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below is the complete introduction which
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interested in the subject. It provides an
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1988, it may not be reproduced without the
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THE MILLSTONE
British Naval Policy in the Mediterranean,
1900-1914, the Commitment to France and
British Intervention in the War
Introduction
On the morning of Wednesday, 20 December
1905, Major General James Grierson mounted
his charger, settled his large frame in the
saddle and commenced his constitutional ride
in the crisp winter air of Hyde Park. As he
trotted along Rotten Row another military
figure on horseback came into view. The
dapper, almost dandified, rider whose
delicate features were accentuated by an
ornate, waxed moustache was soon revealed to
be Major Victor Jacques Marie Huguet, the
French Military Attaché. It was, so Grierson
claimed a few weeks later, a chance
encounter. At most other times, Grierson’s
word might have been accepted; however, with
Germany engaged in a periodic bout of
sabre-rattling, and with the threat of a
Franco-German war over Morocco pervading the
diplomatic atmosphere, the meeting was
anything but a coincidence. Grierson, the
Director of Military Operations at the War
Office, had had a brilliant career,
including a spell as Military Attaché in
Berlin. Untypically, he spoke French ‘with
ease and fluency,’ and, in the opinion of
General Sir John French, ‘he used to
astonish French soldiers by his intimate
knowledge of the history of their regiments,
which was far in excess of what they knew
themselves.’ Feeling completely at ease in
Grierson’s company, Huguet expressed the
anxiety felt in Paris that Germany may soon
attack. However, when Huguet then inquired
about the current British war organization,
Grierson alleged that he did no more than
refer Huguet ‘to the Army List, which shows
[the war organization] and actually gives
the composition on mobilisation of a
division which does not exist in peace.’
Huguet, apparently satisfied by this less
than revealing answer, then inquired if the
General Staff ‘had ever considered
operations in Belgium’, to which Grierson
replied that he himself had worked out such
a plan of operations the previous spring,
though only as a ‘strategical exercise’. And
that, maintained Grierson, to the best of
his recollection, ‘was all that passed
between us’.
Grierson’s memory, which also put the date
of the chance meeting ‘about the 16th or
18th December’, was conveniently faulty. As
the French reports show, the Wednesday
encounter was the first of two meetings and,
far from simply referring Huguet to the Army
List, Grierson in fact confirmed that up to
120,000 British troops would be available
for Continental operations, although the
force lacked the most up-to-date field
artillery. Grierson also dismissed the
Admiralty’s proposed plan of operations in
the region of Schleswig-Holstein in the
event of war as ridiculous. Encouraged by
what he had heard, Huguet arranged to meet
Grierson on the following day. At this
subsequent meeting Grierson, effusive and
indiscreet in equal measure, informed Huguet
of the latest General Staff study which
envisaged reinforcing the available British
force with two divisions currently serving
in the Mediterranean. Tactically, Grierson
favoured operating in Belgium; however, when
pressed, he admitted that the British force
could land at Calais where it would ‘unite
with the French forces, of whom it would,
for example, form the left wing.’ Grierson
then added a cautionary provision, which
would become a familiar litany to the
French: the General Staff deliberations
should not be interpreted as prejudicing the
decision which the British Government might
take at any given moment.
This exchange was neatly to encapsulate the
sorry history of Anglo-French naval and
military planning during the following eight
years. Plans — detailed plans — could be
formulated; plans which would allow of no
last-minute tinkering, and of no last-minute
faint-heartedness. But these plans were not
to be put into operation until a political
decision had been made. Events on the
battlefield would have to await Cabinet
deliberations in London. However, with the
lack of overt Cabinet scrutiny before the
war (neither the Foreign Secretary, Sir
Edward Grey, nor the pre-war Liberal Prime
Ministers, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith,
showed any interest in considerations of
strategy) assumptions tended to be made —
assumptions which could never be admitted.
It was assumed by the General Staff that the
British Army would operate in Northern
France or Belgium; but this could never be
admitted. It was assumed that, if the
British withdrew their battleships from the
Mediterranean at the same time as the France
transferred theirs into the Mediterranean,
that France would undertake to guard British
interests in return for an implied guarantee
of her Northern Coasts; but this could never
be admitted. It was assumed that, so long as
France was not the aggressor, British
support would be forthcoming in a
Continental War; but this could never be
admitted. No wonder Grierson’s memory failed
him.
