Those who made the policies of appeasement did not think in terms of the struggle between ideologies, but of national survival. ‘We shall come to no good, and I don’t see how we’re to defend our interests here, in the Med or in the F[ar] E[ast]. Most Depressing,’ were Alexander Cadogan’s thoughts on how matters stood in 1937.7 Chamberlain did see a way out through short-term appeasement and long-term rearmament. As the latter gathered momentum, the need for appeasement would disappear, for the greatest threat to Britain’s security, Hitler, would shrink from further aggression. But Hitler could only be deterred if he was isolated, and so Chamberlain needed to resuscitate cordial relations with Italy. Once Hitler was neutralised and Mussolini friendly, Britain could turn its attentions towards the Far East and Japan.
Chamberlain’s quest for a stable Europe was accompanied by the acceleration of Britain’s rearmament programme. Traditional, imperial strategic priorities were adhered to in a way that would have won the approval of any eighteenth-or nineteenth-century statesman, and as it turned out they held the key to the nation’s deliverance in 1940. Home defence came first, with the RAF receiving the biggest share of the budget. The money was split between defence (Hurricane and Spitfire fighters and RADAR) and medium and long-range bombers for offensives against the industrial heartlands of Germany. Progress was impressive; by September 1939, when the programme still had three years to run, the RAF mustered 608 fighters and 536 bombers ready for action, 2,000 aircraft in reserve, and a further 425 deployed in the Middle East, India and Malaya.
These totals were, however, only superficially reassuring. Throughout the past five years, British policy-making had been pervaded by fears about the size and offensive capability of the Luftwaffe. Both were consistently overrated; at the outbreak of war it was officially calculated that Germany possessed over 2,000 bombers, whereas in fact it had 1,180 and 366 dive-bombers. One incubus spawned another. The government felt certain that the moment war was declared, if not before, the bulk of Hitler’s airforce would be used for a sustained aerial bombardment of British cities. Hence the hurried construction of shelters, rehearsals of air-raid drill, distribution of gas masks, and the emptying of 50,000 London hospital beds in readiness for casualties during the Czech crisis in September 1938. These chilling preparations for a holocaust gave international crises a peculiar horror, and explain the heartfelt sense of national relief the moment it was known that Chamberlain had returned from Munich with a formula for peace.
Britain’s second and third strategic priorities were the protection of the world’s seaways and the defence of the empire; again, a policy which would have recommended itself to earlier statesmen. For practical and emotional reasons, Chamberlain was opposed to the despatch of a second massive expeditionary force to the Franco-Belgian frontier. The promise of such an army would discourage the French from extending the Maginot Line from the southern border of Belgium to the Channel coast, and would commit Britain to another extended, bloody war of attrition in Flanders. As a result, the army was pushed to the back of the queue for cash. It was, therefore, ill-equipped for a European war when, in February 1939, Chamberlain reluctantly consented to sending an expeditionary force to those same fields where another had nearly bled to death between 1914 and 1918.
Since October 1935, British military intelligence had been closely following developments in the German army. Most important of these were the creation of Panzer divisions and the novel theories of close cooperation between tanks and aircraft known as Blitzkrieg. If, as seemed very likely, the Wehrmacht was embarking on a new type of mobile warfare, the British army was not ready to counter it.8 Britain lagged behind in the tank race; a lack of funds slowed down the formation of armoured divisions, and none was ready for deployment during the battle for France in May 1940. The demand for anti-aircraft batteries meant that there were serious shortages in artillery of other kinds, including anti-tank guns, which were not expected to be remedied before 1942.
* * *
Britain’s authority at the conference tables of Europe and its military muscle depended ultimately on support from the empire. This had never been more vital for, in 1931, the total white population of Britain and the Commonwealth had stood at 67 million, of whom 19 million lived in the dominions. As in the period before 1914, Britain needed the assurance that, in the event of war, the dominion governments would fall into line and deliver their quotas of fighting men, ships and aircraft.
