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

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515 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

route. If either were to happen, then Britain’s ‘survival’ would resem-

ble that of a patient on a life-support machine: dependent indeﬁnitely

on American aid to fend off invasion; incapable of defending, sup-

plying, ﬁnancing or controlling the component parts of the pre-war

imperial system. Neither Churchill nor his advisers regarded such a

fate as remotely acceptable. ‘Our history and geography demand’, said

Anthony Eden, ‘that we should remain a world power with world-

wide interests.’

They imagined survival in imperial terms, as the full

recovery of the British world-system. Deprived of its ‘system’, Britain

would be desperately vulnerable to the will of whatever great powers

had outlasted the conﬂict. Real survival meant the freedom to restore

London’s global network of trade and resuming Britain’s function as a

banker and investor. It meant regaining the footholds (in the Mediter-

ranean especially) that underpinned Britain’s status as a great European

power. It meant reafﬁrming Britain’s leadership over the white domin-

ions on whose loyalty, manpower and resources British inﬂuence and

interests already depended in part. It meant recovering sufﬁcient power

and prestige to negotiate authoritatively over the future of India, and

resist the demand (largely from American voices) that Britain’s colo-

nial territories should be administered internationally and opened to

American business. It meant – above all – recreating the geopolitical

conditions that secured the European mainland from a single power’s

domination. British leaders suspected that the failure to achieve all – or

almost all – of these war aims (most of them tacit) would unravel the

links and connections on which Britain’s place in the world was actu-

ally (if rather mysteriously) based. In the second half of the war, much

of their energy was spent in the struggle to make a military victory that

would meet this demanding wish-list.

Strategy and Empire, 1943–1945

1943 was the year in which the tide of battle turned. It was also the

year in which the shape of a post-war world could begin to be glimpsed,

if only in outline. For the British, the signs were not reassuring. Their

victories in North Africa and the successful invasion of Italy did not

strengthen their hand. At the level of strategy, 1943 was to be dom-

inated by the furious Anglo-American arguments over the priority to

be given to the Mediterranean attack on Germany and the planned

516 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

cross-Channel invasion already named ‘Overlord’. The British resented

the scale of America’s commitment to the war on Japan and suspected

the motive behind American support for Kuomintang China in whose

military potential they had little conﬁdence. They were also deeply

uneasy at what they regarded as the dangerous ignorance of the Amer-

ican planners about the risks and demands of an amphibious invasion

against the full weight of German military power in the West. A pre-

mature onslaught quickly bogged down in a war of attrition (with a

huge cost in life for every advance) or, worse still, a catastrophic defeat

and a second Dunkirk, were bound to inﬂict disproportionate (and per-

haps irrecoverable) damage on British resources and British prestige.

On the American side, British devotion to a Mediterranean strategy,

at the expense of postponing the decisive attack through Northern

France to the Rhine, was cynically regarded as a means of shoring up

British imperial interests and as evidence that the British lacked the

stomach to ﬁght in the theatre that mattered. Too great a delay in the

onslaught on Germany would weaken the case of those in the Roosevelt

administration who favoured the ‘Europe ﬁrst’ strategy, against those

who demanded priority for the war on Japan. In Washington’s view, it

would also worsen the friction with their Soviet ally and increase the

danger that Stalin would make a separate peace (of which there were

signs). Indeed, the British themselves were all too aware of how much

their recovery depended upon Soviet success on the Eastern Front. A

Soviet collapse would have released huge German reinforcements to

regain the ground lost in the Mediterranean, and open the door into

the Caucasus and Iran, hurling the British back into the terrible crisis

of July 1942. Yet, by the same token, the Red Army’s advance (it had

driven the Wehrmacht out of the Caucasus and most of the Ukraine by

the end of 1943) reinforced Stalin’s claim to a very large voice in any

eventual peace, and in the strategic decisions required to achieve it.

