Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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485 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

argued, was to combine all the elements where Britain was powerful

to defeat the threats to her global system. A small professional army

would use amphibious mobility to throw the enemy off balance – not

engage in the brutal combat of the Western Front. Sea-power would

throttle a landlocked aggressor. Economic warfare would demolish its

civilian morale. ‘Moral war’ would subvert its self-belief and ideology.

The aim was to avoid a new Armageddon, one decisive battle on which

all would turn. The ‘indirect approach’ (Liddell Hart’s key concept)

was intended to dissuade an aggressor as much as defeat him. A cold

war of diplomacy and suasion, on the Byzantine principle of ‘watch

and weaken’, could be waged indeﬁnitely at sustainable cost. Its central

virtue in the political climate of the 1930s was to make the defence of

empire compatible with mass democracy.

The unanswered question

as war drew nearer was whether it would be enough to save Britain’s

system from catastrophic defeat.

The uncertain state of British public opinion was a major

inﬂuence on policy. For a time, the political and practical limits to

rearmament seemed to argue against a futile attempt to hold on to

everything. Perhaps the proﬂigate sweep of Britain’s possessions and

spheres (expanded still further after 1918) was too vast to defend.

Perhaps some retrenchment was wise. It was widely acknowledged that

seizing Germany’s colonies after 1918 had been an act of injustice. Some

colonial concession might pave the way for a European d

etente.

The

same might have been said for the imperial ambitions of Italy and

Japan. At a time of depression, Britain lacked both motive and means

to ﬁnance the progress of her ‘undeveloped estates’. A more equitable

share-out of the colonial world might improve diplomatic relations and

curb the costs of defence. But, for all their agonising over how to protect

them, British leaders showed little desire to shrink their global commit-

ments. Indeed, the whole logic of their policy – and of the resort to

appeasement – was a tenacious defence of Britain’s worldwide claims.

The paradox perhaps is more apparent than real. Returning

Germany’s lost colonies to a Nazi regime raised awkward questions

about their status as mandates. The attempt to do so would have roused

humanitarian outrage. Some of them, anyway, were not Britain’s to

return. Nor was it easier to practise partition diplomacy on the few

sovereign states that survived in Afro-Asia – the obvious lesson of the

Ethiopian debacle. Any acknowledgment of Japanese claims in China

(as opposed to outlying provinces like Manchuria) would have faced

486 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

similar protest and the intimidating prospect of American hostility. A

further objection was the uncertain reward for such painful conces-

sions. Hitler showed no disposition to trade a European settlement

for colonial small change. There was no serious chance that Tokyo’s

army-dominated governments would agree a limit on their deepening

involvement in mainland China. British leaders had to bear in mind that

to acquiesce in more than modest adjustments to the post-war treaties

would ruin their claim to represent legality and order in international

affairs. This inhibition was closely connected to another constraint no

less powerful for remaining implicit. Governments in London were all

too aware that their imperial system was in a delicate stage of con-

stitutional transition. The dominions’ independence had been formally

ceded in the Statute of Westminster. India’s promotion to (qualiﬁed)

dominion status was clearly foreshadowed in the 1935 Act. Imperial

devolution made it harder to be sure of the dominions’ support for

British commitments in Europe, of which their governments had always

been wary. But it also placed a premium on British prestige as the primus

inter pares of the ‘British nations’. Any public admission of Britain’s

military weakness, or of her reluctance to defend all her worldwide

interests, might weaken her grip on dominion loyalty. Ofﬁcial doubts

about the navy’s ability to reinforce Singapore in a Far Eastern crisis

were carefully concealed from the dominion premiers at the Imperial

Conference in 1937. Similar arguments about imperial prestige applied

with even greater force in India, Egypt and the Middle Eastern states.

With so few concessions to make, and no reliable clues as to

where Germany’s, Italy’s and Japan’s ambitions might lead, there was

little alternative but to strengthen the base of British military power as

quickly as possible. From 1936 onwards, the strategic debate became

more and more fraught. The ‘Anti-Comintern Pact’ signed between

Berlin and Tokyo in November 1936, despite its avowed purpose,

warned that the two main ‘revisionist’ powers might combine their

assault on the Eurasian peace settlement of 1919–22, and its main cham-

pion, Britain. Deterring Japan, insisted the Admiralty, meant sending

the ‘Main Fleet’ to Singapore. But sending the Fleet east would leave

the Mediterranean defenceless for an indeﬁnite period, exposing Malta,

Suez and Egypt. By May 1937, the planners were saying that the Fleet

could only set out if Germany and Italy had declared their neutrality

in an East Asia war – an unlikely scenario.

