Peden G.S. Arms, Economics and British Strategy From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs
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capture the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem in September.
167
The
Allies’ logistical problems would have made victory in 1944 difficult in
any case. The Germans still had sufficient forces to launch a counter-
attack in the Ardennes in December 1944, and the final Al lied advance
across Germany did not begin until February 1945.
Meanwhile, there had been successful interactions between Allied air
and land forces. As already noted, the air forces had great ly impeded the
German army’s mobility by attacking its commun ications in France.
From the autumn, strategic and tactical bombers extended the attack to
transport systems in Ge rmany itself, helping to paralyse the German
economy. Alfred Mierzejewski has argued that German industry was
dependent upon distribution of coal by rail and inland wat erways and
that the bombing of railway marshalling yards in particular reduced
armaments production by more than half between June 1944 and
February 1945.
168
Moreover, by 1944 the USAAF and Bomber Com-
mand had at last acquired the technical means and the experience with
which to make effective attacks on oil targets. The USAAF began to do
so in May 1944, and Bomber Command in June. German stocks of
aviation fuel, petrol and diesel oil had been increasing down to May, but
in May total fuel production fell to 85 per cent of that of April, and in
June to 50 per cent. The invasion of Normandy and the Soviet offensive
in White Russia in June forced the Germans to increase consumption of
fuel just as strategic bombing was reducing production. The Russians
captured the Romanian oilfields in August. With fuel in short supply,
the Luftwaffe found by November that it could no longer use the large
numbers of fighter aircraft being produced in Germany, or train pilots to
fly them. The strategic air offensive also benefited from the advance of
the Allied armies, which deprived the Luftwaffe of rada r early warning
systems in France and Belgium. This gain was particularly marked in
the case of Bomber Command, which had been suffering unsustainable
losses from German night-fighters prior to its diversion to operations
over France in support of D-Day. The German night-fighter force was
largely ineffective after August. On the other hand, the Allied armies
benefited from the fact that by 1944 about 2 million German soldiers
and civilians were engaged in ground anti-aircraft defence, and that 30
per cent of total German artillery production was for the anti-aircraft
defences, including 70 per cent of 88-mm guns which otherwise would
167
G. E. Patrick Murray, Eisenhower versus Montgomery: The Continuing Debate (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1996), chs. 1–4.
168
Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944–1945 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), esp. p. 198.
The Second World War 225
have been employed in the anti-tank role.
169
The last twelve months of
the war thus saw a successful combination of air and land power, quite
different from earlier Air Staff ideas of the RAF as an independent
instrument of war. After the war, the British Bombing Survey Unit
concluded that the attempt to break the morale of the German civilian
population had clearly failed.
170
Britain’s resources were so fully stretched that her contribution to
victory over Japan was necessarily limited. The Allied objective in Burma
in 1944–5 was to reopen links with China, where the great er part of the
Japanese army was engaged, and from where American strategic bombers
could attack Japan. American and Chinese force s operated in northern
Burma, securing airfields and clearing the one good road from Burma to
China. The main British effort was to recover central Burma, and then to
seize the country’s only sizeable port, Rangoon. General Sir William
Slim’s 14th Army, which included African as well as British and Indian
divisions, began operations in October 1944, as the monsoon tailed off.
Mandalay fell on 20 March, and Rangoon on 3 May, 1945, after a
seaborne landing. The campaign was a brilliant success, but played little
part in the defeat of Japan. Likewise the creation of a British Pacific Fleet
in December 1944 was essentially a political gesture as by that date the
US Navy had gained decisive superiority over the Japanese.
171
Japan had already been brought to the brink of surrender by blockade
and conventional air attacks by the time that atomic bombs were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. The
Quebec agreement of August 1943 had stated that the United States
and the United Kingdom would not use an atomic bomb without the
other’s consent, and British cons ent had been given on 4 July 1945,
twelve days before the first test bomb was exploded at Los Alamos in
New Mexico. Churchill never doubted that President Truman’s deci-
sion to use the atomic bomb was right.
172
The British decision to make
an atomic bomb went back to the end of August 1941, when British
scientists had concluded that there was a reasonable chance that one
could be produced before the end of the war, and the Chiefs of Staff had
recommended maximum priority. There had been a fear that the Ger-
mans might make one first. The Americans had also been active in the
169
Murray, Luftwaffe, pp. 245–50, 264–5; Overy, Air War, p. 122; Webster and
Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. III, pp. 123–40, 225–61; Wilson, Churchill
and the Prof, pp. 81–8.
170
Biddle, ‘British and American approaches’, pp. 126–7.
