Gwilym Lloyd George
Liberal leading National Government
1941-1949
Like his father before him, Gwilym Lloyd George led the United Kingdom into the fires of a world war. Unlike the late Welsh Wizard however, the new Prime Minister was distinctly an observer to the Empire’s conduct of the war. The men who dominated the front pages of the news during the British Empire’s war with France would be the Premiers of the Dominions, figures like Robert Menzies and Charles Wilkinson. This reduction in prominence was perhaps an inevitability, but the pressures of war and the fact that unlike his two immediate predecessors he did not enjoy a high position in either a Dominion’s politics or the Imperial military, meant that the exile government’s prominence very quickly became an anachronism.
The opening months of the conflict were nicknamed a Phoney War due to the lack of impact the declaration of a state of war seemed to have on the lives of Imperial citizens and subjects. The British Revolution had severed Imperial ties in Europe and the ensuing chaos and reorganisation had seen many British colonies fall under French jurisdiction, further reducing the number of potential boundaries for confrontation. Belgium and Luxembourg were occupied after mere weeks, shortly to be followed by the Netherlands. France’s eastern border was now upon the Rhine, a puppet state established in Amsterdam. Germany was next. Considering the military restrictions and humiliations that the Germans had endured since 1918, they put up a good fight against the invading French. But the result was an inevitability. By 1942, French troops were marching through the Brandenburg Gate.
The unchecked advances of the French war machine, somewhat assisted by the Italians and Spanish, led to condemnation in the Parliaments of the Dominions. There was a sense that if the Empire did not act with urgency then the war would be over almost before it had begun. But lacking a real presence in Europe, and without the backing of the United States, there was a segment of opinion that felt that the declaration of war was premature. Nationalist movements in the Dominions tended to be opposed to the war, though ironically the South African National Party – the largest party that advocated a Dominion’s secession from the Empire – was strongly in favour of the war, in defence of the Dutch and Germans who had been conquered by Paris. Fortunately this strain of thought was silenced somewhat by the unity of resolve demonstrated by the Premiers and other ministers in the Imperial War Cabinet.
It was unclear at this stage just what Lloyd George’s role was going to be in the War Cabinet and indeed in the Empire’s conduct of the war. Following the fall of Germany in 1942, it became clear that if the British Empire was to bring the fight to Europe, they would have to take control of the Atlantic. The French also knew this and prepared for those eventualities, invading Denmark and Norway to prevent the hitherto neutral states from being used as landing grounds for an Imperial expeditionary force. The surrender of Denmark to the French implied that Iceland and Greenland would also fall under the rule of Paris. But at that time, France’s ability to extend their power out to the North Atlantic was limited. Mackenzie King quickly sent a Canadian force to take control of Greenland, while in a move that proved surprising to Paris, the British occupied Iceland upon the invitation of a hastily formed Provisional Government in Reykjavik. The Cagoulard war planners had not anticipated the possibility of a rapprochement between the Cooperative Commonwealth and her former Empire. The British occupation of Iceland did not amount to a declaration of war, but it was a statement of intent. The North Atlantic had been successfully prevented from falling into the French grasp, and there was a clear pathway for an Imperial Expeditionary Force to use Britain as a platform from which to launch an invasion of Europe. From now on, the French would have to factor Britain in to their plans.
Lloyd George became a de facto special ambassador between the Imperial War Cabinet and their equivalents in the concrete palaces of Whitehall. The growing coordination between the respective governments in the North Atlantic, particularly between Canadian and British naval and air forces, necessitated oversight by a civilian representative. While the Dominion governments continued to refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Cooperative Commonwealth, and Lloyd George’s extended visits to the former Court of St James were treated merely as personal visits. The change in leadership of the Cooperative Commonwealth had brought a younger, far less pacifist generation to power, who saw the French as a greater threat than the distant former Empire and eagerly grasped the outstretched hand of friendship.
Meanwhile in Europe, France set about digesting her conquests. Jews, who had been registered and categorised in France for many years were now officially removed to the French Mandate of Palestine, along with the German Jews who now fell under the control of France. While parts of Germany were peeled off to French allies in Poland, Italy and the puppet state of Denmark, the men in the Elysee had grand plans to make the bulk of former Germany an integral part of France itself, placing the country in the dominating position in Europe they felt was their right. Millions of Germans were to be removed, in a similar fashion to the Jews and planted in disparate regions of their Empire, where in time they would become not only good Frenchmen but would make the French presence in Africa a permanent one. Where land had been vacated, it would then be settled by French families, largely drawn from the cities. The Cagoulard vision for the new Greater France was a rural one, romanticising peasants and harking back to the old Carolingian Empire of Charlemagne.
