The Anglo-Saxon Social Model

[Rattigan]

Newest of the Empires: Bolshevik Russia and the Soviet Union, 1920 - 1935

The New Soviet Man: Nikolai Bukharin at around the time of the implementation of the New Economic Policy in 1931


Following their seizure of power in 1917, the Bolsheviks had been forced to deal with rebellious forces at home and a hostile international climate. Leon Trotsky, in his capacity as Commissar for Foreign Affairs (and de facto head of the military) lead the new regime successfully through the resulting civil war (generally dated 1917-1919 but sporadic fighting would continue in the east until c.1922), all the while keeping Russia in the Great War (albeit that they acted more as an army in being in 1917-18 rather than an actual military threat) and currying favour with international regimes. Trotsky’s aims for the Great War was to dismember the Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires into small republics which were ripe for the anticipated world revolution. Although this objective was partially accomplished by the Treaty of Paris, the resulting Russian-backed revolutions in eastern Europe all failed and resulted in Trotsky being removed from his position at the 10th Party Congress in 1921 and packaged off as governor of Nenets Province.

The 10th Party Congress was also significant for another reason, namely the passing of two important motions: ‘On the Management of the Free Market’; and ‘On Internal Disagreements.’ The first motion adopted a policy of what was labelled (derisively by some) as “market socialism”, which foresaw a role for entrepreneurs and markets in trade and pricing. Rather than requisitioning agricultural surpluses according to centralised dictat (as had been the case previously), peasants were allowed to sell these on the open market. Furthermore, while what Lenin termed the “commanding heights” of the economy - i.e. heavy industry and banking - remained nationalised, market socialism loosened direct controls and empowered managers to make their own economic decisions. Meanwhile, the second motion relaxed some of the restrictions on factionalism within the party, recognising that reliance on the genius of one man (Trotsky) without sufficient space for reasonable critique had lead the country to foreign policy failure in 1918-22. Although there was no question of there being alternative parties or public policy debate, internal factions now had somewhat more room to maneuver freely.

The adoption of market socialism empowered Nikolai Bukharin, who became its foremost supporter, but Lenin remained firmly in control of the government and, after his incapacitation by a stroke in 1922, so did the triumvirate of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin. At the 13th Party Congress, the first held after Lenin’s death in 1924, Lenin’s final will and testament was read, in which the deceased leader urged his former comrades to remove Stalin. For some time, it seemed that Stalin’s fate hung in the balance but, in the end, the intervention against him by the head of the Cheka, Feliz Dzerzhinsky, proved decisive. Stalin and his cronies (Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze - forming the so-called Gang of Three) were arrested and blamed for the excesses of the first near-decade of Bolshevik government.

For the remainder of this period, Bukharin was the driving force behind the Russian government (re-named and re-organised as the Soviet Union in 1927), although he did not hold either of the key positions of either General Secretary or Premier. His influence within the party led the country to significant economic reforms, including the loosening of state control over the sale of land and the opening up so-called ‘Enterprise Zones’ in areas where certain key industries were located. The most successful of these Enterprise Zones was located in Petrograd, which soon became home to numerous British bankers and German industrialists. Trotsky returned to government following the Gang of Three’s fall in 1924, serving as Foreign Secretary again. Under his guidance, relations improved on Russia’s Caucasus border with Turkey and they became especially close with Germany (as emphasised by the substantial involvement of German industry in the Soviet economy by 1930). Trotsky also managed to maintain an uneasy peace with Poland, which was threatened by the nationalist government of Jozef Pilsudski, who periodically advanced claims to Russian Poland.

Although the Soviet Union was the world’s only communist country, it was still a player in international trade and could not help but be buffeted by the financial crisis of 1929-30. At first, the government seems to have trusted its managed command economy to ride out the global crisis but continued balance of payments issues and depletion of foreign currency reserves forced a change of plan in September 1931. Bukharin’s old ally Alexei Rykov was removed from his post as General Secretary as the party resolved to adopt what came to be called the ‘New Economic Policy’ or ‘NEP’ for short. The NEP revolved around widespread government investment in heavy industry, designed to make the Soviet Union industrially self-sufficient. The uninspired but diligent Vyacheslav Molotov was appointed General Secretary to oversee the administration of this mammoth task.

The NEP was explicitly designed following research on the industrial revolutions in Britain and the United States and, in many senses, it proved the advantages of, on its own terms, a planned economy: that they can copy a pre-existing path or catch up economically faster than a market economy could. The amount of industrial, capital and consumer goods produced in the Soviet Union exploded by over 100% in the first five years of NEP, pushing the country further and faster down its road to becoming an economic and industrial superpower. Attempts were made to move the country’s economic centre of gravity away from just the older centres of Petrograd and Moscow, with factories being set up east of the Urals where none had existed before.

However, despite being a success in blunt economic and GDP terms, the NEP also unleashed a number of catastrophes which Soviet planners did not anticipate (although they probably should have). The drive for urbanisation lead to, in many cases, the unwilling transfer of whole rural communities to local cities in order to work in new factories. This, along with more willing migration, left a severe shortfall of manpower in important food-producing districts like the Ukraine and, in turn, lead to crops not being collected (the NEP had concentrated on industrial improvements and Soviet agriculture remained largely reliant on traditional methods despite some improvements under market socialism) and cities not receiving sufficient food. In an attempt to solve this problem, the army was deployed to ‘help’ with the harvest and requisition foodstuffs to feed the cities. However, this succeeded only in riling up the peasantry and created widespread discontent in the Ukraine and the Don River region that, by the autumn and winter of 1933, was almost akin to a full-scale uprising by Tartar, Cossack and Ukrainian communities. Although the situation was smoothed over by spring 1934, the long-term damage had been done and in 1934 a bad harvest combined with the failures of the previous year to cause a famine that is estimated to have killed up to 2,000,000 people across the Soviet Union. This, combined with the fact that many of the migrants to cities were young men, lead to an overall drop in the Soviet population.

In its attempt to achieve the best parts of Anglo industrialisation, it was clear that the Soviet Union had failed to avoid the worst part and Bukharin abruptly called a halt to the NEP in July 1934. The Premier Valerian Kuybyshev paid for his maladroit handling of the crisis with his job and was replaced by Arkady Rosengolts (even though, as Premier, his remit was more closely involved in foreign policy and geopolitics than domestic economic policy). A hasty agreement was struck with the Commonwealth to allow imports of Canadian grains and Australian and New Zealand meats over the winter of 1934-35 but the short-term damage to the regime was done. In March 1935, large protests formed in Moscow and Petrograd formed, scathingly throwing the Bolsheviks’ old motto of “Peace, Bread, Land” back at the government. Although the Politburo seems to have initially considered conciliation, they eventually declared martial law in April and forcibly dispersed the protestors. In the subsequent reprisals (known colloquially as “Bukharin’s Purge”) approximately 50,000 people are estimated to have been arrested and a further 15,000 executed, while hundreds were probably killed or wounded during the initial dispersals.

Premiers of the Russian Republic/Soviet Union (after 1927)

1. Lev Kamenev; May 1922 - December 1929
2. Valerain Kuybyshev; December 1929 - July 1934
3. Arkady Rosengolts; July 1934 - present

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Russia/the Soviet Union (after 1927)

1. Joseph Stalin; April 1922 - June 1924
2. Alexei Rykov; June 1924 - September 1931
3. Vyacheslav Molotov; September 1931 - present

People’s Commissar for Finance

1. Nikolai Bukharin; June 1922 - present

 

[Rattigan]

The Jewell in the Crown: India after the Ripon Report

Antony MacDonnell: the somewhat unlikely first face of Indian self-government


The Ripon Reforms had created the conditions for Indian self-government, albeit under a heavily circumscribed franchise (approximately 5% of the population) and a Viceroy and an upper house (made up of the monarchs of the 119 salute states and 28 members selected from the monarchs of the non-salute states), both of which had a veto over any proposed legislation. However, the reforms did provide an avenue for native Indian representation in government, alongside Europeans, and the opportunity for a (quasi) democratic legislature to influence financial matters (although the Viceroy was responsible for the budget, it rapidly became a convention that it would first be debated in the lower house). Elections were to take place in February and March every seven years. At the first such election, in 1893, the Anglo-Indian population (all of whom had been enfranchised) coalesced with native gentry and landlords (which included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs) to form the Liberal Party, which won 90 seats in the first Imperial Legislative Assembly. The remaining 57 seats were taken by the Indian National Congress (“INC”). Although the INC would develop considerably over the following decades, in the 1890s there was little difference between them and the Liberals, the main source of contention being attitudes towards modernisation. The Liberals tended to take a more technocratic and top-down approach, whereas the INC stressed localism and gave a slightly more prominent role to native Indians. But, even here, the distinction was largely one of tone rather than policy substance. But, like all political differences, it rapidly became more tribal than the disagreements really warranted. Sir Antony MacDonnell, an Anglo-Irish civil servant who had been in India since 1865 and had joined the Liberals in 1893, became the first Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Under MacDonnell, the government made strides in famine relief, infrastructure improvements and in protections for tenants and smallholders. However, despite his able managing of both the political and administrative aspects of the job (winning an increased Liberal majority in the 1900 election), MacDonnell did not prove personally popular with the party and his decision to retire due to ill-health and return to the UK in April 1901 was greeted with some relief. Sir Guido Wilson took over smoothly and continued governing in much the same manner (including founding the Reserve Bank of India in 1905) until he announced his decision to retire immediately prior to the 1914 elections, which the Liberals won but with a decreased majority.

Thoughts on who should replace Wilson in 1914 immediately turned into the question of who should be the leader going into the following set of elections, scheduled for 1921. It was still anticipated that, by this time, the next stage of the Ripon Report would have been implemented, expanding the franchise to approximately 25% of the population. Given that, many thought that it would be wise to have a native Indian as the leader, and figures such as H.N. Kunzru, M.M. Malaviya and Shahab-ud-Din Vik were suggested. However, perhaps inevitably, the leadership instead passed to Lawrence Dundas (the future Marquess of Zetland but then known by his courtesy title of Lord Ronaldshay).

Over the two decades following the Ripon Report, the INC had come to define itself in a more pro-independence direction, although whether this implied Dominion status or republicanism depended on the individual politician. At the same time, it had also come to be increasingly associated with a specifically Hindu message, which encouraged the development of specifically Muslim movements in response. The All-India Muslim League (the “League”) was established in September 1906 in response, winning three seats in the 1907 elections and 22 in 1914, taking votes mainly from the Liberals and establishing themselves as a solid third party. The appearance of sectarian parties on the national stage lead the Liberals to rename themselves the Liberal Unionists in 1914.

Sectarian trends were exacerbated by the cancellation of the Ripon Report in 1917 and the subsequent Curzon-Donoughmore Reforms (as has been explained in more detail, above), which left the Liberal Unionists with a tiny majority of three at the 1922 elections. Upon his arrival as the new Viceroy in November 1924, Lord Runciman announced that the communal award would be scrapped and that a new franchise would be prepared for the next set of elections, scheduled for 1928. This new franchise would, ideally, be decided upon, along with a roadmap for future political development, at cross-party talks in New Delhi in January and February 1925.

However, these talks revealed fundamental splits across the three parties. The INC immediately opened with demands for universal suffrage, an ask they knew would be impossible for Runciman to grant, but ostentatiously allowed themselves to be argued down to a property qualification that would have enfranchised about 75% of the population. However, this was a radically larger franchise than the Liberal Unionists (not to mention the heads of the princely states and the British government) were comfortable with, as most of their support came from landowners and industrialists (both Hindu and Muslim) who had done well out of the Ripon Reforms and wanted to maintain their privileges. The League, for their part, were concerned that the INC’s demand for unreserved seats was a recipe for sectarian Hindu domination. Talks broke down, with Runciman ordering that they reconvene in Shimla in June.

During the recess, the Liberal Unionists and the League were able to come up with a compromise that they could present to Runciman. Although the Liberal Unionists could not accept the idea of separate constituencies (and the recent experience of the Orange Strategy in the UK would likely make such a sectarian arrangement unpalatable for Runciman too), they could accept heavily gerrymandered districts that would, in effect, guarantee Muslim representation. Combined with a restricted franchise (about 33%, only slightly higher than that recommended by the Ripon Report), this formed the basis of a League-Liberal Unionist alliance. To reflect the INC’s contribution, the resultant Runciman Report (published in December 1925) included input from their leader Jawaharlal Nehru about an Indian Bill of Rights which, among other things, asserted that the government’s authority came from the people and guaranteed the legal equality of the sexes. The Runciman Report would be passed into law by the Westminster Parliament in 1926.

The Runciman Report took some of the heat out of the political moment, something which was further helped by Runciman’s and Ronaldshay’s conciliatory politics. Ronaldshay was known to be privately in favour of India joining the Commonwealth and appointed cabinets which were virtually fully Indian (outside of the military). Furthermore, when his government lost a vote on a budgetary amendment, he did not do what MacDonnell and Wilson had done (in 1899 and 1911, respectively) and carry on following a cabinet reshuffle. Instead, he resigned and persuaded Runciman to invite Nehru to form a government. Nehru formed a minority government purely of INC members but, lacking a majority and with the institutional blocks of the Princes and the Viceroy in place, he did not achieve much of substance beyond demonstrating continuing Liberal Unionist good faith towards the Indianisation process.

At the 1928 elections, the Liberal Unionists staged a significant comeback, gaining 15 seats (for a total of 91) from both the INC and the League. However, despite being able to form a government by themselves, the Liberal Unionists and the League had grown close over the previous six years and, as a result, the prominent League politicians Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mian Muhammad Shafi were included in the cabinet. While he remained in the cabinet, Ronaldshay rejected the Chairmanship and instead Runciman sent for the Hindu Hari Singh Gour. Gour continued to govern in the Liberal Unionist tradition and India managed to survive the period 1929-33 without an economic recession (albeit that this was mainly because of their severe underdevelopment prior to this).

However, the freezing up of international trade and credit did not leave India untouched. The price of commodities rose and Indian exports to Britain were damaged by increased Commonwealth protectionism. Additionally, the Grand Coalition’s desperate defence of the Gold Standard necessitated that India export some of its gold reserves to the UK, which damaged the Reserve Bank’s ability to act as a lender of last resort. Jinnah and Shafi both resigned from the government in 1934 over tax increases in the budget, leading the League into opposition once more. However, at the 1935 elections, aggressive campaigning by the Liberal Unionists saw them pick up 15 of the League’s seats to give themselves an even more comfortable majority, now under the chairmanship of Sikandar Hayat Khan, a Muslim Punjabi landowner.

