Peden G.S. Arms, Economics and British Strategy From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs

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bankruptcy, and he believed that Britain could not afford an army on the

scale that the War Ofﬁce wanted as well as the navy and air force

essential for the security of the United Kingdom and the Empire. On 12

November a report by the Chiefs of Staff predicted that the German

army would be unlikely to be strong enough to attack the French and

Belgian frontier defences before 1939–40. Hankey, who did much of the

drafting of Inskip’s report, had always placed a high priority on the navy

and on imperial defence, and on 23 November he advised that the army

should no longer be prepared for service on the continent of Europe.

While the Treasury’s ‘fourth arm of defence’ argument led Inskip and

others to accept a need to impose ﬁnancial limits on rearmament, the

consequent strategic priorities were determined outside the Treasury.

149

Inskip’s interim report of 15 December 1937 stated that the corner-

stone of defence strategy must be the secu rity of the United Kingdom,

where the Empire’s principal strengths in manpower and industrial

capacity lay. It was for this reason that he recommended that the ﬁrst

and main effort should be directed to protectio n of the United Kingdom

against attack, and to preserving its trade routes. The defence of

Britain’s overseas territories and interests was less important than these

two objectives, since so long as the United Kingdom was secure ‘we may

hope in time to repair an y losses or defeats suffered elsewhere’. Inskip

was unhappy about the recommendation that the objective of

co-operation in the defence of the territories of allies in war should be

provided for only after the ﬁrst three had been met. His report noted

that, despite recent developments in air warfare and in mechanised

forces on land, there was no evidence that infantry would not be

required in a future war. He therefore warned his colleagues that they

should expect to be criticised if it proved later to be necessary to

improvise an army to assist France if she were in danger of being

overrun. Nevertheless, the Cabinet accepted his recommendation that

the War Ofﬁce’s estimates should be prepared on the assumption that

the army’s primary roles were to be anti-aircraft defence of the United

Kingdom and imperial defence.

150

Inskip’s second report of 8 February 1938, in ﬁxing the defence

departments’ ﬁnancial ‘rations’ for the next four years, mentioned that

the army was to be equipped for ‘an Eastern theatre’, claiming that this

149

‘Report by Chiefs of Staff Sub-Committee of the CID on comparison of the strength of

Great Britain with that of certain other nations as at January 1938’, Documents on

British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (DBFP), 2nd series, vol. XIX (London: HMSO,

1982), p. 502; Peden, British Rearmament, pp. 137–8.

150

‘Defence expenditure in future years’, CP 316 (37), CAB 24/273, esp. paras. 41–4, 61,

72–5, 101, TNA.

Retrenchment and rearmament 155

role would make possible substantial reductions in the provision of tanks

and reserves of ammunition compared with what would be required for

European operations.

151

The War Ofﬁce took Egypt to be the most

probable eastern theatre. There had been a danger of war with Italy in

1935–6, and since the summer of 1937 the Chiefs of Staff had been

engaged in a major strategic appreciation on the Mediterranean and the

Middle East. The likelihood that control of the eastern Mediterranean

would be temporarily lost if Britain were engaged in war simultaneously

with Germany, Japan and Italy was accepted, but the Chiefs of Staff

agreed that the defence of Egypt was necessary both strategically, on

account of the Suez Canal, and to maintain Britain’s prestige in the

Middle East. It was envisaged that an armoured division and two

infantry divisions, with perhaps a third in reserve, would have to be sent

out from the United Kingdom within a month of the outbreak of hos-

tilities, and the Chiefs of Staff recommended that the garrison in Egypt

should be brought up to strength and should include a mobile force

capable of providing cover in the Western Desert until reinforcements

arrived.

152

At the suggestion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, now

Sir John Simon, the Cabinet decided that the Field Force should be

prepared ‘for general purposes’ rather than a particular campaign. This

decision enabled the Treasury to hold up War Ofﬁce proposals that

would exceed what was required for a Field Force of one armoured

division and two infantry divisions, plus two infantry divisions to be

ready in forty days, plus a further two infantry divisions, which might be

Regular or Territorial, to be ready four months after the outbreak of

war. Further divisions, from the Territorial Army, would not be able to

take the ﬁeld until after the eighth or tenth month of the war.

153

March 1938 the army was able to put into the ﬁeld only two infantry

divisions, both deﬁcient in many kinds of equipment required for

modern warfare, including artillery.