It was again imperative to take the dominion governments into Britain’s confidence and explain to them the aims of its foreign policy and outline possible wartime strategy. A Commonwealth conference, the first for six years, was called at the beginning of 1937, and at the centre of its proceedings was an assessment of Britain’s present and future position, compiled by the chiefs of staff. At its heart lay the inescapable fact that Britain’s defeat in a continental war ‘would destroy the whole structure of the Commonwealth, which in its present state could not long exist without the political, financial and military strength of the United Kingdom.’9 As Sir Edward Grey had made clear over twenty years before, without Britain the dominions were isolated and unable to fend for themselves. This being so, and Germany the hypothetical enemy, Britain would commit itself to the defence of the Low Countries and France and would expect dominion assistance.
Outside Europe, Indian troops would be deployed in the Middle East and Egypt if Italy threw in its lot with Germany. Singapore remained the key to the defence of the Far East and Australasia in the by now very likely event that Japan would attempt to acquire forcibly raw materials in Borneo, the western Pacific and the Dutch East Indies, the latter now designated ‘a major British interest’. Singapore was still beyond the range of Japan’s land-based bombers, but if this immunity disappeared, Britain would shift additional squadrons to Malaya from the Middle East, relying on the South African airforce to replace them. This arrangement proved inadequate since the RAF was understrength in the Middle East, and by the spring of 1939 it was under pressure to transfer aircraft from India to Singapore in the event of an emergency. Breaking point had been reached. As Sir Cyril Newall, the chief of air staff, observed, fewer aircraft in India would force the government there to adopt a less aggressive stance on the North-West Frontier, which would of course diminish British prestige.10
The question of how to defend Singapore was naturally the concern of the Australian and New Zealand delegates to the conference. They were assured that the promised relief armada would sail and would pass unhindered through the Mediterranean and Suez.11 The Australian Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, was not satisfied, and proposed either a rapprochement with Japan or a Pacific defence pact that would include the one power which possessed the means to withstand Japanese aggression swiftly, the United States. This suggestion was squashed by Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, for its acceptance would have been tantamount to an admission that Britain could no longer defend its empire unaided.12 Undercurrents of doubt about Singapore’s impregnability remained, and there were darker suspicions that once Britain had become entangled in a European war circumstances would force it to abandon Singapore, and with it Australasia.
These fears were partly confirmed when Britain dragged its heels in providing aircraft for Australia’s rearmament programme. Potential allies in the Mediterranean came first on British aircraft manufacturers’ list of priorities; orders from Rumania, Greece and Turkey took precedence over those for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) between 1937 and 1939.13 In exasperation, Lyons turned to the American suppliers, Lockheeds, and ordered fifty Hudson bombers in 1938. The following year, American-made engines had to be fitted to Beaufort fighter-bombers, recently delivered from Britain.14 Henceforward, the United States and not Britain would be Australia’s main arsenal; the old rule by which the dominions only used British or locally made equipment was quietly dropped.
Local problems and doubts about Britain’s ability to solve them were beginning to nudge Australia towards America’s
orbit. Internal politics and an unsentimental view of its own, rather than the empire’s interests, dictated Canada’s foreign policy. Ever since the Chanak crisis in 1922, Canada had made it clear that its parliament alone would decide whether or not it went to war. Canada could afford to take an independent line since it enjoyed the immeasurable advantage of closeness to the United States, which, following the Monroe Doctrine, could reasonably be expected to take care of Canada’s only vulnerable region, its Pacific seaboard. Inside Canada, the racial mix ruled out unquestioning attachment to Britain and the Commonwealth. Its 11-million population was split three ways; just over half were of British stock, a quarter French, and the rest Red Indians and the descendants of central and eastern European immigrants. Imperial loyalty remained solid in some sections of the English-speaking community, but there was an equally sturdy and growing sense of a purely Canadian identity. In 1925, prospective immigrants were warned: ‘Don’t forget that a Canadian-born Britisher is just as good as an English-born one, and that he won’t be patronised.’15
The assay of Commonwealth fidelity or, one might say, biddableness came during the autumn of 1938. The issue was Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland, that region of Czechoslovakia whose inhabitants were predominantly German. Chamberlain, harking back to his father’s time, likened the Sudeten Germans to the Transvaal’s Uitlanders, a people also stranded in a foreign land whose affinities were elsewhere.16 He reconciled himself to the eventual merging of Sudetenland with the Reich, which he agreed with Hitler during a personal meeting at Berchtesgaden in mid-September. What Chamberlain and a majority of the British public could not stomach was Hitler’s next demand, for an immediate military occupation of the disputed Czech territory. Suddenly, and much to Chamberlain’s distress, the question had changed to one of war or peace; would Britain and France resist a German invasion of Czechoslovakia?