Elections to the Imperial Legislative Assembly (seat breakdown in brackets)
1893 (90 Liberal Party; 57 Indian National Congress)
1900 (103 Liberal Party; 44 Indian National Congress)
1907 (110 Liberal Party; 34 Indian National Congress; 3 All-India Muslim League)
1914 (87 Liberal Unionist Party; 38 Indian National Congress; 22 All-India Muslim League)
1922 (76 Liberal Unionist Party; 37 Indian National Congress; 34 All-India Muslim League)
1928 (91 Liberal Unionist Party; 31 Indian National Congress; 25 All-India Muslim League)
1935 (106 Liberal Unionist Party; 31 Indian National Congress; 10 All-India Muslim League)

Viceroys of India

1. George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon; Liberal Party; June 1880 - December 1895
2. Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin; Conservative Party; December 1895 - January 1899
3. Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto; Conservative Party; January 1899 - November 1905
4. Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading; Liberal Party; November 1905 - November 1915
5. Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire; Liberal Party; November 1915 - January 1922
6. Richard Hely-Hutchinson, 6th Earl of Donoughmore; Conservative Party; January 1922 - January 1925
7. Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford; Liberal Party; January 1925 - April 1931
8. Christopher Addison, 1st Viscount Addison; Liberal Party; April 1931 - present

Chairmen of the Indian Council of Ministers

1. Antony MacDonnell; Liberal Party; March 1893 - April 1901
2. Sir Guido Wilson; Liberal Party/Liberal Unionist Party (after 1914); April 1901 - March 1914
3. Lawrence Dundas, Earl of Ronaldshay; Liberal Unionist Party; March 1914 - May 1927
4. Jawaharlal Nehru; Indian National Congress; May 1927 - March 1928
5. Hari Singh Gour; Liberal Unionist Party; March 1928 - March 1935
6. Sikandar Hayat Khan; Liberal Unionist Party; March 1935 - present

 

[Rattigan]

Citizens: China under the First, Second and Third Republics

Sun Yat-sen: The Father and Gravedigger of Republican China


Since the First (1842) and Second (1856-1860) Opium Wars, the need for a drastic reformation of Chinese society had been evident. However, over the course of the last third of the nineteenth century, various attempts at reform (for example the Self-Strengthening Movement in 1861 or the Hundred Days in 1898) had foundered for a variety of reasons. This was compounded by a number of humiliations at the turn of the twentieth century. In the First Sino-Japanese War (1895) the Joseon Dynasty of Korea was annexed by Japan, following the Boxer Rebellion (1900) more unequal treaties were imposed on the Qing and in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1910) Manchuria was placed under an informal Japanese protectorate (although it was not formally annexed to Japan, this was a major ideological blow as it was the homeland of the Qing rulers). Following the Anglo-Tibetan War (1905-06) and the Anglo-Chinese Convention, the Beijing government had also been required to accept the British annexation of Tibet. To further add insult to injury, the Qing found themselves sidelined as the great powers of Russia and Japan duked it out in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), carving up Chinese territory and market access without them in the room.

All of these long-term structural issues coalesced with short-term complaints in March 1912, where a series of uprisings which had begun in October 1911 resulted in the declaration of the Republic of China, ending over 2,000 years of imperial rule. The Xuantong Emperor and what remained of his court fled to Korea under Japanese protection (something of a surprise for all concerned). Mongolia, Turkestan and Tuva also used this opportunity to escape from Qing suzerainty. Sun Yat-sen became president of the First Chinese Republic but political chaos soon engulfed the young republic. Yuan Shikai, the closest the late Qing had to a military hero, lead a coup in December 1915, overthrowing the republican government and restoring the empire with himself as the Hongxian Emperor. However, while he had expected international support, in the atmosphere of the Great War, none was forthcoming. Even the two neutral Pacific powers, Japan and the United Kingdom, were skeptical of Yuan and kept their distance.

In the resulting Anti-Monarchy War, Yuan’s skeleton imperial government would be overthrown after three months and he would die three months after that. However, the fate of China’s first republican government left important scars. In the first place, it demonstrated that the Republic had not gained the loyalty of the army in 1912 (even those units who had rebelled) and, instead, Sun was forced to rely on numerous regional warlords who, after 1916, controlled their fiefdoms effectively as separate states, minting their own currencies and passing their own laws. In 1917, the Second Republic of China came into being, with a federal system which attempted to accommodate the warlords but in reality was little more than an acceptance of the failure of the Chinese state to hold together. Sun’s alliance with the Communists in 1918 also did little to improve his position, as had been hoped. By 1919, the Second Republic controlled probably little more than a few south-eastern provinces centred on Guangzhou, while the rest of the country was ruled by ever-shifting coalitions of the warlords.

At the Paris Peace Conference, the Chinese delegation were frustrated at the high-handed way they were treated by the Entente. Even though they were not a defeated country or a member of the Central Powers, they were very much treated like one. German territories and concessions in China were handed over to Japan and even the notionally anti-imperialist Russian delegation proved unsympathetic to the Chinese (reasoning that it was more important to stay on the Entente’s good books). This lead to a wave of anti-Western sentiment sweeping through China, as expressed in the May Fourth Movement. Or, rather, it should be said that a wave of anti-Entente sentiment swept through China: somewhat bizarrely, images of Wilhelm II and Franz Ferdinand were often paraded on protests as other examples of nations trampled under the feet of the avaricious Entente.

The failure of the Paris Treaty (from China’s point of view), combined with the discrediting of British, French, American and Russian thought amongst the Chinese intelligentsia, lead to the development of a uniquely Chinese philosophy that blended elements of romantic nationalism, traditionalist confucianism, idiosyncratic marxism and militarism into a potent ideology. In January 1922, Sun was the driving force behind an alliance of his Chinese United League and the Communist Party of Li Dazhao, creating the Kuomintang Alliance, and beginning the Chinese Civil War to unify the country and overthrow the warlords.

Sun would eventually die of cancer in 1925, precipitating a round of infighting over who would replace him as leader. Chiang Kai-shek would come out on top exactly a year later: assassinating, arresting and forcing into exile his three principal rivals of Liao Zhongkai, Hu Hanmin and Wang Jingwei, respectively. The rapid and unpredictable turnover of leadership allowed Chaing to effectively end civilian oversight of the military and establish a military dictatorship along the lines of Germany. Chiang conducted a series of purges of the Kuomintang in July 1926, especially against former Communist elements, riding himself of them and consolidating his control over his regime. In January 1927, Chiang commenced a vast invasion of the northern cliques, advancing to the Yellow River by April. Co-opting several warlords to their side, the Kuomintang secured a series of decisive victories and captured Beijing in December. That same month, Chiang promulgated the constitution of the Third Chinese Republic, which centralised power in the army under his rule.

The following decade was far more stable than the preceding decade and a half. Diplomatic recognition was extended by most governments, China joined the League of Nations and the unequal treaties began to be unraveled. Although he never fully trusted them, Chiang tolerated entrepreneurs, who created the conditions for economic growth (which averaged nearly 4% per year over the decade). This was, however, combined with consistent suppression of dissent as well as government corruption and nepotism. Revolt in the provinces was never fully eradicated and there were periodic severe crackdowns on a number of groups, especially the Communists (who mostly fled to the Soviet-protected Turkestan or Mongolia).

1931 also saw a significant diplomatic setback for Chiang, with his failure to persuade the Japanese to end their involvement in Manchuria. Instead, that year they installed former emperor Puyi as the puppet Kangde Emperor of the Empire of Manchuria, under their vassalage. Correctly guessing that he lacked the military means to remove the Japanese at this stage, Chiang contented himself with harshly cracking down on the protests that sprang up in response to the Japanese move.

Thinking of the Japanese, British, Americans and French as untrustworthy imperialists (not, in fairness, an unreasonable assessment) and having close relations only with the German government, Chiang believed that China must be able to take on all comers, if necessary. That necessitated a significant military build up, particularly of the Chinese navy, which was in a risible state in 1930. By the secret Circle One plan of 1931, construction began on 39 new warships and an expansion of the Naval Air Service to 14 Air Groups, which were completed in 1933. The success of Circle One shocked the world and lead to a rapprochement between the Pacific Powers, with Japan and the UK renewing their alliance in 1933. This was followed up by the Circle Two plan on 1934, covering the construction of 48 new warships including aircraft carriers, all of which were built according to stolen British, French and Japanese designs.

Chinese Governments

1. Great Qing; April 1644 - March 1912
2. First Republic of China; March 1912 - December 1915
3. Empire of China; December 1915 - March 1916
4. Provisional Government of China; March 1916 - July 1917
5. Second Republic of China; July 1917 - December 1927
6. Third Republic of China; December 1927 - present
   

Presidents of the First Republic of China

1. Sun Yat-sen; Chinese United League; March 1912 - December 1915
   

Emperors of the Empire of China

1. Yuan Shikai; Hongxian Emperor; December 1915 - March 1916
   

Chairman of the Provisional Government of China

1. Li Yuanhong; Progressive Party; March 1916 - July 1917
   

Presidents of the Second Republic of China

1. Sun Yat-sen; Chinese United League/Kuomintang (after January 1922); July 1917 - March 1925
2. Liao Zhongkai; Kuomintang; March - August 1925
3. Wang Jingwei; Kuomintang; August - December 1925
4. Zhang Renjie; Kuomintang; December 1925 - March 1926
5. Chiang Kai-shek; Kuomintang; March 1926 - December 1927
   

President and Generalissimo of the Third Republic of China

1. Chiang Kai-shek; Kuomintang; December 1927 - present

 

[Rattigan]

Showa Democracy: Parliamentary Politics and the End of Militarism Under the Taisho and Showa Emperors

The First Keynesian: although far from fully formed, Takahashi Korekiyo's policies as Finance Minister would do much to influence economic orthodoxy for decades


Japan’s experience of the Great War had, to a great extent, mirrored that of its island ally the United Kingdom. Having entered the war in 1917, its navy and army had demonstrated ruthless efficiency in capturing and subduing Germany’s Far Eastern territories while suffering only 360 soldiers killed. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Japanese delegation’s racial equality proposal was shot down but, other than that, they got more or less everything they wanted out of the conflict: namely all of Germany’s territories north of the equator and even greater international prestige. Japan was well-established as one of the Great Powers as well as an advanced economy with a burgeoning industrial sector. In the words of one historian, Japan had rather remarkably “achieved in forty years what it had taken France nearly 150.”

However, such surface-level statistics concealed deeper problems at the heart of the Japanese geopolitical position: namely the nation’s lack of natural resources. The Korean Peninsula had been annexed in 1895 and the Manchuria region of China had been placed under occupation in 1910 as a way of trying to solve this problem but control of these regions were fragile: in the first place, there were few Japanese actually in these region (despite a moderately successful programme to encourage emigration to Manchuria in the 1910s); and there was the feeling, real or not, that the safety of the Japanese Empire largely rested on the goodwill of the British, something the Royal Navy’s devastating destruction of the Kriegsmarine in 1917 had done nothing to dispel. The major foreign policy choice for the Japanese in the 1920s and ‘30s, therefore, was how to approach this challenge: hug Britain ever-closer as an ally; or attempt to build up the military in order to out-compete them.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was reaffirmed in a conference in 1920 which resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Kyoto, with both British and Japanese diplomats concerned that the US’s oscillation between internationalism and isolationism would make them an unreliable partner. However, concern about the abilities of the IJN as against the Royal Navy encouraged the navy to begin an ambitious ship-building programme. The Treaty of Kyoto committed Japan to securing the Pacific north of the equator and the British south of the equator, with both navies (although not merchant shipping) being excluded from operating in the other theatre. The Royal Navy commenced a massive re-fit of their Singapore Naval Base in 1921 to serve as their new base of operations while the Japanese took over and re-did the operation of the former British base at Liugong Island.

Over the course of the 1920s, Japanese domestic politics became more and more ‘parliamentary’ in its outlook, mainly because the Taisho Emperor was a sickly man who did not take as close an interest in politics as his Meiji predecessor had. Hara Takashi, a commoner, had taken office as Prime Minister in 1918 with the rallying cry of “militarism is dead” and his nine-year tenure went some way towards realising that aim. During this time, Japan’s foreign relations were dominated by Kijuro Shidehara, who advocated closer relations with the British and the Dutch, as well as a conciliatory approach towards Japan’s Korean and Manchurian subjects. In Korea, in particular, the comfort women system was cracked down upon and more avenues were opened up for Koreans to join the administration.

Following Hara’s unexpected death of pneumonia in November 1927, the government was taken over by his former Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo. Takahashi governed in much the same style as his predecessor until the summer of 1930, when he unveiled a budget which included severe cuts (including in military expenditure) as a way of responding to the then unfolding economic crisis. The army and the navy had long retained the prerogative of appointing the Army and Naval ministers, respectively, meaning that they were potentially capable of bringing down any government they didn’t like by simply withdrawing their ministers and refusing to appoint new ones. In June 1930, both military departments pulled the trigger on this power for the first time, causing the government to fall.

The elections later that month produced a majority for the Constitutional Democratic Party and Wakatsuki Reijiro became Prime Minister. Wakatsuki was expected by many to allow the military to dictate matters but, to many people’s surprise, quite the opposite happened. Wakatsuki turned out to be a strong and capable Prime Minister who frustrated the ambitions of his would-be controllers in the military and of the far-right paramilitaries who were becoming increasingly vocal on the streets. Indeed, in April 1931, Wakatsuki’s government took part in the Singapore Naval Conference with the Commonwealth and the Dutch Empire arguing for cuts in military expenditure. At these talks, the three parties discussed their response to Chiang Kai-shek’s naval building plans. All three countries were anxious to avoid extensive rearmament commitments at a time when they were all experiencing financial crises and the conference finished with a commitment to an anti-Chinese alliance between the three and joint naval exercises in the near future.