154

Inskip’s recommendation for the

army was ambitious in relation to what actually existed, and it allowed

for further re-equipment of the army with the available industrial

capacity. Apart from the new medium tank, which was only a pap er

project in 1937, the development of the armoured vehicles designed for

European warfare was continued. Howard commented that Inskip had

151

‘Defence expenditure in future years: further report by the Minister for Co-ordination

of Defence’, CP 24 (38), 8 Feb. 1938, CAB 24/274, para. 15, TNA.

152

Steven Morewood, The British Defence of Egypt 1935–1940: Conﬂict and Crisis in the

Eastern Mediterranean (Abingdon, Oxon.: Frank Cass, 2005).

153

Peden, British Rearmament, pp. 143–4.

154

Ironside Diaries, pp. 53–4.

Arms, economics and British strategy156

replaced a policy of limited liability in continental warfare with one of no

liability at all,

155

but the new strategy was not irreversible.

The change in the European balance of power following the loss of the

Czech army of thirty-ﬁve divisions after the Munich agreement made it

impossible to ignore French pressure for support on land in a future war.

The Chiefs of Staff recommended that the Field Force of four infantry

divisions, plus two armoured divisions each with six tank battalions

instead of the existing ‘mobile’ division of nine battalions, should be

equipped for a campaign on the European continent; that four Terri-

torial divisions should also be fully equipped so as to be ready to be sent

overseas as soon as their training was complete; and that a further eight

Territorial divisions should have enough equipment to enable them to

be trained for overseas service. When the role of the army was discussed

in Cabinet on 2 Februa ry 1939 Simon expressed his fear that the scale of

proposed increases from all three armed services would undermine

Britain’s ﬁnancial strength, but the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax,

argued successfully that the present state of tension with Germany must

end soon in war or the destruction of the Nazi regime. When the War

Ofﬁce’s proposals came before the Cabinet again on 22 February

Chamberlain said that he had come reluctantly to the conclusion that

there was no alternative to preparing the army for European operations.

The dates by which the ﬁrst echelons, each of two infantry divisions, of

the Field Force were to be ready to embark were to be settled in staff

talks with the French, but the ﬁrst of the two armoured divisions would

not be ready until mid-1940. Following the German occupation of the

rump of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, volunteers ﬂocked to the

Territorial Army , and as an alternative to conscription its establishment

was doubled from thirteen to twenty-six divisions on 29 March. (Con-

scription followed anyway in April, partly to provide for permanent

manning of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences and partly to impress foreign

opinion.) The enl arged Territorial Army made it possible to promise

increased support for France and by mid-April the continental com-

mitment comprised four Regular infantry divisions to be despatched

within six weeks; the ﬁrst ten Territorial divisions to be available in

the fourth, ﬁfth and sixth months; and the last sixteen Territorial

divisions to be ready in the ninth to twelfth months.

156

On the other

hand, the rapid increase in the number of divisions disrupted the

organisation of the Regular and Territorial armies only a few months

155

Howard, Continental Commitment, p. 117.

156

Cabinet conclusions, 2 Feb. and 22 Feb. 1939, CAB 23/97, TNA; Gibbs, Grand

Strategy, vol. I, pp. 503–18; Pownall Diaries, vol. I, pp. 196–7.

Retrenchment and rearmament 157

before the outbreak of war, and it was unlikely that the new Territorial

formations could be equipped and trained within twelve months.

157

Howard argued that the defence of the Empire led to the dissipation

of British strength. However, Britain’s land and air forces round the

Empire tended to be the last to receive up-to-date equipment.

158

It was

the defence of the United Kingdom that took up industrial capacity for

anti-aircraft guns and their reserves of ammunition – capacity that might

otherwise have been used for the Field Force’s artillery. Likewise, Inskip

recommended that there should be expansion of the RAF in the United

Kingdom but he rejected proposed increases in overseas squadrons,

although he recognised that his recommendation meant permanent and

dangerous insecurity against Japan and Italy.

