Security studies and the use of history: Neville Chamberlain's grand strategy revisited

Security Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 397-437

  Layne, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 52449104354     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410802319628     Document Type: Article

References (255)

1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume I: The Gathering Storm (London: Penguin, 2005 [1948]).
2. Strategic adjustment is the ability of great powers to recognize shifts in the international distribution of power and respond to the "new strategic landscape" with appropriate policies that balance resources and commitments. Charles A. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2.
3. Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 107. Kupchan argues that by the mid-1930s, there should have been a "dramatic reorientation" of British grand strategy, and after the March 1936 Rhineland crisis it was "simply unreasonable" for Britain to have persisted with its appeasement diplomacy.
4. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire, 165.
5. Similarly, Schweller faults British policy makers for engaging in "overly cooperative behavior" - appeasement - toward Berlin. Randall L. Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 69-70.
6. When menaced by their peers, great powers respond either by building up their own military capabilities (internal balancing) and/or by forming alliances with others (external balancing). See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, 13, 139
7. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 17, 61-63
8. and Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 163, 168.
9. Kier, Imagining War, 92, 107, 116-17
10. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire, 1, 11, 151 163-65, 170-71
11. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 263
12. and Schweller, Unanswered Threats, 69-75. Posen acknowledges that Britain did balance against Nazi Germany, but also cites London's failure to prepare a large army to fight in western Europe as a failure to integrate its political objectives with its military posture.
13. Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 40, 142-43.
14. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 161.
15. Waltz also implies that Britain buck-passed to France instead of balancing against Germany. Waltz, Theory of International Politics 170. Mearsheimer says "Buck-passing is a threatened great power's main alternative to balancing."
16. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 157 (emphasis added).
17. See also, Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 64.
18. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 161
19. and Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire, 130, 145-47, 155-61.
20. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire, 151
21. Kier, Imagining War, 92-97
22. and Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 143, 178.
23. For leading examples of Chamberlain revisionism, see John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989)
24. Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865-1980 (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1981)
25. D. C. Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War (New York: Pantheon, 1989)
26. David N. Dilks, "'We Must Hope for the Best and Prepare for the Worst:' The Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and Hitler's Germany, 1937-1939," Proceedings of the British Academy 58 (1987):309-52
27. David N. Dilks, "Appeasement Revisited," University of Leeds Review 15 (1972): 28-57
28. Paul Kennedy, "The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865-1939," in Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870-1945: Eight Studies (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983)
29. and D. C. Watt, "Appeasement: The Rise of a Revisionist School?" Political Quarterly 36 (April-June 1965): 191-213.
30. For examples of the new wave of Chamberlain "counterrevisionism," see R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1993)
31. and Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).
32. British strategy during the 1930s has been used to develop and test, among others, theories about: Deterrence and reputation, the origins of grand strategy, balancing and under-balancing, strategic adjustment failure, and preventive war. Key works on these topics include: Kier, Imagining War
33. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire
34. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics
35. Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine
36. Schweller, Unanswered Threats
37. Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)
38. and Norrin N. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, "The Preventive War that Never Happened: Britain, France, and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s," Security Studies 16, no. 1 (January-March 2007): 32-67.
39. For the argument that great powers' grand strategies are determined primarily by structural factors, seeWaltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979)
40. and Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
41. For various nonstructural explanations of grand strategy, see Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
42. Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)
43. Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine
44. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire
45. Alastair Ian Johnson, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
46. Kier, Imagining War
47. and Scwheller, Unanswered Threats.
48. There are multiple, competing neoclassical realist interpretations of British strategy during the 1930s. For example, compare my explanation in this article with Schweller, Unanswered Threats.
49. Neoclassical realism picks up where neorealism leaves off. "Neoclassical realism posits an imperfect 'transmission belt' between systemic incentives and constraints, on the one hand, and the actual diplomatic, military, and foreign economic policies states select, on the other. Over the long term, international political outcomes generally mirror the actual distribution of power among states. In the shorter-term, however, the policies states pursue are rarely objectively efficient or predictable based on a purely systemic analysis." Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Stephen E. Lobell, and Norrin M. Ripsman, "Introduction: Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy," in Stephen E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, eds., Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy (forthcoming).
50. At Locarno, Britain and Italy undertook to guarantee both Germany and France from attack by the other.
51. A.E. Chatfield to Sir Warren Fisher, 4 June 1934, quoted in Christopher Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League, and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931-1933 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972), 397-98.
52. Neville Chamberlain to Mrs. Morton Prince, 16 January 1938, quoted in Keith Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), 323.
53. Philip Gibbs, Ordeal in England (London: Heinemann, 1938), 409-10.
54. Chamberlain's intelligence, administrative ability, and forceful personality stood out in a series of cabinets that lacked strong leadership. Almost by default, Chamberlain became, in Churchill's words, "the pack-horse of our great affairs." For Chamberlain's reaction to Churchill's description, see Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 28 March 1936 in Robert Self, ed. The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, Volume IV: The Downing Street Years, 1934-1940 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 183.
55. On Chamberlain's dominant position, also see David Dilks, "We Must Hope for the Best and Prepare for the Worst," 311
56. and R. J. Q. Adams, British Politics and Foreign Policy in an Age of Appeasement, 1935-1939 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 157.
57. Serving on the DRC were the chiefs of staff of the army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, and the three most powerful civil servants in the British government: Sir Maurice Hankey (secretary to both the cabinet and the CID), Sir Robert Vansittart (permanent Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs), and Sir Warren Fisher (Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and Head of Civil Service).
58. Vansittart and Fisher argued that Germany posed the main threat to Britain, which meant that the RAF and, perhaps, the army should be given priority in any rearmament plan. Chatfield and Hankey believed that Japan was a more immediate threat to British interests, and that main focus of rearmament should be completing the Singapore naval base, and strengthening the Royal Navy by building more capital ships. See Stephen Roskill, British Naval Policy Between the Wars, Vol II: The Period of Reluctant Rearmament, 1930-1939 (London: Collins, 1976), 168-69.
