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

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495 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

view was likely to drive a wedge between its supporters in Quebec

and those elsewhere in Canada. This was why King had strenuously

insisted that no decision could be made in advance. But, by March

1939, this carefully disingenuous position had become untenable. It

was Lapointe who spelled out the compromise. He shrewdly reminded

Quebec that to declare neutrality would mean seceding from the Com-

monwealth, and breaking with the Crown and Westminster, where

the power to change the Canadian constitution was still deposited –

largely because of French Canadian fears that its ‘patriation’ would be

exploited by the non-French majority. But his central argument was

one of brutal realism. Canadian neutrality would mean the internment

of British soldiers and ships of war. ‘I ask any one of my fellow coun-

trymen whether they believe seriously that this could be done without a

civil war in Canada.’

On neutrality, British Canadian sentiment was

far too strong to be thwarted.

Quebec’s price, said Lapointe, was a

promise that there should be no conscription. King made the best of

it. The idea of sending Canadian troops to Europe was out of date,

he said. The defence of the Empire had been decentralised. The issue

would not arise. The King–Lapointe formula was a political triumph.

The huge popular success of the royal tour of Canada in the summer

gave ample proof that Lapointe was right. When London declared war,

the Canadian decision was the merest formality.

For quite different reasons, the careful distinction made by

Mackenzie King between entering the war and sending troops to Europe

was forcefully echoed by Australian leaders. There was never any ques-

tion of Australia’s not following the British lead. ‘Let me be clear on

this’, said the Prime Minister Robert Menzies in a broadcast at the end

of April, ‘I cannot have a defence of Australia that depends upon British

sea-power as its ﬁrst element . . . and at the same time refuse Britain Aus-

tralian co-operation at a time of common danger. The British countries

of the world must stand or fall together.’

But, in his speech on 6

September, Menzies carefully avoided spelling out the military impli-

cations of Australian entry; in fact, sending an expeditionary force to

Europe along the lines of 1914 had been ruled out the previous day.

Like the Labor leader John Curtin, Menzies and his cabinet regarded

the ﬁrst priority as the defence of Australia against the growing threat

from the ‘Near North’. Throwing their lot in with Britain was to express

Britannic solidarity, assert a reciprocal claim on British naval protection

and seek the best available guarantee of Australia’s survival as a ‘free

496 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

white country’.

In the New Zealand Parliament, the government’s

afﬁrmation of loyalty to King and Commonwealth was seconded by

the opposition, and the House proceeded without further ado to sing

the national anthem.

In South Africa, however, things were not so

simple.

Since 1933, South Africa had been governed by a coalition

between the National party led by General Hertzog, and the South

Africa party of Smuts, supported by most ‘English’ voters. After ‘fusion’

in 1934, they came together as the United party. By agreeing upon

South Africa’s status as a fully self-governing dominion, with the King

as head of state, fusion seemed to have buried the long-standing quarrel

between ‘republicans’ and ‘loyalists’, and paved the way for a (white)

South African identity common to both Afrikaners and English. With

the return of prosperity, the United party trounced the Nationalist rump

led by D. F. Malan in the general election in 1938. But Afrikaner opinion

was volatile. 1938 saw a huge commemoration of the Afrikaner ‘Great

Trek’ a century before, the crystallisation of the founding myth of the

Afrikaner people, and its physical expression in the plans to construct

a great Voortrekker monument. At precisely this moment, the crisis in

Europe reopened the subject of South Africa’s status: was Pretoria free

to stay neutral in a ‘British’ war? For Hertzog, the price of fusion was a

deﬁnite yes, and he held to this view when the theoretical war of 1938

became the actual war of 1939. To decide otherwise would split the

Afrikaner people, wreck the fragile bark of racial good feeling (‘racial-

ism’ in this period referred usually to English–Afrikaner antipathy) and

smooth the path of Malanite republicanism.

The Governor-General,

Patrick Duncan, Smuts’ former lieutenant and an old prot

e of Milner,

raged privately against London’s ‘war for Danzig’ and the damage it

would do to fusion, the crowning achievement of South African politics

since the making of Union.

But, when Hertzog put his views to the

fusion Cabinet, it voted against him by seven to six.

As a result, the debate in parliament on South African entry

was quite unlike those in the other dominions, where (whether for

or against) they were largely formal. Hertzog rejected the argument

that Hitler was set on world domination and proposed a convoluted

‘neutrality’ by which South Africa would meet its obligations to its

Commonwealth associates and the defence of the Simonstown base

while playing no part in the ‘European’ war. He was opposed by Smuts.

