BRITISH POLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY IN THE AGE OF APPEASEMENT,

Transcription

1 BRITISH POLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY IN THE AGE OF APPEASEMENT,

2 Also by R. J. Q. Adams ARMS AND THE WIZARD: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915~16 THE CONSCRIPTION CONTROVERSY IN GREAT BRITAIN, 1900~18 (wirh Philip P. Poirier) THE GREAT WAR, 1914~18: Essays on the Military, Political and Social History of the First World War (ediror)

3 British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, R. J. Q. Adams Professor of History, Texas A&M University, College Station

4 R. J. Q. Adams 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TO Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook)

5 To Freddie and Valerie

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7 Contents List of Maps Preface and Acknowledgments VIII ix Introduction : Rearmament and Abyssinia : The Year of Three Kings : Calm Before the Storm : Anschluss : Munich : The End of Peace Afterwords 155 Appendix I Results of the Peace Ballot 161 Appendix II The Munich Agreement 162 Drama/is Personae 165 Notes and References 175 Selected Bibliography 181 Index 188 vii

8 List of Maps Abyssinia: The proposed Hoare-Laval Pact, 1935 German territorial acquisitions, VIII

9 Preface and Acknowledgments This is a book about high politics and the making of British foreign policy in the last few years before the outbreak of the Second World War. On its library shelf it will be in good company, for there are many works on the subject. The reason is not difficult to fathom: the policy of appeasement is one of the great subjects of history, and it will always fascinate those who are interested in Britain's past. The same can be said of the Black Death, the Reformation, the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution. This particular effort grew from more than twenty years of lecturing to undergraduates and conducting seminars with graduate students on the history of Britain in the twentieth century. I suppose I have said and listened to many thousands of words on the subject, and I have for years wished to put some of them into print. There are many comprehensive studies of the age of appeasement by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, Keith Eubank, Keith Robbins, William R. Rock, A J. P. Taylor, and Telford Taylor- to name only a few- and there is no shortage of good books which survey the broad sweep of British foreign policy in the twentieth century by W. N. Medlieott, Paul Hayes, F. S. Northedge, and others. The student will find these and many more works duly noted in the bibliography at the close of this volume. Why, then, write another book about appeasement? One is tempted to give a variant of the answer to the question about why one chooses to climb Everest- but there is a better reply. Historians have tumed in the last quarter century to unearthing and interpreting information in great quantity about the many questions related to foreign policy-making in the age of Baldwin and Chamberlain. There is hardly a political notable, a department, a geographical region or a problem related to the period which has not found its historian. As each part of the whole was given its moment in the spotlight, the greater question was both illumined and obscured. The student or general reader who wished a broad introduction to the matter of manageable size from among the ranks of academic historians was often sent back to books written before he or she was born. This book grew from a fortunate set of circumstances: the time has come again to step back and consider the questions of appeasement in the interest of the reader seeking an introduction to the subject. With the splendid materials provided by the hard archival work of a generation or more of ix

10 X Preface and Acknowledgments historical researchers, no one has ever been better prepared than I. In a way, I suppose, I am standing on the shoulders of giants in this atteq1pt to light the way for the next generation. There is another point worth making. As we have learned more about the RAF, or imperial problems, or economic concerns, or the civil service, we are sometimes lured away from the greater question by the sheer weight of the micro-historical conclusions we read. It is not that we need fewer monographs, for they are the reasons we know much of anything at all. Yet, it is still important to recall and to try to answer the widest questions of politics and statecraft of the period This essay, though in a small package, is an exercise in macro-history. The method of this book, in an age of cliometrics and deconstructionism, is unashamedly traditional. The late A. J. P. Taylor, the irresistible Peck's bad boy of the historical profession for four decades, defended narrative history by suggesting that he set out to answer the child's question: 'what happened next?' Like Taylor- and so very many other good historians- I attempt here once again to do just that, and to add to it the complementary question which all good students should ask: 'what did it mean?' The theme of this essay is drawn from a few simple questions: 'what was appeasement?' 'Why and how was it pursued?' 'What did it mean?' A decade ago Paul Kennedy enquired, in a brief article in a popular journal, into the state of appeasement studies. He concluded that what was needed was:... a historical work which investigates the two distinct levels of causality - that is, the nebulous, sometimes confused mentality of the appeasers on the one hand, and the cluster of 'objective' military and economic motives which justified or served to justify concessions to the dictators on the other - will manage to pin down this phenomenon in a truly satisfactory way. One does not envy the historian who will attempt this trying task. 1 I have no delusions of grandeur about the power of the pages which follow, but I hope that this will be considered an effort at the unification of themes, of causalities, into a coherent whole to make the subject more understandable to the reader. I would not be unhappy if this book were thought of as an appeasement primer. A word or two about the apparatus employed herein would be useful. The framework is chronological, the approach is narrative-interpretive. Endnotes are kept to a minimum. They are, in almost all cases, employed only in the case of direct quotations; and quotations are, in all possible cases, from sources available to most readers. Historical characters are

