The Anglo-Saxon Social Model
- Thread starter Rattigan
- Start date
The Labour Movement, 1885-1916
Keeping the Red Flag Flying: The Edwardian Labour Movement
Kier Hardie - a titanic, if unrepresentative, figure in early Labour history
While the controversy around the Conservative campaign took up a large amount of publicity at the time and attention from historians since then, it was perhaps the achievement of the Labour Party which was the most important development in the election of 1916. With the party more than doubling its parliamentary representation from 40 to 84 seats, it was firmly cemented as a major third force in British politics. Ramsay MacDonald, the party’s leader since 1911, had attracted some criticism from his own party for his firm stance that the UK should stay out of the war in 1913 but was seen to have been largely vindicated by events since then, further cementing his place as one of the leading intellectual figures of the Edwardian left.
Despite the organisation’s importance in subsequent political developments, the origins of Labour were oddly badly recorded and many of the facts remain in slight doubt. The origins seem to have begun with a series of meetings between trades union representatives and the leaders of the Liberals over the winter of 1885-86. In the midst of the Home Rule crisis roiling the country, it appears that some amongst the Liberal leadership thought that the trades unions could be persuaded to take a more explicit stance in favour of constitutional reform in return for closer involvement with the Liberals. However, agreement could not be reached and a special Trades Union Congress in February 1887 adopted a proposal to sponsor individual parliamentary candidates by way of paying for their campaigns. The subsequent ‘Liberal-Labour’ grouping returned 8 MPs in 1890 and 9 in 1895 but they all primarily caucused with the Liberals rather than being the voices of the trades unions.* Thus, in 1897, another Congress resolved to take things one step further by sponsoring their own candidates under their own banner. The so-called ‘Labour Representation Committee’ returned 2 MPs at the 1898 ‘Khaki Election’, a qualified success which persuaded other left wing organisations, notably the paternalistic Fabian Society and the utopian Social Democratic Federation, to agree to join the trades unions in 1899 to form the Labour Movement (although naming conventions mean that it is most often, then and now, called the Labour Party). The most notable absence from the Movement’s founding was the Marxist grouping called the Independent Labour Party, which attended the congress but left midway through.
When the election of 1904-05 came around, Labour was well prepared and made gains of 27 seats, taking particular advantage of the Conservative collapse in London and Dublin. Particularly notable new MPs included the prominent Fabians Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, Edward Pease, Hubert Bland, Sydney Olivier and George Bernard Shaw, leading one wag in ‘Vanity Fair’ to describe Labour as “the parliamentary wing of the London School of Economics.” Although Keir Hardie, a committed and ideological socialist, was chosen as leader of the parliamentary party, he found the duties of leadership trying and himself further from the mainstream of his MPs. He quit the role in 1906 to concentrate on a variety of individual campaigns. Instead, the leadership devolved on to Arthur Henderson.
Henderson was a committed gradualist and trades unionist and Labour’s ideology concentrated on a unification of the two strands of thought. All the while, the Movement built up its organisation around the country. At the elections of 1910 and 1916, Labour successfully increased its grip on urban constituencies, particularly London, Cardiff and Dublin. Although a class analysis was inevitably an important vector of Labour’s critique of Edwardian society and lessening inequality a central focus of their policy proposals, class warfare, as such, never dominated Labour politics in the way that it did amongst European socialists or American progressives. Instead, the Labour leadership devoted most of its attention to the development of powerful state institutions, building on community groups, trades unions and what would nowadays be called civil society. With this emphasis on the evolution of the state, the early Labour Movement thus owed as much to a kind of Darwinism as it did to Marxism or more traditional socialism. While the specific politics were radical, the Movement also fitted closely into the Edwardian governing tradition, focusing on intellectual discussion and lawmaking and less on agitation.
* They are all listed in the Liberal column in previous updates covering these elections.
Kier Hardie - a titanic, if unrepresentative, figure in early Labour history
While the controversy around the Conservative campaign took up a large amount of publicity at the time and attention from historians since then, it was perhaps the achievement of the Labour Party which was the most important development in the election of 1916. With the party more than doubling its parliamentary representation from 40 to 84 seats, it was firmly cemented as a major third force in British politics. Ramsay MacDonald, the party’s leader since 1911, had attracted some criticism from his own party for his firm stance that the UK should stay out of the war in 1913 but was seen to have been largely vindicated by events since then, further cementing his place as one of the leading intellectual figures of the Edwardian left.