However, the continued refusal to indulge in increased military spending infuriated reactionary elements of the army and navy. In May 1931, a coterie of officers in league with the far right League of Blood, attempted a coup which involved attacks on the Prime Minister’s office, the office of the Lord Privy Seal and the main branch of the Mitsubishi Bank in Tokyo. The Finance Minister Kato Takaaki and the Foreign Minister Takuma Dan were both killed. However, the uprising failed to ignite the majority of the population or the military. A key moment appears to have been the move by the great war hero Admiral Togo, who, although he professed a distaste for politics, declared in May 1931 that, despite his dislike of the results of the Singapore Naval Conference, the military must respect the decisions of the Japanese civilian government. Combined with Wakatsuki’s skilfull pacifying of the powerful Kwantung Army by allowing them to formally declare a protectorate over Manchuria (something which merely made de jure the de facto situation on the ground), the majority of the military remained loyal to the civilian government. The Japanese courts subsequently handed down harsh sentences to the conspirators and the political blowback was enough to result in the sacking of hard right ministers such as War Minister Sadao Araki, who had described the conspirators as “irrepressible patriots.”

As so often in the history of the world, while global trends seemed to be blowing in one direction, Japan steadfastly trod its own path. While the various powers across Europe were declining into chaos and militarism, Japan’s democracy seemed, over the course of 1931, to have reached a certain maturity. The attempted coup in May 1931 and its aftermath have since been labelled the birth of Showa democracy.

Perhaps the most lasting testament to the strength of Japan’s democracy came in December 1931, when Wakatsuki called a general election and lost. Despite the fraught atmosphere of only a few months ago, the May coup barely featured in the electoral campaign, with most discussion being focused on the continuing economic crisis. Inuki Tsuyoshi became Prime Minister and Takahashi returned to government as Minister of Finance. To bring Japan out of the depression, Takahashi immediately instituted dramatic expansionary monetary and fiscal policy, abandoning the gold standard in December 1931 and increasing deficit spending.

These actions devalued the Yen and had an immediate effect. Japanese textiles became attractive on the open market and deficit spending proved to have a profound stimulating effect on Japanese industries in a number of sectors such as automobiles and modern electrical goods. By 1933, Japan was already out of the depression, which in turn lead to concerns about the possibility of the economy overheating and in 1934 he moved to institute cuts to the military (choosing to rely instead on the alliance with Britain reaffirmed in 1933). In a further sign that the failure of the 1931 coup had caused a backing away from militarism, there was grumbling amongst the top brass at this move but the budget passed and the cuts went into effect.

Prime Ministers of Japan

1. Count Terauchi Masataki; army; October 1916 - September 1918
2. Hara Takashi; Constitutional Association of Political Friendship; September 1918 - November 1927
3. Viscount Takahashi Korekiyo; Constitutional Association of Political Friendship; November 1927 - June 1930
4. Baron Wakatsuki Reijiro; Constitutional Democratic Party; June 1930 - December 1931
5. Inuki Tsuyoshi; Constitutional Association of Political Friendship; December 1931 - present

 

[Rattigan]

This will be the final detour update before returning to Anglo-focused updates next time. This one is a bit more whimsical on my part and not, frankly, all that important to the overall narrative but I thought it was fun.

* * *
​

Days in the Sun: The First Years of the International Cricket League

The United States team posing with the inaugural ICL trophy in 1911. Note the Haverford College jerseys still worn by some of the players, indicating the low-key nature of the affair at that point.


Although the laws of the game had been codified in 1744, it took over a century and a half for cricket to receive a formal international calendar. The first international match took place in 1844 between Canada and the United States, a game that would continue as an annual tradition for over eighty years. The first recognised test match (for which players received international caps) took place in 1877, when an English team touring Australia played two matches against full Australian XIs. The following year, substantially the same Australian players toured England for the first time and the success of this tour ensured a popular demand for similar ventures in the future. In 1882, Australia won a test match for the first time, defeating England at the Oval in the match which gave rise to the famous ‘Ashes’ rivalry.

In the summer of 1884, the Gentlemen of Philadelphia toured England, playing 12 first class games and one match against and English XI that was, at the end of the game, granted international status and the players involved given test caps. In part this seems to have been a mistake as the English authorities did not know that there was a separate US national cricket team and assumed that the Philadelphia Club stood in for American cricket as a whole overseas (in much the same way that the Marylebone Cricket Club then stood in for English cricket when touring abroad). In that context, some of the English players demanded caps for what they believed to be an international-level match. Perhaps they should have been tipped off by the nature of the game, which they won easily. Nevertheless, quite by accident the United States had become the third Test nation.

With the door to international membership already cracked open, South Africa followed in 1889 and Ireland in 1902. This, in turn, stimulated the speedy development of the domestic sport in all of those countries, albeit that in Ireland and the United States it remained some way short of a national sport, its following being heavily based on elites in Dublin and Philadelphia, respectively. By 1905, the sport was growing in popularity around the world and the governing bodies of the five international teams met together in London and announced the formation of the International Cricket Council (“ICC”), a world governing body for the sport.

With the creation of the ICC to govern the world sport, the members of its governing body immediately set out to give itself something to govern. Games starring touring teams were immensely popular in every country in which they were played but different governing bodies began to raise complaints about a lack of context for the games: although England and Australia had the narrative of ‘the Ashes,’ matches between Ireland and South Africa, for example, had less of a spice to them. Furthermore, with the sport rapidly becoming popular in places like New Zealand and India, smaller countries like Ireland worried that they would be squeezed out of the touring schedule and the US was concerned that the sport’s relative lack of popularity in their country might see them dropped in favour of a more empire-focused future for the sport.

Eventually the ICC came do a decision in 1909 that satisfied all of its five full members equally. Starting in 1910, each of the five full members would play each other in one full test series of five matches, with each team playing two series at home and two series abroad (with home advantages swapping in each tournament). With points awarded for performances in both the test series and individual matches (1 point for winning a match, 2 for drawing a match, 3 for drawing a series and 4 for winning a series), the team with the most points would be crowned the winners at the end of the tournament.

To the surprise of many observers, the United States won the inaugural tournament. They had a bowling-dominated line-up, with Bart King dominating the leading records with 174 wickets at an average of 11.01. Their top batsman, George Patterson, top scored with 1,139 runs at an average of 39.45 but that was otherwise unremarkable. The decisive match was a victory over Australia in Melbourne in the Boxing Day game of 1910, where King’s 6-102 in to skittle out Australia in their first innings and Patterson’s 162 not out in the United States’ second innings gave the Americans an unexpected victory by 8 wickets and put them on the map. The US team would finish the inaugural 1910-11 season unbeaten and news of their exploits abroad was reported back home and gobbled up by a fascinated public. When they returned home victorious in December 1911, they were greeted by huge crowds in New York when their ship berthed and were treated to a ticker tape parade through Philadelphia (apparently, much to their surprise).

The 1912-13 season had to be cancelled owing to the outbreak of the Great War, when the ICC board agreed that the competition must have all 5 teams or none at all. However, when hostilities ceased, crowds across the world were eagerly looking forward to the competition beginning again, which it did in 1919-20. This second tournament was won by Great Britain (as England had formally been renamed in 1918). The competition continued on in its current format until 1926, when India, New Zealand, West Indies, Canada and China (effectively a team of British expatriates in Hong Kong) were admitted to the competition as full members. Thereafter, the competition was expanded to two divisions (named the Spofforth Division and the Grace Division after the two great pre-ICL players) each of five teams. The five teams in each division would play off against one each other in the same manner as the original format, with the two winners of each division advancing to a ‘Championship Series.’ Despite the expansion of teams, however, the overall quality of the new teams was somewhat low and Great Britain, the US and Australia continued to dominate the winners’ board.

Winners of the International Cricket League

1. 1910-11 (5 teams): United States of America (1)
2. 1912-13 (5 teams): cancelled due to the outbreak of the Great War
3. 1919-20 (5 teams): Great Britain (1)
4. 1921-22 (5 teams): Australia (1)
5. 1923-24 (5 teams): United States of America (2)
6. 1925-26 (5 teams): Australia (2)
7. 1927-29 (10 teams; 2 divisions): Great Britain (2)
8. 1930-32 (10 teams; 2 divisions): United States of America (3)
9. 1933-35 (10 teams; 2 divisions): Great Britain (3)

 

[Rattigan]

Freedom from Fear: The United Kingdom under the People's Home Programme

Three of the most famous examples of Lloyd George's 'People's Home' stimulus programmes. From top to bottom: a 'functionalist' apartment block in Birmingham; construction proceeding on the M1 in November 1937 (note also the new electricity pylons in the background); HMS Illustrious underway after being commissioned in May 1938.


David Lloyd George’s government of the 1930s is perhaps the most clearly deliniated ‘government of two halves’ in history: widely praised (or at least admired) for its transformative domestic agenda, which did so much to define British and Commonwealth history for years to come; but, on the other hand, its foreign policy remains infamous as a particularly shameful episode that many would rather forget but know that they cannot. Fortunately for the subsequent memory of the those involved in the government’s domestic agenda, they have largely been excused the failures of its foreign policy.

The key figures at the head of the Liberal’s domestic agenda on their return to power were Lloyd George himself, the Chancellor John Maynard Keynes and the Home Secretary William Beveridge. In Keynes’ emergency budget of December 1934, he announced an immediate increase in government spending and a full suite of tax cuts to boost the money supply in the economy. The Banking Regulation Act 1935 increased regulation on high street banks in an effort to prevent further bank runs and encourage lending. The Bank of England was nationalised with Reginald McKenna installed as its chairman and interest rates were cut to 1% in a further effort to encourage borrowing and move money around the economy.

Lloyd George worked closely with other Commonwealth governments and the quadrilogy of Prime Ministers made up of Lloyd George, Canada’s William Lyon Mackenzie King, New Zealand’s Michael Savage and Australia’s James Scullin (along with their respective Chancellors) formed an informal ‘Commonwealth Cabinet’ that was in almost constant contact to coordinate their economic response. All four of these men shared a similar outlook on politics, economics and ideology, seeing the role of the markets and the state and being to promote equality, freedom, democracy and economic efficiency. On a concrete level, the Curtin-Keynes Plan of 1935 provided for a means whereby the central banks of all of the Commonwealth countries would work together to ensure that there was a trade balance between the Commonwealth and the rest of the world and a semblance of one between each member state. In a famous speech to conclude the 1934 Prime Ministers’ Conference, Lloyd George declared that he aimed to turn Britain and the Commonwealth into “the people’s home” and the ‘People’s Home Programme’ became a common name for his economic platform as a whole.

Although Labour (and, by extension, the trades unions) never abandoned their hostility to Lloyd George personally, Bevin (back in full control of the TUC by the autumn of 1936) was willing to work with him on proposals relating to industrial democracy. Additionally, the government committed itself to a number of industrial works programmes in order to reduce unemployment, which became perhaps the most famous (or at least most physically long-lasting) aspects of his premiership. In this context, it was perhaps unsurprising that Keynes turned to the thing that had, off and on, been a reliable supplier of economic growth for all British governments since the 1880s: house building and slum clearance. Thanks to a mix of subsidies and the cut in interest rates, 350,000 houses were built in 1936, 1937 and 1938. Part-state-owned businesses were set up across Scotland, the north of England and Wales (the regions worst hit by the economic crisis) to stimulate modern technology. Electrification, in particular, was instituted at a great pace, with the vast majority of the country electrified by the end of 1939. Further farming subsidies rolled out in 1936 and 1937 caused a modest but meaningful agricultural boom in Ireland.

The motor industry, especially, recovered well from the 1929-30 crisis to continue the progress it had experienced in the 1920s. The industry at large pivoted away from personal cars (which were harder to make money from as people had less to spend) and towards commercial transportation, entering into a vigorous competition with railway companies which would dominate the next three decades of the British freight industry. Cities and towns which already had motor industries, notably Coventry, Birmingham and Oxford, saw a boom in their businesses. The government also embarked on a substantial upgrade of rail tracks and a wide-ranging road-building programme, including building the country’s first five motorways.

Perhaps the biggest stimulus spending, however, was on the Commonwealth military. Much of the rest of the intra-Commonwealth response to the crisis had been on the level of rhetoric or technical fixes which, while vital to the continued health of the countries’ respective economies, went largely under the radar at the time. However, the expansion of the various Commonwealth armies and the Royal Navy could not be ignored. Anxious for a programme which could positively impact each Commonwealth countries’ economy, at a Prime Ministers’ Conference in winter 1935, the prime ministers gave the green light to what was at the time the largest government spending programme of all time (albeit that spending came out of the pooled resources of six countries). Total military spending increased by 700% across the entire Commonwealth, with the Navy, in particular, being equipped with technologically advanced weaponry, the most notable of which were the 3 Ark Royal-class and 12 Illustrious-class aircraft carriers which had been completed by December 1939.

In the interests of balance, it should be noted that the deflationary policies of the Grand Coalition had, by decreasing prices, probably helped the economy turn the corner by the end of 1934 and created the conditions for Lloyd George’s and Keynes’ subsequent economic recovery. Furthermore, the tariff protections around the Commonwealth had protected more vulnerable British industries (notably British, Australian and Canadian shipyards but also the motor industry) which otherwise might have gone to the wall in 1929-30. However, few doubt that Lloyd George, Keynes and their Commonwealth contemporaries had exercised a positive and immediate effect on the economy: unemployment dropped below the ideologically significant number of 1,000,000 by January 1937 (continuing to drop thereafter) and growth was consistent and robust, if not necessarily that large.

The Commonwealth too saw great improvement as a whole: agriculture was mechanised and modernised in Rhodesia and South Africa while Australia and Canada developed sustained industrial bases for the first time. All countries in the Commonwealth had roared past their 1929 levels by the end of 1936 and by 1938 the Commonwealth as a whole was clearly established as the world’s pre-eminent industrial and economic superpower once more (if, indeed, it had ever lost that title), with a total GDP a third larger than its nearest competitor, the United States.

With the economy looking good and his personal health robust even at the age of 76, Lloyd George began to make plans for an election in the winter of 1939. However, the disastrous sinking of the RMS Queen Mary following an engine explosion during in the English Channel in October 1939, with the loss of over 1,500 lives, dampened the national mood and caused the government to hastily cancel the election and secretly rearrange it for the spring. Little did they know, however, that events were going to intervene once more.

 

[Rattigan]

Down a Long and Dark Road: The Foreign Policy of the Third Lloyd George Ministry

Images of a slow-burning crisis: (top to bottom) Italian troops being transported to the front in Dalmatia, November 1935; Kuomintang propaganda commemorating the signing of the Wiesbaden Pact, April 1937; Otto von Habsburg proclaims the incorporation of Austria into the German Empire to crowds in Vienna, October 1937.


