The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The British may have felt racially superior to the Japanese, but they were not inclined to take chances with their former allies. In June 1921, the cabinet tempered its faith in collective security, and agreed in principle to the construction of a massive naval base on Singapore island, which was intended to tilt the delicate balance of power in the Far East in Britain’s favour.

  This proved to be one of the most significant decisions in the empire’s history. It was also possibly the most ill-considered. The strategic thinking behind Singapore belonged to the eighteenth century. The base was designed as a modern Gibraltar, a reinforced concrete stronghold bristling with big guns commanding the passage between the Indian and Pacific oceans. In theory, it was intended to function as Gibraltar had done during the French wars, as the means of sustaining British seapower in distant waters. If the Japanese behaved as Jellicoe imagined they might, and advanced southwards, their path would be blocked by Singapore. In the meantime, a British battlefleet would assemble in home waters and set out to relieve the base. Even allowing for operational mischances such as bad weather and the Suez Canal being out of action, it was estimated that the relief force could reach Singapore within seventy days. On arrival, it would raise the siege, refuel, and then engage the Japanese navy. This was how Gibraltar and British seapower in the Mediterranean had been saved at the end of the American war.

  With a great deal of luck, this strategy might just have worked again if Singapore had been adequate for the task. It was not, thanks to Treasury economies. The total bill for the installations was £16.5 million with a further £9 million for the fuel oil that was to be stored at the base. This was all the Admiralty dared asked for from a Treasury short of cash and obsessed by thrift.22 As a result, the dockyard facilities were too small for a fleet needed to take on the Japanese with any hope of winning. Nonetheless, construction started in 1923 and continued for the next fourteen years. During this time, the Australians and New Zealanders, for whom Singapore was the first and only line of defence, became increasingly uneasy about its usefulness and the viability of the strategy of which it was the keystone. Their disbelief was shared by senior naval officers serving in the Far East.23

  In the event of a collision with Japan, Britain’s actual muscle in the Far East consisted of an aircraft carrier, a handful of cruisers and a pack of destroyers, an unfinished base of doubtful efficiency nearly 3,000 miles from Tokyo, and a deterrent force 10,000 miles away on the other side of the world. In these circumstances, it was not surprising that British governments persevered with efforts to restore the old accord with Japan. As late as November 1934, Britain still believed that an Anglo-Japanese non-aggression pact was possible, even if it involved conceding Japan greater influence in China. The Japanese were not interested, and at the end of the year they withdrew from discussions on naval disarmament. ‘Japan can no longer submit to the ratio system,’ announced Rear-Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who would later mastermind the attack on Pearl Harbor. The invidious naval limitation treaties were due to expire at the end of 1936, and in January 1934 the Japanese government gave notice that after that date it would feel free to build as many warships as it needed.

  Japan’s belligerence was the result of its government slipping into the hands of a cabal of senior officers who upheld the ancient warrior codes of the samurai and preached modern, aggressive imperialism. They manipulated the fainéant, weathercock Emperor Hirohito, and promised national economic salvation through a mixture of conquest and autarky. Japan could protect itself from the world recession, acquire raw materials and markets, and feed its growing population through a programme designed to make China its economic dependency. Between 1929 and 1932 Japan overran Manchuria, acquiring its minerals and a springboard for future incursions southwards into China.

  The balance of power in the Far East was now swinging against Britain. The Admiralty hoped it might be corrected by additional men-o’-war in the region, but, in 1934, the country could not afford such a gesture. The national government had been elected in 1931 because it was pledged to careful housekeeping and a balanced budget. Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, therefore kept a tight hold on the purse strings, believing in the current wisdom that Britain’s economic strength would prove its most powerful weapon in any future war. Imperialist blood ran in Chamberlain’s veins: his father, Joseph, had made the empire his creed and had staked his career on it. The son was also an imperialist; he was convinced that the British empire was an unequalled force for good throughout the world and its maintenance took precedence over all other considerations, even his deep personal commitment to international peace.