Smuts had been critical of British policy in Europe and had agreed to

497 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

neutrality in 1938. But he was also convinced that South Africa would

be irrevocably damaged by breaking the British connection and by the

isolation that would follow a declaration of neutrality. Unlike most

of the Afrikaner politicians, Smuts was convinced that a ‘white’ South

Africa would only be safe if it absorbed the colonial regions that lay to

the north – a future that the break with Britain would instantly abort.

Smuts did not lay bare this reasoning. He avoided any hint of a ‘duty’

to Britain – the red rag to the Afrikaner bull. He emphasised instead

the danger to South Africa (especially South West Africa) of Hitler’s

drive for world domination, and her need for friends. But perhaps

his shrewdest hit was to yoke together a threat and a promise. Smuts

carefully quoted the speech by Lapointe in which he conceded that

neutrality was impossible, except at the risk of a civil war in Canada.

And he was at pains to insist that there was no question of South African

troops being sent to the war. In the vote that followed, Smuts carried

more than half of the United party with him, as well as the English

in the small Dominion and Labour parties. Neutrality was rejected by

sixty-seven to eighty.

In all these four cases, ‘Britannic’ feeling was a powerful force

for alignment with Britain, and an implicit threat that neutrality was

unworkable. In the quasi-dominion of Southern Rhodesia, it ensured

that ‘automatic’ entry was enthusiastically endorsed by white settler

opinion. In the Irish Free State (‘Eire’ since 1937), where it did not

exist, and where hostility to partition trumped any sense of shared

strategic interest, a pragmatic neutrality (sometimes described as ‘half

in, half out’) was the only option. The debate in the Dail on 2 September

1939 turned more on the emergency powers that the government would

assume.

In most of the rest of the Empire, dependent status made par-

ticipation involuntary. In India, however, the position was more compli-

cated. Under the constitution of 1935, provincial self-government had

been conceded to much of British (i.e. non-Princely) India, and, after

the 1937 elections, most of the provinces were to be ruled by Congress

ministers. Technically, since India had not yet attained its promised

status as a federal dominion, it entered the war by the Viceroy’s procla-

mation. But the real issue was whether the Indian ministers in the

provincial governments would remain at their posts and serve a war

effort directed by the Viceroy in Delhi.

It was an awkward dilemma. To abandon ofﬁce after only two

years might wreck the chance of entrenching Congress at the provincial

498 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

level and reinforcing its leverage on the central government where the

Viceroy was still supreme. On the other hand, well before the war,

there had been a growing fear among many Congress leaders that the

provincial ministries would prefer the fruits of power to a perhaps futile

struggle against the federal constitution that Nehru had called ‘a charter

of slavery’ (it balanced Congress’ inﬂuence against that of the Muslims

and the Princes). The approach of war gave the High Command an

opportunity to reassert its control over the Congress ministries, reunify

the movement and restore the priority of political advance at the Indian

centre by forcing the British to scrap federation. It insisted that Indian

support could only be given if the London government renounced impe-

rialism and promised independence to India, with immediate effect so

far as was possible.

At the provincial level, this ideological appeal

was reinforced by more practical fears. Congress ministers were bound

to be anxious that remaining in ofﬁce, and aiding the war effort, would

make them the target for public resentment when its costs were felt.

So, when the Viceroy promised no more than a post-war review of

the 1935 constitution, the Congress ministries in Bombay, Madras, the

United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa and the North

West Frontier Province followed the High Command’s instructions and

resigned in a body. What Congress could not do was to win the sup-

port of the Muslim League for its policy of pressure. Jinnah’s price

was predictably high: recognition of the League as the sole represen-

tative of all Indian Muslims. No agreement was possible.

So, while

Jinnah too had a bone to pick with the British Raj, Muslim cooperation

was not withdrawn, and in the Punjab and Bengal Muslim-dominated

governments gave unconditional backing to the imperial war.

For many months it was war in slow motion and a war without

strategy. Chamberlain’s plans were opaque, but the apparent aim was

to contain German expansion without recourse to unlimited war. The

ﬁrst priority was to strengthen the air force, the vital shield against

the ‘knock-out’ blow. The timetable for sending a large army to France

was much more leisurely. Instead of the ﬁfty-ﬁve divisions that Churchill

wanted to match France’s effort, barely twenty were planned for the sec-

ond year of war.

Far from rearming to the hilt with maximum speed,

Chamberlain was determined to conserve British resources and avoid

the sell-off of overseas assets. At the present rate of spending, calculated

the American business magazine Fortune (a little wistfully) in the spring

of 1940, it would be four years before Britain and France had to realise

499 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

their direct investments abroad.