A ‘new standard navy’,

matching the sea-power of Germany and Japan, would not be enough if

487 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

Italy entered the war. Nor could it defend Britain against what seemed

the greatest danger of all, not a cross-Channel invasion but a ‘knock-

out’ blow from the air. To counter the threat of such a German attack,

the Defence Requirements Committee insisted on ‘air parity’ with

Germany: a heavy bomber force; 2,000 planes with the vital reserves;

and the industrial capacity to match Germany’s effort. When the

Treasury came to add up the bill, the ﬁgures were daunting. The max-

imum sum that could be spent safely over the following ﬁve years,

Cabinet ministers were told, was barely enough for the navy and air

force, let alone the army as well.

Thus, by the time that Neville Chamberlain became prime min-

ister in May 1937, the strategic outlook had become suddenly bleaker

and was getting much worse. In July, full-scale war broke out between

China and Japan. In August, there was ﬁerce ﬁghting in Shanghai, and,

by September, a Japanese blockade of the China coast. Japan’s invad-

ing army would soon be more than a million strong. In November

1937, Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact to afﬁrm solidarity with

Germany and Japan. Meanwhile, in what was Britain’s most likely

outside source of supply, the American Congress passed the Neutral-

ity Act to bar the sale of munitions of war to any belligerent. The

raising of loans there (a major recourse in the First World War) had

already been blocked by the Johnson Act three years earlier. But Cham-

berlain was a strong and self-conﬁdent leader whose administrative

ability and careful stewardship of public ﬁnance since the 1931 crash

had earned him his name as a safe pair of hands. Like most main-

stream opinion, he was strongly against a continental commitment for

the British army, or an alliance with France that might drag Britain

into an East European war. He also opposed too ﬁerce a response to

Japan’s advance into China, preferring the ‘indirect approach’ of giving

the Kuomintang government some ﬁnancial assistance. On this, and

on his eagerness to bury the hatchet with Italy, he was at odds with

Anthony Eden, his Foreign Secretary.

Unlike Eden (and the Admi-

ralty), Chamberlain saw little point in challenging Japan to win Amer-

ican goodwill,

and privately disparaged Washington’s diplomacy as

no more than words. In early 1938, he resisted Roosevelt’s proposal

of a peace initiative as untimely, pushing a discontented Eden into

resignation.

Chamberlain took what he considered a realistic view. He

favoured the build-up of naval strength, though not on the scale that

488 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

the Admiralty wanted. But he regarded the deterrent of air power as a

greater priority. With a heavy bomber force at Britain’s disposal, there

would be almost no danger of a German ‘knock-out blow’, since the

RAF’s retaliation would be swift and devastating. With the ‘knock-

out blow’ ruled out, Hitler would have to reckon on a ‘long war’,

if he aimed to ﬁght a war at all. In a ‘long war’, almost all experts

agreed, German chances were slender. There would be stalemate on

the Western Front, where France was defended by the Maginot Line,

and stalemate in the air. The longer war went on, the tighter would

be the British blockade on a German economy that was already over-

strained. And the more likely it would be that the United States would

relax its prohibition on providing cash and supplies. With every month

that passed, the Western Powers would grow stronger and Germany

weaker. In light of this, it seemed very unlikely that Hitler would

be rash enough to risk a second German defeat. The best he could

hope for was some territorial gains, a colony or two and an informal

hegemony in Southeastern Europe. So the centrepiece of Chamber-

lain’s grand strategy was to inveigle Hitler into a European settlement.

Once that was done, the ‘brutal friendship’ between Rome and Berlin

would quickly fade. When Europe was restabilised would be the time

to deal with Japan’s opportunistic imperialism. There was a wide con-

sensus (that included Churchill) that Japan would not dare to attack

British interests directly unless Britain had already been defeated in

Europe.

Chamberlain’s design had a seductive coherence. His critics

disliked his political tactics but they found it hard to gainsay his strategic

assumptions – in public at least. It was widely assumed that the ‘have-

not’ powers could not sustain their huge military budgets for much

longer without drastic damage to their civilian economies. The chances

that they could agree upon war aims and synchronise their strategies

against a set of great-power enemies that might include the United

States and the Soviet Union as well as Britain and France, seemed

remote. It seemed more likely that, after hufﬁng and pufﬁng, a new

equilibrium would emerge in Europe. In the short term, it was vital

to avoid an ‘accidental’ conﬂict. Thereafter, the greatest danger that

faced the British system was of bankrupting itself by overspending on

defence and risking a new ﬁnancial crisis on the scale it had faced in

1931. If that were to happen, the Chamberlainites might have argued,

the British world-system would disintegrate anyway.

