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Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Deterrence, Coercion,
and Appeasement
British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940
DAV I D F R E N C H
1
1
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Acknowledgements
The staffs of the National Archives at Kew, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at
King’s College London, the library of University College London, the Churchill College
Archives Centre, and the Institute of Historical Research have again placed me in their debt
by offering me every possible assistance. They made working in their institutions a pleasure.
I have amassed a considerable number of intellectual debts in the course of writing this
book. I would especially like to thank Professor Kathleen Burk who kindly took the time
and trouble to read a draft of my manuscript, and to give me the benefit of her suggestions.
I also benefited from the advice of two anonymous readers who, I hope, will forgive me if
I did not incorporate each and every one of their suggestions into the text. The members of
the Military History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research have provided me with
both friendship and intellectual stimulation over more than forty years, and I am grateful
to them. None of the above is responsible for what appears here, and I alone am responsible
for any errors of fact or interpretation. I must also thank my editors at OUP, Stephanie
Ireland and Cathryn Steele and their colleagues, for their patience and assistance during
the gestation of this book.
The following institutions and individuals have kindly given me permission to consult
and refer to documents in their keeping: the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections,
University of Birmingham; the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College Cambridge;
the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Kings College London; the
National Archives of Australia; Library and Archives Canada; the FDR Presidential Library and
Museum. Crown Copyright material is reproduced under the Open Government Licence
v3.0. To view this licence, visit http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-
licence/. All reasonable efforts have been made to contact the holders of copyright materials
reproduced in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future printings if notice is
given to the publisher.
This book is dedicated to the memories of three friends, each of whom passed away
during its creation. Ian Shaw first set me on the path to becoming a historian. He showed
me that doing history could be both fun, challenging, and intellectually stimulating. In their
different ways Michael Dockrill and Keith Neilson made the inter-war period their own.
My numerous references to their works can be but a small tribute to all that they have con-
tributed to my understanding of this period. This would have been a much better book had
I been able to show them a completed draft and taken advantage of their wisdom and
knowledge, as I have done so often in the past.
David French
Contents
Abbreviations ix
1. Introduction 1
I . M A K I N G P E AC E A N D M A NAG I N G P E AC E , 1 9 1 9 – 3 0
2. Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 15

3. Creating the New World Order, 1919–21 66
4. Reconstructing the New World Order, 1921–6 113
5. Managing the New World Order, 1926–30 167
I I . T H E C RUM B L I N G O F T H E N EW WO R L D
O R D E R , 1 931 – 6
6. The World Crisis and the National Government, 1931–3 229

7. A New Grand Strategy: The Defence Requirements Committee, 1932–5 271
8. ‘I wish I saw a real policy emerging, but frankly I don’t’:
The Baldwin Government, 1935–7 315
I I I . T H E A S C E N D E N C Y O F C HA M B E R L A I N , 1 93 7 – 4 0
9. The Grand Strategy of Fortress Britain, May 1937–September 1938 371

10. ‘And I sincerely believe that we have at last opened the way to
that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos’:
Appeasement, Containment, and War, October 1938 to September 1939 436
11. ‘. . . there was no hurry as time was on our side’: Chamberlain’s War 502
12. Conclusion 564
Bibliography 577
Index 611
Abbreviations
ADM Admiralty
AHR American Historical Review
AIR Air Ministry
ARP Air Raid Precautions
BEF British Expeditionary Force
BUL Birmingham University Library
BUF British Union of Fascists
CAB Cabinet
CAC Churchill Archives Centre
CAS Chief of the Air Staff
CBH Contemporary British History
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CDS Chief of Defence Staff
CHAR Chartwell manuscripts
C-in-C Commander-in-Chief
CID Committee of Imperial Defence
CIGS Chief of the Imperial General Staff
CNS Chief of the Naval Staff
CO Colonial Office
COS Chiefs of Staff
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
DBFP Documents on British Foreign Policy
DC(M) Disarmament Committee (Ministerial)
DGFP Documents on German Foreign Policy
D&S Diplomacy & Statecraft
DRC Defence Requirements Sub-Committee
EHQ European History Quarterly
EHR English Historical Review
FO Foreign Office
FPC Foreign Policy Committee
FSR Field Service Regulations
GC&CS Government Code and Cipher School
Gen. General
HJ Historical Journal
IHR International History Review
IJN Imperial Japanese Navy
INS Intelligence and National Security
IPI Indian Political Intelligence
IRA Irish Republican Army
IWC Imperial War Cabinet
JCH Journal of Contemporary History
JICH Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
JMH Journal of Modern History
x Abbreviations
JMilH Journal of Military History

JOHDC Joint Oversea and Home Defence Committee
JPC Joint Planning Committee
JSS Journal of Strategic Studies
KL Kindle Location
LAC Library and Archives Canada
LNU League of Nations Union
Lt.-Gen. Lieutenant General
Maj.-Gen. Major General
MAS Modern Asian Studies
MI5 The Security Service
MES Middle Eastern Studies
MEW Ministry of Economic Warfare
MOD Ministry of Defence
MOI Ministry of Information
MOS Ministry of Supply
NAA National Archives of Australia
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PASC Public Administration Select Committee
SIS Secret Intelligence Service
SWC Supreme War Council
TCBH Twentieth Century British History
TNA The National Archives
UDC Union of Democratic Control
USN United States Navy
VADM Vice Admiral
WinH War in History
WO War Office
1
Introduction
Peace with Security
By the middle of the 1920s Britain was a satiated power. As the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Curzon, told the Imperial Conference in 1923 ‘We have no further conquests that we desire
to make.’1 Its empire covered 13.4 million square miles of the world’s land surface. It had a
population of 491 million people, of whom only 72.5 million were of European ethnicity.
About two-thirds of its total area, and 80 per cent of its people, lay in an arc of territory
around the Indian Ocean stretching from Cape Town via India to Singapore and Sydney. Its
land frontiers totalled about 20,000 miles, and it was linked by nearly 80,000 miles of sea
routes. Its interests and influence extended still further. Trade with foreign countries
beyond the confines of its formal empire represented about half of Britain’s external trade
in the early 1920s, and a similar proportion of its overseas investments were held outside
the empire.2 The policy objective of every post-war government was to ensure that it con-
tinued to enjoy the fruits of its past successes. On 2 November 1918 Premier David Lloyd
George had written to his coalition partner and the leader of the Conservative party, Andrew
Bonar Law, suggesting that they should lead their parties into the forthcoming general
election on a Coalition platform. Britain was on the point of emerging as one of the victor
powers in the world war, and a coalition government would be best placed to ensure that
Britain reaped the full fruits of the allied victory. ‘My fundamental object’, he wrote, ‘will be
to promote the unity and development of the British Empire and of the nations of which it is
composed, to preserve for them the position of influence and authority in the conduct of the
world’s affairs which they have gained by their sacrifices and efforts in the cause of human
liberty and progress, and to bring into being such conditions of living for the inhabitants of
the British Isles as will secure plenty and opportunity to all.’3 He and his successors under-
stood that the optimum way to achieve those goals was to work to ensure a peaceful and
stable world. As one of Curzon’s successors, Austen Chamberlain, told the Lord Mayor’s
banquet in London in 1924, ‘Peace, My Lord, is must and ever be the aim of all our efforts.’4
Both in public and in private Stanley Baldwin, who served as Prime Minister in 1923, from
1925 to 1929 and as the leader of the National Government between 1935–7, was of the same
mind. In October 1926, he told the assembled Dominion Premiers that:
It is only in the last resort, and after every means of preserving peace has been exhausted,
that we can contemplate the possibility of war. We might perhaps describe our policy in
the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who speaks of—
1 K. Middlemas (ed.), Thomas Jones. Whitehall Diary, Vol. 1: 1916–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969), 247.
2 Major D. H. Cole, Imperial Military Geography. General Characteristics of the Empire in Relation to Defence
(London: Sifton Praed, 1937. 9th edn. First published in 1924), 2.
3 Lloyd George to Bonar Law, 2 November 1918, quoted in J. Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics. The
Political Diaries of Robert Sanders, Lord Bayford 1910–1935 (London: The Historians’ Press, 1984), 115.
4 TNA FO 800/256. Chamberlain, Speech given at the Guildhall on 10 November 1924.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press.
© David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0001
2 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement
‘In the first and fundamental law of Nature which is to seek Peace and follow it.
The second the summe [sic] of right of Nature; which is by all means we can defend
ourselves.’5
A year later and in public he was more succinct, writing in an open letter to the Times that,
‘The whole foreign policy of His Majesty’s Government has been inspired by one purpose—
the maintenance of peace and the prevention of war.’6 Chamberlain’s Labour party succes-
sor, Arthur Henderson, echoed the same sentiments in 1930: ‘More than ever before peace
is the first of British interests . . . .’7
This was not merely rhetoric designed for the consumption of a public sickened by the
losses of the First World War. It was shared and echoed by the government’s professional
advisers. In 1926, in a secret briefing paper they prepared for the recently constituted Chiefs
of Staff, Foreign Office officials explained why peace and stability were paramount British
interests. British policy was not altruistic. It was based on a realistic appreciation of British
interests: ‘The fact is that war and rumours of war, quarrels and friction, in any corner of
the world spell loss and harm to British commercial and financial interests. It is for the sake
of these interests that we endeavour to pour oil on troubled waters. So manifold and ubi
quitous are British trade and British finance that, whatever else may be the outcome of a
disturbance to the peace, we shall be the losers.’ But they also understood that their single-
minded pursuit of peace put Britain at odds with some other powers, for:
Obviously the ultimate, if not the immediate, aim and object of the foreign policy of
countries such as Germany, Hungary and Russia is to recover the territory lost in the war.
Italy has her eye on the Aegean Islands and parts of Asia Minor. Japan may well hope
someday to absorb Manchuria. We, on the other hand, have no territorial ambitions nor
desire for aggrandisement. We have got all we want—perhaps more. Our sole object is to
keep what we have and live in peace. Many foreign countries are playing for a definite
stake and their policy shaped accordingly. It is not so in our case. To the casual observer
our foreign policy may appear to lack consistency and continuity, but both are there. We
keep our hands free in order to throw weight into the scale on behalf of peace. The main-
tenance of the balance of power and the preservation of the status quo have been our
guiding lights for many decades and will so continue.8
The focus of this book is on the period between the end of the First World War and the
collapse of France and the British army’s withdrawal from Dunkirk in 1940. It will address
three questions: what was British grand strategy, how did British policy-makers go about
devising it, and why were the outcomes so much more successful in the 1920s than they
were in the 1930s?
In December 2009 the then Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, made the start
ling claim that Britain had ‘lost an institutionalised capacity for, and culture of, strategic
thought.’9 A year later the unpopularity of the British military intervention in Iraq, and the
5 TNA CAB 32/46/E. Imperial Conference. 9 meeting, 26 October 1926.

6 The Times, 21 December 1927.
7 TNA FO 800/281. Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on the proposal made by the
French Government for the organization of a system of European Federal Union, 7 June 1930.
8 TNA CAB 4/14/CID 700B. Note by the Secretary covering papers prepared for the use of the COS in their
First Annual Review of Imperial Defence, 15 June 1926.
9 Annual Chief of the Defence Staff Lecture, 3 December 2009. Downloaded 18 March 2014 at http://www.
rusi.org/cdslectures.
Introduction 3
apparent lack of public understanding for the reasons why the British government had sent
troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, persuaded the House of Commons Public Administration
Select Committee (PASC) to ask the question, ‘Who does British national strategy?’ Their
disturbing answer was that no one did it. Neither campaign had been based on any concep-
tion of grand strategy, or a close examination of what British national interests were at
stake, or how British involvement in those campaigns might impact upon its wider policy
in the Middle East.10 The PASC agreed with Stirrup that policy-makers had once known
how to think strategically, but they had now forgotten how to do it. During the Cold War,
Britain had become the obedient junior partner of the United States, much of its defence
efforts was focused on Europe, and the need to think about strategy had been passed to
Washington. But, as one of the witnesses who appeared before the PASC remarked, with
the end of the Cold War, ‘suddenly we’re being asked to step up to a global role at a time of
great financial stress.’11 Four years later matters had apparently not improved. In July 2014
the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford, suggested politicians were
‘“making it up as they go along”’.12
Things had apparently not always been like this. The PASC learnt that in 1902
A. J. Balfour’s Conservative government had established the Committee of Imperial
Defence. Its purpose was to bring together ministers, senior officers of the armed forces,
and senior civil servants to devise a grand strategy for the British Empire. But what the
PASC and its witnesses were not clear about was how it went about its business, what advice
it gave ministers, how willing or otherwise they were to accept it, and what were the
consequences of the decisions they took. It would be unreasonable to criticize either the
committee or the witnesses who appeared before it for failing to explore these issues.
A parliamentary select committee is not the best vehicle to conduct a sustained historical
examination of the development of British grand strategy over several decades. But they are
questions that historians of British grand strategy can and should examine. Stirrup’s insist-
ence that the British had lost the capacity to think strategically implied that it had once
possessed it. The CID was established in 1902, but the chronological starting point of this
book is 1919. This is partly because the pre-war history of the CID, and the evolution of
British strategic policy before 1914, have already been explored at length by a several
authors, including the present writer. Little would be gained by rehearsing their detailed
findings beyond highlighting one point.13 Before 1914 the CID failed to do what it was
established to do. It did not devise and implement a single, coherent, and overarching
grand strategy for the British Empire. Confronted by the possibility of a war with Germany,
the Admiralty planned to fight it by blockading Germany in the expectation that if they did
so the German economy would collapse, and the Kaiser would have to make peace. The
role of the army would be to seize islands off the coast of Germany to use as advanced bases
for their destroyers and submarines. But the army’s General Staff wanted to land on the
10 House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, HC 435, Who Does UK National Strategy?, 18
October 2010, 15.
October 2010. Q9. Professor Julian Lindley-French.
12 Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2014.
13 A brief selection of their works would include M. Howard, The Continental Commitment. The Dilemma of
British Defence Policy in the Era of Two World Wars (London: Penguin, 1974); J. Gooch, The Plans of War. The
General Staff and British Military Strategy, c.1900–1916 (London: Routledge, 1974); D. French, British Economic
and Strategic Planning, 1905–1915 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982); N. d’Ombrain, War Machinery and High Policy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); D. G. Morgan Owen, The Fear of Invasion. Strategy, Politics, and British
War Planning 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
continent and operate in cooperation with the northern flank of the French army. At a
meeting of the CID in 1909 the Liberal government’s Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, delib-
erately decided not to decide. Whether or not his government would permit the army to go
to France in the event of a war with Germany was a matter of expediency that could only be
decided on the day.14 In this instance, as in so many others, politics trumped strategy.
Asquith knew that the dispatch of British troops to the continent was something which
many Liberal MPs would deplore. He saw no need to stir up a dangerous wasp’s nest when
his government was already deeply embroiled in the political controversies surrounding
the introduction of the Peoples’ Budget and all the political and constitutional ramifications
into which it was leading him. But that failure has not prevented others from continuing to
single out the CID as a model worthy of emulation. In his comparison of British strategy-
making in the 1930s and the post-Cold War era, one author has claimed much for the success
of the CID in the 1930s in preparing Britain for war: ‘Lord Chatfield and Lord Hankey gave
Churchill the weapons with which to fight in 1940.’15 But such a claim might cause the
sceptical reader to ask whether an institution that had helped to devise policies that had left
Britain bereft of major allies in the summer of 1940 and faced by the possibility of invasion,
really was a successful model that present-day policy-makers would do well to follow.
Any author writing about grand strategy ought to define their subject. Stirrup had no
hesitation in defining it as ‘where, in true Clausewitzian fashion, politics and the military
art intersect.’16 The PASC hesitated even to use the phrase ‘grand strategy’, claiming that the
phrase was associated with empire, and that in the twenty-first century it might be seen as
hubristic. They preferred to employ the term ‘National Strategy’.17 But as the period exam-
ined in this book was a time when Britain was a major imperial power, the term ‘grand
strategy’ is appropriate because strategy extended far beyond the boundaries of the British
nation state. Defining it is, however, problematic, not least because the meaning of the
word ‘strategy’ changed over time.18 The most succinct definition of grand strategy, and
one that avoids the pitfall of wrenching the concept from its historical context, was pro-
vided by the future Field Marshal Lord Wavell. Drafting the final pre-war edition of the
army’s basic doctrinal manual, the Field Service Regulations, he stated boldly in 1935 that
‘Grand strategy is the art of applying the whole of the national power in the most effective
way towards attaining the national aim.’19 It had not always been so regarded. Until the eve
of the First World War the phrase was rarely used, and when it was, it served merely to
define the conduct of purely military or naval operations in a particular theatre of war. In
1896 the journalist H. W. Wilson welcomed the Royal Navy’s recent naval manoeuvres
because ‘whereas our fleets are at work on minor tactics all the year round; the manoeuvres
represent their sole opportunity of studying the grand strategy of a campaign.’20 The first
14 French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 30–1.