Despite the organisation’s importance in subsequent political developments, the origins of Labour were oddly badly recorded and many of the facts remain in slight doubt. The origins seem to have begun with a series of meetings between trades union representatives and the leaders of the Liberals over the winter of 1885-86. In the midst of the Home Rule crisis roiling the country, it appears that some amongst the Liberal leadership thought that the trades unions could be persuaded to take a more explicit stance in favour of constitutional reform in return for closer involvement with the Liberals. However, agreement could not be reached and a special Trades Union Congress in February 1887 adopted a proposal to sponsor individual parliamentary candidates by way of paying for their campaigns. The subsequent ‘Liberal-Labour’ grouping returned 8 MPs in 1890 and 9 in 1895 but they all primarily caucused with the Liberals rather than being the voices of the trades unions.* Thus, in 1897, another Congress resolved to take things one step further by sponsoring their own candidates under their own banner. The so-called ‘Labour Representation Committee’ returned 2 MPs at the 1898 ‘Khaki Election’, a qualified success which persuaded other left wing organisations, notably the paternalistic Fabian Society and the utopian Social Democratic Federation, to agree to join the trades unions in 1899 to form the Labour Movement (although naming conventions mean that it is most often, then and now, called the Labour Party). The most notable absence from the Movement’s founding was the Marxist grouping called the Independent Labour Party, which attended the congress but left midway through.
When the election of 1904-05 came around, Labour was well prepared and made gains of 27 seats, taking particular advantage of the Conservative collapse in London and Dublin. Particularly notable new MPs included the prominent Fabians Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, Edward Pease, Hubert Bland, Sydney Olivier and George Bernard Shaw, leading one wag in ‘Vanity Fair’ to describe Labour as “the parliamentary wing of the London School of Economics.” Although Keir Hardie, a committed and ideological socialist, was chosen as leader of the parliamentary party, he found the duties of leadership trying and himself further from the mainstream of his MPs. He quit the role in 1906 to concentrate on a variety of individual campaigns. Instead, the leadership devolved on to Arthur Henderson.
Henderson was a committed gradualist and trades unionist and Labour’s ideology concentrated on a unification of the two strands of thought. All the while, the Movement built up its organisation around the country. At the elections of 1910 and 1916, Labour successfully increased its grip on urban constituencies, particularly London, Cardiff and Dublin. Although a class analysis was inevitably an important vector of Labour’s critique of Edwardian society and lessening inequality a central focus of their policy proposals, class warfare, as such, never dominated Labour politics in the way that it did amongst European socialists or American progressives. Instead, the Labour leadership devoted most of its attention to the development of powerful state institutions, building on community groups, trades unions and what would nowadays be called civil society. With this emphasis on the evolution of the state, the early Labour Movement thus owed as much to a kind of Darwinism as it did to Marxism or more traditional socialism. While the specific politics were radical, the Movement also fitted closely into the Edwardian governing tradition, focusing on intellectual discussion and lawmaking and less on agitation.
* They are all listed in the Liberal column in previous updates covering these elections.
British Foreign Policy, 1913-1916
Perfidious Albion: British Foreign Policy, 1913-1916
The Robbers of the World - a German cartoon satirising British diplomatic policy
Although the UK had stayed out of the war, this did not mean that she was uninvolved in global affairs: far from it. In fact, Lloyd George early on regarded Britain as a potential mediator in the war and he and Haldane made repeated attempts to prod the German, French and American governments to enter discussions of peace terms, usually on the basis of status quo ante bellum. In January 1914, Edward Grey was persuaded to return to the frontbench as Under Secretary in the Foreign Office in order to balance out the pro-German sympathies of Haldane. Between them, Haldane and Grey spent almost all of 1914 and 1915 in Germany, France or the United States on various formal and informal diplomatic missions. These missions all failed basically for the reason that both Grey and Haldane were trusted by one side but not the other. Nevertheless, these diplomatic missions did serve a number of wider purposes, not least of which was to increase British international prestige in the face of the continued embarrassment about the diplomatic contortions over Belgian neutrality. Furthermore, the close personal relationship which formed between Grey and the US Secretary of State Edward M. House went some way to repairing Anglo-American relations, which had grown increasingly strained over Britain’s perceived failure to back Roosevelt over going to war in 1913.
At the same time, developments on the Caucuses Front were watched closely from London, with diplomats and generals alive to anything which could threaten the security of the passage to India through the Middle East. In 1914 and 1915, the various armies of the Dominions conducted full and amalgamated military training exercises. In 1915, the Indian Army was fully mobilized in response to the perceived threat of the Armenian Uprising to the neutrality of Persia. Although this move was perceived globally as a flex of the British imperial muscles, it in fact caused a minor scandal at home because the ‘threat’ to Persia was perceived in London as completely absurd and resulted, ultimately, in the recall of the Viceroy, Lord Reading.
