians.
John Bull was still alive and kicking in those regions where no one was likely to kick back. An Egyptian looking at the line of battleships and cruisers anchored off Alexandria in 1936, while his government haggled over the terms of a new treaty with Britain, would have been in no doubt of this. Nor would the Chinese. In 1928 there were 11,000 British and Indian troops scattered across northern China, guarding British property and investments against the depredations of local warlords.9 Gunboats still chugged up and down the Yangtze River and handed out condign retribution if British subjects were abused. There was more than a spark of Palmerstonian bravado in Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, who, in September 1937, proposed to sink the Spanish cruiser, Canarias if the Nationalists and their allies persisted in attacks on British shipping. In the end, there was no need for retaliation as the dispute was settled by diplomacy.
There was no question that the Mediterranean fleet could have knocked out a Spanish cruiser without difficulty. What mattered was whether the British government had the nerve to act so drastically. Hitler, whose yardstick for a nation’s political vitality was its willingness to act ruthlessly in its own interests, felt sure in 1924 that Britain’s rulers still possessed the resolution necessary to preserve their empire. Various Indians, Egyptians and Arabs would have ruefully concurred. Later historians were far less certain. Those who have become engaged in tracing the path of Britain’s decline as a global, imperial power have come to regard the inter-war years as a period during which Britain found it harder than ever to uphold its international pretensions.
One possible explanation has been offered to explain this phenomenon. The thesis, advanced by Correlli Barnett, alleges that Britain’s governors were psychologically unfitted to make the sort of decisions that were imperative if the country was to survive as a world power. The fault lay with their moral outlook, which was the product of ideas implanted in them by the public schools and universities of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.10 That blend of evangelical Christianity, chivalric virtues, a sense of fair play, and a faith in man’s ability to solve his problems through reason produced a breed of rulers who were mentally unprepared to face up to, let alone outwit, Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito’s generals and admirals.
Americans recognised few signs of mildness, moderation and a desire to conciliate among British ministers, diplomats and strategists. A 1931 State Department analysis of Britain’s future detected a strong urge to recover lost ground and restore the country to the eminence it had enjoyed in the last century. The methods to be employed included ‘a reversion to the Palmerstonian “damn your eyes” tradition in diplomacy’.11 The first consultations between British and American staff officers in 1941 left the latter with the impression that they were dealing with an artful, grasping and hard-headed crew. After the conference at Argentia Bay in August, one American officer commented, ‘One point which stood out in the British Papers was adherence to the long-established policy of directly organising other peoples to do the fighting necessary to sustain a mighty empire.’12 From the President down, Americans knew that their partners could never be trusted. ‘It was always the same with the British,’ Roosevelt observed, ‘they are always foxy and you have to be the same with them.’ What also struck Americans was the chasm which separated Britain’s public image and private conduct in international affairs. It was paradoxical that, in the words of one American minister, ‘the British do not know how to play cricket’.13
Clearly, the Christian gentlemen who ruled Britain never behaved as if the Queensberry rules could be freely applied to all human activities, nor had their schooling neglected Machiavelli. Even those unaware of his texts would have learned something of his stratagems for survival from the everyday life of their public schools. Whatever these institutions professed in terms of providing moral and spiritual enlightenment, they were microcosms of the outside world, and, like it, were inhabited by the cunning, the vicious and the dishonest. For this reason alone, the men who emerged from public schools could never have been ignorant of the nasty side of human nature nor how to contend with it. As Americans discovered during the war, the British ruling class was a match for anyone when it came to underhand political sparring.
British power did not decline because its governors lived in a world of make-believe in which foreigners, even dictators, were all fundamentally decent chaps who played with a straight bat. Neville Chamberlain may have faced the newsreel cameras after Munich and attested to Hitler’s trustworthiness, but he never for a moment imagined that a man whom, on first acquaintance, he had characterised as ‘the commonest little dog’ could ever act like an English gentleman.14
Yet Britain’s behaviour before and during the Munich crisis was widely seen as evidence that the country’s power had diminished. As will be explained later, the policy of appeasement was devised to assist the preservation of the empire when external circumstances had severely reduced Britain’s scope for manoeuvre. Even so, and with hindsight, it is still possible to argue that for some years before Munich, and certainly after, British prestige had become a façade that masked a structure which was becoming more and more rickety. What had happened was that Britain’s reputation as a global power had somehow outlived its actual strength in terms of wealth and economic capacity.