By late 1943, as planning began in earnest for the invasion

of France the following summer, the growing reliance of the Anglo-

American armies upon American manpower as well as materiel,

and

the enormous scale of the Soviet military effort, drove home the les-

son that the post-war world-order would be shaped to the wishes of

these emerging ‘superpowers’ more than to Britain’s. At the Teheran

conference in November 1943, Stalin and Roosevelt, as Churchill

later lamented, negotiated over his head. At almost the same time,

a speech by Jan Smuts on ‘Thoughts on the New World’ (to the Empire

517 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

Parliamentary Association in London) spelt out the dangers of the

new balance of power that would follow German defeat. ‘We have

moved into a strange new world . . . such as has not been seen for hun-

dreds of years, perhaps not for a thousand years. Europe is completely

changing . . . the map is being rolled up and a new map is unrolling

before us.’ Three of the continent’s ﬁve great powers would have van-

ished. ‘Germany will disappear . . . France has gone . . . Italy may never

be a great power again.’ Instead, Russia would be ‘the new Colossus

of Europe’, all the stronger once the threat from Japan in the rear had

been vanquished. Britain would have great prestige, but ‘she will be

a poor country . . . there is nothing left in the till’. The best hope for

peace in the world, Smuts insisted, lay in a new world organisation, but

one in which the ‘trinity’ of great powers exercised real leadership. But

for the British to play their proper part in this required them not only

to reorganise their overseas system, but also to strengthen their hand

in Europe. That meant closer relations with the small democracies of

Western Europe, who knew that ‘their future is with Great Britain and

the next world-wide British system’. Closer union with Britain would

create a ‘great European state . . . an equal partner with the other Colossi

in the leadership of nations’.

Smuts called for ‘fundamental thinking’ and admitted that his

ideas were ‘explosive stuff’. But his speech was a remarkable sum-

mary of the challenges facing the Churchill government in the last two

years of the war. Indeed, his speculations about a British ‘closer union’

with Europe have a more than passing resemblance to the ‘European

union’ for which Churchill himself was to call. Amid the press of day-

to-day business before and after the landings in Normandy in June

1944, entailing the conduct of campaigns in France, Italy, Greece and

Southeast Asia, and in the air over Germany, the looming shape of

a Soviet-dominated Europe, from which the American armies would

have quickly withdrawn at the end of the war, exerted more and more

inﬂuence over British military planning. Its conclusions were deeply

unwelcome. The defeat of Germany would result in a much heavier

strategic burden on Britain than she had had to carry before the descent

towards war after 1937. In June 1945, the Post Hostilities Planning Staff

told the Chiefs of Staff Committee that even a united British Empire

would be no match for Soviet aggression, and would need the help of

the United States. To keep the Red Army at bay, Britain would have to

be ready to give early help to her European allies, and hold a deep air

518 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

defence belt in Northern Europe. To keep India safe and guard commu-

nications through the Indian Ocean would require new naval and air

bases and a main base in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). To deter a Soviet advance

in the Middle East, Britain’s defence system there would have to be

pushed further north, but with no guarantee that either the oilﬁelds or

the Suez Canal could be saved in a war. Even in peacetime, maintaining

internal security in the Middle East ‘will involve a formidable military

commitment’.

It is not hard to see why close cooperation between

the Great Power ‘trinity’, in the new ‘world organisation’, appeared

so urgently necessary to the makers of policy in London. It was the

best guarantee that the British could limit the liabilities that otherwise

threatened to over-tax their strength.

For, as Smuts had said candidly, there was nothing left in the

till. Strictly speaking, of course, this was an exaggeration. The British

had sold off their assets in dollars and acquired a great burden of

overseas debt. They had retained investments in the sterling area coun-

tries, but had also assumed huge sterling obligations by their purchases

from them. Egypt and certain Middle East states, the colonial territo-

ries that supplied British needs, and above all India with its army of

two million men and its industrial base, built up credits in London, the

so-called ‘sterling balances’. Britain’s war effort was sustained in large

measure by American aid, especially ‘lend-lease’. When peace came,

Britain’s post-war economy would carry a mass of overseas debt con-

siderably greater than in 1919 even though the vast bulk of lend-lease

(perhaps $20 billions’ worth) would be forgiven. This was one side of

the ledger. But the sources of overseas income had also been damaged.

This was partly a matter of the assets sold off in the war to the tune of

£1.5 billion, more than one-third of the total. It was also a consequence

of huge physical losses, including a large share of Britain’s mercantile

ﬂeet, the largest in the world before 1939, and a valuable earner of

invisible income. As part of the terms of lend-lease, the British were

required to cut down their exports and withdraw from many overseas

markets. By the middle of the war, their exports had fallen to well

under one-third of their pre-war level.

All the main sources of over-

seas earnings – from exports, investments, shipping and services – had

been drastically shrunk. The destruction of industrial plant at home, the

conversion of much of the rest to the production of war goods, and the

huge diversion of manpower into military service meant that rebuild-

ing the civilian economy and Britain’s export capacity would need a

519 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

major investment as well as a period of grace. Yet the conditions laid

down in return for America’s wartime aid demanded the rapid return

to peacetime ‘normality’ making sterling convertible (so that sterling

countries could buy dollar goods freely) and ending imperial preference

(to remove the tariffs imposed on dollar goods in British Empire coun-

tries since the early 1930s). On this scenario, before the British could

catch their breath, or begin to scale down the vast military load of the

war and its aftermath, their foreign markets would vanish and they

would be bankrupt.