159

Although Inskip was persuaded that the greatest danger to be faced was

an air attack on the United Kingdom that might inﬂict a knock-out blow at

the outset of a war, he did not give the RAF all that it wanted. He advised

that the Air Staff should no longer aim at having an air striking force equal

to the German air striking force. The Air Staff held that the deterrent effect

of an air force was greatly increased if the enemy knew that he would

sustain the same damage as he could inﬂict, but Inskip did not believe that

the government’s public commitment to air parity should lead it to try to

match the German air force as regards numbers or types. The full increase

asked for by the Air Staff for ﬁghter squadrons should, he thought, be

granted. However, according to the Air Ministry’s calculations, the aircraft

industry had not yet built up enough capacity for production in war-time

to replace the losses that the Air Staff estimated would be sustained by the

size of air force that the expansion scheme adopted in 1936 aimed to

create. The Air Staff had used these estimates to justify reserves of aircraft

equal to 225 per cent of ﬁrst-line strength. Inskip argued that it would be

better to use some of the industrial resources that would have gone into

producing reserves of aircraft to expand the aircraft industry’s productive

capacity, including shadow factories. He also said that while there should

be ‘some increase’ in the present ﬁrst-line bomber strength, ﬁghters must

have priority. Despite the priority he had allocated to defence of trade

routes, Inskip did not refer to the Air Staff’s proposal to provide only ﬁfty-

six aircraft for trade defence, although that ﬁgure was remarkably modest

in relation to the proposals for bombers (an increase from 1,022 to 1,442)

or the approved increase in ﬁghters (from 420 to 532).

160

This lack of

157

David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany

1919–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 157.

158

Howard, Continental Commitment, p. 100; Peden, ‘Burden of imperial defence’.

159

‘Defence expenditure in future years’, CP 316 (37), CAB 24/273, paras. 98–9, TNA.

160

Ibid., paras. 80–99.

Arms, economics and British strategy158

provision can be attributed to the Air Staff ’s priority for strategic bombing

and the Admiralty’s wish to avoid further conﬂict with the Air Ministry so

soon after recovering control of the FAA, but Inskip himself cannot escape

criticism.

161

The Cabinet endorsed Inskip’s recommendations, but Sir John

Slessor, who was head of the Air Staff’s Plans Branch from 1937 to

1940, admitted in his memoirs that ﬁghters were not really given

priority by the Air Ministry until the autumn of 1938.

162

Indeed, the

Secretary of State for Air, Swinton, told the Cabinet that, while it could

say whether an expansion scheme was affordable, it could not dictate to

the Air Staff what the character of the air force should be. Scheme L,

which the Cabinet approved on 27 April 1938, provided for 608

ﬁghters, an increase of 76 on the proposed numbers in December

1937, and 1,352 bombers, a reduction of 90. Scheme M, which the Air

Ministry put forward after Mun ich, provided for 800 ﬁghters and 1,360

bombers, but 10 of the 50 ﬁghter squadrons were allocated to work

with the Field Force, and all of the bombers were to be heavy types,

whereas 600 of Schem e L’s bom bers had been medium types. The

Treasury protested that Scheme M, if implemented in full, would make

such heavy demands on industry that it would ‘probably bring down

the general economy of this country’. Chamberlain, who in late 1938

was still in favour of maintaining the fourth arm of defence, and the

Secretary of State for Air, now Sir Kingsley Wood, accepted the

Treasury view that if Scheme M were revised to concentrate more on

ﬁghters and go slowly on bombers, the strain on the economy would be

reduced. One heavy bomber cost the equivalent of four ﬁghters. On 7

November 1938 the Cabinet duly approved Sche me M’s proposals for

ﬁghters, specifying maximum producti on possible before April 1940,

but directed that only sufﬁcient orders for bombers were to be placed

to ensure that labour and plant were not unemployed. However,

Cabinet decisions do not necessarily determine what happens in the

execution of policy: technical difﬁculties in producing new ﬁghters and

the fact that much plant was already committed to producing bombers

meant that ﬁghter deliveries did not ove rtake those of bombers until

February 1940. Moreover, the Treasury could not prevent the Air

Ministry from creating the industrial capacity required to produce a

new generation of heavy bombers. In the event technical delays in

161

For the services’ attitudes, see John Buckley, ‘Contradictions in British defence policy

1937–1939: the RAF and the defence of trade’, Twentieth Century British History,

5 (1994), 100–13.

162

Slessor, Central Blue, pp. 166, 180.

Retrenchment and rearmament 159

bringing in new types into production, not the Treasury-inspired

Cabinet decision, were what held back the re-equipment of Bomber

Command.

