Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (41 page)

Even with the government unchanged, the despatch of the BEF was not a foregone conclusion and did not go according to the plans which had been worked out by Wilson in consultation with the French General Staff.
²³³
This was because, as we have seen, a clear decision in favour of the continental commitment had never actually been made, so that all the old arguments against it immediately resurfaced when war broke out. The navalists insisted, as they had always insisted, that sea power alone could decide the war.
²³⁴
They also tended to favour keeping part or all of the army at home to preserve social peace and fend off any invasion. Others worried that even six divisions (plus one cavalry division) were too few to make a decisive contribution: the Kaiser was not alone in doubting whether ‘the few divisions [Britain] could put into the field could make [an] appreciable difference’.
²³⁵
There were also conflicting views about where an expeditionary force should be sent, and how far it should be placed under French command.
²³⁶
The decision to send just four divisions and a cavalry division to Amiens rather than (as Wilson had always intended) Maubeuge was the result of two days of haggling.
²³⁷

Did it - as its proponents claimed and subsequent apologists have argued - make a decisive difference to the outcome of the war?
²³⁸
It is sometimes argued that the Schlieffen Plan would have failed anyway even without the BEF, such were the flaws Moltke had introduced into it.
²³⁹
Perhaps the French could have halted the German offensive unassisted, had they themselves not attempted to launch their own offensive rather than concentrating on defence. But they did not; and, even allowing for German errors, it seems likely that, despite the initial chaotic retreats and the failure of the feint at Ostend, the presence of British troops at Le Cateau on 26 August and at the Marne (6-9 September)
did
significantly reduce the chances of German victory.
²⁴⁰
Unfortunately, what it could not do was to bring about a German defeat. After the fall of Antwerp and the first battle of Ypres (20 October-22 November), the bloody stalemate that was to endure for four years on the Western Front had been established.

If the BEF had never been sent, there is no question that the Germans would have won the war. Even if they had been checked at the Marne, they would almost certainly have succeeded in overwhelming the French defences within a matter of months in the absence of the substantial British reinforcements which Kitchener had resolved to recruit as early as 10 August.
²⁴¹
And even if the BEF
had
arrived, but a week later or in a different location as a result of a political crisis in London, Moltke might still have repeated the triumph of his forebear. At the very least, he would have been less inclined to retreat to the Aisne. Then what? Doubtless the arguments for British intervention to check German ambitions would have continued - especially with Bonar Law as Prime Minister. But only intervention of a very different kind would have been conceivable. The expeditionary force would have been rendered obsolete by French defeat; had it been sent, a Dunkirk-like evacuation would probably have been necessary. The navalists’ old schemes for landings on the German coast would also have been consigned to the rubbish bin. With hindsight, it seems more likely that some version of the Dardanelles invasion would have emerged as the most credible use of the army (especially if Churchill had remained at the Admiralty, as he almost certainly would have). Besides that hazardous enterprise - which might, of course, have fared better if the full BEF had been available - the most Britain could have done would have been to use its naval power to wage the kind of naval war against Germany which Fisher had always advocated: rounding up German merchant vessels, harassing neutrals trading with the enemy and confiscating German overseas assets.

Such a dual strategy would certainly have been an irritant to Berlin. But it would not have won the war. For the evidence is strong that the blockade did not starve Germany into submission, as its advocates had hoped it would.
²⁴²
Nor would a victory over Turkey have significantly weakened the position of a Germany which had won in the west, though it would certainly have benefited the Russians, by realising their historic designs on Constantinople.
²⁴³
Without the war of attrition on the Western Front, Britain’s manpower, its economy and its vastly superior financial resources could not have been brought to bear on Germany sufficiently to ensure victory. A far more likely outcome would have been a diplomatic compromise (of the sort which Kitchener and later Lansdowne actually advocated), whereby Britain ended hostilities in return for German guarantees of Belgian integrity and neutrality and some kind of division of spoils in the Ottoman Empire. That, after all, had been Bethmann Hollweg’s objective all along. With France beaten and the German offer to restore Belgium to the status quo ante still on the table, it is hard to see how any British government could have justified continuing a maritime and perhaps Middle Eastern war of unforeseeable duration. For what? It is possible to imagine embittered Liberals still calling, as they did, for a war against Germany’s ‘military caste’, though the argument cut little ice with Haig and would have been hard to sustain if, as seems probable, Bethmann Hollweg had continued his policy of collaboration with the Social Democrats which had begun with the 1913 tax bill and borne fruit with the vote for war credits.
²⁴⁴
But a war to preserve Russian control over Poland and the Baltic states? To hand Constantinople to the Tsar? Although Grey at times seemed ready to fight such a war, he would surely have been overruled by those like the Chief of the General Staff Robertson, who could still argue in August 1916 for the preservation of ‘a strong ... Teutonic ... Central European power’ as a check against Russia.
²⁴⁵