171
Jon Robb-Webb, ‘‘‘Light two lanterns, the British are coming by sea’’: Royal Navy
participation in the Pacific 1944–45’, in Greg Kennedy (ed.), British Naval Strategy
East of Suez, 1900–2000 (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 128–53.
172
Churchill, Second World War, vol. VI, p. 553.
Arms, economics and British strategy226
field, and in October 1941, while the United States was still neutral,
Roosevelt had suggested that the British and American efforts might
usefully be co-ordinated or even jointly conducted. Churchill’s initial
response had been non-committal. However, by July 1942 Anderson,
the lord president, who had oversight of atomic research, realised that
the effort required to produce atomic bombs was beyond what Britain
could achieve in war-time, and recommended that the two countries’
research programmes should be merged.
173
Subsequently the British
scientists concerned moved to the United States, and Canada provided
the raw material, uranium. Nevertheless, most of the scientific and
industrial input to what was called the Manhattan Project was Amer-
ican, and it was the United States that emerged from the Second World
War as the first nuclear power.
Summary
Britain was by no means as backward in her capa city to wage war as
critics such as Barnett have made out. While one can point to short-
comings, the overall impression is one of a formidable military-scien-
tific-industrial complex. Nor were servicemen conservative either in
their requ irements for new weapons systems or in the doctrin es for their
use. The quality of British arms varied but most matched the best that
Germany could produce, and some, for example strategic bombers,
were better. There were failures, notably unreliable tanks, but failures
tended to be the result of trying to do too much too quickly, and the
improvement of British tanks by 1945 deserves as much attent ion as
earlier defects.
Britain began the war intendin g to conserve her economic strength for
a three-year war, but had to throw caution to the winds from the summer
of 1940. British strategy aimed to make the United Kingdom and its
trade routes secure, to protect overseas territories and interests, to sup-
port alli es, and to win a long war in which the enemy would first be
weakened by blockade and air attac k before a decisive offensive could be
mounted on land. The strategy could be said to have been successful
eventually, but there were many unexpected events on the way. It had
always been realised that Britain could not make her empire secure
against both Italy and Japan if she were engaged in a war with Germany.
Even so, Malaya could have been defended more effectively if Churchill
173
The Roosevelt–Churchill correspondence in 1941, and Sir John Anderson’s letter to
Churchill, 30 July 1942, recommending a merger with the Americans, are in PREM 3/
139/8A, TNA.
The Second World War 227
had allowed the Chiefs of Staff ’s plan for air defence to be implemented.
In the event, as the Norwegian campaign and the battle for Crete had
already demonstrated, sea power had to be supplemented by air power.
The defence of the United Kingdom itself depended upon Fighter
Command and, whatever criticisms may be made about neglect of
imperial defence before or during the war, events in 1940 showed the
wisdom of conforming to the strategic principle of first securing one’s base.
Belief in the effectiveness of blockade tended to be exaggerated, but
did not involve the creation of additional naval forces, since command of
the sea was necessary in any case to protect trade. The Air Staff’s faith in
the strategic bomber, however, did involve substantial opportunity cost
in terms of trade defence and tactical air power. Moreover, the RAF
failed to develop effective strategic bombers and the technical means of
hitting vital targets such as oil plants and transport systems until late in
the war. The Air Staff’s strategy also proved to be beyond Britain’s
industrial strength, which could never have supported a 4,000-strong
heavy bomber force without weakening the defence of her trade routes
and overseas interests even more than was the case.
Britain’s ability to conduct a long war was compromised by the fall of
France, and proved to be possible only wi th the support of Lend-Lease.
It was also the United States that provided about two-thirds of the air
and land force s used to defeat Germany in the west in 1944–5. The Red
Army absorbed the efforts of the greater part of the German army from
1941. Given the scale of the effort required for victory in 1945, it would
seem that the long-term strategy worked out by the Chiefs of Staff in the
autumn of 1940 for weakening Germany by blockade and bombing,
prior to landing British land forces in support of popular revolts in
occupied Europe, was beyond Britain’s unaided strength. Britain could
not realistically have mobilised more manpower than she did, and
indeed it was the manpower budget of 1942 that imposed a reality check
on Churchill’s directives requiring more heavy bombers and more army
divisions than could be provided.
Nevertheless, Britain’s contribution to the Allied victory was con-
siderable. She was the only great power to be engaged against Germany
from September 1939 to May 1945. She made the main contribu tion to
Allied sea power in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Indian
Ocean. She also built up a larger air force than Germany. The British
and Commonwealth armies played the leading role in the Middle East
and a strong supporting role in North-West Europe. Yet events showed
that Britain could not stand alone in a great war, militarily, economically
or in the scientific-industrial effort to maintain the full range of weapons
systems, which, by July 1945, included the atomic bomb.