59. National Archives of the United Kingdom, DRC 14, "Report of the Defense Requirements Subcommittee," CAB 16/109. Copies of the documents cited in this article can be found in multiple files in Britain's National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office, PRO). I conducted my primary source research in 1979-80 (while writing my doctoral dissertation on British grand strategy in the 1930s) using the microfilmed documents at the University Library, University of Cambridge. I have referenced the microfilm files there, in which I found the documents that are cited herein.
60. The DC(M) was superseded by the Defence Policy and Requirements Subcommittee (DPRC) in July 1935.
61. On the close working relationship between Chamberlain and Fisher, and their shared views on strategy and rearmament, see G. C. Peden "Sir Warren Fisher and British Rearmament Against Germany," English Historical Review 94, no. 370 (January 1979): 31.
62. As Chamberlain noted, "This all works out as the result of the proposition that we cannot provide simultaneously for hostilities with Japan and Germany, and that the latter is the problem to which we must now address ourselves." Quoted in Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain, 253 [Diary Entry of 6 June 1934].
63. National Archives of the United Kingdom, DC(M) 32, Minutes of Meeting, 3 May 1934, CAB 16/110.
64. DC(M) 32, 120 "Note on the Report of the Defence Requirements Committee," CAB 16/111.
65. Ibid. As he stated in May 1934, "We must prepare our defence against possible hostilities from Germany rather than from Japan."
66. Ibid.
67. As Sir John Simon, who supported Chamberlain's views on strategy, put it, "If the British Empire in the East were to breakup, that would be a terrible calamity, but it would not be quite so desperate as if we were attacked and defeated at the heart of the Empire." National Archives of the United Kingdom, DC(M) 32, Minutes of Meeting, 25 June 1934, CAB 16/110.
68. Documents on British Foreign Policy [hereinafter cited as DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 13, no. 14.
69. Paris and London conducted sporadic, limited staff talks during the 1930s (following the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, and immediately following the Anschluss)
70. This point is discussed in more detail in the section Assessing the Chamberlain Grand Strategy - Alternative Strategies.
71. G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932-1939 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), 65. As G. C. Peden has observed, "the extent to which Britain could rearm was limited by the quantity of raw materials which she could purchase from abroad." As Fisher told the DRC, the domestic supply of key raw materials "was negligible ... and therefore have to be secured from other countries who will not, of course, give us them, and, when our international purchasing power is exhausted, will not continue indefinite credits to us."
72. Quoted in Peden, "Sir Warren Fisher and British Rearmament," 34.
73. See also the similar views put forward by Inskip in an important 1937 cabinet paper as quoted in N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, Volume I: Rearmament Policy (London: HMSO, 1976), 283-85.
74. G. C. Peden, "A Matter of Timing: The Economic Background to British Foreign Policy, 1937-1939," History 69 (January 1984): 24.
75. As rearmament gathered steam in 1936, increasing scarcities in the factors of production - especially the shortage of skilled labor - imposed a ceiling on the British economic recovery that began in 1932 and lasted into late 1937. H. W. Richardson, Economic Recovery in Britain, 1932-9 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 31-33.
76. See Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 280-81.
77. Quoted in ibid.
78. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Cabinet Papers [hereinafter CP] 24 (38), "Defence Expenditure in Future Years, Further Report by the Minister for Coordination of Defence," CAB 16/182. As Brian Bond observes, influenced by the Treasury, policy makers harbored the concern "of making the major financial and industrial effort too soon and being exhausted before war began. The Treasury could not know in advance that war would begin in 1939, or how long it would last." Brian Bond, British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 245.
79. Quoted in W. K. Hancock and Margaret Gowing, British War Economy (London: HMSO, 1949), 72.
80. DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 1, no. 164. As Hankey said, "In the first few months they could knock us about most frightfully, but I do not think they could knock us out completely, and in time we should wear them down." Maurice Hankey to Sir Eric Phipps, 9 October 1936, Phipps Papers, Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, PHPP I 3/3.
81. In a February 1937 analysis for the cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff said: "By the combined action of our Navy, our Air Force and our diplomatic and commercial influence upon Neutrals we could develop economic pressure upon Germany." Economic pressure was "one of the most powerful influences which this country can exercise in war," and that "if war against Germany continued for a period of some years, economic pressure effectively maintained would probably prove decisive." National Archive of the United Kingdom, Defence Plans (Policy) [hereinafter DP(P)] 2 "Planning for War with Germany," CAB 16/182.
82. According to Chamberlain, Britain's economic and financial staying power was a "powerful deterrent against attack" and that even a powerful adversary "may hesitate to risk a struggle with a country whose staying power may be able indefinitely to prolong their resistance." Therefore, "in a period of protracted and heavy expenditure, such as we are passing through now, we must be careful to preserve our economic and industrial stability." Neville Chamberlain, ed. Arthur Bryant, In Search of Peace: Speeches, 1937-1939 (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), 108.
83. Ibid.
84. Quoted in Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 283-85.
85. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 66.
86. In 1938-39, even as Britain sought to conserve its financial strength, its efforts were undercut by Washington's international financial policies, which forced London to expend its precious gold reserves - the Treasury's "war chest" - in a vain attempt to prevent depreciation of the pound sterling. See R. A. C. Parker, "The Pound Sterling, the American Treasury and British Preparations for War, 1938-1939," English Historical Review 98, no. 387 (April 1983): 261-79. Parker argues "that by the time war broke out, Britain was almost certain either to be defeated or become dependent on the United States. In great part this was a result of the loss of gold incurred in supporting sterling."
87. Ibid., 278.
88. It was Britain's imperial possessions, Chamberlain said, that elevated Britain from "the status of a fourth-rate Power to the heart of an Empire which stands in the front of all the Powers in the world." Quoted in Fraser Cameron, Aspects of British Strategy and Diplomacy, 1933-39 (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1974), chap. 3, 27n87.
89. Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, n.d. [1-2 April 1939], Chamberlain Diary Letters, 399.
90. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Note by Sir Warren Fisher, 29 January 1934, CAB 16/109.
91. The First DRC Report stated that no responsible British official could "be under any illusions as to the gravity of the situation which would arise if we were faced with hostility by Japan in the Far East, especially if (as is by no means impossible) it coincided with trouble in Europe.... We cannot overstate the importance we attach to getting back, not to an alliance (since that would not be practical politics), but at least to our old terms of cordiality and mutual respect with Japan." DRC 14, CAB 16/109.
92. DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 13, no. 14. In a September 1934 letter to Simon, Chamberlain said, "It is clear that the measures necessary to maintain that safety which is our paramount interest must be affected by any arrangement which gave us not merely a neutral but a benevolent Japan in the East and still more so if we could feel that we had eliminated, so far as that is humanly possible, any cause of difference between Japan and ourselves for a considerable time to come."
93. Ibid.
94. See the views of senior Foreign Office officials: C. W. Orde (head of the Far Eastern Department), Robert Craigie (head of the American Department), and Sir John Pratt (the Foreign Office's leading China expert). Quoted in Keith Neilson, "The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, British Strategic Foreign Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement," English Historical Review 118, no. 477 (June 2003): 663, 668, 670-71.
95. On the proposed Anglo-Japanese rapprochement, also see Ann Trotter, "Tentative Steps for an Anglo-Japanese Rapprochement in 1934," Modern Asian Studies 8, no. 1 (1974): 59-83.
96. As Chamberlain described it, it was "the very mid-summer of madness" for Britain to wreck the nascent anti-German coalition of France, Britain, and Italy (the Stresa Front), alienate Rome, and drive the Italians into Berlin's arms by supporting the imposition of League of Nations economic sanctions on Italy. As Vansittart put it, "For the gravest and biggest of reasons, reasons which concern the maintenance of peace in Europe and therefore the lives and security of our people, we cannot afford to quarrel with Italy and drive her back into German embraces. This would be the effect of a quarrel with this country, which would break the European harmony of London, Paris, Rome, or of Italy leaving the League. This is, of course, an unpleasant necessity, but to ignore it in any way would be the most dangerous and unpardonable folly on our part. It would be a grave and foolish departure from the policy of realism on which our existence depends."
97. DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 14, no. 175. Notwithstanding these objections the Baldwin Government decided to confront Italy.
98. In 1938 Hankey said, "Ever since the breach with Italy over Abyssinia the Service authorities have been hammering that it is impossible for us to conduct a war in the Far East, the West, and in the Mediterranean on the line of communication between the two." Hankey to Phipps, 21 February 1938, Phipps Papers, PHPP I 3/3. A 1937 Chiefs of Staff strategic analysis said, "It is only while we avoid war against Italy that the security of our sea communications through the Mediterranean, which is one of our chief interests in the area, can be maintained." Quoted in Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 413.
99. Chatfield to Admiral Little, 11 November 1937, quoted in Cameron, Aspects of British Strategy and Diplomacy, chap. 5, 15.
100. CP 24, (38).
101. After World War II some of Chamberlain's associates invoked the buying time argument to explain British policy during the Czech crisis. For example, see Viscount Templewood [Sir Samuel Hoare], Nine Troubled Years (London: Collins, 1959), 331-35.
102. During the 1930s, some British officials did regard diplomacy as a means of buying time for rearmament. In 1936 Vansittart said "time is the very material commodity which the Foreign Office is expected to provide in the same way as other departments have to provide other war material." Memorandum by Vansittart, "The World Situation and British Rearmament," 31 December 1936, VNST 1/19, Vansittart Papers, Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. Among scholars, Norrin Ripsman and Jack Levy accept the buying time argument and argue although British policy makers' "choices may have been poor ones, they were driven by realist logic based on strategic balance of power considerations, not by a naive optimism about Hitler's Germany and confidence in the ability to avoid a war." Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, "The Realism of Appeasement in the 1930s: Buying Time for Rearmament," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, California, 21-25 March 2006, 7.
103. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Vansittart's successor as Permanent Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, said that "the parrot-cry of 'Rearmament' is a mere confession of failure in foreign policy. We must reach a modus vivendi with Germany." David Dilks, ed. Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (London: Cassell, 1971), 71, entry of 25 April 1938.
104. National Archives of the United Kingdom, DPR 52, "Programmes of the Defence Services - Third Report of the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee," CAB 16/139.
105. DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 16, app. II, 755-56.
106. The First DRC Report said there was risk that "Japan may yield to the sudden temptation of a favourable opportunity arising from complications elsewhere. And elsewhere means Europe, and the danger to us in Europe will come only from Germany." DRC 14, CAB 16/109. This passage was based almost verbatim on the arguments set forth by Vansittart in a memo for the DRC. See Norman Rose, Vansittart: Study of a Diplomat (London: Heinemann, 1978), 126.
107. Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 1 August 1937, Chamberlain Diary Letters, 264. Elaborating in an April 1938 speech, Chamberlain said the first prong of Britain's strategy was diplomatic: "That if you want to secure a peace which can be relied upon to last, you have got to find out what are the causes of war and remove them." The second prong was military power: "You must see to it that your preparations, or defensive and offensive forces, are so organised and built up that nobody will be tempted to attack you, but that, on the contrary, when your voice is raised for peace, it will be listened to with respect."
108. Chamberlain, In Search of Peace, 172-73.
109. Chamberlain explained the relationship between diplomacy and rearmament in July 1939: "You don't need offensive forces sufficient to win a smashing victory. What you want are defensive forces sufficiently strong to make it impossible for the other side to win except at such a cost as to make it not worthwhile. That is what we are doing and though at present the German feeling is that it is not worthwhile yet they will presently come to realise that it never will be worthwhile, then we can talk. But the time for talk has'nt come yet because the Germans have'nt yet realized that they cant get what they want by force." Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 23 July 1939, Chamberlain Diary Letters, 431.