163

The RAF’s offensive strategy was confronted with other practical

difﬁculties in 1938 and 1939. Air Staff doctrine since Trenchard’s time

had held that an air force could act decisively to destroy the enemy’s

morale and means of production. However, the rapid expansion of

Bomber Command after 1936 had denied it the opportunity to train

aircrew adequately for the tasks they were expected to perform. Even in

favourable daylight conditions the average aircrew was unlikely to drop

bombs closer than 250 yards to its target, and experience of the Spanish

Civil War suggested that the 250- to 500-pound general purpose bombs

with which the RAF was equipped would do little damage to reinforced

concrete. Most of the aircraft available were too short-range to penetrate

deep into Germany, even from French bases, and had inadequate

defensive armament. The ofﬁcer in charge of Bomber Command, Air

Chief Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, warned the Air Council in

May 1939 that his force would not be ready for war ‘within any pre-

dictable period’.

164

In the circumstances, the Air Staff’s offensive doc-

trine was hollow, and it was as well that Fighter Command had been

given sufﬁcient priority to give the United Kingdom effective protection

against defeat by air attack.

The Air Staff’s strategic doctrine had led to a considerable mis-

allocation of resources in the production of bombers inadequate for

their purpose. Moreover, the Air Staff had aroused unnecessary fears

among ministers of a knock-out blow that the German air force was in

no position to deliver in September 1938 or even in the Second World

War. The Luftwa ffe also experienced problems in carrying out rapid

expansion, and chose medium bombers in the 1930s instead of heavy

bombers, as they made fewer demands on scarce resources and had the

ﬂexibility to co-operate with the army as well as attack civil targets.

However, the choice also reﬂected the inadequacies of the four-engined

types available to the Germans at the time. The Luftwa ffe believed in

strategic bombing, and had ordered the development of a new four-

engined type, the Heinkel He 177, which the German air ministry

expected to be in production in late 1940 or early 1941.

165

Given that

163

Cabinet conclusions 6 Apr. and 27 Apr. 1938, CAB 23/93, and 7 Nov. 1938, CAB

23/96, TNA; Peden, British Rearmament, pp. 133–4, 158–60; Postan, British War

Production, p. 484; Smith, British Air Strategy, pp. 217–20, 264–6, 334–5.

164

Smith, British Air Strategy, pp. 241–3, 268–81.

165

Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power: The Path to Ruin

(Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 39–45, 250–2; R. J. Overy, ‘From ‘‘Uralbomber’’

Arms, economics and British strategy160

Britain’s rearmament programme was designed to cover a period down

to April 1942, it was no t unreasonable for Air Staff offensive and

defensive strategy to take account of the potential threa t of German

heavy bombers.

What is perhaps most notable about British strategic foreign policy in

1939 is the conﬁdence with which Chamberlain confronted Germany.

In the diplomatic sphere, he announced on 31 March that Britain would

support Poland in the event of an armed attack, and similar guarantees

to Romania, Greece and Turkey followed in April. However, he was

doubtful about the wisdom of an alliance with the Soviet Union. He

distrusted Stalin’s intentions, as did the Polish and Romanian govern-

ments. Moreover, Brit ish intelligence reports suggested that the Soviet

armed forces would not be able to provide much assistance.

166

Nego-

tiations in Moscow failed to reach agreement on the crucial question of

whether the Red Army should have the right of passage over Polish ter-

ritory, and the Germans took the opportunity to sign a non-aggression

pact with the Soviet Union on 23 August, leaving Britain and France

isolated.

167

Summary

By May 1939 the navy doubted its ability to fulﬁl plans, dating from

1920, to send out a ﬂeet to the Far East adequate to meet the Japanese

ﬂeet, and Bomber Command doubt ed its ability to carry out the stra-

tegic air offensive that Air Staff doctrine laid down for it. From February

1939 the army was being belatedly prepared for a continental com-

mitment that it had been told throughout the previous twelve months

not to prepare for. How had defence policy gon e so far astray when

Britain had seemed to be so secure in the 1920s? One obvious reason

was the difﬁculty of adapting strategy to a changing international

situation. The DRC report of February 1934 was rapidly overtaken by

events: Germany rearmed at a pace that Britain found difﬁcult to match,

and Italy appeared as an additional potential enemy. The dominions

were not prepared to share Britain’s overall responsibility for the defence

of the Empire and Commonwealth, and political developments limited

India’s contribution. Chatﬁeld and Hankey both put imperial defence

to ‘‘Amerikabomber’’: the Luftwaffe and strategic bombing’, Journal of Strategic Studies,

1 (1978), no. 2, 154–78.

166

See reports, dated 6 Mar. 1939, from Moscow Embassy in DBFP, 3rd series, vol. IV,

pp. 188–99.

167

The best account of these events is Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The

Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1989).