In May 1916, a more overt issue regarding the route to India appeared in the form of an uprising in the Arabian Peninsula. Under the leadership of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, and the command of his son, Faisal, Arab guerillas captured Medina and Mecca in May, following up with the capture of Tabuk in June, bringing the whole of the Hejaz under their control. Although the uprising was portrayed as coming completely out of the blue (and, for the Ottoman authorities, it may have done), it was in fact the culmination of a series of carefully managed diplomatic negotiations. Since the Young Turk Revolution in 1906, the various governments in Istanbul had grown increasingly pro-Turkish in their attitudes. This had had a number of obvious effects in the Balkans and the Caucuses, including stimulating the Armenian Uprising and boosting the Balkan League’s claim to be the only guarantors of the safety of the Orthodox community. However, less remarked upon at the time was the effect in Arabia, where local rulers began to feel more alienated from the government in Istanbul. Of particular concern was the future of the Caliphate, which had been under the governance of the Ottomans since 1517 but, given their more pro-Turkish bent, many Arabs felt that the Caliphate was beginning to be a specifically Turkish vehicle rather than speaking to the entire Muslim community (as it was, in theory, supposed to).
In this context Lord Cromer, now aged 73 and in his 31st year of administering Egypt in one form or another, decided to embark on a little bit of freelance diplomacy. Starting in 1914, Cromer entered into secret correspondence with Hussein where he indicated that the UK would be willing to provide recognition of an Arab nation that included the Hejaz and other adjacent territories (excepting, of course, the British client kingdoms in the Persian Gulf) as well as approval for the proclamation of an Arab Caliphate of Islam. Although Cromer stopped short of promising military support for such a venture, on 31 March 1916, Emir Abdullah, Hussein’s son, chaired a meeting of Arab tribal leaders in which he proclaimed Hussein to be the King of the Arabs and the true Caliph of Islam.
As with Lord Reading’s mobilization a year earlier, the government in London was less than pleased by the actions of its men on the ground, not least of all because it threatened to break Britain’s neutrality policy. Cromer was recalled from Cairo to London (where he would die quietly the following year) and replaced by Sir Joshua Milne Cheetham. Sir Joshua was an old hand in the colonial civil service and managed the transition smoothly, ensuring that the secret communications, firstly, did not leak out to the wider public and, secondly, assured Hussein that the general tone of them at least had not changed. The British regarded the Hashemites (as Hussain’s family were called) as a better bet to control the route to India than the Ottomans and money was secretly funneled to support them, on the (tenuous) condition that it was not used outside Arabia.
The Ottomans certainly suspected that the British were behind this but were powerless to do anything without the say-so of their German allies, who refused to take steps which might lead to Britain joining the war in Europe.
The Robbers of the World - a German cartoon satirising British diplomatic policy
Although the UK had stayed out of the war, this did not mean that she was uninvolved in global affairs: far from it. In fact, Lloyd George early on regarded Britain as a potential mediator in the war and he and Haldane made repeated attempts to prod the German, French and American governments to enter discussions of peace terms, usually on the basis of status quo ante bellum. In January 1914, Edward Grey was persuaded to return to the frontbench as Under Secretary in the Foreign Office in order to balance out the pro-German sympathies of Haldane. Between them, Haldane and Grey spent almost all of 1914 and 1915 in Germany, France or the United States on various formal and informal diplomatic missions. These missions all failed basically for the reason that both Grey and Haldane were trusted by one side but not the other. Nevertheless, these diplomatic missions did serve a number of wider purposes, not least of which was to increase British international prestige in the face of the continued embarrassment about the diplomatic contortions over Belgian neutrality. Furthermore, the close personal relationship which formed between Grey and the US Secretary of State Edward M. House went some way to repairing Anglo-American relations, which had grown increasingly strained over Britain’s perceived failure to back Roosevelt over going to war in 1913.
At the same time, developments on the Caucuses Front were watched closely from London, with diplomats and generals alive to anything which could threaten the security of the passage to India through the Middle East. In 1914 and 1915, the various armies of the Dominions conducted full and amalgamated military training exercises. In 1915, the Indian Army was fully mobilized in response to the perceived threat of the Armenian Uprising to the neutrality of Persia. Although this move was perceived globally as a flex of the British imperial muscles, it in fact caused a minor scandal at home because the ‘threat’ to Persia was perceived in London as completely absurd and resulted, ultimately, in the recall of the Viceroy, Lord Reading.