Meanwhile, the Western Powers

stood on the defensive: even at sea the Royal Navy was fully stretched

to contain the German attack using U-boats and cruisers. One German

raider in the North Atlantic, grumbled Churchill (now First Lord of

the Admiralty), required the efforts of half of Britain’s battle ﬂeet.

But, as the weeks of inaction stretched into months, the risk of disaster

seemed more and more remote. The ‘worst-case scenario’ of the pre-

war strategists had failed to materialise. Italy and Japan both remained

neutral. Germany’s failure to strike suggested a loss of self-conﬁdence.

On 4 April 1940, Chamberlain told a Conservative party meeting that

‘Hitler had missed the bus’. Hitler might have replied: some miss, some

bus. Five days later, he invaded Denmark. On 10 May (as Churchill

became premier), the Germans attacked in the West. On 14 June, they

occupied Paris, and, on 22 June, received the surrender of France.

The fall of France opened the decisive phase of Britain’s impe-

rial crisis. While the hiatus had lasted, the internal relations of the

British system had seemed little affected by the strains of war. But the

collapse of France was a catastrophic blow, whose full implications

had been scarcely imaginable before it actually happened. The disas-

ter that had loomed only brieﬂy over the British world-system in mid-

1918 now arrived in earnest. Britain itself was exposed to invasion.

France’s coastline became the springboard for the German onslaught

in the North Atlantic. French defeat was the signal for Italian aggres-

sion in the Mediterranean and a direct attack on British control over

Egypt and Suez. It was an open encouragement to a Japanese advance

into French Indo-China, as the forward base for the invasion of British

Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. It was the brutal demolition of

almost all the assumptions on which conﬁdence in the future of British

world power had come to depend: the shield afforded by the European

balance of power; the sufﬁciency of British naval strength once ade-

quately modernised; the latent force of global economic power once

properly mobilised. The Allied economic strategy, remarked a writer in

Fortune, ‘like their military, had a Maginot Line – their free and fruitful

institutions against which no reluctant army of slaves could possibly

prevail. Behind these, as behind the immobile bastions in France, they

hopefully undertook to ﬁght a war of position, “of limited risks”, until

they could laboriously convert their incredible wealth into goods of

destruction. But the enemy, who was committed to a war of unlimited

risk, did not wait.’

Amid the terrible urgencies of an ever-widening

500 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

war, both the material resources and sustaining myths of the pre-war

empire began to look dangerously frail.

Between June 1940 and October 1942 a disastrous defeat in

one or more theatre of war threatened the rapid collapse of British

world power. The most pressing danger was the invasion of Britain

itself, thwarted in the hour of maximum danger by the desperate strug-

gle for air supremacy over Southeast England and the English Channel

in the Battle of Britain. But the extreme vulnerability of Britain during

the long year of war without any great-power ally meant that Cham-

berlain’s ﬁnancial caution had to be cast to the wind in the race to

buy arms before it was too late. The long-war illusion had become

the short-war nightmare. Meanwhile, a vast effort was being put into

the build-up of air power, the one weapon with which Britain could

strike directly at Germany. The new war in the Middle East also cre-

ated a voracious demand for manpower, supplies and the shipping to

send them. As the Mediterranean route grew more dangerous (and was

eventually closed), the importance of the Cape and of reinforcements

from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India in the defence

of Egypt became greater and greater. ‘On no account’, wrote Churchill

in January 1941, ‘must General Smuts be discouraged from his bold

and sound policy or working South African Forces into the main the-

atre.’

By June 1941, Churchill intended Britain’s Middle East forces

to comprise some sixteen divisions: eight Indian, four Australian, two

South African, one New Zealand and three British.

But the calami-

tous intervention in Greece (partly to forestall the German overawing

of Turkey), and the dramatic impact of Rommel’s Afrika Korps on

the North African campaign, wrecked the early hopes of a decisive

imperial victory. By June 1942, the defence of Egypt and Suez, and

Britain’s whole position in the Middle East, had reached its lowest ebb.

To Churchill and his advisers it was obvious that, if Egypt fell, the

British world-system would be cut in half. In the North Atlantic, they

faced a struggle that was no less decisive for British prospects. A huge

proportion of Britain’s naval capacity, including some of the most pow-

erful ships, was diverted to convoying and the hunt for U-boats and the

even more dangerous German surface raiders. By June 1941, the losses

of shipping had become so heavy that further announcement of them

was abruptly halted. The intense strain felt in the North Atlantic and

Mediterranean meant that any sizeable reinforcement of British sea-

power in Southeast Asia was out of the question, despite the warning

501 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

signs of a Japanese advance and the rising tension between Tokyo and

Washington. It was the impossibility of assembling a larger force in time

that led to the fateful decision in October 1941 to send Prince of Wales,

one of the Navy’s most up-to-date battleships, to deter any Japanese

move – but without the air-cover or ﬂotilla defence that was its vital

complement. The sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse within days

of the outbreak of the Paciﬁc War removed all chance of disrupting

Japan’s invasion of Malaya, and its epic climax, the fall of Singapore

in the middle of February 1942.