489 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

Chamberlain’s ideas were soon to be put to the severest of tests.

In March 1938, the German army marched into Austria to impose the

Anschluss – Austro-German uniﬁcation – to wild local enthusiasm.

Two months later, Hitler opened the campaign for the separation of

the German-speaking Sudetenland from the main body of Czechoslo-

vakia, with the transparent intention (after the Anschluss) of absorbing

it into Germany. The Chamberlain policy now came to its crisis. It

seemed hard to oppose in principle the right of self-determination for

the Sudeten Germans. It was even harder to see in practice how Britain

could prevent the outcome Hitler wanted, without forming an alliance

with France and the Soviet Union.

The danger to Chamberlain’s policy

was that, if Hitler imposed his will without regard to Britain and France

(and then annexed the dismembered Czech state), their prestige would

collapse, and with it the leverage they needed to make Hitler agree

to a general settlement. This was the issue on which the crisis turned.

Britain and France had already agreed to the Sudetenland’s ‘return’ (in

actuality it had never been part of Germany) when Hitler demanded (at

the Godesberg meeting on 23–24 September) the immediate military

occupation of the Sudeten areas to ensure ‘stability’. Chamberlain’s

own inclination was to press the Czech government not to resist. But

a Cabinet revolt on 27 September, led by Halifax and Simon, his two

colleagues in the Inner Cabinet dealing with the crisis, brought matters

to the brink. The next day, the Royal Navy was mobilised. But a fur-

ther appeal to Hitler, and intervention by Mussolini, prepared the way

for the Munich Conference. At the fateful meeting on 30 September,

Hitler agreed to delay occupation and allow an international commis-

sion to supervise the sovereignty transfer. But, far more important, from

Chamberlain’s viewpoint, was his agreement that all future change

in European affairs should be settled peacefully between Britain and

Germany. Hitler, it seemed, had lost his nerve. It was this piece of

paper that Chamberlain ﬂourished to such huge acclaim on his return

to London, and with which he all but demolished his domestic critics.

The euphoria was pardonable. All roads had led to Munich.

The Admiralty view had been strongly against a premature confronta-

tion with Germany before the new ﬂeet was ready.

British intelli-

gence about the bomber threat (badly ﬂawed in practice) assumed that

Germany enjoyed decisive air superiority

and that Britain was still in

the danger zone of the ‘knock-out blow’. Despite French belligerence,

British leaders were highly sceptical of the French will to ﬁght or their

490 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

capacity to do so. It was widely doubted that British opinion would

support a war to keep the Sudetenland Czech. A grand alliance with

the Soviet Union and France, even had it been possible, would have

courted the risk of a European war with an aftermath worse than after

1918. The ﬂy in the ointment had been Hitler’s last brutal demand and

the angry reaction it evoked in Cabinet. The astonishing outcome had

seemed the best of all worlds, the vital ﬁrst step down the road to a

settlement. Hitler had even reiterated the naval promises made in June

1935.

But, as even Chamberlain himself may have sensed, it was too

good to be true. Hitler’s negative intentions soon became clear. And

less than six months after the Munich accords he occupied Prague and

added the rest of Czechoslovakia to the German Reich.

The defence

of empire had been based on the hope of a European peace: now it must

be built on the virtual certainty of a European war.

With the ﬁnal collapse of Chamberlain’s grand strategy, British

world policy fell apart in confusion. To salvage the shreds of his own

credibility and shore up French conﬁdence in British intentions, Cham-

berlain issued a guarantee to Poland: Britain would ﬁght for Poland’s

‘integrity’.

As panic spread about German inﬂuence in Southeast-

ern Europe and the Mediterranean, further guarantees (and ﬁnancial

aid) were extended to Turkey, Greece and oil-rich Romania. Now that

resistance to Germany depended so heavily on France’s will to ﬁght,

it was no longer possible to refuse a continental commitment. Intro-

ducing conscription was an early sign that sending a large army into

Europe was no longer ruled out. The strategic implications went wider

and wider. On the reasonable assumption that, when war came, Italy

would join Germany in an attack on France, the old order of priorities

was abruptly reversed. The Fleet would stay in the Mediterranean to

protect vital interests (especially the Canal) and begin the assault on

the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis powers. Whatever happened in East

Asia, there would be no ‘Main Fleet to Singapore’, or anything like it,

for an indeﬁnite time. The Admiralty refused to abandon the Singa-

pore strategy and insisted that a defensive force would be sent to cover

any threat from Japan.

