With Friends Like these...the French again.

The Entente Cordiale was conceived 100 years ago, but now, says Simon Heffer, France and Britain are further apart than ever

One hundred years ago, on 1 May 1903, King Edward VII arrived in Paris on the last stop of a European tour. It had already sparked some controversy: His Majesty’s Protestant subjects were not happy that he had dropped in at the Vatican to see the 93-year-old Pope, Leo XIII. What came next, however, was to be far more radical, and would have unimaginably deep consequences.

Not even the King’s most senior ministers had more than an inkling at the time of what he was up to. Irritated by his nephew the Kaiser, and depressed at the surge of German power in Europe, the King had come to Paris to bury the idea that France was Britain’s traditional enemy. He was determined to sow the seeds of an alliance between the two nations; what would come to be known as the Entente Cordiale was conceived during his visit.

A century later, when relations between Britain and France are probably worse than at any time since Waterloo, the old Entente is strained. But feelings between the two nations were little better when King Edward made his initiative. His first official biographer, Sir Sidney Lee, reported that the crowds that turned out to witness the King’s arrival in Paris were merely ‘sullenly respectful’. One of the King’s private secretaries, Fritz Ponsonby, drew the monarch’s attention to some booing from the bystanders. ‘The French don’t like us,’ he observed. ‘Why should they?’ the King replied.

However, during his stay the King used every opportunity to plead for a new friendship between the two nations and their peoples. Without recourse to a spin doctor, he managed in under three days to turn public opinion around and to present himself as France’s best friend in the world. He announced at a banquet in his honour, ‘Our great desire is that we may march together in the path of civilisation and peace.’ When he left, the crowds were cheering themselves hoarse.

While Mr Balfour, his prime minister, and Lord Lansdowne, his foreign secretary, watched more or less from the sidelines, the King sought to capitalise on this triumph. He invited Emile Loubet, the French president, to London two months later, where there were talks both at head- of-state and at ministerial level about formalising the new friendship. His ministers, schooled in Lord Salisbury’s doctrine of splendid isolation, had not wanted the King to go near Paris. Now that he had, there was nothing they could do to stop the momentum of this new alliance. Over the next few months, French and British diplomats discussed and removed every possible cause of Anglo–French grievance, not least in various colonial disputes. A treaty of formal alliance was signed by the countries’ foreign ministers on 8 April 1904. Now, officially, Britain and France were the best of friends.

The Entente survived throughout that century, though its cordiality was at times questionable. The terms of the treaty left Britain with no choice but to join in the Great War, though the status of Britain as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality would have seen to our participation anyway. More complex is the question of whether the Kaiser would have felt so determined to blow up the Balkan crisis of the summer of 1914 into a Europe-wide conflict if he had not, to use his own words, felt ‘encircled’ by Britain, France and Russia. Russia and France had long been close, and in 1908 the alliance had become a Triple Entente after a meeting on the Baltic between King Edward and his kinsman Tsar Nicholas II. The Kaiser certainly felt that he was being hemmed in, and that the Entente’s agenda was headed by the desire to contain Germany. From what we know of King Edward’s private thoughts, the Kaiser was right. Whether the war that resulted would have happened without this alliance must remain a matter for speculation, or for books of counterfactual history.

Although there were political and military strains between the British and the French during the Great War, and certain doubts about the French level of vindictiveness against Germany at Versailles, the serious difficulties did not emerge until after 1939. The Hoare–Laval pact of December 1935 had given a clear indication of how the French mind was working as Hitler became more threatening. Mussolini, Hitler’s ally, had just invaded Abyssinia. Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, brokered a secret deal with Sir Samuel Hoare, the British foreign secretary, to give Mussolini a slice of Abyssinia in order to keep the Axis happy. There was outrage when this leaked out, and Hoare had to resign. The key events of 1940, with the French capitulation, the refusal to defend Paris and the agreement to set up the Vichy state, certainly soured British regard for elements of the French governing class, though not at that stage for France and the French.

One of those who, like the British, was furious that his country had not fought to the last man seemed determined to take out his anger on Britain. Charles de Gaulle, in London for most of the war, made himself a thorough nuisance to Churchill and to the rest of his British hosts; he was quickly assessed as troublesome and unreliable. Once France was free again, the British added rank ingratitude to their list of charges against de Gaulle. In August 1944 he famously told the people of Paris that they had liberated themselves, tactlessly ignoring the British and American corpses that lay all the way along the road from Cherbourg. His simmering resentment towards this country would come to the boil in the winter of 1962–63, when negotiations were under way to admit this country to what was then called the Common Market. He ended those proceedings with his famous ‘non’, a veto on our joining that was to postpone the event for ten years, until after his death.

