The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  It was of course possible that Hitler was sincere when he protested that German expansion in East Central Europe would pose no threat to the British Empire. There were numerous instances when Hitler expressed his desire for an alliance or understanding with Britain, beginning with Mein Kampf. From November 1933, Hitler sought a naval agreement with Britain, and secured one – overriding the wishes of his Foreign Ministry and the German navy – in June 1935. ‘An Anglo-German combination’, he noted at the time, ‘would be stronger than all the other powers.’ At times he displayed, as Britain’s ambassador in Berlin Sir Eric Phipps put it, ‘an almost touching solicitude for the welfare of the British Empire’. Such ideas resurfaced four years later when Hitler started to feel nervous about British intervention on the eve of his invasion of Poland. He had ‘always wanted German-British understanding,’ he assured the new British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, on August 25, 1939. When Britain ignored these blandishments and honoured its pledge to Poland of April, he was dismayed, telling Rosenberg that he ‘couldn’t grasp’ what the English were ‘really after’: ‘Even if England secured a victory, the real victors would be the United States, Japan and Russia.’ On October 6, having conquered Poland, he renewed his offer of peace. Time and again after 1939, Hitler expressed regret that he was fighting Britain, because he doubted ‘the desirability of demolishing the British Empire’. As he told General Franz Halder, who became his Chief of the General Staff in 1938, he ‘did not like’ war with Britain: ‘The reason is that if we crush England’s military power, the British Empire will collapse. That is of no use to Germany… [but] would benefit only Japan, America and others.’ Hitler often alluded to the racial affinity he believed existed between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans. As a Propaganda Ministry press briefing put it in 1940: ‘Sooner or later the racially valuable germanic element in Britain would have to be brought in to join Germany in the future secular struggles of the white race against the yellow race, or the germanic race against Bolshevism.’ Such notions led some at the time, and have led some subsequent historians, to imagine that peaceful coexistence between the British Empire and a Nazi Empire might have been possible, that the great mistake was not appeasement but its abandonment in 1939. Perhaps, it has even been suggested, peace could have been restored in 1940 or 1941, if only someone other than Churchill had been in charge of British policy.

  Standing aside had been an option for Britain in 1914. The Kaiser’s Germany would not easily have won a war against France and Russia; even in the event of victory, the threat to Britain would have been relatively limited, not least because Wilhelmine Germany was a constitutional monarchy with a powerful organized labour movement. In any case, Britain was not prepared for war with Germany in 1914 and the costs of intervention proved to be very high. Hitler’s Germany was a different matter. The Kaiser did not have the Luftwaffe. Hitler did not have to worry about Social Democracy and trade unions. Perhaps Hitler was a sincere Anglophile; the Kaiser had sometimes been one too. But no one could be sure if Hitler was telling the truth or, even if he was, that he might not one day change his mind. We know that he did. Encouraged by a disillusioned Ribbentrop, his ambassador in London, to regard Britain as a declining power, Hitler came to the conclusion as early as late 1936 that ‘even an honest [sic] German-English rapprochement could offer Germany no concrete, positive advantages’, and that Germany therefore had ‘no interest in coming to an understanding with England’. As he put it in a meeting with his military chiefs in November 1937 (recorded in the famous Hossbach Memorandum), Britain was a ‘hate-inspired antagonist’ whose empire ‘could not in the long run be maintained by power politics’. It was a view constantly reinforced by Ribbentrop, who saw England as ‘our most dangerous opponent’ (January 1938). On January 29, 1939 work began on the construction of a new German navy consisting of 13 battleships and battlecruisers, 4 aircraft carriers, 15 Panzerschiffe, 23 cruisers and 22 large destroyers known as Spähkreuzer. There could be no doubt against whom such a fleet would have been directed, had it ever been built.

  In short, Hitler’s Germany posed a potentially lethal threat to the security of the United Kingdom. Hitler said he wanted Lebensraum. If his theory was right, its acquisition could only make Germany stronger. A bigger Germany would be able to afford a larger air force as well as an Atlantic battle fleet. The likelihood of peaceful coexistence on such a basis was minimal. Yet it is not as easy as it looks to learn lessons from the failure of appeasement, though many have tried. To Neville Chamberlain’s defenders, it is important to understand why he and his colleagues took the decision as they did. But tout comprendre, ce n’est pas tout pardonner: to understand the appeasers does not mean excusing them. Those who condemn appeasement have a better prima facie case. But no case for the prosecution is complete unless it can show that a credible alternative policy existed at the time.

  Even a dog has a choice when confronted by a more aggressive dog: to fight or to flee. The British chose to fight in September 1939. By the end of May 1940 they no longer had a choice; they had to flee. This was, despite valiant propaganda about the ‘Dunkirk spirit’, one of the biggest débâcles in British military history – precisely the defeat they and their allies had spent four and a quarter years avoiding after July 1914. The British had failed to appreciate that their options were better than a dog’s. Having identified the potential threat posed by Hitler, they had four to choose from: acquiescence, retaliation, deterrence or pre-emption.