Millions of ‘undesirables’, ranging from political dissidents to the physically and mentally disabled were sent to camps where they ultimately met their deaths. The largest death tolls were inflicted upon Germans, Jews and Roma. Only some Germans were classified as suitable for settlement in the overseas colonies, with millions more been categorised as ‘unsalvageable’, to be consigned to the scrapheap. Similarly, many Jews refused to board the boats to Palestine or tried to assert themselves politically once there and earned a grim fate. The Roma, who as a nomadic people did not fit the Cagoulard vision of a world with hard borders, had no recourse except extermination. Despite the awkwardness that was the occupation of Iceland and Greenland, it seemed to many that the war had already concluded in France’s favour. The Mediterranean was firmly under the control of the French and their allies, Scandinavia had been subjugated and the military dictatorship of Poland drawn into an alliance of convenience. French soldiers were assisting the Italians in the conquest of the Balkans, helping Mussolini make his pretensions to Roman grandeur a reality.
But the march eastwards agitated the Russian bear. The Soviets had been a distant friend to Germany, which France was well aware of thanks to the appearance of a surprising number of tanks upon the battlefield as they advanced across the Rhine. Despite this, Stalin had felt no desire to intervene as Berlin was crushed under France’s boot. He believed the French dictatorship, in its obsession with the past would not be so foolish as to attempt an invasion of Russia. He also believed the governing system of France was built on sand and would crumble once they had no enemy to unite them. But the alignment of Poland with France, the annexations of Balkan states and the threats that Warsaw made to the Baltic states, began to raise fears in the Kremlin. The Cagoulards had never been quiet in their low opinions of communism, and while these had become muted as they concentrated on Germany and directed their vitriol toward the British Empire, now that Europe was firmly under their thumb, there were concerns that Deloncle would next set his sights upon Moscow.
The burgeoning relationship between Britain and her former Empire thus now acted as a conduit through which the British Empire could clandestinely exchange messages with the Soviet Union. While the Imperial Workers Administration and the Empire’s vast industrial capacity was turned over to building the engines of war, she was still a long way from being able to exert herself in Europe. Imperial soldiers were fighting in Central and Eastern Africa but the war would not be won until Paris fell. The idea of supplying and aiding the Soviet Union in potentially opening up a European Front was an attractive one to the Imperial War Cabinet. Stalin was more cautious, well aware that the brunt of casualties would fall upon the Red Army.
In East Asia, a new front opened up as the forces of Chiang Kai Shek explicitly aligned themselves with Paris in the surprise capture of Hong Kong and Macau from their previous European owners. The French colony of Gouangzhouwan was conspicuously ignored. Throughout China, the KMT dictatorship systematically isolated and took control of traditional European spheres of influence while ignoring the presence of their French allies. In reaction, the Imperial War Cabinet turned to Japan, who had entrenched their sphere of influence in Northern China over the years and exploited the decline of a Russian presence. The Japanese and Chinese were already at war over control of Manchuria, and the hope was that bringing the Japanese into the wider war with France would help the Empire concentrate its forces on pushing the French in Africa and ultimately on the invasion of Europe. The Japanese were not easily convinced. The reason that the French had courted China was to prevent Japanese expansionism, and an alliance with the British Empire and her hangers on like the Dutch exiles in the East Indies would preclude an expansion into those colonies. Lloyd George, who was at this point treated as the de facto Foreign Minister of the Imperial War Cabinet negotiated a deal that would place French colonies in East Asia and the Pacific under the control of Tokyo after the war, as well as giving them a free hand in China. The promise of being accepted to the very top table of nations was enough, and Japan entered the war on the side of the British Empire.
The final pieces of the puzzle fell into place in 1943. The ‘colonel’s regime’ in Poland had, ever since the annexation of Silesia and East Prussia, emphasised an idea of revenge for the injustices of the Partitions. The Austrian Empire was dead, now so was Germany. All that remained was Russia, and Warsaw was well aware that after the League had attained victory, she would be in an excellent position to exact territorial concessions from the defeated Soviet Union with the blessing of their allies in France. These desires coincided with those of Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists who remained a thorn in his side presented themselves as patriots resisting the Japanese invasion, while the Nationalist government were corrupt incompetents. He believed a war to wrest control of Mongolia and historically Chinese territory in Northern Asia would allow him to deflect these criticisms while cutting the Communists off from their main source of support. The growing industrial power and military strength of the Soviet Union made the French themselves nervous, and with their enemies in the rest of Europe defeated, delay seemed to invite disaster. Stalin had begun a purge of the Red Army’s officers in 1941, and the belief was that such a leaderless and demoralised force would put up a poor fight against the forces of the League.