15 G. Prims, The British Way of Strategy-Making. Vital Lessons for Our Times (London: Royal United Services
Institute, 2011), 34.
16 Annual Chief of the Defence Staff Lecture, 3 December 2009. Downloaded 18 March 2014 at http://www.
rusi.org/cdslectures.
October 2010, 9; MOD, Joint Doctrine Publications 0–01. British Defence doctrine (London: MOD, 2008), 1–3.
18 L. Freedman, Strategy. A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 72–4, 82–95, 114; B. Heuser, The
Evolution of Strategy. Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
3–9; H. Strachan, ‘Strategy in theory; strategy and practice’, JSS, vol. 42 (2019), 171–90.
19 General Staff, War Office, Field Service Regulations, Vol. III: 1935 (London; HMSO, 1935), 5. For a critique of
the propensity of some writers to commit such a sin, see D. G. Morgan-Owen, ‘History and the perils of grand
strategy’, JMH, vol. 92 (2020), 351–85.
20 H. W. Wilson to the editor, The Times, 20 June 1896.
Introduction 5
major thinker to argue that strategy went beyond military operations and encompassed the
whole resources of the nation was another naval writer, Julian Corbett.21 Addressing an
audience of officers at the Royal Naval War College at Portsmouth in 1909, he made a dis-
tinction between ‘major strategy’ and ‘minor strategy’. Minor strategy encompassed plans
of operations, the selection of objectives and the direction of the forces assigned to them.
But major strategy:
. . . has also to deal with the whole resources of the nation for war. It is a branch of states-
manship which regards the Army and Navy as parts of one force, to be handled together
as instruments of war. But it also has to keep in constant touch with the political and
diplomatic position of the country (on which depends the effective action of the instru-
ment), and the commercial and financial position (by which the energy for working the
instruments is maintained). The friction due to these considerations is inherent in war,
and is called the deflection of strategy by politics. It is usually regarded as a disease. It is
really a vital factor in every strategical problem. It may be taken as a general rule that no
question of major strategy can be decided upon apart from diplomacy, and vice versa.22
The experience of the First World War showed that Corbett was right. Grand strategy
encompassed far more than the operational conduct of armies and navies. Every belliger-
ent discovered that it also involved social, economic, and political factors in ways hitherto
unimagined. By 1920 Lloyd George recognized that:
One of the principal lessons learnt during the last few years was that war was not a purely
naval or military matter, and that it was of the highest importance that the work of the
Admiralty and War Office should be closely coordinated with that of the Foreign Office
and other Government Departments. Questions such as that of equipping our forces and
the maintenance of food supplies were of great importance. There was also the question
of sustaining the moral[e] of the people. Practically all the books which had been written
since the war by German writers such as Tirpitz, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, pointed
out that the German collapse was due to the spirit of the people not being maintained
more than to anything else.23
It was the British who did more than anyone else to give a new meaning to the concept of
grand strategy. Within the opening weeks of the war the Germans had occupied much of
France’s industrial heartland and the war would have been over quickly were it not for the
economic support that the British were now able to offer their French allies. Possessing the
world’s largest navy they were able to use their control of the world’s sea lanes to impose an
increasingly tight economic blockade on the Central Powers, with the result, as Alexander
Watson has argued, that ‘the conflict ceased to be a purely military affair. Instead, it became
a grinding attritional contest that assailed whole communities and turned civilians into
targets.’24 As the Naval Staff explained in December 1918, ‘Nothing can be clearer than the
fact that modern war resolves itself into an attempt to throttle the national life. Waged by
21 H. Strachan, The Direction of War. Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 27–33.
22 J. Corbett, ‘The green pamphlet’, in J. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, ed. Eric Grove
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988; 1st edn, London, 1911), 327.
23 TNA CAB 2/3. CID 133 meeting, 29 June 1920. Minutes.
24 A. Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London: Penguin, 2014), 208.
the whole power of a nation, its ultimate object is to bring pressure on the mass of the
enemy’s people, distressing them by every possible means, so as to compel the enemy’s gov-
ernment to submit to terms.’25 Writing in 1921 Sir William Robertson, who had served as
Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the government’s most senior military adviser
between 1915 and 1918, explained the consequences of this: ‘It is much too commonly sup-
posed’, he wrote, ‘that war is a matter solely for armies and navies, and that a statesman’s
duties are concerned almost entirely with those services. This is as wide apart as the poles
from being the truth. War draws into its vortex every element of the national life, nothing
escapes it, and upon the statesman devolves the responsibility, once war is declared, for
combining the whole diplomatic, political, financial, industrial, naval, and military powers
of the nation for the defeat of the enemy.’26
The fact that Robertson included political considerations in his list of the factors that
governments had to consider was significant. The war had demonstrated the vital import
ance of mobilizing and maintaining popular consent for war. As the experience of Tsarist
Russia in 1917, and Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918 demonstrated, if the people
withdrew their support for their country’s war effort, defeat was inevitable. By the end of
the 1930s this was an increasingly pressing concern for the British themselves. ‘The capacity
which a country possesses to wage war depends not only upon the strength of the efficiency
of the fighting forces’, the members of the Joint Planning Staff told ministers, ‘but also upon
the organisation of the whole of the industrial resources and of the available man power of
the nation and on the maintenance of civil morale.’27
A second point they emphasized was that Britain could not hope to win a great power
war without outside help. That help could come from two sources. Britain would not have
emerged amongst the victor powers in 1918 had it fought alone. In was on the winning side
because the skill of its diplomatists ensured that it fought alongside France, and Russia
(until its collapse), and the USA after its entry into the war in 1917. Simultaneously, it was
also able to draw upon the resources of its own empire. As Sir Ernle Chatfield, the First Sea
Lord, wrote in 1934:
We have always had, and we cannot get away from, our Imperial responsibility and it is
our Imperial position which gives this country its great voice in the world. Unless we are
willing to maintain that Imperial position we shall become once more nothing but an
insignificant island in the North Sea secure from air attacks and sea attack and should
carry as much weight in the councils of the world as Italy or Spain.28
The study of British grand strategy between the world wars must focus, therefore, on the
ways in which British policy-makers sought to orchestrate all the elements of power at their
disposal so as to achieve their political objectives. Such a study must also emphasize that
British grand strategy was not made by military intellectuals like J. F. C. Fuller, or journal-
ists like Basil Liddell Hart, sitting in front of their typewriters. They might try to influence,
25 TNA CAB 4/7/239B. Admiralty, The Freedom of the Seas, 21 December 1918.
26 Field Marshal Sir W. Robertson, From Private to Field- Marshal (London: Constable, 1921), 385. The
Germans, too, made the same discovery. See M. Strohn, The German Army and the Defence of the Reich. Military
Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11–13.
27 TNA CAB 53/14/COS755. JPC, Draft appreciation of the situation in the event of war against Germany in
April 1939, July 1938. The COS repeated this definition in what became their seminal assessment of British strat-
egy in the opening phase of the Second World War, TNA CAB 53/45/COS843. COS, European Appreciation
1939–40, 20 February 1939.
28 TNA CAB 21/434. Chatfield to Warren Fisher, 16 July 1934.
Introduction 7
advise, or criticize those who were responsible for making it. But they were commentators,
not actors. British grand strategy was made, as Chapter 2 shows, by a small group of politi-
cians, diplomatists, senior service officers, and senior civil servants. They worked on the
basis of often incomplete and contradictory information which they filtered through their
own particular preconceptions and against a background of a host of often tangential
events and outside pressures that they could not afford to ignore.
An Age of Appeasement?
A book exploring the development of British grand strategy between the world wars
cannot avoid the tangled and contested history of appeasement.29 The story began as a
morality play. Hitler planned a war of conquest to dominate Europe, and then the world,
and the timorous democracies, led by such ‘Guilty Men’ as Stanley Baldwin and Neville
Chamberlain, tried and failed to appease him by shamefully bowing down to his demands.30
In the 1940s and after they were attacked from the right for failing to rearm and from the
left for failing to work with the League of Nations to make a reality of collective security.
The opening of the British government’s archives in the late 1960s paved the way for a series
of revisionist studies. They suggested that appeasement was not based on fear. Rather it
represented an acceptance that Germany had genuine grievances that deserved to be
assuaged. Furthermore, it was a policy that had widespread public support, and it was
underpinned by the fact that policy-makers knew that Britain just did not have the where-
withal to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously. Appeasement was, therefore, a
rational response by men who were aware that British power was in long-term decline.31 But
this consensus was itself subsequently challenged by several post-revisionist studies suggest-
ing that the policy-makers who chose appeasement could have chosen differently. They
might have created a powerful front to designed to deter Hitler by accelerating their own
rearmament programme, giving a clear promise of support to France, and looking to the
USSR for support.32 What all this suggests is that John Ferris was right when he wrote in
2008 that, ‘many key matters remain inexplicable.’33 The existing literature has become so
fragmented that a new synthesis is necessary if we are to understand how those people who
made British grand strategy saw their world and why they made the choices that they did.
The evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk may have been a great deliverance, but
it also represented a catastrophic failure of strategy. The most common explanation for that
catastrophe is exemplified by the first volume of the official history of British grand strategy
by N. H. Gibbs. Britain disarmed rapidly after World War One. The ‘Ten Year Rule’
29 For two excellent introductions to the broad lines along which this literature has developed, see S. Aster,
‘Appeasement: before and after revisionism’, D&S, vol. 19 (2008), 443–80; A. Adamthwaite, ‘Historians at war’, in
Frank McDonough (ed.), Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective (London: Continuum,
Kindle edn, 2011), 507–35. For an analysis of more recent literature, see A. Capet, ‘Neville Chamberlain and
appeasement’, Global War Studies, vol. 10 (2013), 68–79. The longer-term legacy of the Munich agreement in
British policy has been thoughtfully explored in R. G. Hughes, The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British
Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
30 ‘Cato’, Guilty Men (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940).
31 C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1972); P. M. Kennedy, The Realities
behind Diplomacy. Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865–1980 (London: Fontana, 1981).
32 The most significant of these was R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement. British Policy and the
Coming of the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1993); R. A. C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement
(London: Macmillan, 2000).
33 J. R. Ferris, ‘“Now that the milk is spilt”: appeasement and the archive on intelligence’, D&S, vol. 19 (2008), 527.
hamstrung the armed services until the early 1930s. The impact of the Great Depression
made it impossible for the British to rearm in time. Neville Chamberlain’s government
pursued its disastrous efforts to appease the dictators. The focus, and the teleology, are plain.
The motif that distinguished British grand strategy throughout the inter-war period was
‘appeasement’, and everything led to the disaster of the summer of 1940.34 The same ideas
are echoed in more popular literature. One textbook writer asserted that by 1924 ‘Britain
was by now firmly set on a course of appeasement’. Another labelled the whole period from
1919 to 1939 as, ‘The Politics of Appeasement’.35 But opting to see the period between 1919
and 1939 as an era in which appeasement was the keynote of British grand strategy is the
product of a tendency to view the whole period through the distorting and narrowing
image of Anglo-German relations, and to assume that Germany and its ambitions was
almost the only major problem with which British policy-makers had to wrestle.36 That was
not so. The British policy-making elite had to maintain the security of an empire that
spanned the globe. Germany might at times constitute a threat to its future and stability, but
so, according to the estimates of those same policy-makers, might other great powers such
as France, Italy, Japan, the USSR, and the USA, as well as a host of regional powers ranging
from Afghanistan to Spain. The British did prefer peace to war, and where possible they did
try to manage potential threats to their security by negotiations. Overt threats had to be
reduced to manageable proportions, preferably by diplomatic negotiations. In any case
effective armed forces were essential to give the necessary backing to diplomacy.
Governments always had to be able to muster the economic and financial wherewithal to
sustain their efforts, while simultaneously they also had to generate the popular support
they needed, for without it they could do nothing. What they did not do was consistently
prefer appeasement to all other options. Until the second half of the 1930s they were more
likely to choose one or a combination of three other policies. They might try to contain
potential enemies by working to prevent them from expanding their hostile influences and
co-exist with them in a state of mutual antagonism that fell short of actual armed conflict.
They might try to deter them from taking actions that were inimical to British interests, or
they might try to coerce them into acting in ways that were consistent with those interests.
They also customarily sought working relationships with other powers to spread the bur-
den of pursuing whatever policies they chose to pursue if they believed that doing so would
not come at an unacceptable cost.
Gibbs’ book also exemplifies two other distorting tendencies in the historiography. He
focused on the 1930s at the expense of the 1920s, devoting fewer than one hundred of his
859 pages to the 1920s, and he paid scant attention to the impact that domestic party polit
ics had in determining the choices that policy-makers felt it right to make.37 His was a
world that civil servants might have wished for, one in which the electorate could be
34 N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, Vol. 1: Rearmament Policy (London: HMSO, 1976).