In May 1916, a more overt issue regarding the route to India appeared in the form of an uprising in the Arabian Peninsula. Under the leadership of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, and the command of his son, Faisal, Arab guerillas captured Medina and Mecca in May, following up with the capture of Tabuk in June, bringing the whole of the Hejaz under their control. Although the uprising was portrayed as coming completely out of the blue (and, for the Ottoman authorities, it may have done), it was in fact the culmination of a series of carefully managed diplomatic negotiations. Since the Young Turk Revolution in 1906, the various governments in Istanbul had grown increasingly pro-Turkish in their attitudes. This had had a number of obvious effects in the Balkans and the Caucuses, including stimulating the Armenian Uprising and boosting the Balkan League’s claim to be the only guarantors of the safety of the Orthodox community. However, less remarked upon at the time was the effect in Arabia, where local rulers began to feel more alienated from the government in Istanbul. Of particular concern was the future of the Caliphate, which had been under the governance of the Ottomans since 1517 but, given their more pro-Turkish bent, many Arabs felt that the Caliphate was beginning to be a specifically Turkish vehicle rather than speaking to the entire Muslim community (as it was, in theory, supposed to).
In this context Lord Cromer, now aged 73 and in his 31st year of administering Egypt in one form or another, decided to embark on a little bit of freelance diplomacy. Starting in 1914, Cromer entered into secret correspondence with Hussein where he indicated that the UK would be willing to provide recognition of an Arab nation that included the Hejaz and other adjacent territories (excepting, of course, the British client kingdoms in the Persian Gulf) as well as approval for the proclamation of an Arab Caliphate of Islam. Although Cromer stopped short of promising military support for such a venture, on 31 March 1916, Emir Abdullah, Hussein’s son, chaired a meeting of Arab tribal leaders in which he proclaimed Hussein to be the King of the Arabs and the true Caliph of Islam.
As with Lord Reading’s mobilization a year earlier, the government in London was less than pleased by the actions of its men on the ground, not least of all because it threatened to break Britain’s neutrality policy. Cromer was recalled from Cairo to London (where he would die quietly the following year) and replaced by Sir Joshua Milne Cheetham. Sir Joshua was an old hand in the colonial civil service and managed the transition smoothly, ensuring that the secret communications, firstly, did not leak out to the wider public and, secondly, assured Hussein that the general tone of them at least had not changed. The British regarded the Hashemites (as Hussain’s family were called) as a better bet to control the route to India than the Ottomans and money was secretly funneled to support them, on the (tenuous) condition that it was not used outside Arabia.
The Ottomans certainly suspected that the British were behind this but were powerless to do anything without the say-so of their German allies, who refused to take steps which might lead to Britain joining the war in Europe.
The Great War, January - October 1917
The Suicide of Civilised Europe: January - October 1917
Left to Right: American troops retire from the front lines at the Third Battle of the Scheldt, Roger Casement at his trial
Since 1913, the course of the war had shifted back and forth, with seemingly-permanent stalemate on the Western Front, constant managed-Ottoman retreat in the Caucuses, vast changes in territory across eastern Europe and maneuvers in the Balkans which switched from desperate defences of Istanbul to cautious optimism. However, in 1917 the course of the war would switch decisively.
On the Eastern Front, the losses of the Brusilov Offensive had, as suspected, severely damaged the capacity of the Russian army to operate and caused catastrophic falls in morale in both the Russian army and the wider public. This combined with a continued series of crop failures and food shortages, along with the general incompetence of the Tsarist government, to create the conditions for the February Revolution, which overthrew the Tsarist regime and replaced it with a republican provisional government. Although the provisional government kept Russia in the war for the time being, there was now a significant anti-war position in Russian politics and the army itself was only kept in the field by the most tenuous of threads.
A more positive development for the Entente, however, would come only two months later. In April, the Irish émigré Sir Roger Casement was arrested in Paris by the nascent British intelligence services with the connivance of their French opposite numbers. Casement had originally worked for the Foreign Office in a number of capacities, acquiring an international reputation for his two reports into human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo (1905) and Peru (1911). He had retired from government service following the publication of his Peru report and had since drifted into Irish republican circles. Since the Home Rule crisis, the appeal of Irish republicanism had almost completely died away. What remained was a tiny and extremist minority, who were now devoted (however ineffectually) to the violent overthrow of the British state.