Since 1973 our relations with France have been seen through the prism of the shared European experience. Thus the partnership has been theoretically closer and more formalised than at any time during the century of the Entente. Paradoxically, or perhaps coincidentally, the squabbling and the downright unfriendly acts have become worse and more plentiful.

One of the clichés about Europe is that the British abide pedantically by the letter of every treaty and regulation enforced on them, while the French break with impunity those that do not suit them or their commercial interests. There has been a long list over the years. Lorryloads of sheep imported from Wales were hijacked and destroyed, sparking a compensation battle that was never satisfactorily resolved. In contravention of rights of free access through the ports, blockades sparked by internal French political troubles had a devastating effect on British hauliers and exporters; again, the French regarded demands for compensation as eccentric. More recently, orders from Brussels to allow British beef to be imported and sold in France were flagrantly disregarded. A heavy per diem fine was imposed on the French government, which subsequently negotiated an exemption from paying it. Even before the Iraq war brought Britain and France into conflict, it was already clear that the two countries had very distinct and different views about life in general, and that the ‘partnership’ in Europe had its more nominal aspects.

Now, 100 years on from King Edward’s great coup, the Anglo–French relationship is not what he would have wanted. Following the Iraq war, we might not be so brutal with the French as our American cousins are — Mr Bush said only the other day that President Chirac would not be invited to the ranch for the foreseeable future — but differences are considerable. A war of liberation that was concluded with relatively little bloodshed within a month ought to have left Britain, as one of its advocates, with the moral high ground. Instead, it is we who, in a display of extreme magnanimity in victory, seem to be keen to prove to the French (among other dissident European partners) that we should be friends. The old ties, however much they are strained, seem unbreakable. But is that for the good?

For years, the Americans were reluctant to share any intelligence with the British that might in turn be shared with the French through our common institutions, because they knew that the French would pass it on to potential enemies. If a story published last weekend is true, then the French were doing precisely that with the Iraqis. Indeed, several stories in the last few days have suggested that there was full-scale collusion between the French and Iraqi security services, in direct opposition to the interests of the majority of France’s European partners. The Americans, meanwhile, have discovered evidence of widespread sanctions-busting by the French, confirming the notion that France’s objections to a war were rooted in economic self-interest rather than in any form of higher principle. This philosophy was evident, too, in France’s determination to allow the tyrant Robert Mugabe to attend an international summit on Africa in France earlier this year.

One starts to suspect not just that the French have no ethical standards, but that they never enjoy parading their turpitude more than when those most offended are the English. The shared values of 1903 seem long since to have gone. The two countries are no longer separated just by 22 miles of water, but by two rapidly diverging approaches to international morality. In a perverse way, though, the French are to be envied. Their fanatical devotion to promoting their self-interest is something many Britons wish was emulated by our government. If the honouring of any international treaty, or playing by the rules of any club to which France happens to belong, threatens to compromise French wallets or French lives, then the treaty is dishonoured or the rules broken.

Attack being the best form of defence, France then seeks to divert attention from its low behaviour by screaming blue murder at anyone else guilty of minor infractions. It is a rather feminine stratagem but, like most such things, it seems to work. That, perhaps, is why Mr Blair is so keen to kiss and make up with France. Unlike America, he might argue, we are not a superpower, and are not separated from France by 3,500 miles. We do not have the luxury of being on bad terms with our nearest neighbour. Therefore, showing inordinate enthusiasm for the French-driven proposals for a European constitution, or hinting that joining the euro is now very much on the cards, or simply talking more sweetly about the United Nations are all means of showing the French that we do, after all, have much common ground.

Unfortunately, much that has happened in recent years, and more particularly in recent months, shows that the belief in the shared Anglo–French march towards ‘civilisation’ is simply wishful thinking. We cannot help having France just 22 miles away. We cannot, for the moment, help being in ‘partnership’ with them in the EU. But we can make it clear that we find the way in which they do business offensive, that the absence of a moral compass from their foreign policy is degrading, and that the arrangement we have with them in future will be one of necessity rather than of great love and common purpose. To pretend to the contrary would be weak of us, and would do nothing except convince France that she can continue her venal conduct in perpetuity. If such deception is to be the basis of a second century of Entente, then it is simply not worth having.

From "The Collapse Of British Power", Correlli Barnett, ISBN 0 86299 074 2.
Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd.

1. The Audit Of War.

At 5:35 a.m. (German time) on Friday, 10 May 1940, amid fresh-smelling dawn mists that presaged another fine spring day, the German advanced guards crossed the western frontiers of the Reich, and opened the battle for the mastery of Europe. Behind the advanced guards 137 divisions were on the move, cramming the roads back to the Rhine and beyond with tanks, trucks and guns; with marching infantry; with horses and wagons.