This need to disguise the actual extent of
Anglo-French military and naval co-operation
would be evident throughout the pre-war
period. As a result of Grierson’s activities
(and a simultaneous, though independent,
series of meetings instigated by the
Secretary of the Committee of Imperial
Defence) Grey, the incoming Foreign
Secretary following the fall of the
Conservative administration, acquiesced in
January 1906 in the commencement of
officially recognized though informal
Anglo-French staff talks. It has always been
accepted that Grey then left the military
and the naval planners to get on, with a
minimum of political interference; this was
simply accomplished by virtue of Grey’s own
lack of interest and by his deliberate
action in not informing the majority of his
Cabinet colleagues that the secret talks had
commenced. Such an interpretation has been
emphasized by Grey’s own comments. When, in
April 1911, to protect his own position Grey
was forced to acknowledge that the ‘military
experts then convened [in January 1906]’, he
added, ‘What they settled I never knew’.
There is evidence however that, in so far as
military planning was concerned, Grey knew
more of what was being decided than he
admitted to (with regard to naval planning
Grey’s genuine ignorance was more a product
of the fact that there was no naval planning
to speak of, merely a succession of
half-baked schemes).
While Grierson and subsequent Directors of
Military Operations, particularly Sir Henry
Wilson, further integrated military strategy
with their French counterparts, despite the
official go-ahead from Grey in January 1906,
Anglo-French naval co-ordination and
strategic planning remained chaotic. The
blame for this can be placed squarely at the
door of that most colourful of First Sea
Lords, Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher. An abysmal
strategist and a born centralizer, Fisher’s
undoubted gifts in other areas were balanced
by his refusal to countenance the formation
of a naval war staff. Similarly, the saga of
joint war planning by the Admiralty and War
Office from 1905 till 1914 exhibits a
depressingly marked failure to co-operate.
In the early years of the century, while the
Army was tarnished by its performance in the
Boer War, the Navy, overwhelmingly strong
and with no threat yet to appear on the
horizon, held sway in the nascent Defence
Committee. Within a few years the position
was reversed. While the War Office adapted
to new realities, the Admiralty under Fisher
remained locked into a narrow range of
strategic options whose common denominator
was their impractical, if not suicidal,
nature. During 1905 the Admiralty and War
Office could not agree on a joint plan of
operations in a future war. When the War
Office version prevailed, Fisher took his
bat home. Then, in 1908, he thoroughly
confused the French with his invitation for
them to assume overall control in the
Mediterranean. Fisher’s excesses resulted in
his opinions being discarded, even when he
had a legitimate grievance: ‘Are we or are
we not going to send a British Army to fight
on the Continent as quite distinct and apart
from coastal raids and seizures of islands,
etcetera, which the Navy dominate?’ he
complained in 1909. The accusation was a
valid one; it went unanswered just the same.
Unfortunately, Fisher’s faults were also
evident in his successor, Admiral Sir Arthur
Wilson.
So long as the German challenge remained a
threat on paper (and Fisher was fortunate
that the launch of Dreadnought severely
disrupted the German ship-building
programme) there could be no real winner
between the Admiralty and General Staff
whenever strategic options were debated,
although greater weight was given to the
General Staff appraisal. By 1910, with
Fisher’s departure and the German naval
programme now a reality, it had come to a
showdown. With the coming of the next major
crisis, the Admirals and the Generals would
have to fight it out until one of them won.
The date for the bout was 23 August 1911;
the setting, a meeting of the Committee of
Imperial Defence to which only the inner
core of the Cabinet were invited. Both
protagonists were called Wilson — General
Sir Henry Wilson and Admiral Sir Arthur
Wilson. There the similarity ended. The one
fluent, confident, a master of his brief
with a detailed and convincing answer for
every question; the other hesitant,
inarticulate, unsure of himself in
cross-examination. By the time the meeting
had finished late that afternoon the naval
view of how a future war would be fought had
been comprehensively demolished. Admiral
Wilson had gone down for the count. From
that moment onward, despite some Cabinet
ructions by the Radical wing of the Liberal
party, tacit approval was given to the
scheme by which a minimum of four of the six
regular divisions of the British Army would
operate on the left wing of the French Army.
Subsequently, any proper discussion of the
momentous new strategy would become
submerged in the minutiae of troop
movements, railway timetables, shipping
requirements. The Continental commitment,
for that was what it was, like the debates
in the first winter of the war leading to
the Dardanelles Campaign, had developed a
momentum of its own. Grey acknowledged his
powerlessness to control the situation: it
‘would create consternation’, he declared
soon after the C.I.D. meeting, ‘if we
forbade our military experts to converse
with the French. No doubt these
conversations and our speeches have given an
expectation of support. I do not see how
that can be helped.’ Nevertheless, it
remains the case that the Continental
policy, committing British troops to fight
in Europe, was decided upon in August 1911
by a small inner circle of the Cabinet who
knew precisely what it would entail.