The four-cornered assault on the British world-system did not

bring about a catastrophic defeat, nor the total disintegration that

haunted the strategists. But it did set in motion a rapid, cumulative and

irreversible transformation of the pre-war structure of British world

power. This was felt differently by the four dominions that had joined

the war. In Canada, Mackenzie King’s initial caution about sending

troops to Europe had been quickly overcome.

King and his colleagues

were uneasy that too slow a mobilisation would expose them to attack

by the Conservative opposition for lack of loyalty to Britain.

But the

fall of France in June 1940 was a turning point. It rammed home the

danger that Canada itself might be exposed to attack if Britain were

invaded or British sea-power disabled. In August 1940, joint plan-

ning for the defence of the North American continent was agreed by

Roosevelt and King in their discussions at Ogdensburg. A long stride

had been taken towards strategic integration between the United States

and Canada. It passed almost unchallenged by King’s Conservative

critics

– although not by Churchill, to whom King retorted that

Canada was sending Britain military aid.

It would be wrong to see

the Ogdensburg agreement as the calculated transfer of Canadian secu-

rity from one great-power patron to another, or as a deliberate switch

from ‘imperialism’ to ‘continentalism’. In the frantic summer of 1940,

Canadian leaders contemplated the prospect of a British surrender –

in which all their available military strength would be swallowed

up – and its effects upon their trade-dependent economy and fragile

sectional politics. Canada might have to assume the leadership of the

Commonwealth much sooner than anyone expected, Mackenzie King

told his colleagues.

Once the immediate crisis was past, ministers like

Ralston (a First World War veteran) and Macdonald were determined

that Canada should be fully committed to the military as well as the

industrial struggle. But, at the moment of Britain’s greatest weakness,

502 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Ottawa had been forced to agree that its continental alliance should

henceforth be permanent.

The British connection was now to be lim-

ited by a third-party contract. Secondly, within a few months it was

also clear that the Canadian supplies for which Britain was desperate

could only be sent if Washington helped Canada to buy its American

imports, and ﬁlled the foreign exchange gap left by Britain’s inability

to pay for Canadian goods in convertible funds (before 1939, Canada

had met its deﬁcit with the United States from its positive balance on

British trade). The Hyde Park agreement of April 1941, said King,

was the ‘economic corollary’ of Ogdensburg:

strategic partnership

implied economic integration. Thirdly, the savage battle of the ship-

ping lanes that raged deep into 1943, and the huge Canadian effort

that was needed to guard North America’s eastern approaches against

U-boat attack, gave cruel proof that Britain had lost (for the time being

at least) the ‘empire of the North Atlantic’.

Whatever the strength of

the sentimental tie, the material basis of Anglo-Canadian relations had

been altered for good.

Much the same was true of the Paciﬁc dominions. Australia

had joined Britain at war without hesitation, but the Australian gov-

ernment pinned its hopes on an early peace.

Thereafter, it waged

an unrelenting campaign for inﬂuence in London – through represen-

tation in an ‘Imperial War Cabinet’ (promptly rejected in London),

through a personal visit by the Prime Minister, Menzies, in the spring

of 1941, and by urging a meeting of dominion prime ministers.

Aus-

tralian ministers were deeply uneasy over the concentration of British

naval and military power in Europe, and the lack of any real deter-

rent to a Japanese attack. To make matters worse, the prompt offer

by New Zealand to send a division to ﬁght in Europe had forced them

to make a matching offer.

By 1941, three Australian divisions were

ﬁghting in the Middle East, and the small Australian navy had been

placed at Britain’s disposal. As alarm about Japanese intentions grew,

the Australian and New Zealand governments were forced to accept

Churchill’s reassurances that Japan would do nothing until Britain was

defeated, and that, if they were attacked, the British would abandon

the Mediterranean struggle and send army and navy to protect kith and

kin. The military debacle of mid-1941, when the disastrous invasion of

Greece and Crete wrecked an Australian and a New Zealand division,

intensiﬁed Canberra’s mistrust of Churchill. But the new Labor Prime

Minister, John Curtin (who had originally opposed sending Australian

troops abroad), was very reluctant to ask for the return of Australian

503 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942

troops. He accepted the argument that Singapore was the key to Aus-

tralia’s defence.