In London the news of the German onslaught not only caught the British Government utterly by surprise (*1), but in the middle of a major political crisis. On 7 and 8 May there had taken place in the House of Commons a debate on the course of the current campaign in Norway; a debate arising from the ignominious evacuation of the Allied forces from the central part of that country. The debate had transcended the narrow topic of Allied bumbling in this secondary theatre, and had become a general inquest on Neville Chamberlain's conduct of the war. It had concluded with a decisive rejection of Chamberlain, his government and all that Chamberlain had stood for, in peace as well as in war. In the vote on an Opposition motion of censure, the Government's majority of about 240 sank to only 81; 41 Government supporters voted with Labour, and some 60 more abstained. A national coalition instead of a party administration had now become inevitable. But under whose leadership?

During the next day, 9 May, therefore, when Hitler was fixing zero hour for the attack in the west for the following dawn, a British ministerial crisis had embarked on its measured and traditional course - meetings of politicians in Downing street, frenzied talk and rumour in the clubs and in the purlieus of the House of Commons, delicate enquiries as to who would be prepared to serve under whom. At the end of the day, however, when the German forces received a signal bearing the single code-word Danzig (the executive order for the offensive), Chamberlain was still the British Prime Minister. He had gone to bed awaiting the Labour leaders' reply on the morrow, after they had conferred with their colleagues at the Labour Party's Annual Conference then taking place at Bournemouth, as to whether the Labour Party would be willing to serve under him in a national coalition.

During the morning of 10 May, while the sun climbed a blue sky and a torrent of violence by land and from the air swept into the Low Countries, the British ministerial crisis went on. At eleven o'clock Chamberlain, Lord Halifax (Foreign Secretary) and Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) conferred in a quiet and lofty room in No. 10 Downing Street. Beyond the tall windows, towards Buckingham Palace, St. James's Park was a shimmer of water and new foliage. Two hundred miles away, in Dutch cities which yesterday had been no less tranquil in the sunshine, the howl of the dive-bomber was preceding the collapse of homes into rubble and the transformation of human beings into carcasses. For Chamberlain - a 'man of peace', as he himself had once said, 'to the depths of my soul' - it had been the outbreak of war itself on 3 September 1939 which had marked the moment of personal failure, bringing down in ruins all his once-confident hopes of appeasing Europe. Now, however, he had to acknowledge to his two colleagues that his career as Prime Minister was at an end. For the Labour leaders had that morning refused to serve under him. Lord Halifax then expressed his feeling that he himself could not adequately lead a national coalition from the House of Lords '...by the time he had finished', Churchill wrote in his war memoirs, 'it was clear the duty would fall on me - had in fact fallen to me.' (*2)

Churchill told Chamberlain that he would make no touch with the Opposition parties until the king had commissioned him to form a government. With that, the conversation lapsed into a brief informal chat. Then Churchill went back to his office. Chamberlain, who had been once so overweeningly self-assured, was left, a drawn and defeated old man, to tell his Cabinet of his resignation. (*3)

Towards six o'clock that evening, while British people were beginning to set off on their Whitsun holiday, and the Dutch and Belgians were fighting ever more desperately for their lives, Churchill was driven along the Mall from the Admiralty to Buckingham Palace. The interview with George VI was short and friendly, distinguished by English humour and ease rather than by a portentous awareness of a moment of destiny. Churchill returned to the Admiralty with the king's comission to form a government.

Between seven and eight o'clock, Clement Attlee, the Leader of the Labour Party, and his colleague Arthur Greenwood called on Churchill and accepted his invitation to join a national coalition. At about ten o'clock Churchill sent the king the names of the first five members of his was cabinet; intimation that he had in fact been successful in forming a government.

Thus, by a dramatically neat coincidence of a kind rare in History, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on the very day when the Second World War ceased to smoulder on a slow fuse, and exploded.