To avert this disaster, the British set out in the autumn of

1944 to persuade their American allies to help them revive much of

their pre-war role in the world economy as soon as Germany was

defeated. ‘Stage II’ – as the period between the defeat of Germany and

the surrender of Japan was termed – was expected to last for a year or

longer. During Stage II, the British were anxious to begin the process

of civilianising their economy. More manpower would be moved into

civilian production and much more effort put into the manufacture of

exports. Britain would begin to start paying its way. With a nod from

Roosevelt, agreements were framed to prolong wartime support and

permit its application to the task of post-war recovery.

Had Stage II

taken the time that the planners expected, the economic transition to

peace might have been much less painful. In fact, it barely lasted three

months. As soon as Japan was defeated, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry

S. Truman, abruptly halted lend-lease. To bail out their economy and

keep it aﬂoat, the British were forced to apply for an American loan,

but without the leverage that their war effort had given them. In the

graphic language of John Maynard Keynes, who had master-minded

the management of Britain’s external ﬁnances, the British were faced

at the end of the war with a ‘ﬁnancial Dunkirk’.

Without a drastic

reduction of their foreign commitments, and perhaps even with one,

they would have to accept years of even greater austerity than they had

already endured. The ﬁnancial and commercial power on which they

had always relied as the ‘fourth arm’ in warfare would have vanished

completely.

The full extent of their economic fragility was thus partially

hidden from British leaders until the very end of the conﬂict. But they

were already aware of the enormous importance of close cooperation

with the white dominions if they were to make good their claim to

be one of the ‘Big Three’. In the traumatic twelve months after June

520 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

1940, before Hitler’s onslaught on Russia gave Britain a reluctant,

suspicious and (as it seemed for some time) ill-fated ally, dominion

support had been important materially and perhaps vital psychologi-

cally. The dominions’ contribution to Britain’s ﬁghting strength, unlike

that of India, cost London nothing. Canadian, South African, Aus-

tralian and New Zealand troops fought in the Mediterranean and

Northern European theatres, as well as closer to home (in the Aus-

tralian case). Canadian enlistment exceeded the levels of 1914–18.

Dominion supplies could be purchased on tick. Canada’s dollars and

its industrial base (much larger than that of the other dominions)

were mobilised for the war effort. The Royal Canadian Navy grad-

ually took over the anti-submarine war in the Northwest Atlantic.

South Africa’s value as the great redoubt guarding the only safe route

to Egypt and India was greater than ever by 1941–2. The main base

from which the British intended to launch their part in the defeat of

Japan after 1944 was expected to be in Australia and to use Australian

resources.

Perhaps as a consequence, British leaders began to talk enthu-

siastically about the need for imperial unity and a common foreign

policy to which Britain, the dominions and the rest of the Empire,

including India, would be tied. They may have been encouraged by the

speech made by John Curtin, the Australian Prime Minister in August

1943. Curtin had enraged Churchill by his notorious statement (at the

end of December 1941) that Australia ‘looks to America, free of any

pangs as to our links or kinship with the United Kingdom’.

Now,

like the prodigal son, he had returned to the fold. His Adelaide speech

(ampliﬁed some three weeks later) roundly declared that ‘some imperial

authority had to be evolved’, and called for an ‘Empire Council’ and

a permanent secretariat to give it effect.

His ideas were welcomed in

The Times. The Empire, it said, could only keep peace in the future as

one of the four great powers of the United Nations. But the dominions

‘would fail in these duties if they accepted individual membership of the

United Nations as a substitute for the Imperial bond’.

In July 1943,

Sir Edward Grigg, a leading Round Tabler and soon to be Resident

Minister in the Middle East, had published a manifesto calling for a

‘Commonwealth, coherent, united and strong’, able to stand beside the

United States, Russia and China. Its disintegration, he claimed, ‘would

expose many parts of Asia, the Paciﬁc, the Atlantic and Africa to open

international rivalry’.

The book was reissued in December to catch

521 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

the following wind that now seemed to be blowing. Then, in January

1944, Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington, and for-

mer Foreign Secretary, delivered a widely reported speech in Toronto

(where the ﬂame of Empire loyalty usually burned brightest). ‘Not Great

Britain only’, he declared, ‘but the British Commonwealth and Empire

must be the fourth power in that group on which . . . the peace of the

world will henceforth depend.’