Between 1913 and 1917, Casement had travelled surreptitiously around Europe (on a Swiss passport he had received as a reward for his humanitarian work) attempting to drum up foreign support for an Irish uprising. Although most serious politicians regarded Casement as, by this stage, a dangerous fantasist and his schemes the surest way of ensuring that the UK entered the war on the opposing side, he did find ears in Berlin who were, at least, willing to hear him out. In April, he was returning to Ireland from Berlin through France, apparently with plans for guns to be supplied to republicans in County Cork, when he was picked up and taken back to London. In a highly-publicised treason trial in London, Casement’s actions generated a storm of anti-German sentiment, even though the German government forcefully rejected any of Casement’s claims about their support for an uprising in Easter 1918. Anti-Casement riots broke out in numerous cities, including Dublin, and his boyhood home in Sandycove was vandalized.
The patriotic (and/or jingoistic, according to taste) outburst caused by the Casement trial combined with two other important factors to make the march towards war increasingly irresistible. The first factor was the Hashemite defeat of their final two Arab enemies: the Al-Saud and Al-Rashid clans. This left the Hashemites in complete control of the Arabian Peninsula and meant that their eyes turned inexorably towards the Arab-populated lands in Syria, Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. As the Hashemites began to make direct strikes against Ottoman forces in Palestine and Syria, the British posture of neutrality became increasingly untenable and their double-dealing more and more outrageous, with British money and arms now clearly funding the Arab uprising and British ‘volunteers’ (most famously T.E. Lawrence) taking prominent roles in the campaign. When the British government demurred about giving more explicit support, the Hashemites began to make tentative approaches to the Entente about the possibility of a formal alliance over British heads, something London was desperate to prevent.
Finally, the old British concern with retaining the balance of power in Europe once more came to the fore. Over the course of 1914, the British intelligence services had successively cracked the codes of confidential French, American and German communications and the government became increasingly concerned about the tone of messages being sent between important American and French political and military figures. Recent communications spoke of the annexation of the west bank of the Rhine to France and the dismemberment of the rest of the Hohenzollern Empire into up to 30 micro-states. Also mentioned were plans for a French protectorate in Arabia and an American one in Palestine. Grey had long argued that the Entente was now more likely to win the war and that the best way to influence the subsequent peace settlement was to help them do it. In 1917, that argument began to find more ears.
These concerns enmeshed with each other and came to a head on the day of Casement’s execution in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1917. The same day, Britain declared war on the Central Powers.
British arrival into the war came in the midst of the two biggest offensives of the year. On the Eastern Front, the Russian Minister of War Alexander Kerensky ordered another offensive in July but, rather than prove that Russia remained a reliable member of the Entente, the offensive collapsed after three weeks amidst widespread mutinies and 60,000 Russian casualties. On the Western Front, General Funston launched the Third Battle of the Scheldt on 31 July, over the heads of his political masters in Washington and against the reservations of his French allies. The offensive soon devolved into an horrific stalemate amidst dreadful weather which turned the battlefield into a quagmire. The battle eventually dragged on until November with the cost of 245,000 American casualties, 155,000 French and 270,000 German. Furious, Roosevelt removed Funston from his position in December and replaced him with Wood, who assumed overall command of the AEF.
Forces from around the Commonwealth had been en route to the UK for pre-arranged military maneuvers and were soon re-directed to the two fronts they would be fighting on: the Western Front and in Palestine. Herbert Kitchener, as head of the ICS, took overall command of the forces and Imperial troops and supplies were divided into two expeditionary forces: the Imperial Expeditionary Force (“IEF”) bound for France under the command of Field Marshal John Monash; and the Anglo-Egyptian Expeditionary Force (“EEF”) under the command of the Lightning General himself, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby. The first IEF troops arrived in France in September and the EEF was in place in Sinai by October.
Left to Right: American troops retire from the front lines at the Third Battle of the Scheldt, Roger Casement at his trial
Since 1913, the course of the war had shifted back and forth, with seemingly-permanent stalemate on the Western Front, constant managed-Ottoman retreat in the Caucuses, vast changes in territory across eastern Europe and maneuvers in the Balkans which switched from desperate defences of Istanbul to cautious optimism. However, in 1917 the course of the war would switch decisively.
On the Eastern Front, the losses of the Brusilov Offensive had, as suspected, severely damaged the capacity of the Russian army to operate and caused catastrophic falls in morale in both the Russian army and the wider public. This combined with a continued series of crop failures and food shortages, along with the general incompetence of the Tsarist government, to create the conditions for the February Revolution, which overthrew the Tsarist regime and replaced it with a republican provisional government. Although the provisional government kept Russia in the war for the time being, there was now a significant anti-war position in Russian politics and the army itself was only kept in the field by the most tenuous of threads.
