Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (62 page)

Russian and French military preparations undoubtedly did pose a direct threat to the security of the Habsburg-Hohenzollern Reich, which, because of its highly decentralised structure, lacked the financial resources to match its neighbours in terms of manpower. It was this threat to German security which made some sort of war more or less certain on the continent in the second decade of the twentieth century. Of course, there continued to be influential voices in British diplomatic and military circles who argued that Britain should align itself with France and Russia to avert what they claimed, rather implausibly, was a growing German threat to British security. Germanophobes like Eyre Crowe consistently pressed for some kind of continental commitment to France; and this view also had its adherents among the leaders of the Imperialist party. But the Francophiles remained in a distinct minority within the Home Rule party which came to power in 1905. Thus, when war broke out between the continental powers in August 1914 - ostensibly over Bosnia-Herzegovina, where there had been an unsuccessful attempt on the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s life - the majority of the Cabinet overwhelmingly supported the course of non-intervention urged by the Welsh Non-Conformist and ardent Home Ruler Lloyd George. This reflected not only the party’s pacific traditions, but the realisation - confirmed by subsequent historical research in the Russian archives - that the war was to a large extent forced upon Germany by the Russian government’s decision to mobilise its army rather than wait for a diplomatic settlement. Despite the resignations of the Home Rulers’ Foreign Secretary Grey and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill - which brought down the Asquith government - there was thus little the Imperialists under Bonar Law could do to influence the outcome of a continental war once the King had finally consented to their forming a government with Churchill and Grey. As Churchill ruefully remarked, to have sent the British Expeditionary Force would have been ‘too little, too late’ by the time the Germans had won the second battle of the Marne; and the naval sanctions imposed by Britain were no more than a warning to Vienna not to establish any naval bases on the French coast.

The German victory of 1915 and the subsequent treaties of Versailles and Brest-Litovsk came as no surprise to those who had followed the course of German policy before the outbreak of war. In addition to imposing substantial reparations on the French and Russian governments, the imperial Foreign Minister Bethmann Hollweg created a Central European Customs Union -
Mitteleuropa
- embracing France, the Netherlands, Piedmont and Sweden as well as the German Empire itself. Although formally nothing more than a free-trade area with a uniform system of external tariffs, it was not long before Anglo-American observers were referring to the new entity as the ‘European Union’. Of particular importance from the British point of view were the limited military implications of the German victory. In return for territorial gains in Central Africa and the lifting of the Anglo-American blockade, Bethmann Hollweg agreed to end the military occupation of Northern France and the Netherlands. From the German point of view, this was an easy concession to make: it had never been their intention to threaten British security by establishing a naval foothold on the Channel coast.

Of course, it is impossible to say what form German war aims might have taken if Britain
had
acted as Grey and Churchill wanted, and intervened more effectively in early August 1914. As recent research has revealed, British plans certainly existed for the despatch of an ‘expeditionary force’ to France in the event of a German invasion. But they were merely contingency plans - strategic options - and, as the government repeatedly made clear before the war, they did not commit Britain in any way to the defence of France. It is sometimes suggested that, if Grey had only been heeded, the war on the continent might have been averted, in that a clear British commitment to France would have persuaded the Germans to halt their mobilisation. But this is wholly far-fetched. Once it was clear that the Russians were determined to mobilise, the Germans had no real alternative but to do the same. The most that Grey could have done, if he had been able to convince his Cabinet colleagues, would have been to send the expeditionary force. Given its size, the most this could have achieved would have been to halt the German advance (at worst, it would merely have shared in the ignominy of defeat at the Marne). But this would not have sufficed to defeat Germany. British intervention would simply have prolonged the war, perhaps for as long as two years.