Many have since identified the reincorporation of Bavaria into the German Empire in July 1934 as the final nail in the coffin of the League of Nations. While, in truth, that organisation was probably already dead by then, the Bavarian crisis was certainly the time when the rest of Europe seemed to realise. In the grip of a series of more or less extreme military and/or fascist dictatorships, European states rapidly returned to the politics of pure power, with predictable results. In January 1935, the Italian army invaded and occupied the entirety of the Free State of Istria, scattering the small Austrian and Serbian forces which had been sent to oppose them. Given that this was a violation of the Paris Treaty (not to mention a crime of aggression), Serbia and Austria appealed to the League of Nations, which issued a weakly-worded condemnation of Italy’s actions and demanded that Graziani withdraw his troops, which he resolutely refused to do. France wanted to do something more but the British Foreign Secretary Sir Francis Acland dragged his feet, urging countries to work for conciliation through the League as a proxy for doing anything practical.

This failure to respond did not go unnoticed and, in June 1935, Germany decided to push things a little further by marching soldiers into the Rhineland. One of the terms of the Paris Treaty was that this region would remain demilitarised as a buffer zone with France. The German army did not meet any resistance from either France or the local population (privately a relief to Groener, who had been against the move). France brought a case against Germany in the League but, once again, it foundered on the apathy of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Britain was a supporter of allowing Germany to be rebuilt as a counterweight to France, something helped by the presence in London of the popular German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch. Lloyd George was, privately and publicly, a supporter of the German economic programme as an example of a non-communist planned economy. Furthermore, the British entry into the Great War had been conditioned not by a hatred of Germany but by a mistrust of French ambitions and this fundamental emphasis persisted into the 1930s. In this context, they also turned a blind eye to the German rearmament programme that kicked into a higher gear after about 1932 (but which had, in truth, been going on for some time).

In October 1935 a small incursion into Istria by Serbian partisans resulted in the death of a local Italian farmer. The Graziani government immediately used this as a pretext for a punitive military expedition into Dalmatia that rapidly became a full occupation, with Graziani’s interior minister Benito Mussolini declaring that the Italian army would now make good on the promises of the London Agreement. By the end of the month, Italian forces had turned back the Serbian defenders and effectively occupied the old Hapsburg kingdoms of Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia. When Serbian requests for support from her Balkan League allies (Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro) fell on deaf ears, the question for the international community rapidly became one of how to respond to the new reality of the Italian occupation rather than how to turn it back.

In secret negotiations between Italy, France and Britain held in London in December 1935, Britain and France agreed to accept the new reality and have Italy absorb its conquered gains. In return, the three countries agreed to a secret mutual defence treaty, with Britain deciding that its previous position of keeping Italy down had failed and that instead they had to do their best to keep them friendly instead. France, for its part, saw the agreement as a key plank of its defences against a resurgent Germany. When the so-called Acland-Barthou Agreement was made public, it was met by a public outcry in Britain over Britain’s abandonment of the Balkan League (less of an issue, in reality, as Bulgaria’s and Greece’s refusal to come to Serbia’s aid in October had effectively killed the League) and cost Acland his job. However, it was put into effect nonetheless.

The most prominent effect of the Acland-Barthou Agreement on British domestic politics was to create yet another split in the parties. Concerned by Lloyd George’s lackadaisical approach to foreign policy, a cross-party coterie of MPs began meeting together and urging the government to take a more aggressive stance, particularly against what they identified as the quadruple threat of Italy, Germany, Russia and China. Formed in January 1936 and known, to themselves and subsequently by others, as the Country Party, none of its members actually left their previous parties but, with prominent politicians like the Liberal Winston Churchill, the Conservative Anthony Eden and Labour’s Arthur Greenwood, they attained a national profile very quickly especially on matters of defence. Perhaps their most notable success in their first year was their alliance with conservative Anglicans to pressure Lloyd George to ensure that Edward VIII abdicated from the throne in December 1936, publically over his plan to marry an American divorcee but privately over his anti-democratic views.

Perceiving, correctly, that the Acland-Barthou Agreement was intended by the French and the Italians (if not the British) as an attempt to isolate Germany, Groener turned his attention towards both ensuring that Germany had the power of size in Europe and alliances internationally to fall back on. To this end, he concluded the Wiesbaden Pact with representatives of the Kuomintang in April 1937, a mutual defence treaty between China and Germany. Although what practical support each side could give to one another was questionable, it did serve to create a general problem for the British and the French: they couldn’t intervene in Asia for fear of creating a problem in Europe and they couldn’t intervene in Europe for fear of creating a problem in Asia. British and French strategists knew that both sides were probably bluffing but the word ‘probably’ was the key part of that observation. That, at least, was the theory.

For their part, British diplomatic and military planners knew that both China and Germany were threats but the secretive nature of their rearmament meant that they weren’t exactly clear how much of one they were. To this end, Lloyd George altered his previously pro-German position over the summer of 1937, now seeking to play a double game with them: quietly supporting Groener’s ambitions in Europe in order to develop goodwill towards Britain while also building up a coterie of allies against them to act as a backstop. German territorial ambitions centred on Austria, which had muddled its way through the 1920s and ‘30s attempting to deal with Czech secessionists and urban-rural polarisation. Its position had been further weakened by the Italian annexation of Istria and Dalmatia, which had left the country landlocked. As such, unification with Germany began to look more and more attractive, especially when it was made clear that Otto von Habsburg would be able to keep his throne at the head of German Austria in the expanded Empire. In October 1937, the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns signed the Vienna Agreement, incorporating all of Austria into Germany.

The move was controversial internationally but none of Britain, France, Italy and Russia were willing to go to war over something that clearly had a lot of public support in both Vienna and Berlin. As such, at a conference in Vienna in January 1938, the newly-expanded German Empire signed a declaration that it would not look for further territorial expansion. The League of Nations was ignored, a complete waste of time by this point. Lloyd George returned from Vienna declaring to Parliament that he foresaw “peace in our time” but even he, by this point, was anticipating at least a short war very soon. Groener took the opportunity to retire a day later, handing over to Ludwig Beck.

 

[Rattigan]

The White Eagle and the Double Cross: The Polish-Slovak Civil War

Slovakian armoured troops shortly before the Battle of Opawa in April 1939


Since the agreement on population transfers with Germany, the chimerical nation of Poland-Slovakia had entered into a period of (relatively) watchful calm. For some time intra-ethnic tensions were salved with the ideology of the country as a “home of nations” under the leadership of the Polish Chief of State Josef Pilsudski and his Slovakian Prime Minister Milan Hodza. However, this social peace came under severe fire following the 1929-30 crash (when the Polish-Slovakian economy saw unemployment rise to over 20% and output fall by 40%) - which stimulated the rise of a more exclusionary race-based politics - and finally collapsed after Pilsudski’s death in 1935. Instead, the politics of the country came to be quickly and violently polarised between the Polish nationalist Camp of Great Poland lead by Roman Dmowski and the Slovakian nationalist People’s Party lead by Andrej Hlinka.

The immediate push towards civil war seems to have been the death of Dmowski in January 1939. Rumours immediately spread that he had been murdered (reputable historians agree that he died of natural causes) and anti-Slovak riots immediately broke out, which lead to anti-Polish riots breaking out in response. Over the ‘Bloody Winter’ of January-February 1939 an estimated 100 Poles and 80 Slovakians were murdered by mobs. On 17 February, after an internal argument within the People’s Party, the leader Vojtech Tuka (who had taken over following Hlinka’s death in August 1938), announced his intention to withdraw Slovakia from the Commonwealth. There then followed a period where nobody knew what was going on, as the Polish leader Stanislaw Grabski (a relatively moderate member of the Camp of Great Poland) attempted to reach some kind of conciliation. However, any hopes of reconciliation were torpedoed decisively in April 1939, when the Polish General Jozef Haller responded to the build up of Slovakian forces on the border by shelling them with artillery and subsequently putting them to flight at the Battle of Opawa.

From then on, the slide to Civil War was inevitable. The smart money, in April 1939, would have been to back Poland, with their greater numbers of military officers and equipment. Indeed, their early victories seemed to prove this point. However, People’s Party politicians such as Tuka and Josef Tiso proved successful at mobilising the Slovakian population and, in Ferdinand Katlos, they soon found a general capable of organising a capable defence. Nevertheless, Slovakia was indisputably the weaker part of the Commonwealth and Poland was able to settle in for what they imagined would be a difficult but ultimately successful war of attrition.

However, this changed radically in December 1939. That month, a small Slovakian convoy travelling near the contested city of Zilina and heading towards the German border in Bohemia was surrounded by Polish troops. When the individuals inside refused to surrender, several were gunned down in a firefight and the remainder were carted off to a POW camp. This was all a fairly normal, if grim, part of the civil war then raging but what made it unusual was when it emerged in the days afterwards that one of the captured was the German diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop. Germany had been building up its forces along its Polish-Slovakian border for months now, concerned about the possibility of the conflict spilling over, and at this point everything entered into a different gear.

Even at this stage, conflict could have been avoided. Lloyd George and his foreign secretary Herbert Samuel immediately raced to Berlin, reminding Beck of the promise Groener had made and urging him to adopt a diplomatic posture. Sadly, by this point the hotheads in the Polish government had got the upperhand over the relatively more cautious Gabski. Jedrzej Giertych, the Polish Prime Minister, believing that the threat of war with Britain, France and Italy would hold Germany back, not only refused to return Ribbentrop, calling him a spy (indeed, it is unclear what he was doing in Poland-Slovakia if not negotiating with the Slovakian government, which was known to have pro-German sentiments) and sending an insulting note to the German Chancellery.

On receipt of the note, Beck informed Lloyd George, Graziani and the French Prime Minister Leon Blum that the affair was now a matter of honour and that he intended for Germany to “inflict a severe blow upon Poland and to read a lesson to her leaders which shall not soon be forgotten.” In response, Blum and Lloyd George said that, in that case, they would be required to abide by the Vienna Agreement and other agreements made between them and declare war on Germany. Italy notably sent a more ambiguous response and Spain, for what that was worth, sided with Germany.

Thus, on 14 January, Germany declared war on Poland and German troops poured over the border, at the same time recognising Slovakian independence and signing an agreement making it a German protectorate. The next day, following the expiry of an ultimatum, France and Britain declared war on Germany. This act, however, opened up a web of secret German treaties that immediately made the Anglo-French position far weaker than it had looked only a day earlier.

Italy and Russia did not declare war alongside their notional allies. Instead Russia revealed a secret German-Soviet Pact, in which the Soviets acknowledged the German annexation of Poland-Slovakia in return for the German government agreeing to buy large quantities of Soviet oil and natural gas (not, in truth, much of a hardship for them). Italy’s failure to declare war on Germany revealed that it had an agreement with Germany whereby Germany would accept Italy’s future conquests in the eastern Mediterranean in return for Italy recognising the German conquest of Poland. Once more, the world was at war.

 

[Rattigan]

So, I plan for the updates on the war effort and other assorted political updates to take about the next two weeks, after which we'll be back on a primarily domestic and Commonwealth political and economic focus. As I think I've mentioned before (and you've probably been able to work out), military history isn't really something I'm terribly interested in or knowledgeable about and so, while I think everything kind of works out rationally and plausibly, I'm sure the military nerds amongst you will be able to pick out obvious errors and issues. After the end of this war, things will diverge further and further from OTL (in many ways most of this TL has been a prologue to a post-1945 TL) and so a lot of how this war pans out is so I can get people and/or countries to where I need them to be for the immediate postwar period. Anyway, apologies in advance for anything that seems dumb about the military history: I hope it doesn't impact your enjoyment of the TL as a whole.

* * *​

The Abyss Opens Once More: 1940

From left to right: The German delegation arrives ahead of the signing of the French surrender; Japanese troops prepare for the Chinese assault at the Battle of Pusan; General Montgomery surveys the scene following the Commonwealth landings in Galicia.


Poland fell in short order under the combined attacks of Slovakia to the south and the German army to its west and north. What was left of the Polish government surrendered in Gdansk on 28 January, confirming the German annexation of the territory. These events left Germany with not only the territories she had possessed in 1912 but also all of the German-majority lands of the old Habsburg Empire as well as Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia. It was a remarkable achievement for the men who had lead the empire through the difficult times of the 1920s. They were the dog who had caught the car but, like all such dogs, they now needed to work out what to do with it.

Although a web of secret treaties had left Germany fighting only France and Britain, that was still clearly two enemies too many, especially with President Roosevelt issuing strongly-worded condemnations of German aggression from across the Atlantic. In his state of the union address, delivered on 13 February, Roosevelt warned that the United States had “fought to protect the world from Germanic tyranny once before and if necessary we shall do so again.” Beck immediately got in contact with the Kuomintang and between them they organised a (semi-) coordinated plan of attack. Although, in truth, both Chiang and Beck thought that the time was slightly too early, they reasoned that quick victories in Manchuria and France, respectively, could bring them the success they needed.

The Kuomintang had been planning for war with Japan for some time and had a clearly defined strategy both on land and sea. Germany, however, had not been planning on war with France at this stage and, immediately upon war beginning with Poland, they began to cast around for a plan. Eventually Beck settled on a plan that had been drawn up by Erich von Manstein, something which saved him from having an otherwise undistinguished career as a staff officer in eastern Prussia.

On 18 April 1940, Chiang commenced his attack on Manchuria by land, simultaneously invading the Japanese naval base at Liugong Island. Over the next week, the Chinese army experienced a series of sweeping victories, taking advantage of the Japanese reduction in military spending over the previous decade. By 25 September, the Chinese were in effective control of Liaoning and Kirin provinces and were threatening the main line of rail communications in Korea. Fighting over Liugong lasted for another two days but it was mainly a delaying action by the underprepared Japanese forces, who surrendered on 25 February with over 130,000 POWs.

At the same time, the Chinese navy under Chen Shaokuan played a clever cat and mouse game with the IJN using a strategy based around the use of their six extant aircraft carriers. Taking advantage of the IJN’s doctrine of ‘decisive engagement’, Chen would use his thin gunline to lure Japanese warships out of range of land-based air support, at which point he would use his aircraft to attack them from above. The most successful such operation occurred on 10 July, when dive bombers successfully sunk the battleships Mutsu and Nagato, then the largest ships in the IJN. These series of disasters lead to the quiet abrogation of the Kyoto Treaty and Royal Navy and Dutch ships began sailing north of the equator to support Japanese formations.

The destruction of the Mutsu and the Nagato lead to the fall of Inuki’s government and, for a moment, it seemed as if the Japanese military might step in and disestablish the civilian government. However, they stepped back from the brink. Instead, Saito Takao delivered an inspiring speech to the Diet on 17 July, demanding that Japan fight on in the name of protecting her people from Chinese tyranny.

