Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (57 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Just as in Ireland, the hard line initially had support. O’Dwyer endorsed Dyer’s action. His superior officers quickly found fresh work for him to do in Afghanistan. Some local Sikhs even made him an Honorary Sikh in a ceremony at the Golden Temple, likening him to ‘Nikalseyan Sahib’ (John Nicholson, the legendary hero of the 1857 Mutiny). At home, the
Morning Post
opened a sympathy fund for Dyer, collecting over £26,000 from donors, among them Rudyard Kipling. Once again, however, the mood changed quickly from self-righteousness to remorse. Dyer’s undoing began when two Congress-supporting lawyers succeeded in having him summoned before an inquiry to answer for his actions. His unabashed admission that his intention had been to ‘strike terror into the whole of the Punjab’ brought the roof down on his head. In Parliament Montagu angrily asked of those who defended Dyer: ‘Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation, and subordination, and frightfulness ...?’ Less predictable was Churchill’s denunciation of the massacre as ‘monstrous’. It was
without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.
 
Insisting that firing on unarmed civilians was ‘not the British way of doing business’, Churchill accused Dyer of undermining rather than saving British rule in India. This was simply ‘the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy’. Dyer was hastily invalided out of the army. Although he was never prosecuted, his career was over.
India was Ireland but on a vast scale; and Amritsar was India’s Easter Rising, creating nationalist martyrs on one side and a crisis of confidence on the other. In both countries, the nationalists had begun peacefully by asking for Home Rule, for devolution within the Empire. In both cases, it took violence to get the British to agree. And in both cases, the British response to violence was schizophrenic: harsh on the ground but then emollient at the top. If, as Gandhi said, Amritsar had ‘shaken the foundation’ of the Empire, then the first tremor had emanated from Dublin three years before. Indeed, the Indians had been learning from the Irish experience for some time. When the young Jawaharlal Nehru visited Dublin, he had found Sinn Fein ‘a most interesting movement ... Their policy is not to beg for favours, but to wrest them’. When the Hindu visionary Bal Gangadhar Tilak wished to protest against the partition of Bengal, he adopted the Irish tactic of the boycott. Indeed, an Irishwoman was elected to the presidency of Congress in December 1918: Annie Besant, a half-mad theosophist who believed her adopted son to be the ‘vehicle of the world teacher’ and saw ‘Home Rule’ as the answer to the Indian Question.
But what was important was not the nationalist tremors themselves; it was the fact that they made the Empire shake. In previous centuries the British had felt no qualms about shooting to kill in defence of the Empire. That had started to change after Morant Bay. By the time of Amritsar, the ruthless determination once exhibited by the likes of Clive, Nicholson and Kitchener seemed to have vanished altogether.
Yet amid all this inter-war anxiety, there was one man who continued to believe in the British Empire. In his eyes, the British were ‘an admirably trained people’ who had ‘worked for three hundred years to assure themselves the domination of the world for two centuries’. They had ‘learned the art of being masters, and of holding the reins so lightly withal, that the natives do not notice the curb’. Even his favourite film,
Lives of the Bengal Lancers
, had an imperial subject.
In
Mein Kampf
and in his later dinner table monologues, Adolf Hitler repeatedly expressed his admiration of British imperialism. What Germany had to do, he argued, was to learn from Britain’s example. ‘The wealth of Great Britain’, he declared, ‘is the result ... of the capitalist exploitation of the three hundred and fifty million Indian slaves’. That was precisely what Hitler most admired: the effective oppression of an inferior race. And there was an obvious place where Germany could endeavour to do the same. ‘What India was for England’, he explained, ‘the territories of Russia will be for us’. If Hitler had a criticism of the British it was merely that they were too selfcritical and too lenient towards their subject peoples:
There are Englishmen who reproach themselves with having governed the country badly. Why? Because the Indians show no enthusiasm for their rule. I claim that the English have governed India very well, but their error is to expect enthusiasm from the people they administer.
 
As he explained to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in 1937, the way to deal with Indian nationalism was simple: ‘Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established’.
Hitler had no doubt that it was rival empires, not native nationalism, which posed the real challenge to British rule. ‘England will lose India’, he argued in
Mein Kampf
, ‘either if her own administrative machinery falls prey to racial decomposition ... or if she is bested by the sword of a powerful enemy. Indian agitators, however, will never achieve this ... If the English give India back her liberty, within twenty years India will have lost her liberty again’. He was also disarmingly frank in admitting that his version of imperialism would be a great deal nastier than the British version:
However miserably the inhabitants of India may live under the British they will certainly be no better off if the British go ... If we took India, the Indians would certainly not be enthusiastic and they’d not be slow to regret the good old days of English rule.
 
