The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956

Essays in Honour of David French

Keith Neilson, Greg Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754665939
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317039754
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In his groundbreaking book The British Way in Warfare (Routledge, 1990), David French outlined the skillful combination of maritime, economic and diplomatic power employed by Britain to achieve its international goals. Almost two decades later, this collection offers a reassessment of French's thesis, using it as a lens through which to explore Britain's relationship with various kinds of power (military and civil) and how this was employed across the globe. In particular, each essay addresses the ways in which the use of power manifested itself in the maintenance of Britain's place within the international system between 1856 and 1956. Adopting twin methodologies, the collection firstly addresses the broad question of Britain's relationship with other Great Powers and how these influenced the strategies used, before then testing these with specific case studies. By taking this approach, it is possible to discern which policies were successful and which failed, and whether these remained constant across time and space. Measuring Britain's strategy against her commercial, imperial, and military competitors (including France, the USA, Italy, Germany, and Russia) allows intriguing conclusions to be drawn about just how an essentially maritime power could compete with much larger - and potentially more powerful - continental rivals. With contributions from an outstanding selection of military scholars, this collection addresses fundamental questions about the intersection of military, economic and diplomatic history, that are as relevant today as they were during the height of Britain's imperial power. It will prove essential reading, not only for those with an interest in British military history, but for anyone wishing to understand how power - in all its multifaceted guises - can be employed for national advantage on the international stage.

Chapter 1
The British Way in Warfare and Russia

Keith Neilson

David French has argued that neither the ‘navalist’ argument made by Basil Liddell Hart (the original ‘British way in warfare’) nor the ‘mixed paradigm’ put forward by others adequately explains how Britain has fought her opponents. ‘The only generalization which is valid for the whole period’, he has asserted in his The British Way in Warfare 1688–2000, ‘is that British strategic policy was essentially adaptive.’ British ‘policy-makers’, he concluded, ‘pursued policies which seemed to be best calculated to achieve their dominant policy aims at minimum cost’.¹

Anglo-Russian relations in the century from the Crimean War to at least 1957 provide us with an opportunity to examine the validity of these competing paradigms. Perhaps no other of Britain’s bilateral relationships better illustrates the variety of ways in which Britain has pursued her interests in both war and peace. In the century and a half since the Crimean conflict, Russia has been at the centre of British strategic foreign policy – albeit playing sharply different roles throughout. In the First and Second World Wars, Russia was a British ally against Germany and the latter’s supporters. However, with the exception of the seven years (1914–17 and 1941–45) that the two countries fought alongside each other, Russia has been viewed as a threat to British security. Indeed, it would be fair to argue that the Anglo-Russian relationship in the past one hundred and fifty years has been one of near-unbroken enmity, a state of affairs interrupted only briefly by collaboration against the threat that Germany has posed to them both.²

The Crimean War would seem to support the ideas advanced by the ‘mixed paradigm’ school, in that Britain not only utilised her naval forces to harass Russia on a global scale, but also sent a substantial army to the Continent to operate alongside an ally.³ However, a careful look at the agreements signed at the end of the war sheds a different light on British motives. The first arrangement reached was the Declaration of Paris, dealing with maritime law, signed in April 1856.⁴ While the Declaration gave up Britain’s traditional maritime rights with respect to privateering, the war had demonstrated that blockade and in-shore bombardment provided sufficient naval means for Britain to deal with Russia. The second agreement was the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war. From a British perspective, its key terms were decidedly naval. The neutralisation of the Black Sea meant that Russia was unable to use that body of water as an enclosed harbour from which its fleet could issue into the Mediterranean to harass British ships secure in the knowledge that, when superior British forces were encountered, the Russian fleet could retreat to fortified anchorages. A similar case emerged about the Baltic. There, the related provisions of 1856 demilitarised the Åland islands, something that prevented Russia from making the eastern Baltic into a secure base for operations.⁵

After the Crimean War, Russian foreign policy in Europe took a pacific turn. With the country’s weaknesses exposed by the conflict, Russia turned its attention to domestic reform and the repair of its armed forces.⁶ Russia’s withdrawal from international affairs was not complete. When her own interests were involved – such as in the Polish insurrection of 1863 – St Petersburg moved quickly. However, Russia was no longer willing to play the role of ‘gendarme of Europe’, as she had under Nicholas I. This meant that the shadowy Anglo-Russian condominium that had underpinned the settlements reached at Vienna in 1815 was no more.⁷ In turn, this also meant that British influence on the Continent would have to depend on what maritime pressure London could bring to bear against the European states or what alliances she could find, since Russian arms were no longer available to ensure the stability of the post-Napoleonic settlement.