The counterfactual of British intervention in 1914 is not as difficult to visualise as might be thought. In fact, contemporaries like Ivan Bloch and Norman Angell had done their best before the war to imagine what the consequences would be of a major European conflagration. The consensus was that the economic consequences of such a war would be so dire that it would be almost impossible to sustain it for long. During the July Crisis, Grey himself had warned of economic, social and hence political crises comparable with those of 1848. Numerous German commentators went further, predicting that a war would topple ‘many a throne’. We can only guess which regime would have collapsed first, in the event of a war of long duration. At the time, it was argued by Bloch that Russia would outlast her enemies, as her population was used to greater hardship. The alternative view is that the Anglo-American Empire’s superior economic resources would ultimately have been decisive, leading instead to a German collapse. At the very least, the established dynasties would have had to face unprecedented popular disaffection. Even the short war that was fought obliged the combatants to make significant political concessions. In both Russia and France, reigning monarchs were obliged to abdicate following the military failures of 1914-15. Under strong pressure from his own aristocracy and generals, Nicholas II stepped aside to make way for his haemophiliac son Aleksei. Even in victorious Germany, the ZPD (Zentralisierungspartei Deutschlands - German Centralisation party) was for the first time treated as a governing party in the postwar years, to the dismay of Prussian particularists; while in Britain the Imperialist coalition which had taken Britain into the war to so little effect was swept from power by a rejuvenated Home Rule party in the election of 1916.

Happily, the economic catastrophe of a long war did not become a reality. Instead, the years after 1916 brought unparalleled prosperity to the industrialised economies, though the continued decline of commodity prices put agricultural economies under increasing pressure. Moreover, the successful reform of the American monetary system in 1913 had brought the burgeoning financial markets of New York under closer supervision by the Bank of England, which continued to manage the global monetary system known as the bimetallic standard. The appointment of the young Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes as governor of the Bank in 1920 - a reward by the Home Rulers for his seminal attack on Grey and Churchill,
The Economic Consequences of the War
- ushered in an era of highly successful monetary policy. Indeed, as Milton Friedman and others have argued, if it had not been for Keynes’s decision to pursue counter-cyclical policies in the late 1920s, the minor downturn in world stock markets which occurred in September 1929 might have turned into a severe depression.

In economic terms, Keynes was certainly right to argue that British neutrality in 1914 would have been preferable to ineffectual intervention. As he pointed out, a Britain which had formally agreed to Bethmann Hollweg’s neutrality offer on the eve of the war might have stood to gain a share of French and Russian postwar reparations to Germany. Yet there remained dissident voices - notably the maverick Imperialist Churchill - who regretted that the expeditionary force had not been sent in time to halt Moltke, and solemnly predicted a future conflict between Britain and an expansionist Germany.

This time Churchill was right. Germany had changed since 1914. As a result of the victory, as Bethmann Hollweg had feared, power had increasingly shifted away from the monarch and his bureaucracy towards the political parties: the ZPD and the two confessional parties, the German Protestant party (PPD) and the Catholic Centre party. Because of the system of proportional representation which had been introduced in 1918, this tended to give disproportionate power to small extremist parties like the radical Nordic Centralising German Aryan party (NZDAP) led by the Austrian demagogue Adolf Hitler, who preached a mixture of anti-Semitism and neo-paganism, and called on Protestant and Catholic Germans to bury their historic differences. When Hitler was installed as chancellor in 1933 - after much political manoeuvring in Vienna in which the new Emperor Charles failed to thwart the NZDAP’s ‘seizure of power’ - there was an immediate shift in German domestic and foreign policy.

The possibility of German aggression had not wholly been ignored by the Anglo-American governments. In their meeting at Long Island in 1931, the three ministers who were to dominate the 1930s - the North’s Herbert Hoover, the South’s Huey Long and the Scottish Home Ruler Ramsay MacDonald - resolved to maintain security at levels ‘sufficient’ to deter any future agressor. Yet none of them had his heart in maintaining imperial security. MacDonald in particular saw his primary role as to improve church attendance in the British Isles; indeed, imperial considerations were an embarrassment to someone who, in 1914, had seen the war as an affront to God. For their part, Hoover and Long were simply uninterested in foreign affairs. As Hoover’s unsuccessful opponent in 1932 complained, Americans were too busy enjoying Keynesian reflation and the relaxation of the American licensing laws to worry about Germany and Japan. ‘We have nothing too dear’, Franklin Roosevelt told listeners in a radio broadcast, ‘but beer itself.’