  During the first half of 1934, Chamberlain and his colleagues were faced with the problem of how to balance the nation’s books and simultaneously safeguard its empire in a world which was about to revert to the law of the jungle. In February, a stark memorandum from the new Defence Requirements Committee identified Japan as posing an immediate danger to the empire, but predicted that in the long term Germany was the adversary most to be feared. Chamberlain had been among the first to interpret recent Japanese aggression, its departure from the League, and Hitler’s coming to power as tokens of the impending collapse of collective security. Britain, had, therefore, to direct cash into rearmament, and, for Chamberlain, the first priority was home defence, particularly the enlargement of the RAF.

  This was a traditional and proven response to an old problem. For the past two hundred years, governments had recognised that the empire’s survival rested ultimately on the strength of its home base. As Chancellor, and the most forceful member of the cabinet, Chamberlain threw his weight behind a rearmament programme which channelled the bulk of available funds into projects for the defence of Britain rather than the overseas empire. His argument was unanswerable:

  … if we had to enter upon such a struggle [against Germany] with a hostile Japan in the East, if we had to contemplate the division of our forces so as to protect our Far Eastern interests while prosecuting a war in Europe, then it would be evident that not only would India, Hong Kong, and Australia be in dire peril, but that we ourselves would stand in far greater danger of destruction by a fully armed and organised Germany.

  This was the old strategic dilemma. How could Britain defend both its mainland and its empire in a global war? There was, however, a new and frightening dimension to the arithmetic of dispersing ships and men. In 1934 a European war would involve the extensive use of aerial bombardment by both sides. London had suffered extensive air raids during 1917–18, and the RAF had been preparing for a similar offensive against Berlin. Subsequent developments in aircraft design and chemical weapons meant that, in the event of war, Britain would be attacked again on a far greater scale. Prognoses about the extent of casualties and damage were uniformly chilling, with predictions of mass deaths and the possible dissolution of civil order in the larger cities. A glimpse of what might happen was provided during the Spanish Civil War when the Nationalist air force bombed Granollers, Barcelona and Guernica during 1937 and 1938. There was also the grim prospect of a repeat performance of the last war, for conventional military wisdom insisted that Britain would again contribute a mass army to the European battlefield.

  These prospects and the recent upsurge in popular pacifism placed the government in a quandary. One way out was to jettison the League and the ideals of collective security and return to the old give-and-take power diplomacy of the pre-1914 era. This course was bound to offend a large and clamorous section of the public, especially on the left, which retained a faith in the League and was certain that rearmament increased the chances of war.

  The effectiveness of the League was tested in 1935 in an episode which incidentally exposed the fragility of the empire’s defences. Shortly before he had come to power in 1922, Mussolini had asserted that ‘the Fascist ethos demanded the avenging of Adowa’, and by the end of 1934 he was preparing for a showdown with Abyssinia. A border incident was the pretext for a quarrel
which Haile Selassie, the Abyssinian emperor, referred to the League of Nations. By July 1935 it was clear that Italy would disregard the League’s injunctions against aggression, which left no alternative to the imposition of economic sanctions. A naval blockade would have to be imposed on Italy, which Britain, as a League member, would be obliged to support with warships. France was unready and lukewarm, and the Mediterranean fleet needed eight weeks in which to be ready for action.

  In anticipation of sanctions, reinforcements were hurried to the Mediterranean from the home fleet and the China, Pacific, American and West Indian stations.

