British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars/Britannia at Bay: The Defense of the British Empire Against Japan 1931-1941
Bond, Brian & Haggie, Paul
THE BRITISH EMPIRE AGAINST JAPAN 1931-1941 Paul Haggie / Oxford / $49.50 Eliot Cohen There are at least two good reasons to embark upon a study of Britain's defense policy between the World Wars:...
...It also, however, complicated mechanization in a variety of administrative and psychological ways-as demonstrated by the controversy over whether tank battalions should belong to a separate giant regiment or come from modernized cavalry...
...British civilian leaders between the wars failed both to force service disputes out into the open and to resolve them...
...On the other hand, it is well to consider the intractable difficulties of Britain's position...
...Military technology progresses by a constant dialectic between measure and countermea-sure-hence it is quite as foolish today to suggest that guided antitank missiles have made the tank obsolete as it was fifty years ago to think it invincible...
...The student of war and strategy, however, if he is to learn from historical study, must ask how men might have shaped events differently...
...Furthermore, an Army trained to fight colonial war had neither the equipment nor the training to fight continental war...
...No matter how salutary the defense policies of the Reagan administration are, they can help only in small measure unless they are backed not only by closely reasoned analysis of our predicament, doctrines, and military institutions, but by the will to act on the basis of such study...
...Ironically, as Bond points out, those who criticized the Army most sharply for its failure to mechanize-Liddell Hart above all-were the same ones who advocated a policy of little or no continental commitment, and thereby obviated the need for an armored striking force...
...This is also true in a larger sense...
...The British Army was designed primarily to garrison the Empire and fight colonial wars: The Cardwell system kept each regiment at a strength of two battalions, one overseas and one at home, and endowed each regiment with a peculiar tradition and ethos...
...Japan today) demand protection but resist its pleas for military contributions-and-whom it would be both wrong and unwise to abandon...
...To this end Brian Bond's British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars and Paul Haggie's Britannia at Bay are valuable studies, though not equally so...
...Nonetheless, the books are complementary, for if Bond concentrates on Britain's failure to create an effective army for Europe, Haggie explains some of the competing demands on Britain's defense resources...
...This arrangement was vital to the morale and efficiency, of long-service volunteer soldiers who spent much of their time overseas...
...The Royal Navy could not hope to defeat German submarines and heavy commerce raiders, the Italian and the Japanese main battlefleets all at once-on what threat should it have concentrated...
...Without naval protection armies cannot be transported and sustained...
...He presents his thesis forthrightly: "The most important cause of the Army's unpreparedness at the start of the Second World War lay in protracted political and military indecision over its role...
...without armies an enemy cannot be overthrown...
...British political leaders did not accept the necessity of fulfilling the military consequences of their foreign policy by creating an armored force capable of intervention on the continent...
...In economic terms alone we are relatively (let alone absolutely) far larger and healthier than Britain was fifty years ago...
...Of course, the analogy is suggestive but by no means exact...
...Both groups deceive themselves in their belief that the exotic or cheap solution is based on sound military advice, for their skepticism about the wisdom of most military men does not extend to their chosen prophets...
...The Army could not get the resources to mechanize primarily because politicians were unwilling to contemplate a serious military commitment to France and Belgium...
...As a result, these groups often turn to military mavericks who advocate either a particular service or weapons technology to the exclusion of all others...
...THE BRITISH EMPIRE AGAINST JAPAN 1931-1941 Paul Haggie / Oxford / $49.50 Eliot Cohen There are at least two good reasons to embark upon a study of Britain's defense policy between the World Wars: sheer curiosity about why World War II began as it did, and a desire to learn from the British experience...
...On the land, wars are usually won by skill at combined arms operations, by full use of what Field Marshal Slim called the orchestra of war...
...Thus too arise the arguments advanced today by politicians such as Gary Hart and writers such as James Fallows for a cheaper but better defense...
...As we are now learning, crash building programs are no substitute for a defense industry operating at a fairly constant level...
...Unlike Haggie, Bond often steps back and gives his reader a sense of the larger political and military context of his topic...
...The most sobering reflection that these books engender is this: Despite its undoubted strength and will, this country, like any other, has limited spiritual and material resources, and more threats to its security than means to cope with them...
...its mere existence might have forestalled Belgium's foolhardy retreat to neutralism in 1936 and encouraged a more aggressive attitude in France in 1938...
...And so, politicians can believe they have contrived a cheap solution to defense problems, while intellectuals acquire a set of villains to pillory and martyrs to eulogize...