  Acquiescence meant hoping for the best, trusting that Hitler’s protestations of goodwill towards the British Empire were sincere, and letting him have his wicked way with Eastern Europe. Until the end of 1938 this was the core of British policy. The second option was retaliation – that is to say, reacting to offensive action by Hitler against Britain or her chosen allies; this was Britain’s policy in 1939 and 1940. The defects of those two options are obvious. Since Hitler was not in fact to be trusted, acquiescence gave him several years in which to enlarge Germany and her armaments. Electing to retaliate against him when he attacked Poland was still worse, since this left the timing of the war in the hands of the German and Polish governments. The British also tried deterrence, the third option, but their concept was fatally flawed, as we shall see. Fearful as they were of aerial bombardment, they elected to build bombers of their own, with a range sufficient to reach the biggest German cities. Hitler was undeterred. A far more credible deterrent would have been an alliance with the Soviet Union, but that possibility was effectively rejected in 1939 and had to be thrust upon Britain by Hitler himself in 1941. Thus, the only one of the options that was never seriously contemplated was pre-emption – in other words, an early move to nip in the bud the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany. As we shall see, the tragedy of the Second World War is that, had this been tried, it would almost certainly have succeeded.

  THE STRATEGIC CASE FOR APPEASEMENT

  Superficially, the arguments for appeasement still seem sensible and pragmatic when one reads them today. The British had the most to lose from a breakdown of peace. Theirs was the world’s biggest empire, covering roughly a quarter of the globe. In the words of a 1926 Foreign Office memorandum:

  We… have no territorial ambitions nor desire for aggrandisement. We have got all that we want – perhaps more. Our sole object is to keep what we want and live in peace… The fact is that war and rumours of war, quarrels and frictions, in any corner of the world spell loss and harm to British commercial and financial interests… So manifold and ubiquitous are British trade and finance that, whatever else may be the outcome of a disturbance of the peace, we shall be the losers.

  Those words were echoed eight years later by Lord Chatfield, who observed that ‘we have got most of the world already or the best parts of it, and we only want to keep what we have got [and] to prevent others from taking it away from us’. Given her vast commitments, Britain certainly seemed in no position to worry about any other country’s security. As the Conserv
ative leader Bonar Law remarked in 1922: ‘We cannot alone act as the policemen of the world.’ The reality was that defending even her own possessions could prove impossible in the face of multiple challenges. In the words of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (writing in 1921): ‘Our small army is much too scattered… in no single theatre are we strong enough – not in Ireland, nor England, nor on the Rhine, nor in Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopotamia, nor Persia, nor India.’

  The Royal Navy, too, soon found itself overstretched. The construction of a naval base at Singapore, which began in 1921 but was more or less suspended until 1932, was supposed to create a new hub for imperial security in Asia. But with Britain’s naval forces concentrated in European waters, the base itself threatened to become a source of vulnerability, not strength. By the time of the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference, British policy-makers had abandoned the historical goal of naval preponderance by agreeing to parity with the United States, an advantageous arrangement for the latter given its far fewer overseas commitments. Britannia had ceased to rule the waves, in the Pacific at least. In April 1931 the Admiralty acknowledged that ‘in certain circumstances’ the Navy’s strength was ‘definitely below that required to keep our sea communications open in the event of our being drawn into a war’. In the face of a Japanese attack, the Chiefs of Staff admitted in February 1932, ‘the whole of our territory in the Far East as well as the coastline of India and the Dominions and our vast trade and shipping, lies open.’ Eight months later, the same body admitted that, ‘should war break out in Europe, far from having the means to intervene, we should be able to do little more than hold the frontiers and outposts of the Empire during the first few months of the war’. A war in Asia would ‘expose to depredation, for an inestimable period, British possessions and dependencies, trade and communications, including those of India, Australia and New Zealand’.

  The Dominions – as the principal colonies of white settlement were now known – had played a vital role in the First World War, as suppliers of both materiel and men. Around 16 per cent of all troops mobilized by Britain and her Empire had come from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. After the war, their economic importance grew still further, accounting for around a quarter of British trade by 1938. The adoption of ‘imperial preference’ – empire-wide tariffs – at the Imperial Economic Conference at Ottowa in 1932 was in many ways merely a response to a worldwide swing towards protectionism, but it reinforced the reliance of British business on imperial markets. Including all British possessions, exports to the Empire accounted for more than two-fifths of total exports. Partly encouraged by legislation, and partly by the many inter-war defaults by sovereign borrowers, British investors were also putting more and more of their money into the colonies and Dominions. Between 1924 and 1928 around 59 per cent of the value of overseas capital issues on the London market were for imperial borrowers; ten years later the proportion was 86 per cent. The Empire, as we have seen, was a treasure house of vital raw materials, which grew more important with each new refinement of military technology. In economic as well as in strategic terms, the Empire never seemed so important to Britain as it did in the 1930s. Yet its military (and diplomatic) importance was simultaneously declining. Each of the Dominions in turn made it clear that British policy-makers could not take their support for granted in the event of a second great European conflict. Moreover, as the Chiefs of Staff observed in 1936: ‘The greater our commitments to Europe, the less will be our ability to secure our Empire and its communications.’ In a review presented to the Chiefs of Staff in July 1936, the Joint Planning Sub-Committee summed up the military case for appeasement exactly:

  From a military standpoint, owing to the extreme weakness of France, the possibility of an understanding between Germany and Japan, and even in some circumstances Italy, and because of the immensity of the risks to which a direct attack upon Great Britain would expose the Empire, the present situation dictates a policy directed towards an understanding with Germany and a consequent postponement of the danger of German aggression against any vital interest of ours.