110. Ripsman and Levy and I disagree about whether the primary objective of Chamberlain's grand strategy was to build strength to avoid war by bolstering London's diplomacy with military power or, as they argue, to buy time for Britain to complete its rearmament program before fighting Germany. However, implicitly, they do acknowledge the salience of war avoidance for Chamberlain and Halifax: "Their views are better characterized by uncertainty and fear rather than by optimism. Indeed the only thing that was certain was the catastrophic costs of war. Even a victorious war, which they thought unlikely, would leave Britain worse off than the status quo, which they recognized no longer could be secured. Faced with the near certainty of a destructive war, they pursued a strategy that they believed had a small chance of securing an acceptable settlement and a larger chance of buying time so that the dreaded war could be fought on more favorable terms." Ripsman and Levy, "The Realism of Appeasement in the 1930s," 39. Chamberlain's double policy of rearmament and appeasement - "hoping for the best while preparing for the worst" - suggests he did not think war with Germany was inevitable, and, hence, there was more than simply "a small chance" of finding a modus vivendi with Berlin.
111. Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 30 July 1939, Chamberlain Diary Letters, 435.
112. Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, "Chain-Gangs and Passed-Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity," International Organization 44, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 137-68.
113. Entrapment is "being dragged by one's commitment into a war over interests of the ally one does not share. The ally behaves recklessly or takes a firmer position toward its opponent that one would like because it its confident of one's support." Glenn H. Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 181.
114. Following World War I, Britain rejected France's request to guarantee the peace settlements in central Europe. As British Prime Minister David Lloyd George said at the time, "The British people were not very much interested in what happened on the eastern frontier." Quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe, 1914-1940 (London: Arnold, 1995), 74.
115. In April 1938, Chamberlain said that Britain would assist France and Belgium if they were the victims of unprovoked aggression but "we have declined to commit ourselves to a similar undertaking in respect of other countries farther away, in which our vital interests are not concerned to the same extent, and which might be involved in war under conditions under which we would have no control." Chamberlain, In Search of Peace, 170.
116. Vansittart said Britain's vital interests "would not permit us to be silent witness of the establishment of Germany in Belgium and Northern France as a result of France becoming involved in a war which had started without us in the Centre or East of Europe. We are therefore directly interested in France's policy in Central and Eastern Europe. This does not mean that we must follow French policy in those regions, but, on the contrary, that we should bring it into accord with our own." Memorandum by Vansittart, "Britain, France, and Germany," 3 February 1936, VNST 1/13.
117. In April 1938 Chamberlain told French Premier Edouard Daladier: "His Majesty's Government were anxious to avoid being drawn unconsciously and against their will into any engagements regarding the assistance they could render on land in a continental war which might prevent them utilising British armed forces in the way considered most desirable in the national interest on the outbreak of war." DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 1, no. 164. In 1937 General Sir Edmund Ironside sympathetically acknowledged the cabinet's reluctance to expand the army because "if they have such a Force they may be forced to send it to Europe once more." Once the BEF was on the Continent, he noted, London would be tied to France strategically: "Once we are landed," he observed, "our commitment is limitless." The French, he said, "wish only to get us committed, and we are then harnessed to the cart driven by them."
118. Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly, eds., The Ironside Diaries (London: Constable, 1962), 42 (entry of 29 December 1937).
119. Vansittart dissented from limited liability. "No Frenchman," he wrote, "would ever accept the proposition that they could do the land fighting and we would, for our own convenience, limit ourselves to air and sea." DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 16, no. 189. Vansittart doubted that Britain could safely buck-pass to France the costs of fighting a land war against Germany. As he said, "it puzzles me how anyone can feel confident that we would always count on France when we repeatedly toy with schemes to let her down."
120. Vansittart to Sir John Dill, 13 March 1934, quoted in Oliver R. Metcalf, British Defence Policy, Strategy, and Diplomacy (PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1976), 122.
121. DC(M) 32, 120, CAB 16/111. As Philip Meilinger observes, "Britain felt particularly vulnerable to air attack because the concentration of political, financial, social, and industrial power in the London area made it the most valuable target in the country. Worse, because it was so close to the Channel it was within easy striking range of air bases on the Continent. The fear of a "bolt from the blue" against London preoccupied British leaders from the early 1920s on. In 1932 former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made his glum prediction that the bomber would always get through. He added his pessimistic assessment that the only way to prevent the destruction of one's cities was to bomb an enemy's even more viciously .... " Philip S. Meilinger, "Trenchard and 'Morale Bombing': The Evolution of Royal Air Force Doctrine Before World War II," Journal of Military History 60, no. 2 (April 1996): 261.
122. See Malcolm S. Smith, "Rearmament and Deterrence in Britain in the 1930s," Journal of Strategic Studies 1, no. 1 (May 1978): 327.
123. Barry Powers argues that during the interwar years there was "no clear line of demarcation between air offensive and air defence in British aerial doctrine." Barry D. Powers, Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy, 1914-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 16.
124. Draft Memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "The Role of the British Army," n.d., WEIR 17/10, Weir Papers, Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge.
125. Malcolm S. Smith, British Air Strategy Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 67-68
126. Smith, "The Royal Air Force, Air Power, and British Foreign Policy, 1932-37," Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 1 (January 1977), 157, 169.
127. Smith says "It was basic to the Air Staff theory that a large strike force was essential to reduce the size of the enemy air offensive to a scale with which the interceptor fighters could deal." Ibid., 169.
128. As Meilinger notes, the "path to victory by bombing the enemy's industrial and economic infrastructure, such as public utilities, food and fuel supplies, transportation networks, and communications was seen as the task for airpower. It was hoped that the destruction of such targets would cause [as the RAF's war manual, AP 1300 stated] 'a general undermining of the whole populace, even to the extent of destroying the nation's will to continue the struggle'." Meilinger, "Trenchard and 'Morale Bombing'," 265-266.
129. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Cabinet Conclusions (CC), CAB 23/96, CC 53, (38) 2, 7 November 1938.
130. Quoted in Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain, 314.
131. Smith, "The Royal Air Force," 137.
132. John R. Ferris, "The Air Force Brats' View of History: Recent Writing and the Royal Air Force, 1918-1960," International History Review 20, no. 1 (March 1998): 133.
133. This argument is developed in John R. Ferris, "Fighter Defence Before Fighter Command: The Rise of Strategic Air Defence in Great Britain, 1917-1934," Journal of Military History 63, no. 4 (October 1999): 845-84.
134. In 1934, most of what the RAF would need to succeed in 1940 already was in place and it "was acquiring the rest through a sharp and rising learning curve. It had a large and experienced body of strategic air defence personnel, the only ones in the world, under a senior command dedicated solely to that task, organised in an effective way, possessing the world's most sophisticated C3I system, and training for remarkably sophisticated operations." Ferris, "Fighter Defence Before Fighter Command," 883.
135. Also, see David Zimmerman, "Information and the Air Defence Revolution," Journal of Strategic Studies 27, no. 2 (June 2004): 370-94
136. and Alexander Rose, "Radar and Air Defence in the 1930s" Twentieth Century British History 9, no. 2 (1998): 219-45.
137. Ibid., 884. "Between 1934 and 1940, as Britain increasingly allocated resources to air defence, they went to an institution which already knew what to do and did it well. Air defence was not simply a matter of Spitfires, radar, gallant pilots, and wizard boffins, but,
138. For the counter argument that only civilian intervention in late 1937 forced a recalcitrant RAF to begin paying attention to air defense, see Smith, British Air Strategy, 69-71, 175-76
139. and Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 160-61, 166-69, 171-75.
140. Inskip made the ink between the air defense and deterrence in his December 1937 and February 1938 reports to the cabinet on strategy and rearmament priorities. See National Archives of the United Kingdom, CP 316, (37), "Interim Report on Defence Expenditure in Future Years," 15 December 1937; and CP 24, (38).
141. DC(M) 32, 120, "Note on the Report of the Defence Requirements Committee," CAB 16/111.
142. This point is made by Smith, British Air Strategy, 90
143. and Smith, "Rearmament and Deterrence." Smith is a critic of RAF strategy during the 1930s.
144. In addition to the works of Kier, Kupchan, Mearsheimer, Posen, and Schweller already cited, see Bond, British Military Policy
145. Peter Dennis, Decision by Default: Peacetime Conscription and British Defence, 1919-1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)
146. and Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972).
147. For a critique of the "limited liability" strategy and its intellectual godfather, B. H. Liddell Hart, see John J. Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
148. In 1925 the Chiefs of Staff stated: "The true strategic frontier of Great Britain is the Rhine; her security depends entirely upon the present frontiers of France, Belgium and Holland being maintained and remaining in friendly hands.... Any line of policy which permitted Germany (with or without allies) to swallow up France, and then to deal with Great Britain would be fatal strategically." Quoted in Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 41.
149. DC(M) 32, 120, CAB 16/111.
150. About the Low Countries the First DRC Report stated: "Their integrity is vital to us in order that we may obtain that depth in our defence of London which is so badly needed, and of which our geographical position will otherwise deprive us. If the Low Countries were in the hands of a hostile Power, not only would the frequency and the intensity of air attack on London be increased, but the whole of the industrial areas of the Midlands and North of England would be brought within the arc of penetration of hostile air attacks." DRC 14, CAB 16/109.
151. My argument here is similar to Barry Posen's. See Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine.
152. See Smith, "Rearmament and Deterrence," 324.
153. Chamberlain "thought that we could make a definite contribution to peace by maintaining an Air Force and an Expeditionary Force sufficiently large to act as a deterrent to Germany vis-a-vis the Low Countries." DC(M) 32, Minutes of Meeting, 25 June 1934, CAB 16/110. If deterrence failed, Chamberlain's fall-back strategy was defense based "partly in the enlarged Air Force, partly in the completion of antiaircraft equipment, and, finally, in the conversion of the Army into an effectively equipped force capable of operating with Allies in holding the Low Countries and thus securing the necessary depth for the defence of this country in the air." DC(M) 32, 120, CAB 16/111. Chamberlain's policy toward the Continent was "limited liability," not no liability. William Philpott and Martin S. Alexander, "The French and the British Field Force: Moral Support or Material Contribution?" Journal of Military History 71, no. 3 (July 2007): 748.
154. Bond, British Military Policy, 192.
155. In a recent article, B. J. C. McKercher argues that from 1934 until late 1937, London's strategy was based on the Continental commitment, which reflected Britain's commitment to maintaining a balance of power on the European continent. McKercher argues that Chamberlain reversed this policy upon becoming prime minister, and by so doing "abandoned the pursuit of the balance of power on the continent." B. J. C. McKercher, "Deterrence and the European Balance of Power: The Field Force and British Grand Strategy, 1934-1938," English Historical Review 123, no. 500 (February 2008): 128.
156. Chamberlain said, "The deterrent itself, a strong Air Force, he considered should be ready as soon as possible and priority should be given that, whilst the second line, the Army, must be considered second in priority." National Archives of the United Kingdom, DC(M) 32, Minutes of Meeting, 26 June 1934, CAB 16/110. In 1937 he reiterated that economic constraints required giving strategic priority to the RAF and Royal Navy at the army's expense: "The essential point is whether our resources (skilled labour, industrial organisation, financial, and imports) can cope effectively with the whole task in addition to the equipment required ... to take an effective part in Continental War." Draft Memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "The Role of the British Army."
157. In May 1937 Chamberlain told Inskip: "Where we may be led in the course of a prolonged war is impossible to foresee ... The ultimate role of the Army [ss] a thing which we cannot now determine." Quoted in Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 125.