When Australian troops were sent back from the

Middle East (at Churchill’s suggestion) after Pearl Harbor, their desti-

nation was Java. It was only after the fall of Singapore on 15 February

1942 that Curtin insisted, after a furious exchange with Churchill,

that the two divisions in transit – the dominion’s sole trained ﬁghting

force – should be diverted not to Burma but home to Australia.

By that time, Curtin had already infuriated Churchill by his

notorious New Year’s message announcing that Australia ‘looks to

America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the

United Kingdom’. What has often been seen as a symbolic repudiation

of the old tradition of imperial loyalty was much more ambivalent. It

is better seen as an anxious attempt to claim a full Australian place

in strategic planning as America’s main partner in the Paciﬁc War (a

claim badly received in Washington). In this role, Curtin was saying,

Australia would not be Britain’s poodle. Both Curtin and Fraser, the

New Zealand Prime Minister, recognised that their own defence, as

well as ultimate victory in the Paciﬁc conﬂict, largely rested in American

hands. But neither wanted to abandon the British connection or would

have been allowed to do so by their public opinion. As the overweening

scale of American power became more and more evident, they searched

for better ways to inﬂuence Anglo-American policy and the post-war

settlement. Closer Commonwealth unity (to secure British backing),

local solidarity (as in the Australia–New Zealand agreement of January

1944) and the long-standing claim that the Paciﬁc dominions should

represent all Britain’s interests in the South Paciﬁc (as the ‘trustees of

British civilisation’) were their preferred (and perhaps only) means to

this urgent end. But there was no brooking the fact that, with the fall

of Singapore (taking with it all hope of a British ﬂeet being sent to

Southeast Asia – Churchill had planned to send a battle squadron east

in May 1942), the Paciﬁc dominions had passed from the strategic

sphere of the British system into that of the United States.

In all three dominions where there was a Britannic majority,

the sense of being ‘British’ countries remained strong and there was

a continued and intense commitment to the survival of Britain as an

independent great power. The armies despatched by dominion govern-

ments told only half the story. Among RAF aircrews, where losses were

highest and life expectancy shortest, dominion volunteers were out of

all proportion to their population size.

‘England is the home of our

504 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

race’, said an Australian Labor MP in June 1940. ‘We love England,

and if England should go down, it would seem to me as if the sun went

down.’

But all three had been forced to ﬁnd ways of compensating

for the British weaknesses so starkly revealed between 1940 and 1942.

All three had been forced to recognise that the old reciprocity of the

British system could no longer be counted on. The unstinting commit-

ment of the dominions’ manpower to an imperial war had been based

on the assumption that British sea-power would keep their homelands

safe. After 1940–2, that assumption could no longer be made: another

great-power protector was needed whose claims might be greater. For

the British system, the implications were profound. Since the late nine-

teenth century, the mutual and unconditional loyalty of the ‘British’

countries had lain at the core of British world power. Their relatively

high levels of economic development (Canada’s national income, cal-

culated The Economist in 1941, was as large as Italy’s

), their shared

political values, and their astonishing capacity to mobilise their man-

power for faraway wars, made them valued allies out of all proportion

to their population size. Their oft-declared loyalty to King and Empire

was an important source of psychological reassurance to the British at

home that their global burdens would be shared in a crisis. Though it

took some time before the pattern was clear, 1942 saw the end of this

old imperial nexus. As they took stock of their interests in the world-

wide war, it was to a new international order that they began to look

to supplement, replace or incorporate the British connection.

It was ironic that this trend was weakest in the least Britannic

of the overseas dominions. In South Africa, Smuts had won the support

of enough Afrikaners to back South African entry. The volunteer army

despatched to ﬁght in East and North Africa was composed of Afrikan-

ers as much as English South Africans.

Smuts waged a vigorous propa-

ganda campaign to win over South African opinion and counter the calls

for peace made by opposition politicians after the fall of France. But in

South Africa’s case there was no Singapore, although, with the crisis of

the North African war in July 1942, Smuts was anxious enough to start

thinking of how South African forces might be withdrawn to stage a

ﬁghting retreat up the Nile valley.

In 1943, after Alamein, Smuts was

strong enough to win a decisive victory in a general election (another

‘khaki electie’ as his opponents complained). The pragmatic basis of

Anglo-South African relations, helped by the specially favourable treat-

ment in imports and shipping by which Churchill aimed to bolster