A more positive development for the Entente, however, would come only two months later. In April, the Irish émigré Sir Roger Casement was arrested in Paris by the nascent British intelligence services with the connivance of their French opposite numbers. Casement had originally worked for the Foreign Office in a number of capacities, acquiring an international reputation for his two reports into human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo (1905) and Peru (1911). He had retired from government service following the publication of his Peru report and had since drifted into Irish republican circles. Since the Home Rule crisis, the appeal of Irish republicanism had almost completely died away. What remained was a tiny and extremist minority, who were now devoted (however ineffectually) to the violent overthrow of the British state.
Between 1913 and 1917, Casement had travelled surreptitiously around Europe (on a Swiss passport he had received as a reward for his humanitarian work) attempting to drum up foreign support for an Irish uprising. Although most serious politicians regarded Casement as, by this stage, a dangerous fantasist and his schemes the surest way of ensuring that the UK entered the war on the opposing side, he did find ears in Berlin who were, at least, willing to hear him out. In April, he was returning to Ireland from Berlin through France, apparently with plans for guns to be supplied to republicans in County Cork, when he was picked up and taken back to London. In a highly-publicised treason trial in London, Casement’s actions generated a storm of anti-German sentiment, even though the German government forcefully rejected any of Casement’s claims about their support for an uprising in Easter 1918. Anti-Casement riots broke out in numerous cities, including Dublin, and his boyhood home in Sandycove was vandalized.
The patriotic (and/or jingoistic, according to taste) outburst caused by the Casement trial combined with two other important factors to make the march towards war increasingly irresistible. The first factor was the Hashemite defeat of their final two Arab enemies: the Al-Saud and Al-Rashid clans. This left the Hashemites in complete control of the Arabian Peninsula and meant that their eyes turned inexorably towards the Arab-populated lands in Syria, Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. As the Hashemites began to make direct strikes against Ottoman forces in Palestine and Syria, the British posture of neutrality became increasingly untenable and their double-dealing more and more outrageous, with British money and arms now clearly funding the Arab uprising and British ‘volunteers’ (most famously T.E. Lawrence) taking prominent roles in the campaign. When the British government demurred about giving more explicit support, the Hashemites began to make tentative approaches to the Entente about the possibility of a formal alliance over British heads, something London was desperate to prevent.
Finally, the old British concern with retaining the balance of power in Europe once more came to the fore. Over the course of 1914, the British intelligence services had successively cracked the codes of confidential French, American and German communications and the government became increasingly concerned about the tone of messages being sent between important American and French political and military figures. Recent communications spoke of the annexation of the west bank of the Rhine to France and the dismemberment of the rest of the Hohenzollern Empire into up to 30 micro-states. Also mentioned were plans for a French protectorate in Arabia and an American one in Palestine. Grey had long argued that the Entente was now more likely to win the war and that the best way to influence the subsequent peace settlement was to help them do it. In 1917, that argument began to find more ears.
These concerns enmeshed with each other and came to a head on the day of Casement’s execution in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1917. The same day, Britain declared war on the Central Powers.
British arrival into the war came in the midst of the two biggest offensives of the year. On the Eastern Front, the Russian Minister of War Alexander Kerensky ordered another offensive in July but, rather than prove that Russia remained a reliable member of the Entente, the offensive collapsed after three weeks amidst widespread mutinies and 60,000 Russian casualties. On the Western Front, General Funston launched the Third Battle of the Scheldt on 31 July, over the heads of his political masters in Washington and against the reservations of his French allies. The offensive soon devolved into an horrific stalemate amidst dreadful weather which turned the battlefield into a quagmire. The battle eventually dragged on until November with the cost of 245,000 American casualties, 155,000 French and 270,000 German. Furious, Roosevelt removed Funston from his position in December and replaced him with Wood, who assumed overall command of the AEF.
Forces from around the Commonwealth had been en route to the UK for pre-arranged military maneuvers and were soon re-directed to the two fronts they would be fighting on: the Western Front and in Palestine. Herbert Kitchener, as head of the ICS, took overall command of the forces and Imperial troops and supplies were divided into two expeditionary forces: the Imperial Expeditionary Force (“IEF”) bound for France under the command of Field Marshal John Monash; and the Anglo-Egyptian Expeditionary Force (“EEF”) under the command of the Lightning General himself, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby. The first IEF troops arrived in France in September and the EEF was in place in Sinai by October.
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So British and American roles in this war are ultimately and completely switched: the Brits join at the last hour, ultimately turning the tide in spite of Russia probably dropping out like IOTL.