35 P. Hayes, Modern British Foreign Policy. The Twentieth Century 1880–1939 (London: A & C Black, 1978), 225;
Kennedy, Realities behind Diplomacy, 223. Other textbook writers have been more discriminating. For example,
R. Holland, The Pursuit of Greatness. Britain and the World Role, 1900–1970 (London: Fontana, 1991), confined
the ‘Age of Appeasement’ to the decade beginning in 1929.
36 A point made by T. G. Otte, ‘A very internecine policy’: Anglo-Russian cold wars before the Cold War’, in
C. Baxter, M. L. Dockrill, and K. Hamilton (eds), Britain in Global Politics, Vol. 1: From Gladstone to Churchill
(Houndmills, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–49.
37 Gibbs, Grand Strategy. Conversely, two excellent studies of British policy in the 1920s, A. Orde, Great
Britain and International Security 1920–1926 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978); and J. Ferris, Men, Money,
and Diplomacy. The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919–1926 (New York: Cornell University Press,
1989), both end their analysis in 1926.
Introduction 9
ignored. But it was a world that politicians knew did not exist. The seventy-fifth anniver-
sary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 brought forth two major
studies that did accord a more prominent place to the role of domestic politics in shaping
grand strategy. Their authors understood that there was a symbiotic relationship between
domestic politics and British external policy. But, in seeking to show how Winston
Churchill supplanted Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940, any sustained
analysis of grand strategy took a definite second place to explaining who got to the top of
the greasy pole of British politics.38 Furthermore, dismissing as they did the 1920s as no
more than a sorry prelude to the mistakes and failures of the 1930s does less than justice to
what policy-makers actually achieved in the 1920s.39 If the ‘appeasers’ of the 1930s are to be
condemned for their failures, they—for in some instances they were the same men—ought
to be accorded a measure of recognition for the successes they achieved in the 1920s. But to
do that it is essential to understand the magnitude of the problems they faced. In 1919 they
were confronted by the same kind of geopolitical revolution that their successors faced at
the end of the Cold War. Old enemies, the Kaiser’s Germany and its allies in 1919, and the
Soviet Union and its East European satellites in the early 1990s, had suddenly disappeared.
But in both cases hopes for a stable and peaceful world proved to be a chimera. Policy-
makers then had to recalibrate their thinking to understand and devise solutions to the
new problems facing them.40 In reality, far from being merely the precursor to disaster, the
decade after 1919 was a period of outstanding British success. The men responsible for
constructing and steering British grand strategy played a major role in stabilizing the inter
national system that had been torn apart by the First World War.41
Most British policy-makers would have been surprised to be told in the 1920s that they
were committed to a policy of appeasement. In 1919 members of the British delegation at
the Paris peace conference were somewhat uneasy at the apparently harsh terms imposed
on Germany, and there was some talk amongst them of the need to appease German griev-
ances if Europe was to find lasting peace.42 But thereafter the word was hardly in common
currency. A survey of the usage of ‘appease/appeasement’ in the Times indicated that it
appeared in print on only 194 occasions between 1919 and 1931 (or on average just fifteen
times annually), and on just 260 occasions between 1932–6. It was only between 1937 and
1939 that it passed into more common usage, appearing in print no less than 897 times.43
Its usage by ministers in the Cabinet followed a similar trajectory. Between January 1919
38 T. Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler (London: Bodley Head, Kindle edn, 2019); and R. Crowcroft, The End Is Nigh.
British Politics, Power and the Road to the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For an
earlier attempt to show the intimate connections between foreign and domestic politics, see M. Cowling, The
Impact of Hitler. British Politics and Policy 1933–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
39 One significant exception to this approach, and a book that does give proper prominence to the events of
the 1920s, is Z. Steiner’s magisterial study, The Lights That Failed. European International History 1919–1933
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
40 S. Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, AHR, vol. 112 (2007), 1091–2.
41 Among several outstanding works dealing with this issue are A. Orde, British Policy and European
Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and P. O. Cohrs, The
Unfinished Peace after World War I. America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe 1919–1932 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006). But, as their titles indicate, their focus is on Europe, with the result that they
cannot take account of the real magnitude of the problems facing British policy-makers and their efforts to create
stable security structures to safeguard British interests in both the Middle East and Asia, while simultaneously
re-ordering their relations with their own colonies (both formal and informal), and the Dominions.
42 A. Lentin, ‘“Appeasement” at the Paris Peace Conference’, in M. Dockrill and J. Fisher (eds), The Paris Peace
Conference, 1919. Peace without Victory (London: Palgrave Macmillan & the Public Record Office, 2001), 51–66.
43 These figures were derived from a survey using the search facility available on the electronic copy of the
Times. A survey of the use of the word ‘appeasement’ as it appeared in the Daily Telegraph between 1919 and 1939
produced a broadly similar result.
and the formation of the National Government in August 1931 its use was recorded in the
Cabinet minutes on just seven occasions, and even then not always in the context of state-
to-state relations.44 In March 1922, for example, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Robert
Horne, used ‘appease’ in the context of satisfying the demands of members of the Royal
Irish Constabulary left disgruntled by their severance terms following the signing of the
Anglo-Irish treaty.45 Thereafter it appeared in the minutes just four times between September
1931 and May 1937. It was only during Neville Chamberlain’s peacetime premiership
between May 1937 and September 1939 that the word was used with any real frequency,
appearing in the minutes on no fewer than twenty-seven occasions. If the inter-war period
was an age of appeasement, contemporaries, both inside and outside the Cabinet, did not
know it. It was not until Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister that it became the
dominant motif, and only then can it be used accurately to describe what policy-makers
were trying to do.
A proper understanding of British grand strategy between the world wars also requires
us to ditch the idea that Britain had entered into an inevitable state of decline in the early
twentieth century, a process that accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s, and that as a conse-
quence the overriding goal of British policy-makers after 1919 was to appease potential
enemies because ministers and officials believed that Britain was too weak to oppose
them.46 Neither of these propositions was true. The notion that British power was in
‘decline’ rests heavily on the assumption that power in the international sphere is synonym
ous with economic performance, and that British power had ‘declined’ because after 1919 it
no longer possessed the economic predominance it had before 1870.47 The reality was dif-
ferent. Economic strength was important. It was necessary to generate the wherewithal
both to protect British interests and project British influence beyond its own shores.
‘Without our trade and finance’, a Foreign Office official wrote in 1926, ‘we sink to the level
of a third-class Power.’48 But trade, finance, and the wealth they generated were never the
be all and end all of the instruments of British power. Power, that is the ability to persuade,
deter, or coerce others to act in ways that would further British interests, was the product of
far more than just material factors. British policy-makers had first to interpret correctly the
world within which Britain and its empire existed. They had to understand the shifting
ambitions and capabilities of other states, both near and distant, and identify both potential
allies and potential enemies. They then had to decide how to secure the support of the for-
mer, and how best to prevent the latter from harming their own interests. Wealth alone was
of no account unless it could be transformed into the instruments of power, that is armies,
navies, and air forces and effective intelligence gathering and diplomatic services. Policy-
makers therefore had to decide to what extent they could call upon their own people to
make sacrifices in order to generate and sustain those instruments.
44 These figures were derived from a survey of the PDFs of the Cabinet’s minutes in TNA CAB 23 for the
whole of the inter-war period.
45 TNA CAB 23/29/18(22). Cabinet meeting, 15 March 1922.
46 For a powerful exposition of this view, see C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Gloucester: Alan
Sutton, 1972). It has been robustly challenged in a series of articles in IHR, vol. 13 (1991). See G. Martel, ‘The
meaning of power: re-thinking the decline and fall of Great Britain’, IHR, vol. 13 (1991), 662–94; K. Neilson,
‘Greatly exaggerated: the myth of the decline of Great Britain before 1914’, IHR, vol. 13 (1991), 695–725; J. Ferris,
‘“The greatest power on Earth”: Great Britain in the 1920s’, IHR, vol. 13 (1991), 726–50; B. J. C. McKercher, ‘Our
most dangerous enemy: Great Britain pre-eminent in the 1930s’, IHR, vol. 13 (1991), 784–92.
47 The most sustained exposition of this thesis is P. M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to the 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).
48 TNA CAB 4/14/CID 700B. Memorandum by the Foreign Office, n.d., but c.15 June 1926.
Introduction 11
British grand strategy in the inter-war period never consisted of the single-minded
ursuit of appeasement. It was merely one of a number of options that policy-makers might
p
choose. They understood that the world was too complex to allow them to pursue a one-
size fits all policy that could constitute their grand strategy. Instead, they adopted a mix and
match approach in which they employed the instruments they deemed most appropriate.
The first of these was diplomatic engagement, that is furthering their own interests through
negotiations. This was usually their policy of first-resort, not least because it was likely to be
the cheapest and most risk-free. But it was not necessarily synonymous with appeasement
as it was practised by British governments in the second half of the 1930s. Defining appease-
ment as ‘the policy of settling international (or, for that matter, domestic) quarrels by
admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby
avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly
very dangerous’, is so broad that it robs the word of any real meaning.49 Because it takes no
account of the context within which negotiations took place it could too easily be used to
describe almost any attempt to settle differences between states by negotiations rather than
war. This was something that contemporaries understood. In 1927 Lord Salisbury, the Lord
Privy Seal in the Conservative government elected in 1924, told the Foreign Secretary,
Austen Chamberlain, that at an international conference, ‘in coming to an arrangement
one must be prepared to give something, the skill consisting in giving relatively unimport
ant details in order to maintain vital principles.’50 This was just what Austen Chamberlain
did when he claimed, ‘No one can be more anxious than I to meet the real need of France
and Belgium for security; no one is more conscious than I am of the immense importance
of doing so as a stage in the appeasement of European animosities and in our progress to a
better state of things.’51 But he knew that he was negotiating from a position of relative
strength and that he could, therefore, follow Salisbury’s recipe. He believed that he had
identified and could work with groups inside the policy-making elites of the French and
German governments who shared at least some of his own aims. His diplomacy also had the
backing of sufficient credible hard power to enable him to secure most of his objectives.
But, when policy-makers were confronted by more intransigent adversaries in the 1920s,
they were equally ready to eschew compromise and negotiations and use hard power either
to coerce their opponent by encouraging them to take a particular course of action, or to
deter them, and thereby dissuade them from acting in ways inimical to British interests.52
Appeasement, as practised by Austen’s half-brother Neville in the late 1930s, was different.
It did entail the surrender of ‘vital principles.’ In this instance the context mattered. Neville
opted to appease the fascist dictators because he believed that Britain was too weak to resist
their demands, and because he hoped that if he met them more than half-way the door
might be opened to some more permanent and wider-ranging settlement.
No matter what grand strategy they opted to use, policy-makers knew that they had to
have the support of the British public. Britain was a parliamentary democracy. Political
leaders had to have both the will and the ability to persuade the electorate who had put
them in power in the first place to follow whatever path they had marked out for them.
49 P. M. Kennedy, ‘The tradition of appeasement in British foreign policy 1865–1939’, British Journal of
International Studies, vol. 2 (1976), 195.
50 TNA FO 800/260. Salisbury to Chamberlain, 15 April 1927.
51 BUL A. Chamberlain mss. AC 52/418. Chamberlain to Grahame, 22 January 1925.
52 These typologies are derived from, but are by no means identical to, the work of P. Layton, Grand Strategy
(Kindle edn: 2018, no publisher or place of publication given), 40, 76–87; and Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine
Publication 0–01, 59–62.
That might mean that they had to coax them into making sacrifices to maintain the security
of Britain and its empire. This latter point was doubly important because all the instru-
ments of power described above had potential drawbacks. Both diplomatic engagement
and appeasement depended for their success on there actually being like-minded people in
control of the policies of the states with whom the British were trying to engage. If British
policy-makers were mistaken about their existence, they were pursuing a policy likely to
fail. Deterrence, and even more coercion, required the creation of credible armed forces.
But creating them might spark an international arms race, and put Britain on the high road
to financial ruin. And if coercion or deterrence spilled over into war fighting, and if that
turned out badly, the outcome might be disastrous.
The aims of British policy-makers remained consistent throughout the period examined
in this book: the pursuit of peace coupled with security. The next chapter will examine in
more detail who made British grand strategy, how they viewed their world, and what were
the main instruments of power at their disposal: the skills of their diplomatists, the hard
power that could be generated by their armed forces, and the wealth that could be created
by their economy. It will also examine how they tried to gather and process knowledge
about the aims and capabilities of both their potential friends and their potential oppon
ents, and how their choices were constrained by what they believed the British public
would permit them to do. These were the elements that came together to constitute British
grand strategy. They resembled a matrix in that each element was inextricably linked to
every other element, and any change in one element was liable to have repercussions that
would be felt across the whole. Constructing a successful grand strategy was, therefore,
always going to be challenging. To analyse how British policy-makers tried to meet these
challenges this book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the 1920s. Successive
chapters will examine policy-makers’ efforts between 1919 and 1926 to construct a new
world order, and the ways in which they managed that order in the second half of the 1920s.
The second part will explore how that world order crumbled in the early 1930s, and the
largely unsuccessful efforts of policy-makers in the first half of the 1930s to construct a new
grand strategy to manage the growing number of threats they faced to the security of
Britain and its empire. Finally, the third part will suggest that the tipping point, when
British governments abandoned Salisbury’s dictum that they should be willing to surrender
on unimportant points of detail but cling to ‘vital principles’, happened in 1937–9. This
part will explore the reasons why the Chamberlain government opted to appease rather
than contain, deter, or coerce those who sought to challenge British interests, and the
consequences of doing so as they had become manifest by the summer of 1940.
PART I
M A KING PE AC E A ND M A NAG I NG
PE AC E , 1919 – 3 0
2
Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy
Ministers and Cabinets
The men who were responsible for shaping British grand strategy were a small and, for the
most part, cohesive elite of politicians, civil servants, and senior service personnel.1 Robert
Sanders, who served in the Conservative Cabinet in 1922–3, remarked that ‘Of the House of
Commons members, most of us are intimate friends. It is curious that Peel, Baldwin and I
were all in the Upper Six at Harrow together.’2 At the very centre of the policy-making
process was the Cabinet and its key defence committee, the Committee of Imperial
Defence. Most of the men who attended these meetings did so by virtue of their ministerial
office. They were the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign, India,
and Colonial Secretaries, and the three service ministers. (After 1925 the Colonial Secretary
also held the new post of Dominions Secretary.) In addition, a handful of ministers
attended these meetings by virtue of their personal abilities and at the invitation of the
Prime Minister. They were Lord Haldane, the Lord Chancellor in the first Labour govern-
ment, who was invested with the chairmanship of the CID by the Labour party’s first Prime
Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Baldwin invited Lord Robert Cecil, who served as the
Foreign Office with special responsibility for League of Nations affairs and disarmament
policy, and Lord Salisbury, to attend the CID. In the 1920s just thirty-seven men filled these
key positions. Not only were they few in numbers, but most shared a common social and
educational background. Apart from a sprinkling of genuine aristocrats like Salisbury,
most were the scions of the gentry and the professional middle classes. They had been edu-
cated at one of the elite public schools before attending one of the ancient universities.3 The
senior civil servants and officers of the armed forces who advised these ministers came
from similar backgrounds, although most of the latter had been educated at one of the ser-
vice academies rather than at a university. The Labour Cabinets of 1923 and 1929–31 were
something of an exception to these generalizations. Both contained a majority of ministers
whose fathers had been manual workers. But even Labour Cabinets had a sprinkling of
aristocratic and middle class public-school, and university educated ministers.4 Sanders
had been at Harrow with his Labour party successor at the Board of Agriculture, and he
1 This follows D. C. Watt’s seminal analysis of the taxonomy of the British policy-making elite, ‘America and
the British foreign policy-making elite, from Joseph Chamberlain to Anthony Eden, 1895–1956’, Review of
Politics, vol. 25 (1963), 3–33. However, as I show, policy-makers were more responsive to public opinion than
Watt suggested.
2 J. Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics. The Political Diaries of Robert Sanders, Lord Bayford 1910–1935
(London: The Historians’ Press, 1984), 192.
3 Seven attended Harrow, six went to Eton, two each went to Rugby, Winchester, and Cheltenham College,
and one to Wellington College. On leaving school a dozen attended the University of Oxford, five went to
Cambridge (all of whom attended Trinity College), two to Edinburgh, and one to UCL. Lord Milner attended
both King’s College London and Balliol College Oxford, E. S. Montagu went to both UCL and Trinity College
Cambridge, and Lord Haldane attended the universities of Edinburgh and Göttingen. Three others were trained
as army officers, either at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, or the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
4 D. Butler and G. Butler, British Political Facts 1900–85 (London: Macmillan, 1986), 83.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press.
© David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0002
had studied for the Bar alongside Labour’s new First Lord of the Admiralty.5 But both
Labour and Conservative ministers did share a common generational background. The
majority (twenty-five out of thirty-seven) were born in the 1860s and 1870s. Given their
commonality of experience and background it was hardly surprising that most members of
the policy-making elite had a broadly similar view of Britain’s place in the world. Their
schooling had instilled in them the self-assurance that they had a right to rule, coupled
with a sense of patriotic duty and a commitment to public service. They had thus reached
adulthood and formed their view of the world and Britain’s place in it, in the 1880s and
1890s. They had learnt that Britain was still unquestionably one of the great powers, that it
ought to remain so, but that its status was under growing pressure from a number of com-
petitors. The most obvious challenges came from Germany, the Tsarist Empire, and the
USA, and from the tendency of the European great powers to form competing alliance
blocs. Before 1900 British policy-makers felt sufficiently confident to remain aloof, and
instead, as Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister between 1895 and 1902, recommended, ‘float
lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.’6
After the First World War this seemed like a golden age, and one that many policy-makers
hankered to recreate.
Four men sat atop the British political system between 1919 and 1931. One of them,
Andrew Bonar Law, died in 1922 within seven months of entering 10 Downing Street.
Personally able, he entered office crushed by the responsibility and already in poor health.7
He left little mark, beyond being determined not to follow his predecessor’s example in
trying to control foreign policy himself.8 The other three, David Lloyd George (1916–22),
Stanley Baldwin (1923–4, 1924–9, 1935–7), and James Ramsay MacDonald (1924, 1929–31),
each had their own way of doing government business. Lloyd George had been brought up
in humble circumstances in Northwest Wales. Quick witted and able to master a compli-
cated brief rapidly, after qualifying as a solicitor he soon made his mark as a politician, first
on a local scale in Wales and then at Westminster. He was a superb orator before a large
audience, but he was equally effective when dealing with small groups. He had immense
political courage, a capacity for hard work and the ability to inspire those around him. But
by the end of the war he was too apt to try to dominate both people and events. The Cabinet
secretary, Maurice Hankey, a sympathetic observer who worked closely with him, believed
that ‘The mistake he is making is to try and absorb too much into his own hands. He seems
to have a sort of lust for power, ignores his colleagues, or tolerates them in an almost dis-
dainful way, and it seems more and more to assume the attitude of a dictator.’9 He routinely
by-passed his Foreign Secretaries, preferring to deal with foreign statesmen in person at
international conferences.10 His quasi-presidential style of government, allied to a wide-
spread belief that he was not always overly scrupulous in his dealings, seemed to go against
the grain of British party politics, and was one reason for his growing unpopularity in the
final years of his premiership.
Baldwin, who had been Bonar Law’s closest adviser during his brief premiership before
succeeding him, was a superb platform orator, but he also proved himself to be a master of
the new technique of addressing the electorate through the more intimate medium of
5 Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics, 214.

