TLIAW: Failed Miserably

Failed Miserably
A UK Political Timeline In A Week-ish
By An American Who Should Know Better​

On one level, continued British resistance after the spring of 1918 seemed strikingly uncharacteristic. It appeared to the casual observer to be the sort of autocratic, jingoistic, irrational, Custerite, “Damn the Torpedoes” that the made more sense to expect from the bombastic regimes of the Entente. In the end though it was not the authoritarian warlords of the houses of Bonaparte, Hohenzollern, and Hapsburg that continued the war, but the newly rechristened Windsors and and their centuries old democratic government. It was not something that seemed a fit in the land of the Glorious Revolution, Gladstone and Disraeli, and and the heart of the world economic system in the City of London.

But on another level, as the world would learn in the decades that followed, perhaps it was the inevitable reaction, and the most British. This was the Britain of Lionheart, a man so blinded in his quest for blood that he attempted to sell his kingdom to the Holy Roman Empire to fund his crusades in the Holy Land and France. Stripped of One Nation reforms to be One Nation at war it had found the old characteristics that had allowed it to send armies and fleets time and again to be decimated in not one but two Hundred Years’ Wars regardless of the cost in men or gold. It was the Britain of Waterloo, and of Peterloo. The world had forgotten in the soft days of the Belle Epoque what Britain was capable of, that they were the nation that could conquer millions subcontinent, and murder thousands upon thousands while crushing its rebels in 1857, or could burn down the Summer Palace, or concentrate the civilians of the Boer Republic.

They were of course, also the nation that had been willing to ignore all the sins of Black Hundreds-Czarist Russia to create the alliance that had helped helped lead Europe to this war in the first place, so perhaps the casual observers should have expected more than they did.

The Royal Navy had been gutted in the past four years. From Otranto to Karmøy, the Battlecruisers of the Fleet had died bravely, and uselessly, parring Franco-German thrusts with wooden decks and young men led to the slaughter.

The British Armies in the Mediterranean were gone too. The Expeditionary Forces with the Turks and the Italians had both ended in disaster, though the surrender of 6 Divisions trapped by the collapse of the Cardona Line at the start of the Spring Campaign that year made the second dramatically worse.

By the time of the Italian Armistice on April 21st, revolution had shaken Russia to its core, brought about the collapse of the Eastern Front and saw the Czar flee to prison in Moscow for his life. Constantinople, whose fall had triggered the war was still in Bulgarian hands, as now was a large portion of Asia Minor. What was left of the British Armies was scattered, in Egypt and Arabia, under siege in Salonica, or the scattered small campaigns of Empire in Africa, India and Indochina.

Casual Observers were certain that the hard nosed Bankers and Aristocrats of Britain would have to see sense, that their cause was hopeless, and that peace was urgently needed. That continued war was nothing short of madness.
But then there was an argument to be made, though it was disproved by events, that the British decision to keep fighting wasn’t pure madness. The Portuguese entry into the war, and the clearing out of the last major German mobile forces in East Africa had freed up troops to be juggled back to Britain or to shore up things in Arabia and Egypt, while these forces had to go the long way round Africa, their eventual arrival would transform the situation in the Home Islands, as would new Conscript forces from India, Canada, and Australia.

While the Battlecruiser Fleets had been virtually wiped out, the remaining battleline were fully armored battleships. In augmentation of this, mass programs of destroyer, submarine, and torpedo boat construction had created a mass fleet which could continue to fight to control the North Sea, Home Waters, and Atlantic Convoy routes.

A newly independent Royal Air Force was nearly entirely concentrated in the Home Islands, while its commanders used ever more powerful engines and airframes to try and develop tactics to help crush landings from the air.

And besides the military forces deployments, and the victories in the far flung theaters of the global conflicts, there was hope emanating from the Government. Lord Kitchener, having skyrocketed to the Prime Ministership in the first eighteen months of the war oversaw a Government of all major parties, supported by varied forces from outside of the traditional Westminster system in the press and in the new political forces manifested by the National and Silver Badge Parties, as well as an ever increasing amount of government control and oversight in industry and agriculture.