158. During 1934-38 Chamberlain did not reject the Continental commitment in principle. Had Britain possessed unlimited resources for rearmament, he might have contemplated building a large army. However, this was precluded by the economic and financial situation. Responding to the 1937 proposal by the Secretary of State for War to increase the BEF's size, Chamberlain stated: "If we could afford to consider the scale of our military efforts in isolation from our other defence preparations, there clearly is much to be said for the Secretary of State's view. But it is necessary, in determining the role which our Army can be called upon to play, to consider the parts played by the other services, and the effect upon our industrial organisation of the present programme for remedying our defence deficiencies." Draft Memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "The Role of the British Army."
159. For example, see National Archives of the United Kingdom, DPP 17, "The Organization of the Army for its Role in War," CAB 16/182. Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha attended the French Army's fall 1937 maneuvers and formed a favorable impression of the competence and morale of the troops, and the quality of their officers. R. J. Minney, ed. The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha (London: Collins, 1962), 56-59.
160. Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, 335. French military planners realized that in a war's initial stages Britain would be able only to send only a small contingent to the Continent. However the French hoped that whatever British forces did come would be mobile and equipped for modern warfare, would arrive quickly, and that the BEF would be capable of expanding its numbers as the conflict progressed.
161. Philpott and Alexander, "The French and the British Field Force," 751.
162. Lord Weir stated: "To the war effort of our allies we must lend our strength whatever it may be in the most effective manner possible." Draft Memorandum by Weir, "Comments on the Third DRC Report," n.d. (1936), WEIR 17/10. He then asked how the Allies' military power could most effectively be strengthened: "Is that something really secured by each country producing something of each arm for the general effort, or is it not rather secured by the various countries contributing those elements which industrially, economically and geographically they are best fitted to contribute and to make immediately effective?" Ibid.
163. Quoted in Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain, 314.
164. On the weakness of the French Air Force during the 1930s, see Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 71-72, 238-41
165. and Robert J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 163-64.
166. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire, 132.
167. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 515. Tucker observes that even if Stalin had been inclined in 1938 to join Britain and France in an alliance against Hitler, "vserious participation in a coalition war against Germany was not an option open to him at that time given his insistence on completing the great purge." In May 1939, after commencing alliance negotiations with the Soviet Union, Chamberlain expressed "profound doubts as to her military capacity even if she honestly desired & intended to help."
168. Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 28 May 1939, Chamberlain Diary Letters, 418.
169. In March 1938, Chamberlain stated that the Soviet Union was "stealthily and cunningly pulling all the strings behind the scenes to get us involved in a war with Germany (our Secret Service does spend all its time looking out of the window)." Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 20 March, 1938, Chamberlain Diary Letters, 306-07. In April 1939, he said the Soviet Union "is afraid of Germany & Japan and would be delighted to see other people fight them. But she is probably very conscious of her own military weakness and does not want to get into a conflict if she can help it. Her efforts are therefore devoted to egging on others but herself promising only vague assistance."
170. Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 29 April 1939, Chamberlain Diary Letters, 412.
171. Tucker, Stalin in Power, 345.
172. This argument is most notably made by Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939: The Path to Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
173. For another argument that Britain should have gone to war in September 1938, see Richard Rosecrance and Zara Steiner, "British Grand Strategy and the Origins of World War II," in Richard Rosecrance and Arthur A. Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 124-53.
174. Norrin Ripsman and Jack Levy argue that preventive war theory does not predict that Britain would have fought Germany in 1939. Ripsman and Levy, "The Preventive War that Never Happened," 32-67. Pointing out that preventive wars occur when the declining power concludes that "its better to fight now rather than later," they claim that this logic did not apply to Britain in 1938 because the British believed time was on their side, not Germany's. This argument is interesting theoretically but is misplaced historically. The Chamberlain grand strategy's logic was "avoid war if at all possible - both now and later" - because even if Britain fought on the winning side, it would be a big-time loser in another World War.
175. Ibid., 68.
176. For London, Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland was not a crisis because Britain had already decided to include remilitarization as part of a diplomatic package it intended to offer Berlin. For Foreign Office views to this effect, see DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 15, nos. 455, 490, and 521.
177. On 7 March 1936, the day the German army reentered the Rhineland DMZ Anthony Eden (Minister for League of Nations Affairs) lamented that Hitler "has deprived us of the possibility of making to him a concession which might otherwise have been a useful bargaining counter in our hands in the general negotiations with Germany which we had it in contemplation to initiate." DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 16, no. 48.
178. This was the conclusion of the cabinet's Foreign Policy subcomittee [FP]. National Archives of the United Kingdom, FP 36, 26th mtg., 16 March 1938, CAB 27/623.
179. Ibid.
180. DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 1, no. 164.
181. Enclosure to FP 36, 26th Mtg., 16 March 1938, [Halifax, "Memorandum on Possible Measures to Avert German Action in Czechoslovakia"] CAB 27/623.
182. Ibid.
183. Quoted in Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 642.
184. There is a myriad of explanations for France's defeat. For good starting points, see Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War
185. Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery
186. Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
187. Joel Blatt, ed. The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1998)
188. Robert A. Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919-1939 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1985)
189. J. A. Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat in the West, 1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979)
190. Alastair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969)
191. Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of France in 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
192. Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000)
193. William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969)
194. Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994)
195. and Young, In Command of France.
196. May, Strange Victory, 7. Rosecrance and Steiner argue that had Hitler heeded the advice of the German military, he would not have gone to war in September 1939: "In 1939, Hitler, as his generals told him, should have anticipated defeat or stalemate in any invasion of France."
197. Rosecrance and Steiner, "British Grand Strategy and the Origins of World War II," 133.
198. Philpott and Alexander, "The French and the British Field Force," 771. Noting that a number of factors contributed to the French collapse in 1940, Philpott and Alexander argue that "even if a stronger and more mechanized BEF might have won a few more tactical successes for the Allies, it is doubtful this would have been enough to prevent France's defeat."