By this time, however, things had gone from bad to worse for Britain and France. Spooked by the Chinese invasion of Manchuria, the ICS had immediately ordered the moving of large numbers of troops and ships to India and the Pacific, meanwhile warning the French army that they could only promise naval support in Europe. In May, under this cover, Germany had commenced a massive invasion through the Ardennes, bypassing the main French defences along the Maginot Line. French and Belgian defences were cut in two by the thrust and those on the north side were forced to retreat all the way to the sea, where over 300,000 French and Belgian soldiers were hastily evacuated by the Royal Navy. Outflanked and in full retreat, French forces abandoned Paris without a fight on 14 June. Spain declared war on France too on 15 June and invaded over the Pyrenees the next day. France surrendered for good on 25 June. Philippe Petain would form a notionally neutral government.

Also on 25 June, Italy and Bulgaria had also sent formal ultimatums to the Serbian and Greek governments, demanding the secession of Vojvodina to Italy and Macedonia to Bulgaria. When those ultimatums went ignored, Italy and Bulgaria invaded three days later. The Axis (as they would later begin calling themselves from September 1940) of Germany, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria and China was sitting in a pretty decent position by this point. But then the Spainish government, buoyed by the (relative) success of their invasion of southern France, did something very stupid. On 27 June, seeking to repay the humiliation heaped on them by the Treaty of Lisbon, Spanish troops invaded and occupied Gibraltar, capturing around 15,000 civilian and military personnel, although the naval and merchant shipping managed to escape. This, combined with the Italo-Bulargian invasion of Serbia and Greece, meant that Britain faced the very real possibility of losing control of the Mediterranean.

The fall of Gibraltar was an immediate and devastating blow for Lloyd George, who had, by many accounts, been looking to cut an honourable peace with the Axis beforehand. He was unceremoniously defenestrated by a motion of no confidence tabled on 29 June. However, far from crushing British resolve, has Primo de Rivera had (for unclear reasons, with hindsight) supposed, the occupation in fact meant that there was no way that Britain could not continue in the war. In place of the Welsh Wizard, the King sent for Winston Churchill, whose persistent warnings about the dangers of German militarism were looking pretty prescient. Churchill formed an all-party coalition and vowed to fight on with Britain’s ally Japan.

The first order of business was the recapture of Gibraltar. Guessing (correctly) that Spain was by far the weakest of the Axis, Commonwealth planning quickly focused on recapturing Gibraltar and knocking Spain out of the war as soon as possible. Beginning on 17 July, the Royal Navy organised a sealift of troops from Egypt into Andalusia while orchestrating an amphibious landing in Galicia under the overall command of Claude Auchinleck with General Crerar commanding the Andalusian Front and General Montgomery the Galician Front. On 21 July, the Royal Navy successfully sunk two of Spain’s three battleships at the Battle of Ferrol using torpedo bombers launched from aircraft carriers. At the same time, the Royal Navy began a blockade of the Italian ports in North Africa. Knowing that they could not successfully defeat the British at sea, Graziani chose not to attempt a reconquest and instead Italy and Britain set into a period of watchful tension in the Mediterranean, with naval squadrons periodically raiding one another but, for the most part, the Italian navy remaining in port in the Adriatic.

Meanwhile, in Asia, China commenced its invasion of Korea in July, driving south and securing significant victories at the Battle of Seoul and the Battle of Osan. Commonwealth forces (mostly Australians and Canadians) were hastily deployed alongside Japanese and Korean soldiers. At the Battle of Pusan in September 1940, Allied forces held off the Chinese advance long enough to evacuate the majority of their soldiers. Although the retreat was well-organised and served as something of a morale boost, it nonetheless left the Axis in control of the Korean Peninsula.

Over the course of August and September 1940, British forces would make steady advances in the north of Spain, cutting off Spanish land access to France following the Battle of Irun. In November, Montgomery launched his first assault on Madrid, which was repulsed by heavy fighting, with Spanish forces being reinforced by German troops and planes.

In December 1940, the Chinese navy made its most audacious attack yet: sailing its carrier forces almost straight up to the Japanese Home Islands and launching an air raid attack on the IJN as it lay at anchor at Hitokappu Bay. The losses - 3 aircraft carriers and 4 battleships sunk, 4 more battleships severely damaged - left Japan exposed ahead of what promised to be an attempted invasion next year.

 

[Rattigan]

The twist of the Knife: The World War, 1941

Left to right: German troops pushing through Ukraine as part of Operation Typhoon; Chinese soldiers engaged in house-to-house fighting during the Kyushu Campaign; the RMS Lancastria sinking as viewed from an attempted rescuer

Over the winter of 1940-41, Claus von Stauffenberg was transferred from his role on the General Staff and placed in charge of the Polish Population Division with authority over the newly (re)conquered Polish territories. While there, von Stauffenberg undertook a major programme of ethnic cleansing, not only returning the great Junker estates lost in the population exchanges of the 1920s but also making plans to systematically remove Poles from their lands and replace them with German settlers. In December 1940, the Soviet government raised its first protests, concerned especially about the possibility of a large Polish migrant crisis on the borders of the Polish SSR. This, combined with Germany’s stunning military successes in 1940 and the revelation of the secret treaties with Italy and the Balkan League, caused many in the Soviet government to reevaluate their support for Germany. In February 1941, Romania and the Soviets concluded an agreement to impose an oil embargo on Germany with the aim of forcing her to commit to a peace (at least in Europe) with Britain, possibly to be brokered by the Soviets. The actual result, however, was a good deal more complicated.

In the first place, the embargo precipitated a political crisis in Berlin over the future direction of the war, which resulted in Beck (as the head of the faction preferring peace) being forced into early retirement and being replaced as Chancellor by von Manstein at the head of an anti-peace faction. Von Manstein proposed an audacious plan to occupy Romania and capture the Russian oil fields in the Caucuses. To this end, they reopened the secret negotiations with the Turkish government, which had its own revanchist ambitions in the region.

In Spain, the Falange government began to have more success, managing to hold off Montgomery’s second attempt to capture Madrid in January and February. Von Manstein decided that, given that Commonwealth forces had cut off the land approaches over the Pyrenees, the Catalan government was remaining studiously neutral (albeit allowing the Axis to use its airspace) and the Royal Navy was looking invincible in the Mediterranean, the best way to force Britain out of the war was to damage its industrial base and break the resolve of its population to continue the fight. To that end, in April the Luftwaffe began a vast aerial bombing campaign of British cities and air defence infrastructure. At the same time, they also began a period of unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to starve Britain of its support from the rest of the Commonwealth.

Later that same month, China and Germany commenced their major offensive actions of the year, with China launching fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in preparation for their land invasion and Germany invading and occupying Romania over the course of 6-18 April. One day later, Chiang commenced the invasion of Kyushu, the largest amphibious invasion in history at the time. The Japanese eventually ordered a retreat to Honshu on 1 June after suffering massive casualties. Two weeks later, the Germans commenced Operation Typhoon, a vast invasion of Russia designed to throw their defences into disarray and set up the capture of Petrograd in the autumn.

On 22 June, Chiang launched his invasion of the Kanto Plain. However, with few tanks and artillery ashore, the Chinese forces were unable to break out of their beachhead. At dawn on the 24 June, the second wave of the Chinese invasion was launched with supplies including armour and heavy artillery but this was intercepted by a combined Royal Navy-IJN fleet, which destroyed around two-thirds of the wave. Chiang immediately ordered the Chinese navy into the Korean Strait. In a skirmish in the Tsushima Strait, the Chinese navy succeeded in sinking two British destroyers and damaging six further ships (including two aircraft carriers), which caused Admiral James Somerville to withdraw his ships to Hokkaido.

Nevertheless, the Allied Navy remained a threat to the Chinese (who, it was now clear, did not have practical control over the sea lanes) and their troops in Japan only had an estimated 7 days of supplies and ammunition left, with casualties mounting on both sides. Chiang ordered further fire-bombings of Japanese cities and infrastructure, which convinced him that he had knocked Japan out as a potential opponent for the time being, even if he had failed to occupy the Home Islands. As such, he ordered his remaining reserves to stand down and prepare for redeployment to southern and western China on 28 June. The next day, 33,000 Chinese troops were successfully evacuated back to Korea while those who remained in Japan, some 65,000, surrendered.

The invasion was a resounding failure in pure tactical terms but, curiously, Chiang was not particularly downcast and the Allies weren’t particularly upbeat: the Chinese attack had devastated Japan’s internal infrastructure and the casualties she had sustained in the first 18 months of combat had effectively knocked her out of the war apart from as an auxiliary to her other allies. China, meanwhile, was able to absorb the personnel, technology and energy losses that she had sustained and now Chiang turned his attention elsewhere.

However, the Axis’ qualified successes of the first six months of 1941 came to be seen in a dramatically different light in July 1941. On the night of 17 July, a German U-Boat torpedoed the RMS Lancastria without warning, causing it to sink with the loss of 5,378 passengers and sailors, including 613 American citizens. Germany immediately ordered the cessation of her unrestricted submarine warfare and the drawdown of the bombing campaign of the British Isles, in an attempt to limit the diplomatic damage. However, the damage had been done and Roosevelt declared war on Germany and China on 16 August. Somewhat ironically, despite having taken power on the promise of providing stability and good governance, the Prussian Junker elite in the German military had dragged their country into a war with the three nations with the largest resources in the world.

Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1941, there were many indications that von Manstein’s gamble in Russia had paid off. Although the German invasion was not necessarily designed to conquer territory (even if some German planners contemplated the creation of buffer states in Ukraine and the Baltic), the German army had captured significant amounts of Soviet land, including all of Poland and most of Ukraine, inflicted over 500,000 casualties, destroyed over 20,000 planes and tanks and, finally, captured the capital of Petrograd in September. Elsewhere, in Asia Minor, Turkey entered the war on the Axis side, occupying Armenia and invading the first few miles of territory in the Soviet Caucuses. This put them well in a position to capture the Caucasus oil fields via a pincer movement in next year’s campaigning season.

However, the Soviet government managed to evacuate Petrograd before the German arrived, regrouping in Moscow. Bukharin would then attend the Aden Conference in November 1941, in which the Soviets would appear alongside British, American and Japanese delegations as the ‘Big Four.’ Together, they affirmed their commitment to pursue the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers, not accept a separate peace from any of their opponents, and for the United States to enter the conflict against both China and Germany.

As well as the Big Four, the conference was attended by representatives from the Commonwealth, Costa Rica, the Kingdom of Spain, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Ethiopia, Mexico, Egypt and Arabia, as well as governments in exile from Belgium, Poland, Austria, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Serbia and Denmark. Together, all nations published the Declaration of the United Nations on 1 January 1942, affirming their alliances and a commitment to global reconstruction after the defeat of the Axis.

 

[Rattigan]

The Last Burden: Sir Stafford Cripps in India

The Best of Enemies - Jawaharlal Nehru and Sir Stafford Cripps after the signing of the United Front Covenant


When the Commonwealth went to war in January 1940, India dutifully followed her imperial masters into the fighting. The Liberal Unionists, as expected, were fully behind the war effort, as was the League. The INC was divided over the issue. On the one hand, senior INC figures like Nehru and Gandhi had little sympathy with German or Chinese militarism (and, at least in Nehru’s case, a great deal of sympathy with the communism of Britain’s Soviet allies) but, on the other, many more radical figures such as Subash Chandra Bose and Chempakaraman Pillai wanted to use the war as an opportunity to force the British out of India.

In August 1940, Bose announced his split from the INC to found his own party known as the Jai Hind, taking 10 other members of the assembly with him. Jai Hind called for Britain to immediately leave India and to refuse to offer any form of cooperation until Britain’s departure. At first, Sikandar Hayat Khan and the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow were ambivalent about Jai Hind, as such a grouping’s numbers did not seriously threaten British control over the subcontinent. However, that changed with the discovery, in October 1940, of the group’s significant clandestine communications with Germany and China. The British authorities thereafter began an immediate crackdown on any and all forms of Indian dissent, including the arrest of not only members of Jai Hind but also the INC. Finally, in December, Linlithgow summarily closed the legislative assembly and returned India to direct rule from the Viceroy’s office, something Sikandar had counselled against.

The move generated the predictable rush of rioting and violence, at a level not seen since the aborted 1922 election. The response from Westminster was swift: Linlithgow was immediately removed from his post and in his place General Claude Auchinleck was appointed both Viceroy (as the 1st Earl Auchinleck) and Commander in Chief of the Indian Army; the legislative assembly was reinstated but now with Sir Stafford Cripps sent over to serve on a non-party basis in the now-combined role of Chairman and Speaker. Cripps and Auchinleck were confirmed in their positions in January 1941.

Cripps immediately halted the trials of those arrested under Linlithgow and began the process of releasing all political prisoners apart from those who could be proven to be supporters of Jai Hind. The half-dozen figures directly implicated in the intelligence report that revealed Jai Hind’s Axis links were sent to Britain to be jailed for the rest of the war. Although their confidence had been shaken by Linlithgow’s actions, the League and the Liberal Unionists were willing to go along with Cripps and continue their support for the war effort.

The INC was a different matter, with many leaders radicalised by being arrested in the winter of 1940. Cripps made efforts to bring them into the government, forming an all-party coalition to provide civilian oversight, with Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar and Sardar Patel all joining the cabinet. However, they and their supporters continued to cause trouble for the government. Cripps had sympathy for the idea of India joining the Commonwealth and was closely advised on this by Lord Ronaldshay (now Lord Zetland, having succeeded his father to the title in 1929). Therefore, in March 1941 Cripps promised the INC that, if they fully cooperated with the British government for the duration of the war, he would hold elections on the basis of universal suffrage within six months of the war’s end, to be followed by negotiations with the eventual aim of India joining the Commonwealth.

It was exactly the kind of big offer that the INC needed and later that month INC leaders visited the Viceroy’s mansion in New Delhi and signed the United Front Covenant, committing them to putting their full force behind the war effort. When Churchill heard about this in London, he flew into a rage and nearly ordered Cripps’ immediate recall. However, the Lord President of the Council and leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, dissuaded him, pointing out that, although Cripps had technically overreached his mandate, it was more important to keep as much internal peace as possible in the face of the war.