--

Chamberlain had fallen not because of his policy, but his leadership. British grand strategy remained unchanged by Churchill's accession to power. The key to this strategy, laid down in April 1939 and confirmed by the Allied Supreme War Council in September 1939, was faith in the French army. It was assumed that the French army would hold the Western Front while Germany was enfeebled by blockade, and while Britain and her empire created their own mass army of fifty-five divisions. [PD: compare with 137 divisions deployed by Germany on Western front alone.] This process was not expected to be completed until the end of 1941. (*4) If Fascist Italy entered the war during this defensive period of preparation, some cheap victories might be won over her, it was thought, by the superior Allied sea and land forces in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Finally, once the Allies had at last girded up their full economic and military strength, the offensive would be taken against Germany. (*5)

If the British Cabinet and its professional advisers could rest their grand strategy so securely on the French alliance and the French army, it was not surprising that the British public, for its part, saw the war as a kind of replay of 1914-18, where in good time great British armies would take the offensive alongside the French on the Western Front and achieve final victory. Meanwhile it was expected that any German onslaught in the west would be baulked by the impregnable Maginot Line, whose wonders and strength had been assiduously peddled through the winter and spring of the 'phoney' war. After all, General Gamelin, the present French Commander-in-Chief, was the man who had been at Marshal Joffre's side in 1914, his Chief of Staff and mastermind, during the defeat of the Schlieffen Plan at the Battle of the Marne. And the French army itself, the victor of 1918, was the finest in Europe. English newspapers and the new illustrated war magazines constantly carried features and pictures displaying the French army's tough, brilliant leaders and its splended equipment - heavy tanks; huge railway guns; self-propelled medium artillery. As recently as 19 April 1940, in the magazine The War, for example, J.F.C. Fuller, the famous military critic and historian, was assuring his readers that: 'There is nothing flashy about the modern French fighting machine. It realises that war is a grim business and goes into action determined to inflict losses upon its opponent heavier than it suffers itself.' (*6)

Churchill himself, in a broadcast on 30 March 1940, had both expressed and reinforced the comfortable British sense of time in hand; the total and tranquil dependence on the shelter afforded by the French army:

"We do not conceal from ourselves that trials and tribulations lie before us far beyond anything we have so far undergone, and we know that supreme exertions will be required from the British and French nations.

We know all this, but we are entitled to recognise the basic facts.

Our resources and our man-power, once they are fully developed, massively exceed those of the enemy.

The British and French races together amount to 110 millions, against less than 70 millions of Germans...Through our command of the sea, which is becoming continually more complete, the resources of the whole world are to a very large extent open to us and, surveying the whole scene, we may rightly feel a good and sober assurance that if we do our best we shall not fail."

At the beginning of May 1940 the British Chiefs of Staff reviewed grand strategy in the light of the German invasion of Norway and Denmark. On 9 May, the eve of the German offensive in the west, their paper was discussed and approved by a Cabinet meeting attended by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. While the Chiefs of Staff noted that Germany could deploy 160 field divisions in the west against 104 Allied field divisions, nevertheless - granted adequate air defence - they considered that France should be reasonably secure, even with this disparity, against land attacks by both Germany and Italy. (*8) [PD: Incredibly complacent. Remember that the Germans had the advantage of surprise, and that of being able to mass their forces to strike at the enemy's weakest point].

It was therefore with confident anticipation over the Whitsun weekend of 1940 that the new British Government and the British people awaited the coming collision of the Allied and German armies in the Low Countries.

But instead the British were to be jerked from complacency into catastrophe with the upsetting rapidity of first-class passengers descending from the captain's dinner-table into a lifeboat, upon learning that the bottom has just been removed from the liner's hull by an unforeseen iceberg.

Up to 14 May the campaign seemed to open not unfavourably. Greeted with flowers, cheers and kisses, the French army and the British Expeditionary Force (*9) advanced into Belgium. A great encounter battle opened in the Belgian plain in front of Brussels, and the Allied forces appeared successfully to be blocking what was taken to be the main German effort.

Then the scene changed with the swiftness of a revolving stage. Though unreported in the British newspapers until 15 May, German panzer forces had already smashed the French front further to the south, along the Meuse between Namur and Sedan. On 15 May, the Dutch surrendered, overwhelmed despite their inundations. That same day the French Prime Minister informed the British Prime Minister that, because of the collapse of the French front on the Meuse, the road to Paris lay open. Instead the Germans headed due west, and at a speed which seemed unbelievable. On 20 May the panzer spearheads reached the Channel coast, cutting off the Allied army group in Belgium from the main body of the French army. On 3 June the destruction of this army group was consummated when the last of some 330,000 survivors, with no more than their personal weapons, were evacuated from Dunkirk to England. On 5 June, 104 German divisions fell upon 49 weak French divisions and one British division holding a line from the mouth of the Somme to the Maginot Line at Malmédy. On 11 June Italy entered the war on Germany's side. On 14 June Paris fell. The exhausted and outnumbered French army finally disintegrated. On 16 June Pétain's Government asked the Germans for an armistice. On 22 June the armistice was signed, and on 25 June the French forces ceased to fight. Northern France and the Atlantic coast fell into German occupation; central and southern France, under Pétain's government, into a neutrality tinged with hostility towards France's late ally, Great Britain.

