Britain's role in the Second World War Summary of a talk by Brendan Clifford
THE WAR SEEN FROM IRELAND
The general British opinion of the Second World War is that it was the best war Britain ever fought. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as an 'ethical bath' after the series of grubby wars Britain had fought for Imperialist gain.
Brendan Clifford had begun looking at the war while he was growing up in Ireland and initially had thought it best to treat it in purely military rather than political terms. Ireland had been neutral during the war and had maintained a culture of neutrality through the 1950s. It was much criticised for this and for exercising censorship but in Brendan's experience this censorship was mainly directed against propaganda on both sides. The information on military matters in Irish papers was generally better than what could be obtained from British papers. And British military historians gave more objective and better informed accounts than political historians. Through grasping the military sequence, he had come to the conclusion that far from being the best of British wars it was probably the worst.
Unlike previous wars it was a war Britain had started without having the will to see it through. The First World War had started as a European war independent of Britain. Britain had taken advantage of this already existing war and steadily and as a matter of policy expanded it into a world war (Brendan argued this case in his previous talk to the group. A summary of his argument is available here). As a result of the war, by 1919 Britain possessed unparalleled political, military and moral power. Churchill remarked at the time that nothing in the world could move without British permission. He evoked this remark ten years later but it was to observe that the opportunities that had been available then had been squandered and that it was no longer true.
Brendan sees Churchill as the most serious of British political historians in the twentieth century as he sees Basil Liddell-Hart as the most serious twentieth century military historian. Both of them were agreed that Britain had made a mess of the inter-war period.
THE INTER-WAR PERIOD
In particular it had prevented France from consolidating the European peace. France and England were agreed in their Great War propaganda that a European peace was incompatible with the continued existence of a German state. There was therefore a need to reorganise Germany and in particular to put an end to the influence of Prussia. But the British prevented the French from doing it. The old instinct of maintaining a balance of power in Europe and therefore preventing France from becoming a dominant power prevailed.
The French argued for a continuous border along the Rhine and for the establishment of buffer states between itself and Germany. Konrad Adenauer in Cologne was willing to consider an independent Rhineland and there was a substantial independence movement in Bavaria. Britain and France struggled over these issues until 1924 when France gave up, Britain set about recreating a strong, territorially united German state to counterbalance the influence of the French.
Under the Versailles treaty Germany had been given an ultra-democratic constitution, which was politically dysfunctional. Throughout Germany there was a virtually unanimous desire for revision of the treaty and for union with Austria. It was generally felt that with the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire there was little reason for the continued existence of Austria as a German state independent of Germany.
So long as Germany was a democratic country trying to achieve its ends legally and peacefully, Britain remained implacably opposed to any revision of the treaty. But Britain tolerated and even collaborated with Hitler when he set about breaching the treaty unilaterally, with rearmament, the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the union with Austria, the 'Anschluss', at the beginning of 1938. Britain pressured Czechoslovakia into surrendering the Sudetenland in October 1938 at a time when the Czech army was still relatively strong and the Germans relatively weak, and Czechoslovakia was defended by treaties with Russia and France. Without the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia was unviable as a state and collapsed. Hungary and Poland took parts of it, Slovakia became independent and Bohemia/Moravia became a German protectorate. Germany had thus been strengthened immeasurably as a result of British policy. These were the circumstances in which Britain gave its unconditional guarantee to Poland.
MANIPULATING POLAND
Poland as a state had been recreated by the Treaty of Versailles. The historic Polish state had been carved up between Prussia and the Austrian and Russian Empires. The Austrian and Prussian parts were given independence under the terms of the treaty and the Poles won a large part of the Russian/Ukrainian portion in a war with the new Soviet state.
In order to give Poland access to the Baltic sea the Versailles agreement cut Germany in two, isolating East Prussia and putting the German sea port of Danzig under international control. This was felt as a major grievance in Germany but when Hitler took power he pursued a policy of improving relations with the Poles, postponing consideration of the Danzig question and forming a German-Polish alliance in 1934 (at a time when Poland was still under the competent leadership of its then Minister for War Josef Pilsudski).
The German demand for the return of Danzig was a minor matter in the balance of power compared with the demand for the Sudetenland. Liddell-Hart saw the unconditional guarantee of military support to Poland in any quarrel it might have with Germany as an absurdity. It was not even obvious that the Poles needed it. The German army was new, reconstructed from scratch with British help after the complete disarmament of 1919/20. The Polish army had fought and won against the Soviets in 1920. The British guarantee was a serious military threat to Germany, especially since the French had been persuaded, reluctantly, to support it. It meant that Germany was encircled by a hostile alliance. It was a threat that could not be ignored. Yet at the same time it was clear that neither Britain nor France were ready to fulfil their part of the treaty. The Poles, thinking themselves secure (and under rather less competent leadership than they had had in 1934. Pilsudski died in 1935) were refusing to negotiate. France would not move without a British initiative. But the British were making no preparations.
