War and Propaganda
Secret History: The US Prepared for War with Britain
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
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 battle cruisers, 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 maneuvering 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 gold braided 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 Admiral 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.
in The Observer supplement, 1972.