In the course of just six weeks the Western Front, the French army and the French alliance had all ceased to exist - and with them the very foundations of British grand strategy.

--

The consequences of the fall of France were far more immediate and dangerous than the mere conversion into waste paper of existing British plans for eventually winning the war. Britain and the British Empire now stood alone and exposed to the united aggressive force of Germany, Italy, and, all too probably, of Japan as well.

In the summer of 1940 therefore the assets and liabilities of British power were subjected to the searching audit of war. There was, in the first place, the direct threat offered by the victorious German army (some 160 divisions strong) and the Luftwaffe to the United Kingdom, which was at once the empire's industrial base, principal reservoir of 'white' population, and main source of troops. This was the danger of which the British public was most conscious at the time during that summer of pride, defiance and exaltation. Although in numbers the British land forces in the United Kingdom in June 1940 amounted to the equivalent of twenty-six British divisions and one Canadian (*10), there was only enough equipment after the débâcle of Dunkirk to arm the equivalent of two divisions. (*11) It was therefore the Chiefs of Staff's sombre conclusion that, 'should the enemy succeed in establishing a force, with its vehicles, firmly ashore, the army in the United Kingdom, which is very short of equipment, has not got the offensive power to drive it out'. (*12) [PD: Note the number of clauses in that sentence! It is indicative of the comfortable bureaucratic mindset of complacent generals.] Whether the navy could defeat an invasion force while at sea depended on its power to operate in the face of heavy air attacks. We could not count, write the Chiefs of Staff, on operating surface forces in the southern part of the North Sea and the English Channel at all - the very seas that the Germans must be expected to try to cross. (*13) 'The crux of the matter,' wrote the Chiefs of Staff in reply to a direct question from the Prime Minister as to whether the United Kingdom would be able to fight on, 'is air superiority.' (*14)

The air defence of Great Britain had been the first care of pre-war rearmament programmes. In organisation and modern equipment (rader, excellent aircraft), Fighter Command presented a single exception to the general inadequacy and unreadiness. Even so, Fighter Command was expected to be heavily outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. It was therefore far from certain that the Royal Air Force could prevent the Germans from achieving air superiority over the Channel and southern England. And if Fighter Command lost the battle, the invasion and conquest of the heart of the empire would surely follow.

If the safety of the United Kingdom itself turned on a narrow enough margin, the global state of British power was even more precarious.

To secure imperial sea communications to India via the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, and, more recently, to secure the oilfields of the Persian Gulf, a colossal but rickety structure of British involvement had been erected in the Middle East in the course of the previous century and a half - colonies, protectorates, bases, mandates, treaties - a structure militarily represented in 1940 by Middle East command. This Command encompassed nine countries and parts of two continents, an area some seven thousand miles by two thousand miles stretching from Cyprus to the Sudan and British Somaliland, from Iraq to the western frontier of Egypt. With the French forces in North Africa and Syria now lapsed into neutrality, the task of fighting Italy in the Mediterranean and Middle East devolved entirely on the British Empire. In the Italian colonies of Libya and East Africa there were some 18 divisions; and the Libyan force could draw on the main strength of the Italian army at home of some 60 divisions. (*15). To defend the immense Middle East theatre against this formidable threat, the British could only deploy the unformed equivalent of 2 divisions, 2 brigade-groups, an armoured division well below establishment, 64 field-guns and a camel corps of 500 men.

The Mediterranean sea-route, in order to secure which the British involvement in the Middle East had been incurred, had always been recognised to be vulnerable, lying as it did through the Sicilian narrows and exposed to Italian surface forces and air attack. The French Mediterranean fellet in the western basin and the British Mediterranean fleet in the eastern basin (based on Alexandria) together had just about balanced the Italian battle fleet. (*16) Now, with the French neutral, the balance swung heavily against the English; and this affected not only British seapower in the Mediterranean itself, but right across the world. (*17)

For it meant that a powerful squadron had to be spared from the Home fleet to replace in some measure the French in the Western Mediterranean. This dangerously reduced the strength available to protect the Atlantic convoy routes against attack by raiding German battleships. At the same time the loss of the French fleet also placed the British Empire in the Far East and Pacific in jeopardy, should Japan decide to exploit the present British plight. Australia and New Zealand, nations too small in population and too extensive of coastline to defend themselves either by land or sea, utterly depended for their security on English seapower - on an English fleet being sent in good time to the naval base of Singapore. The defence of Malaya, Borneo, Burma and, in the last resort, India too, against the Japanese equally depended on there being an English fleet at Singapore strong enough to fight the Japanese battlefleet. In fact the Royal Navy had entered the war in 1939 far too small to meet all the requirements of the defence of a maritime empire. It had been therefore intended that, should Japan attack in the Far East, the British fleet in the Mediterranean would sail via the Suez Canal to Singapore, while the French navy remained to hold the Italian fleet in check. This eastwards move of the English Mediterranean fleet had now become impossible except at the cost of abandoning the Mediterranean. The English Prime Minister therefore informed the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand on 8 August 1940 that he did not propose to make this sacrifice simply because Japan attacked in the Far East, but only if she 'set about invading Australia or New Zealand on a large scale" (*18).