Arms, economics and British strategy228
5 The impacts of the atomic bomb and the
Cold War, 1945–1954
Introduction
For the purposes of military technology, the post-war period may be
divided into an atomic phase and a the rmonuclear phase, the latter
beginning with the Americans’ first hydrogen-bomb tests in 1954. This
chapter deals with the first phase. As international relations came gra-
dually to be dominated by the Cold War, British forei gn policy aimed to
co-operate with what Churchill in 1948 called three overlapping circles
of ‘free nations’: the United States, the Commonwealth and Western
Europe.
1
Anglo-American relations were the most important for three
reasons. First, Britain had merged her atomic research with America’s in
1942 and had hopes of collaboration in the post-war period. Second,
Britain had to borrow dollars to finance imports from North America
while converting her ind ustries from war to peace, and she hoped to
co-operate with the United States in creating a stable and expanding
international economy. Third, only the United States could counter-
balance the power of the Soviet Union.
In analysing defence policy after 1945 one has to remembe r that the
course of international relations was not predictable. An important
Foreign Office brief for the Potsdam conference in July 1945 recom-
mended that Britain should stand firm diplomatically against Soviet
designs, but did not assume that American support would be forth-
coming, and concluded that Britain must base its foreign policy on the
principle of co-operation between the United States, the Soviet Union
and the British Commonwealth.
2
By May 1946 the Foreign Secretary,
Ernest Bevin, could tell the Cabinet and Commonwealth prime
ministers that the danger from the Soviet Union had become as great,
1
The Times, 11 Oct. 1948.
2
Sir Orme Sargent, ‘Stocktaking after VE Day’, 11 July 1945, reprinted in Documents on
British Policy Overseas (DBPO), series 1, vol. I (London: HMSO, 1984), pp. 181–7.
Sargent became permanent under-secretary in 1946.
229
and possibly greater, than that of a revived Germany, but the threat was
one of subversion not outright war. Bevin skilfully exploited American
fears of Communism as a means of reducing Britain’s commitments at a
time when the British economy was under strain. On 21 February 1947
he announced that Britain could no longer afford to give aid to Greece,
where Communist guerrillas were active, or Turkey, thereby prompting
the American President to announce the ‘Truman doctrine’ of sup-
porting ‘free peoples’ who were resisting armed minori ties or outside
pressures.
3
However, it was not until after the Communist takeover of
Czechoslovakia in February 1948 that Labour ministers were convinced
about Soviet hostility. The US State Department made plain that any
American commitment to the defence of Western Europe would depend
on evidence that the Europeans were willing to help themselves. To this
end Bevin signed the Brus sels Treaty with France and the Benelux
countries in March 1948, creating the Western Europe an Union
(WEU), with its obligation to assist any member that was attacked, and
the North Atlantic Treaty followed on 4 April 1949.
4
It was the invasion
of South Korea by the Communist North on 25 June 1950 that turned
NATO from a mutual defence pact into a tight military alliance, since it
was believed in Washington and London that the war might be a
curtain-raiser for Soviet aggression in Europe within the next few years.
The Labour government’s response was to embark on an over-
ambitious rearmament programme that Churchill had to cut back after
he returned to office during a sterling crisis in October 1951.
The issues to be addressed in this chapter are: in what sense did the
Labour government’s decision to develop a British atomic bomb mark
the beginning of a nuclear phase in the British way of warfare? Was
Britain’s defence policy in the immediate post-war period commensu-
rate with her economic resources? Of particular significance in this
respect was the Chiefs of Staff’s Global Strategy paper of 1952, which
was described by a leading American expert in strategic studies, Richard
Rosecrance, as ‘undoubtedly the most influential British defense paper
of the post-war period’, and by Eric Grove as ‘perhaps one of the most
remarkable attempts of its kind to rethink national strategy from first
principles’.
5
John Baylis and Alan Macmillan questioned the extent to
3
Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 266,
368–70, 378–9.
4
John Baylis, The Diplomacy of Pragmatism: Britain and the Formation of NATO,
1942–1949 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 68–73, 92–111.
5
R. N. Rosecrance, Defense of the Realm: British Strategy in the Nuclear Epoch (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 159; Eric Grove, Vanguard to Trident: British Naval
Policy since World War II (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 1987), p. 82.
Arms, economics and British strategy230
which the paper broke new ground but nevertheless considered that it
‘set the foundations of declaratory British strategic policy for many years
to come’.