  This exercise had made the Admiralty twitchy for it was clear that Japanese planners would draw the obvious conclusion, which was that if Britain was forced to fight Italy for mastery of the Mediterranean, there would be no ships to spare for Far Eastern waters. ‘The cable of Imperial Defence was stretched bar taut,’ remarked Chatfield; ‘Italy was the gnat whose weight could snap it.’24 Worse still, the Suez Canal was now endangered since Italy had increased its Libyan garrison from 20,000 to 50,000, ten times the number of British troops in Egypt. Chatfield’s observation has enormous significance even though he was by nature inclined to pessimism and, some thought, rather too willing to raise potential snags whenever a course of action was proposed. His predecessors at the Admiralty had faced similar difficulties, most notably in 1779 and 1797–8. But then there had been some lucky breaks and, above all, a willingness to gamble, a quality which was notoriously absent in Britain’s leaders during the 1930s. Even if it had been present, it was very unlikely that the voters to whom they answered would have tolerated daring and risky policies which might easily have led to war.

  Unlike their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century counterparts, Britain’s rulers were now circumscribed by the morality of collective security and the opinions of a mass electorate flirting with pacificism. Both ruled out a Copenhagen-style pre-emptive strike against the Italian navy which, at a stroke, would have saved the empire and blocked further aggression by Mussolini and Hitler. The temper of the times as much as the temperament of the country’s rulers meant that the empire’s strategic weakness was lamely accepted as a fact of life, and policies would be devised accordingly. Imperial decline was now underway.

  With Britain effectively in check, Italy invaded Abyssinia in October. Six weeks after, the League announced a feeble programme of sanctions which, amazingly, gave the aggressor access to the Suez Canal and all the oil its war machine needed. As their ships entered Port Said, Italian sailors jeered at their British counterparts and some got knocked about in bars for their impudence. Britain had abdicated its control over the Mediterranean, and in December Sir Samuel Hoare, the Foreign Secretary, and his opposite number Pierre Laval (the future traitor) concocted a hugger-mugger deal which offered Italy two-thirds of Abyssinia as a placebo. There was a howl of rage from the left and the peace groups, who saw the bargain as a negation of all the League had represented and a return to the pre-1914 style of diplomacy in which the great powers bartered other peoples’ countries. In Britain the indignation was so great that Hoare had to resign.

  In March 1936, while Britain and France were still agonising over what, if anything, could be done to restrain Italy, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. Two months later, the Italian army marched into Addis Ababa. Within less than nine months, Italy had torn up the covenant of the League, and Germany had repudiated the Versailles territorial settlement. There were many in Britain, most notably Chamberlain, who, while dismayed, found themselves arguing that national interests were not imperilled. Germany had a moral right to its historic boundaries, and Italy had extended its empire by the annexation of a ramshackle, semi-barbaric state. Less than twenty years before, a lobby of Kenyan settlers had urged Britain to seize Abyssinia, ‘a wonderful country in which you can grow two crops of everything’. ‘Including dragon’s teeth,’ a Colonial Office official drolly minuted.

  Chamberlain, his imperial thinking rooted in his father’s age, was prepared to sanction a new partition of Africa if, like the old, it would help bring stability to Europe. A month before the Italians completed their conquest of Abyssinia, he wrote:

  I don’t believe myself that we could purchase peace and a lasting settlement by handing over Tanganyika to the Germans, but if I did I would not hesitate for a moment to do so. It would be of more value to them than it is to us.

  The empire’s African subjects were appalled by what they saw as British dithering and impotence over Abyssinia. Nigerian nationalists interpreted Britain’s behaviour as evidence of waning power. Elsewhere, black nationalists contrasted Britain’s readiness to send troops to protect the Jews in Palestine with its callous abandonment of the Abyssinians to bombs and mustard gas. Subsequent public discussion of a possible redistribution of Britain’s African colonies as part of a bargain with Germany further alarmed and angered black nationalists. Their persons and lands were still regarded as pawns in an international chess game, to be sacrificed when necessity demanded. Britain’s credentials as a generous, benignant imperial power had been ripped to flinders.

  The events of 1935–6 had greatly tarnished British prestige. The reinforcement of the Mediterranean fleet and the accompanying hostile noises about sanctions had turned Italy, a friend for the past seventy-five years, into an enemy, and demonstrated to Japan that the moment Britain became embroiled in a European conflict, her Far Eastern dependencies were defenceless.

