Abstract

Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

When Munich Went Communist

After the Nazi period, the impression we have of the southern Mediterranean-looking Germans called Bavarians is that they are beerswilling (Oktoberfest) fascists, and that progressives and lefties in Germany tend to be the northern blond teutonic-looking Germans, but that impression is spoiled by a blot in history. Following the first World War, the Bavarians proclaimed themselves first an independent republic, then a socialist republic, and finally a communist, soviet style republic.

In the confusion of defeat in WWI, and the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, workers and soldiers all over the German and Austrian empires began setting up self governing councils during the summer of 1918. The war itself might have been lost but perhaps a new way of life could be won from the ruins. It looked, at last, as if socialism had arrived. In November 1918, the Kaiser abdicated and power in Berlin was handed over to the two socialist parties, the official SPD and the independent socialists, the USPD, a breakaway peace party formed in 1917 to which, at the time, the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht both belonged.

Throughout December, rifts between the socialist parties grew wider, and doubts arose among the members of the Spartacus League about whether it was possible to cooperate with the Social Democrats at all, even to the extent to participating in the forthcoming election campaign. Things came to a head when the Social Democrats tried to dismiss the Berlin police chief, an independent socialist called Emil Eichorn. Thousands of people stormed through the streets of Berlin to occupy public buildings.

On 5 January, they seized the offices of the Social Democrat paper Vorwarts. By 11 January, the doomed rising—like that of the eponymous Roman slave—had been put down with terrible ferocity. On 15 January, Rosa and Liebknecht, who had disapproved of the rioting but had to accept it as a fait accompli, were arrested and later “shot while trying to escape”—as it was put, not for the first time.

The movement was not finished. Eugen Levine, a Russian Jew of good family from Petersburg, who was born the year Marx died, 1883, inherited it. In March 1919, he was despatched from Berlin to Munich to see what role the communists could play there—to guide, indeed to create, a Communist Party. According to the German historian and columnist Sebastian Haffner, he was the only real communist in Munich.

There had been a putsch in Munich in 1918, when thousands of people—fed up with the war, with the Prussians for getting them into it, with hunger and unemployment—gathered on the Theresienwiese, the great meadow where major political meetings were traditionally held. Enthralled by their own rhetoric, they decided to depose king Ludwig and declare a republic. Ludwig left hastily, that same evening. The crowd was led by an independent socialist, Kurt Eisner, who believed passionately that you could combine parliamentary democracy with the workers’, soldiers’, and, in the Bavarian case, peasants’ self governing councils. But, his party did disastrously in the elections, and his right-wing opponents did not believe him when he said he would abide by the majority decision. He was assassinated on his way to the Diet on 21 February, 1919. A letter of resignation was found in his bloodstained pocket. A hundred thousand people followed his funeral. Martial law was declared.

When Levine arrived in Munich early in March, the city was outwardly one of the most quiet in Germany. You could, according to one of the survivors, “actually read the Rote Fahne (the Communist Party paper) in the street without being attacked”. Nevertheless, there were some 45,000 people unemployed and no government. Demands issued forth for everything from bread to a Red Army. Eventually the impotent Landtag—parliament—issued an enabling act giving all authority to a cabinet led by an SPD man, Johannes Hoffman, and then prorogued itself.

Hoffman also could not cope with the economic and political complexities of the situation. By April, the choice lay between recalling the Landtag or doing what the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils wanted, declaring a soviet republic. The SPD and USPD decided, on 5 April, that they were for a soviet republic. They had the backing of a lot of romantics and anarchists—but not the communists. Levine said no soviet could be declared from above, “from a green table”, as he put it, and turned down the idea, because—according to his widow, who was also called Rosa, and who eventually lived in London—he knew it had no chance. It would be certain to be crushed by the White Guards and Free Corps, either from within Bavaria itself, or, even more likely, despatched from Prussia. No genuine soviet republic could exist, he believed, in which Communists were outnumbered and dominated by Social Democrats. It would only be worthy of the name if it adopted a communist programme. As it was, the so-called phony soviet (Scheinriterepublik) literally nationalised artists’ studios rather than factories—they lived in a dream world which was all too soon to be destroyed.

Meanwhile, the White Guards and Free Corps were, as Levine had forecast, advancing on the city, slaughtering whoever they fancied as they came, and the Communists decided that, since the republic was under military attack, however imperfect it might be, it was their duty to defend it. They must go down fighting. The first thing was to form a Red Army. Weapons were no problem, as so many people had recently returned from the front, and so many of the soldiers garrisoned in Munich were sympathetic—even if for no better reason than hatred of the Prussians.

Their first trial of strength came on Palm Sunday, 13 April, against opposition within the city that Hoffman had organised—from a safe distance in Nuremburg. According to the historian, Allan Mitchell, 20 people were killed. Levine put the figure at seven and said:

The enemy are not even fighting properly any more.

Soon, however, the city was in a state of siege and so short of food that by 26 April it had become a capital offence to provide milk for anyone but the dying. The Whites planned their final takeover for 2 May, hoping to avoid confronting a mass workers’ demonstration on 1 May. But on 30 April, 10 hostages, held in a school by the Red Army, were murdered, and this incensed the Whites so much that they broke into Munich on 1 May after all. At a conservative estimate, some 600 people were killed. Others believe the numbers ran into thousands—and no nonsense about sparing women and children.

The story of the hostages assumed an importance which, as an incident, it seems not to have merited. Is there something qualitatively different about murdering hostages and slaughtering innocents in the street? In any case, the question of who ordered the deaths is still a mystery. Some Communists said they were counter-revolutionaries condemned to die, but the suggestion that Levine ordered their deaths has done his reputation great damage. His widow says vehemently that apart from any other considerations, he would never have done anything so foolish, so calculated to play into the enemy’s hands. If he had done so and there were any proof of it, the court-martial before which he eventually stood trial would have charged him, and it failed to do so. Nevertheless, the slander is used against him still.

Many of Levine’s supponers, like Rudolf Egelhofer, the 26 year old sailor who was in charge of the Red Army, and Gustav Landauer, an anarchist scholar who had supported the revolution for romantic reasons, were killed without trial. Levine went into hiding, was trapped and court-martialled. German law was curious in that it was not illegal to conduct revolutionary activities, but it was illegal to conduct them for “dishonourable motives”. It was for this that Eugen Levine, whom many people feel might have become the German Lenin, was tried. His speech from the dock, in which he used the unforgettable phrase:

We communists are dead men on holiday,

so impressed his hearers that the soldiers who were guarding him crowded round the dock begging to hear more. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The officer who conducted him back to his cell said to him:

We had to kill you, of course, but to say you were dishonourable is quite wicked.

His last words, as he faced the firing squad, were “Long live the world revolution”.

When Churchill Blew up the Red Fleet

It is secret history that Britain and the US intervened in Russia between 1917 and 1921. Churchill tried to stop the communists.

The scale and complexity of British operations in the budding USSR is not generally admitted, nor is Winston Churchill’s personal role in it. After the Bolshevik Revolution, internal conflict within Russia developed into a full-scale Civil War in which western powers fought the Red army in support of the counter-revolutionary (White) armies. Though the Armistice of November 1918 had been signed, Churchill, as UK Secretary of State for War, intensified Britain’s fight against the Russian Revolution.

Churchill took up the crusade against Bolshevism with fervour and conceived a master-plan for “strangling the Soviet regime at birth”. By bolstering anti-Bolshevik regimes in Archangel, in Siberia, on the Caspian and in the south, he hoped to encircle and starve the Reds. British officers were sent to Siberia to help Admiral Kolchak organize and train an army. In the south, an RAF squadron, allegedly on a training mission, flew in combat against the Red Armies. A British crew drove a British tank through the defences of Red-held Tsaritsyn—later Stalingrad. British officers took batteries into action. Some 330 British soldiers and sailors were killed. Most of this was Churchill’s doing. The rest of the Cabinet were lukewarm or skeptical, and Prime Minister Lloyd George told Churchill Russia was “an obsession, upsetting your balance”. British aid, which Lloyd George estimated cost over £100 million (£several billion today), achieved nothing, and Churchill’s strategy of dissipating his forces was wrong. Only in one sector, the Baltic, did it have dramatic and lasting results.

The British were particularly interested in the Russian Baltic Fleet at anchor in the apparently impregnable fortress harbour of Kronstadt. After the Armistice, Churchill’s British strategy was that the Navy should be the dominating force in the Baltic, and so anti-Bolshevik forces should be given every support. But, despite the presence of a powerful naval force under Rear Admiral Cowan and of an RAF squadron on a secret Finnish airfield, the threat of Russia’s capital ships in Kronstadt harbour remained.