The British Empire in South-East Asia, being thus deprived of all hope of its protective fleet, could now only be defended on land and by air-power. But in the summer of 1940 there were in Malaya (the hinterland of Singapore and the strategic key to the whole region) only 3 brigades instead of the 3 divisions believed to be essential; 88 obsolescent aircraft instead of the 336 modern ones considered the minimum adequate force. (*19) Not a single division could be spared for Malaya either by India or by Great Britain. (*20) At the same time the French collapse meant that French Indo-China was no longer a defended buffer between Malaya and the Japanese forces in China, but a potential staging post.

After the fall of France there was therefore an immense disparity between the naval, air and land forces required for the defence of the British Empire against its actual and potential enemies, and those in fact available. The disparity was compounded - especially in the Far East - by a lack of joint policy-making organs, joint command organisations, and joint head-quarters, staffs and intelligence deparments. The British Empire was not only ill-armed, but ill-organised.

The existence of the British Empire loaded Britain with enormous responsibilities - war with Italy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, risk of war with Japan in the Far East - and this at a time when Britain herself was in peril. However the empire's military and economic contribution to British power was by no means adequate compensation. The dominions - Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa = had a combined 'white' population of over 20,000,000. (*21) The population of the United Kingdom was just under 50,000,000. (*22) Yet the combined navies of the dominions numbered no more than 11 cruisers and 20 destroyers or escorts, as against the 12 capital ships, 7 aircraft carriers, 50 cruisers, 94 fleet destroyers and 87 escorts in the Royal Navy (*23) - hardly a proportion of 2 : 5. Nor was the dominion contribution to the imperial field army, as compared with that of the United Kingdom, in the proportion of 2 : 5. Of the divisions noted as 'existing' (*24) on 1 August 1940 only five were from the dominions, while thirty-four were from the United Kingdom.

India, often supposed to be a mighty buttress of imperial military strength, contributed three field divisions, a third of whose personnel was in any case British. The Indian contribution to the imperial field army merely balanced the British troops locked up in defending India and maintaining its internal security. (*25)

Thus in the summer crisis of 1940 the British Empire proved strategically a net liability to Britain rather than an asset, and a heavy liability at that.

Nor did the empire's economic and industrial resources afford adequate compensation for this strategic burden. In the first place, the natural resources of the British Empire, although rich in all kinds of strategic raw material, remained in 1940 unevenly and inadequately exploited to a degree best illustrated by their later wartime development. (*26) The British had preferred to obtain many commodities from Europe rather than from the empire, in order to save shipping. As a result of the loss of Scandinavia and the collapse of France, Britain now found herself cut off from European supplies, while her own imperial resources were in many cases still only potential for the future - if there was to be a future. (*27)

Secondly, the dominions and India, far from adding to the industrial strength of the empire, were almost wholly dependent on British industry for the equipment of their armed forces. (*28)

And it was here, after the fall of France, in the impact of headlong imperial re-armament and military expansion on British industrial resources, that there lay a danger to British independence just as mortal as that posed by the German invasion forces across the Channel : just as mortal a danger, but certain instead of possible; as certain as the onset of an incurable disease. For while Britain had faced the peril of invasion many times before in her history, an entirely new peril presented itself in the summer of 1940, in that the mere continuance of the war for another two years would in itself destroy British independence; even in default of further enemy victories, even despite British victories. It was a situation that England had never before had to face since she first emerged as a great power during the wars of William III and Marlborough. For whereas the struggle against Louis XIV had been nourished out of buoyant and expanding trade, and whereas the war against Napoleon had rested solidly on British technical leadership in the Industrial Revolution and on bounding productivity, in 1940 Britain was too small, too old-fashioned an industrial base even to equip her own manpower, let alone equip the whole imperial military effort; let alone maintain also a sufficient volume of exports to ensure the country's solvency. (*29) Unlike Nazi Germany, which could wage war out of the resources of her own indsutry and the skills of her own technology, or out of the extra resources of countries her armies could conquer, Britain had to turn to American industry and American technology. This dependence dated from the very beginnings of British re-armament in the mid-1930s. (*30)