As a result of the need for reform, Russia played a passive role in both the Italian and German wars of unification. However, Russia did not remain quiescent without exacting a price. In the latter conflict, the Russians received a Prussian agreement to the abrogation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris as recompense for their agreeing to remain neutral.⁸ The abrogation was counter to British interests. As the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Edmund Hammond, noted, ‘it is a matter of no small moment for the maritime Powers that Russia should not be allowed to maintain a fleet of unlimited strength in a secure basin, inaccessible to the navies of other Powers who are excluded from the Black Sea by the Treaty’. Further, this would allow Russia to threaten the Suez Canal, all the while maintaining the security of her own route to India.⁹ But the fact that London was isolated diplomatically limited its course of action to mere protest. Lacking a Continental ally, the British could bring only sea power to bear on the Russians, and this was not felt either worth the cost or likely to be effective, particularly given public opinion.¹⁰

However, the British inability to affect Russia’s naval efforts in the Mediterranean was only temporary. The aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 provided an opportunity to compensate for the abrogation of the Black Sea clauses and to curb Russian aspirations in the Balkans. The treaty of San Stefano, which ended the conflict between the Russians and Turks, was widely viewed as unsatisfactory. For the British, the prospect of Russia’s having access to the Mediterranean via a ‘Big Bulgarian’ port on the Aegean and the Russian acquisition of Batum (Batumi) in the Black Sea, was particularly unwelcome, raising as it did the spectre of Russia’s becoming an Eastern Mediterranean naval power and one able to threaten the newly-opened Suez Canal. However, British plans to counter Russia by moving Indian troops to Malta and threatening to blockade both the Black Sea and the Baltic were fraught with difficulties. It was not clear that a British fleet could force the Straits, while the military strength available – 7,000 men – was inadequate to effect a landing on the Black Sea Coast.¹¹ While the Mediterranean fleet did eventually go into the Sea of Marmora, this was viewed as a risky business.¹² As a result, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, moved to check Russia by other means. He did so by signing a secret agreement with Russia on 31 May 1878, giving the latter Batum in exchange for St Petersburg’s surrendering the idea of ‘Big Bulgaria’. Four days later, he checked the strategic advantage that Russians had gained at Batum by obtaining the right from the Turks to maintain British forces in Cyprus in exchange for a British guarantee of Asiatic Turkey against Russia.¹³

Further manoeuvrings occurred at the Congress of Berlin, which opened on 13 June 1878. This meeting, called by German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was designed to find a settlement to replace San Stefano. At it, the Russians attempted to evade the ramifications of the secret agreement with the British, but to no avail. Salisbury took advantage of the general anti-Russian feeling at the Congress and declared that Britain would respect the right of the Sultan to prohibit warships entering the Black Sea only when London was convinced that this decision had been made independently. This meant, in effect, that the Royal Navy would be able to move into the Black Sea to check Russia at any time that it was judged in London that St Petersburg posed a threat to British interests.¹⁴ Diplomacy had secured the necessary conditions for British sea power to continue to be a major weapon against Russia.