...the threat posed by the Soviet Union is in many ways less severe than that posed by Germany, Japan, and Italy...
...At best, history only hints at the solutions statesmen and soldiers may find: It reveals all too clearly, however, the consequences should they fail to do so...
...Haggie, by contrast, does not really tell us to what extent penury, stinginess, political delusions, lack of a clearcut naval doctrine, or the need to appease both Japan and the United States simultaneously were responsible for Britain's fatal weakness in the East in December 1941-though, of course, he would say they all were...
...Bond succeeds particularly well in explaining why the Army did not create heavy armored divisions during the 1930s, even though the pioneers of armored warfare during the 1920s had been Englishmen (Fuller, Hobart, Mattel, and others...
...His book is both excellent in its own right and definitive in relation to the subject...
...Not only might this force have tipped the balance during the Battle of France (which was less pre-determined than many suppose...
...The Royal Air Force had to choose among such different missions as the defense of Great Britain, close air support for the Army, cooperation with the Navy, and an independent strategic bombing role, as well as between overseas and home commitments...
...Both men go far to defend the British armed forces against charges of Blimpery...
...without them one has disasters like Gallipoli in 1915...
...for good or ill NATO is hardly the Empire...
...He also points out that the British Army was the only completely motorized army in 1940-the Germans, French, and Russians all relied on horses for the bulk of their transport...
...With such integrated forces one can produce triumphs like the liberation of France in 1944...
...although primarily a great naval and aeronautic power it too must possess a land force capable of fighting enemies as different as Arab guerrillas and Soviet tank armies...
...As did Britain, the United States finds itself the nominal leader of a vast alliance whose members (for example, Australia during the 1930s...
...Anglo-Saxon politicians and intellectuals tend to believe that their professional soldiers are obscurantists, if not fools, while at the same time they themselves shun a serious study of military affairs...
...In a myopic (and as Bond maintains, unnecessary) pursuit of economy, Britain allowed her armaments industries to wither...
...As Haggie makes clear, the squabbling and lack of cooperation among the Army, Navy, and Air Force left Singapore as vulnerable as a crab out of its shell...
...A world power requires air, naval, and land forces capable of the most intimate cooperation...
...without airpower neither ships nor soldiers can engage their foes on anything like equal terms...
...Bond concedes the stifling effect of certain promotion policies and the mores of the British officer corps, but he observes that British military doctrine in the colonies was often highly progressive, as on the Northwest Frontier in 1936 or earlier in Iraq, where light mobile forces worked in tandem with aircraft to smother sizable guerrilla forces...
...Both authors write well and display considerable scholarship, but Bond is clearly the superior historian...
...Historians are interested, above all, in why things happened as they did, and hence these two authors convey to the reader a sense that the Empire was doomed before its foreign enemies...
...Thus arose the immense and pernicious popularity of the Royal Air Force in the interwar period and the inflated reputation of the tank theorists (especially Fuller and Liddell Hart) after World War II...
...To his credit, Bond goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate that Britain could have afforded and ought to have deployed a continental striking force of several armored divisions during the 1930s...
...Like Britain in its age of imperial pre-eminence it must defend global interests while maintaining a conventional balance on the European continent...
...Although I would not slight the former motivation, there is a great deal to be said for the latter, for the United States has succeeded Great Britain as the only liberal-democratic world power...
...Politicians deceived themselves and others by calling the island base-which was' the fulcrum of Britain's strategic position in the East-a "fortress" when it was nothing of the kind...
...The fact is that for every weapons system there is a counter-fighters and anti-aircraft guns can shoot down bombers, special artillery (today, missiles) can puncture tank hulls, and so forth...
...When rearmament began in earnest during the late 1930s, all kinds of supply bottlenecks impeded Britain's return to military strength...
...The American problem today is precisely the reverse but no less acute: We possess an Army of short service volunteers (and in the past and probably in the future, draftees) trained and equipped for high intensity European war but unsuited for grueling counterguerrilla or small war...
...The point, simply, is that there are lessons to be drawn from a thoughtful study of how a great Empire exposed itself to defeat and dissolution...
...Her Navy, restricted in both size and type of ship by the naval arms control agreements of the interwar years, was too small and in some instances (particularly in the case of cruisers and battleships) undersized and underarmored...
...Today, the United States faces a similar if lesser difficulty in its choice of a strategic bomber-should it buy an aircraft designed only to launch nuclear strikes against the USSR, or a terribly costly but multi-purpose conventional bomber...
Vol. 14 • November 1981 • No. 11