British public opinion was divided and the dominions shrank from committing themselves. For the Australian government, ‘almost any alternative is preferable to involvement in a war with Germany in the event of the latter forcibly intervening in Czechoslovakia.’17 Anti-war sentiment was even more marked in Canada, where violent racial clashes were expected if the matter came to a parliamentary debate.18 Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister, therefore trod warily, privately admitting his sympathy for Britain, but publicly opposing a war over Czechoslovakia.19 The South African government, conscious that Afrikaner nationalist opinion was against a war, also signalled its unwillingness to fight for the Czechs.20 Ireland had already served notice of its neutrality. It was Chanak all over again, and yet, on the eve of his last-minute attempt to avert a war, Chamberlain spoke to the nation as if he headed a united empire: ‘However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British empire in a war simply on her account.’
The truth was that Britain had not convinced the dominions that the integrity of Czechoslovakia was worth fighting for. Chamberlain flew to Munich at the end of September full of uncertainty. If his talks with Hitler broke down and war followed, he could not rely upon a Canadian expeditionary force to materialise or Anzacs to rush to the defence of the Suez Canal. Furthermore, France was wobbling; most of the battlefleet was refitting; and Britain’s rearmament programme still had a long way to go. Czechoslovakia had to be left to its fate and Chamberlain went home with Hitler’s promise that all remaining Anglo-German differences would be amicably resolved. It was ‘peace in our time’ he announced, echoing Disraeli’s words in 1878 when he returned from the Congress of Berlin.
The choice of words was unintentionally apt, for Chamberlain, like Disraeli, was accused of following a course dictated by expediency rather than morality. The British public was undoubtedly relieved by the peaceful resolution of the crisis, even though it had been an exercise in buying time and was seen as such. Pragmatism had triumphed at Munich, as it had in 1877–8 when Disraeli had resisted the pressure of the high-minded, who had insisted that Britain had a moral duty to support those Balkan nationalists who were struggling for freedom, rather than to back Turkey. Sixty years after, there was a similar wave of protest from a coalition, embracing right and left and including Churchill, which saw the crisis in purely moral terms with Czechoslovakia as the hapless victim of injustice. Predictably, this group bitterly denounced Munich as a cowardly and cynical sell-out. But, Chamberlain’s supporters argued, Britain could not seriously contemplate entering a European war over a region where she had no interests when she was being threatened in areas where she had many, all of them vital. It was a view expressed by a young correspondent to the Spectator, who argued that ‘my generation … is not prepared to fight for the integrity of various territories in Central and Eastern Europe which contain big and discontented minorities.’ It would, he claimed, fight for India, the dominions, the colonies and France.21
Imperial security had been uppermost in Chamberlain’s mind when he had gone to Munich. ‘If only we could get on with Germany, I would not care a rap for Musso,’ he had once remarked.22 Ever since he had become prime minister and virtually taken over the direction of foreign policy, Chamberlain had endeavoured to reach an understanding with Mussolini that would preserve Britain’s strategic position in the Mediterranean. There was an urgency about Chamberlain’s overtures to Italy which owed much to the service chiefs’ unrealistic assessments of the strength and capabilities of its army and navy.23 The result was the ironically named ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ of 1938 by which Britain, and later Australia and Canada, recognised Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia, and Italy promised to accept the status quo in the Mediterranean.