However, the major British concern about Russia after 1856 was not in regard to the Balkans, but, rather, the defence of India.¹⁵ While Russia had pursued a quiescent policy in Europe, she had followed an aggressive policy in Central Asia. Beginning in the 1860s, Russia had moved steadily into the Eurasian heartland. Her advances had raised concerns in both London and Simla about the security of British India, something already stimulated by the Great Mutiny of 1857 and by the unstable frontier with Afghanistan.¹⁶ Beginning in 1865, these fears took on greater significance as the Russian advance into Central Asia began.¹⁷ The latter raised serious difficulties for British defence planners. Whereas Russian aggression either against the Great Powers or against the Ottoman Empire was sure to generate support among the European Powers for British efforts to curtail it, the same could not be said for Russian threats to India. Equally, maintaining an Indian army sufficient to defend the North-West Frontier against Russia was expensive. Nor could naval power be used to deter Russia, except possibly by entering the Black Sea and threatening Russia’s lines of communication. As Salisbury had noted in 1877, Russia was ‘unassailable by us’; there was ‘absolutely no point at which we could attack her with any chance of doing serious injury’.¹⁸ The concessions that Salisbury had gained in 1878 only eased, but did not obviate, the difficulties in dealing with Russia by maritime means.

This problem grew worse over time. The steady Russian advance into Central Asia, despite St Petersburg’s denials of such intentions both before and during the Congress of Berlin, created increasing Anglo-Russian enmity.¹⁹ British concern grew as the Russian incursions approached Afghanistan. In the second half of 1878, the Russians sent an envoy to Kabul, something that seemed to foreshadow the creation of a Russian sphere of influence in Afghanistan. The response of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, was to initiate the Second Afghan War (1878–80), despite the fact that Salisbury (then Secretary of State for India) had contended three years earlier that, ‘We cannot conquer it [Afghanistan]; we cannot leave it alone. We can only spare to it our utmost vigilance.’²⁰ The result of the war was to extend a shadowy British protectorate over Afghanistan. In this relationship, the British promised to defend Afghanistan’s territorial integrity against Russian encroachments; in return, Afghanistan’s external relations were to be supervised by the British. This did not, however, end the question of how to defend India against a Russian threat and raised the additional question of just how Afghanistan’s territory was to be maintained.

For this, there were two schools of thought.²¹ One – the so-called ‘defence-in-depth school’ – believed that India was best defended by using Afghanistan as a buffer state, strengthening the Indian Army and meeting any attack at the Indian border itself. The other, the ‘forward school’, preferred to push actively into Afghanistan itself to establish the so-called ‘Scientific Frontier’ and prevent any Russian advances from reaching India at all.²² Each of these approaches had problems. Opponents of the defence-in-depth school argued that an unopposed Russian presence in Afghanistan would act as a catalyst for native unrest in British India. On the other hand, proponents of the forward school – best exemplified by the British Quarter-Master General in India (1880–85), Sir Charles MacGregor, and the British Commander-in-Chief in India (1885–1893), Lord Roberts – had to justify the enormous cost of establishing and maintaining a presence in Afghanistan.²³ Costs of plans for the defence of India tended to be somewhat vague; however, MacGregor’s plans called for 65,000 British and 220,000 Native reinforcements to maintain an Indian Army of 120,000 on a war footing, figures so vast that the Secretary of State for India, Lord Kimberley, noted ‘I have never read anything wilder’.²⁴

The next flashpoints in Anglo-Russian relations occurred in 1885, with the Bulgarian crisis and the Penjdeh incident.²⁵ These two events underlined the difficulties of dealing with Russia. The year before, these problems had been outlined by the War Office. The Assistant Quarter-Master General, Major J.S. Ro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The British Way in Warfare and Russia
• 2 Some Principles of Anglo-American Strategic Relations, 1900–1945
• 3 Italy and the British Way in Warfare
• 4 Managing the British Way in Warfare: France and Britain’s Continental Commitment, 1904–1918
• 5 British Power and French Security, 1919–1939
• 6 Germany, Britain and Warmaking
• 7 The Territorial Army and National Defence
• 8 The British Army and Anglo-American Military Relations in the Second World War
• 9 Cooperation in the Anglo-Canadian Armies, 1939–1945
• 10 The Naval War Course, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy and the Origins of ‘The British Way in Warfare’
• 11 Financing Kitchener’s (and Everyone Else’s) Armies
• 12 Financing Churchill’s Army
• 13 ‘The Method in which we were schooled by Experience’: British Strategy and a Continental Commitment before 1914
• 14 The British Empire vs. The Hidden Hand: British Intelligence and Strategy and ‘The CUP-Jew-German-Bolshevik combination’, 1918–1924
• Index