Re-Writing History - 3 September 1999

Waking up on Wednesday morning with not a notion of what I might care to talk about, I came on the opening sentence of a startling newspaper piece by two professors which seemed more serious and timely than the recent revelation that every level of Russian business - from hot dog stands to giant corporations and banks - is controlled by the Russian Mafia.

The two professors: Ronald and Frederick Kagan - one professes classics and history at Yale and the other military history at West Point, the American Sandhurst. Their first sentence is an introduction to a piece of history and to a warning thesis which suggests that the United States could well fall victim to the same calamitous error in national policy that Britain did in the 1930s.

The first sentence goes: "Sixty years ago today Adolf Hitler sent Germany's armed forces crashing into Poland and launched World War II - the most terrible conflict in history which killed tens of millions of soldiers, promoted the deliberate murder of millions of innocent civilians and introduced the world to the terror of atomic warfare."

That's quite a sentence. And I'm sorry to say no quarrel can be picked with it as a statement of fact. Now the professors declare their thesis. Now they go into the history of the 1920s and 30s to show a warning similarity between Britain's case then and America's now.

Well if this parallel is substantially true we certainly have cause for concern. Especially since, in our present roaring prosperity, we are living in the carefree euphoria that most of us revelled in, in Britain too, at the end of the 1920s, along with the powers that reigned in both countries from the bankers down to small business men and the professional classes and the mass of people.

President Hoover himself, a very able administrator and much acquainted with the conditions of poverty - he did a great deal to save Central Europe from post-war starvation - President Hoover believed that American society had reached a plateau of permanent prosperity. That was our theme song a year or less before Wall Street collapsed and we all went down into an 11-year depression the like of which few Westerners now living have ever known.

Well the Kagans say we share the same delusion, or to be fair to them I think it better to say what they see in America's attitude today that is similar to Britain's fateful, if not fatal attitude in the 1920s-30s, is rather a condition of insensitivity to the real world outside. Anyway this is their thesis about the years in Europe between the wars.

First, that the treaty of peace - the Versailles Treaty, the only point on which Britain and America now agree with Hitler - that the Treaty had dealt too harshly with Germany and more or less paralysed her during the 1920s.

Hence her dreadful condition - roaring inflation, mass unemployment, huge and widespread poverty, the hopeless struggle of the Weimar Republic to survive.That was the democratic republic that nevertheless lasted, often miserably and bravely, from the peace treaty year - 1919 - till 1933 when the Nazis were elected (don't forget) into power and Hitler took over as Fuhrer.

The professors go on to say that Germany was so weak that the only great power which could again threaten Britain was now out of action and no threat. Right. This, they say, only reinforced the almost universal desire, in Britain and America, to reject the possibility that armed force would ever again be needed or used. And "Britain especially was determined to turn inward and solve the many domestic problems the War had created or exacerbated."

Well right there the professors' thesis grows ragged and dubious. Not so much a wrong thesis as one based on false assumptions.

First, "Britain was determined to turn inward and solve the many domestic problems" etc. Well, of course, there were aching post war problems - huge unemployment among returning soldiers, lack of housing, so on.

But the main determination was about foreign policy. In parliament and in the nation at large was something the professors don't mention: a determination to make the League of Nations work.

It wasn't that they thought armed forces would never be needed again. They trusted wholeheartedly in the League to make their use impossible by hewing hard to the central provision of the League's charter, that each member should begin to disarm to the minimum requirement of any single nation, so that any act of aggression could be easily stifled by the collective force of all these little armies, navies and air forces.

The blunder there was repeated with the United Nations. The false assumption that all or most member nations would agree to pool their forces - which they've never done - having agreed in any given case who was the aggressor.

The next sentence is equally correct but sprouts a quite false assumption. "No peace settlement that left Germany intact" - well it didn't, it stripped Germany of her colonial positions, reduced her army to a police force and forbade her any air force.

So even "the peace would have been secure if the victorious powers had maintained their military strength." Then they say Britain failed because it started to disarm swiftly and deeply.