Photographs of derelict factories, idle cranes standing over empty shipyards, and disconsolate, jobless men at street corners are still the most familiar images of the British economy of the 1930s. They portray human as well as economic tragedy, and are supported by the statistics. Within two years of the Wall Street stockmarket crash of 1929, unemployment had soared to over 3 million, just over 20 per cent of the nation’s workforce. The already vulnerable and decaying staple industries were hardest hit; unemployment in ship-building and repair touched 62 per cent in 1932, and there were mass lay-offs from the textile mills, coal mines, iron and steel foundries and heavy engineering works, which were all concentrated in South Wales, the North and Scotland. During 1932 nearly half the national budget was dispersed in welfare payments, chiefly to the families of men without work. Recovery was gradual and patchy. Unemployment fell to 11 per cent by 1939, but the older industries remained in the doldrums. After 1937 the demand for housing in the South East and the Midlands, together with that for armaments, had triggered a limited revival whose effects were most marked in the growth of domestic demand for such ‘new’ products as radios, motor cars and refrigerators. But, as in the
previous decade, expansion in modern industries was insufficient to take up the slack created by the terminal decay of the older.
Britain had endured and, up to a point, been able to come to terms with stagnation before 1914 largely because of its invisible earnings. Much foreign investment had been disposed of for ready cash during the war, and it was not replaced. The international demand for outside capital fell after 1918, and what there was tended to be met by American banks. Between the wars, corporate and private British investors were cautious, particularly after 1930, when there was an understandably nervous mood abroad. Low-risk, secure government stock, unit trusts, and building societies were therefore highly popular.
There had been, especially on the left, demands for government-directed investment policies as a means to redress both short and long-term economic deliquescence. The government preferred old nostrums, and so thrift, balancing the budget, and laissez faire were the order of the day during the Slump. Free trade, however, was killed off. Imperial preference was resuscitated by the 1931 national government, not as a visionary measure to bind together the empire, but as a desperate device to secure raw materials and cheap food, and to keep some outlets for industrial goods in a rapidly shrinking world market. The result was a series of agreements made during and after the 1932 Ottawa conference. Suggestions that Britain and the dominions might cooperate in Keynesian joint-investment schemes were pooh-poohed by the British government. A further economic link between Britain and the empire was the creation of the sterling block which was intended to defend the value of the pound when it, like the rest of the world’s currencies, was sliding about helplessly. All dominion and colonial reserves were to be in pounds, and the exchange value of their individual currencies was pegged against the pound.
Government policies staved off disaster, but the economy remained frail. In 1937, there was a trade deficit of £302 million, which was reduced to £70 million by invisible earnings. By comparison, the force-fed, state-controlled economies of the dictatorships seemed to have pulled through the Slump rather more successfully than Britain’s in terms of their share in the world’s manufacturing output.
The peculiar circumstances of the global depression apart, Britain’s position was weaker than these statistics suggest. Throughout this period British governments, always hesitantly interventionist, left too much to the market, as the immediate post-war decay of aircraft manufacture showed. At the same time, British exporters neglected such entrepreneurial techniques as selling, packaging and advertising. In 1921, virtually no British businessman was showing interest in the fast expanding Malayan market.15 In the aftermath of the wartime rubber boom, Malaya imported goods worth nearly £100 million a year, of which Britain supplied a sixteenth. The default was most noticeable in the export of modern commodities. Nearly all Malaya’s cars came from America, and the West African haulier bought Ford rather than Austin trucks for, in 1926, only 139 of the 2,400 lorries in the Gold Coast were British-made.16 It was worse with the older export staples; 93 per cent of the cotton goods sold in East Africa in 1938 came from Japanese mills.17 Moreover, capital for new imperial enterprises, like the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia or the oil wells of the Persian Gulf, was largely American.