And while Kitchener had united most of the nation, and those opponents of the war were ignored by the press and suppressed more and more by ever-new Defense of the Realm (Wartime Security) Acts, it was not just a unity in the face of Armageddon. The Three Kaiser’s Entente was a divided alliance with three egotist Autocrats and Four Governments at its core, every victory in fact had created ever more political troubles between Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. These divisions, further fanned by the propaganda gold that Germany’s mercurial Warlord, seemed not just to straw-grasping England but the world at large, as proof that inevitably Louis Napoleon IV or Franz Ferdinand would declare the victories already gained to be enough, and start the long hoped for peace conference.

As the disasters of spring 1918 gave way to the awkward quiet, interrupted only by bombing raids and siege news, of summer. The British became convinced that Peace with Honor, if not a victory of sorts was at hand. With the destruction of the inevitable invasion the Entente would shatter, Britain would secure gains and avenge the decade-old doom of its Splendid Isolation, and be in a position to recreate a balance of power in Europe. It is easy from our modern perspective to write this goal off as delusional but for the average Briton that year, “Alone” had become a watchword, and victory was close at hand down the road of stiff upper lips and just a few more months of belt tightening and black draped Newspapers.

Historians in the end would view what did occur as inevitable, as it served as confirmation to the predictions of laymen and casual observers. In most ways though, as they always were, these predictions were wrong, and could not imagine either how wrong they would be, or the world-changing chaos that would follow in ever quickening succession.
​

Sub-Lieutenant Patrick Blackett’s hands couldn’t stop shaking as he gave up any pretense of official respect and cool headedness. Even after Karmøy he would have been reprimanded for his slouch, the fact that he wasn’t in fully proper uniform, or the occasional convulsions of his body. At other times the men would have lost respect for him, and the senior officers would have looked on in horror. But the men were no better, and the Royal Marine Captain who had stopped into the radio room for a moment a few minutes ago had looked no better, and been content to offer him no more than a pat on the shoulder and a smoke.

The fires were out, with no more smoke drifting out from the destroyed No. 1 and 2 turrets. Practically every room of sufficient size on the HMS Marlborough were housing the wounded and the half-drowned fellows from what seemed to be half of what was left of the fleet. It had been as one of the junior ratings in the radio room had called it “A bloody shambles, a bloody nightmare, a bloody horror, a bloody…” If there was any consolation for Blackett and the men it was that, for the first time in the war the Fleet had fought decisively. June 8-9th, 1918 was going to do down in History as as one of the grand moments in the history of the world. The greatest existential threat to the United Kingdom had just been swatted down. The Entente invasion of Ireland had been defeated.

For once, he thought to himself, the cost might have been worth it. Because finally, at long last, England was safe. It was the only thing that kept the shaking and the convulsions from becoming things far worse. For once, as the fleet moved from the battle area off the coast of Spike Island back to safe harbor at Scapa Flow, it had really meant something. Though when the total losses, just in ships, had been tallied Blackett had shamelessly wept.

The trite, and gaudy transmission “England expected, and England was not disappointed. - Kitchener” had though been without much thought transcribed and sent to the Captain, before eventually coming back on the address system. Thought he didn’t admit to why he cared so little for the old Warlord’s congratulations, Blackett firmly hoped, his ever-so-secret personal readings aside, that the old man would do the right thing and use the victory as a means for peace. The war, which had started with Blackett as a midshipman had gone on far enough, thank you very much.

They were passing St. David’s Head, late at night when the radios started to come alive.

The fleet was with all due haste to turn around, No ship, regardless of damage was permitted to continue on towards the home port.

Wounded and rescued men were to be evacuated off at the nearest port.

The crippled ships of the Fleet were to return to Scapa Flow.

The wounded and rescued men were to remain on board, no delays permitted.

Fleet to regroup at point off Scilly Isles.

Fleet to dash the entirety of the Channel.

The Fleet to move on their own.

The Fleet to wait for unification of forces with Destroyer and Torpedo Boat Forces.