6
Briefly, the Global Strategy paper recognised that too much
expenditure on defence by Britain and her allies would undermine their
economies and present the Communists with a bloodless victory.
Moreover, the Cold War was expected to continue for a long period
during which equipment would become obsolescent, making high levels
of expenditure on research and development necessary to keep abreast
of the Soviet forces. However, ‘a new factor of fundamental importance’
was that studies in 1951–2 had shown that there would be no effective
defence in the foreseeable future against an atomic air attack, either
against the United Kingdom or the Soviet Union. A strategy of nuclear
deterrence therefore offered security at a sustainable cost.
7
The Global
Strategy paper brings out starkly the interconnection between technol-
ogy, economics and strategy, and forms the main focus of this chapter.
Policymakers
Although central to the future of defence policy, atomic energy was
rarely on the Cabinet agenda, even for report. In 1945 and 1946 the
Prime Min ister, Attlee, consulted his inner Cabinet: Bevin, Herbert
Morrison (lord president of the council) and Cripps (president of the
Board of Trade), and two or three others in an ad hoc ministerial
committee, known as Gen 75, the papers of whic h were not circulated to
the rest of the Cabinet. Initially, recommendations on atomic policy
were made by an Advisory Committee, which included service, scientific
and official members, and was chaired by Sir John Anderson, who had
been in charge of the atomic energy programme during the war. A
complicating factor was that Anderson was Independent MP for the
Scottish universities and sat on the Opposition front bench. He was very
much involved in policymaking for about a year but thereafter the dis-
advantage that he did not attend ministerial meetings led to the creation
of a new standing committee, the Atomic Energy Official Committee,
which largely superseded Anderson’s committee. The decision to make
a British atomic bomb was not taken formally until January 1947, and
then by an ad hoc ministerial committee, known as Gen 163. Bevin and
Morrison were again members, along with the Secretary of State for the
Dominions, the Minister of Defence and the Minister of Supply. The
6
John Baylis and Alan Macmillan, ‘The British Global Strategy paper of 1952’, Journal of
Strategic Studies, 16 (1993), no. 2, 200–26, at 221.
7
‘Defence policy and global strategy’, D (52) 26, CAB 131/12, TNA.
The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War 231
Cabinet’s Defence Committee was not kept regularly informed of the
atomic programme and was not asked to take a decision on it until 1950,
and then only because the Chiefs of Staff had recommended some delay
in the interests of accelerating other weapons projects.
8
It was not, of
course, unprecedented for a prime minister to reserve sensitive defence
matters to himself and an inner circle of ministers and advisers.
Churchill had excluded the Cabinet from important discussions on the
atomic bomb, and much else, during the war.
Attlee did not long follow Churchill’s example of being his own
minister of defence. His experience as under-secretary of state for war in
1924 had led him to believe that there should be a single defence doc-
trine, not one for each service, and in 1936 he had proposed that there
should be a minister of defence with authority to establish priorities and
allocate resources between the three services.
9
Nevertheless the changes
outlined in the 1946 White Paper Statement Relating to Defence were
hardly revolutionary. Drawing upon war-time and pre-war experience,
an informal group including General Ismay, Churchill’s war-time chief
of staff, General Sir Ian Jacob, Ismay’s chief staff officer during the war,
and Sir Edward Bridges, the Cabinet secretary, had recommended that
the three independent service departments retain responsibility for plans
and operations, with co-ordination through numerous inter-service
committees. The minister of defence, advised by the Chiefs of Staff, was
to decide the balance of resources going to each department before the
estimates were sent to the Treasury, but in practice it was difficult for
him to do so if the Chiefs of Staff could not agree where cuts necessary
to bring defence expenditure within its budget were to be found. The
possibility of a powerful chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee
giving independent, inter-service advice had been considered and
rejected, and a chief of the defence staff was not appointed until 1959.
10
The Treasury, therefore, continued to have an active role in discussions
on defence policy from the point of view of securing economies. The
minister of defence represented all three services in Cabinet, and was the
prime minister’s deputy on the Defence Committee, but neither of
the ministers of defence who held office between December 1946 and
October 1951, A. V. Alexander and Emmanuel Shinwell, was a leading
member of the government. The Chiefs of Staff enjoyed considerable
8
Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 2 vols.
(London: Macmillan, 1974), vol. I, pp. 19–31, 231.
9
308 HC Deb., 5s, 1936, cc. 1317–21.
10
Franklyn A. Johnson, Defence by Ministry: The British Ministry of Defence 1944–1974
(New York: Holmes and Meir Publishers, 1980), pp. 17–28; Peden, Treasury and British
Public Policy, pp. 420–1.