To deal with these vessels, on the night of Sunday 17 August, 1919, eight British torpedo craft, guided by Finnish smugglers, crept through the chain of forts that guard Petrograd bay. At the same time, the RAF launched a bombing raid on the heavily defended island harbour. Under this cover, the boats swept into the main docking area. It was only about half a square mile, forcing them to throttle right down and reverse to turn. Confined, the frail craft were easy targets, and the Soviets, once aware of the enemy’s presence, opened up with every weapon they had. One torpedoboat (No 24) was sunk almost at once, split clean in two by high explosive. Two others, desperately manoeuvring at the harbour-mouth, collided. The commander of the undamaged vessel went full ahead to keep the boat he had rammed afloat until her crew could come aboard, but no sooner was this accomplished than the surviving craft was sunk by shell-fire. Lieutenant Steele, who had taken over No 88 after her commander was shot in the head, recorded that when he loosed his torpedoes at the battleship Andrei Pervozvannyi:

We were so close to her that a shower of picric powder from the warhead of our torpedo was thrown over the stem of the boat, staining us a yellow colour which we had some difficulty in removing afterwards.

No 86 broke down and was taken in tow by No 72 under intensive fire from the forts. Dawn was breaking as the boats finally turned away for their secret base in Finland, speeded by the fire of every battery in Kronstadt. But the damage they had done spoke for itself. They had broken into “the strongest naval fortress in the world”, and succeeded in sinking two battleships, the Petropavlovsk and Andrei Pervozvannyi, a large depot ship and a destroyer, for the loss of three torpedo boats with six officers and nine ratings killed, and three officers and six ratings captured. The “cradle of the revolution”, manned by the ultra-revolutionary Red sailors, had been penetrated by boats devoid of armour and dependent entirely on the skill of the men who handled them.

The Illustrated London News announced on 30 August:

The sinking of two Bolshevik battleships by British coastal motor boats—a brilliant naval exploit. The Admiralty announced on 19 August—“A report has been received from the British senior naval officer in the Baltic that a naval engagement took place in the Gulf of Finland early on 18 August. Two Russian battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the the Andrei Pervozvannyi and one destroyer were sunk. A cruiser was also probably seriously damaged. The British losses were three coastal motor boats. The Petropavlovsk had a displacement of 23370 metric tons and carried twelve 12-in guns. The Andrei Pervozvannyi had a displacement of 17680 metric tons, with a complement of 933, an indicated horse-power of 17600 equal to 18 knots and four 12-in guns”. In a list of casualties issued later by the Admiralty, among the officers reported killed were Lieut Archibald Deyrell-Reed, DSO, Lieut William H Bremner, DSO, and Sub-Lieut Thomas R G Usborne. Among those reported missing and believed to be dead were Acting Lieut-Commander Frank G Brade, DSC, Lieut Laurence E S Napier, Sub-Lieut Osman C H Giddy, and Sub-Lieut Hector P Mclean… It has been stated that the motor boats attacked immediately off Kronstadt without the support of the fleet, but accompanied by three aeroplanes. The British squadron in the Baltic which has done such brilliant work is under the command of Rear-Admiral Cowan.

No declaration of war had been made by the UK. The British cabinet had only vaguely approved. They were trying at the time to negotiate the peaceful withdrawal of the Archangel troops, so the sinking of the Soviet Baltic Fleet was hardly well timed. The gallantry of the crews could not be passed by and two VCs and three DSOs were awarded. Yet there was no rejoicing, no campaign medal, and the cabinet made it clear that they wanted to forget the incident.

The interventions failed. The anti-revolutionary Whites had to be abandoned and were left to fight their last battles alone. For a while, the Bolsheviks were hard put to defend Petrograd itself from Yudenich’s White army, but the new nations hostile to the Soviets on the Baltic shores were freed of any fears of Russian naval action against them. It made possible the survival of an independent Finland and the creation of the Baltic States, though they ended up supporting the Nazis, before being absorbed by the Soviet expansion post WWII.

Above all, it impressed the Soviets with the dangerous and undying hostility and duplicity of Great Britain, and the people of the east have not forgotten it to this day. Indeed, the present UK Prime Monister, Anthony Blair, is duplicitous to his own party and country, and very likely to himself!

When the UK Government Expected Revolution

In 1919, Britain’s Cabinet Ministers had presided over the senseless slaughter in Flanders, and had seen the three great empires of central and eastern Europe dissolve in revolution. Was the British Empire to be the next to fall? After the revolution in Russia, and the collapse of the European empires in WWI, the British Cabinet thought there might be a revolution in the UK, and they prepared for it by sending troops out on to the streets.

Their fears were fed by strikes in the police force, mutinies in units at the rear of the demobilisation queue, and a rising tide of violence in Ireland, where a genuine situation of revolution existed. But the evidence shows working-class organisations never planned for, or even wanted, the overthrow of society. With wages being slashed drastically—the lower-paid mine labourers faced a cut of nearly 50 per cent to £1 18s ll½d a week—and a steep rise in unemployment past the million mark, demonstrations and unrest were inevitable. And nothing more sinister. One of the “extremists”, Willie Gallacher, who became an MP, bitterly remarked many years later:

We were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution.

But Britain’s Cabinet, conditioned by its war mentality, reached for its guns. In January 1919, while the economy was still booming, they moved troops, machine-guns and even tanks into Glasgow. Winston Churchill regarded this as a merely tentative measure. He told the Cabinet:

By going gently at first we should get the support we wanted from the nation, and then troops could be used more effectively.

By August 1919, Ministers had ordered a massive concentration of force in Liverpool. Three battalions, some 2600 troops, composed what The Morning Post called “the occupying military force”. The battleship HMS Valiant and two destroyers were deployed in the Mersey, with steam up. Tanks patrolled the streets. Under The Defence of the Realm Act, the notorious “Dora”, the state already possessed wide emergency powers, but more were called for. In October 1919, the Home Secretary publicly appealed for all loyal persons to form Citizen Guards “in face of the menace with which we are confronted today”. A Cabinet Strike Committee was set up, and divided the country into a dozen regions, each with its Commissioner and staff.

The government’s state of mind was reflected in a private letter from the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, who wrote, after listening to Britain’s Ministers:

I felt I had been in Bedlam. Red revolution and blood and war at home and abroad!

The very detailed Cabinet minutes taken by Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary, give us a hair-raising glimpse into the minds of the frightened men who presided over Britain’s Empire at the end of the First World War. He noted on 2 February, 1919, how the Prime Minister…

…then turned to Trenchard [head of the RAF] asking “How many airmen are there available for the revolution?” Trenchard replied that there were 30,000 mechanics and 2000 pilots, but only 100 machines. The pilots had no weapons for ground fighting. The PM presumed they could use machine-guns and drop bombs.

The discussion continued for hours. Walter Long, First Lord of the Admiralty, chipped in:

The peaceable manpower of the country is without arms. I have not a pistol less than 200 years old. A Bill is needed for licensing persons to bear arms.

Lloyd George cross-questioned senior officers on the relative value of using firearms and hand-grenades against the mob. How could the Crown forces be supplemented by volunteers? During the discussion Bonar Law so often referred to the stockbrokers as a loyal and fighting class one felt potential battalions of stockbrokers were to be found in every town. Sir Robert Horne wanted secret lists of reliable men drawn up by the Chief Constables, but noted “Eric Geddes suggested having the Mayors up, but in view of the number of Labour Mayors, and the difficulty of keeping the matter secret, there was opposition to the suggestion”.

Nobody seems to have considered inviting the leaders of the working class to Downing Street and asking what their intentions were. As in the days of Castlereagh, the government’s main source of information was the police—a special “Directorate of Intelligence” of 150 officers, headed by the famous “spy-catcher” Sir Basil Thomson, being removed from the jurisdiction of Scotland Yard to despatch directly to the Cabinet Fortnightly Reports on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom and Morale Abroad. One for 2 December, 1918 reported:

During the past fortnight the idea of direct action by the workers has certainly gained ground, particularly in London. Among the advanced people there appears to be a quiet certainty that revolution is coming.

All the Ministers seemed to have shared the mistaken assumption that the workers were being dragged into revolution by lying propaganda in the Labour Press, though the papers were violently anti-strike, let alone anti-revolution, and even the Herald was studiously moderate. The government indulged in elaborate propaganda of its own. Millions of leaflets, embodying an appeal by the Prime Minister to the nation, were printed and lodged in bank-vaults in each of the twelve security districts, ready for immediate issue. Tom Jones noted on 2 February, 1919:

Discussion moved on to the publicity arrangements, and Lloyd-Graeme got authority to spend money (£1000) on sending men to Scotland to work up government case in local papers from inside, eg, Edinburgh Evening News, Glasgow Bulletin, etc.