Messages were garbled by tired men, the code books were rushed through page after page at the fastest of speed. Not all the mistakes were on the Marlborough’s end, double-checks showed. By the time something was cleared up, it had already been contradicted. The Captain was summoned. Blackett’s hands could not stop shaking but he just didn’t care any longer.

It was impossible, there had been too many of the top rated French and German ships. So much transport capacity. At least two French Divisions had been lost on the Cork beaches. Probably another two had been wiped out when the converted yachts and torpedo boats had broken through the screen and made it to the transports.

Oh yes, he was well aware that that hadn’t been the entire Entente Navy, as far as everyone knew at the very least no Austro-Hungarian ships had made it out of the Med since the start of the War. But, it had been the best of their forces available.

My God, he shouted in his own mind, we just sank half of their newest Battleships!

And as his legs buckled and he offered no salute to the old prick who was the man in charge who oozed jingo and had been one of the ones to fall for this trick, it suddenly clicked for him. With the Home Fleet the way it was, with the utter destruction of the Battlecruisers over the past few years, the losses from the blockade, the scattering of fleet units from Egypt and Gibraltar to Nova Scotia and Haiphong, they weren't going to need their most advanced ships anymore, the refurbished outcasts of the first half of the Naval Race would do well enough. Well rested, well armed, and with all four of their turrets working it would be more than enough.

The captain hadn’t even left yet, before Blackett sat down in his chair, and vomited into the bucket that served as the radio rooms ashtray.

It hadn’t been worth it at all.

And neither a sinking voice in the back of his mind declared, would this.

​

Sub-Lieutenant Patrick Blackett couldn’t feel his right leg below the knee anymore. The only reason it was still attached was because no Surgeon could be found to remove what was left of it.

He was, he thought, lucky to have made it this far, it had been dumb luck that had allowed the Marlborough to make it to the Sussex coast, and dumb luck that the old prick of a Captain had been killed as he was addressing the ship, droning on about dying while thinking of England. Whoever had issued the order to turn and run full speed for the shore hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy the results of beaching a British Battleship and ordering its remaining turrets to fire independently while other men were given helmets and what small arms were aboard and told to hold the deck.

They hadn’t been able to do that for long. Landing on Entente-occupied beaches had meant that most of the men on deck quickly fell due to the better trained fire of what appeared to be Bavarian Riflemen and Machine guns in their blue uniforms.

But it had meant that Blackett and what men were left to try could at least make a run for it. Staying aboard would have just meant dying in the flames, and at this point Blackett just wasn’t interested in doing that for Country, Lord Kitchener and King anymore.

After that, a blur. No sleep, ambushes and running battles. A link up with a force of ertzaz Guards Infantry, those conscripts who for appearances sake had taken up the titles of the old regiments after they’d been lost in Turkey the year before. They’d been falling back though, to the North, and so Blackett had gone north. He’d gotten a rifle somewhere, very un-officer like part of him thought. The other part ripped off his insignia of rank, had found an Army overcoat from a dead Corporal, had thought only about getting far enough away from the fighting to be able to work his way back to London, and home.

But eventually the front had found him, a real front, not just a mess of men fighting blindly, amid burning farms and looted or quickly-surrendering towns. And at that point the Colonel who found him wasn’t interested in sending him off to the Navy just yet. And so somehow he’d made it onto the line yesterday. And promptly been wounded by a grenade while trying to lead a random group of men behind a stone wall.

There was no one from the Marlborough at the hospital, he was half-sure he was the only crewman alive, unless someone luckier than he had managed to get captured. There was no one from the navy at all. And as he raised his head to glance down at the festering wound, the bandages that covered it, and the tourniquet he was pretty sure there weren’t any doctors either.
It was high time, he thought to himself, for the war to end. They’d squandered the best chance for a decent peace for the people under the government. If the government now failed to recognize that peace was the only option now, Blackett was quite sure he was going to recognize that the government wasn’t an option worth keeping anymore.