Yet Hitler disavowed any such desire to ‘take’ India. On the contrary, as he said in
Mein Kampf
, ‘I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under English rule than under any other’. He insisted that he had no desire to bring about the destruction of the British Empire, an act which (as he put it in October 1941) ‘would not be of any benefit to Germany ... [but] would benefit only Japan, the United States, and others’. The Empire, he told Mussolini in June 1940, was ‘an important factor in world equilibrium’.
It was precisely this Anglophilia that posed perhaps the gravest of all threats to the British Empire: the threat of diabolical temptation. On 28 April 1939, Hitler made a speech in the Reichstag that deserves to be quoted at length:
During the whole of my political activity I have always expounded the idea of a close friendship and collaboration between Germany and England ... This desire for Anglo-German friendship and cooperation conforms not merely to sentiments which result from the racial origins of our two peoples, but also to my realization of the importance for the whole of mankind of the existence of the British Empire. I have never left room for any doubt of my belief that the existence of this empire is an inestimable factor of value for the whole of human cultural and economic life. By whatever means Great Britain has acquired her colonial territories – and I know that they were those of force and often brutality – nevertheless, I know full well that no other empire has ever come into being in any other way, and that in the final resort it is not so much the methods that are taken into account in history as success, and not the success of the methods as such, but rather the general good which the methods yield. Now there is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon people have accomplished immeasurable colonizing work in the world. For this work I have a sincere admiration. The thought of destroying this labour appeared and still appears to me, seen from a higher human point of view, as nothing but the effluence of human wanton destructiveness.
 
Then he came to the point:
However, this sincere respect of mine for this achievement does not mean forgoing the securing of the life of my own people. I regard it as impossible to achieve a lasting friendship between the German and Anglo-Saxon peoples if the other side does not recognize that there are German as well as British interests, that not only is the preservation of the British Empire the meaning and purpose of the lives of Britishers, but also that for Germans the freedom and preservation of the German Reich is their life purpose.
 
This was the carefully calculated preamble to a final bid to avert war with Britain by doing a deal based on co-existence: the British would be allowed to retain their overseas Empire if they would give Hitler a free hand to carve out a German Empire in Central and Eastern Europe. On 25 June 1940 Hitler telephoned Goebbels to spell out exactly how such a deal would look:
The Führer . . . believes that the [British] Empire must be preserved if at all possible. For if it collapses, then we shall not inherit it, but foreign and even hostile powers will take it over. But if England will have it no other way, then she must be beaten to her knees. The Führer, however, would be agreeable to peace on the following basis: England out of Europe, colonies and mandates returned. Reparations for what was stolen from us after the World War ...
 
It was an idea Hitler returned to repeatedly. As late as January 1942 he was still convinced that ‘the English have two possibilities: either to give up Europe and hold on to the East, or vice versa’.
We know that there were some elements in the War Cabinet who would have been – were – tempted by such a ‘peace’ based on surrendering the Continent to Nazism. Halifax had himself approached the Italian ambassador on 25 May to offer colonial bribes (perhaps Gibraltar, perhaps Malta) in return for Mussolini’s staying out of the war and brokering a peace conference. Chamberlain privately admitted that if he believed ‘that we could purchase peace and a lasting settlement by handing over Tanganyika to the Germans’, then he ‘would not hesitate for a moment’. But Churchill, to his eternal credit, saw through Hitler’s blandishments. Three days later, addressing the full Cabinet rather than just the appeasement-minded War Cabinet, Churchill insisted that ‘it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our Fleet – that would be called disarmament – our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state ...’ This was quite right. Hitler’s offers of peaceful coexistence with the British Empire were wholly insincere. Why else refer to ‘England’ as a ‘hate-inspired antagonist’, as he did in his famous meeting with the service chiefs on 5 November 1937? On that occasion, Hitler had spoken in a very different tone about the British Empire, frankly predicting its imminent dissolution. This was what Hitler really thought of the Empire, that it was ‘unsustainable ... from the point of view of power politics’. German plans for an Atlantic fleet and an African colonial empire tell the same story.
Nevertheless, Churchill was defying not just Hitler; he was in some measure also defying the military odds. True, the Royal Navy was still much larger than the German, provided the Germans did not get their hands on the French navy too. True, the Royal Air Force had enough of an edge over the Luftwaffe to stand a reasonable chance of winning the Battle of Britain.
107
But the 225,000 British troops who had been evacuated from Dunkirk (along with 120,000 French) had left behind not only 11,000 dead and 40,000 captured comrades but also nearly all their equipment. By comparison with the Germans’ ten Panzer divisions, the British were all but tankless. Above all, with France vanquished and Russia on Hitler’s side, Britain now stood alone.
Or did she? The peroration of Churchill’s speech to the Commons on 4 June 1940 is best remembered for its sonorous pledges to fight ‘on the beaches ... in the fields and in the streets’ and so on. But it was the conclusion that really mattered:
... we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.
 

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