How much money was actually spent on newspapers and journalists is not clear from the documents, but the same discussion gave a hint of how the press was influenced:

Sir P Lloyd-Graeme… pointed out that the art of propaganda was to conceal it. Last strike the government was sending out matter to 900 newspapers via the Coalition and Unionist organisations, etc, and the local political organisations were paid, and the public suspected little or nothing.

The nervous men gathered for long hours around the Cabinet table tended to infect each other with their own fears and produce a highest common denom1nator of alarmism. Austen Chamberlain said on 2 February, 1920, that their security arrangements involved “really the defence of the foundations of civilisation”, and on 4 April, 1921, Ministers in some desperation debated how to bring back troops from abroad to protect “civilisation” at home. Worthington-Evans, the War Secretary, said:

We need 18 battalions to hold London. We had three battalions at Malta, two of which we could bring back home. There were four battalions in Silesia. They could be brought back to the Rhine at once.

Lord Curzon, in charge of foreign policy, objected that to pull out from Silesia would bring “a possibly serious disaster”. Chamberlain snapped back:

We are in front of a situation here which may require all our forces. I am all for holding the British coalfields rather than the Silesian ones.

Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, summed up:

We should decide without delay around which force loyalists can gather. We ought not to be shot without a fight anyway.

Ministers were not alone in their terror of being shot. They reflected the prevailing mood in the clubs and drawing rooms of the West End, in the City business-houses, and in the Law Courts. In April 1921, the Recorder of London, Sir Forrest Fulton, declined to send a convicted man to prison because he had served in the Air Force:

I am influenced by the fact that we are living in a very perilous time and that your services may, for all I know, within the next few days be again required by His Majesty.

Various categories of reservists were called up, and a citizen defence force of 70,000 was recruited. This consisted mainly of the ex-Serviceman type who constituted the Black and Tans in Ireland, but it included, by a supreme irony, a number of striking miners who needed the money.

Britain’s threatened class-war dissolved in bathos and anti-climax. Even when the terrifying monster of the General Strike finally appeared on the scene in 1926, it revealed itself as a typically British creature, moderate, dogged rather than audacious—a timid apparition. The story might have been different if the nervousness of Ministers had led to a clash between troops and workers on a Peterloo scale. The Civil War of the 1640s was brought about not by set purpose on the part of king or Parliament, but by brinkmanship and miscalculation.

There ought to be lessons here for the present neurotic “Labour” government of Britain in the supposed war on terror, but they are incapable of learning it, being the very image of the post WWI Liberal government—completely out of touch!

When Lloyd George Backed Terror

On 19 December, 1919, a secret report on Michael Collins, one of the rebel leaders, from the Director of Intelligence at Scotland Yard reached the Chief Secretary for Ireland:

There is definite and trustworthy information that Michael Collins is directing the murders of policemen, that he has attained such a position that his friends say that the police do not dare to touch him, and that if any attempt was made to arrest him it would precipitate a rising in Ireland.

Collins had indeed been conducting an audacious and successful campaign against the police. The Royal Irish Constabulary, an armed force, were the main instrument of the government’s authority. The “G” (Detective) Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police was the principal government intelligence service. By January 1920, the IRA—acting independently of the political assembly, Dail Eireann—had killed five key members of “G” Division.

Throughout 1919, the government seemed to have pledged itself to stamp out rebellion. Shootings, burnings, and other reprisals by police and even troops filled newspaper headlines. Yet the government had chosen not to make full use of the one instrument available to it that could conceivably smash the rebels—the Army. Until the end of 1920, the Army was kept in a subordinate role.

In the opinion of general Macready, who was appointed General Officer Commanding in Chief in April 1920, the police forces were “rotten”. Macready hoped that Major-General Tudor, the new Police Adviser, would improve the situation. Late in July, Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, summarized the views of the Prime Minister’s Irish advisers. They were “rapidly deteriorating” and could only be replaced from England. According to Jones, two policies were open to the government. They could apply the full rigour of martial law, or they could seek a negotiated settlement. There were other alternatives, though. Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, had recorded in his diary for 23 May 1920 that Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff wanted to collect the names of Sinn Feiners by districts, proclaim them on church doors all over the country, and whenever a policeman was murdered, pick five by lot and shoot them!

The Cabinet shrank from the idea of martial law. Meanwhile they continued to hope that a new political formula—the granting of separate Parliaments to the North and South—might satisfy some, if not all, of the IRA and Sinn Fein leaders.

Strange as it may now appear, ministers and officials had found it necessary to fight hard at the end of 1919 to prevent the reduction of the military forces in Ireland. It was well understood that a war-weary British public and a watchful Press were urging economies on the government. One obvious solution seemed be a large increase in the police forces, but where were recruits to be found? The army command suggested some of the unemployed ex-soldiers in Britain should be recruited. From March 1920, “carefully selected” temporary constables began to reinforce the RIC. In makeshift uniforms of khaki and green, with black belts, they were dubbed the “Black and Tans” after a famous pack of hounds.

For as long as possible Lloyd George wanted to avoid resorting to full-scale repression, but he was not willing to rush to the conference table making substantial concessions to men who were in arms against the Crown. He had to create a situation in which some responsible and representative Irish spokesmen would negotiate terms which he could grant.

Although it was not the government’s policy, and he told no-one, Lloyd George relied until November 1920 on countering the ruthlessness of the IRA with a ferocious and unpredictable campaign of counter-terror. No evidence exists that Lloyd George or any of his colleagues instigated the direct action by police or troops against suspected terrorists. Many instances of official retaliation were spontaneous—men provoked to breaking point simply ignored discipline—but the diaries of Sir Henry Wilson and of Mark Sturgis, a senior official of the Irish Administration, have clues that point to Lloyd George privately encouraging and sympathising with General Tudor’s loose rein on the police and the 1500 ex-officers who constituted the specially-formed Auxiliary Division. As late as February 1921, Sir John Anderson, the Joint Under Secretary at Dublin Castle, told Thomas Jones:

Whenever Tudor came over to see the PM he returned very much strengthened in his policy that, even if not in words yet by atmosphere and suggestion, the PM conveyed his encouragement.

The diaries of Sir Henry Wilson offer the most conclusive evidence. In July 1920, Wilson discovered to his horror and amazement that the Prime Minister thought a sort of “counter-murder association” was operating under Tudor’s authority. Wilson wrote about Lloyd George’s “amazing theory that Tudor, or someone, was murdering two Sinn Feiners to every loyalist the SF murdered”.

The activities of Tudor’s subordinates—especially after the blatant sacking of Balbriggan in September 1920—were fiercely debated in Whitehall and Westminster. The Cabinet on 1 October, 1920, reached “complete agreement that reprisals by burning must be put a stop to at the earliest moment”. But Macready told Mark Sturgis:

LG is against burning, but not gunning, and told me so himself.

In a frank discussion on 5 October 1920 with his Liberal critic Lord Grey of Fallodon, the Prime Minister “strongly defended the murder reprisals”. According to the account of Sir Maurice Hankey who was present at the interview, Lloyd George…

…showed that these had from time immemorial been resorted to in difficult times in Ireland. He gave numerous instances where they had been effective in checking crimes, he quoted two eminent nationalists who had told him in confidence that the Irish quite understood such reprisals, and that they ought not to be stopped.

Hankey concluded:

The truth is that these reprisals are more or less winked at by the government.

And contemporary orders and memoranda emanating from Dublin Castle are consistent with this judgment. Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, brought matters to a head early in November 1920, demanding:

The substitution of regular, authorised and legalised reprisals for the unauthorised reprisals.

A decision was made easier by Lloyd George’s belief, following the ambush and killing of 18 auxiliaries at Kilmichael at the end of November, that the rebels had moved into a phase of military operations rather than assassinations. Martial law was proclaimed in the South on 10 December, to be followed within two days by one of the most notorious of all unauthorised reprisals, the burning of Cork by a detachment of auxiliaries. Fighting continued with undiminished ferocity for another six months and it was not until December 1921 that the Republican leaders signed the peace treaty with Lloyd George.

When the US Prepared for War with Britain

The US prepared for war with Britain only months after the end of hostilities in WWI.