6 Quoted in K. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar. British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), 49.
7 CAC Hankey mss. 1/7. Diary, 23 November 1922.
8 Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics, 193. 9 CAC Hankey mss. 1/5. Diary, 25 December 1918.
10 TNA CAB 63/39. Hankey, Lord Curzon, 19 May 1927.
Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 17
radio. This helped him to dominate Conservative politics for most of the inter-war period.
A successful businessman before he entered the Commons, Baldwin possessed the self-
confidence and patience that enabled him to wait for an opportune moment before acting,
and if the moment did not seem opportune, not to act at all. Committed to a one-nation
conservatism, he saw his role in politics as that of a mediator intent on creating harmony
between capital and labour. The British political landscape underwent a seismic shift in the
decade after the war. The 1918 and 1928 Reform Acts transformed the electorate, more than
trebling the number of people who could vote, and also ensuring that after 1928 a majority
of voters were, for the first time, women.11 Henceforth, the critical question in British pol
itics was no longer who should vote and on what terms, but how to integrate this new and
politically uneducated electorate into the party system.12 The readiness of millions of men
to volunteer to join the army in the first two years of the war, and the acceptance by further
millions of the imposition of conscription reassured Conservative politicians that the
working classes were overwhelmingly loyal to the British state.13 Even so, faced by the onset
of mass unemployment in the early 1920s, Baldwin was privately fearful that it would be all
too easy for a demagogue, and in his mind Lloyd George was just such, to shepherd the
new electorate down dangerous paths leading to the destruction of British civilization.
However, under Baldwin’s leadership the Conservative party proved to be a stout bulwark
against threats to democracy. In the twenty years after the 1918 Reform Act the party won
more seats than any other party in every general election, with the sole exception of 1929,
and even then they gained more votes than the Labour party. However, that did not mean
that Baldwin’s political judgement was always right. In December 1923, convinced that pro-
tectionism could solve Britain’s unemployment problem, with hardly a word of warning to
his Cabinet colleagues and without consulting civil service officials who could have warned
him of the impracticability of his proposals, he went to the country on a tariff reform plat-
form.14 He was decisively defeated. He now had no option but to opt for more conventional
remedies, focusing on efforts to improve Britain’s foreign trade position by seeking a settle-
ment of its war debts and reparations, by returning to the gold standard, and by restoring
peace and stability to Western Europe, which was still Britain’s most important trading
partner. But he knew that success was problematic, writing in 1927 that ‘Democracy has
arrived at a gallop in England, and I feel all the time that it is a race for life: can we educate
them before the crash comes?’15 His efforts at education focused on inculcating onto the
new electorate that there were certain innate British qualities, particularly common sense,
moderation, toleration, class harmony, and a love of liberty, order, and peace.16 In March
1928 he summed up his political mission in the simple phrase, ‘We have got to make
democracy safe for the world.’17 To that end the Conservative party projected itself as the
11 J. V. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter- War Britain (Houndmill,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 162–3; S. Ball, ‘The Reform Act of 1918—the advent of democracy’,
Parliamentary History, vol. 37 (2018), 1–22.
12 H. McCarthy, ‘Parties, voluntary associations, and democratic politics in interwar Britain’, HJ, vol. 50
(2007), 891–2.
13 S. Ball, ‘The Conservative party and the impact of the 1918 Reform Act’, Parliamentary History, vol. 37
(2018), 23–46.
14 CAC Hankey mss. 1/7. Diary, 9 December 1923.
15 P. Williamson and E. Baldwin (eds), Baldwin Papers. A Conservative Statesman, 1908–1947 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 196.
16 P. Williamson, ‘“Safety first”: Baldwin, the Conservative party, and the 1929 general election’, HJ, vol. 25
(1982), 385–409. For an example of his effort to do this see the text of a BBC broadcast he made on ‘National
Character’. LHCMA Sir A. Bryant mss. CG2. National Character, 25 September 1933.
17 The Times, 11 March 1928.
quintessence of patriotic Britishness, and its Labour opponents as in thrall to dangerous

foreign ideologies. But Baldwin’s focus on domestic issues, combined with his willingness
to wait on events, came at a price. He acquired a not underserved reputation for being
reluctant to take bold initiatives, a reputation that eventually led critics to condemn him as
being downright lazy.18 Although he usually had a sure touch in domestic politics, the same
could not be said for his grasp of international affairs. Austen Chamberlain, who served
under him as Foreign Secretary between 1924 and 1929, wrote of his ‘amazing ignorance of
Indian and foreign affairs’.19 Like Bonar Law, Baldwin wanted to distance himself from
Lloyd George’s habit of interfering too much in foreign affairs. ‘I have never professed to be
an expert in foreign affairs. I prefer to be advised by those who really know’, he once told a
colleague.20
MacDonald’s background could hardly have been more different from Baldwin’s.
Whereas the latter had been born into a prosperous business family and educated at
Harrow and Cambridge, MacDonald, born in Lossiemouth on the northeast coast of
Scotland, was the illegitimate son of a farm servant, and was educated at the local parish
school. The war transformed the Labour party from a left-wing auxiliary of the pre-war
Liberal government into a party that could contend for power in its own right.21 As the
leader of the Labour party, Prime Minister of two minority Labour governments in 1924
and between 1929–31, and then leader of the National Government between 1931–5,
MacDonald was no demagogue intent on preaching revolution. On the contrary, he saw his
political mission as being to make Labour ‘respectable’ in the eyes of the electorate, and he
just about succeeded.22 Methodism was more important than Marxism in determining
Labour’s outlook. It exhibited a confused commitment to socialism coupled with a con-
servative reverence for key institutions such as parliament and the monarchy. To that extent
the party worked alongside Baldwin to make Britain’s parliamentary institutions secure
and ensure that Britain would not follow the same path as so many continental European
countries and fall prey to demagogues of the left or the right. Unlike Baldwin MacDonald
had a real interest in defence and foreign policy. He possessed an extensive library of mili-
tary literature, and in 1917 had authored a short book on national defence policy.23 He had
an undeserved reputation for being a pacifist, and he showed himself to be a good deal less
of a radical in foreign policy matters than some of his followers. He defended the Foreign
Office against those of his supporters who wished to ‘politicize’ the administration of for-
eign policy, and in the eyes of at least one senior civil servant, he succeeded. ‘As you can
imagine’, wrote Walford Selby, his private secretary, in May 1924, ‘I am pretty busy here with
my new job, but from the practical point of view the new Government is a very great
improvement on the old. They are far more business-like in their methods and up to the
present have shown no signs whatsoever of “wrecking the State.”’24 In 1924 he served as his
18 NAA A1420 2. Casey to Bruce, 8 October 1925.