Their nerve was tested in June 1939 when

the British concession area at Tientsin, a treaty-port near Peking, was

blockaded by the Japanese army searching for Chinese ‘terrorists’. The

Chiefs of Staff decided that no more than two of the navy’s eleven avail-

able battleships could be sent to the East if the confrontation turned

violent: six had to be kept in Home waters, and three in the Eastern

491 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

Mediterranean.

At best, they could act as ‘some deterrent’ against

a major Japanese move into ‘the South China Seas or Australasian

waters’. If the Japanese moved south ‘in force’, the China squadron

would have to leave Singapore and ‘retire westwards’.

To relieve the

crisis, the British ate humble pie.

Meanwhile, home defence loomed

larger and larger. As rearmament quickened and its cost raced ahead

of the projected budget (hurriedly increased from £1,500 million to

£2,100 million), purely defensive needs assumed an ever higher pri-

ority: ﬁghters (to defend) not bombers (to attack); escort vessels (to

guard convoys) not battleships. The Admiralty’s request for a building

programme to match the expected new level of German construction

(Hitler had denounced the 35 per cent limit) was quietly shelved.

The

‘new standard navy’ would never be built.

Two further shocks lay in wait. Fighting the ‘long war’ had

been the centrepiece of British grand strategy. Offensively, that meant

blockade. Defensively, it meant Britain’s using her ﬁnancial muscle to

outlast any enemy, to fund her allies and buy war materials from any

part of the globe. In early July, the Treasury punctured this grand illu-

sion. Britain’s gold stock was larger than in 1914, it said, but much of it

was ‘fugitive money’ escaping from Europe. A large fraction had gone

(to the United States), and more would follow if and when the threat of

war continued. In other respects, the situation was even worse. In 1914,

short-term capital or ‘hot money’ had ﬂowed back to London: in 1939,

it was ﬂowing away. In 1914, Britain had a foreign income stream of

£200 million a year to help ﬁnance any overseas purchases and provide

collateral on foreign loans. In 1939,£200 million was the total sum of

Britain’s saleable foreign securities. In the First World War, Britain had

been able to borrow over £800 million from the American government.

In 1939, such loans were banned by the Johnson Act against defaulting

debtors. Even at pre-war levels of spending, the reserves in gold and

foreign securities ‘would barely last three years’: in conditions of war,

it would be very much shorter.

In Cabinet, the Chancellor drew the

brutal lesson. The longer that war was delayed, the weaker would be

Britain’s ﬁnancial position.

But the last shock was the worst. In the

aftermath of Hitler’s entry into Prague, British leaders had toyed with

the idea of a Soviet alliance to restore the European balance of power.

There were many doubts. Could the Red Army ﬁght? Would the East

European states desert to the Germans? Would the dominions disap-

prove (Canada and South Africa were said to)? Would Stalin embroil

492 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Britain and France in an East European war? Chamberlain’s fear was

that an alliance would trigger not stop an all-out war and recreate the

catastrophe of the First World War. Perhaps for this reason the negoti-

ations were desultory. It soon turned out that they were also academic.

On 23 August 1939, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was announced to

the world. Germany and Russia were to be friends if not allies. Russia’s

vast resources (including its oil) would be open to Hitler. The blockade

had been broken before it began. Britain was at war less than two weeks

later.

By a series of steps the policy-makers in London had led the

British world-system into a strategic impasse of almost catastrophic

proportions. They had placed home defence ﬁrst because Britain’s safety

in Europe was the ultimate surety for her imperial power. But when it

came to a ﬁght they found they had no means of winning a European

war. They had abandoned one ally (Czechoslovakia) that had a modern

army, and chosen another (however gallant) that did not. They had

done so on a premise – that time was on their side – which turned out

to be wrong. They could do almost nothing to help their chosen ally,

Poland, nor bring pressure to bear on their enemy, Germany. They had

hesitated over an alliance with Stalin, only to ﬁnd that he had joined

their enemies. The weapon of blockade was struck from their hands.

Planning to crush Germany by their ﬁnancial power, they found their

own war-chest shrinking with every month that passed. Their last hope

of forestalling Germany’s continental supremacy rested almost entirely

on resistance by France. But ‘war to the last Frenchman’ proved a

dangerous motto for the British Empire.

In less than half a decade, British world power seemed to have

shrunk to undigniﬁed impotence, exposing the British system to an

international war it had little chance of winning. With all the wisdom

of hindsight, historians have assembled a catalogue of errors. But the

deeper question is much more interesting. What shaped the course that

took British leaders into the strategic quagmire of September 1939?

Five factors exerted a magnetic force upon their geopolitical reasoning.