Another signpost on the road to war was
Churchill’s transfer to the Admiralty late
in 1911. In response to the proposed new
German Navy Law, one of Churchill’s first
acts after settling in to the position he
coveted was to propose, in February 1912,
the withdrawal of the Mediterranean
battleships. The German initiative had, in
Churchill’s view, rendered ‘the formation of
an additional Battle Squadron in Home waters
necessary. We cannot afford to keep fully
commissioned battleships abroad during these
years of tension,’ Churchill argued, as the
first days of war ‘would require the maximum
immediate development of naval power in the
North Sea and the Channel.’ The proposal by
the new First Lord of the Admiralty was a
further indication of British naval
overstretch in the face of new challenges
and proof of Admiral Sir John Fisher’s
dictum, that ‘We cannot have everything or
be strong everywhere’. With the German
building programme continuing apace, and
with dreadnoughts being constructed in Italy
and Austria-Hungary, British command of the
Mediterranean could not be guaranteed by the
force of elderly battleships stationed at
Malta in 1912. The French meanwhile realized
that their original plan, to base the main
part of their fleet on the Atlantic coast so
as the defeat Germany first before then
entering the Mediterranean was no longer
tenable. They could, naturally, have reacted
to altered strategic conditions by
unilaterally moving their fleet into the
Mediterranean; much better, however, if the
move could be made at such a time that it
appeared contingent upon the planned British
withdrawal of the Mediterranean.
Although Churchill’s initial scheme, to
denude the Mediterranean almost completely,
was over-ruled and a compromise force of
British battle-cruisers was to be stationed
at Malta from 1912, it was still open to the
French to argue, as they did successfully in
1914, that the transfer of their battle
squadrons was dependent upon the British
evacuation and would not have been taken
without the presumption of British
assistance to protect the now denuded
Atlantic and Channel coasts of France. In
London the Cabinet fought against this
presumption. As Churchill continually
insisted, ‘The present [naval] dispositions
represent the best arrangements that either
power can make independently. It is not true
that the French are occupying the
Mediterranean to oblige us. They cannot be
effective in both theatres and they resolve
to be supreme in one.’ Ultimately, this
battle of words was lost. Semantics had been
overtaken by reality. The situation created
by the German, Italian and Austro-Hungarian
naval programmes, and the failure to reach
an accommodation with Berlin over the
limitation of warship building, gave Britain
no option other than to denude the
Mediterranean. And this, despite the
specific injunction contained in the
exchange of letters between Grey and Paul
Cambon, the French Ambassador, in November
1912, was generally regarded as part of a
reciprocal arrangement with the French.
The heat which had built up during Sunday 2
August 1914 succeeded eventually in setting
off a series of heavy downpours, one of
which resulted in breaking up the meeting of
Socialists in Trafalgar Square. The cause
for which they had congregated was already a
lost one. Earlier that afternoon, the
Foreign Secretary had informed Paul Cambon,
of the decision which had just been arrived
at by, or rather, had been forced upon, the
British Cabinet after days of rancorous
debate. Despite not yet being at war with
Germany, Grey declared that if the German
fleet ‘came into the Channel or entered the
North Sea … with the object of attacking the
French coasts or the French navy and of
harassing French merchant shipping, the
British fleet would intervene … in such a
way that from that moment Great Britain and
Germany would be in a state of war.’ It was
to be Grey’s defence, both at the time and
after, that this assurance, ‘did not bind us
to go to war with Germany unless the German
Fleet took the action indicated, but it did
give a security to France that would enable
her to settle the disposition of her own
Mediterranean Fleet.’ The disposition of the
Mediterranean Fleet had, in fact, been
settled in 1912. This was clearly just
another example of Grey’s strategic
ignorance — or was it? It continued to suit
Grey to deny any awareness of what had been
decided by the military and naval planners.
Grey would also claim that the German
Government was made aware of the pledge; in
fact, Grey was determined to conceal this
fact until the afternoon of Monday, 3
August. For Cambon, when he was informed of
the pledge, the feeling was similar to that
which would be experienced by Churchill
twenty-seven years later when news was
brought to him of the Japanese attack at
Pearl Harbor. ‘So we had won after all!’ was
Churchill’s immediate response in December
1941. In August 1914 Cambon also knew
precisely what Grey’s declaration meant:
‘The game was won’, he subsequently stated.