19 R. Self (ed.), The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters. The Correspondence of Sir Austen Chamberlain with his
Sisters Hilda and Ida, 1916–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society,
1995), 497.
20 Williamson and Baldwin (eds), Baldwin Papers, 180, 370.
21 See C. Wrigley, ‘The Labour party and the impact of the 1918 Reform Act’, Parliamentary History, vol. 37
(2018), 64–80 for a useful recent summary of the literature of the impact of the First World War on the
Labour party.
22 Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics, 297–305.
23 Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, passim; CAC Hankey mss. 1/7. Diary, 11 October 1924. The book was
National Defence. A Study in Militarism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917).
24 TNA FO 800/218. Selby, to Roberts, 26 May 1924.
own Foreign Secretary, and although in 1929 he allotted that role to his political rival,
Author Henderson, he did not let go completely of his power of patronage. In January 1930,
and without consulting Henderson, he appointed a noted exponent of the ‘old-diplomacy’,
Sir Robert Vansittart, as the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under Secretary.25
The most important task of Prime Ministers was to preside over the Cabinet. Lloyd
George had run the war through a small War Cabinet of half a dozen ministers. After 1919,
when the full Cabinet was restored, its membership numbered about twenty, and it held an
average of seventy meetings annually between 1920 and 1931.26 Issues which were likely to
have significant political repercussions had to be brought before the Cabinet where minis-
ters were free to air different views in its secret conclave. But once they had reached a deci-
sion, and whatever their private views, they were bound by a code of collective responsibility
and were expected to uphold its decisions in public.27 They did not always do so, for it
could hardly be expected that conclaves of ambitious and powerful men would always pro-
ceed harmoniously, and some ministers were not above strengthening their position by
judicious and secret leaks of information to the press.28 In 1925, ‘Popular rumour credits a
good many “leaks” to Birkenhead and Winston Churchill, and to a lesser extent to
Worthington-Evans. They are great diners-out, do themselves very well, are good and
entertaining talkers, and have many friends who are on the lookout for ready means of
information, particularly those that originate with highly placed servants of the State.’29
Cabinet ministers could also expect to spend much of their time sitting on inter-
departmental committees, usually assisted by more junior ministers and senior civil ser
vants and service personnel, where they ‘can talk as freely as they like of their departmental
difficulties and defects’.30 They were also expected to explain and defend their department’s
policies in parliament.31 The post-war Cabinet system looked much like the pre-war sys-
tem, but with one major exception. Since December 1916, the War Cabinet had been served
by its own secretariat, headed by Sir Maurice Hankey, and for the first time a British
Cabinet kept formal minutes of their proceedings and conclusions. The secretariat con-
sisted of a mixture of middle-ranking civil servants, who usually serviced those committees
responsible for examining domestic policy issues, and officers from the three armed ser-
vices and the Indian army, who were responsible for servicing committees concerned with
foreign and defence policy, and in particular the CID. Each of them was seconded to the
Cabinet Office for between three and five years, after which they returned to their own
service.32 Hankey also continued to act as the Secretary of the CID, a job he had held since
1912, and as he held it until his retirement in 1938 no one in Whitehall knew more about
defence matters than he did. He was the ultimate Whitehall operator, combining a
25 M. L. Roi and B. J. C. McKercher, ‘“Ideal” and “punch-bag”: conflicting views of the balance of power and
their influence on interwar British foreign policy’, D&S, vol. 12 (2001), 62–3.
26 TNA CAB 181/3. Cabinet Precedent Book. Annexes.
27 TNA CAB 181/2. Precedent Book. The Cabinet, 2.
28 See, for example, TNA CAB 23/29/16(22). Cabinet Conclusions, 8 March 1922.
29 NAA A1420 1. Casey to Bruce, 14 May 1925. But sometimes the leakers were more lowly state servants. They
acted not to gain political leverage over their rivals, but to swell their bank-balances. See, for example, TNA CAB
23/52/11 (26). Cabinet Conclusions, 15 and 24 March 1926. In this instance the culprit was a temporary clerk in
the Treasury.
30 TNA CAB 63/27. Hankey to Lloyd George, n.d., but c. May 1920. 31 Ibid.
32 TNA CAB 23/18/1(19). Cabinet Conclusions, 4 November 1919; TNA CAB 63/30. Hankey to Ramsay, n.d.,
but c. December 1920; TNA CAB 63/32. Hankey to Lloyd George, 9 July 1922; K. Middlemas (ed.), Thomas Jones.
Whitehall Diary, Vol. 1: 1916–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 123–4; TNA CAB 24/168/CP480(24).
Hankey, Cabinet Procedures, 10 May 1924; J. F. Naylor, A Man and an Institution. Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet
Secretariat and the Custody of Cabinet Secrecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8–84.
phenomenal memory, intelligence, tact, and energy in equal parts.33 He evoked the
admiration, although not always the affection, of his subordinates. He was supremely good
at smoothing over differences between ministers, being able to ‘please two people with dif-
ferent views, in different offices in Whitehall, sticking down with their toes in the ground
whilst he trots from one to the other.’34 He was the confidential adviser to every inter-war
Premier. ‘At Committees it is the habit for the Chairman to canvass Hankey’s view in a
whisper and then to re- ennunciate it as a Chairman’s fiat’, one of his subordinates
remarked.35 Even if outwardly politically neutral, he had an agenda of his own, although it
was one that was shared widely amongst his fellow policy-makers in Whitehall: a deter
mination to maintain Britain’s status as a great power, a pronounced suspicion of the
League of Nations or any precise obligations to continental states as being likely to lead
Britain into commitments and entanglements that did not touch upon her own vital inter-
ests, and a determination to maintain British naval power at the highest possible pitch in
order to safeguard the security of the British Empire. The ‘British Empire is worth a thou-
sand Leagues of Nations’, he insisted, for it was, ‘the sheet anchor of the world.’36
The Departments
Beneath the Cabinet several government departments played key roles in advising minis-
ters about policy choices and implementing their decisions. The most important were the
Foreign Office, the Treasury, and the three service departments. The India and Colonial
Offices were also called upon from time to time to offer advice and implement policies
when their own interests were involved. The India Office oversaw relations with India and
its immediate neighbours, while the Colonial Office did the same for the rest of the empire,
and following the First World War, the mandated territories in the Middle East and Africa
handed to Britain at the Peace Conference. However, that did not preclude inter-
departmental wrangling with the Foreign Office whenever issues arose that involved rela-
tions between one or more of the mandated territories and Turkey or any of the independent
Arab rulers of the Arabian Peninsula.37 Tension between the two departments rumbled on
and were not entirely eliminated by the Labour Cabinet’s decision in 1930 to establish a new
CID sub-committee consisting of representatives of all of those government departments
concerned with Middle East questions.38
Elsewhere, the Foreign Office reigned almost supreme. British diplomatists had no
doubts about the importance of their calling. Austen Chamberlain understood that ‘The
more we cut our army and Navy the greater is the responsibility placed on our diplomacy,
and my own experience teaches me, and I think must show to others, how very greatly the
success of diplomacy depends upon personal influence exercised not only by the Secretary
33 Lord Ismay, The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay (London: Hyndman, 1960), 44; Lieutenant-General
Sir Gordon Macready, In the Wake of the Great (London: William Cloughs, 1965), 72.
34 LHCMA Pownall diary, 24 June 1935.
35 N. J. Crowson (ed.), Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics. The Journals of Colin Brooks, 1932–1940
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1998), 52.
36 CAC Hankey mss. 1/5. Diary, 17 April 1919.
37 TNA CAB 24/119/CP2545. Churchill, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Middle East,
7 February 1921; TNA CAB 23/24/7(21). Cabinet Conclusions, 14 February 1921.
38 TNA CAB 2/5. CID 249 meeting, 14 July 1930; TNA 24/214/CP252(30). Hankey, The general control of
British relations with territories in the Middle East, 17 July 1930; TNA CAB23/64/44(30). Cabinet Conclusions,
23 July 1930.
of State himself and his responsible officials in London, but by the Ambassadors and
Ministers and members of their staffs.’39 Their tasks were four-fold: to collect information
about the foreign policies of other countries, to analyse it in the light of their expert know
ledge, to advise ministers about the actions they should take, and finally to execute the
policies determined by ministers. Even before 1914 the Foreign Office had been subjected to
a good deal of public criticism for its social exclusivity, and such criticisms were redoubled
after 1914 when it was held responsible for having failed to avert the war. Consequently, it
lost a good deal of the influence it had once enjoyed over foreign policy-making. This pro-
cess was accelerated when Lloyd George, one its most vociferous critics, became Prime
Minister, and made several political appointees to key embassies. But with his departure,
the professional diplomats recaptured most of the ground they had lost and despite some
minor steps towards democratizing recruitment, the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service
(the two having been amalgamated shortly after the war), maintained much of their social
exclusivity. The typical British diplomatist remained, as he had been before 1914, the scion
of a ‘good’ family. He was educated at an ancient public school and Oxbridge, before spend-
ing a year abroad perfecting his knowledge of French and German. The result was a depart-
ment whose personnel shared both a common ethos and a sense that they constituted an
elite that set them apart from other government servants.40 Most ambassadors between the
wars were career diplomats of considerable experience. As they could expect to remain in
post for between five and six years, they could build-up some real expertise about the pol
icies and culture of the country to which they were accredited. However, their more junior
colleagues tended to be rotated through posts much more rapidly. Diplomatists posted to
one of the Foreign Office’s geographical departments followed a similar career trajectory,
where again the heads of departments tended to be in post for longer than their more jun-
ior colleagues. This rapid shuttling between posts reflected the fact that the dominant ethos
within the Foreign and Diplomatic Service was that Britain’s interests were world-wide and
so diplomatists needed a broad understanding of the complex interconnections in the
world of diplomacy if they were to manage that intricate web of relationships.41
With a few exceptions, such as Anthony Eden, who served as Foreign Secretary between
1935 and 1938, most Foreign Secretaries and senior officials had served their professional
apprenticeships during the period of great power rivalry in the decades before 1914. They
had practised balance of power diplomacy with the goal of preventing any single power or
group of powers from establishing its hegemony, not just over the European continent, but
in those other parts of the globe, notably the Mediterranean and Middle East, and South
and East Asia, where vital British interests were at stake. Nothing that happened since then
caused them fundamentally to question the continued utility of the ‘old diplomacy’ of the
pre-war era, although few of them dared to admit as much in public, and until Neville
Chamberlain’s assumption of the premiership in May 1937, this remained their goal.42 They
were also slow to accept that ideologies might drive foreign policy, and with the exception
of the USSR they paid little attention to that possibility. In their estimation the foreign
39 TNA FO 800/259. Chamberlain to Churchill, 2 February 1926.