When the dominion prime ministers

met in London in May 1944, it was left to Mackenzie King, the Cana-

dian premier, to challenge the formula that the British ministers present

proposed to insert in the ﬁnal communiqu

e. It would refer, said Eden,

to the Empire’s foreign policy. ‘All agreed’, said Attlee. There would be

an ‘Imperial Joint Board for Defence’, said Cranborne, the Secretary of

State for the Dominions. But King refused to agree. ‘The more I think

of the high pressure methods that have been used the more indignant I

feel’, he wrote in his diary that evening.

The reality was that there was little agreement among the

dominions or between them and the London government on what Com-

monwealth unity should actually mean. Curtin had emphasised Aus-

tralia’s British identity. His election campaign in 1943 had wrapped

itself in the Union Jack: Australia should be a ‘second Britannia in

the Antipodes’.

When he came to London in May 1944,hetoldhis

Guildhall audience: ‘Australia is a British people, Australia is a British

land.’

But Curtin (and Fraser, the New Zealand Prime Minister, who

supported Curtin’s call for an Empire Council) did not intend the sub-

ordination of the Paciﬁc dominions to the wishes of London. Far from

it. In the long tradition of Australian statecraft, his aim was to commit

more imperial resources to the South Paciﬁc and to assert Australia’s

claim to manage all ‘British’ interests in the region. ‘We are in the

south what the motherland is in the north’, he told a Sydney audience

in May 1942.

His ‘Empire Council’ was meant to rotate between

the dominion capitals and London because the Empire could not be

run by a government sitting in Britain. In case there should be any

doubt in the matter, the Australia–New Zealand Agreement in January

1944 had bluntly insisted that any settlement in their region would

require the active assent of Canberra and Wellington – an assertion

that was even more badly received in Roosevelt’s Washington than

in Churchill’s London. Curtin and Fraser’s ‘imperial regionalism’ was

implicitly shared by Smuts in South Africa. The northward extension

of South African inﬂuence and the gradual inclusion of Central and

522 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

East Africa in the South African sphere were long-cherished ambi-

tions. They duly emerged in Smuts’ ‘explosive’ speech in November

1943. The British system needed ‘tightening up’ but also decentral-

ising if it were to match the ‘Colossi’. That meant consolidating the

colonial territories into larger units and tying them more closely to

the neighbouring dominion – a delicate euphemism.

Smuts may also

have hoped that this sub-imperial vision would strengthen his United

party’s appeal against its National party opponents. The ‘old narrow

little-Afrikanerdom had been defeated for good’, he told Leo Amery in

October 1943.

But Smuts (with an Afrikaner majority on the elec-

toral roll) knew better than to call for new imperial machinery. The

government-inspired Cape Times had rubbished Curtin’s ideas.

Talk

of imperial unity, Smuts conﬁded to King, was just ‘damn nonsense’;

it ‘was a thing of the past’.

And, for Smuts perhaps, as for Curtin

and Fraser, the prospect of Britain’s huge wartime commitments in the

Mediterranean and Europe continuing on into the peace made it all the

more urgent to wrest the direction of British power in their regions into

dominion hands.

All this made less sense in the senior dominion. Mackenzie

King was keenly aware of the strength of pan-British patriotism in

Canada. One of his closest allies, the Montrealer Brooke Claxton,

echoed Curtin’s ‘Britannic’ sentiments in a speech made at much the

same time. ‘Canada’, he said, ‘is a British Nation in North America’.

King himself was irritated by the ‘isolationist and autonomist position

in intra-Imperial relations’ adopted by his own ofﬁcials in the External

Affairs department. ‘Of all countries’, he noted, ‘we are really the most

vulnerable because of our extensive territory, resources and the like.’

Canada ‘will greatly need strength alike of British Commonwealth as

a whole and of US in protecting her position’ (he was thinking of the

threat that the Soviet Union would pose).

But, since the conscription

election in 1918, King had been obsessed by the danger of an irrec-

oncilable rift between Quebec and ‘English Canada’ that would tear

his party, as well as the country, in half. English Canada’s loyalty to

Britain, and to Canada’s identity as a ‘British nation’, were facts of polit-

ical life. They had forced King into the 1942 referendum that authorised

the government to apply conscription ‘if necessary’. Quebec’s low rate

of enlistment was observed with resentment. ‘Quebec is hated in the

rest of Canada’, noted ‘Chubby’ Power, one of King’s ministers, an

English-speaking, Catholic Quebecker and a much decorated veteran

523 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

of the First World War.