 

[Rattigan]

Stopping and Starting All Over the World: The World War, 1941-42

Left to right: Soviet soldiers during the Battle of Grozny; General Slim surveys the scene during the Siege of Singapore; HMS Victorious suffers damage under fire from Chinese dive bombers during the Battle of Mussau


Following the failure of the invasion of Japan, Chiang decided to change his approach, this time to focus on knocking Britain off her perch in the Pacific. The unrest in India in 1941 and 1922 had convinced the Chinese that the British Empire in the Pacific was a hotbed of unrest and, in Chiang’s own words, “we only need to kick in the door to make the whole rotten structure collapse.” Hong Kong had been evacuated by the British in December 1941, leaving China’s main avenues of attack as through Malaya and over the Tibetan Plateau. Chiang took overall command of the operation, with Sun Li-jen in command of the Malayan Front and Chen Cheng in command of the Tibetan Front.

As a prelude, Thailand was occupied over the course of 6 hours on 21 December 1941 and Sun began his invasion of Malaya immediately afterwards, capturing Penang two days later while the Chinese navy occupied American naval bases in Guam and Wake Island, along with the Japanese islands of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands. On 1 January, the British Admiral Louis Mountbatten was appointed supreme commander for Allied forces in south-east Asia and India, with USAF Lieutenant General George H. Brett as his deputy and the Australian Field Marshal Thomas Blamey as overall commander of the land forces. Later that month, the Chinese launched an enormous combined-arms invasion of the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The British were driven out of Malaya within a month and were forced to withdraw to Singapore. As the Chinese bore down on the city, the defenders made moves to evacuate and/or surrender. However, the order came down from Mountbatten ordered that the city should be defended at all costs, reasoning that its loss would lead to collapse in the East Indies, the splitting of the Allied forces in two and open up Indian Ocean routes to Chinese attack.

William Slim was promoted to General and given overall command of Singapore’s governance. The city managed to hold out under intense barrage as the Royal Navy struggled to keep it supplied. However, although the city held, the Chinese still had vast successes, occupying 90% of the Malayan Peninsula, Borneo, Sulawesi and much of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The fighting then became an intensely strategic one, as Mountbatten and Chun played chess with each other’s ships, hoping to gain control of the vital shipping lanes. In February, the Chinese successfully devastated a majority-Dutch force at the Battle of the South China Sea but a tactically inconclusive skirmish between the Royal Navy and the Kuomintang Navy at the Battle of the Java Sea only two months later prevented Chun from pressing his advantage.

In Europe, the Soviet army attempted to counter attack in Ukraine, planning to split the German army in two, but defeat at the Battle of Poltava in May put an end to those hopes. In June, Germany began its major offensive for the year with an assault in the south which took Rostov by the end of July. At the same time, Turkish forces invaded the Caucasus mountains, where they encountered fierce resistance.

Also in June, Chen’s forces crossed the Jinsha River on 23 June 1942, beginning what came to be known as the Battles of the Jinsha. Chinese forces outnumbered the Allied defenders (mostly drawn from Tibet, India and Nepal and commanded by Wavell, who was replaced in the Spanish Theatre by Harold Alexander) by around three-to-one but failed to penetrate the strong Allied lines in the gorges along the river. Because the British had spent several decades building up defences in a piecemeal fashion, their forces occupied higher ground than the Chinese and the invaders failed to make much headway before the battle ended in July. Another frontal assault launched two weeks later was also beaten back despite initial Chinese success.

In Spain, the Falangists launched an all-out campaign to reconquer Andalusia in the Battle of the Guadalquivir, which lasted from July until November. The attack was initially successful, prompting fears amongst the Allies that the Spanish might be able to advance down to Seville and split their forces once more. This was heightened when the French government handed their navy over to the Axis (although they stayed, notionally, neutral), giving them a powerful Mediterranean fleet once more.

The course of the Pacific Theatre shifted decisively against the Chinese over the course of the next two months. At the Battle of the Bismarck Sea on 3-4 July, the Royal Navy successfully engaged the Kuomintang Navy and succeeded in sinking a carrier and damaging two others. However, Chun still believed that he could draw the British into a trap, using a feint attack on New Ireland to draw in the Royal Navy, whereupon they could be set upon by Chinese aircraft and destroyed. However, what he did not know was that the Allies had already successfully broken the Chinese code transmissions and were able to set their own trap for the Chinese. Over the course of 4-7 August, the Royal Navy and US Navy caught the Chinese in a pincer movement (Royal Navy from the south and west and the US Navy from the North) north of Mussau Island. Although vice-admiral Shen Hongli managed to maneuvre most of his ships out of the trap, Chinese losses from the Battle of Mussau were still decisive: totalling 4 aircraft carriers and 2 cruisers, as against the American loss of an aircraft carrier and the British loss of a cruiser. Chun’s gamble had failed and Chinese naval power now looked totally blunted.

With the Chinese’s capacity for aggressive action greatly diminished as a result of their defeat at the Battle of Mussau, Chiang chose to focus on a belated attempt to capture Port Moresby by an overland campaign on Papua. Blamey, meanwhile, planned a counterattack against Chinese positions in the Philippines. Both plans started in July, but by mid-September, the Battle for the Philippines took priority for the Chinese and troops in New Guinea were ordered to withdraw from the Port Moresby area to the northern part of the island, where they faced Australian and British troops in the Battle of Buna-Gona.

Over the autumn, General Chen once more launched an attack in Tibet, but the Third Battle of the Jinsha once again resulted in large casualties without significant gains. A Fourth Battle commenced in November and wound down in December because of a shortage of supplies, with the Chinese again failing to make significant gains. Things were going better for the Axis in the Caucuses, however. In September, the German army defeated the Soviets at the Battle of Maikop. A month later, Turkish and German soldiers successfully linked up at the Battle of Grozny, annihilating an opposing Soviet army and capturing the city.

In November, the former French fleet sailed for Andalusia with the ambitious mission to link up with Spanish forces advancing towards Seville and Cadiz. However, the 10 French ships that did set sail were ambushed by a Royal Naval force under Admiral Cunningham as they sailed past Minorca. At the subsequent Battle of Minorca, the Royal Navy sunk 3 battleships and 4 destroyers for the loss of only 5 damaged battleships, another demonstration of the Royal Navy’s devastating use of its carrier fleet. This defeat, combined with dwindling supplies and ammunition, destroyed Spanish morale and resulted in them retreating back along the Guadalquivir.

 

[Rattigan]

The Fickle Gods of Momentum: The World War, 1943

From left to right: Soviet tanks advancing at the Battle of Zaporizhia, September 1943; Chinese troops charging at the Ninth Battle of Jinsha, November 1943; Spanish troops retreating from a suburb of Madrid ahead of the final Commonwealth advance, March 1943; American heavy armour unloading following the landings at Biarritz, July 1943.


1943 began with China looking in severe difficulty, damaged at sea and unable to force a decisive breakthrough in either Tibet or Malaya. Germany, however, was looking in a paradoxically strong position: her Spanish ally was on the verge of collapse and she had failed to neutralise Britain but she was also on the verge of capturing Baku, giving her control over the entirety of the Caucasus oil fields. Indeed, the concern amongst the Western Allies that the Soviets would seek a negotiated peace was so strong that a conference in Trondheim was hastily organised in November 1942 to hash out the plans for the next year. Roosevelt and Churchill were both wary of Tukhachevsky’s (having been appointed Premier of the Soviet Union and Grand Marshal of its armies in October 1941) demands that they open a fresh front in France. Instead, they promised renewed offensives against the Turks in Asia Minor to draw pressure away from the Soviets in the Caucasus, along with a renewed assault in Spain.

In Spain, British troops under Crerar conquered the remainder of the Spanish coast in a whirlwind campaign during January and February 1943, culminating in the capture of Alicante on 2 February. This left Madrid and a few other Falangist holdouts in the centre of the peninsula and even these were only maintained with the harshest of repression. On 27 February, Germany evacuated what forces it could by air, leaving Spain to her fate. On 26 March, Montgomery and Crerar began a general offensive, resulting in the capture of Madrid five days later and the arrest, the following day, of Primo de Rivera and other prominent Falangists as they attempted to flee for Catalonia.

After a winter lull in Tibet, the Chinese launched another Battle of Jinsha in March 1943, which once more petered out with little strategic gain on either side. Over the summer, four more battles along the Jinsha erupted. The Sixth Battle of Jinsha, launched by the Chinese in August, resulted in greater success than the previous attacks, gaining nothing of any particular strategic value but managing to take Chamdo, which boosted Chinese spirits. The Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Battles of Jinsha (all fought between September and November) managed to accomplish little except to wear down the already exhausted armies of both nations.

The fall of Spain opened up a potential second front in Europe, a long-term strategic aim of the Allies. Germany immediately used this opportunity to attempt to broker a peace with the British and the Americans, reasoning that they had little love for the Soviets (which was, to an extent, true) and would willingly abandon them if needed (which turned out to be untrue). Roosevelt, too, was anxious to give his American troops a showing as the main combatants, with the majority of their engagements in the Pacific having been alongside the Royal Navy or in less flashy engagements in the mid-Pacific. To this end, he won the approval of Churchill and Tukhachevsky to open an American-lead front in the south of France.

In June, the Commonwealth, with support from American forces, began major operations to isolate Rabaul by capturing surrounding islands and the US Navy attacked the Chinese Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. Meanwhile, Allied forces, predominantly Egyptian and Ethiopian, invaded and occupied the Italian colonies of Libya and Eritrea, respectively. Because of British control of the Mediterranean, the Italian government could not credibly combat either of these.

The three major operations of the year all opened in July: the Americans made a surprise amphibious landing at Biarritz, attempting to link up with an American-lead invasion over the Pyrenees; a combined Anglo-American-Arab army commenced a pre-planned invasion of Asia Minor; and the Soviets launched an enormous invasion of Ukraine down the River Dnieper. The initial landings in France were successfully commanded by Douglas MacArthur, helped in part by the breaking of German secret codes by British intelligence. In particular, the Battle of Biarritz lead to the rapid collapse of the still-notionally-neutral French forces and resulted in the disorganised retreat of German troops on the Franco-Spanish border back to the north of France. The Soviet operation along the Dnieper was similarly successful, with a series of enormous tank battles being fought along the river before Soviet forces retook the city of Zaporizhia in September 1943.

The going in Asia Minor was tougher, as a mixture of the terrain and the Turkish defences in depth prevented the Allies from fighting the war of maneuver they wanted. Fighting was more akin to that of the Great War, with infantry formations fighting over small pieces of territory, particularly along the Malatya Line, the Alexandretta Beachhead and the Antep Line. In particular, fierce resistance at the Malatya Line forced the Allied advance to a halt in the autumn.

With the German lines in Russia split in two, a combined effort of their Bulgarian, Turkish and occupied Romanian allies managed to allow the Germans to withdraw much of their forces from the Caucasus to the west of the Dnieper. There, freshly supplied with Caucuses oil and new tanks from Germany, they prepared for another great mechanised advance to regain the territory they’ve lost.

 

[Rattigan]

The Deluge: The World War, 1944

Left to right: American marines advancing under fire in Normandy; Gurkhas clear Chinese positions during the Allied reconquest of Malaya; HMS Warrior taking damage during the Battle of Leyte Gulf; Chinese POWs after the Twelfth Battle of Jinsha

With the momentum of the war seeming to have swung behind the Allies, a conference in Tehran over the winter of 1943-44 reorganised their command structure. The Western Front (i.e. France and Spain) was under the overall command of Dwight Eisenhower, the Eastern Front was commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Middle Eastern Front (essentially the Anglo-American-Arabian army in Asia Minor) by Harry Crerar, the Indian and South Asian Front by Louis Mountbatten and the Pacific Front by Chester Nimitz. Negotiations also took place over the return of the Japanese to active fighting in Asia, with them having been relegated largely to naval duties in support of the Royal and US Navies since the failure of the Chinese invasion.

On 16 March 1944, Germany made a vast attempt on the Eastern Front to launch a counter-offensive in the Ukraine, hoping to smash the Soviet forces against the Dnieper, encircle them with their backs against the Black Sea and force a political settlement. Despite initial gains for the Germans, the attacks were poorly conceived, lacked adequate support (Germany had had to commit most of its remaining reserves to the initial offensive) and was repulsed by the end of April with no strategic objectives fulfilled and at the cost of over 90,000 German casualties killed, wounded and captured (Soviet losses were similar but by this point her pools of men and resources vastly outnumbered Germany’s).

Following the failure of the Dnieper offensive, von Manstein was moved to one side and quietly placed under house arrest. His replacement as Chancellor was Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, who immediately sent out feelers to the British and Americans, seeking a separate peace with them which, he thought, might put Germany in a position to either encourage the Soviets to the negotiating table or enable Germany to fight a successful defensive war. Such feelers were summarily rejected by both British and Americans. In response, Goerdeler resigned himself to leading Germany through a last ditch defence of everything he and his social class had fought for.

Japan’s land forces finally re-entered the war in April, with an invasion of Korea. By June, Japan had largely re-conquered the peninsula, bringing to an end the periodic Chinese air raids on the Home Islands from Korean airfields. In Tibet, further Chinese assaults in May and August yielded only miniscule gains for them. This left their soldiers’ morale crippled and minor mutinies sprung up along their lines. Also in May, General Slim lead a breakout from Singapore that drove the Chinese out of Malaya by July. The Malayan Campaign resulted in over 55,000 Chinese casualties and the sacking of General Sun.

In June, there were dramatic developments on both the Western and Eastern Fronts. On the Western Front, a combined Anglo-American force commenced an amphibious invasion of Normandy, meeting up with MacArthur’s forces in the south of France and capturing Paris by a pincer movement in the last week of August. The new French provisional government under Charles De Gaulle immediately declared war on Germany and the Allies made steady gains during the course of the year but successful defensive actions from the German army meant that Eisenhower’s forces were stuck on the left bank of the Ruhr by the end of the year.

On the Eastern Front, the Soviets’ June offensive consisted of an attack over a vast front from Belarus to the Crimea that almost completely annihilated the German forces arrayed against it. Soon after that, another Soviet offensive finally forced the Germans out of the Ukraine and Russian Poland. Another strategic offensive in eastern Romania cut off the considerable German troops there, liberating Romania from German occupation (with the help of a campaign lead by the pro-Russian King Michael I) and triggering a coup in Bulgaria, which brought down the pro-German government and brought in a new one which immediately joined the Allies.

In the Pacific, the Royal and US Navies continued to press back the Chinese perimeter. In mid-June 1944, the US Navy began their Mariana and Palau Islands campaign and the Royal Navy decisively defeated Chinese forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. These defeats gave the Allies more air basis from which to launch heavy bomber attacks on northern Chinese cities. They also lead to an attempted coup attempt against Chiang in July 1944, lead by General Sun, which failed with the arrest of all of the main conspirators.