199. On off-shore balancing, see Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 18-25
200. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 141, 234-71
201. and Christopher Layne, "The 'Poster Child' for Offensive Realism: America as a Global Hegemon," Security Studies 12, no. 2 (Winter 2002/2003): 120-63.
202. This logic was underscored in June 1940 when London resisted French entreaties to commit RAF Fighter Command to the Battle of France. This decision reflected the - correct - calculation that Britain could be defended successfully even if Germany overran western Europe.
203. Posen makes a similar argument. See Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 177-78. B. J. C. McKercher, a critic of Chamberlain's grand strategy, describes it as a strategy "by which Britain would ensure its own security, isolated itself behind the protective curtain of the RAF and RN and move to settle outstanding issues with the three totalitarian powers."
204. McKercher, "Deterrence and the European Balance of Power," 129.
205. David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 99. Reynolds goes on to observe that Churchill's "refrain of the early 1930s, 'Thank God for the French Army' reminds us that he, like most policymakers, never imagined the collapse of the Western Front in 1940."
206. The Chamberlain grand strategy was a text book example of conventional (nonnuclear) deterrence. "A potential attacker's fear of the consequences of military action lies at the heart of deterrence. Specifically, deterrence - a function of the costs and risks associated with military action - is most likely to obtain when an attacker believes that his probability of success is low and the attendant costs will be high." John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 23. The Chamberlain grand strategy sought to drive up Germany's costs by punishment (economic attrition and a strategic air offensive) and drive up its risks by preventing it from winning a knock-out blow victory (the air defense of Britain). Rosecrance and Steiner characterize Chamberlain's strategy as an example of "weak" deterrence because it was based on the premise that Germany could be dissuaded from going to war by the realization that it could not win. They argue that London could have transformed its strategy into "strong" deterrence by enlisting France and/or the Soviet Union as firm Continental allies against Germany and making an appropriate commitment to fight alongside them in Europe.
207. Rosecrance and Steiner, "British Grand Strategy and the Origins of World War II," 130.
208. In July 1939, the Treasury warned that without massive financial and economic support from the United States, Britain's prospects in a long war were "exceedingly grim." Quoted in Peden, "A Matter of Timing," 27. By 1939, because of the linked effects of London's attempt to prevent depreciation of the pound sterling and the massive expansion of Britain's rearmament program, an increasingly adverse balance of payments was draining London's gold and foreign exchange reserves. Consequently, by the eve of war, it was dawning on British policy makers that to prevail in a long war against Germany, Britain would be completely dependent on the United States. That is, Britain no longer would be an independent great power.
209. See Peden, "A Matter of Timing"; R. A. C. Parker, "The Pound Sterling, the American Treasury, and British Preparations for War"
210. and R. A. C. Parker, "Economics, Rearmament and Foreign Policy: The United Kingdom before 1939 - A Preliminary Study," Journal of Contemporary History 10, no. 4 (October 1975).
211. On British intelligence estimates of Germany's economic capability to prosecute a long war, see F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Volume I (London: HMSO, 1979), 59-73.
212. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1961, 2nd ed.).
213. E. H. Carr defended appeasement by pointing out the difficulty of upholding a prevailing geopolitical status quo when the power relations underlying it had shifted. If the status quo powers refused peaceful revision, the dissatisfied powers would seek revision by war. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964, Torchbook ed.). Carr's defense of appeasement was stated more forcefully in the 1939 edition.
214. The 1938 Czech crisis underscored Britain's strategic disinterest in central Europe, however as early July 1936 cabinet members suggested that "our policy ought to be framed on the basis that we could not help Eastern Europe." On the other hand, "we ought, however, to resist by force any attempt against our own Empire or Flanders." DBFP, 2nd ser., vol. 16, app. II, 756.
215. On 9 March 1938, Halifax told German Ambassador Ribbentrop that "once war should start in Central Europe, it was quite impossible to say where it might not end, or who might not become involved." DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 1, no. 8. On 24 March 1938 Chamberlain told the House of Commons that "where war and peace are concerned, legal obligations are not alone involved, and, if war broke out, it would be unlikely to be confined to those who have assumed such obligations.... The inexorable pressure of facts might well prove more powerful than formal pronouncements, and in that event it would be well within the bounds of probability that other countries, besides those which were parties to the original dispute, would almost immediately be involved. This is especially true in the case of two countries like Great Britain and France, with long associations of friendship, with interests closely interwoven, devoted to the same ideals of democratic liberty, and determined to uphold them."
216. DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 1, no. 114. In an August 1938 speech, Simon warned Berlin that "the beginning of a conflict is like the beginning of a fire in a high wind. It may be limited at the start. But who can say how far it would spread or how much destruction it would do or how many may be called upon to beat it out.... This very case of Czechoslovakia may be so critical for the future of Europe that it would be impossible to assume a limit to the disturbance that a conflict might involve, and everyone in every country who considers the consequences has to bear that in mind."
217. DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 2, no. 704. At a 11 September 1938 press briefing, Chamberlain stated that if Czechoslovakia was attacked and France came to Prague's assistance, "it was impossible to set a limit to the scope of the conflict if those events took place or to say what Governments might or might not ultimately be involved." Referring the press to his March 24 statement to the House of Commons, Chamberlain stressed that "it was quite clear from that statement that we contemplated the possibility that this country could not stand aside if a general conflict were to take place in which the security of France might be menaced."
218. DBFP, 3rd ser., vol. 2, app. III.
219. On 24 March 1938 Chamberlain told the House of Commons that London could not undertake to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance militarily or to promise Paris that Britain would lend military support if France intervened militarily to defend Czechoslovakia, because he would not accept a policy that meant that "the decision as to whether or not this country should find itself in war would automatically be removed from the discretion of His Majesty's Government.... This position is not one that His Majesty's Government could see their way to accept, in relation to an area where their vital interests are not concerned in the same degree as they are in the case of France and Belgium." DBFP 3rd ser., vol. 1, no. 114 (emphasis added).