Power opposed conscription, arguing that it

would turn Quebec into ‘Ireland all over again’,

but several of King’s

cabinet colleagues were determined to enforce conscription for over-

seas service once the losses from ‘Overlord’ began to be felt. To King

these cross-pressures made it all the more critical that Ottawa should be

visibly free from any last vestige of imperial control, most of all when

it came to external commitments. At the prime ministers’ meeting in

May 1944, he threw his weight against any change in the way that

dominion governments were consulted. When the premiers discussed

the proposed ‘World Organisation’, King insisted that Canada would

want its own representation ‘as one of the medium powers’, a position

soon followed by Curtin, Fraser and Smuts.

For all four dominions,

a separate voice at the United Nations offered better protection of their

‘national’ interest than collective membership of a Commonwealth bloc

in which London would enjoy an inevitable lead.

The main imperial legacy of the second half of the War was the

scale of the British commitment in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

This was an echo (with certain key differences) of the ‘Eastern’ war in

1914–18. Then, as later, the British responded to a double imperative.

They had to guard the road to India through Iraq and Iran, and defend

Egypt, the ‘Clapham Junction’ (as the clich

e had it) of their imperial

communications and the northern gateway to the Indian Ocean. But

the Middle East was also a huge bastion that was meant to make up for

Britain’s weakness in Europe. In 1918, it had been the grim prospect

of outright defeat on the continent that drove the British forward in

Palestine and Iraq and towards the Caucasus. The fall of France in

June 1940 and the German advance into Russia the following year

recreated the nightmare of 1918. For the British once again, the Middle

East was the theatre where their fate would be settled. If they were to

lose the Middle East war, their world-system would be cut in half, and

Britain’s dependence on American aid would become absolute. But, if

they could hold on and secure their position, the Middle East was a

springboard from which they might hope to reassert their position as

a Mediterranean power and as a great power in Europe. The equation

was not new. Britain’s claim to be a great power in Europe had rested

in part on her Mediterranean presence since the seventeenth century.

Of course, the pattern of conﬂict after June 1940 had fol-

lowed a different trajectory. In 1914–18, the British had fought the

Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli, in Palestine and in modern Iraq. After

524 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

June 1940, they fought the Italians and Germans in a war that was

as much Mediterranean as Middle Eastern and became steadily more

so with the invasion of Italy and the British intervention in Greece.

The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 reduced the strategic impor-

tance of the Mediterranean theatre and also signalled the moment when

the United States army became the indisputably dominant force in the

Anglo-American alliance. The ﬁnal struggle for Europe would be fought

for the most part between German, Russian and American armies: two-

thirds of the eighty-ﬁve divisions assembled for Eisenhower’s advance

into Germany in the spring of 1945 were American. In the Mediter-

ranean, however, the British remained the senior partner, and a British

general was the Supreme Commander. In the Italian campaign, there

were as many British and Commonwealth troops as American.

‘Italy

is a country which we can get at and in which we rather than Russia

should naturally expect to exert predominant inﬂuence’, remarked a

senior British ofﬁcial.

The British were eager to ‘reconstruct’ Italy as

a parliamentary state that would look towards Britain. They were just

as determined that the liberation of Greece would produce a regime

that was friendly to Britain, if not dependent upon her. Intervention

in Greece, Eden told his War Cabinet colleagues in August 1944,

was indispensable to Britain’s strategy in the Balkans and the Eastern

Mediterranean.

Churchill’s notorious ‘percentages’ deal with Stalin in

Moscow in October 1944 (Greece was to be ‘90 per cent’ British) was

designed to exclude Soviet inﬂuence from the Mediterranean. What-

ever was to happen elsewhere in Europe, Churchill and Eden were

determined to use Britain’s large share in the Mediterranean victory to

contain Soviet expansion and reinforce Britain’s claims as one of the

‘trinity’ – what Smuts had seen as the post-war executive of the United

Nations.

It was this grand ambition that made the Middle East so impor-

tant. Historians have often been scornful of the British failure to rethink

their Middle East interests at the end of the war. In fact, the course of the

war had reinforced their belief in the region’s exceptional value. Egypt

was the base from which the British had fought their Mediterranean

campaign. It was from Cairo, after all, that their war and diplomacy

in the Eastern Mediterranean had been organised and directed. At the

British Embassy there, in the elegant house of the British Resident Min-

ister in the Garden City nearby, and at the Mena Palace Hotel beneath

the Great Pyramid, diplomats, soldiers and politicians in transit had