Malayans drove Oldsmobiles, Ford wagons trundled along the streets of Accra, Kikuyu women wore cotton spun in Osaka, and New York financiers put up cash for mines in what had been Cecil Rhodes’s backyard. As much as the locked factory gates in Rochdale or the closed shipyard on Clydeside, these were indicators of Britain’s persistently poor economic performance. Did it then automatically follow that Britain’s prestige was a sham and her power in terminal decay? Superficially, the answer would appear to be yes, but with qualifications. One measurement of international power was a nation’s ability to channel its surplus wealth into weaponry. Here, Britain’s record was still good: in 1938, Britain produced 7,940 aircraft, Russia 10,382 (many of poor quality), Germany 8,295, Japan 4,467, France 3,163, and the US 2,195. But Britain’s survival in a world war would not only depend on her ability to produce armaments, she would have to find the wherewithal to purchase commodities abroad on a scale equal at least to that of the First World War. The decrease in value of overseas investments and a trade balance permanently in the red rendered such an undertaking extremely difficult. Britain’s prestige may still have been high and its armed strength formidable by any standard, but, in the event of an emergency, the government would have to be sparing when it came to signing cheques. This fact of life considerably reduced Britain’s freedom of action and made ministers, diplomats and strategists tread warily. As a diplomat, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told a sailor, Admiral Lord Chatfield, during the China crisis of 1937, it was ‘No good blustering unless we are sure we can carry out our threats.’18
Before 1935 Britain’s rulers did not expect to have to repeat the Herculean effort of 1914 to 1918. They had done everything in their power to construct and operate a system for international stability and peace based upon the League of Nations and a sheaf of non-aggression pacts, signed during the 1920s. What became known as collective security was not only a guarantee of a new international order in which war was outlawed, it created a world in which the empire would be protected and allowed to flourish. For this reason, as much as an idealistic faith in universal brotherhood, British statesmen tailored their policies to the principles of the League.
For a time, the League generated enough optimism to convince many of its supporters that a new millennium was imminent. Blind faith in the League was most pronounced between 1933 and 1936 when, ironically, collective security was on the verge of collapse. Almost in desperation, large sections of the public, mostly middle-class, succumbed to pacifism, and in various ways pledged themselves never to fight ‘for King and Country’. This mood slowly vanished once it was obvious that no one in Berlin, Rome or Tokyo took any notice of self-indulgent moralising and peace ballots. Nonetheless, the government, while largely unmoved by the pacifist lobby, had to proceed carefully for fear of being branded as war-mongering.
Nor could Britain ignore the views of the dominions. They had joined the League as independent states and were wholeheartedly committed to collective security. When Britain had appealed for dominion assistance during the 1922 Chanak confrontation, Australia had pointedly suggested that it was a matter for the League’s arbitration. A few months later, Stanley Bruce, who had represented Australia at the League, warned Britain that, ‘We cannot submit blindly to any policy which may involve us in a war.’19 Similar caveats came from South Africa, Canada and the Australian Labour party during the European crisis of August and September 1938. Even when collective security lay in ruins, Britain could no longer take for granted unqualified dominion support for its European policies.
The mainstay of collective security was international disarmament. Between 1920 and 1932, successive British governments had calculated their defence budgets on the understanding that there would be no general European war within ten years. A new balance of power was engineered in the Far East early in 1922, after Britain had refused to renew the alliance with Japan, largely in deference to the United States and Australia, neither of which had ever been happy with the arrangement. At the same time, restraints were imposed on the sizes of the great powers’ fleets by the Washington Naval Treaty. Battleships were still the measurement of seapower, and so comparative naval strengths were fixed according to the following proportional scale:
Similar ratios were allocated for cruisers, aircraft carriers and destroyers in 1930, although, oddly, no restrictions were placed on submarines.
Always touchy about real or imaginary racial snubs, the Japanese chafed at an agreement which consigned them to an inferior position, and were bitter about what they saw as Britain’s rejection of them in favour of the Americans. There was disquiet too in the Admiralty about arrangements which effectively left the Imperial Japanese Navy sole master of the China Sea and the western Pacific. In 1919, Admiral Jellicoe had ret
urned from Australia and New Zealand full of foreboding. He foresaw, with uncanny exactness, the 1941–2 ‘nanshinron’ of the Japanese navy, army and air force, a relentless thrust southwards through south east Asia, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the islands of the western Pacific. His colleague Beatty, now First Sea Lord, was also apprehensive about the scope of Japan’s ambitions.
As Lord Salisbury had once wisely remarked, endless poring over maps was a dangerous activity. In his time, imperial strategists had been making everyone’s flesh creep with scary tales about the grand masterplans of the empire’s enemies, which had in the end come to nothing. Alarmist forecasts about Japanese expansionism were therefore greeted with scepticism in some quarters. Churchill and many others were certain that the Japanese were mentally and physically incapable of carrying through a campaign of conquest on the scale predicted by the scaremongers. Racial contempt for the Japanese was found at every level in the British and American governments throughout the 1920s and 1930s.20 What had happened during the Russo-Japanese War had been forgotten; public men preferred to hark back beyond to the days when Asian armies had been swiftly and totally overwhelmed by smaller numbers of Europeans. This fatal purblindness was summed up by the observation made in 1934 by the British naval attaché in Tokyo. The Japanese, he told the Admiralty, have ‘peculiarly slow brains’.21
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 56