British Strategy and War Aims 1914-1916 (RLE First World War)

David French

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415749909
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686941
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XX

This book illustrates the relationship between British military policy and the development of British war aims during the opening years of the First World War. Basing his work on a wide range of unpublished documentary sources, David French reassesses for the benefit of students and scholars alike what was meant by 'a war of attrition'.

1
The Ententes and the Security of the British Empire

BRITISH foreign and defence policy was made by a small elite before 1914. At its apex was a small number of Cabinet ministers. First among them was the Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916, H. H. Asquith. Those who worked with him frequently remarked on his great judicial ability and his rapid grasp of even the most intricate problems. But he also had some of the defects of his virtues. He managed to hold together a very talented team of ministers for nearly eight years but he was not a man of great initiative himself. Nor was he an inspiring war leader. The war filled him with sadness and he disliked the public adulation which greeted him in the early days of the conflict. His contempt for attacks on his person was coupled with an indifference to public opinion which eventually weakened his position as a wartime Prime Minister. He delighted too much in his ability to compose arguments in Cabinet with a form of words. Too often after August 1914 this meant that he simply skirted around real divisions of opinion to the fury of some of his colleagues. Before the war his authority over his colleagues was undisputed and remained so during the opening months of the war. Charles Hobhouse, the Postmaster General, wrote of him in March 1915 that ‘The P.M.’s abilities are as transcendent as ever: his qualities more noticeable. Temper, tact, courage quite marvellous.’¹ But after the formation of the coalition his power began to decline. The Unionist party in the country never had any confidence in him and the confidence of some Liberals began to wane because of the problems raised by his mishandling of conscription and Ireland.²

Asquith’s closest confidants before 1914 were Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary and Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for India between 1910–15, Lord President of the Council 1915–16 and President of the Board of Education in 1916. Asquith believed that Crewe had the soundest judgement of all of his ministers. His admiration for him may have been based on the fact that, unlike some of his other colleagues, he never spoke at unnecessary length. He was, according to Lord Selborne who sat with them both in Cabinet in 1915–16, ‘a replica of the P.M.’ only less able.³ Grey lived much less in the Prime Minister’s shadow. Between 1905 and 1914 there was general agreement between Grey and his professional advisers about foreign policy. He listened to their advice but ultimately he made policy.⁴ Grey’s first experience of foreign affairs had been as under secretary in the 1890s when he had been unpleasantly struck by the way in which Germany tried to exploit Britain’s differences with France and Russia to force it to make concessions. Grey was a Liberal Imperialist although he did not give the empire the same close attention as his Unionist predecessor, Lord Lansdowne. But he believed that if Britain abandoned its empire it would pass under the control of other powers and Britain would cease to be a great power. He was opposed to further imperial expansion because he recognized that British resources were already dangerously overextended in defending what it already held. He welcomed the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 because it reduced Britain’s liabilities and since 1895 he had sought a similar agreement with Russia. Germany’s behaviour during the Boer War had served only to convince him further of its hostility. Under his guidance the centre of British diplomatic policy shifted to Europe and he was ready to sacrifice some Indian and colonial interests for the sake of preserving good relations with Britain’s Entente partners.⁵ He impressed everyone before 1914 with his apparent honesty. His speech of 3 August 1914 urging that Britain should stand by its Entente partners made him a symbol of Britain’s determination to fight the war second only to Kitchener. He went into partial eclipse after August 1914, depressed by his inability to prevent the outbreak of war and by his failing eyesight. But he had his own ideas about policy, and naturally obstinate, he was not prepared to follow blindly the lead of the military.⁶

R. B. (later Lord) Haldane was Secretary of State for War between 1906 and 1912. He was a close associate of both Asquith and Grey before the war, but by February 1915 Asquith only rated his judgement as about average in the Cabinet. Many Liberals were repelled by his propensity for intrigue and many Unionists believed that he was pro-German. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty 1911–15, aroused deep distrust. ‘Churchill is ill mannered, boastful, unprincipled, without any redeeming qualities except his amazing ability and industry’, wrote one Liberal.⁷ The Unionists thought he was a renegade who had crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the Liberals. Many Liberals were perpetually afraid that he might be about to make the return journey. But none could deny his political courage. ‘I would go out tiger shooting with him any time’, wrote Selborne, ‘but I could never trust him in the absence of the tiger, because the motive power is always “self” and I don’t think he has any principles.’ His colleagues resented the way in which he squandered their time in Cabinet by delivering lengthy harangues. At his worst he could be ‘noisy, rhetorical, tactless, & temperless – or -full’. Most Liberals were horrified by the war but he was both repelled and fascinated by it.⁸ In contrast his closest associate in the Cabinet, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, showed little interest in preparations for war before 1914. He was Churchill’s equal in energy and ability and in temperament. Therein lies the reason for their estrangement from their Liberal colleagues in 1915–16. They were both impatient of delay and anxious to see things done quickly.