They gained their opportunity in the autumn. As France had developed a network of compliant satellites in the Balkans, sponsoring the irredentist instincts of countries that did not interfere with either their or Italy’s designs, Romania seemed to consistently get the thin end of the wedge. Following humiliating cessions of territory to Hungary and Bulgaria, they came under pressure to hand over Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. The King abdicated and a coup led by local fascists, ironically modelled on the very states which had already reduced her so badly, established a new government that refused the Kremlin’s ultimatums. The League quickly swung in behind Romania, secretly promising their new leaders territorial compensation following victory. Without issuing a declaration of war, the League attacked. It was opportunistic, built on the understanding that the Red Army was weak, ill-prepared for an invasion and that the country would fall before winter truly set in.
These assumptions were poorly founded. Codebreakers in Britain had been handing information over to Stalin concerning the League’s plans for months prior to the invasion. The purge of the Red Army which had begun in 1941 was largely complete the following year and by the time the League launched its invasion, the officer corps and military morale had been essentially restored. After early advances, the Soviets hit back hard. The Eastern Front quickly became a quagmire and Deloncle and his Cagoulard comrades soon felt something of the foreboding that Napoleon must have encountered as his Grande Armee froze and died. Worse, the British formally declared war after the invasion and permitted Imperial forces to move troops into their island in preparation for an invasion of Europe.
How much of this can be placed at Lloyd George’s door is impossible to tell, because many of the documents that would be essential to making such an assessment remain classified. In any case, Lloyd George’s own unclear official position on his diplomatic adventures make what can be verified difficult to analyse. In the time between him taking up the position as Prime Minister of the exile government and the Co-operative Commonwealth’s declaration of war however, a sea change had occurred in the relationship between the British and their old empire. The idea that hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the Empire could arrive on British shores, not as invaders but as allies, would have been unthinkable only four years before. The events occurring in Europe were exceptional, and truly called for exceptional methods, but nothing about them meant the rapprochement was inevitable.
The next several years would be trying ones, but the League miscalculation in the autumn of 1943 laid the foundation for Allied victory. It was truly a war fought on every continent, as Canadians tore the French Caribbean away from them, the Japanese shored up the Soviets in the Far East, the British supplied every Resistance movement they could in Europe, the Empire marched ever northwards in Africa, and in 1945 a British-Imperial joint invasion was launched of Northern France itself. The unexpectedly narrow victory of Huey Long against the Republicans was perceived as a growing frustration with his isolationist policy, and he opened up American industry and coffers to harden the resolve and strength of the Allies.
While Chiang committed suicide and his government surrendered in 1947, the war in Europe would end very differently. The second front in Europe was never an enormous success, the French fighting tooth and nail to halt a breakout, ironically aiding the Soviets on the Eastern Front as the Normandy Campaign drained manpower and materiel that might have otherwise have been used to check the Red Army’s advance. Much of Africa had fallen to the Allies, the Cagoulard’s own genocidal policies catching up with them as the ‘salvageable’ Germans now in Africa joined forces with the German government-in-exile based in Canada and established the Freiwehr, which recruited a great number of Africans who were similarly frustrated by the French colonial regime. But Europe herself was a tough nut to crack, the Cagoulard’s policies on indoctrination bearing fruit with a generation of fanatic-soldiers. To the Imperial War Cabinet, while they were clearly winning the war the long drawn out Siege of France was simply handing more of Europe to the Soviets. They needed a swift end to the war. In July 1948, an atomic bomb was dropped on Marseilles. A few days later a second was dropped on Nice. Deloncle was removed from office by the very military which had put him there and offered an unconditional surrender to the Allies.
The relative unity of purpose that the Allies had behaved with during the war quickly fragmented. The most obvious immediate problem was over the post-war division of China and spheres of influence in Asia. While Japanese and Soviet interests aligned, Moscow had directed the Chinese Communists to concentrate their efforts on defeating the Kuomintang, but with the peace the erstwhile allies soon turned upon one another. The defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek’s government placed the Communists as the only ‘legitimate’ Chinese government was the claim of the USSR while the Japanese pointed to their puppet state based out of Nanking. Meanwhile British Indian troops has occupied Tibet as they had a few decades before. While the three powers agreed in principle to an eventual reunification of China, in reality it came to nothing. A Soviet sphere of influence, centred on satellites in Mongolia and East Turkestan, rubbed up uncomfortably against the Japanese on the coast. Gwilym Lloyd George, as one of the architects of bringing Japan into the war advocated for the Japanese position and in the new settlement ensured that the Japanese sphere in East Asia was contiguous.