These accords reflected Chamberlain’s utter failure to comprehend the nature of Italian fascism and the personality of its leader. Neither could tolerate the status quo in any form; fascism was about continual, often frenzied action and radically transforming the existing order of things. This perpetual political motion included imperial expansion and Mussolini constantly bragged about the new Roman empire which he would create. At the close of 1938, well-rehearsed fascist deputies, heartened by Hitler’s acquisition of the Sudetenland, demanded Corsica, Tunisia, and France’s colony of Djibouti at the foot of the Red Sea. Early in the new year, Mussolini threw down the gage to Britain in a belligerent speech to his ministers:
Italy is washed by the waters of the Mediterranean. Her links with the rest of the world are through the Suez Canal, an artificial channel which could easily be blocked, even by accident, and through the Straits of Gibraltar, commanded by the guns of Britain. Italy therefore has no free access to the oceans; she is actually a prisoner in the Mediterranean, and as her population grows and she becomes more powerful, the more she suffers in her prison. The bars of that prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta and Cyprus, and its guards are Gibraltar and Cyprus.24
At some date in the future Italy would break free from this gaol, an escape which would inevitably lead to war with Britain and France. In the meantime and in spite of official protests, Radio Bari broadcast anti-British propaganda to the Arabs and Egyptians, and the Italian consul in Kabul offered covert help to the tribesmen of the North-West Frontier.25 In private, Mussolini described Britain as a decrepit, weary nation which, in the fascist nature of things, would inevitably have to give way to a youthful and virile imperial power.
This judgement was also being reached in different parts of the empire, where British moral reputation and prestige had been tarnished by the Italian agreements and Munich. After Eden’s resignation as Foreign Secretary early in 1938 in protest against Chamberlain’s policies, the Gold Coast Spectator predicted that, ‘Eden may come back as a Premier of Great Britain, and early too; a terror to dictators, and a bulwark against attacks upon the traditional character of all Britons and the liberty of Britain.’ In November 1938, Sierra Leone nationalists declared that by acknowledging Italian sovereignty over Abyssinia, Britain had stepped down from ‘the pedestal
of Justice and Equity’.26
For the rest of the world, Munich had been an object lesson in British impotence. In October 1938, the Economist gloomily noted a sudden increase in contempt for British power:
From Palestine it is reported that the new boldness and aggressiveness of the Arabs is due to their belief that they can negotiate with the British Empire as equals. In the Far East, the Japanese descent on Southern China, which, if it does not actually invade Hong Kong is designed to ruin its trade, is ascribed to Japanese confidence that the Western powers need not be seriously considered.27
Sir Alexander Cadogan was of similar mind; he feared that Japan’s assault on China and indifference towards British commercial interests there were a signal to the rest of Asia that Britain now counted for less and less in the world. Chamberlain may have staved off a war that Britain and a disunited Commonwealth were unready to fight, but the hidden price of appeasement had been high. Serious damage had been inflicted on Britain’s moral and political standing within the empire and throughout the world.
* * *
After Munich, Hitler continued to order the pace and course of events, and their direction was towards war. There was no ambiguity in the unending rant of a man who believed with all his heart that, ‘War is eternal and everywhere. There is no beginning and no peace treaty.’ He was Napoleon reborn, a megalomaniac who could never be trusted and was prepared to risk everything to get what he wanted. His nature and the compass of his ambitions were now fully understood by many members of the government and the great majority of the British public. There was, however, a band of appeasers silly enough to imagine that Hitler could still somehow be bought off. At the beginning of 1939, one of the more abject went so far as to argue that Germany’s old African colonies should be returned, a shameful stratagem which even Chamberlain had abandoned.28 It is of more than passing interest that he, and others who ought to have known better, ever contemplated the transfer of colonies which had enjoyed twenty years of humane British rule to a régime that was now a byword for brutality.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 58