Kind of... In general terms you're obviously right but I'm trying to avoid a simple role reversal - bearing in mind that the US is still the rising power with a higher ceiling than the UK (the UK sans Commonwealth, that is), which really alters things especially after the war. A couple of things I'd point to is the fact that the Bolsheviks have not sued for peace ITTL and Britain is joining very explicitly for its own reasons and not really as part of an alliance of equals and friends. The results on the ground might not look all that different from OTL, I admit, but the tone and wider meaning of it ITTL are and will be vastly different. The rest of the 1917 should follow some time over the weekend and I'll come up to the end of the war and the peace treaties during next week, after which I'll do a brief survey of the war's global economic effects and its British/Imperial domestic effects. Both of those will hopefully show you how I'm differing ever more from OTL and what that will mean going forward.
Just realised that I’ve accidentally slightly spoiled the beginning of my next update. Don’t worry, that will all be explained in a day or so...
Cool, looking forward to it. No, to be more precise: I'm at the edge of my seat.
The Great War, October - December 1917
The Lion Awoken: October - December 1917
Left to right: a stylised painting of Lenin proclaiming the first communist republic, Field Marshal Allenby entering Jerusalem, the SMS Von der Tann explodes under fire from HMS Invincible and HMS Australia
Despite the entry of the British into the war, by the autumn of 1917 things seemed to be getting worse for the Entente on the Eastern Front. After the Kerensky Offensive had petered out, a combined Central Powers offensive pushed back on all the Russian gains from 1916, this time with German forces taking the lead. By October, German forces were running rampant across the Baltic and Belarus and Austrian troops had occupied much of western and central Ukraine. A cabal of conservative Russian generals attempted a coup that went nowhere and, with their army now driven almost to the point of destruction and the home front in total chaos, the provisional government was overthrown in a coup by the Bolshevik Party on 25 October.
While the Bolsheviks had promised peace as part of their programme, they did not immediately sue for it, however, because news was filtering through of radical developments in the military situation in the west.
On 18 October, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet put to sea in order to block any attempt by the German Kaiserliche Marine to enter the Atlantic. Owing to a mix of broken German codebooks and skillful use of the reconnaissance capabilities of the fleet’s four seaplane carriers, the Grand Fleet was able to ambush the scouting squadron deployed by Admiral Franz Hipper in advance of the main Kaiserliche Marine line, annihilating them in an action on the evening of 20 October. Admiral John Jellicoe was then able to form up his lines in advance of the German ships and on 21 October the two fleets – totaling 245 ships between them – commenced the largest battleship engagement in history. Jellicoe’s adroit maneuvering of his ships, combined with his subordinate David Beatty’s aggressive use of his battlecruisers and the general superior British preparation and gunnery, ensured that they had the best of the day: sinking 14 German ships (in addition to the 5 German ships lost the previous day) to their own losses of 11, with a total of nearly 10,000 deaths on both sides.
After sunset on the 21st, Hipper attempted to disengage and return to port but found that Jellicoe had cut off his retreat. On the following morning, Hipper attempted a breakout of the encirclement but the attempt failed with the loss of a further 6 Kaiserliche Marine ships. With his situation now hopeless, Hipper chose to ignore a cabled message from the Kaiser to attempt to fight his way out and instead surrendered his fleet aboard the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Iron Duke on the evening of 22 October. Over the next three days, a rolling convoy of British, French, Russian and American ships escorted the entire captured Kaiserliche Marine of 68 ships (10 dreadnoughts, 3 pre-dreadnoughts, 4 cruisers and 51 torpedo boats) to Scapa Flow, where they and their sailors were interred. Updating the House of Commons on the war effort, the War Secretary Alfred Milner, described Jellicoe as “the man who had won the war in an afternoon.”
In the Middle East, Allenby marched the EEF into the Negev desert and captured Beersheba on 31 October. With Ottoman defences in the region weakened by the constant Hashemite attacks, the EEF broke the Ottoman lines at the Battle of Gaza on 8 November. Successfully implementing his lightning war strategy (even if the desert terrain meant that his armies were not as mechanized as he would have wished), Allenby captured around 50 miles of territory in a week. Jerusalem fell on 30 November after a fortnight-long siege and street battle. Meanwhile, Hashemite forces commenced raids on the Damascus Railway, opening up the route to the heart of Syria.
Having begun the year moderately confidently of at least forcing Russia out of the war, the Central Powers ended it in a position of almost complete disaster. With Britain having entered the war and annihilated the Kaiserliche Marine as a serious prospect in three days, both Germany and Austria faced the prospect of total blockade exacerbating already-serious food shortages. Meanwhile, the Ottoman position was now completely untenable, with their forces in a state of total collapse in both Anatolia and the Middle East. In November, Berlin recalled the Eighth Army from Istanbul. Although it was not explicitly said, the Ottomans were now left to their fate.