Retrenchment and rearmament 161

before a continental commitment for the army, but Inskip, while allo-

cating a non-European role for the army, deliberately subordinated the

air requirements of imperial defence to the air defence of the United

Kingdom.

The Treasury exercised strong inﬂuence as long as ministers were

more concerned with economic risks than military ones. The Treasury’s

doctrine of economic stability as a fourth arm of defence, which would

help to deter Germany and prepare for the long-war strategy being

planned by the Chiefs of Staff, reﬂected experience of the economic

effects of the First World War, just as the Chiefs’ strategy reﬂected the

perceived success of the blockade in weakening Germany by 1918. The

fact that Britain would be unable to borrow again from the United

States in the foreseeable future made it seem important that Britain

should be able to ﬁnance purchases in America from her own resources.

The policy of non-interference with normal trade was designed to

protect export markets and therefore Britain’s ability to earn foreign

exchange. From March 1938 that policy was gradually abandoned and

rearmament accelerated, raising the question of whether an earlier effort

would not have greatly improved the position in which Britain found

itself in 1938 and 1939. However, while the British armaments indus-

tries were not backward by international standards in the early and mid

1930s, there was a danger in the case of the air force and army that an

earlier effort might have produced more obsolescent equipment,

exempliﬁed by the story of the Battle bomber or by the army’s problems

with tank designs, rather than war-winning weapons. This argument

does not apply to the navy, whose ships were less prone to obsolescence

than aircraft or tanks, but it was in the air and on land that Britain was

weakest.

Acceptance of the doctrine of the fourth arm of defence led the

Cabinet, on Inskip’s recomm endation, to make a choice between having

an air force or an army ready for war with Germany in 1939. Fear of the

bomber, which the Air Staff had carefully cultivated since the 1920s,

pointed to a higher priority for the air force. The danger of the Luftwaffe

being able to deliver a knock-out blow by an attack on the United

Kingdom was much exaggerated in the 1930s. Far from being con-

servative, policymakers were too readily impressed by new weapons. On

the other hand, it could not have been known in advance that the

Germans would fail to develop strategic bombers, and Britain’s air

defences – the most advanced in the world – were by no means over-

insurance. It was realised that the United Kingdom would be more

exposed to air attack if the Low Countries were occupied by Germany,

Arms, economics and British strategy162

but Inskip, in giving priority to air defence and to the defence of trade

routes, assumed that France was not in immediate danger of being

overrun. He recognised the possibility that the army would have to be

prepared to help France at a later date. The doctrine of the fourth arm of

defence was accepted in 1937–8 when the purpose of rearmament was

long-term deterrence rather than war. By February 1939 the situation

had changed and, in the last months of peace, military strategy was

determining economic policy rather than the other way round.

Retrenchment and rearmament 163

4 The Second World War

Introduction

The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led to British and

French declarations of war two days later, but Britain’s war aim was to

end the Nazi menace, not to preserve the status quo in Eastern Europe.

This aim endured through a succession of military disasters and the

extension of the war to the Mediterranean and the Far East through the

intervention of Italy on 10 June 1940 and of Japan on 7 December 1941.

From the French armistice with Germany on 22 June 1940 to Hitler’s

invasion of the Soviet Union exactly a year later the British Common-

wealth and Empire fought alone. Hopes of victory depended upon

supplies of food, raw materials and munitions from the United States,

and therefore on victory over the U-boats as well as on American aid

through the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941. Although the Japanese

attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States fully into the war, it

was not until the American naval victory at Midway in June 1942 that

the Japanese were decisively checked. The summer of 1942 was the

nadir of British fortunes: Singapore had surrendered on 15 February;

India was threatened. The Commonwealth armies in North Africa were

heavily defeated by the Germans and Italians, and it seemed that Egypt

too might be lost. The tide turned in late 1942, with the battle of El

Alamein (23 October – 5 November), the Anglo-American landings in

North Africa (8 November) and the Soviet relief of Stalingrad (19–25

November). Thereafter the Allies were on the offensive.

It is tempting for the economic historian to attribute the Allies’ victory

to their combined technological, industrial and manpower resources.

This position has been put forward most convincingly by Mark

Harrison, who has argued that, while purely military factors more than

offset the Al lied economic advantage down to 1942, thereafter ‘eco-

nomics determined the outcome’ in a war of attrition.

However, as

Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II (Cambridge University Press,

1998), p. 2. Paul Kennedy takes a similar position: Rise and Fall, p. 458.

164