  9

  We Shall Come to No Good: The Empire Goes to War, 1937–9

  Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937. It was an office he had coveted for years, for he was vain, ambitious and relished the exercise of power. He also had a mission: Chamberlain believed that he alone could rescue Britain and its empire from the predicament they were now in, and possibly avert a European war. In many ways he was an unlikely national saviour, for he had made his reputation as a social reformer, knew little about diplomacy, and was thin-skinned, which was why he liked to surround himself with yes-men. He had none of the charisma of, say, Pitt or Lloyd George, and little presence. Once, when things were not going his way, Anthony Eden cruelly likened him to ‘a turkey who has missed his Christmas’.1

  Chamberlain was not helped by his prejudices. He had ‘an almost instinctive contempt for the Americans and what amounted to a hatred of the Russians’.2 A newcomer to the world of international negotiations, he assumed that they would be of a kind with which he was familiar, that between English bosses and workers.3 This did not promise well, for the comparison took for granted a parity of goodwill and a joint willingness to reach an equitable compromise. But Chamberlain was persistent, confident of his abilities and unshakeable in his belief that he was acting in the best interests of Britain and its empire.

  These were best served, he imagined, by a return to the old-fashioned way of conducting foreign policy, that is through give-and-take bargaining between powers. Those who agreed with him, and those who did not, called it appeasement. Appeasement had played a prominent part in Britain’s relations with other nations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then, Britain had encouraged transfers of territory which reduced tension in Europe and maintained a balance of power. To this end, Britain had been willing to evacuate Malta in 1802, surrender captured Dutch and French colonies in 1814–15, and at the same time permit Austria to govern much of northern Italy, and Russia Poland. Such arrangements left Britain free to devote her attention and resources to what really mattered, her overseas empire and interests. Both were in jeopardy in 1937, and could be saved only if a measure of stability was restored to Europe.

  Appeasement offended consciences everywhere. Its end result was that the inhabitants of small, weak nations were forced to accept unwelcome rulers, and this blatantly violated those principles of self-determination that the League had stood for. Appeasement also meant an end to collective security and the revival of old-style, cynical power-broking. And not a moment too soon though
t some on the right: ‘What we require is to divest our diplomacy of cant, metaphysics, and the jargon of collective security, and to begin talking to Mussolini in terms of Realpolitik.’ Only then, could Britain ‘preserve the peace and protect our vital Imperial interests’.4

  The left were horrified by this reversion to old methods and the jettisoning of the noble idealism which the League embodied. Then and after, Chamberlain’s political enemies branded him as the arch-appeaser, the most culpable of the so-called ‘Guilty Men’ of left-wing mythology. The legend (a distillation of contemporary journalism, post-war historiography and Comintern propaganda) depicted appeasement as the instrument of capitalism. Abyssinia, the Spanish Republicans and Czechoslovakia were successively thrown to the Fascist wolves because they were the beasts which would eventually devour Russia, and with it Communism.

  The Conservative government was the handmaiden of capitalism and its preservation was the sole object of Chamberlain’s foreign policy. According to the Left Book Club’s The Road to War (1937), the appeasement of Japan over Manchuria and China was being undertaken for sinister motives:

  It was literally unthinkable to our propertied classes that they should incur the slightest risk of war, or even of loss of trade and investments, for a result that would most certainly include a social revolution in Japan! Hence the violently pro-Japanese feeling manifested in the City, by most of the Government press, and by a powerful section of the Conservative Party.5

  Appeasement was therefore a device to frustrate the aspirations of the Japanese working class and, so the conspiratorial school of commentators believed, the masses everywhere. Such paranoid stuff had a wide circulation and many converts, including the Australian Labour party which suspected that Chamberlain was pro-fascist.6