The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (77 page)

We Shall Come to No Good: The Empire Goes to War, 1937–9

Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937. It was an office he had coveted for years, for he was vain, ambitious and relished the exercise of power. He also had a mission: Chamberlain believed that he alone could rescue Britain and its empire from the predicament they were now in, and possibly avert a European war. In many ways he was an unlikely national saviour, for he had made his reputation as a social reformer, knew little about diplomacy, and was thin-skinned, which was why he liked to surround himself with yes-men. He had none of the charisma of, say, Pitt or Lloyd George, and little presence. Once, when things were not going his way, Anthony Eden cruelly likened him to ‘a turkey who has missed his Christmas’.
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Chamberlain was not helped by his prejudices. He had ‘an almost instinctive contempt for the Americans and what amounted to a hatred of the Russians’.
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A newcomer to the world of international negotiations, he assumed that they would be of a kind with which he was familiar, that between English bosses and workers.
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This did not promise well, for the comparison took for granted a parity of goodwill and a joint willingness to reach an equitable compromise. But Chamberlain was persistent, confident of his abilities and unshakeable in his belief that he was acting in the best interests of Britain and its empire.

These were best served, he imagined, by a return to the old-fashioned way of conducting foreign policy, that is through give-and-take bargaining between powers. Those who agreed with him, and those who did not, called it appeasement. Appeasement had played a prominent part in Britain’s relations with other nations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then, Britain had encouraged transfers of territory which reduced tension in Europe and maintained a balance of power. To this end, Britain had been willing to evacuate Malta in 1802, surrender captured Dutch and French colonies in 1814–15, and at the same time permit Austria to govern much of northern Italy, and Russia Poland. Such arrangements left Britain free to devote her attention and resources to what really mattered, her overseas empire and interests. Both were in jeopardy in 1937, and could be saved only if a measure of stability was restored to Europe.

Appeasement offended consciences everywhere. Its end result was that the inhabitants of small, weak nations were forced to accept unwelcome rulers, and this blatantly violated those principles of self-determination that the League had stood for. Appeasement also meant an end to collective security and the revival of old-style, cynical power-broking. And not a moment too soon thought some on the right: ‘What we require is to divest our diplomacy of cant, metaphysics, and the jargon of collective security, and to begin talking to Mussolini in terms of
Realpolitik.’
Only then, could Britain ‘preserve the peace and protect our vital Imperial interests’.
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The left were horrified by this reversion to old methods and the jettisoning of the noble idealism which the League embodied. Then and after, Chamberlain’s political enemies branded him as the arch-appeaser, the most culpable of the so-called ‘Guilty Men’ of left-wing mythology. The legend (a distillation of contemporary journalism, post-war historiography and Comintern propaganda) depicted appeasement as the instrument of capitalism. Abyssinia, the Spanish Republicans and Czechoslovakia were successively thrown to the Fascist wolves because they were the beasts which would eventually devour Russia, and with it Communism.

The Conservative government was the handmaiden of capitalism and its preservation was the sole object of Chamberlain’s foreign policy. According to the Left Book Club’s
The Road to War
(1937), the appeasement of Japan over Manchuria and China was being undertaken for sinister motives:

It was literally unthinkable to our propertied classes that they should incur the slightest risk of war, or even of loss of trade and investments, for a result that would most certainly include a social revolution in Japan! Hence the violently pro-Japanese feeling manifested in the City, by most of the Government press, and by a powerful section of the Conservative Party.
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Appeasement was therefore a device to frustrate the aspirations of the Japanese working class and, so the conspiratorial school of commentators believed, the masses everywhere. Such paranoid stuff had a wide circulation and many converts, including the Australian Labour party which suspected that Chamberlain was pro-fascist.
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Those who made the policies of appeasement did not think in terms of the struggle between ideologies, but of national survival. ‘We shall come to no good, and I don’t see how we’re to defend our interests here, in the Med or in the F[ar] E[ast]. Most Depressing,’ were Alexander Cadogan’s thoughts on how matters stood in 1937.
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Chamberlain did see a way out through short-term appeasement and long-term rearmament. As the latter gathered momentum, the need for appeasement would disappear, for the greatest threat to Britain’s security, Hitler, would shrink from further aggression. But Hitler could only be deterred if he was isolated, and so Chamberlain needed to resuscitate cordial relations with Italy. Once Hitler was neutralised and Mussolini friendly, Britain could turn its attentions towards the Far East and Japan.