11 Prefuce and Acknowledgments xi referred to by the names and titles they held during the period under examination. Two maps are provided to give the reader some visual clues about the Abyssinian territorial adjustments proposed by the Hoare-Laval pact and the changes to European national borders made after Munich. Two appendices are included: the first gives the results of the so-called Peace Ballot of The second reproduces the actual terms of the Munich accords. Also provided are a series of brief biographical notes titled Dramatis Personae. They describe the men who took principal roles in the drama of appeasement - this is certainly not an original device, but it is useful all the same. Finally, a lengthy bibliography of printed works follows. It cannot be considered comprehensive - and it includes only a sampling of the massive periodical literature on the subject - but I hope it will be useful to the student. Comments about archival sources and notes for further reading are also included. All history books seem to be labored with pages of acknowledgments; this is because authors realize that their debts are many and their methods for repayment correspondingly few. I am pleasantly weighted down with such obligations. I acknowledge with gratitude those who went before me --and their names arc to be found in the bibliography. From them I learned about appeasement. I record here, also, my thanks to the staffs of the many libraries and archives who assisted me in my researches, including especially those of the British Library and the Imperial War Museum (London), the Public Record Office (Kew), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the Library of Churchill College and the University Library (Cambridge), the University Library (Binningham) and the Sterling C. Evans Library (Texas A&M University). Many years of writing the history of Britain while living in America has taught me that it cannot be done without the help of British institutions, colleagues and friends. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and St Catherine's College, Oxford, for their generous hospitality during research trips, and I am pleased to record my thanks to Drs Ian and Sally Craig who once again provided me with a home away from home in Oxford. Professor Peter Clarke and Dr J. W. Winter of Cambridge University made enjoyable my brief stay among them, and I hesitate to think how much less pleasant London would be without the Reforn1 Club. I also wish to record my thanks to the College of Liberal Arts of the Texas A&M University, and to the Military Studies Institute of the same institution for financial assistance in support of my research. I am pleased to thank my colleagues at the Texas A&M University, Professors Larry D. Hill, Joseph G. Dawson and James M. Rosenheim, for their encouragement

12 xii Preface and Acknowledgements over the lifespan of this project. Thanks are due to Mr Tim Davis of the Cartography Laboratory of Texas A&M University who drew the maps found herein. Professors John D. Fair (Auburn University, Montgomery), Thomas C. Kennedy (the University of Arkansas) and William R. Rock (Bowling Green University) gave generously of their time to read the manuscript of this book and labored mightily to save me from snares of my own creation. Not least of all, I would like to thank several of my graduate students of recent years who have endured many hours of talk about appeasement and, through their good work as my assistants, spared me many hours to read and write about it: Miss Anne Airth-Kindree and Messrs Stephen Duffy, Paul Ratcliff and James Thomas. [ wish to thank also Mr T. M. Farmiloe, Director of Macmillan, the originating publisher, and Mrs Belinda Holdsworth, my editor, for their continued help on yet another book. I am grateful also to Mr Norris Pope of the Stanford University Press for his patient faith in the viability of a U.S. edition of this work. Despite all of these great debts, I alone am responsible for errors of fact or interpretation. Thanks of a very special kind are due to my wife, Susan Charlotte, who continues to be an inspiration and the ideal historian's comfort and ally. So are they deserved by Alfred and Valerie Gollin, to whom this work is dedicated with my affection. Bryan, Texas R. J. Q. Adams