By the Agadir crisis in 1911 this group of ministers were agreed that British policy had to be based on the continuation of the Triple Entente. In July 1911 Grey explained to C. P. Scott, the editor of the Liberal Manchester Guardian, that the foundation of his policy

was to give France such support as would prevent her from falling under the virtual control of Germany and estrangement from us. This would mean the break up of the triple Entente and if France retired Russia would at once do the same and we should again be faced with the old troubles about the frontiers of India. It would also mean the complete ascendancy of Germany in Europe and some fine day we might have the First Lord of the Admiralty coming to us and saying that instead of building against two powers we had to build against six.⁹

They were also prepared to commit the small British regular army to the continent to support France. They believed that Britain could limit its participation in a land war to a token force of a handful of divisions. In February 1912 Lloyd George, looking back to the Agadir crisis, believed that

the French Government had thrown away the finest opportunity they had ever had or were ever likely to have again, to try conclusions with Germany. They had the certainty of our armed support. The aid of 150,000 English soldiers would have had a great moral effect. Our Navy would have cut off Germany commercially from the West, Russia would have put pressure on the Eastern frontier of Germany, there would have been shortness of food and famine prices in Germany, commercial stagnation and financial disaster. He did not think that France would have crushed Germany as Germany had France in 1870, but it would have brought home to the Germans that they could not ride rough shod over Europe as they appeared to think.¹⁰

Their readiness during the Agadir crisis to participate in a European land war to preserve the balance of power set them apart from the rest of the Cabinet and Liberal party. In 1858 John Bright had condemned the balance of power as ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’.¹¹ Many members of the radical wing of the Liberal Party and the Labour Party rejected both the balance of power and conscription as being inherently evil. They welcomed the Anglo-French Entente as a sign of good relations between the two countries but objected to the Anglo-Russian Entente because they disliked being associated with the repressive tsarist regime. They objected to Britain entering into peacetime alliances because they prevented it from performing its proper role as an international pacificator. They objected to conscription because the navy could protect Britain from invasion and because they feared it would encourage governments to embark on expensive foreign adventures against the wishes of the people. The idea of a conscript army also ran counter to their preference for voluntarism and they feared that it might be used by a future government as a tool of domestic repression. The way in which some Unionists supported conscription before 1914 only made Labour doubly suspicious that it was on a par with landlordism and capitalism. Grey continually had to look over his shoulder to appease radical suspicions. In December 1911 about eighty back-benchers formed the Liberal Foreign Affairs Committee to stop what they saw as Grey’s tendency to move too close to Russia and France at the expense of a better understanding with Germany. More than any other group they were instrumental in ensuring that the Ententes did not blossom into alliances before 1914.¹²

The number of really committed radicals who simply wanted to ignore the balance of power was quite small. In the prewar Cabinet they were represented by Lord Loreburn, who resigned as Lord Chancellor in 1912, John Burns and Lord Morley, both of whom resigned in August 1914 rather than support Britain’s entry into the war. Other radicals realized that although they might be the heirs of Bright, they were also the heirs of Gladstone. Whilst they were not prepared to intervene on the continent to uphold the balance of power they might be ready to do so to preserve the rights of small nations against aggression. The German invasion of Belgium allowed most of them to support the government with a more or less clear conscience in 1914. This group helped to bridge the gap between the out-and-out radicals and those ready to use force to preserve the Ententes.

One of them was Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Agriculture between 1911 and 1914 and President of the Board of Trade from the outbreak of war until the fall of the Asquith coalition. He was generally reckoned to be an able and hardworking departmental minister but lacking Churchill’s political genius or Lloyd George’s charm. That alone was enough to make him liked and respected by those Unionists who worked with him in 1915–16 even if they did not agree with his opposition to the Military Service Acts. Like his close friend Reginald McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1908 to 1911, Home Secretary 1911–15 and finally Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Asquith coalition, he made no secret of the fact that he disliked Lloyd George. When McKenna was at the Home Office before the war his colleagues believed him to be an able administrator. Asquith rated his political courage and his intelligence very highly. But by early 1915 his handling of the aliens question and the bill to disestablish the Anglican church in Wales had made him one of the most unpopular men in the Cabinet and he was heartily loathed by the Unionists who entered the government in May 1915. Selborne described him as ‘a bigoted Cobdenite radical with a narrow technical mind … and the appearance of a cocksparrow’.¹³ During the coalition period he was probably the Prime Minister’s closest Liberal confidant.

During the Agadir crisis in 1911 Runciman and McKenna opposed the dispatch of troops to the continent but they were ready to support France by other means. Runciman explained their position when he wrote in September 1911 that

What I have been most anxious about has been that this week which is critical should not pass without the French knowing that whatever support we may have to give her, it cannot be by six divisions, or four, or one on the Continent. The sea is our natural element and the sooner they realise that we arc not going to land troops the better will be the chances of preserving Europe’s peace.¹⁴

In 1912 they were instrumental in engineering the dispatch of Haldane to Berlin in an attempt to improve Anglo-German relations. Between 1912 and 1914 one of their number, the Colonial Secretary, Lewis Harcourt, did all he could to mend Britain’s fences with Germany by helping to engineer agreements with it about outstanding colonial differences in Africa and the Middle East.¹⁵

The Cabinet received information and advice from several groups of advisers. Grey’s senior officials were highly experienced diplomatists. Ambassadors were usually middle-aged men of wide experience. Sir George Buchanan, for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Ententes and the Security of the British Empire
• 2 Maritime Operations, August–October 1914
• 3 Russia, Turkey and the Balkans, September–December 1914
• 4 The Search for an Entente Strategy, December 1914–February 1915
• 5 The Constantinople Agreement, Italy and the Collapse of the Asquith Government, February–May 1915
• 6 The Asquith Coalition and the Policy of Attrition, May–August 1915
• 7 Men, Money and Munitions: Mobilizing the British Economy for War in the Summer of 1915
• 8 Britain and the ‘Drang nach dem Osten’, 1915–16
• 9 Britain and the Development of the Entente's Policies in the Winter of 1915–16
• 10 Verdun to the Somme, February to June 1916
• 11 From the Somme to Bucharest, July–August 1916
• 12 The Strategic Background to the Collapse of the Asquith Coalition
• 13 Conclusion: Victory or Bankruptcy?
• Bibliography
• Index