Chamberlain’s quest for a stable Europe was accompanied by the acceleration of Britain’s rearmament programme. Traditional, imperial strategic priorities were adhered to in a way that would have won the approval of any eighteenth-or nineteenth-century statesman, and as it turned out they held the key to the nation’s deliverance in 1940. Home defence came first, with the RAF receiving the biggest share of the budget. The money was split between defence (Hurricane and Spitfire fighters and RADAR) and medium and long-range bombers for offensives against the industrial heartlands of Germany. Progress was impressive; by September 1939, when the programme still had three years to run, the RAF mustered 608 fighters and 536 bombers ready for action, 2,000 aircraft in reserve, and a further 425 deployed in the Middle East, India and Malaya.

These totals were, however, only superficially reassuring. Throughout the past five years, British policy-making had been pervaded by fears about the size and offensive capability of the Luftwaffe. Both were consistently overrated; at the outbreak of war it was officially calculated that Germany possessed over 2,000 bombers, whereas in fact it had 1,180 and 366 dive-bombers. One incubus spawned another. The government felt certain that the moment war was declared, if not before, the bulk of Hitler’s airforce would be used for a sustained aerial bombardment of British cities. Hence the hurried construction of shelters, rehearsals of air-raid drill, distribution of gas masks, and the emptying of 50,000 London hospital beds in readiness for casualties during the Czech crisis in September 1938. These chilling preparations for a holocaust gave international crises a peculiar horror, and explain the heartfelt sense of national relief the moment it was known that Chamberlain had returned from Munich with a formula for peace.

Britain’s second and third strategic priorities were the protection of the world’s seaways and the defence of the empire; again, a policy which would have recommended itself to earlier statesmen. For practical and emotional reasons, Chamberlain was opposed to the despatch of a second massive expeditionary force to the Franco-Belgian frontier. The promise of such an army would discourage the French from extending the Maginot Line from the southern border of Belgium to the Channel coast, and would commit Britain to another extended, bloody war of attrition in Flanders. As a result, the army was pushed to the back of the queue for cash. It was, therefore, ill-equipped for a European war when, in February 1939, Chamberlain reluctantly consented to sending an expeditionary force to those same fields where another had nearly bled to death between 1914 and 1918.

Since October 1935, British military intelligence had been closely following developments in the German army. Most important of these were the creation of Panzer divisions and the novel theories of close cooperation between tanks and aircraft known as
Blitzkrieg.
If, as seemed very likely, the Wehrmacht was embarking on a new type of mobile warfare, the British army was not ready to counter it.
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Britain lagged behind in the tank race; a lack of funds slowed down the formation of armoured divisions, and none was ready for deployment during the battle for France in May 1940. The demand for anti-aircraft batteries meant that there were serious shortages in artillery of other kinds, including anti-tank guns, which were not expected to be remedied before 1942.

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Britain’s authority at the conference tables of Europe and its military muscle depended ultimately on support from the empire. This had never been more vital for, in 1931, the total white population of Britain and the Commonwealth had stood at 67 million, of whom 19 million lived in the dominions. As in the period before 1914, Britain needed the assurance that, in the event of war, the dominion governments would fall into line and deliver their quotas of fighting men, ships and aircraft.