When the German challenge came therefore, it found Anglo-America unready. Historians will doubtless never cease to ask if an earlier increase in the pace of rearmament could have averted ‘the deluge’. But such speculation simply ignores the strength of the forces arrayed against any more assertive policy. The reality was that the German centralisers led by Hitler were able to tranform the federal Europe created in 1916 into an increasingly centralised ‘leader-state’ without paying the slightest heed to Anglo-American views. First the German states themselves were merged into a single state in 1938. Austrian troops marched into Berlin to a rapturous welcome, and the provinces of Moravia and Bohemia were formally deprived of their traditional rights - this in the wake of a summit meeting between Hitler and the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee (who had succeeded MacDonald on the latter’s death in 1937). Then, in 1939, the Germans turned to the rest of the European Union. Poland was partitioned in September 1939, its western provinces being absorbed into the Reich. The next year it was the turn of France and Italy.

What no one was prepared for, however, was the invasion of Britain which followed almost immediately after the German occupation of Paris. In fact, Hitler had been secretly preparing this for some time, so that immense amounts of shipping had been concentrated in the Maas and the Scheldt estuaries by late May. When this naval force was unleashed, the antiquated destroyers of the Royal Navy, some of which had been commissioned when Churchill was still at the Admiralty, were overwhelmed. Confronted by the combined might of the Luftwaffe and an invasion force equipped with superior weaponry (including tanks, an innovation of the previous war with which the British were unfamiliar), the defending forces stood no chance. The thirteen German divisions which landed on the morning of 30 May swept through the 1 st London Division defending the vital line between Sheppey and Rye, and by 7 June had reached the outskirts of London.

Could this calamity have been avoided by an earlier acceptance of Hitler’s peace offer, made repeatedly in the 1930s and repeated on the eve of the invasion? Some historians have suggested as much, and there were certainly influential voices urging such a deal. Yet the evidence indicates clearly that Hitler was insincere in his offers. From 1936 onwards, he was bent on the destruction of British power; and only the timing of his strike was left to be decided. An equally plausible counterfactual would have been a British pre-emptive strike in 1939 - over Poland, perhaps. This, of course, was what Churchill advocated. But such a course of action at the time seemed fraught with peril, not least because of British military unpreparedness and the conclusion, shortly before the partition of Poland, of Hitler’s pact with the Russian government.

What of the alternative hypothesis - that any sort of resistance to German power was futile? Certainly, the costs of continued fighting against the occupation were higher than in areas (such as the Channel Islands) where the populations simply acquiesced. On the other hand, the ‘Free English Government’ set up by Churchill and Eden on the other side of the Atlantic enjoyed considerable popular support. Thousands of young men answered their appeal to fight on, no matter what the costs. Few had military experience, much less proper equipment; but they were able to maintain a persistent guerrilla war against the occupiers. The numbers of hostages shot in reprisals ran into thousands. Nevertheless, the exiled Churchill remained convinced that only such sustained resistance could secure him the support of the American Viceroy and his officials. There, in the neo-classical surroundings of the Northern capital, New York, Churchill urged America to mobilise for total war.

Yet what was in it for Roosevelt, who had finally become the North’s prime minister at the third attempt? There was - or seemed to be - a legitimate government in England. A minor princeling from the House of Saxe-Coburg had been installed in the Stuarts’ place as ‘Edward VII’. Lloyd George had accepted the post of prime minister and had recruited a number of other senior politicians into his Cabinet including Samuel Hoare and R. A. Butler. True, this government was very clearly subordinate to the occupying authorities - the military under General von Brauchitsch and, more importantly, the senior SS officer in Britain, whose first act on arriving in Britain had been to take into ‘protective custody’ over 2,000 political suspect people listed in his notorious ‘Black Book’Yet (as Andrew Roberts shows) the propaganda broadcast by the BBC - now under a new DirectorGeneral, William Joyce - was extremely persuasive. The Anglo-German Friendship Treaty signed in 1941 between Ribbentrop and Lloyd George was presented as the historic fulfilment of Britain’s destiny as a European island. British membership of the new ‘German-European Union’ could be made to seem more geographically rational than the previous Anglo-American transatlantic empire. In any case, Roosevelt had no stomach for a fight with the German navy in the Atlantic.