In the final analysis, then, the historian is bound to ask if acceptance of a German victory on the continent would have been as damaging to British interests as Grey and the other Germanophobes claimed at the time, and as a generation of Fischerite historians have subsequently accepted. The answer suggested here is that it would not have been. Eyre Crowe’s question had always been: ‘Should the war come, and England stand aside ... [and] Germany and Austria win, crush France and humiliate Russia, what will then be the position of a friendless England?’
²⁴⁶
The historian’s answer is: better than that of an exhausted England in 1919. A fresh assessment of Germany’s pre-war war aims reveals that, had Britain stood aside - even for a matter of weeks - continental Europe would have been transformed into something not unlike the European Union we know today - but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars. Perhaps too the complete collapse of Russia into the horrors of civil war and Bolshevism might have been averted: though there would still have been formidable problems of rural and urban unrest, a properly constitutional monarchy (following Nicholas II’s abdication) or a parliamentary republic would have stood more chance of success after a shorter war. And there certainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world. True, there might still have been fascism in Europe in the 1920s; but it would have been in France rather than Germany that radical nationalists would have sounded most persuasive. It may even be that, in the absence of a world war’s stresses and strains, the inflations and deflations of the early 1920s and early 1930s would not have been so severe. With the Kaiser triumphant, Hitler could have lived out his life as a failed artist and a fulfilled soldier in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain.

Immanuel Geiss, in an article published in 1990, argued:

Though his assumptions perhaps unconsciously reflect the hubris of the post-reunification era, in one sense he is absolutely right: it would have been infinitely preferable if Germany could have achieved its hegemonic position on the continent without two world wars. But it was not only Germany’s fault that this did not happen. True, it was Germany which forced the continental war of 1914 upon an unwilling France (and a not so unwilling Russia). But it was - as the Kaiser rightly said - the British government which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war, a conflict which lasted twice as long as and cost many more lives than Germany’s first ‘bid for European Union’ would have, if it had only gone according to plan. By fighting Germany in 1914, Asquith, Grey and their colleagues helped ensure that, when Germany did finally achieve predominance on the continent, Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check to it.

Andrew Roberts

Finally when it was plain, even to Sir Joseph, that in the space of a few days England had lost both the entire stores and equipment of her regular army and her only ally; that the enemy were less than 25 miles from her shores; that there were only a few battalions of fully armed, fully trained troops in the country; that she was committed to a war in the Mediterranean with a numerically superior enemy; that her cities lay open to air attack from fields closer to home than the extremities of her own islands; that her sea-routes were threatened from a dozen new bases, Sir Joseph said: ‘Seen in the proper perspective I regard this as a great and tangible success.... The war has entered a new and glorious phase.’

EVELYN WAUGH,
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Jackboots goose-stepping through London: a column of Wehrmacht soldiers marching down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. Such images are familiar enough from film and fiction.
¹
But how close in reality did a German invasion and occupation of Britain actually come? Fifty years after the defeat of Nazism, we tend to take it for granted that Britain was bound to fight against Hitler in 1939 - to fight and, despite the overwhelming odds the country faced in the
annus mirabilis
of 1940, ultimately to win. Throughout all 1995’s celebrations of VE Day, the possibility that it might have turned out differently was scarcely mentioned. On the contrary: the Allied victory in the war was remembered as not only just and right - but also inevitable.

Yet few events in history, particularly in the military and diplomatic spheres, can really be described as inevitable. When we go back to the early 1930s, and consider the options open to Britain as the European political situation deteriorated, we can see that, of all of them, a declaration of war against Germany over Poland in 1939 (to say nothing of five long years of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ under the leadership of Winston Churchill) was among the least likely. The road to war in 1939 was twisted and tortuous. We need only to imagine how one or two things might have turned out otherwise - not always important things either - to see how easily events might have taken a radically different course.

Hitler’s adjutant Fritz Wiedemann claimed that Lord Halifax - Neville Chamberlain’s envoy to Hitler in 1937 and his Foreign Secretary at the time of the Munich agreement - once said that he ‘would like to see as the culmination of my work the Führer entering London at the side of the English king amid the acclamation of the English people’.
²
Of course, we know that Halifax began to question the policy of appeasement even as the Munich agreement was signed - and it was he who advised committing Britain to the defence of Poland in 1939. But he remained deeply pessimistic about the prospect of a war with Germany if this attempt at deterrence failed; and, when the war was going badly in May 1940, was one of a number of influential voices who advocated negotiating some kind of peace with Hitler. We know also that Churchill rejected those arguments, despite Britain’s impending isolation as France crumbled. And we know too that Britain was able to hold out and ultimately - once the Soviet Union and the United States had joined the fight against Germany - to win the war. But these outcomes were anything but predestined.

Of course, the question ‘what if?’ has been asked many times about the events which led up to the outbreak of the Second World War. But, until relatively recently, historians have tended to ask whether more could have been done sooner to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, or to undermine his position once he was there. What if Britain had stood up to the Third Reich earlier ? - that has been the traditional basis for counterfactual arguments about Britain and Hitler. It was, of course, a question originally posed by Churchill himself. As he later wrote: ‘If the risks of war which were run by France and Britain at the last moment had been boldly faced in good time and plain declarations had been made and meant, how different would our prospects have been today.’ For Churchill, the Second World War had been ‘the unnecessary war’. He and others believed that a strong signal of determination by France, Britain and the Soviet Union to resist German aggression in Czechoslovakia might have given enough encouragement to Hitler’s critics within the German military establishment to bring about, if not his downfall, then at least a change of policy. As he argued: ‘If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his earlier stages ... the chance would have been given to the sane elements in German life, which were very powerful - especially in the High Command - to save Germany from the maniacal system into the grip of which she was falling.’