The dependence had become greater and greater. In peacetime Britain had relied largely on American machines to equip new British factories for producing aircraft, tanks, motor-transport, aero-engines and weapons. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, Britain, like France, had tried to repair in haste the consequences of late re-armament and industrial weakness by buying from America the aircraft, motor-transport, aero-engines and weapons themselves, as well as machine tools. At the same time, owing to the inadequacy of the British steel industry, Britain had to turn to America even for steel, the very foundation of an advanced industrial economy in peace or in war. (*31)

Although up to the fall of France some attempt was made to keep British spending in the United States within bounds, to relate it to British reserves of hold and dollars and to the capability of British exports in earning dollars, England was even at that time faced with the inevitability of ultimate bankruptcy and economic collapse. In February 1940 Lord Stamp, the economic expert, in a 'Survey of the National Resources in relation to our War Effort', (*32) calculated that in the first year of war Britain's adverse trade balance would be £400 million, while a Treasury estimate gave the same figure as the deficit for the sterling area as a whole. If England drew on her gold and dollar reserves to the extent of £150 million, this still left a gap of £250 million. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer explained to the Cabinet, other sources - loans from empire countries, sales of British overseas assets - were unlikely to yield more than £100 million. For although overseas investments amounted to a capital value of above £3,000 million, their nature - Argentine Railways, subsidiaries of British companies - meant that they were 'not easily realisable assets'. (*33) Therefore all that could be expected from requisitioning British overseas investments and selling them for dollars was £200 million or £250 million. Since British gold reserves were only £450 million, it followed that, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote in February 1940, 'the sum total of our resources is thus not more than £700,000,000 ... It is obvious that we are in danger of our gold reserves being exhausted at a rate that will render us incapable of waging war if it is prolonged.' (*34)

And the Treasury then reckoned that, if carefully husbanded, British resources could last at the current rate of dollar expenditure no longer than two years. (*35)

If this was the sombre and inescapable consequence of even the cautious policies of the 'phoney' war, when the burden of the conflict was still shared by France, what must be the effects of the headlong expansion of British imperial forces decided upon by the new British Government and its professional advisers in response to the stock-taking of imperial weakness in the summer of 1940?

What had been a mere general intention to create an army of fifty-five divisions by 1942, ten of them armoured, now became a firm commitment. (*36) At the same time the Royal Air Force was to be vastly expanded, especially in bombers, with monthly production running at 2,782 aircraft by December 1941. (*37) These programmes, competing as they did for similar productive resources and equipment, demanded immense extra quantities of American machine tools and steel. (*38) Whereas, for example, it had been estimated in April 1940 that Britain would buy £12.6 million of iron and steel from the United States during the year, in July the estimated requirement had gone up to £100 million.

Yet British production itself, however increased by lavish purchases of American machines and metals, could not alone meet the speed and scale of the proposed expansion of the armed forces of the British Empire. Therefore, on top of the immensely greater dollar expenditure on American industrial equipment, the aftermath of the fall of France saw the British also turn to the United States for huge additional supplies of aircraft, aero-engines, motor-transport and war equipment of all kinds - long-term contracts as well as stop-gap aid. (*39)

The loss of Europe through German conquest itself further weakened the British economy, not only cutting off one of Britain's most important markets, but also a principal source of essential raw materials - iron ore from France and Spain, steel from France and the Low Countries, Norwegian wood-pulp and pyrites, French bauxite (for aluminium), French fertilisers, Dutch and Belgian flax. (*40)

These losses threw England into even greater dependence on North American supplies of raw material, which rose from 8 per cent of British imports of raw materials in 1939 to 24 per cent in 1940; (*41) yet another charge on the scanty British resources of gold and dollars.

On 21 August 1940 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a Memorandum to the Cabinet, (*42) forecast that the total cost of all British purchases in North America - munitions, raw materials, industrial equipment - over the next twelve months would be $3,200 million. Yet England's total resources in foreign exchange and American securities, now amounted to only £490 million. British holdings in American securities of some £200 million in paper value, were, the Chancellor wrote, 'virtually unsaleable at present and could only be slowly realised', while Britain's South American assets stood at 'rubbish prices'. (*43) As a consequence, England, far from remaining solvent until the end of 1941 at least (as had been forecast in February 1940), would exhaust her gold and dollar reserves by December 1940. In a word, Britain would be bankrupt : incapable of waging war or of sustaining her national life. In that summer of heroic attitudes, therefore, when the English scanned the skies for the Luftwaffe and the sea for the German army, and thrilled to Churchillian rhetoric on the wireless, England's existence as an independent, self-sustaining power was reckoned by the Government to have just four months to run.