On May 6, 1919, the Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy, Admiral Benson, wrote from the Versailles Peace Conference to Josephus Daniels, President Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy. The best thing the President could do, he advised, would be to create a situation which would compel him to break with the Allies. He was more and more convinced, he said, that the source from which America had to look for serious trouble in the future was Great Britain. And he believed it was his solemn duty to warn that his country was in great danger and should be prepared for the worst.

So, he continued, the destroyer flotilla should be kept in commission, manned and ready for action. Work on the six battle cruisers laid down in 1916 should be hurried to completion. The United States must be ready at all times. And in the meantime he recommended a major increase in American naval strength to prevent British domination of the newly-formed League of Nations.

In Washington, the General Board of the US Navy shared his views. On 28 May, 1919, they listed the obstacles to war between Britain and America. Despite all these, however, they asserted that war might come most probably from trade rivalry. In every case in the past, they said, Britain had resorted to war to eliminate from competition any nation which seriously threatened her commercial supremacy. Thus, six months after Armistice Day 1918, the senior Naval advisers of the United States seriously contemplating war with Britain.

What could have produced this situation? It was a combination of three sets of factors. Thinking in the American Navy was dominated by the theories of the great American writer on naval strategy, Admiral Mahan. All wars, he taught, came from commercial rivalry. England fought Spain and France and Holland for this reason and, his disciples added, was quite willing to fight Germany for the same reason when a legitimate excuse presented itself. In August 1914, they advised that Germany’s defeat would not be to America’s interest. And up to America’s entry into the war and beyond, they remained convinced that the end of the war would be followed by an assault on America by one or more of the belligerents, with Britain’s acquiescence or participation, because of America’s emergence as the major trading power in the world.

The second factor was British reaction to the immense American naval construction programme laid before Congress in November 1918. We know now that this was a psychological weapon by which Woodrow Wilson hoped to bludgeon Congress into accepting America’s entry into the League of Nations. Unless the League came into being, he argued, America would have to bear arms expenditure at the rate this programme involved. But to the British, the programme seemed a deliberate challenge, and there was no shortage of hot-heads in British naval uniform to denounce it and to call for a pre-emptive strike to destroy the American fleet.

The third factor was the fate of the German battle-fleet surrendered into British custody and lying at anchor in Scapa Flow. If that fleet, 19 Dreadnoughts and five battle cruisers, was treated as the spoils of war and divided between the victors in proportion to their losses, Britain would get 13 Dreadnoughts and four of the five battlecruisers, giving her a fleet far beyond America’s capacity to out-build. The Americans remained obstinately convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the British were manoeuvring to get such a distribution accepted by the Allies.

The problem was exacerbated by Lloyd George, whose actions appeared to confirm the worst American fears. For, determined to avoid a new naval race with America, he tried his utmost to get the American battleship programme abandoned and persuaded Josephus Daniels and Admiral Benson to meet their opposite numbers, Walter Long, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Sir Rosslyn Wemyss. The latter’s goldbraided hauteur—he was descended from an illegitimate line of William IV)—naval arrogance and contempt for the lack of fighting experience of the American Navy, made the worst impression on Benson, who believed his deepest suspicions justified.

So American naval suspicion of Britain continued festering throughout the 1920s, the General Board of the Navy denouncing the inter-war naval treaties of Washington and London and fighting bitterly, against the latter when it came before Congress for ratification. It was not until the mid-1930s that American naval war plans ceased to consider Britain as a potential enemy. And in the American Adniira1 King’s unwillingness, as late as 1944, to accept a Royal Navy component to fight against the Japanese in the Pacific, one can see the last echoes of Admiral Benson’s alarmist despatch after WWI. For King had served as a member of the US Naval War Staff in European waters in the Office in London from which Admiral Benson had, back in 1919, drawn his inspiration and his briefing papers.

Mussolini’s Supporters

Benito Mussolini has a strong physical constitution although he suffers from syphilis. His robustness allows him to work round the clock…

These were the opening words of the long report on Mussolini and the Fasci di combattimento—combat squads—presented by Police Inspector General Gasti to the Italian Ministry of the Interior on 4 June, 1919. Gasti went on to list the rumoured sources of finance for the Fascists and for Mussolini’s newspaper, the Popolo d’Italia, among them Pirelli, the rubber and cable company, and Ansaldo, the munitions company which had its headquarters in Genoa. Mussolini was supported by business—and the Church!

Ansaldo and Mussolini had been linked previously. Another police report, dated 22 August, 1918, described how there were insistent rumours in industrial and press circles in Milan that Mussolini, together with his newspaper, had been cornered by the Ansaldo company through the payment of large subsidies. And an intelligence survey of the same period stated:

Signor Pagliani [director of the Banca di Sconto, an important bank in which the brothers Pio and Mario Perrone, owners of Ansaldo, had a large stake] had paid 200,000 lire [some £20,000] to Mussolini.

It was even rumoured that Ansaldo’s Perrone brothers were backing Mussolini to get more munition orders from the government. The question of who should get what of the dismembered Austro-Hungarian empire was much in the politicians’ minds at that time, and so Ansaldo had a strong interest in supporting publications like Mussolini’s Popolo d’Italia which took a strong anti-Yugoslav line—and which also made the prospect of war credible.

The war business gave Mussolini his first big break, in 1914, when he broke from the Socialist Party over the question of whether or not Italy should join the war. The Socialists strongly opposed Italy participating, and so Mussolini, an ardent advocate of Italy’s entry, sought and got backing from others who shared his view. The first edition of the Popolo d’Italia came out on 15 November, 1914, thanks to the backing of a group of industrialists in central Italy—for although considered a wild man because of his revolutionary socialist past, conservatives liked Mussolini’s line in nationalist rhetoric.

The gulf between Mussolini and the socialists widened, in 1919, with the war over and thousands of disgruntled ex-servicemen desperately looking for jobs. The Bolshevik revolution convinced many that revolution was imminent in Italy too, but it terrified the middle classes, industrialists and landowners. Mussolini, with his anti-Socialist combat squads, stepped into the breach and offered his services in the face of the government’s unwillingness or inability to deal with left-wing strikes and demonstrations. From 1919 until the March on Rome in October 1922, Italy became a sort of no-man’s land in which the Fascist squads gradually extended their terrorist tactics from the Po Valley in the north to the whole of north and central Italy, acting as strong-arm men for both landowners and industrialists and as strike breakers for the latter.

By 1921, after two years of violent expansion, the Fascists’ finances were said to be rocky, and so local representatives, mainly retired officers, were recruited and each given a beat to cover—tapping the local farmer or factory owner for funds in a polite sort of protection racket. The agents kept between 10 and 15 per cent of the takings and the remaining money was split 60 per cent for the central organisation, which passed part of it on to the poorer squads, and 40 per cent to the squads in whose area the money had been raised. Some 5,819,975 lire, about £10 million at 2006 values, was raised in this way between October 1921 and December 1924—almost 60 per cent of the money coming from the province of Milan and nearly 25 per cent from Rome.

Contributions from banks, insurance companies and industry accounted for almost ¾ of the total—and this sum does not account for numerous contributions made directly to the local squads, particularly in the rural areas of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany. Nor does it include the subsidies given, either in the form of cash or advertising contracts, to the Popolo d’Italia. One of the important contributors, donating tens of thousands of pounds, was Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat, who was made a senator shortly after Mussolini came to power and whose contribution to the rise of Fascism was publicly acknowledged by the Duce.

Senator Alberto Pirelli, the tyre magnate, also provided solid financial endorsement of an equivalent magnitude, and so did Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, an immensely rich financier and industrialist who owned a vast empire of financial, engineering, electrical and steel companies that survived in his family’s hands until the 1960s. The Perrone brothers also contributed funds from Ansaldo and the Banco di Sconto. Few of these industrialists actually belonged to the Fascist Party. Their objectives were less creditable still. They wanted to protect their interests by any means possible. Denis Mack Smith says in his survey of modern Italy’s history that these liberals evidently put riches and comfort before liberty.

Now events played right into Mussolini’s hands, justifying the faith his industrialist backers had placed in him, for. In January 1921, the Socialists split, the Communists forming their own separate party. The consequence of the break-up was that membership of both the Socialist and Communist parties plunged from 216,000 in 1920 to less than half that in 1921. In March of the same year, an anarchist bomb attack in a Milan theatre killed 21 and wounded 200, and then, in May, the Prime Minister Giolitti sprang general elections on the country and included the Fascists, who until then had no Member of Parliament, in a “National bloc”. This enabled the Fascists to return 35 deputies, including Mussolini, after an election campaign characterised by the violence of the Fascist squads. Between 8 April and 14 May 1921, 105 people were reported killed and 431 wounded.