At this stage, the Imperial War Cabinet did not perceive Japan as a threat and instead saw them as an ally against the expansion of communism. This was a very real fear, as the Red Army had advanced over a vast swathe of Europe, penetrating deep into Germany and threatening the fringes of Italy. Lloyd George took up the cause of rebuilding Western Europe as a bulwark against communism. While a rough dividing line between East and West was drawn up, the internal boundaries of Europe were rapidly altered to suit the designs of the two sides. Lloyd George found an unlikely ally in the form of Britain’s President, Ernest Bevin. While a firm socialist, he saw the British Empire as a more reliable than the Soviet Union with whom the Co-operative Commonwealth had never really seen eye to eye. While France was firmly placed under joint British-Imperial military occupation, Germany had been, like China, temporarily divided along the line where the Soviets had managed to advance. This became a permanent dividing line as each side sponsored their own Germany. In the West, the German State was restored, merging the institutions of the Freiwehr, the German Resistance movement and the Canadian based government-in-exile. This was done with the blessing of Bevin, who also acquiesced to the expansion of West Germany westwards into Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg and Eupen-Malmedy.
The negotiations between the post-war Great Powers also led to the foundation of the World Conference, which thanks to the growing tensions never became as formidable an institution as several of its founders had hoped. Former League of Nations mandates were handed over to the World Conference to handle. While the British Empire took responsibility for several mandates which had been their colonies prior to the British Revolution, a swathe of territory in Africa was handed over to the German State. This was condemned by the Soviet Union and their pet German Worker’s and Farmer’s Republic, and they were only silenced by an agreement over spheres of influence in the Middle East which restored the international status of the Suez Canal Zone. Where the British and the Empire divided was over the fate of other former colonies and over the destiny of France.
A swathe of former French territories and satellites were now under untrammelled Imperial occupation, under the auspices of the World Conference. The former King of Egypt, who had been a strong supporter of the Cagoulards, had been deposed. Lloyd George pushed hard for a new colony to be established in North East Africa, centred in Cairo and with himself as Governor, ostensibly as a strong bulwark against the Soviet sphere of influence on the other side of the Suez Canal. This sent a shockwave of fear across Britain as it appeared the government-in-exile was looking to establish a territory for itself in the Mediterranean. Bevin shot down the idea, and more to the point, so did the Imperial War Cabinet. The Premiers of the Dominions had found Lloyd George useful but they had no time for further colonial aggrandisement. The Kingdom was restored with the addition of Sudan and was treated as a Dominion of the Empire, but the mandates in North Africa remained just that, not a new sphere for an exile influenced government to rule over.
Lloyd George had burned some bridges already but the next episode was the more embarrassing. It was the desire of the Imperial War Cabinet to restore the pre-Cagoulard government of France but this proved near impossible, as Deloncle had been thorough in the purging of any plausible opposition. Bevin sternly called for democratic elections, which had been organised the Netherlands and Belgium in early 1948 and had resulted in narrow socialist victories under alleged British influence, though likely the growth of the not quite fully democratic West Germany was a contributory factor. Both the Socialist and Communist parties had grown enormously in France, while the political right had been thoroughly tainted by the Cagoulards. It seemed likely that democratic elections would put a socialist government in power. While the Imperial War Cabinet dithered over terms, Lloyd George took the initiative. He met with numerous members of the French military and members of the ‘Constitutional Resistance’, planning to ensure that the elections only took place in circumstances which would avoid a revolution at the ballot box. The leaking of these meetings had the effect of a hand grenade, with the French left and the British government alleging that these were plans to carry out a military coup. Embarrassed, the Imperial War Cabinet hastily agreed to the democratic elections and the rapid dissolution of the sitting military government. The result was expected and a humiliation to the Imperial War Cabinet and Lloyd George alike.
The clash between Lloyd George, the Imperial War Cabinet and the Co-operative Commonwealth was to spell his doom. While his hard work in coordinating the involvement of the Allies into the war meant that he was lauded, the moment had clearly come where the Dominions found the prominence of an exile to be tiresome. The War Cabinet was dissolved and replaced with the Imperial Council, composed of appointees from the respective Dominion governments but not out of the Premiers themselves. There was to be no place at its table for the British government-in-exile. Returning to Ottawa, Lloyd George found it impossible to adapt to the quiet life to which subsequent Prime Ministers have had to become accustomed to. After only a few weeks he handed his resignation to the King-Emperor.
Lloyd George remains a heroic figure of the war, and the clumsiness of his end is well forgotten. The British-Imperial achievement of inventing the atomic bomb is often laid at his door, as he laid the groundwork for cooperation between the socialist republic and it’s former empire. However, he was also responsible for the denouement of the exile government’s relevance in the governance of the Empire, and for those who continue to work in the offices of the exile Parliament, this is something they will never forget.