Of course: it was pledged as a signer of the League charter to do so for the sake of collective security. That was the great slogan of the day. And Britain proceeded to do so not because it was blind or obsessed by domestic troubles but because it was more faithful than any other country to its first obligation to the League.

In fact the huge hole - the gaping omission - in the Kagans' argument is their silence about the main driving force for keeping the peace at all costs, even at the end to the brink of invasion. Namely that force (though we now believe it to be pathetic) - it was strong and heartfelt, it was belief, hope in the League.

The emotion that infused this drive was the searing memory - still burning in every family - of the millions of their young men buried, mostly, on the fields of France or butchered or drowned in the futile Dardanelles.

The League members held a two-year disarmament conference - '32 to '34. Disarmament was the main policy, only the French deplored and ignored it.

This trust in the League lasted from 1919 right into 1935 when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and the League did nothing to stop him. Then next year Hitler broke the covenant, marched into the Rhineland. To his sweating relief and amazement neither the League nor the British and French did anything but protest. And on and on.

A sure sign that the professors are trying to be wise by distant hindsight is one sentence I will quote: "Throughout this period between the wars the British leaders were eager to avoid a ground war."

A ground war! I doubt the phrase was ever heard much before the Right Honourable William Jefferson Clinton. All wars in Europe were ground wars and had been for a thousand years. Any future war in Europe would be, of course, not only a ground war but, everyone thought - not knowing Hitler - also an underground, trench war.

The brothers more or less conclude their thesis with this almost equally unbelievable sentence, that into the 1930s the defeated powers, notably Germany and Japan, were cautious not to arouse Britain (that's the "swiftly, deeply disarming" Britain) "so long as the memory of Britain's military power lasted." The memory of Britain's military power! That's about as weird as talking about the memory of Israel's naval power.

Britain had, even up to the outbreak of the First World War, an almost pitifully small army. By design. A small professional army was the thing by policy and tradition. The Pax Britannica - the peace that Britain presided over around the world for a century or more - was made possible by the fact of Britain's overwhelming naval power.

A famous Frenchman said that "the geography of a nation determines its foreign policy and is the main reason why it has a foreign policy at all."

Britain, after 1066 and on until Hitler with thundering tanks and terrifying air power crashed into Poland, thought of itself as invulnerable to invasion - and it was right.

In the 1920s there was no campaign in Britain or anywhere else, not even yet in Germany, for the development of a military airforce. Sometime in the 1930s, if you can imagine such a thing, the King of England in his late 60s - George V - a sailor from the age of 12 and no slouch in military matters, urged - admittedly without hope - a thing that should come to pass that today seems preposterous. But the King kept saying to his ministers that both the submarine and the airplane ought to be abolished.

The reason for the Kagans' peculiar and wrong thesis is simple: they have to trust to remote hindsight. They're putting out a book to be called While America Sleeps - echoing no doubt Winston Churchill's book in the dreadful year of Munich entitled While England Slept.

They would do better to read or re-read a book published in 1940 called Why England Slept, signed by - the authorship is disputed - by John F. Kennedy, just then finishing up at Harvard. Certainly it's an astonishing work for a college boy, but it emphasises the main weakness of the Kagan theory about the 20s and 30s. They were not there. Kennedy, though young, was there. If he'd lived he would be today 82 and his steady insistence on the League of Nations as the foundation of British policy gets it right.

As for the warning part of the thesis they may well be right but the American situation, as they themselves describe it, is not at all similar to Britain's between the wars. Their main point is correct, that America's one great potential enemy, the Soviet Union, is now no longer a threat.

But, I suppose you could say like Britain's duties to its empire, the United States has many military commitments. They're new military commitments around the world, which its present defence force cannot possibly meet. The Pentagon has said two local wars no more.

The professors end gloomily but soundly. "If the new hi-tech weapons are truly the magic bullets their advocates claim, they do not yet exist."

These are good and necessary things to say - provided you don't try to draw an ominous parallel with the quite different situation of Britain on 1 September 1939.

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