Mussolini had of course adroitly tailored his movement’s economic programme to please his industrialist backers. In the 14 January 1921, issue of Popolo d’Italia he announced that capitalism was only at the beginning of its history—the electoral campaign of the “National bloc” had been financed by industry and Confindustria, the Italian employers’ federation that had been formed the previous year—and in his maiden speech to the Chamber of Deputies, Mussolini advocated a return to what he called a “Manchesterian economy”, meaning free trade, no shackles on private enterprise, and a minimum of state intervention. He repeated this newly acquired conviction at the inaugural congress of the National Fascist Party, which changed the Fascist movement into a regular political party, in Rome in November 1921.

With the support of big business consolidated, and with large sectors of the army and the police on his side as well, Mussolini now needed the backing or at least the benevolent neutrality of the Church and the monarchy. So in 1922 discreet approaches were made to the Vatican, and on 20 September Mussolini made a speech at Udine in which he was sympathetic to the monarchy. Against the background of a general strike, called by the unions at the beginning of August to protest against the authorities’ toleration of Fascist violence, Mussolini completed with this speech the process of winning the approval of the establishment.

Five weeks later his Fascists had assembled between 15,000 and 25,000 poorly armed squadristi to the north and east of Rome. On 12 October, a delegation of industrialists, including Pirelli and the chairman of the Employers’ Federation, Antonio Benni, had told the Prefect of Milan that Italy needed another government in which the Fascists were included. And the Masons, who represented a great mass of army officers, intensified their political and economic support for the Fascists—to the tune of 3.5 million lire—about £5 million today—it was revealed later.

The National Syndicate of Cooperatives and the Agrarian Confederation also made their contributions. And the largest sum of all appears to have come from the Banking Association—some 20 million lire, nearly £40 million, raised by Italy’s equivalent of our own big banks to help Mussolini’s coup d’etat which, in the event, proved so straightforward he was able to save the money for other uses.

On 28 October, a group of industrialists, including Benni for the Employers’ Federation and the electricity tycoon Ettore Conti, went to Mussolini to try to persuade him to join a conservative coalition. By now the Fascists had the scent of real power in their nostrils and knew they had no need to compromise—not even for the sake of their industrial supporters. On the morning of 30 October 1922, Mussolini arrived in Rome by train and was designated Prime Minister. His army of marchers straggled in after him and a victory parade was held next day.

The crucial factor in Mussolini’s success had been not so much the spectacle of his followers marching into the nation’s capital—demonstrations were usual in Italy after the First World War—but the knowledge that behind them was the economic might of the North Italian business establishment. Jotting down a draft list of Ministers for his Cabinet, Mussolini got the portfolio of Industry and Commerce and scribbled the name of Ettore Conti. The tycoon declined, but he did suggest another name, Teofilo Rossi, and he was the man who got the job. Having helped the Fascists to power, big business had a vested interest in, keeping them there.

The Irish Fascists

The Fascist movement in Ireland, though usually omitted from general accounts of European Fascism in the 1930s, attracted a mass following. It was more formidable in the politics of Ireland than Mosleyism ever was in England. The Fascists became the chief opposition party in Irish politics when the conditions for the appearance of extreme nationalistic parties were strong.

The first 10 years of independence in Southern Ireland had been presided over by Cosgrave’s Free State government, but in the 1932 general election its leading Republican opponent, Eamon de Valera, triumphed at the polls. He prompdy released the IRA detainees and these at once began a campaign of intimidation against Cosgrave’s Free Staters. Meetings of Cosgrave’s party were broken up by force. Threats were made against the lives of its members.

An anti-communist scare also gripped Ireland in 1932 and 1933. There were not actually many real communists in the country, but a large section of the IRA was sympathetic to Marxism. An IRA delegation had actually visited Moscow, in 1925, seeking aid for the overthrow of the Free State government. So against the European background it was not difficult for some in Ireland to exaggerate the threat to internal order from what they imagined was the Irish agency of international communism.

The increasing violence of Irish politics in the early thirties was also assisted by the start of a sharp depression of the economy in 1932. Irish exports dropped by half in one year, caused by de Valera’s policy of economic warfare against Britain. The small-farming class, the backbone of Irish political life, was the worst hit. Hardship and unemployment soon extended to the poor of the Irish cities.

The growth of fascism in Ireland exactly corresponded to these conditions. The movement originated in an Army Comrades Association set up in 1932, just prior to the general election. In August of that year, after de Valera’s success, the Association first revealed its political potential—it declared its aim to guarantee free speech by creating a “volunteer force”. The movement then grew rapidly. By the end of the year it claimed 30,000 active members. They wore blue shirts, like the shirted movements familiar in contemporary Europe. They drilled and marched and saluted in the extended arm Fascist manner.

For their leader the Blueshirts turned to the Chief of Police under the Free State government, General Eoin O’Duffy, who had just been dismissed by de Valera. O’Duffy had been fascinated by Mussolini’s Italy during a visit in 1929. His admiration for Mussolini and Hitler was undisguised. On various occasions, he described both as the greatest leaders Europe had ever known. He looked to the end of parliamentary democracy, and to the construction of a corporate state intended to embody the National Will. O’Duffy denounced parliamentary democracy as an English invention. Party politics were to be brought to an end.

In 1934, he encouraged contacts between Ireland and European fascists. A delegate from the Norwegian fascists was received in Dublin. In the same year, O’Duffy represented Ireland at the International Fascist Congress in Montreux. He supported the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and headed an Irish brigade which fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was a practical man, politically inept and overwhelmed by the dramatic value of fascist ideals which he did not understand.

Because de Valera’s government kept trying to suppress the Blueshirts, it kept emerging in different political incarnations. In July 1933, the Army Comrades Association turned itself into the National Guard and at the same time tightened its political creed, now aiming at the overthrow of Communism “and alien control and influence in public affairs”, as its constitution put it. The Blueshirts also intended to outlaw industrial strikes and replace trades unions and political parties by state corporations representing vocational groups.

Its membership was open ooly to those “of Irish birth or parentage who profess the Christian faith”. Seemingly Irish Catholic piety, it was really anti-Semitic. The Blueshirts were not overtly anti-Semitic, but, though there were very few Jews in Ireland at the time, the culture of anti-Semitism was evident in Ireland. Its sharpest statement came in The Kingship of Christ, a book published in 1931 by a Roman Catholic priest, Fr Denis Fahey. This work elaborated for Irish readers the thesis that Christian civilisation was threatened by an international conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. It was one of the most popular and widely-read books in Ireland of the day. John Charles McQuaid, later to become Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, wrote a preface to the first edition.

The National Guard was banned at once by the government of Northern Ireland, and at the end of August 1933 it was banned by Dublin, too. The Blueshirts were at that moment negotiating an alliance with the political leaders of the former Free State government. The result, declared in September, was a new opposition party, the United Ireland Party—or Fine Gael. Cosgrave had entered this union with ponderous reluctance, but his fear that de Valera was out to create a single-party state of his own had tipped the balance of his judgment. The new party incorporated the forces of the banned National Guard. Clashes between the IRA and the Blueshirts sharply increased.

In December, de Valera tried again to outlaw the Blueshirts, who once again, in Irish fashion, changed the name of their political organisation to escape the ban. They became known as the League of Youth. In the following year the military courts, set up by the government, imprisoned 349 Blueshirts and 102 IRA officers, for de Valera had come to recognise them also as a threat to the survival of his government. By then the number of deaths resulting from clashes between the Blueshirts and the IRA had begun to rise. Violence was the wrong cohesive to sustain the fragile alliance of the fascists and Cosgrave, and, in 1934, they drifted apart.

In June 1935, O’Duffy formalised the split by setting up his own Blueshirt party, the National Corporate Party, with frankly fascist ideals. One of their major aims was to establish an all Ireland Corporate State. Under O’Duffy’s erratic leadership this body slowly evaporated as the political climate changed. A two-party arrangement returned to Dublin. The government’s continuing arrest of IRA leaders removed the apparent threat to public order, and by 1938 the end of de Valera’s economic warfare with Britain had diminished the hardships of the depression.

The Irish Blueshirt movement had echoed the doctrines of blood sacrifice and race purity enunciated by Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. It also embodied much of the Catholic social teaching of the time, including the corporatist overtones of the Papal Encyclical, Quadragessimo Anno, teachings whose sympathy with Irish ideals received a clear confirmation when they were in part written into de Valera’s Eire Constitution of 1937. The Blueshirts had the support of those who watched over Ireland’s culture. Yeats was a firm supporter.