220. Chamberlain urged that the National Government fight the 1935 General Election on a platform of rearmament but was overruled by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
221. As Schweller says, ""British policy did not adjust in response to a dramatically changed strategic environment because elites were paralyzed by the threat of social unrest and fears that the domestic political system could not stand the strains of rearmament." Schweller, Unanswered Threats 71.
222. Also, see Kier, Imagining War, 114-15.
223. Kupchan, Vulnerability of Empire, 163-65.
224. Ibid., 131.
225. Kier, Imagining War, 24-25, 110-13.
226. Ibid, 104
227. Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 160-61, 166-69, 171-76.
228. Bond, British Military Policy, 214-16. Of course, there was a "never again" aspect to the criticisms of those - like Liddell Hart - who believed that Britain's Continental commitment had been a strategic mistake.
229. For more recent arguments that Britain chose the wrong strategy in the First World War, see Niall Ferguson, The Pity ofWar (New York: Basic Books, 1999)
230. and Daniel A. Baugh, "British Strategy During the First World War in the Context of Four Centuries: Blue-Water versus Continental Commitment," in Daniel Masterson, ed., The Sixth Symposium of the U.S. Naval Academy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1987), 85-110.
231. David Reynolds demonstrates that Churchill's grand strategy between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor followed the broad contours of Chamberlain's. Under Churchill, Britain: Remained open to the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany (though not with Hitler), remained wedded to a policy of using the RAF's strategic bomber force and naval power to wage an economic war of attrition against Germany, and retained a "limited liability" stance toward ground combat on the Continent. This continuity demonstrates that the key assumptions upon which the Chamberlain grand strategy was based were widely accepted by British policy makers and continued to be so even after he was forced to resign in early May 1940. David Reynolds, "Churchill and the British 'Decision' to Fight On in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons," in Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F. H. Hinsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 147-67. Commenting a draft of this article, Eugene Gholz contested Reynolds' argument. Gholz says the strategic continuity between Chamberlain and Churchill occurred only because Chamberlain's failures foreclosed other options. This is a serious argument but I agree with Reynolds' position that Chamberlain and Churchill both accepted the "The British Way in Warfare," and what Paul Schroeder has called the "British tradition" of limited liability, relying on allies' armies to bear the brunt of fighting in Europe, economic warfare, and diplomacy to uphold its European interests.
232. Rosecrance and Steiner argue that rather than guaranteeing Poland in March 1939, Britain should have stuck with the Chamberlain grand strategy because the probable outcome was that Hitler's expansionist goals in the east would have resulted in a Russo-German collision. Rosecrance and Steiner, "British Grand Strategy and the Origins of World War II," 127. Britain's spring 1939 policy shift was caused by domestic political factors, not by any fundamental shift in the grand strategic picture.
233. The classic work on this is Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Turning the Rosecrance and Steiner argument on its head, both C. G. Peden and R. A. C. Parker suggest London's decision to fight in 1939 was an example of preventive war because policy makers' realized that Britain's economic capacity to wage a long war was deteriorating. Peden, "A Matter of Timing"; and Parker, "Economics, Rearmament, and Foreign Policy." "In 1939," Parker says "Britain was approaching the point at which preparations for war might weaken the capacity for war: If war was to be risked, perhaps the risk should be taken soon."
234. Ibid., 644.
235. Watt, How War Came.
236. Ibid., 613.
237. Reynolds, In Command of History, xix. As Churchill often said of both prewar and wartime controversies in which he was involved, "I shall leave it to history, but remember that I shall be one of the historians."
238. Ibid., 507, 504.
239. Ibid., 503.
240. Ibid., 514.
241. See Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
242. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976)
243. Ernest R. May, "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Abuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)
244. Ernest R. May and Richard E. Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History by Decisionmakers (New York: The Free Press, 1986)
245. Michael C. Desch, "The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy," Security Studies 15, no. 1 (April 2006): 106-45.
246. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press,1999), 57.
247. A good example is the myth that Pearl Harbor was the result of American "isolationism" during the 1930s. This myth overlooks the fact that the Pacific War resulted from Washington's assertive defense of its perceived Far Eastern interests from Japanese encroachment.
248. As early as March 1948 (in separate letters to his daughter, and to Eleanor Roosevelt), President Harry Truman compared the international situation confronting the United States to that faced by Britain and France in 1938-39. Quoted in Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 160.
249. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld invoked the purported "lessons" of 1930s to attack the George W. Bush administration's critics. In the 1930s, he said: "A sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, the carnage and the destruction of the then-recent memory of World War I could be avoided. It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. Those who warned about a coming crisis (the rise of fascism and Nazism) were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued the fascist threat was exaggerated or was someone else's problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last." Donald Rumsfeld, Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention, 29 August 2007 (as delivered), http://www.defenselink.mil/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1033. Similarly, the Economist attributed the hard-line stance toward Iran taken by President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the 1930s analogy, observing: "Both see jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation as dangers akin to those posed by Hitler in the 1930s. Both consider it their calling to rise Churchill-like to the challenge."
250. "Axis of Feeble," Economist, 13 May 2006, 11. Calling for a "preventive war" against Iran, Norman Podhoretz has explicitly compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler and invoked the ghosts of appeasement and the 1938 Munich crisis to inveigh against seeking a diplomatic accommodation between Washington and Tehran.
251. Norman Podhoretz, "The Case for Bombing Iran," Commentary (June 2007), http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/ viewArticle.html?id=10882.
252. For an example of the neoconservatives' lionization of Churchill, see Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesman, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: The Free Press, 2002).
253. President George W. Bush "idolizes Churchill and keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office." Peter Baker, "A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease," Washington Post, 2 July 2007, A1.
254. Also, see Leon Haadar, "George Winston Bush?" American Conservative 23 October 2006.
255. Indeed, Bush administration officials have admitted as much. As one said, "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." Quoted in Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," New York Times Sunday Magazine, 17 October 2004.