In the distance though, he could still hear the rumble of cannon, much further inland than they had any right to have been.​

In less than two weeks following Captain Alcock’s daring nighttime raid on the Franco-German fleet off Spike Island, the first major invasion of the British Isles since 1066 had seen the nation reach the manic heights of joy and the complete transformation of that to horror and despair as the the greatest defeats of the war struck in quick succession. In under a month it would go even beyond that. Hope that an honorable peace, and perhaps even victory were at hand was obliterated as the southern suburbs of London began to hear the rumble of artillery and the 14th Army was shown to be an ad hoc scratch force of old men and young boys ill equipped for the combat at hand.

Prime Minister the Lord Kitchener's last roll of the dice came on June 20th as the Royal Tank Corps --- that is to say what elements of it were available in Britain --- was shot into the Entente flank near Crawley. For a few hours it appeared that it was possible to simply roll up the entire Franco-German line, with no stopping before the coast of Kent.

But German Anti-Tank Artillery, inevitable breakdowns and disastrous losses amid the infantry and cavalry that moved forward with the RTC, meant that the “Glorious 20th of June” was not followed by an “Even-More Glorious 21st of June”, instead it meant that the Major-General Capper’s tank force simply ceased to exist when the first French troops counterattacked.

With his last bolt shot, Lord Kitchener found himself quickly deposed. The National Government he had led since Arthur Balfour had handed over the reins in 1915, nearly to the man rejected his proposal to garrison London for a siege. With the old Warlord removed from the Prime Ministership and his creation the Ministry of War, the next problem became that all potential figures to lead the government wanted nothing to do with the job, fully aware that seeking an Armistice and pleading for the Americans, or one of the minor powers of Europe to host Peace Negotiations was the only task at hand.

The King, aware of this situation already had a man ready for the task. As Kitchener was removed from office and Jan Smuts was put in charge of the Ministry of War based primarily on his being in London at the time, leadership in the Government was handed to The Marquess of Milford Haven, a former First Sea Lord with nearly fifty years of experience in the Royal Navy. He was of course also cousin of the King. He was also a rather unpopular figure in the country, on account of the fact that he was also Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, or at least had been until the previous year when he’d renounced his German titles and changed the family name to a more anglicized Mountbatten.

This appointment, while laying down much of the foundational work for the myth of “Traitors and Germans” that would pervade the post-war era, the Marquis was just the man the country needed, whether it wanted him or not. His first action being to send instruct Balfour at the foreign ministry to use neutral embassies in London to request a cease fire. When Balfour demurred, his resignation was accepted and never one to waste time, the Foreign Ministry was subsumed under the PM, who dispatched the messages himself.

On June 23rd, Deputy Prime Minister Donald Maclean, having only been given that new title an hour before departing by Army Staff car to the front, signed the Armistice with the Entente forces in the dining room of a hotel at Royal Tunbridge Wells. Of his delegation, only Minister of War Smuts would meet a natural death, mostly due to the benefit of his near immediate departure from Europe following the signing of the Treaty of Potsdam in the following year. Having been signed shortly before noon the Armistice went into effect at midnight. In the following days the immediate price for that ceasefire was paid as German, French, Austro-Hungarian and other nations troops occupied vast stretches of the colonial empires, the entire channel coast, of Britain, and saw the surrender of the entirety of the remnants of the Royal Navy at Kiel.

The Marquis of Milford Haven, ceasefire now in hand would oversee the surrender of his cherished fleet, the withdrawal of the army and would attempt to weather the storm that followed as the Coalition government at once began to collapse and cries for a General Election began to be heard from all corners of the political establishment and from outside. And of course the demands for his German head.​

Milford Haven imagined that his government would be a brief one. Well aware that “Peace With Honor”, the Kitchener goal of defeat without any further costs was no longer an option he hoped to secure what he referred to in his tragically small circle of confidants to be “Peace With Dignity”. To achieve this, first and foremost would require honor, pride, decency, courage and determination, assets that the old Sea Lord had possessed and shown over decades of loyal service to his adopted country but would be found wanting in the nation at large in the days, months and years that would follow.