British Peace Talks with Germany

We hear constantly that Saddam invaded Kuwait because he had had the nod of approval from the US, or at least an assurance they would look away at the time it happened. It seems Hitler made a similar mistake in 1939, believing the British would not fight over Poland. The idea that he meant to have a war with France and Britain when Germany invaded Poland is wrong. Hitler was confident that the British and French would not intervene to save Poland and was shocked when the declaration of war came. After the British ultimatum had arrived, Ribbentrop wondered, despairingly, “What are we to do now?” and Hitler, meeting him in the Reichstag building, griped:

You idiot! You told me this wouldn’t happen.

Only six weeks earlier the British government had indicated they were reluctant to go to war. Far from standing up to Hitler, they had instead offered him African colonies, a share of British trade, and—by some accounts—a large cash loan to entice him towards peace.

Towards the end of July 1939, a German civil servant and chief economic adviser to Goering, Wohltat, arrived in London. He was running the four-year plan, and was an important figure, since Goering was believed to be wholly against war. He came to London in June and again in mid July, as German delegate to the International Whaling Conference. From 18 July to 21, he held informal conversations with several important British politicians.

Each side was adamant that it was the other that initiated these conversations. Sir Horace Wilson, chief economic adviser to the government, and a close confidant of Nevil1e Chamberlain, and Hudson, Minister of Overseas Trade, both said that the initiative had come from the Norwegian delegate to the whaling conference. Wilson and Hudson had important communications prepared for some time, suggesting the initiative came from the British side. Wohltat by contrast had nothing much to say, and even refused to meet Chamberlain on the grounds that he did not want to commit his government officially.

Wohltat talked to Sir Horace Wilson on 18 July, and again on 21 July. He talked to Hudson for an hour on 20 July, and both these members of the British Government put to him the suggestion of a nonaggression pact of a far reaching kind between Great Britain and Germany that would remove all causes for enmity. Wilson wanted a pact of non-aggression on a grand scale. Wohltat was “receptive”. Non-intervention in mutually agreed spheres of interest and limitation of armaments were discussed.

Wilson went further. He outlined to Wohltat a possibility of Germany’s regaining the colonies she had lost after the First World War. British public opinion would not swallow an outright return to Germany of the African and Pacific colonies she had had before 1918, but a way could be found. Africa could be set up as a “condominium”, an area of joint European colonial administration, in which the Germans would naturally have a part—and, as before 1914, there was a powerful idea of handing over Portuguese colonies to Germany.

Great Britain would undertake to leave eastern and south-eastem Europe to the German sphere of influence, especially in economic matters, provided legitimate British interests were respected. Co-operation in trading could be established, with joint British and German exploitation of the large areas open to more trade —the Empire, China, perhaps also Russia. On the second occasion, Wilson also produced a paper, on 10 Downing Street notepaper, outlining these suggestions for Anglo-German co-operation. As Wohltat saw it, these proposals certainly had Chamberlain’s approval.

The British Government were casting about for ways of getting rid of their guarantee to the Poles. A non-aggression pact on these lines would “enable Britain to rid herself of her commitments vis-a-vis Poland, so the Polish problem would lose its acuteness”. Wilson added that British public opinion would react favourably to the Conservatives in an election whether they took the slogan “Readiness for war” or adopted a programme of accommodation with Germany as their programme. It was up to the Germans to choose.

With Hudson, Wohltat had another revealing conversation. After the ritual enmination of guilt for the Anglo-German conflict, and suggestions for ways of ending it—including the dispatch of R A Butler to see Hitler—Hudson also suggested a “Joint Anglo-German Declaration not to use aggression” and outlined the possibilities for Britain and Germany in economic co-operation. He agreed that eastern Europe was the “natural economic sphere of Germany” and suggested Anglo-German co-operation against third parties in China, the Empire and perhaps in Russia. Colonies were also discussed, in a way favourable to Germany. More importantly, disarmament should be started. Hudson, in his own account, saw one of the Germans’ problems as “how, when rearmament came to an end, we could find markets for the products of their heavy industries”. Wohltat said that these could be found for Germany in southeastern Europe, but, in liberalising trade, a great problem would be the German debt, and lack of capital to tide over the difficulties. Would England and America help? Hudson answered:

From my discussions I had had with friends in America on this very question I thought we could look forward with some confidence to American help and as far as this country was concerned I had little doubt

In other words, Britain would lend Germany large sums in cash, and would drag the Americans into it, once German disarmament got going.

These conversations never led anywhere. All that the London Embassy heard was a rebuke from Ribbentrop for having allowed them to take place. The paper read to Wohltat by Wilson disappeared from the records. On the British side, Hudson, in the German Ambassador’s phrase, “driven by his feverish need to make himself important”, talked out of turn and rumours appeared in the press to the effect that the appeasers were at work, offering a £billion to the Germans. These rumours in the News Chronicle and the Telegraph were denied by the British Government in Parliament. But Wilson, talking early in August to the German Ambassador, did not deny that a loan offer had been made and outlined again the programme he and Hudson had suggested to Wohltat.

In the circumstances, Germany conducted her policy in 1939 believing that the British regarded their own committnent to Poland as a dangerous irrelevance, and both Hitler and Ribbentrop seem to have suspected, from this and similar evidence, that the British would not seriously intervene if the German army marched into Poland.

Britain And America Defeated

Every Englishman knows how the Royal Air Force defeated the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in 1940. Few recognize that the RAF and the Eighth US Air Force were themselves defeated by the Germans. These air forces practised the doctrines preached in the 1920s by Lord Trenchard. Trenchard had been Chief of Air Staff from the RAF’s inception in 1918 until the end of the 1920s, and his influence on the infant air force’s thinking had sunk in deeply. It nearly prevented Britain from having a fighter command at all to win the Battle of Britain. It prevented the victor of that battle, Air Marshal Dowding, from enjoying the honours and rewards showered on other leaders of the RAF at the end of the war. And it has persisted in the RAF’s thinking even since.

Trenchard’s doctrines reached their apogee in the person of Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris, head of Bomber Command and of the strategic air offensive against Germany for most of the war. Harris was thoroughly opposed to any concentration against specific targets. He dismissed those who wanted to concentrate on ball-bearing factories, on synthetic oil plants, railways or submarine bases, as “panacea-mongers”. For him there was only one road to the defeat of Germany, the destruction of Germany’s cities and the killing of so many civilians that the morale of the survivors collapsed. On 7 December, 1943, he wrote:

The Lancasters alone can, by 1 April, 1944, produce in Germany a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable.

Losses, he estimated, would run at about 5 per cent of the total Lancaster four-engined bomber force. Harris added in November 1944:

We can wreck Berlin end to end if the United States Army Air Forces will come in. It will cost between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.

On both a counts he was proved wrong. The main thesis he operated on was the “pointblank” directive of 10 June, 1943, which was intended to bring about the destruction of the German air force as a preliminary to the invasion of Europe. Under Harris’s influence, however, the final draft called for the destruction and defeat of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of morale to a point where the capacity for military resistance was fatally weakened. These terms were general enough for Harris to continue the night offensives begun in force in March 1943 over the Ruhr whose targets included Essen, Dortmund and Cologne.

Within two months Harris seemed to have come close to victory. The culmination was the assault on Hamburg. In four attacks between 24 July and 2 August 1943, 60,000 died and the city was destroyed beyond recognition. The cost was 89 aircraft lost and 160 damaged out of 3000 individual aircraft visits to the city. Three months more on this scale, said Albert Speer, and things will inevitably slide downhill. And Erhard Milch, the organising genius behind the Luftwaffe, in a sudden and uncharacteristic break of morale, confessed:

We have lost the war. Five or six more such attacks and the German people will lay down their arms.

These attacks were simply not forthcoming. Other targets were more difficult to reach and much more difficult to recognise. At the end of August the RAF made three big raids on Berlin. More than 1700 aircraft took part in three attacks. The losses ran at 14 per cent, with 123 lost and 114 damaged. As the targets receded into central and eastern Germany so German air defences became much more effective. Between 1 July and 1 October, 1943, German fighter strength increased from 1200 to 1500.

On 14 October, 1943, the Eighth US Air Force suffered a major disaster in a daylight attack on the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt. Of just under 300 bombers, 60 were lost, 17 irreparably damaged, and 121 damaged. In six days, 148 bombers were lost attempting to break through Germany’s air defences beyond the range of Allied fighter escort. No attacks could continue at that rate of loss. The USAAF retreated to bomb targets within range of fighter escort.