It was again imperative to take the dominion governments into Britain’s confidence and explain to them the aims of its foreign policy and outline possible wartime strategy. A Commonwealth conference, the first for six years, was called at the beginning of 1937, and at the centre of its proceedings was an assessment of Britain’s present and future position, compiled by the chiefs of staff. At its heart lay the inescapable fact that Britain’s defeat in a continental war ‘would destroy the whole structure of the Commonwealth, which in its present state could not long exist without the political, financial and military strength of the United Kingdom.’
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As Sir Edward Grey had made clear over twenty years before, without Britain the dominions were isolated and unable to fend for themselves. This being so, and Germany the hypothetical enemy, Britain would commit itself to the defence of the Low Countries and France and would expect dominion assistance.

Outside Europe, Indian troops would be deployed in the Middle East and Egypt if Italy threw in its lot with Germany. Singapore remained the key to the defence of the Far East and Australasia in the by now very likely event that Japan would attempt to acquire forcibly raw materials in Borneo, the western Pacific and the Dutch East Indies, the latter now designated ‘a major British interest’. Singapore was still beyond the range of Japan’s land-based bombers, but if this immunity disappeared, Britain would shift additional squadrons to Malaya from the Middle East, relying on the South African airforce to replace them. This arrangement proved inadequate since the RAF was understrength in the Middle East, and by the spring of 1939 it was under pressure to transfer aircraft from India to Singapore in the event of an emergency. Breaking point had been reached. As Sir Cyril Newall, the chief of air staff, observed, fewer aircraft in India would force the government there to adopt a less aggressive stance on the North-West Frontier, which would of course diminish British prestige.
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The question of how to defend Singapore was naturally the concern of the Australian and New Zealand delegates to the conference. They were assured that the promised relief armada would sail and would pass unhindered through the Mediterranean and Suez.
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The Australian Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, was not satisfied, and proposed either a
rapprochement
with Japan or a Pacific defence pact that would include the one power which possessed the means to withstand Japanese aggression swiftly, the United States. This suggestion was squashed by Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, for its acceptance would have been tantamount to an admission that Britain could no longer defend its empire unaided.
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Undercurrents of doubt about Singapore’s impregnability remained, and there were darker suspicions that once Britain had become entangled in a European war circumstances would force it to abandon Singapore, and with it Australasia.

These fears were partly confirmed when Britain dragged its heels in providing aircraft for Australia’s rearmament programme. Potential allies in the Mediterranean came first on British aircraft manufacturers’ list of priorities; orders from Rumania, Greece and Turkey took precedence over those for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) between 1937 and 1939.
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In exasperation, Lyons turned to the American suppliers, Lockheeds, and ordered fifty Hudson bombers in 1938. The following year, American-made engines had to be fitted to Beaufort fighter-bombers, recently delivered from Britain.
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Henceforward, the United States and not Britain would be Australia’s main arsenal; the old rule by which the dominions only used British or locally made equipment was quietly dropped.

Local problems and doubts about Britain’s ability to solve them were beginning to nudge Australia towards America’s orbit. Internal politics and an unsentimental view of its own, rather than the empire’s interests, dictated Canada’s foreign policy. Ever since the Chanak crisis in 1922, Canada had made it clear that its parliament alone would decide whether or not it went to war. Canada could afford to take an independent line since it enjoyed the immeasurable advantage of closeness to the United States, which, following the Monroe Doctrine, could reasonably be expected to take care of Canada’s only vulnerable region, its Pacific seaboard. Inside Canada, the racial mix ruled out unquestioning attachment to Britain and the Commonwealth. Its 11-million population was split three ways; just over half were of British stock, a quarter French, and the rest Red Indians and the descendants of central and eastern European immigrants. Imperial loyalty remained solid in some sections of the English-speaking community, but there was an equally sturdy and growing sense of a purely Canadian identity. In 1925, prospective immigrants were warned: ‘Don’t forget that a Canadian-born Britisher is just as good as an English-born one, and that he won’t be patronised.’
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