In July, a British naval detachment commenced a small amphibious landing in Greece, which ended with a general uprising against Italo-Bulgarian rule and the liberation of the country on 17 August. By this point, Partisans under Josip Tito had been fighting a guerilla campaign against the Italo-Bulgarian occupation for four years and controlled good portions of the country. With British soldiers advancing and King Peter II back in the country after four years of exile in London, the Italian forces began to be pushed back hard.

With the support of the newly-friendly Bulgarian army, British-supported units from the south of the country managed to liberate Belgrade on 20 October, leading to Graziani calling for a general retreat into Bosnia and Croatia. A few days later, the Soviets commenced a massive assault on Germany-supporting Hungary which would last until February 1945. The only dark spot for the Soviets was their continued failure to crush the Finnish rebels who had risen up in 1941. An armistice signed in September 1944 effectively accepted Finnish independence.

In late October, Royal Marines commenced an invasion of the Philippine island of Leyte. Soon after, the Royal Navy scored another large victory at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of the War and, by some measures, the largest naval battle in history. The ground Battle of Leyte ground on until December 1944, launching the Philippine Campaign for the recapture of the entire archipelago. In Tibet, Wavell finally felt ready to go on the offensive, launching the Twelfth Battle of Jinsha in October. Using infiltration tactics and targeted air bombing, the Anglo-Indian-Tibetan force was able to bypass the Chinese lines, attacking them in the rear. Over 250,000 Chinese soldiers were taken prisoner and the remainder entered into a state of full retreat.

 

[Rattigan]

The Battle of Lismore: Keynes, Bukharin, White and the making of a New World Order

Lismore Castle - the site of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference of June 1944

John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White on 11 June 1944, the day before White's recall


By 1944, when the tide of the war had turned decisively in favour of the Allies, more thought could be given to postwar reconstruction, especially the global financial system. Although most governments had clambered out of the recession of 1929-30 by the end of 1939, they had done so in piecemeal ways which meant that global recovery was uneven and had left the global economy vulnerable to further shocks. A conference was called for 1 June 1944, where future governance structures for the global economy would be hammered out. Held at Lismore Castle in County Waterford and hosted by the Duke of Devonshire, it came to be called the Lismore Conference.

The conference brought to the fore a number of divisions between the Allies and was dominated by arguments between the Americans, the Soviets and the Commonwealth. In the first place, the chief Soviet negotiator, Bukharin himself, was anxious that his nation not sacrifice millions of its people simply to make a world safe for bourgeois capitalism. Keenly aware that the Soviets had benefited from being able to make their own agreements with individual nations while protecting their own internal command economy, he was suspicious of any agreement that would require the Soviets to open up to free trade. Harry Dexter White, the chief American negotiator, had a very different set of goals in mind: to promote international development and open up the world as a market for cheap American exports.

Although their economies had rebounded pretty effectively from the depression of 1929-30, Commonwealth economists were keenly aware of how delicately balanced the recovery was. In addition, British merchant shipping had been severely damaged by the war, particularly during the period of unrestricted submarine warfare between April and July 1941. Although the German policy of bombing civilian industrial areas had failed to effectively damage the British will to fight, it had done significant damage to British industrial capacity. Instead, Britain had relied on the supply of money and goods from Commonwealth countries (primarily India, Canada and Australia) under what came to be known as the Chifley Plan (named after the Australian Treasurer Ben Chifley). Under the Chifley Plan, £10.2billion was transferred to Britain, either in money or equipment, free of use (a further £1billion was supplied to Britain by the United States from November 1940, under a programme called Lend-Lease). (In practice, much of the money was spent on the war effort and so found its way back to the other Commonwealth members through a variety of means and most of the equipment was for use by the now-fully-integrated Commonwealth military. So the practical effect of these transfers can perhaps be questioned.)

Nevertheless, serious British macroeconomists and thinkers had come to a number of conclusions. Firstly, the fluctuations of war and global economic development meant that the UK, by herself, was no longer the hegemonic creditor nation it had been only five years earlier. Only as part of the Commonwealth could it retain superpower status and compete with the United States and the Soviet Union. It was therefore imperative that the new world order permit the continuation of the process of shared Commonwealth development begun in the 19th century by the general agreement on tariffs. Secondly, it would no longer, on balance, suit the UK to live in a world where creditor nations held all the power - while the UK retained significant creditor power, expenditure on the People’s Home Programme and warfare had resulted in substantial debts being accrued payable to other Commonwealth countries and the United States. The lead British negotiators, Harold Nicolson and John Maynard Keynes, were anxious to preserve the Commonwealth links (in other words, not open it up to outside free trade), and create a system whereby trade could be rebalanced on two levels: within the Commonwealth and then between the Commonwealth and the rest of the world.

None of the Big Three had sufficient economic clout overrule the other two and so the conference became a battlefield of diplomacy and shifting alliances. The net result was the creation of three global governing bodies for international trade and finance. Firstly, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established as the successor to the Bank for International Settlements and to be a body that would provide a forum for negotiating trade agreements, registering them transparently and a dispute resolution process. White’s proposals that the furthering of free trade would be written in as one of the WTO’s principals were shot down by a united front of the Soviets and the Commonwealth.

Alongside the WTO, the Soviets and the Americans teamed up to pressure the Commonwealth into accepting the founding of the World Bank Group (WBG). The WBG’s remit would be to provide loans and other financing for countries seeking to undertake human development, infrastructure and governance projects. Although it was initially conceived as a way of rebuilding war-ravaged Europe come peacetime, the Commonwealth negotiators (correctly) perceived that it could be used by developing colonies (particularly India) to go get financing behind Westminster’s back.

The Commonwealth did not get everything it wanted out of the creation of the WTO and the WBG but that was, to Keynes’ mind, irrelevant next to the creation of the final prong of the so-called ‘Lismore System’: the International Clearing Union (ICU). The creation of the ICU was a response both to the way that the first half of the twentieth century had changed Britain’s (and the Commonwealth’s and the Empire’s) economic and geopolitical position and to Keynes’ insights about the cause of not only the 1929-30 crises but also economic crises more generally.

Keynes forcefully argued that the overarching reason why financial crises occur is trade imbalances between nations. Countries that accumulate large debts often did so as a result of a trade deficit with other countries, meaning that, as their debts become bigger, it becomes harder for them to generate trade surpluses. This, in turn, creates a class of debtor nations trapped in a state of low development and debt that threatens the entire economic system with periodic crises. In practice, there is very little that debtor nations can do in response to this, reliant as they are on the goodwill of creditor nations.

In response, Keynes proposed that the ICU would issue a unit of account - called the bancor - which would be exchangeable with national currencies at a fixed rate but which could not be held or traded by individuals (although gold could be exchanged for bancors). Each country would therefore have a bancor account at the ICU, with an overdraft facility equivalent to half the average of its trade over the previous five years. Any country with a deficit equating to more than half of its overdraft would be charged interest and obliged to devalue its currency to prevent capital flight. Concomitantly, countries with a bancor credit more than half the size of its overdraft facility would be charged interest and required to increase the value of its currency to encourage the export of capital. Surpluses which persisted for too long would be confiscated and used to clear other nations’ debts.

White had been adamantly opposed to the creation of the ICU, instead proposing a system of fixed exchange rates backed by the dollar. However, both the Commonwealth and the Soviets supported the idea, following negotiations between the two of them which resulted in a secret agreement to let countries in a customs union pool their bancors in certain circumstances. But when White was abruptly recalled to Washington on 12 June to answer espionage charges and died (of an apparent suicide) while in Reykjavik on the way home (the involvement of British and Soviet intelligence in this has often been suspected but never proven), the American approach finally became more conciliatory. In the end, the Americans agreed to the creation of the ICU on the proviso that the Americans, the British (in practice the Commonwealth) and the Soviets each get to nominate one member to its governing board at all times, with veto power over decisions. The three also came to an informal agreement whereby the ICU would be chaired by a Briton, the WTO by a Soviet and the WBG by an American.

 

[Rattigan]

The End of the Old World: The World War, 1945

Left to right: Bernard Montgomery reviewing the German instrument of surrender before signature, April 1945; Supreme Commander Mountbatten receives the salute aboard his flagship following the recapture of Manila, March 1945; Beijing the morning after a USAF air raid, June 1945.


In February 1945, Soviet, British and US leaders met for the Cairo Conference. They made general agreements regarding the occupation of post-war Germany, reached a collective understanding on the future of postwar China and agreed when the Soviet Union would join the war in the Far East.

Later that month, Soviet forces entered Silesia and Pomerania, while in March the Anglo-American forces crossed the Ruhr and closed in on the Rhine. In an attempt to protect its last oil reserves, Germany launched an offensive in Hungary that was repulsed by the Soviets, who captured Vienna two months later. In late February 1945, the newly arrived Brazilian Division lead the charge in Asia Minor, finally breaking through the Malatya Line and allowing the Allies to break out of Cappadocia and Armenia and advance towards Ankara. The Allies’ final offensive in Turkey commenced on 9 April with massive aerial bombardments. Kayseri was captured on 18 April, followed by Konya three days later. On 23 April, the Allies reached Ankara and, two days later, the Turkish government agreed to their own unconditional surrender.

In early April, Soviet troops captured Konigsberg, while the American and Commonwealth forces swept across western Germany, capturing Hamburg and Nuremberg. American and Soviet soldiers met at the Elbe river on 25 April. At the same time, Soviet forces had arrived outside Berlin. Preferring to surrender to the Western Allies, the German government abandoned the city and began a headlong rush towards the Anglo-American lines. The bedraggled remains of Goerdeler’s government arrived in Hamburg on 28 April, where they found Montgomery’s Commonwealth First Army in control of the city. Immediately captured by the Commonwealth forces, the government agreed to an unconditional surrender two days later.

Following the surrender of Germany, the Allies launched an amphibious invasion of Sicily on 10 May. The Italian army put up a stronger resistance than anticipated but were nonetheless eventually overwhelmed and evacuated the island on 17 June. Over the course of May, Italy steadily withdrew its soldiers from Serbia in order to counteract this invasion.

In the Pacific, Allied forces continued their advances in the Philippines. Landings were commenced on Luzon in January and Manila was recaptured in March. In May, Commonwealth forces overran the last Chinese defences in Borneo. Japanese naval and amphibious forces captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa by the end of June, ending the bombing threat to the Home Islands. At the same time, the US Navy recaptured Taiwan from the Chinese occupation it had been under since 1940. These gave the USAF the bases it needed to commence vast firebombing campaigns on strategic Chinese cities beginning in June.

By July 1945, Wavell’s forces in Tibet finally had enough resources to mount a full offensive, launching an attack targeting the city of Kangding. The Anglo-Indian-Tibetan army broke through gaps in Chen’s forces and poured in reinforcements that crushed what was left of the Chinese defensive line. On 3 August, Chen and his last 300,000 Chinese soldiers surrendered. Although technically a humiliation for the Chinese, the sheer scale of the POWs caused severe administrative problems for the Allies, who were forced to effectively end their advance. That same day, in Italy, an Anglo-American invasion of the toe of mainland Italy combined with the reverses in the Balkans to convince the Italian government to accept surrender rather than risk a devastating invasion that they would probably succumb to anyway. To that end, Graziani was quietly arrested and a government lead by General Pietro Badoglio signed the terms of surrender in Catanzaro on 25 August.

On 1 July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany. They confirmed earlier agreements about Germany, and reiterated the demand for the unconditional surrender of China. This call was rejected by the Chinese government, which believed it would be capable of negotiating for more favourable surrender terms. In response to this, and fearing the cost of further invasions of China’s vast mainland, the USAF dropped atomic bombs on the Chinese cities of Beijing and Nanjing on 8 and 11 August, respectively. Between the two bombings, the Soviets, pursuant to the Yalta agreement, invaded Manchuria, quickly defeating what was left of the occupying forces and linking up with the Japanese. These reverses persuaded the previously adamant Kuomintang leaders to accept surrender terms. Chiang died of a conveniently-timed heart attack and Sun Li-jen was released from prison, where he formed a coalition government with Soong Tsu-wen that surrendered aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Hangzhou Bay on 11 September 1945, ending the war.

 

[Rattigan]

Also, and because I'll be referencing it a bit in the politicking and electioneering in the immediate aftermath, here's the makeup of the War Cabinet on VC Day, 11 September 1945:

1. First Lord of the Treasury/Prime Minister: Winston Churchill (Liberal)
2. Lord President of the Council: Clement Attlee (Labour)
3. Lord Privy Seal: Goronwy Owen (Liberal)
4. Chancellor of the Exchequer: John Maynard Keynes (Liberal)
5. Foreign Secretary: Harold Nicolson (Labour)
6. Home Secretary: William Beveridge (Liberal)
7. Minister of Defence: Anthony Eden (Conservative)
8. Minister of Labour and Supply: Ernest Bevin (Labour)
9. President of the Board of Trade: Sir Archibald Sinclair (Liberal)
10. Lord Chancellor: Lord Simon (Liberal National)
11. Chief Secretary to the Treasury: John Anderson (non-partisan)
12. Minister of Agriculture: Arthur Greenwood (Labour)
13. Colonial Secretary: Leo Amery (Conservative)
14. Dominion Secretary: Robert Menzies (non-partisan)
15. Minister of Economic Warfare: F. Kingsley Griffith (Liberal)
16. Education Secretary: Hugh Seely (Liberal)
17. Minister of Fuel: W.T. Cosgrave (Liberal)
18. Minister of Health: Malcolm MacDonald (Labour)
19. Minister of Shipping: Joseph Maclay (Liberal)
20. Scottish Secretary: Ernest Brown (Liberal National)
21. Welsh Secretary: Gwilym Lloyd George (Liberal)
22. Irish Secretary: Owen MacNeill (Liberal)

 

[Rattigan]

Apologies for the slightly delayed post - I was experiencing some IT problems, which, as you can probably tell by the lack of an infobox, are still continuing. I'll edit this with a proper infobox as soon as I can.

So, as some of you can probably tell, I've taken a rather circuitous route through 70 years of history to get to roughly the same point by 1945. As I've sort of mentioned as an aside, a lot of what has come before was basically a prelude to a post-1945 TL and from here on in we'll be moving further and further away from Kansas.