The RAF’s principal weapon was the four-engined Lancaster bomber, backed by smaller forces of Stirlings, Wellingtons and Manchesters. The initial attacks on the cities were made by Pathfinder squadrons guided by a system of radio beams operated by ground controllers, known as “Oboe”, and identifying their targets by airborne radar, code named “H2S”, which showed a city’s outline on a screen. Having found the target, Pathfinders dropped flares and incendiaries to mark the target area. Against them the Germans operated at first a system of night fighter “boxes”, each with early warning radar, airborne radar and ground controllers working on radio telephone hook-ups. But ground controllers could easily be deceived and German radar with its half-metre waveband was easily jammable.

To counter this the Germans introduced different tactics. Parachute flares and starshells were used to light up the sky over the bombers’ targets and make visual attack easier. The next step was to feed German night fighters into the main bomber stream as it crossed the coast. Ground control gave continuous commentaries on the bomber stream, and once contact was made the night fighters attacked individually, using airborne radar. Soon the night fighters had infra-red detectors and receivers to home on the Pathfinder H2S transmitters. Jammers were brought in against Oboe and H2S. And night fighter intruder groups followed the returning bombers over their home airfields.

The British fought back by jamming the running commentaries, or breaking into the German radio telephone frequencies to give misleading instructions to German pilots. But once the main bomber stream was located and the bombers caught by the German night fighters they had little chance. They were unarmoured, slow, had only small calibre machine guns, belched flame from their exhausts, and beaconed their presence by their radar transmissions. Only deception, concentration over the target area, or simply luck could save them. Outnumbered, outgunned, outpaced, as the losses mounted, morale sank so low that Air Vice-Marshal Bennet could write of aircrews “baulking at the jump”.

Enormous quantities of bombs were ditched in the North Sea and the number actually dropped on the markers was negligible. The casualty rate was more than the daily average strength of Bomber Command during the period. The expectation of life of the average crew was fourteen sorties in a “tour” of thirty.

Harris’s offensive on Berlin began on 18 November, 1944. Between November and March, 9,111 sorties were made against Berlin and 11,000 against other targets. Month by month the losses steadily climbed. Only nine bombers were lost in that first attack on Berlin out of 444 aircraft, though 23 were lost in a disastrous attack that same night on Mannheim. In December, losses were running at 4.8 per cent, though 40 bombers, 8.7 per cent of the total force, were lost in the first attack of that month. In January 1944, losses against Berlin rose to 6.1 per cent, against other targets’ 7.2 per cent. The following month in attacks against Leipzig and Berlin, losses stood at 9.5 per cent and 4.8 per cent respectively—120 aircraft out of nearly 1700. The worst disaster struck on 30 March 1944, when 795 aircraft attacked Nuremberg. Of the total force, 94 were lost and 71 damaged.

On 7 April, Harris admitted defeat. The strength of the German air defences, he wrote, would in time reach the point where night bombing attacks would involve casualty rates which could not in the long run be sustained. Tactical innovations were finally exhausted.

The defeat was worse than he knew. Despite the bombing offensive, Berlin’s arms production rose steadily throughout the period, as did the strength of the German night fighter force. Berlin was not wrecked end to end, nor did the attack cost Germany the war. Actual British losses were below Harris’s estimate, though the rate of loss was rising steadily above it. Mass attacks were brought for the time being to a dead halt. The RAF was diverted to bombing targets more directly related to Roundup, the coming invasion of Europe. A revived Eighth US Air Force, gready reinforced in number and provided with P51 long-range Mustang fighter escorts, took up the bombing of selective targets, the “panacea policy” Harris had always rejected. On 24 February, 1944, 266 US and 734 RAF bombers attacked Schweinfurt and avenged the defeat of the previous year.

Yet all the time Harris had a faster, more accurate weapon to his hand in the Mosquito, which could outpace the German fighters, carry a surprisingly heavy bomb load and whose losses were running at 0.4 per cent. But the Mosquito project never fitted the Air Ministry’s shibboleths. Like Fighter Command, its success came despite rather than because of the RAF Establishment, whose obsession with a doctrine they lacked the technology to implement destroyed so much yet failed to achieve its objective.

Locking Up US Japs

They weren’t called concentration camps, but War Relocation Centers—two in California, eight spread across the desert areas of the south-west. Their neat rows of long wooden huts were surrounded with barbed wire, and guarded by floodlights and watchtowers with machine-guns. Their 110,000 occupants—men, women and children—were chosen only by their race, rounded up by the army and packed into trains with no more possessions than they could carry. These were the Japanese Americans, some 79,000 of them, the second generation—as their parents called them, the Nisei.

The Japanese-Americans were one of the United States’ smaller minorities but, unlike the Germans and Italians, they were visible. More dangerously, they were also financially successful. They had started to come to California at the end of the nineteenth century, many of them hired as indentured labourers. By 1920, they had taken plots of barren land and built a multi-million-dollar farming industry, growing fruit and vegetables for California’s urban sprawls. Californians ate better, but it didn’t make them like the Japanese who, when they arrived in California, found laws that made them ineligible to own land or become citizens. So they rented land for their farms, and waited for the Nisei to grow up. They, at least, would be real Americans. Then, in 1941, came Pearl Harbour.

A certain amount of popular hysteria against the Japanese was understandable, but never happened. Nor did the security forces panic. The FBI smoothly detained some 2000 whose loyalty was suspect. The rest, it concluded, were overwhelmingly loyal.

But, when California’s business community speaks, it expects newspapers and politicians to listen. Led by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, it demanded internment. Austin Anson, secretary of a farmers’ organisation said:

We are charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do!

California’s Attorney-General was Earl Warren, later to become America’s most controversially liberal Chief Justice. There were, he said, ways of testing the loyalty of Caucasians, but the Japanese were another matter. Law enforcement officers, he added, believed the Nisei were more dangerous than their Japanese-born parents.

Newspapers suddenly bristled with reports of lurid plots—the Japanese had planted tomato fields to point like arrows at military targets. The syndicated columnists moved in:

• Damon Runyon talked of “enemy agents among the large alien Japanese population”, and revealed the FBI had found a radio transmitter. They hadn’t.
• Drew Pearson unearthed a ring of 50 saboteurs in the Los Angeles Bureau of Water and Power.
• “To hell with habeas corpus”, urged Westbrook Pegler.
• Even Walter Lippman argued that the fact there had been no sabotage was “a sign that the blow is well-organised and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect”.

Milton Eisenhower, the General’s brother, was put in charge of “resettlement”. Everywhere signs read:

New Management White Americans

Most of the Nisei lost everything. A post war government estimate was that internment cost them $400 million. They later received $38 million in compensation. Within a year, Roosevelt was trying to undo the damage proclaiming in February 1943:

Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.

Japanese-Americans who signed loyalty oaths were allowed out of the camps to help the war effort. Some 6000 served as interpreters and intelligence agents in the Pacific, thousands more in North America and Italy. A minority of the Nisei became embittered and violently pro-Japanese, renouncing their US citizenship. Most later asked for it back. There were hunger strikes and riots in several camps, Tule Lake, California, was sealed by tanks and put under martial law for three months.

After the war the Nisei scattered, many to jobs in the cities of the north, some to the lost or ruined orchards, market-gardens and oysterbeds of California, to build again. In December 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that internment had not been unconstitutional, but Mr Justice Jackson and others dissented:

The Court for all time, has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon…

In 1968, a US government spokesman confirmed that America’s concentration camps had not been destroyed or allowed to decay. They were still there!

Churchill Starts the Vietnamese War

When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, they left a power vacuum in Vietnam. Since September 1940, they had been the masters of the French colony. The only resistance they had met was from the Vietminh, the nationalist force led by Ho Chi Minh—trained and equipped, ironically, by the USA.

When the Japanese collapsed, and with the French forces either incarcerated or driven into China, the Vietnamese thought their time had come. The National Liberation Committee, under Ho Chi Minh, took power in Hanoi and the Vietminh Provisional Executive Committee for South Vietnam was set up in Saigon.

The “August Revolution” had been accomplished. A week later, on 2 September, Ho Chi Minh’s Government issued their Declaration of Independence, which ended on the distrusting note:

We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Teheran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self determination and the equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam…

But the high moral tone of Allied statements about freedom and independence were for the record only, for Vietnam. So far as Winston Churchill was concerned, the war in the Far East was being fought to re-establish the Imperial status quo. And he took it upon himself to look after the interests of the other Imperial powers there, France and the Netherlands.