Ireland in the months preceding the Bulgarian siege of Constantinople had verged on Civil War with the Ulster Volunteers having transformed the political situation by resorting to the organized gun-running of German arms and ammunition, followed at the earliest possible moment by the Irish Volunteers having done the same with French rifles. Balfour had only averted open rebellion by promising the creation of a commission as soon as the war with the Entente came to a conclusion. While there had been grumbling, interspaced with the occasional violent protest and more than a few young men fleeing to Paris to join John MacBride’s Irish Brigade. The Boer Commando was able to raise what came close to an actual brigade. (A rarity in the history of expatriate units fighting for enemy states.) And was able to surround it with an intellectual, ertzaz political clique including the likes of Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and Sir Roger Casement. Nonetheless, its impact in Ireland was surprisingly minimal. Far more Catholics and Protestants were willing to go fight in Anatolia the Italian Alps than were willing to shoot their own brothers and cousins.

The Entente landings on the Irish coast though, while a feint and after its initial purpose was served, intended to be evacuated at the earliest possible moment brought about a transformational change in the politics of the island, which would shatter practically before it could be enunciated, Milford Haven’s hope of presenting a proud, strong, and united Britain for the peace talks.

As word spread across the island that the French and Germans had landed, a few thousand of the Irish Volunteers who had not waited for the cause or gone to France had risen up, creating barricades at village crossroads, liberating bridges and settling old scores. Disorganized, and ill prepared the whole affair in any other context would have ended with a handful of brief skirmishes and a large number of arrests. Instead it brought about full panic the Ulster Volunteers skeleton organization sought to ‘preempt’ the rising and save the island for King and Country, once and for all.

By foot, by horse, by car and train, the paramilitaries streamed into Catholic communities in Ulster and towards the south. The British Army in Ireland engaged with Entente forces in the weeks that followed proved unable to spare anyone to deal with the orgy of killings and revenge killings, a the Irish Constabulary was stretched past the breaking point trying to maintain order. Casement and MacBride sought an audience with Napoleon IV at his command headquarters in Calais but could not secure even a single transport to bring the Brigade or even themselves alone to Ireland. For two weeks the two volunteer forces, consisting nearly entirely of old men, young boys, women, and in the case of the ulstermen discharged servicemen and amid their southern counterparts republican radicals played a game of war leaving nothing but murder, rape, arson, and robbery in their path. The police either were unable or unwilling to separate the factions and maintain order. Only in Dublin did things go differently as a third force took the lead, and the day after Armistice day would transform the situation outright.

When James Connolly and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington had called up the Irish Citizen Army they had been very clear to the men and women involved, the goal was to maintain the peace. This had inevitably caused trouble as the government in Dublin Castle quite legitimately was interested in making war, but unlike their Irish Volunteer counterparts the ICA wasn’t interested in taking potshots against British Army troops, just in stopping pogroms sweeping across the island. The docks were in the hands of the government and the troops could make it to the railroad stations towards the south unopposed, and the city didn’t burn as neighborhoods in Belfast were, and so, it was treated as a problem to be dealt with later. Connolly insisting he had no interest in turning the city over to the imperialists of France and Germany at least offered some consolation.

June 24th though would make many a civil servant or military officer regret that though, when, on the steps of the General Post Office Sheehy-Skeffington read the Declaration of the Republic, severing all ties with the United Kingdom and declaring an All-Ireland Socialist State. With the military and police forces of the city stripped to a bare minimum, and with French and German naval forces preventing resupply and reinforcement and with their army at Cork moving to disarm their opponents, the government in London rapidly lost any means of controlling the situation. By the time Casement and MacBride and the first battalion of their troops landed at Cork a week later the Irish Volunteer leadership on the island had already accepted the Republic in Dublin as a fait accompli and they were forced to partake, like Lenin and Trotsky in Russia to accept a lesser position in a Popular Front, against the Unionist equivalent of Lavr Kornilov and his Black Hundreds. Unlike the Social Revolutionary-Labor Front in Russia though, the Irish Republic would at least be able to draw on the support of the Entente rather than fight against it.

Milford Haven would request almost at once for permission to deploy troops across the Irish Sea to fight the revolt but inevitably, neither France nor Germany was interested in supporting him. Austria-Hungary expressed interest in the maintenance of a united Britain, for its own political reasons, but having no more than a token presence in the invasion force was politely told to be quiet. Peace would not return to Ireland for nearly two years.​