First, the system they managed was dispersed and devolved. This had its

advantages, but its resources could not be assembled quickly, or used

to meet a sudden emergency. Neither the dominions nor India nor her

commercial empire could contribute anything to strengthen Britain’s

hand in the pre-war crises when the initiative was lost. Secondly, British

leaders were acutely conscious of the peculiar openness of their global

493 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

system. There was no limes behind which to retreat, no East Wall or

South Wall to keep out the ‘barbarians’. The British system was a

marine archipelago: even India was to all intents a strategic ‘island’. Its

survival amidst the new imperialisms depended upon Britain’s ability to

shufﬂe military power between its various segments, refusing to commit

more than the minimum needed in particular places at a particular time.

They had no choice but to maintain their huge ﬁxed investment in an

all-purpose navy even at the expense of their offensive capacity, since

sea-power alone permitted the strategy of ‘shufﬂe’. Thirdly, almost

no one believed that Britain should be an economic Sparta, with a

controlled economy organised for war. On the contrary, ‘overstraining’

the civilian economy would be a self-inﬂicted and perhaps fatal wound.

Germany, reasoned most British observers, was bound to ‘blow up’: the

pressure of rearmament on its civilian sector would become unbearable.

Britain’s ‘free’ economy would win the day. And, if the worst came to

the worst, its open structure and global connections would be the vital

means of throttling Germany in the economic struggle. Hence what was

needed was not an all-out drive but a skilful balance between immediate

need and conserving strength for the longer war. Fourthly, for all their

pragmatism and their inherited lore of imperial statecraft (a ruthless

business), British leaders displayed a curious faith in the international

system and its framework of law, perhaps because so much of it was

their handiwork and it functioned de facto as an informal extension of

their imperial system. They were loath to admit that, for other states,

it offered little to ease their frustrations and grievances. They found it

hard to conceive that ‘civilised’ governments would show contemptuous

indifference for its rules and procedures. In their insular safety, they

failed to grasp the cyclonic force of the ideological wars being fought

in Eurasia. This was most tragically evident in Chamberlain’s failure

(and that of so many others) to grasp the unlimited scope of Hitler’s

ambitions, the savage nature of the Nazi regime, the tectonic scale of

the coming conﬂict and the brutal imperatives behind the Nazi–Soviet

pact. They were liberals at sea in a revolutionary age.

Finally, they were also the victims of a cognitive bias that

had grown notably stronger in Britain’s inter-war culture. The idea

that Britain formed a world of its own was very old. Primacy at sea,

the rewards of trade and the growth of ‘new Britains’ sharpened the

Victorians’ sense of British ‘exceptionalism’. The assumptions behind

it were tested to the limit in the First World War. Through a tortuous

494 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

rationale, they were vindicated by victory. The horror of war on the

Western Front and revulsion against what seemed a futile slaughter

made it easy to claim a decisive role for economic blockade and what

Liddell Hart would call ‘the indirect approach’. The crucial lesson of

1918 was lost. Mackinder’s insistence that, without decisive action to

stop a ‘heartland’ empire being formed in Eurasia, the ‘world-island’

would soon come to rule the world, was almost forgotten. Its corollary,

that British world power required the closest attention to the Euro-

pean balance, seemed alarmist, impracticable and unnecessary. Hence

the cavalier presumption that French power would sufﬁce in a German

war, and that the most ambiguous promise of British aid was all that

was needed to steel French opinion for a future ﬁght. Hence the failure

to see that a geostrategic earthquake at their own front door could tear

up the foundations of their worldwide power.

The road to Singapore

The immediate question on the outbreak of war was whether the

British world-system would hold together. A year before, there had

been grounds for unease. In Canada, Australia and South Africa, the

prospect of war in defence of Czech rule over the Sudeten Germans had

aroused strong misgivings. But there, as in Britain, Hitler’s brutal repu-

diation of the Munich agreement was a turning point. The European

crisis could no longer be dismissed as a question of frontier adjust-

ment in Eastern Europe. In March 1939, in the Canadian Parliament,

the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who had made the dominion’s

autonomy in external affairs a constant refrain since the early 1920s,

all but acknowledged that, if Britain went to war, Canada was bound

to follow. He rehearsed the importance of Canada’s ties with Britain,

and the unaggressive nature of British world power. ‘A world in which

Britain was weak would be greatly worse for small countries than a

world in which she was strong.’

As a member of the Commonwealth,

Canada would not escape attack by an enemy of Britain. But the crucial

speech was made by King’s French Canadian deputy, Ernest Lapointe.

Since the conscription crisis of 1917–18, French Canadian antipathy

to involvement in a ‘British’ war had been the most dangerous theme

in Canadian politics. For the Liberals especially, even debating the

issue held enormous risks since almost any deﬁnition of the party’s