Arms, economics and British strategy232
autonomy, being individuals of considerable prestige, including
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, the CIGS from 1946 to 1948; his
successor, Slim, the victor in Burma; and two exceptionally able CASs,
Tedder (1946–50) and Slessor (1950–3). The first sea lords had the
confidence that came from representing the senior service. Defence policy
was still very much the product of compromise between independent
departments.
Labour ministers inherited many war-time controls over the econ-
omy, and spoke a lot about economic planning, but few – perhaps only
Cripps and Hugh Gaitskell – had a clear idea of how planning defence
production might be related to the wider economy. As it happened,
Cripps was chancellor of the exchequer from November 1947 to
October 1950, when he was succeeded by Gaitskell, and the Treasury
became the focus of economic planning. At first ministers seem to have
thought in terms of manpower planning, as in the war, but without the
political will to direct labour into munitions or other key economic
activities, such as agriculture or exports, manpower planning could only
reveal the ext ent of shortages.
11
When rearmament began in 1950 raw
materials were in short supply, and a Ministry of Materials was created
in 1951 with a view to making allocations, but it was not easy to dis-
entangle its responsibilities from those of the Board of Trade for
industry or of the Ministry of Supply for munitions, aviation and atomic
energy. By 1952 the raw materials shortage was abating and a Con-
servative government that did not share Labour’s commitment to
planning was in office. The only surprising thing is that it was not until
1954 that the Ministry of Materials was abolished.
Churchill kept the existing arrangements for the Ministry of Defence
and the defence departments, but held the portfolio of minister of
defence himself until 28 February 1952. As his successor, he appointed
the distinguished soldier, Earl Alexander of Tunis, who, howev er, made
no attempt to exert his own authority, leaving the service ministers to
run their departments, while the Prime Minister retained effective
control of defence policy. Churchill was a month short of his seventy-
seventh birthday when he took office, and was in indifferent health. He
was interested in the new strategic problems posed by the atomic bomb
but, in the words of the official historian, Margaret Gowing, ‘for the
most part [his] minutes on atomic energy in the months after his return
to office show the deterioration of his powers’.
12
Churchill continued to
11
Alec Cairncross, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy 1945–51 (London: Methuen,
1985), pp. 299–314, 384–99.
12
Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, vol. I, p. 407.
The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War 233
rely a great deal on Cherwell for guidance on scientific and other
technical questions. Cherwell was an enthusiastic supporter of an
independent nuclear deterrent, but he was also determined that the
aggregate level of defence expenditure should not exceed what the
economy woul d bear.
Atomic weapons
13
The atomic bomb was one of the first problems that Attlee had to deal
with on taking office on 26 July 1945. In the wake of the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he raised with President Truman on 25
September the question of how international relations could be changed
to ensure that mutual annihilation would not result from this new
weapon. However, relations between the United States and the Soviet
Union m ade it unlikely that Washington would agree to share technical
information through the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.
British hopes of bilateral collaboration rested initially on the Hyde Park
Aide-Me
´
moire, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in September 1944,
which had promised post-war collaboration in atomic research for
military and comm ercial purposes, unless terminated by mutual agree-
ment. However, the Truman administration did not consider itself
bound by the Aide-Me
´
moire, which was not a formal diplomatic docu-
ment, and although on 15 November 1945 Truman signed another
informal declaration that there would be ‘full and effective co-operation
in the field of atomic energy’ betw een the United States, the United
Kingdom and Canada, there was little excha nge of scientific information
after the war even before the McMahon Act of 1 August 1946 formally
terminated collaboration. Moreover, the Quebec Agreement, whereby
the United States and the United Kingdom would no t use the atomic
bomb without each other’s consent, was replaced on 16 November 1945
by the Groves–Anderson memorandum, whereby the United States, the
United Kingdom and Canada agreed that they would not use atomic
weapons against other countries without prior consultation with each
13
It is worth mentioning that research was undertaken in this period on weapons of mass
destruction other than the atomic bomb. The 1952 Global Strategy paper noted that
‘research in Bacteriological Warfare has not yet gone far enough to enable us to decide
whether or not it would be advantageous to the Allies to use it. The new nerve gases
can, however, be used tactically to great advantage and would provide the Allies with
weapons of real value against an enemy who relies on massed formations. The moral
objections to Chemical Warfare can surely be no greater than to atomic warfare ...We
consider that the Allies should be prepared to use these weapons in war if they consider
it advantageous to do so.’ (D (52) 26, CAB 131/12, TNA).
Arms, economics and British strategy234