President Roosevelt, on the other hand, detested the Imperial systems. Time after time he tried to persuade Churchill to give guarantees of colonial emancipation—and time after time he failed. Roosevelt’s plan was to put French and Dutch possessions under the “trusteeship” of the UN, to prepare their people for independence. Stalin was happy with it, but ChurchiIl loathed it.

By late 1944, there was steady inter-command wrangling between the American General Wedemeyer, Commanding the China Theatre, and Mountbatten, who was running the South East Asia Command. The RAF had been flying sorties over the area, usually in support of clandestine French and British forces, throughout 1945. Wedemeyer suspected that the British would propose the extension of South East Asia to include all former British, French and Dutch colonial possessions. He was right. Shortly before the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff asked that SEAC’s boundaries be extended. And when at Potsdam the Combined Chiefs eventually arrived at a compromise, Indo-China was split at the 16th Parallel—the north under Wedemeyer, the south under Mountbatten.

When this decision was taken at Potsdam it was fully expected that it would involve an invasion followed by a protracted campaign agaisnt the Japanese forces. But the sudden end to the war transformed the situation completely. The confrontation, when it came, was not between British and Japanese, but between the British and Ho Chi Minh’s nationalists.

On 13 August, 1945, Mountbatten was told to secure Japanese Headquarters, round up and disarm the Japanese prior to their repatriation, and release and ship home Allied POWs and internees. He was to occupy no more of the country than necessary, and was to get out as soon as possible. The organisation established to handle the job was SACSEA Commission No 1 under Major-General Douglas Gracey.

The British force earmarked for the job in South Vietnam was General Gracey’s own 20th Indian Division, reinforced by extra battalions of Gurkhas. At the end of August the advance units of the Commission—mostly medical teams—began arriving in Saigon. They were cordially greeted by the Committee of the South and given all the help they needed. When Gracey himself arrived on 13 September, crowds lined the route from the airport waving Vietrninh and Allied flags, and slogans saying “Welcome to the Allies… But we have no room for the French”.

For the first few days of Gracey’s regime, Saigon was quiet enough. Most of the essential services were operating, for apart from failing to cope with a few food shortages and minor criminal activity, the Vietminh were not doing a bad job. During the day at least, French civilians were safe enough.

But despite strenuous efforts by the Committee to assist the SACSEA Commission, Gracey made it quite clear that he would have nothing to do with them. “I was welcomed on arrival by the Vietminh”, he later said, “and I promptly kicked them out”. As a protest against the British attitude, the Vietminh called a series of strikes and closed down Saigon market. Two days later Gracey responded by closing down the Vietnamese Press. And then, on 21 September, 1945, he issued a proclamation which was virtually a declaration of Martial Law throughout South Vietnam. In it, he warned…

…all wrongdoers, especially looters and saboteurs of public and private property, and those also carrying out similar criminal activities, that they will be summarily shot.

Not only the Vietminh were alarmed, Mountbatten himself was concerned, and warned Gracey to watch his step. But if the Proclamation of Martial Law was a mistake, Gracey’s next move was a disaster. On the night of Saturday, 22 September, 1945, the British took over Saigon jail, disarmed the Vietnamese and released the French colonial troops who had been incarcerated by the Japanese.

These rough French colons, under de Gaulle’s representative, Cedille, promptly assembled a small armed force. In a fast and brutal coup d’ etat they ousted the Committee from Saigon Town Hall, arrested everybody they could find and ran up the Tricolour. Tom Driberg (later a UK MP), who was reporting the situation for Reynolds News, was appalled by the behaviour of the French. He described “disgraceful scenes of vengeance”, and even the official report of the British Commission deplored the whole affair. By then, the damage was done. The moderate line which the Vietminh had all along tried to enforce was now discredited. The British had come simply to restore the French.

Almost immediately the fighting began. The first attacks came in Saigon itself when the nationalists tried to storm the power station and take the radio station. They were easily repulsed by the Gurkhas. In that engagement only two Vietnamese were killed, but in a sweep through the north of the city the British killed 28 and arrested 34. Next day the fighting intensified, and units of Vietnamese were reported to be infiltrating to the centre of the city.

For the next two or three days mortars, 25-pounders and heavy machine guns were freely used by the British in the street fighting, and Vietnamese casualties were heavy from the outset. In one clash with 80 Brigade in the south of the city, 60 Vietnamese were killed. By now Mountbatten was thoroughly alarmed. He called Gracey and Cedille to Singapore on the 28th, and told them that the fighting must stop before the British got bogged down in a war which was none of their business. When Gracey returned, he managed to fix up a truce and a meeting with the Vietminh on l October.

It was to little avail. Despite their efforts, the Vietminh had lost control of the other nationalist groups, the truce was broken time after time and at a meeting in Rangoon on 9 October, when the news came through that more British troops had been killed, Mountbatten authorised Gracey to take “strong I action”. In a series of fast attacks, the British extended their perimeter around Saigon and began patrolling deep into the Mekong Delta and the countryside to the north of Saigon.

Then in the middle of October the Vietnamese launched their most desperate bid to oust the British. On two nights running there were frenzied assaults on the docks, the airport, and on key installations throughout the city. In places the British military were taken aback at the desperation of the onslaught. The 32 Brigade defending Cholon wrote that their perimeter was attacked by “400 men armed with rifles, spears, bows and poisoned arrows, and even a mild type of teargas”.

But fanaticism and courage were not enough against the overwhelming firepower and experience of the British troops. The Vietnamese attack soon ran out of steam, and steadily they were pushed out of the city and into the countryside. The war was not over. It had taken another form. From then on the conflict became a smaller version of the kind of confrontation that became familiar in Vietnam in the murderous years after. The street battles of September and October gave way to a brutal business of ambushes, small scale guerrilla attacks and terrorism. To this new guerrilla war the British Command responded with draconian measures. The British soldiers were told:

We may find it difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Always use the maximum force available to ensure wiping out any hostiles we may meet. If one uses too much, no harm is done…

Gradually the countryside was being pacified—or terrorised—into submission. By the beginning of December 1945, the 4/2 Gurkhas felt relaxed enough to throw a party. Colonel Kitson wrote:

About 100 guests turned up. We thought it a great success, marred only by the fact that two Frenchmen were murdered almost within sight of our house an hour I before the party started, and some of us had to go out and clean up the mess.

Evidence of British ruthlessness is hard to refute. At the end of December, 100 Brigade’s patch to the north of Saigon was becoming troublesome again and Intelligence reported a big build-up of Nationalists. The British units were directed not to be over-scrupulous. Brigadier Rodham told his soldiers:

The difficulty, is to select him [the enemy], since immediately he has made his shot, or thrown his grenade, he pretends to be friendly. It is therefore perfectly legitimate to look upon all locals anywhere near where a shot has been fired as enemies, and treacherous ones at that, and treat them accordingly.

It was that kind of war, and one extraordinary aspect of it was the use the British made of their former enemies, the Japanese. When the advance units of the 1/1 Gurkhas deplaned at Saigon they were shocked to find:

Fully armed Japanese guards and patrols had to be allowed to carry on as willing and well-disciplined “allies” outrageous as this seemed to all ranks at the time.

For although the British had come to disarm them—and had, in fact. begun to do so—the moment the trouble began the Japanese troops were promptly enlisted on the side of the British. Gradually, as the Japanese began to take the brunt of the casualties, British outrage gave way to relief, followed by admiration. The chronicler of the 4/10 Gurkhas wrote:

The Japanese were freely used in all these operations, and they did their job with their characteristic efficiency.

He added gratefully:

a satisfactory result of their use was to reduce the casualties among our own troops.

In fact, during the fighting in late October-November 1945, Japanese casualties were more than the British, Indian and French combined, and local feeling against them was so high that any Vietnamese even selling them food was under threat. In contrast to this hatred, friendship between the British and Japanese became so warm that when the Frontier Force Regiment were shipped ou from Cap St Jacques, in March 1946, there were touching scenes of farewell as “many Japanese senior officer and men lined the route to say goodbye to the Battalion”.

By the turn of the year it was almost all over as far as the Britisl were concerned. General Leclerc’s French forces had been steadily building up ever since October and they were now in sufficient strength to pacify the south on their own. Gracey left the country, his job done.

The official figure for the number of Vietnamese killed during the occupation was 2700. The real figure is certain to have been much higher, and even that amount must pale into insignificance beside the mass slaughter of French, American, Australian, New Zealand and Vietnamese combatants and civiliansin the 27 years of war that followed Britain’s destruction of Vietnam’s first modern attempt to control her own destiny.

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