40 Z. Steiner and M. L. Dockrill, ‘The Foreign Office reforms, 1919–21’, HJ, vol. 17 (1974), 131–56; Z. Steiner,
‘The old Foreign Office: from a secretarial office to a modem Department of State’, Opinion publique et politique
extérieure en Europe, Vol. 1: 1870–1915. Actes du Colloque de Rome (13–16 février 1980) (Rome: École Française de
Rome, 1981), 177–95.
41 M. Hughes, ‘The peripatetic career structure of the British diplomatic establishment, 1919–39’, D&S, vol. 14
(2003), 29–48.
42 Roi and McKercher, ‘“Ideal” and “punch-bag”’, 47–50; B. J. C. McKercher, ‘The Foreign Office, 1930–9: strat-
egy, permanent interests and national security’, CBH, vol. 18 (2004), 87–109.
olicies of most states were driven by a combination of the pursuit of national interests, the
p
personalities of their leaders, and the interplay of different factions within their policy-
making elites.43 The products themselves of a liberal political culture that prized comprom
ise, they found it difficult to accept that policy-makers in other countries might prize
different goals. This did not prove to be a grievous self-inflicted handicap in the 1920s. It
was to become one in the 1930s.
Diplomatists accepted that the service departments had a right to be consulted over
those matters of foreign policy which might affect their interests. What they would not tol-
erate were efforts by them to usurp their function of being the sole adviser to the Cabinet
on foreign policy.44 But they also understood that diplomacy alone could neither create nor
execute grand strategy. Diplomacy was about negotiating agreements that were broadly
acceptable to all parties concerned. If it was to be successful, it had to be supported by cred-
ible armed forces. Consequently, the three service departments played a major role in con-
structing British grand strategy. Their representatives in the Cabinet, the First Lord of the
Admiralty, the Secretary of State for War, and the Secretary of State for Air, each sat atop a
corporate body in his own ministry, the Board of Admiralty, the Army Council, and the
Air Council. The Councils and Board were composed of the ministry’s senior civil servants
and service personnel. The most important of the latter were the professional heads of the
three services, the First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff, the Chief of the Imperial General
Staff, and the Chief of the Air Staff.45 Beneath each of them there were subordinate staff
officers responsible not only for the training, administration, and the provision of supplies
for their own services, but also for collecting intelligence about the armed forces of foreign
powers, for preparing in peacetime plans for offensive and defensive operations, and for
estimating the forces required to carry them out.46
Relations between the three services were not always harmonious. Their main bone of
contention was the continued existence of an independent air force. In April 1918 the gov-
ernment established the world’s first independent air service when it amalgamated the
army’s Royal Flying Corps and the navy’s Royal Naval Air Service into the Royal Air Force.
In the early 1920s both older services took advantage of the shrinking defence budget to
argue that an independent air force was a luxury. Not only would it be more economical if
the control of air power reverted to the older ministries, but it was entirely unreasonable to
deprive generals and admirals of the control of the air support they required to ensure that
their own operations was successful. Bonar Law did toy with their arguments during his
brief premiership, but the Air Ministry emphatically rejected them.47 Churchill, as a former
Secretary of State for Air, thought that if the older services had their way they would prod
43 D. Lammers, ‘Fascism, Communism, and the Foreign Office, 1937–39’, JCH, vol. 6 (1971), 66–7.
44 TNA FO 800/149. Curzon to Worthington Evans, 28 April 1921.
45 S. Roskill, Naval Policy between the Wars, Vol. 1: The Period of the Anglo-American Antagonism 1919–1929
(London: Collins, 1968), 25–7; B. Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980), 42–3; M. Smith, British Air Strategy between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 34–43.
46 General Staff, War Office, Field Service Regulations, Vol. 2: Operations, 1920 (Provisional) (London, HMSO,
1920); Air Ministry, Operations Manual, Royal Air Force (Provisional) (CD22) (London: Air Ministry, 1922); TNA
ADM 186/66. CB 973. Naval Staff, Naval War Manual 1925 (London: Training and Staff Duties Division,
October 1925).
47 Viscount Templewood, Empire of the Air. The Advent of the Air Age (London: Collins, 1957), 36; TNA CAB
5/4/150C. Worthington-Evans, The Air Force in relation to the Army and Navy, 28 September 1921; TNA CAB
5/4/159C. Worthington-Evans, Proposal to transfer the military functions of the Air Ministry to the War Office, 4
February 1922; TNA CAB 5/4/160C. CNS, Relations between the Navy and the Air Force, 6 February 1922; TNA
CAB 5/4/161C. Guest, Reply to the War Office proposals to absorb the military functions of the Air Ministry, 11
February 1922; LHCMA Kirke mss. 1/1/1. Braine to Kirke, 10 February 1921; LHCMA Kirke mss. 1/1/3. Kirke to
DCIGS, 4 March 1921.
uce a divided and disjointed organization. Instead he suggested that the RAF should form
its own army and navy wings, manned partly by its own officers and partly by officers
seconded from the other services.48 This found favour with the Air Ministry, but not with
the Admiralty.49 Meanwhile the parliamentary Air Committee, which could boast a mem-
bership of over two hundred MPs, lobbied equally hard for the continued existence of an
independent air force.50 Bonar Law prevaricated for several months before remitting the
question, together with other matters concerning the general organization of defence, to a
CID sub-committee chaired by Lord Salisbury.51 His choice of chairman was shrewd. There
were few other Tory grandees who carried so much weight within the Conservative party
as Salisbury. Beginning work in March 1923 Salisbury, ‘a very prominent and statesman-
like member of the Cabinet in whose veins the Cecil blood of age-old governmental experi-
ence ran strongly—a most admirable, shrewd and painstaking Chairman’, and his colleagues
listened to the arguments of all three ministries, including a plea from the War Office that
the Air Ministry should be abolished, and then came down definitely in favour of the con-
tinued independence of the RAF.52 Without it they believed that the development of British
air power would be hamstrung.53 The Cabinet agreed, and the existence of the RAF as an
independent service was never again cast into serious question.54 Henceforth the Air
Ministry would continue to raise, train, and maintain the Fleet Air Arm, as well as squad-
rons earmarked and equipped to cooperate with the army, although some of their flying
personnel were to be seconded from the older services for a period of years before return-
ing to their parent service. However, that did not prevent the other services from sniping at
the Air Ministry. The relationship that Salisbury had established between the three services
was, thus, an uneasy one, and Sir George Milne, the CIGS, continued to lobby for the re-
absorption of the RAF into the army, just as the Admiralty continued to lobby for a return
of the Fleet Air Arm to its control.55 The army’s lobbying seems to have ceased following
Milne’s retirement, but the Admiralty maintained its pressure, and finally succeeded in July
1937, when an exasperated Neville Chamberlain acceded to their wishes.56
The final department which had a major voice in the formulation of British grand strat-
egy was the Treasury. The Treasury has often been relegated to the position of whipping-
boy for much that went wrong with British grand strategy, but such charges are misplaced.
Sir Warren Fisher, the PUS of the Treasury between 1919 and 1939, enjoyed regular access to
48 TNA CAB 4/8/360B. Churchill, The Air Force in relation to the Army and Navy, 22 July 1922; The Times, 22
July 1922.
49 TNA CAB 4/8/362B. Secretary of State for Air, the Navy and the Air Force, 27 July 1922.
50 The Times, 10 July 1922.
51 J. Barnes and D. Nicholson (eds), The Leo Amery Diaries, Vol. 1: 1896–1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1980),
320, 321; TNA CAB 23/45/14(23). Cabinet Conclusions, 7 March 1923.
52 Macready, In the Wake of the Great, 78; TNA CAB 24/161/CP354(23). Amery, First Lord of the Admiralty,
The control of naval air work, 26 March 1923; TNA CAB 24/160/CP296(23). Derby, The relative status of the
army and the Royal Air Force, 28 June 1923 and enc.
53 TNA CAB 24/161/CP354(23). Amery, The control of naval air work, 26 March 1923; TNA CAB 24/160/
CP296(23). Derby, The relative status of the army and the Royal Air Force, 28 June 1923 and enc.; Barnes and
Nicholson (eds), Leo Amery Diaries, vol. 1, 330; TNA CAB 24/160/CP299(23). Salisbury, The relations of the
army and the Royal Air Force, 30 June 1923.
54 TNA CAB 23/46/35(23) Cabinet Conclusions, 9 July 1923.
55 LHCMA Milne mss. Box 3. Milne to Secretary of State, 10 February 1933.
56 R. Self (ed.), The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, Vol. 4: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005), 237, 239; TNA CAB 53/7/COS202. COS 202 meeting, 9 April 1937; TNA CAB 53/31/COS571.
Naval Staff, Review of organisation of and responsibilities for naval air work, 16 April 1937; TNA CAB 53/31/
COS572. Air Staff, The organisation and control of the Defence Services with particular reference to the role of
the Air Arm, 20 April 1937; TNA CAB 53/7/COS205. COS 205 meeting, 6 May 1937; TNA CAB 24/270/CP
199(37). Inskip to Chamberlain, 21 July 1937; TNA CAB 23/89/33(37). Cabinet Conclusions, 29 July 1937.
the Prime Minister and did use it to further his ambition to place the Treasury at the heart
of government policy-making.57 This was significant because Fisher and other senior
Treasury officials differed fundamentally from their counterparts in the service depart-
ments about how the armed force should be configured. The Treasury had little truck with
the idea that the British had to maintain large armed forces in a state of instant readiness
merely to prevent friendly but distant powers challenging British interests. Nor did they
accept the service departments’ view that the British should strain themselves to the utter-
most to defend every last part of their empire, for if any of it was lost the prestige upon
which the whole edifice appeared to depend would collapse. Treasury officials would only
willingly agree to significant increases in defence spending if they were convinced that
there was a clear and pressing threat to interests which were vital. At other times they
regarded defence spending as resembling an insurance policy that a wise householder
might take out. In 1925 Fisher told Baldwin that he and his service counterparts were agreed:
that an insurance premium has to be paid against the risk of forcible interference with the
British Empire by Foreign Powers. The size of that premium is, or should be, conditioned
by two principal factors viz: the degree, character and proximity of the risk, and its rela-
tion with the other risks to which a complex civilisation like ours is subject. Your Naval
officials, quite naturally, have regard to the one risk only and as they see it from their
point of view; your Civilian officials have to take into account every aspect of national
existence, and this involves comparative considerations.58
Most Cabinet ministers, be they Conservative or Labour, shared the Treasury’s view that
defence spending did indeed constitute a national insurance policy, and were reluctant to
spend more on it than was necessary. Thus, shortly after he became Chancellor of the
Exchequer in 1925, Winston Churchill warned his colleagues that ‘expenditure on arma-
ments in excess of what is absolutely necessary would be highly injurious.’59 Treasury offi-
cials and their ministers were also wedded to the tenets of financial orthodoxy. As Baldwin,
then Chancellor of the Exchequer, explained to his colleagues in November 1922: ‘Money
taken for Government purposes is money taken away from trade and borrowing will thus
tend to depress trade and increase unemployment.’60 Depressing trade and increasing
unemployment would harm their short-term electoral prospects, something so obvious
that he did not feel the need to state it. But it would also have longer-term implications for
British grand strategy, for, ‘at the present time there is no issue so vital to the strength and
well-being of this country as the reduction of expenditure to a point which will enable its
citizens to rebuild those financial reserves which proved the decisive factor in the winning
of the European War.’61 Churchill agreed, reminding his colleagues that the outcome of the
First World War turned on the ability of the belligerents not merely to mobilize their armies
and navies, ‘but on mobilising their entire productive power’. Britain won the war because
its financial reserves gave access to neutral markets where it could purchase the extra sup-
plies of food, raw materials, and munitions it needed to win a long war of attrition.62
57 G. C. Peden, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and British rearmament against Germany’, EHR, vol. 94 (1979), 30.
58 Fisher to Baldwin, 7 January 1925, T 161/243/S25613/Annex 5, quoted in C. M. Bell, The Royal Navy,
Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 14.
59 TNA CAB 4/12/CID 599B. Churchill, War and Financial Power, 26 March 1925.
60 TNA CAB 24/140/CP4314. Baldwin, The necessity for National Economy, 20 November 1922.
61 TNA CAB 24/159/CP150(23). Baldwin, Note by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 16 March 1923.
62 TNA CAB 4/12/CID 599B. Churchill, War and Financial Power, 26 March 1925.
In pursuit of this policy Treasury officials, to the frequent exasperation of the service
departments, maintained close oversight over their expenditure.63 In order to ensure that
the taxpayer got value for money, departmental estimates were subjected to detailed criti-
cism by the Treasury before the Cabinet and parliament was asked to approve them. To
facilitate this in 1920 the Cabinet agreed to the appointment of a Treasury official to the
Cabinet Secretariat where he was responsible for ensuring ‘that memoranda which reach
the Secretariat from Public Departments for circulation to the Cabinet have been under
review in their financial aspects by the Chancellor of the Exchequer prior to circulation.’64
Hardly had one year’s Estimates been agreed, then work began on preparing those for the
following year. Treasury officials thus played a significant role in shaping grand strategies,
and they were fiercely jealous of their prerogative that only their department could advise
ministers on what it was, or was not, prudent to spend. But it was not until 1926 that the
Treasury finally gained a real measure of control over the estimates of all three depart-
ments, and only then because they had the backing of the Foreign Office and, the Cabinet,
and, critically, the Prime Minister.65 As Hankey understood:
the Departments will not take the decision from anyone else than the Prime Minister
himself. Neither the Lord President of the Council, nor the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
nor the First Lord, nor any other Minister, has, or ever will have, sufficient authority. It is
on the Prime Minister that the burden must fall, and if this is accepted it is surely best he
should take this decision with the full knowledge of the situation as a whole, which the
Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence can alone possess.66
The Treasury could advise and lobby, but ultimately only the Prime Minister could decide.
The Committee of Imperial Defence
The armed services evaluated threats based on the capabilities, rather than the intentions,
of potential opponents, and lobbied for resources to enable them to meet them. The
Treasury regarded finance as the fourth arm of defence and were determined to keep the
service estimates as low as possible, consistent with their own evaluation of security, so as
to ensure that Britain had the economic wherewithal to pay for the next war. The India
Office and the Colonial and Dominion Offices each saw problems from their own narrow
departmental viewpoint. The Foreign Office tried to synthesize all these interpretations of
what constituted Britain’s interests, add to them their own estimations of the intentions of
Britain’s potential enemies and allies, and then suggest possible courses of action to their
political masters. This was a system within which inter-departmental disputes were inevit
able. The way in which Britain had stumbled from one grand strategy to another in the
opening months of the First World War showed the dangers that it might face in the future
63 See, for example, LHCMA Pownall diary, 21 November 1938.