‘A great country does not make war by
halves.’
What led to the giving of this pledge? Was
there an obligation on Britain’s part, or
merely a commitment, moral or otherwise, to
intervene in certain circumstances? Grey was
to insist in his memoirs that the promise to
the French ‘did not pledge us to war.’ The
Foreign Secretary was, however, wrong — once
the promise was made, as Cambon appreciated,
British entry into the war was certain.
Despite this, a group within the Cabinet
would then spend the remainder of the
afternoon and evening of Sunday 2 August
desperately searching for an issue around
which they could group, and which would
provide a more convenient excuse for British
entry into the war than one based upon a
moral commitment to France, of which the
public was generally unaware; that excuse
was to be Belgian neutrality. However,
despite protestations to the contrary, the
issue of Belgian neutrality was a blind: it
was used to assuage consciences and to
prevent the formation of a coalition
Government but it was not crucial to the
British decision for intervention.
In what follows I will attempt to show that
two circumstances and one overriding fact
guaranteed British entry in the war in
August 1914: the two circumstances were the
secret Anglo-French military and naval
conversations, and the naval position in the
Mediterranean. The overriding fact was the
consideration of British interests. The
problem of contending with the superior
numbers of the German Army was not going to
be solved immediately by French planners
merely by the dispatch of a British
Expeditionary Force. Yet the French realized
that if one British soldier set foot on
French soil, others would follow. Indeed, so
confident were they that there was no
attempt made to conceal the intention. For
example, General Sir Henry Wilson spent the
afternoon of 14 January 1910 at the École
Supérieure de Guerre being lectured by
General Foch on the functioning of the
college. With the lecture completed, Wilson
and Foch then ‘talked at great length of our
combined action in Belgium’ in the event of
a war with Germany. ‘What’, Wilson inquired
of Foch, ‘would you say was the smallest
British military force that would be of an
practical assistance to you in the event of
a contest such as we have been considering?’
Foch did not hesitate: ‘One single private
soldier’, he replied instantly, ‘and we
would take good care that he was killed.’
Furthermore, with British military support
assured, France could then count upon the
full might of the Royal Navy.
With British command of the Mediterranean in
doubt, the French, similarly over-extended,
were unable to protect both their Atlantic
and Mediterranean coastlines. From strategic
necessity came political expediency. The
convergence of British and French interests,
which had commenced with the signing of the
Entente Cordiale in 1904, had continued
gradually until 1911, after which it
accelerated. By 1914 British and French
interests were inseparable. Although,
between 1906 and 1911, the main push for
closer Anglo-French military co-operation
was provided by the French (Cambon would
become a familiar sight at the Foreign
Office in times of crisis), a change was
evident from 1911 following the most serious
of the many pre-war crises, when a German
gunboat was dispatched to the sleepy African
port of Agadir. In 1906, in the aftermath of
the First Moroccan Crisis, the German naval
challenge, which had not yet made any
serious inroads, was dealt a huge blow by
the launch of HMS Dreadnought. ‘We can
protect ourselves of course,’ Grey declared
emphatically at the time, ‘for we are more
supreme at sea than we have ever been.’ By
1911, and the Second Moroccan Crisis, the
Cabinet had already weathered a first class
naval scare when, in 1909, it was thought,
erroneously, that Germany would achieve
parity with the Royal Navy in dreadnoughts
within a matter of years. ‘Splendid
isolation’ was no longer a feasible option.
The consistent theme running through the
deliberations in London in the wake of the
Agadir crisis was fear of French weakness
and how this would impact upon the British
position. This would not have mattered so
much had the Royal Navy maintained its
earlier lead over the German High Seas
Fleet. Following the very real scare, the
conclusion to be drawn from the 1911 crisis
was obvious to some: the Entente had
outlived its usefulness; it was time to
replace it with an alliance. But the Cabinet
could not bring itself to accept this
conclusion; heads remained buried in the
sand.
When war erupted on the Continent in the
summer of 1914 the Cabinet suddenly had to
ask itself some searching questions —
questions which should have been posed years
previously. Was there at the very least on
the British side a moral commitment to
France? If so, could the Cabinet have
refused to honour it? Did this commitment
(whether moral or not) entail an obligation?
Was the unwritten pledge to France to be the
sole determinant of British intervention in
the war or was the consideration of British
interests to be paramount? Did the two in
fact coincide? As the great Continental
armies mobilized, the Cabinet deliberated,
at once destroying Henry Wilson’s scheme for
simultaneous Anglo-French mobilization. To
the Cabinet debates must be added some
further, more speculative, queries:
Realistically, could Britain have remained
out of the war? If the commitment had been
formalized, and replaced by a specific
obligation, would the same decisions have
been taken in the last week of July 1914?