* * *​

A Very British Revolution: The General Election of 1945

Following the Chinese surrender, it was clear that the country was expecting an election after nearly 11 years without one. Churchill suggested to Attlee that they go into the election promising a continuation of the wartime coalition under a single ‘Country’ banner. However, Attlee, despite having had an effective and close working relationship with Churchill during the war, suspected that the offer was merely an underhand attempt to keep the Liberals in power in response to pollsters suggesting a strong move towards Labour. (Most subsequent biographers have suggested that Churchill’s offer was probably more genuine Attlee suspected, not that it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion for Attlee to have reached.) On 15 September, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister, dissolving the wartime coalition, and was re-appointed as Prime Minister later that day at the head of a caretaker ministry made up of Churchill’s pre-war Country colleagues and a few non-partisan technocrats. Polling day was set for 5 November, with results to be announced on the 26th in order to allow the votes of servicemen overseas to be counted.

This sudden return of electoral politics prompted bouts of leadership introspection amongst nearly all MPs. In the first place, the remaining MacDonaldites from the 1931-34 period completed their return to the mainstream Labour Party. Although many Labour members continued to mistrust them, the presence of formerly prominent members of the Grand Coalition (notably Harold Nicolson - who had served as Foreign Secretary in the Wartime Coalition - and Malcolm MacDonald - who had served as Minister for Health and, as Ramsay MacDonald’s son, was an influential figure) at the top of the reformed party by 1945 and the conciliatory tone taken by the Labour leader Clement Attlee meant that they were taken back into the fold.

The same could not be said of the Liberal Nationals. John Simon had been kicked upstairs to the Lords in July 1940, as Lord Chancellor. Following that, Ernest Brown - Secretary of State for Scotland in the Wartime Coalition - had taken responsibility for leading the Liberal National caucus in the Commons and they seemed happy enough with him. The real question was whether the Liberal Nationals would make their peace with the Liberals. Negotiations between the two parties looked promising in the last few days of September until, in one of those quirks of fate that seem to spring up now and again in electoral politics, they were torpedoed by the local Liberal Party in Leith. Leith was Brown’s constituency and it was commonly understood that he would be allowed to retain his seat in any merger agreement between the two. However, the split between the Liberals and Liberal Nationals in 1931 had been particularly bitter and the local Liberal Party was adamant that their candidate (John Cormack) would be the candidate. On 1 October, the Liberals and the Liberal Nationals agreed to disagree and commenced separate campaigns.

The Liberals, for their part, were also plagued by leadership questions. Although Lloyd George had, formally, remained the head of the party almost throughout the World War, few of the party’s bigwigs thought it appropriate for him to fight another election (he was kept in place largely because the party’s energies were directed elsewhere) and his death in March 1945 saved them an awkward conversation. Churchill was the natural choice but he turned down the role in March because he wished to devote himself to the final few months of the war effort, meaning that Sir Archibald Sinclair - the Secretary for Air (1940-42) and President of the Board of Trade (1942-45) - took over on an interim basis. Following the end of the Wartime Coalition, Churchill was once more approached about the leadership but he, unexpectedly, turned them down again (although he confirmed that he would be running as a Liberal candidate). Although inexplicable to many at the time, Churchill seems to have been influenced by polling (then still a new art) which suggested that he personally out-polled his party and he apparently foresaw the possibility of remaining in Number 10 at the head of a Labour/Country government. Sinclair, therefore, remained leader on a full-time basis.

The Conservatives too had leadership troubles. Stanley Baldwin had remained leader throughout the War, offering support for the government without ever joining it. The only prominent Conservatives in the War Coalition were Anthony Eden (Minister for Defence) and Leo Amery (Colonial Secretary), both of whom were probably more famous for their ‘Country’ affiliation during the 1930s. The energetic, dashing Eden was in many ways the obvious choice but his unfortunate coming down with a biliary tract infection over the summer of 1945 meant that the veteran Amery became the leader for the election effectively by default.

The Communist Party of Great Britain went into the election confidently. Following the Soviet entry into the War, their long-standing leader Harry Pollitt had returned to the leadership (having been removed from his post in January 1940 over his opposition to Soviet then-neutrality) and they thought they could use the popular lionisation of Soviet soldiers as a springboard to substantial electoral gains.

In the end, the election was barely a contest. Labour scooped up 269 more seats to secure a majority of 91. They did notably well amongst servicemen all over the world, who were particularly attracted to the Labour message of fighting to build a new Britain just as they had fought to build a new world. The Liberals lost virtually all of the seats they had gained under Lloyd George, conclusively not forgiven for their shambolic handling of foreign policy in the 1930s. Both Churchill and Sinclair suffered scares in their seats (although both did survive). The Liberal Nationals managed to hold on to their 13 seats but in many cases only barely and often because they benefited from scooping up votes locally from Liberal voters concerned about Labour. The Conservatives were smashed as a major party, crashing to only 18 seats, condemned to minor party status by memories of their autocratic style and maladroit handling of the economy during the Grand Coalition. The Communists’ pre-election confidence proved to be baseless, with Ernest Bevin (wartime Minister for Labour and still head of the TUC) ruthlessly deploying the trades unions to crush communist organising. The result was that their vote collapsed and they managed to hold only their 4 safest seats (and, then, only by the narrowest of margins in each case).

Churchill’s pre-election plans for himself to remain in Number 10 even if the Liberals lost now seem fanciful but, the day before polling, even Attlee appears to have seriously entertained it. Certainly, in the event of a narrow majority or minority Labour government, the support of Churchill’s Country MPs (perhaps then as a formal party split from Liberals and Tories) could well have been valuable. But the scale of the Labour victory changed all of that: Churchill simply wasn’t needed any more. On the evening of 26 November he telephoned, first, Attlee to congratulate him and, second, the Palace to tender his resignation. The following day, Attlee took a car to Buckingham Palace and after that walked through the doors of Number 10 as the first Prime Minister of a majority Labour government. A new dawn had indeed broken.

 

[Rattigan]

I'm still experiencing my IT problems so I'm just going to post a shorter, more impressionistic, essay about the state of the nation in 1945. Next week, when I've got my IT working fully again, we'll cover domestic policy under Attlee, India and the postwar international settlement. Hope you enjoy.

* * *
​

Britain was the only Allied power to be involved in active hostilities on every day of the World War and the results of this, as Labour began its first majority government, looked to be mixed for the country. On the one hand, the UK singularly and the Commonwealth as a whole were acknowledged as a victor and one of the Allies’ ‘Big Three’, a superpower on a par with the United States and the Soviet Union. But, on the other hand, to walk around the UK in the autumn and winter of 1945, one would certainly be forgiven for thinking that she had been on the losing side. Although the intensity of German bombing of civilian areas had wound down since 1941, the German air force had continued to sporadically bomb the UK in an attempt to break the British people’s will to fight until the loss of their airfields in France late 1944. Furthermore, the experience of fighting the war had loaded the UK government with debt (mainly to the rest of the Commonwealth but also to the United States) and depleted much of the foreign currency reserves she had built up in 1913-17.

Notwithstanding all of this, the UK was still the world’s third largest economy by herself (she had also experienced substantial GDP growth during 1940-45, unlike her allies and opponents) and the Commonwealth, taken together, would have been largest. More generally, the bravery of the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines was praised around the world, with Slim’s valiant defence of Singapore and Mountbatten’s dashing naval victories in the South Pacific being particularly lionised. In addition, Commonwealth soldiers, taken together, formed the majority of the Western Allies’ army of occupation in Germany. The War had forged the various forces of the Commonwealth into a single, unified, global fighting force, complemented by the Military Intelligence Service (the so-called ‘Five Eyes Agency’ named after the five countries of the UK, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia and New Zealand that made it up), which by 1945 was arguably the most effective and advanced intelligence network in the world.

On the financial front, the Chifley Plan and the Lismore Agreements had fundamentally altered the economic model of the United Kingdom in ways that were not, perhaps, fully understood at the time. Many understood the Chifley Plan as a simple handing over of the whip hand to the Dominions away from the Mother Country (this view was especially prevalent amongst left wing Canadians and right wing Britons - a curious coalition if nothing else). In fact, the Chifley Plan had, when combined with the creation of the ICU, bound the Dominions to the Commonwealth in a single financial system. The City of London’s natural markets were now the growing financial industries in Australia and Canada and, in turn, the natural markets for the industrial goods from those countries (and India too) was the UK. Furthermore, Keynes’ achievement in allowing the ICU to count all of the Commonwealth’s net bancor credits and debits in a single account increased the necessities for economic development and relationships within the Commonwealth.

Since the general agreement on tariffs in 1892, the British economy had gradually pivoted away from free trade and towards the Empire. With a mixture of the Chifley Plan and the ICU, this process now looked to be nearing completion. Sterling remained a powerful currency and the Sterling Zone was the largest currency bloc in the world. Its members received the benefits of stable exchange rates and easy access to the financial resources of the City of London, while allowing the Bank of England to use the zone’s pooled resources to back the currency when there was a shortage of foreign currency reserves or gold. In 1940, as part of the Chifley Plan, the Bank of England had set up the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), a body made up of representatives of the central banks of every Commonwealth member state plus India. The MPC would continue to meet after the war to decide common monetary and currency policy, while allowing considerable flexibility for divergent policies by national governments.

It was a brave new world and a brave new Britain would be required to meet its challenges.

 

[Rattigan]

Health, Happiness and Prosperity: Attlee's Britain

Tales from the New Jerusalem: Aneurin Bevan visits a patient on the first day of the NHS

Our man in the ICU: Sir Leslie Melville was appointed to be the first chair of the ICU with a secret mandate to protect Commonwealth interests


Stafford Cripps was recalled from India as soon as it became clear that Labour was going to take office, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. Keynes, who had lost his seat of Cambridge University, was ennobled as Baron Keynes and given a roving brief as effectively the UK’s representative on all international economic matters. In December 1945, after consultation with Commonwealth partners, the UK appointed the Australian economist Leslie Melville as the first head of the ICU.

Keynes’ and Cripps’ immediate tasks involved managing the UK’s balance of payments and currency problems, ensuring that they did not mutate into full-blown crises. In March 1946, a Commonwealth finance ministers conference resulted in the creation of what came to be known as the ‘Keynes Plan’ (although it was, in truth, effectively a continuation of the Chifley Plan). Under the Keynes Plan the Commonwealth countries not physically touched by the World War would provide funds to help with the rebuilding of those which had been. Although many noted that this was, effectively, a way of ploughing money back into the UK within the rules of the ICU, it should be noted that the UK was not the only country helped (it largely kept the economy of Newfoundland afloat for a number of years, for example). In return, the Bank of England announced a devaluation of the £ against the bancor by nearly 35%, which was designed to help make Commonwealth goods more attractive for export and boost the nascent industrial capacities of Canada, Australia and the Punjab.

Of course, as we now know, the financial position of the UK would be radically transformed very suddenly over the course of October-December 1946 (which will be discussed in more detail later). However, over the first few years of his government, Attlee chose to keep a tight grip on the spending taps. As promised in their manifesto, the government nationalised the energy and rail industries but resisted the urging from some MPs to go further. Ernest Bevin, continuing in his wartime role as Minister of Labour, argued successfully that nationalisations should be limited to only those industries which could be affordably modernised and run in conjunction with the trades unions. With his allies in tight control of the TUC, nationalised companies were organised to be run by mixed boards of industry experts, civil servants and trades union representatives.

Rather than run industries themselves, Labour governments chose to regulate them instead, the idea being to direct their energies down socially useful channels while also allowing the vicissitudes of the market to force them to innovate or die. In 1948, the Iron and Steel Confederation, the largest union representing such workers in the UK, sent a delegation to Downing Street asking for nationalization of their industry. They were rebuffed and instead Bevin rolled out a series of reforms of British corporate governance that were crystalised in the Companies Act 1950. The act contained numerous provisions reforming British corporate governance but, for these purposes, its most important, long-lasting and influential provisions regarded the make-up of boards of directors. Simply put, the Companies Act required boards to contain worker’s representation on their boards (usually in the form of directly-elected trades union officials) and expanded the directives of a company so that a company director’s duty was not to simply increase shareholder value but also the well-being of the workers as a whole.

On the welfare front, the government passed the National Insurance Act 1946, the National Assistance Act 1947 and the National Health Service Act 1946 (the service itself would open in 1948), which provided comprehensive and universal healthcare, social security and sickness and disability benefits. The aim was, in the words of the Home Secretary William Norton, to “decommodify the working man from the market: to make his life one he wishes to live and not one his work forces him to live.” As the Lord Privy Seal Hugh Dalton noted, these policies brought closer to reality the old radical Liberal aim of the ‘free breakfast table,’ further demonstrating the liberal origins of this British brand of sociailism.

On the educational front, a key reform was the Returning Servicemen’s Education Act 1947, which provided funds to universities and other tertiary institutions to take on returning veterans and help them integrate into society. In addition, the education system was rationalised, ending the jigsaw pattern of local and religious education into a single system.

More economic growth was stimulated by the Town and Country Building Act 1946, which provided funds for a vast rebuilding program for cities gutted by German bombing as well as an expansion of public transport and suburban housing. Herbert Morrison, the Lord President, took personal responsibility for the program, using the experience he had gained in Greater London politics (where he had been First Minister 1920-25 and 1935-45). Enormous areas of the country were rebuilt and developed, creating the now-iconic rows of three-story terraced flats and neat shared gardens which populate working class areas of cities such as Coventry, Glasgow and London to this day. Also key to this rebuilding process was the British Nationality Act 1948, which encouraged citizens from the Empire, most notably India and the West Indies, to travel to the UK to work in under-manned services, particularly the building trade.

As the country headed into 1949, the economy was growing and rationing had been fully ended in 1947. In addition, a mixture of Keynes Plan grants and the economic gains from the discoveries in 1946 had more or less ended the monetary problems that the country had faced in 1945. Labour had largely delivered on its 1945 manifesto, even if the ‘New Jerusalem’ it had promised still felt some way away. On the other hand, the international situation remained precarious, with China engulfed in civil war, peace in Europe still only hanging by a thread and the work of continental reconstruction still undone. British troops were also facing a growing insurgency in Malaya and the nation’s hold on many of her colonial possessions was becoming increasingly tenuous. However, a cautious Attlee was counselled by his advisors to go to the country in the summer of 1949. According to legend, he was apparently finally persuaded by the King, who was due to undertake a tour of Australia and New Zealand in the autumn and winter of 1949-50 and wished to have the makeup of his government in the UK settled before his departure.