Left to right: a stylised painting of Lenin proclaiming the first communist republic, Field Marshal Allenby entering Jerusalem, the SMS Von der Tann explodes under fire from HMS Invincible and HMS Australia
Despite the entry of the British into the war, by the autumn of 1917 things seemed to be getting worse for the Entente on the Eastern Front. After the Kerensky Offensive had petered out, a combined Central Powers offensive pushed back on all the Russian gains from 1916, this time with German forces taking the lead. By October, German forces were running rampant across the Baltic and Belarus and Austrian troops had occupied much of western and central Ukraine. A cabal of conservative Russian generals attempted a coup that went nowhere and, with their army now driven almost to the point of destruction and the home front in total chaos, the provisional government was overthrown in a coup by the Bolshevik Party on 25 October.
While the Bolsheviks had promised peace as part of their programme, they did not immediately sue for it, however, because news was filtering through of radical developments in the military situation in the west.
On 18 October, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet put to sea in order to block any attempt by the German Kaiserliche Marine to enter the Atlantic. Owing to a mix of broken German codebooks and skillful use of the reconnaissance capabilities of the fleet’s four seaplane carriers, the Grand Fleet was able to ambush the scouting squadron deployed by Admiral Franz Hipper in advance of the main Kaiserliche Marine line, annihilating them in an action on the evening of 20 October. Admiral John Jellicoe was then able to form up his lines in advance of the German ships and on 21 October the two fleets – totaling 245 ships between them – commenced the largest battleship engagement in history. Jellicoe’s adroit maneuvering of his ships, combined with his subordinate David Beatty’s aggressive use of his battlecruisers and the general superior British preparation and gunnery, ensured that they had the best of the day: sinking 14 German ships (in addition to the 5 German ships lost the previous day) to their own losses of 11, with a total of nearly 10,000 deaths on both sides.
After sunset on the 21st, Hipper attempted to disengage and return to port but found that Jellicoe had cut off his retreat. On the following morning, Hipper attempted a breakout of the encirclement but the attempt failed with the loss of a further 6 Kaiserliche Marine ships. With his situation now hopeless, Hipper chose to ignore a cabled message from the Kaiser to attempt to fight his way out and instead surrendered his fleet aboard the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Iron Duke on the evening of 22 October. Over the next three days, a rolling convoy of British, French, Russian and American ships escorted the entire captured Kaiserliche Marine of 68 ships (10 dreadnoughts, 3 pre-dreadnoughts, 4 cruisers and 51 torpedo boats) to Scapa Flow, where they and their sailors were interred. Updating the House of Commons on the war effort, the War Secretary Alfred Milner, described Jellicoe as “the man who had won the war in an afternoon.”
In the Middle East, Allenby marched the EEF into the Negev desert and captured Beersheba on 31 October. With Ottoman defences in the region weakened by the constant Hashemite attacks, the EEF broke the Ottoman lines at the Battle of Gaza on 8 November. Successfully implementing his lightning war strategy (even if the desert terrain meant that his armies were not as mechanized as he would have wished), Allenby captured around 50 miles of territory in a week. Jerusalem fell on 30 November after a fortnight-long siege and street battle. Meanwhile, Hashemite forces commenced raids on the Damascus Railway, opening up the route to the heart of Syria.
Having begun the year moderately confidently of at least forcing Russia out of the war, the Central Powers ended it in a position of almost complete disaster. With Britain having entered the war and annihilated the Kaiserliche Marine as a serious prospect in three days, both Germany and Austria faced the prospect of total blockade exacerbating already-serious food shortages. Meanwhile, the Ottoman position was now completely untenable, with their forces in a state of total collapse in both Anatolia and the Middle East. In November, Berlin recalled the Eighth Army from Istanbul. Although it was not explicitly said, the Ottomans were now left to their fate.
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I wonder how the Bolsheviks might try to spin the continuation of the war. Maybe as lending assistance to the German revolution that must now be fermenting, and to protect the revolution as a whole from the designs of the Entente. You better believe the White are just kicking themselves right now - they just had to hold on another month or two to see the war shift dramatically in their favour.
I know. I'm trying to leave potential PODs for ITTL Alt History forums to worry about.
As for the Bolsheviks not immediately suing for peace, my understanding of OTL is that there was a degree of debate at the time about whether to sue for peace, on exactly the lines you've just suggested. IIRC Trotsky thought he could keep an army in the line and help further the world revolution.
Yes, should have mentioned that: Japan joins the war at the same time as the UK and the war in the Pacific is (more or less) the same ITTL as in the first year of OTL.
I think relations with the Soviets ITTL are going to trend more rather than less friendly than IOTL.
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