Was the outcome of the British refusal to
conduct military conversations openly with
the French a lack of British influence upon
French war planning, with the result that
the disastrous French Plan XVII went
unchallenged? Could the Cabinet have
prevented Britain’s entry into the war or,
with the unrelenting pressure of ‘events’,
could they have done no more than to prevent
the formation of a coalition Government?
What bearing did operational orders issued
unilaterally by Churchill and the Admiralty
in the final days of peace have on Cabinet
deliberations?
But the questions do not end there — how had
this situation arisen in the first place?
Symptomatic of the Liberal administration
from 1906 to 1914 was its ambivalent
attitude, with certain key exceptions
(principally Churchill and Haldane), to the
overall issue of defence. This same attitude
explains in part Grey’s hesitancy in
divulging the opening of Anglo-French
military conversations. In the political
culture of the day, the General Staff and
Admiralty were given a free hand — too free
a hand — in the belief that they knew best.
Exacerbating this, in so far as the
Admiralty was concerned, was the genuine
sense of awe in which Fisher was held. This
allowed his malign influence in the question
of a Naval War Staff and his refusal to
co-operate with the War Office on joint
planning to go unchecked. In view of
Fisher’s early pronouncements in favour of a
Naval War Staff, what explains his
subsequent antipathy? Fisher’s legacy was to
be a distinctly unhelpful one. With serious
naval war planning virtually non-existent,
the strategic impetus shifted by default to
the War Office. Would the General Staff have
won the battle in the C.I.D. on 23 August
1911 quite so easily had the First Sea Lords
been Fisher since 1904 and then Wilson since
1910? These faults could have been put right
following Churchill’s transfer to the
Admiralty in 1911; however, Churchill had
faults of his own.
Naval policy, which could have been
simplified if a formal Anglo-French
convention had been concluded, was instead
complicated by the conditional nature of
joint planning, by the emergence of new
challenges, and by the financial priorities
of the Liberal administration. The response
was to be decidedly ad hoc, so that the
Government reacted to events and not in
anticipation of them — this helps to explain
the numerous defence scares which punctuated
the political scene. Furthermore, without a
Naval War Staff before 1912, and then with
an emasculated one until the outbreak of
war, there was no systematic approach to the
problem of overstretch. So, was the
stationing of the battle cruisers at Malta
after 1912 an inspired compromise or an
admission that these ships had no part to
play in the North Sea? Was the 1909 German
dreadnought scare a ploy to prod an
administration perceived as financially
stringent and intent on diverting funds to
social causes? Were the Anglo-German naval
talks of 1912 bound to fail in the face of
German and British suspicion and French
unease and pressure? What was the rationale
behind the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought
building programme? Was Churchill correct in
his assertion that the French and British
moves into and out of the Mediterranean were
made independently of each other? What
effect did the German spy in the Russian
Embassy in London have on naval planning in
Berlin? Was there, as Nicholas Lambert
asserts, a secret policy of ‘substitution’
in place at the outbreak of the war by which
dreadnought construction would give way to
an increased number of submarines?
Indeed, Lambert goes further, and argues the
case for a ‘major revision of our
understanding of pre-1914 British naval
policy.’ Basing this finding on his own
research and that of Jon Sumida, Lambert
claims that ‘the strategic thought of
Britain’s naval leadership has been
fundamentally misrepresented. In addition, a
reappraisal of naval thinking is almost
certain to produce significant changes in
the understanding of British defense policy
before the First World War. There must be
serious doubts over not only the accuracy of
the currently accepted historical narrative
but also the methodology used to produce
it.’ Was the substitution policy, if it can
be dignified by that name, a genuine shift
in tactics or merely a possible reaction to
British dreadnought preponderance in the
North Sea? Is Lambert’s contention supported
by the evidence? Although he used the excuse
of increased Italian and Austrian building
to help justify an increase in the Naval
Estimates, what was Churchill’s own view of
the Mediterranean situation? If answers can
be provided to these questions, it may then
be possible to decide whether British
interests in the Mediterranean were capable
of being safeguarded adequately, or whether,
by virtue of the obligations it entailed and
the threats posed elsewhere, Britain’s
continuing presence in the Middle Sea was,
in the words of a noted nineteenth writer on
naval affairs, a ‘Millstone Round the Neck
of England’.
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