64 TNA CAB 24/95/CP332. Chamberlain, Representation of the Treasury on the Secretariat of the Cabinet, 22
December 1919; TNA CAB 23/20/1(20). Cabinet Conclusions, 6 January 1920; TNA FO 800/263. Hankey to
Chamberlain, 11 February 1929; TNA CAB 53/23/COS332. Enc. 2. Lord Monsell to Hankey, 28 February 1934;
G. C. Peden, ‘The Treasury and the defence of empire’, in G. Kennedy (ed.), Imperial Defence. The Old World
Order 1856–1956 (London: Routledge, 2008), 71–2.
Year Rule and British service policies, 1919–1924’, HJ, vol. 30
65 J. Ferris, ‘Treasury control, the Ten-
(1987), 859–83.
66 TNA CAB 63/38. Hankey to Esher, 11 February 1926.
if there was no single body charged with the task of harmonizing these conflicting inter-
ests.67 It was one of the tasks of the CID to fulfil that function. But preparing for war was a
competitive business, for in a war two sides were pitted against each other. Consequently,
grand strategy had to be formulated through a process of continuous adaptation as circum-
stances changed and in the light of the actions of real or potential enemies.68 The second
function of the CID was, therefore, to watch over those changing circumstances and to try
to ensure that British plans and preparations were a match for them. Such was the authority
and experience of its members that no government could afford to dismiss its advice unless
it had very good reasons for doing so.
Before 1914 the CID held an average of six plenary meetings annually. After 1920 that
figure doubled.69 Its membership was drawn not only from Ministers of the Crown, but
also from the senior professionals of the armed forces, the Foreign Office, and the home
civil service. Baldwin habitually invited the political and professional heads of the Foreign
Office, the Treasury, the service ministries and the Colonial and Dominions Office and the
India Office, as well as senior non-departmental ministers such as the Lord President of the
Council and the Lord Privy Seal, to attend its plenary sessions. The committee and its sub-
committees also called upon the services of a plethora of other officials and experts. In the
year ending March 1926, for example, 430 people attended one or more of its meetings,
including nineteen ministers, 142 service officers, 157 civil servants, half a dozen represen
tatives of the Dominions, and forty-eight outside experts.70 Prime Ministers themselves did
not always attend its meetings, preferring instead to appoint a deputy. When the committee
was reconstituted in 1920 Lloyd George appointed the former Conservative Prime Minister,
and founder of the CID, Arthur Balfour, to chair its meetings in his stead. In 1924
MacDonald had problems finding Labour members capable of filling any of the top polit
ical posts at the service ministries, and he gave the job of presiding over the CID to the
former Liberal Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for War, Lord Haldane, although
when he returned to office in 1929 he took over the chairmanship himself.71 In November
1924, Baldwin asked Lord Curzon, the Lord President of the Council, to preside over the
full CID, but Curzon died in March 1925.72 Thenceforth, although Balfour acted as chair-
man, Baldwin ‘himself directed the activities of the CID. He attends meetings which are
more than twice as frequent as pre-War meetings, that is to say, about once a fortnight,
appoints Committees, appoints Chairmen, and himself gives decisions in regard to the
points that arise from day to day.’73
The CID was an advisory and not an executive body, and it possessed no powers of deci-
sion. On matters of great importance its recommendations and conclusions were reported
to the full Cabinet where ministers could accept, modify, or reject them as they thought fit.
On matters of lesser importance its conclusions and recommendations were reported
direct to the government departments concerned, who then might, or might not, take
action on Ministerial responsibility.74 Much of its detailed work was devolved to a series of
67 W. Robertson, Soldiers and Statesman 1914–1918, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1926), 300–1; French, British
Economic and Strategic Planning, 98–169.
68 Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 17.
69 TNA CAB 4/14/CID696B. Hankey, A Ministry of Defence, 4 June 1926. 70 Ibid.
71 TNA CAB 2/4. CID 180 meeting, 4 February 1924; CAC Hankey mss. 1/7: Diary, 11 October 1924.
72 Williamson and Baldwin (eds), Baldwin Papers, 164.
73 TNA CAB 63/38. Hankey to Lord Esher, 11 February 1926.
74 TNA CAB 63/38. Hankey to Ramsay MacDonald, 16 February 1926; TNA CAB 63/40. Hankey,
Memorandum on the CID, 1 August 1928; TNA CAB 24/261/CP88(36). Hankey. Appendix III. CID, 2 April 1936.
standing sub-committees, most of whose members were senior officials.75 By 1928 the most
important of these were the Overseas Defence Committee, chaired by the PUS of the
Colonial Office, which considered questions relating to the defence of the Dominions and
Colonies, while the Home Defence Committee, chaired by Hankey, dealt with issues relat-
ing to the defence of Great Britain.76 These two committees sometimes met together in the
Joint Defence Committee under Hankey’s chairmanship, to consider questions common to
the whole empire. The Manpower subcommittee, chaired by the President of the Board of
Trade, prepared plans for the mobilization and utilization of the nation’s manpower in a
future war, and the Principal Supply Officers Committee dealt with the organization in
wartime of supplies of all kinds, including raw materials and manufactured goods. The
First Commissioner of Works was the chairman of the Oil Board, responsible for preparing
plans to coordinate supplies of oil for the three services and the civil population in war-
time, the Imperial Communications Committee, chaired by the Colonial Secretary, con
sidered questions of policy in regard to the telegraph, wireless, and submarine cables
systems that linked the empire together, and the Coordination Committee, which consisted
of the civil service heads of most government departments, was responsible for preparing
the War Book, which laid down the procedures each government department had to follow
on the outbreak of war. In addition to these sub-committees there were others that dealt
with such issues as the reduction and limitation of armaments, trade questions in wartime,
the insurance of shipping in wartime, air raid precautions, the preparation of war emer-
gency legislation, censorship, and the oversight of the preparation of official histories.77
How well suited the CID was to fulfil its functions of coordinating all aspects of govern-
ment policy that touched upon grand strategy was a matter of periodic debate. The CID
had shut its door in August 1914 and during the war the task of coordinating grand strategy
fell initially to the full Cabinet and its sub-committees, and between 1916 and 1918 to the
War Cabinet and its sub-committees.78 In 1917 Lloyd George established a committee under
Lord Haldane to examine the post-war machinery of government and amongst its recom-
mendations was one to establish a single Ministry of Defence responsible for all aspects of
defence policy. Periodically in the inter-war period voices were raised in favour of Haldane’s
suggestion, usually by politicians convinced that greater coordination would lead to reduc-
tions in the estimates. Churchill made just such a suggestion in early 1919, an idea Lloyd
George quickly rejected as it would place too much power in the hands of a single minis-
ter.79 But the idea was revived in 1921 by the Geddes committee, which had been estab-
lished to recommend reductions in government spending across all Whitehall ministries.80
His recommendation was taken up by backbench supporters of a MOD in the Commons
and experts in the press. They were equally quickly opposed by the Service Departments,
who agreed that adequate coordination could be achieved through the CID. This was
another issue that Bonar Law happily remitted to the Salisbury committee. That enabled
Hankey, who had no wish to see his own influence diminished by a new ministry, to kill it,
75 TNA CAB 63/36. Hankey, CID. The future work of the CID, January 1924, 30 January 1924.
76 TNA CAB 5/6/CID289C. Hankey, Constitution and regulations of the Oversee Defence Committee,
31 January 1927; TNA CAB 3/4/CID152A. Hankey, Home Defence Committee. Constitution and regulations,
26 April 1927.
77 TNA CAB 63/40. Hankey, Memorandum on the CID, 1 August 1928.
78 D. French, ‘“A one-man show?” Civil-military relations during the First World War’, in P. Smith (ed.),
Government and the Armed Forces in Britain 1856–1990 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 75–108.
79 CAC CHAR 2/106/15. Churchill to Lloyd George, 14 July 1919.
80 TNA CAB 24/131/CP3570. Interim report of Committee on the National Expenditure, 14 December 1921.
at least for the time being.81 In truth the Salisbury committee took little persuading to turn
their back on a Ministry of Defence. Instead they recommended that the best way to ensure
the development of a coherent strategic policy, and of keeping defence policy under con-
tinuous review, was to bring the professional heads of the three services together in a new
CID sub-committee, the Chiefs of Staff committee.82 The COS committee, which reported
to the CID, was responsible ‘for the consideration of questions of defence as a whole, and
for the co-ordination of the work of the several arms of His Majesty’s Forces, all such con-
siderations as may relate to the concerns of a single Service being subordinated to the
requirements of that duty of National and Imperial Defence which the three services share
in common.’83 The new organization was to be a ‘Super Chiefs of a War Staff in Commission’,
a term implying that they would fulfil the main functions of a combined General Staff.84
But that was something they singly failed to do. Their most important work, beyond advis-
ing the CID and Cabinet over particular issues relating to international crises, was the
preparation of their annual reviews of imperial defence policy.85 The first of these, com-
pleted in 1926, did give a complete picture of Britain’s likely foreign and imperial obliga-
tions, as defined by the Foreign, India, and Colonial Offices, and the state of its armed
forces.86 But like the CID, the COS remained an advisory committee and coordinating
authority. Final responsibility for plans and policy continued to be the prerogative of the
individual service departments. The COS did not exercise collective control over oper
ations of war and, unlike a combined General Staff, could not guarantee unity in action.87
Salisbury had mooted the appointment of a powerful chairman who could stand in for the
Prime Minister if the latter was too busy to attend COS meetings, but it was dropped. In
practice Prime Ministers rarely attended COS meetings, and the chair was taken by the
longest-serving chief.88
Each Chief of Staff was the professional head of his own service and was bound therefore
to do his utmost to further its own particular interest. Consequently, there were times
when the three COS proved unable to scale the heights of self-abnegation required of them
by their warrant. When acting as the head of their own service, they:
take the view that they are responsible to HMG for the full-out roaring-lion efficiency of
as formidable and intransigent a fighting service as possible, irrespective of the political
position of the world, which they say is no concern of theirs. They are all suspicious of the
League and rather contemptuous of it. Their opinions on such matters as disarmament,
political treaties or even the broad subject of Imperial defence, have to be read with the
81 CAC Hankey mss. 8/22. Hankey to Lloyd George, 13 January 1922; TNA CAB 24/132/CP3613. Committee
on proposed National Expenditure: Admiralty and proposed Ministry of Defence, 14 January 1922; TNA CAB
24/132/CP3681. Interim report of the Committee on National Expenditure: alternative to a Ministry of Defence.
Proposals to transfer the military functions of the Air Ministry to the War Office, 4 February 1922; TNA CAB
24/161/CP346(23). Salisbury, sub-committee of the CID on National and Imperial defence. Coordination of the
defence forces, 27 July 1923.
82 TNA CAB 24/161/CP346(23). Salisbury, sub-committee of the CID on national and Imperial defence.
Coordination of the defence forces, 27 July 1923; TNA CAB 23/46/43(23) Cabinet Conclusions, 31 July 1923.
83 TNA CAB 4/14/CID685B. Hankey, The joint responsibilities of the COS. Proposed Warrant, 29 April 1926;
TNA CAB 23/53/39(26). Cabinet Conclusions, 16 June 1926.
84 TNA CAB 53/1/COS. 7 meeting, 31 January 1924.
85 TNA CAB 53/1/COS23. COS 23 meeting, 5 November 1925; TNA CAB 53/12/COS28. Memorandum by the
Chiefs of Staff Committee, 30 November 1925; TNA CAB 2/4. CID 207 meeting, 11 December 1925.
86 TNA CAB 53/4/COS113. COS 113 meeting, 6 October 1933.
87 H. G. Welch, ‘The origins and development of the Chiefs of Staff Sub-committee of the Committee of
Imperial Defence: 1923–1939’ (Ph.D., University of London, 1973), 7.
88 TNA CAB 53/2/COS58. COS 58 meeting, 21 October 1927.
reserve that comes from the knowledge that they are looking at matters through their
own narrow window, and are discounting the political and, in fact, all considerations
other than their own.89
Relations between the three chiefs were probably at their worst in the late 1920s and early
1930s. This followed the circulation shortly before his retirement in 1929 by Sir Hugh
Trenchard, the CAS, of what Hankey called his ‘swan song’.90 Sir Samuel Hoare, who, as
Secretary of State for Air, worked closely with Trenchard for nearly seven years during the
formative years of the RAF as an independent service, described him in biblical language as
a ‘major prophet’. Hoare saw his own role as ‘to be the prophet’s interpreter to a world that
did not always understand his dark sayings.’ Trenchard may have been a prophet, but he
also had a tactless and overbearing manner, and in his memorandum he did not restrain
himself, arguing stridently that the RAF could and should take over many of the duties
(and therefore absorb much of the budgets) of the other two services.91 ‘This greatly irri-
tated the older Services’, Hankey told MacDonald, ‘and fanned the missionary zeal of the
Air Ministry. Ever since then co-ordination has been going from bad to worse. Even the
Chiefs of Staff Committee is not working satisfactorily and the most important part of the
work at the Committee of Imperial Defence is hampered by the lack of any real spirit of
co-operation between the older Services and the Air Ministry.’92
Steps towards creating an inter-service staff able to understand the problems and poten-
tialities of all three services, and to advise the COS accordingly, were equally slow. In 1919
the professional heads of the services had shown little enthusiasm for establishing, ‘a higher
War College, to which senior officers of all services should go’, dismissing it as, ‘a project for
the future rather than a practical proposal for the present.’ The First Sea Lord could see lit-
tle value in it, insisting that ‘the Staff problems of the Navy and the Army were so entirely
different that, except in the matter of combined operations, he doubted if officers of one
Service would be indefinitely improved by attendance at the Staff College of the other,
although a finishing course in combined operations might be valuable.’93 Churchill dis
agreed. He had been primed by one of Haig’s senior staff officers, Guy Dawnay, who insisted
that there was a serious need for just such a college.94 But it was not until 1923 that a plan to
establish what became the Imperial Defence College emerged. Its students, drawn from
amongst the most promising middle-ranking officers of the armed services, the civil ser-
vice, and the Dominions, would spend a year at the college. Its function was ‘to create a
common doctrine in regard to defence policy and to produce a body of officers trained to
look at the problems of war as a whole.’95 On graduation its students would be equipped to
serve on the secretariat of the CID, ‘and to advise Her Majesty’s Government on matters of
war policy and as to the manner in which the power and resources of the country can be
89 NAA A1420 2. Casey to Bruce, 19 November 1925.