  What precisely were Britain’s military commitments in Europe? In 1925 the Baldwin government had signed the Treaty of Locarno, guaranteeing the Franco-German and Belgian-German borders as they had been redrawn at Versailles. But Locarno conspicuously made no such international commitment with respect to Germany’s eastern frontier. Moreover, just as had been the case before 1914, formal commitments to the security of Western Europe were not followed up by meaningful military contingency planning. As A. J. P. Taylor put it, Locarno seemed to imply that ‘Splendid isolation had come again.’ As a result, when Britain sought to broker an agreement between France and Germay over disarmament – or, rather, German rearmament, since the British proposals of January 1934 envisaged a trebling of the German army to 300,000 – the French could legitimately ask what kind of practical reassurance London could offer them for the eventuality of another German invasion. The answer was: None. Britain’s commitment to the defence of Belgium was arguably less binding than it had been in 1914.

  Yet Britain could not pretend that she had no stake in the security of Belgium and France. The May 1934 report of the Defence Requirements Committee reminded the Cabinet of the rather obvious reality that Germany posed a bigger strategic threat to the United Kingdom than Japan and that therefore, as in 1914, Britain might be called on to send troops to the aid of Belgium (and possibly also Holland) in the event of a German invasion. Indeed, the growing importance of air power made it even more imperative than in the past that the Channel coast should not fall into the hands of a hostile continental power. Germany was therefore ‘the ultimate potential enemy against whom all our “long-range” defence policy must be directed’. What form should that ‘long-range’ policy take? If there was one lesson that might have been learned from 1914 it was that a small standing army in Europe was unlikely to deter the Germans. Yet the option of building up a large land force, available for deployment in Western Europe, was rejected in favour of enlarging the ‘Metropolitan’ (that is, British-based) air force to eighty or more squadrons, leaving the army with little more than five regular divisions available to send across the Channel as a ‘Field Force’ – almost exactly as few as there had been in 1914. By the end of 1937 its size had actually been reduced. By 1938 it had been turned into an expeditionary force for use only in imperial trouble-spots. The ineffectual Minister for the Co-Ordination of Defence, Sir Thomas Inskip, was not oblivious to the risk that was being run:

  If France were again to be in danger of being overrun by land armies, a situation might arise when, as in the last war, we have to improvise our army to assist her. Should this happen, the Government of the day would most certainly be criticized for having neglected to provide against so obvious a contingency.

  Nevertheless, the decision was taken, as the Minister for War Leslie Hore-Belisha put it, ‘to put the continental commitment last’. General Sir Henry Pownall, the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence, was appalled, but overruled. Incredibly, the army’s budget was actually cut in the wake of the Austrian Anschluss. Things were no better by the time of the Munich crisis. It was not until February 1939 that the idea of a European expeditionary force was revived, and even at that late juncture it was to be composed of just six regular and four territorial divisions.

  The rationale of relying on air power merits further exploration, for it was pregnant with future difficulties. As we have seen, the role envisaged for Britain’s enlarged air force was not defensive but offensive; it was to be, in the words of the future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, ‘an air force of such striking power that no-one will care to run risks with it’. If Britain could credibly threaten to bomb German cities into rubble from the air, so it was argued, the Germans might be deterred from using force against their neighbours. The idea that this might deter Hitler was self-reflexive; because the
y themselves feared German bombers so much, the British assumed that Hitler would fear their bombers equally. Though Churchill was right that Germany was out-building Britain as far as numbers of aircraft were concerned, British analysts systematically overestimated the Luftwaffe’s capacity to inflict casualties on the population of the capital. That in itself was a grave error, for it caused the government to exaggerate the threat Hitler could pose to Britain in 1938; fantasizing about a flattened London became a substitute for thinking about realistic worst-case scenarios. Also deplorable was the Air Staff’s slowness to work out how Britain’s own strategic bombing forces would actually be used; when it came to the crunch in September 1939, Bomber Command confined itself to dropping propaganda leaflets, having come to the conclusion that trying to hit German industrial targets would be too costly. Most shocking of all is the comparative neglect, until the eleventh hour, of Britain’s air defences, which were to prove the nation’s salvation in 1940. True, vital work was being done by the Aeronautical Research Department chaired by Henry Tizard, which adopted the radar technology developed by Robert Watson-Watt at the National Physical Laboratory as early as 1935. But the Air Ministry was much slower to appreciate the need to invest in fighters capable of intercepting incoming bombers. Another side effect of the focus on long-range bombing was that it further diminished the strategic importance of Belgium and France, since it was assumed from the outset that the bombers would fly from British bases.