The Soviet leadership was puzzled at the British behaviour and concluded that Britain was trying to instigate war between Germany and Poland to encourage a general eastward expansion that would eventually result in a war with Russia. In this light, the Soviet/German pact was entirely rational. As part of it, Stalin and Hitler agreed that in the event of a Polish collapse, the Soviet Union would retake the territory that had been lost to the Poles in 1920 (this territory, which remained in Soviet hands after the war, was incorporated into the Ukraine and has since proved to be a stronghold for the recent western-orientated 'Orange Revolution' of Victor Yuschenko).
Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939 but although Britain and France declared war on Germany they made no serious preparations other than adopting purely defensive positions in France, which did nothing for the defence of Poland. William Edmund Ironside (a romantic figure, reputedly the model for John Buchan's Richard Hannay) was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in September 1939 but complained that all his efforts to prepare the army for active combat were useless. He got no support from the government.
Britain did not even refer the German/Polish conflict to the League of Nations. In 1940, however, the USSR, still fearing an eventual confrontation with Germany and anxious to improve its defences on the Baltic, tried to persuade Finland to agree to an exchange of territory. When the Finns refused, they declared war. At that point, Britain called on the League of Nations to expel Russia and, when the Finns turned down Britain's offer of help, prepared to invade through Scandinavia. They were forestalled at Narvik by the Germans. That was the beginning of Britain's active participation in the war. It was immediately followed by the ignominious expulsion from Europe at Dunkirk and the fall of France (when the combined British and French armies were completely disorientated by a surprise attack from the still numerically inferior German army). Thereafter Churchill took command. His policy was to keep the war going in the hopes of an eventual falling out between the unnatural allies, Germany and the USSR. Which is to say that Britain had started a war which could only come to an end if it was fought by someone else.
FAILURE IN GREECE
Churchill's main initiative in Europe prior to Hitler's declaration of war on the USSR was the unsuccessful attempt to intervene in Greece. Greece had become involved through the activities of Mussolini. Mussolini had only become an ally of Hitler's after the Anschluss. Previously he had been anxious to keep Austria in existence as a barrier between Italy and Germany; but with the Anschluss he felt he had no choice but to come to terms with his new neighbour. With the substantial reordering of Europe in which Hitler was engaged, he felt he could recover territory which Britain and France had promised to Italy during the First World War but which had in the event been assigned to Greece and Yugoslavia. In the event, he encountered unexpectedly stubborn resistance in Greece, organised by the Prime Minister, Yanni Metaxas. Churchill offered to help Metaxas who recognised, however, that a British presence in Greece would inevitably provoke a German intervention (the Royalist Metaxas had previously opposed the efforts of Britain and his Greek Republican rival Eleutherios Venizelos to engage Greece on the allied side in the First World War). And as a fascist himself he had no ideological axe to grind against Germany.
Unfortunately for Greece, Metaxas died and his successor accepted Churchill's offer of help. Germany, as Metaxas had feared, intervened to prevent a British presence in Europe, defeating the Greeks, expelling the British and taking Yugoslavia along the way (the Yugoslav King had agreed to give Hitler right of passage through Yugoslavia to Greece but had been overthrown by a quixotic Serb revolt in support of their Orthodox Greek neighbours. Hitler was widely welcomed in other parts of Yugoslavia Croatia, Slovenia, the non-Serb parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a liberator).
SAVED BY THE USSR
In sum, then: Britain had imposed a vindictive settlement on Germany after the war which created a powerful sense of grievance, a policy which could only have made sense if Germany had been reduced to a state of permanent weakness. Instead, Britain set about shoring Germany up in opposition to France. While refusing to allow any revision of the treaty by the democratic governments of the 1920s, it tolerated and even connived at the means used by Hitler. Having allowed all the major revisions Hitler wanted to the treaty it refused to allow the relatively minor one of the return of Danzig but after inciting a German/Polish war it did nothing to help the Poles. Its attempt to intervene in Scandinavia was a fiasco, it was thrown out of France, its attempt to intervene in Greece was another fiasco. Germany was in the event defeated by the USSR with the result that an area far greater than the area originally coveted by Hitler fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. On the whole, he concluded, there was not much in all that that could be seen as very admirable.