90 TNA CAB 63/44. Hankey to MacDonald, 28 October 1931.
91 TNA CAB 24/207/CP332(29). Trenchard, The fuller employment of air power in Imperial defence,
November 1929.
92 TNA CAB 63/44. Hankey to MacDonald, 28 October 1931.
93 CAC CHAR 16/1/94. Minutes of conference held in room 218, War Office, on 12 February 1919, to consider
the better co-operation, especially as regards education, of the fighting services; CAC CHAR 16/1/93. Minutes of
second conference on the better co-operation, especially as regards education, of the fighting services, held in
room 218, War Office, on 21 February 1919.
94 CAC CHAR 16/6/122. Dawnay to Churchill, 20 February 1919; TNA CAB 2/3. CID 133 meeting, 29 June
1920; TNA CAB 2/3. CID 159 meeting, 12 July 1922.
95 TNA CAB 4/9/409B. Report of the sub-committee on the institution of a joint Staff College for Officers in
the three Services, 11 May 1923.
most effectively applied in waging war. They would also furnish a nucleus of officers fitted
for high command and high staff posts who would have acquired by their training at the
College a broad conception of the functions of the fighting services.’96 But the professional
heads of the services were suspicious of such ideas, fearing that it might detract from their
own power.97 However, the CID ignored their objections, and the college opened its door
to the first intake of students in 1927.98 The syllabus of the course exemplified the fact that
British strategic culture had taken a step change from what it had been before 1914 in that it
privileged politics and international relations, logistics, intelligence, and industrial mobil
ization over the operational conduct of war.99 The COS were mollified when IDC graduates
began to fill staff posts in another innovation in Whitehall, the Joint Planning Committee,
for the JPC was created to give the COS an organization that could do some of the detailed
leg-work of preparing outline draft plans and appreciations which they then presented to
the Chiefs for their amendment and approval before they in turn transmitted them to min-
isters.100 The staffs of the three service ministries then used their appreciations and outline
plans for the preparation, in collaboration when necessary, of detailed war plans.101
Whether Hankey was right to oppose so strenuously the creation of a MOD in the 1920s
is debatable. Had it been created it might have brought about a greater degree of coordin
ation between the policies of the service ministries. But that by itself would not have been
enough to produce more coherent grand strategies, for that would have required measures
to coordinate the policies of a host of other ministries that would have fallen outside the
new Ministry. A MOD might have represented an incremental improvement, but some-
thing like the CID would still have been necessary to bring its policies into line with those
of other departments.
Intelligence
Success in negotiations, the application of deterrence or coercion, or, in the last resort, the
actual use of force, all depended on policy-makers making accurate assessments of their
potential enemies’ capabilities and intentions. Good strategic intelligence—that is, a pic-
ture of the capabilities and political and military intentions of potential enemies and
allies—was, therefore, as important as effective armed forces and skilful diplomatists, in
enabling policy-makers to safeguard British interests. Most strategic intelligence was prod
uced by the diplomatic service. Information flowed into the Foreign Office in great quan
tities. By 1921 it was receiving between five and six hundred telegrams each day from
diplomats abroad.102 In gathering information about foreign armed forces diplomats were
96 Ibid.
97 TNA CAB 53/12/COS8. Cavan, Institution of a Joint Staff College for officers of the three Services, 25
January 1924; TNA CAB 53/1/COS27. COS 27 meeting, 11 March 1926.
98 TNA CAB 53/12/COS8. Cavan, Institution of a Joint Staff College for officers of the three Services, 25
January 1924; TNA CAB 4/14/CID689B. COS, The Imperial Defence College, 27 May 1926; TNA CAB
23/53/39(26). Cabinet Conclusions, 16 June 1926.
99 TNA CAB 4/9/409B. Report of the sub-committee on the institution of a joint Staff College for Officers in
the three Services, 11 May 1923; TNA CAB 53/1/COS. 28 meeting, 22 April 1926; TNA CAB 4/14/CID689B. COS,
The Imperial Defence College, 27 May 1926; TNA CAB 53/1/COS38. Richmond, Imperial Defence College. Notes
in regard to the proposed work of the College, 2 December 1926.
100 TNA CAB 53/2/COS44. COS 44 meeting, 4 March 1927.
101 TNA CAB 53/10/COS266. COS 266 meeting, 5 January 1939.
102 TNA AIR 8/38/E. 6 meeting. Stenographic notes of meeting of representatives of the United Kingdom, the
Dominions and India, held at 10 Downing Street, 24 June 1921.
assisted by the service attachés who were appointed to each of Britain’s overseas missions.
But they were restricted to gathering information from open sources, being forbidden to
indulge in espionage.103 Espionage was the job of the various intelligence organizations that
the British maintained. British governments had collected a good deal of secret intelligence
before 1914, but its collection and assessment apparatus had been haphazard. This changed
during the war and after 1918 the army and navy’s signals intelligence services were com-
bined into the new Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), while its human intel-
ligence agencies were combined into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the domestic
security service, MI5. Problems remained, however, and the efficiency of the whole
machine was to some extent degraded by continued bureaucratic in-fighting in the second
half of the 1920s between the SIS, the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, and MI5 about
who was responsible for counter-subversion and counter-espionage work within Britain.
This was not finally resolved until 1931 when the SIS was made responsible for covering
foreign countries and MI5 was given responsibility for Britain and the empire. The SIS was
stripped of responsibility for domestic operations and MI5 ceased to be a branch of the
War Office, and adopted its modern title of the Security Service.104 In 1921 the SIS and
GC&CS were placed under the control of the Foreign Office, while MI5 reported to the
Home Secretary.105 However, the service departments complained that they were now
starved of information, and so a compromise was reached. From 1923 the activities of the
GC&CS and the SIS were coordinated by the Chief of the Secret Service, although he in
turn remained answerable to the Foreign Secretary.106 At the same time the Indian govern-
ment maintained its own Indian Political Intelligence service in Simla, which had the task
of detecting subversive activities directed against the Indian Empire. In this they were
assisted by the fact that their fears of communist subversion were shared by other European
colonial powers and by the middle of the 1920s they were actively exchanging information
with them.107 Cooperation with the Belgian and French secret services that had developed
during the war continued after 1919, and they shared information not merely on commun
ist subversion, and in the case of the French, anti-colonial nationalists in the Arab world,
but also information on the Balkans, Turkey, and Hungary.108 The Indian army also main-
tained its own cryptanalysts who focused their efforts on reading Soviet, Chinese, and
Afghan military and diplomatic traffic.109
The SIS had a reputation, at least in the eyes of hostile foreign intelligence services, for its
ubiquity. But for most of the inter-war period it was a remarkably small organization, mus-
tering a total of fewer than two hundred staff in the 1920s. SIS officers working overseas did
so under the cover of Passport Control Officers. This not only gave them diplomatic
immunity, but also provided the service with an income stream as they charged a fee for
every passport they issued. Their task was to gather information on neighbouring, but not
on their host, countries. The service established an overseas network which remained in
place until the middle of the 1930s. Stations in Scandinavia and the Baltic states were
103 LHCMA Sir J. T. Burnett-Stuart mss. 6/13–23. Memoirs, Chapter XV, 30.
104 K. Jeffrey, MI 6. The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 225.
105 Jeffrey, MI6, 141–61; CAC CHAR 16/5/137. Curzon to Churchill, 24 March 1919.
106 J. R. Ferris, ‘Whitehall’s black chamber: British cryptology and the government code and cypher school,
1919–29’, INS, vol. 2 (1987), 56–8.
107 A. L. Foster, ‘Secret police cooperation and the roots of anti-Communism in interwar Southeast Asia’,
Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 4 (1995), 331–50; Jeffrey, MI 6, 197–8.
108 M. Thomas, ‘Anglo–French imperial relations in the Arab world: intelligence liaison and nationalist dis
order, 1920–1939, D&S, vol. 17 (2006), 771–98.
109 Ferris, ‘Whitehall’s black chamber’, 64.
directed against Russia, stations in Belgium and Holland were directed against Germany,
and the Berlin station focused its efforts on the Comintern, whose West European
Secretariat was based in the city. The station in Switzerland operated into France, Italy,
Portugal and Spain, the smaller Central European powers, and the Near and Middle East.
The IPI also had a representative in Switzerland who cooperated with SIS. Constantinople
was an important SIS station because of the possibility in the early 1920s that Britain might
soon find itself at war with the Turks. SIS’s deployment in the Middle East was limited, not
from choice, but because of a lack of funds. Even so, at least in the early 1920s it was remark-
able successful in gathering information about the plans and capabilities of Mustapha
Kemal’s Turkish Nationalist forces.110
British ministers had learnt the value of signals intelligence during the war and were
determined to maintain the advantages it gave them into the peace. In Curzon’s opinion the
information provided by the GC&CS was of inestimable value and it was ‘upon whose
work we rely for our most secret diplomacy.’111 This could be an advantage both in govern-
ing relations between Britain and foreign powers, but also between British government
departments, for ministers understood that in the bureaucratic battles they fought in
Whitehall knowledge was power. Thus, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in
November 1924, Churchill was insistent that he should have access to diplomatic decrypts
on the same basis as the political heads of the Foreign Office and service departments.
‘Obviously a discussion between the Treasury and a spending department’, he told the
Foreign Secretary, ‘where the latter has superior secret information not in possession of the
Chancellor is bound to be conducted on very uneven terms.’112 Until the middle of the
1930s GC&CS was probably the most successful signals intelligence organization in the
world. Each week it provided Whitehall policy-makers with more than seventy solutions to
the diplomatic traffic of France, Japan, Italy, the USA, and some of the smaller powers such
as Turkey.113 Its work against Soviet traffic was seriously compromised in 1927 when minis-
ters announced to the Commons that they were reading it. However, what really concerned
the British about Soviet policy was their attempt to subvert their empire in the Middle East,
Afghanistan, and East Asia, and there the British were well informed because of their con-
tinued ability to read the cipher systems the Soviets used in Asia. They were also able to
read Comintern traffic, at least until 1936, when the fact that they were doing so was
betrayed by a young British diplomat and Soviet spy, Donald Maclean.114 German traffic
was a low priority in the 1920s and little of it seems to have been read.115 The British were
less successful in safeguarding their own codes and ciphers. The security practices at British
embassies overseas were sometimes shockingly amateur. Thus between 1924 and 1937 two
minor functionaries at the British embassy in Rome were able to supply a regular flow of
classified Foreign Office material, including code books, to both the Italians and Russians.116
In April 1927 the British minister in Peking reported that amongst papers seized from the
110 Jeffrey, MI 6, 193–6, 203–7; A. L. Macfie, ‘British intelligence and the Turkish national movement, 1919–22’,
MES, vol. 37 (2001), 1–2.
111 TNA FO 800/149. Curzon to Lloyd George, 27 June 1921.
112 TNA FO 800/256. Churchill to Chamberlain, 21 November 1924.
113 V. Madeira, ‘“Because I don’t trust him, we are friends”: signals intelligence and the reluctant Anglo-Soviet
embrace, 1917–24’, INS, vol. 19 (2004), n. 3.
114 J. Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), KL 1812–18, 2194–203.
115 Jeffrey, MI 6, 213; J. R. Ferris, ‘“Now that the milk is spilt”: appeasement and the archive on intelligence’,
D&S, vol. 19 (2008), 551; Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours, KL 2195–203.
116 Ferris, ‘Whitehall’s black chamber’, 65; Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours, KL 2231–6.
nearby Soviet Consulate were ‘copies of two of the Minister’s despatches to the Foreign
Office, as well as of his telegrams to British Consuls’.117
The intelligence produced by SIS and GC&CS sometimes gave British diplomatists an
important advantage in their negotiations with other powers. In 1922 during the Chanak
crisis intercepted French diplomatic traffic provided ample evidence of French double-
dealing, including their efforts to manipulate the British press to secure the dismissal of
Lord Curzon and his replacement by a more pro-French minister. Decrypted American
messages assisted the British delegation during the Washington Naval Conference in 1922.
During the Lausanne conference held between November 1922 and February 1923 to settle
the final peace terms with Turkey, the British negotiators enjoyed the inestimable advan-
tage of being able to read many of the secret communications of the Turkish delegation.
The head of the British delegation, Sir Horace Rumbold, noted at the end of the conference
that ‘the information we obtained at the psychological moments from secret sources was
invaluable to us, and put us in the position of a man who is playing Bridge and knows the
cards in his adversary’s hand.’118 The British were also generally well-informed about Soviet
subversive efforts in the Middle East and Asia, although at the same time it also fed their
hysteria about this threat.
It is probably fair to say that the British intelligence bureaucracy throughout the 1920s
was able to alert British policy-makers to the nature of most of the challenges to the status
quo that they wished to maintain.119 But there was also a significant piece missing from the
British intelligence bureaucracy. GC&CS paid almost no attention to assessing the signifi-
cance of the material they gathered, and SIS rarely went beyond commenting on the reli
ability of its sources. In this respect the establishment of the Cabinet Secretariat in 1916
represented a lost opportunity. It did bring about a more business-like conduct of Cabinet
discussions in that decisions were now properly recorded and transmitted to those required
to act upon them. But although there was some discussion that the new organization would
include an intelligence department, nothing came of it.120 Assessment of intelligence
material stopped at the level of the consuming departments, each of which had its own
specialist officers with the task of assessing its significance. But until the establishment of
the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1936, followed in July 1939, by the creation of a situ
ation report centre to coordinate Foreign Office and military assessments, there was no
inter-departmental organization that served Whitehall as a whole tasked with the job of
producing all-sources intelligence assessments.121
The World as Seen from Whitehall
The absence of a central intelligence staff tasked with the job of providing comprehensive
assessments of the significance of the plethora of information reaching Whitehall was sig-
nificant. It meant that ministers and officials were left to produce their own assessments,
117 TNA CAB 23/54/28(27). Cabinet Conclusions, 27 April 1927.

118 TNA FO 800/253/Tu/23/54. Rumbold to Oliphant, 18 July 1923.
119 J. R. Ferris, ‘The road to Bletchley Park: the British experience with signals intelligence, 1892–1945’, INS,
vol. 17 (2002), 69.
120 J. Turner, Lloyd George’s Secretariat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 19.
121 K. Jeffery and A. Sharp, ‘Lord Curzon and secret intelligence’, in C. Andrew and J. Noakes (eds), Intelligence
and International Relations, 1900–1945 (Exeter: Exeter Studies in History, no. 15, 1987), 104; R. Overy, ‘Strategic
intelligence and the outbreak of the Second World War’, WinH, no. 5 (1998), 453.
and there was no one to check them if they allowed their own prejudices and preconcep-
tions to colour their conclusions. Correlli Barnett has argued that British policy-makers in
the inter-war period suffered from a surfeit of morality. They were high-minded, whiggish,
and naïve.122 It is not difficult to find policy-makers saying things that chimed with his
argument. Speaking to a Conservative party audience in 1924, Baldwin asserted that:
I think deep down in all our hearts we look to the Empire as the means by which we may
hope to see that increase of our race which we believe to be of such inestimable benefit to
the world at large; the spread abroad of people to whom freedom and justice are the
Breath of their nostrils, of people distinguished, as we would fain hope and believe, above
all things, by an abiding sense of duty.123
In a similar vein Austen Chamberlain believed, ‘There is something about our training
which makes the ordinary Briton very reticent. He not only considers it bad form to brag
but he is apt in conversation to belittle his own deeds, but it would be becoming in our
Allies in the late war that they should remember this national trait and should, in their own
minds, correct our deprecatory habit.’124 One reason why Hankey objected to the League of
Nations was because it would enable some (unspecified) foreign powers to take advantage
of the British, for, ‘the British, being a law-abiding nation, would abide by and possibly
trust unduly in a League of Nations, whereas other nations would merely use it to get the
best they could.’125 In the eyes of Lord Robert Cecil, then serving as an adviser to the British
delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, the reputation for high-mindedness that the
British possessed was of transcendent importance. ‘For the last two generation any rate’, he
told Lloyd George in 1919, ‘the greatest national asset which we have had in foreign affairs
has been the belief in our justice. At the outbreak of the war international public opinion
was unquestionably greatly moved by our attitude.’126 But high-mindedness was not the
exclusive property of either pro-or anti-appeasers. Rather, all parties debating foreign pol-
icy claimed the moral high ground. Thus in 1936, Harold Nicolson, a former diplomat
turned National Labour politician, and one of Neville Chamberlain’s bitterest critics,
recounted an argument he had with a group of pro-Chamberlain Conservative MPs, dur-
ing which he claimed that the British people ‘represent a certain type of civilised mind, and
that we are sinning against the light if we betray that type. We stand for tolerance, truth,
liberty and good humour. They [the Nazi regime] stand for violence, oppression, untruth-
fulness and bitterness.’127 Two years later, Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to
Germany, and one of Chamberlain’s strongest supporters, echoed very similar sentiments,
claiming that ‘When I think in terms of British interests only, regardless of right or wrong,
I still feel that, however repugnant, dangerous and troublesome the results may be or may
seem likely to be, the truest British interest is to come down on the side of impartial moral
principles.’128
Ministers and officials did not see the world and judge those around them in terms of a
simple black and white morality. The myriad of problems they faced and the welter of
122 C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1972/1984).
123 The Times, 5 December 1924.
124 TNA FO 800/257. Chamberlain to Grahame, 22 January 1925.
125 TNA CAB 63/31. Hankey to Balfour, 12 January 1921.
126 TNA FO 800/216. Cecil to Lloyd George, 27 May 1919.
127 N. Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939 (London: Fontana, 1966), 10.
128 TNA FO 800/269/38/74. Henderson to the Halifax, 12 August 1938.
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Deterrence Coercion and Appeasement British Grand Strategy 1919 1940 1St Edition David French Full Chapter

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Deterrence, Coercion, and

Appeasement: British Grand Strategy,

Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

2. Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 15

6. The World Crisis and the National Government, 1931–3 229

9. The Grand Strategy of Fortress Britain, May 1937–September 1938 371

JMilH Journal of Military History

Peace with Security

2 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

5 TNA CAB 32/46/E. Imperial Conference. 9 meeting, 26 October 1926.

4 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

14 French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 30–1.

6 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

8 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

34 N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, Vol. 1: Rearmament Policy (London: HMSO, 1976).

10 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

12 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Ministers and Cabinets

16 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

5 Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics, 214.

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 17

18 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

quintessence of patriotic Britishness, and its Labour opponents as in thrall to dangerous

18 NAA A1420 2. Casey to Bruce, 8 October 1925.

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 19

20 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 21

39 TNA FO 800/259. Chamberlain to Churchill, 2 February 1926.

22 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 23

24 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 25

The Committee of Imperial Defence

63 See, for example, LHCMA Pownall diary, 21 November 1938.

26 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 27

28 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 29

89 NAA A1420 2. Casey to Bruce, 19 November 1925.

30 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 31

32 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 33

The World as Seen from Whitehall

117 TNA CAB 23/54/28(27). Cabinet Conclusions, 27 April 1927.

34 Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement

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The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

2. Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy 15

6. The World Crisis and the National Government, 1931–3 229

9. The Grand Strategy of Fortress Britain, May 1937–September 1938 371