The predicament which Churchill's Government faced after the fall of France was unique in English history : a war without an ally against two great powers, probably three; an ill-defended, ill-organised, ill-developed and immensely vulnerable empire; an inadequate industrial machine and insufficient national wealth. Yet only sixty years earlier Britain had been the richest country in the world; she had been 'the Workshop pf the World'. Only twenty-two years earlier she had emerged victorious from the Great War powerful in herself, buttressed by great allies, and with her one great enemy lying smashed in defeat.

The plight of the summer of 1940 therefore marked the consummation of an astonishing decline in British fortunes. The British invested their feebleness and isolation with a romantic glamour - they saw themselves as latter-day Spartans, under their own Leonidas, holding the pass for the civilised world. In fact it was a sorry and contemptible plight for a great power, and it derived neither from bad luck, nor from the failures of others. It had been brought down upon the British by themselves.

(*1) Cf. the Chiefs of Staff's Appreciation of 4 May 1940, approved by the Cabinet on 9 May, which considered that a German air attack on Great Britain was more probable than a ground offensive in Western Europe. CAB 66/7, WP(40)145. Public Record Office; Cabinet Papers.

(*2) Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London, Cassell 1964), Vol. II, p. 235.

(*3) CAB 65/7, 116(40)1.

(*4) CAB 65/1, 23(39)1.

(*5) Stage 1 Report of the Anglo-French Staff Conversations, April 1939, CAB 29/159, AEC7; Meeting of the Supreme War Council, 12 September 1939, CAB 66/1, WP(39)38.

(*6) The War, No. 26 (19 April 1940), p. 775.

(*7) Quoted in War Illustrated, Vol. 2, No. 32 (12 April 1940), p. 372.

(*8) CAB 66/7, WP(40)145.

(*9) The British contributed 10 divisions to the battle for Europe as against the French contribution of 94 divisions from a smaller population.

(*10) J. R. M. Butler, Grand Strategy (London, HMSO 1954), Vol. II, p.279.

(*11) M. M. Postan, British Was Production (London, HMSO 1952), p. 117.

(*12) COS Appreciation of 25 May 1940, CAB 66/7, WP(40)168.

(*13) Ibid.

(*14) CAB 66/7, WP(40)169, 26 May 1940.

(*15) Butler, p.297.

(*16) S. W. Roskill, The War At Sea (London, HMSO 1961), Vol. I, pp. 60-1, 294.

(*17) See COS Appreciation of 25 May 1940, CAB 66/7, WP(40)168.

(*18) Quoted in Butler, p. 334.

(*19) S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan (London, HMSO 1957), Vol. I, p.35.

(*20) Ibid.

(*21) Statesman's Year Book 1940.

(*22) Ibid.

(*23) Roskill, Vol. I, Appendix E, pp. 586-7.

(*24) 'Existing' was a cryptic official expression which did not necessarily imply that a formation was wholly or even partially equipped, trained or organised or in any sense fit for the field.

(*25) 39,100 British troops, according to the War Office Progress Report for May 1940, CAB 68/6, WP(R)(40)145.

(*26) See J. Hurstfield, The Control Of Raw Materials (London, HMSO 1953), pp. 156, 163-4, 168-9, especially Table 32, and note.

(*27) Ibid. pp. 155-7.

(*28) W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, British War Economy (London, HMSO 1953), Table p. 373, figures for Sept.-Dec. 1939 and 1940. See also Potsan, p.229.

(*29) See William Hornby, Factories And Plant (London, HMSO 1958), p. 34; Hancock and Gowing pp. 107-8, 112, 114-15, 118-19.

(*30) Hornby, pp. 302, 305-11, 319 and the whole of chapter XI. See also the Proceedings and Memoranda of the Defence Policy and Requirements Committee of the Cabinet, CAB 16/136-44.

(*31) Hancock and Gowing, pp. 112-14.

(*32) CAB 65/5, 40(40)1.

(*33) Ibid.

(*34) Hancock and Gowing, p. 116.

(*35) Ibid.

(*36) Butler, p. 255; Postan, p. 128.

(*37) Postan, p. 124.

(*38) Hornby, pp. 329-31; Postan, pp. 156, 229-30; Hancock and Gowing, p. 206.

(*39) Hancock and Gowing, p. 224; Postan, pp. 230-2; H. Duncan Hall, North American Supply (London, HMSO 1955), chs. V and VI.

(*40) Hurstfield, pp. 154-9.

(*41) Ibid. pp. 159-63, especially Table 29, p. 161.

(*42) CAB 66/11, WP 40(40)324.

(*43) Ibid.

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