Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

Copyright © 2008 by Patrick J. Buchanan

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938–

Churchill, Hitler, and the unnecessary war: how Britain lost its empire and the West lost the world/Patrick J. Buchanan.—1st ed.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. World War, 1939–1945—Causes. 2. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1936–1945. 3. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874–1965. 4. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945. I. Title.

D742.G7B83 2008

940.53'11—dc22

2007048445

MAPS BY JEFFREY L. WARD

Ebook ISBN: 9780307409560

v3.0_r7

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

EPIGRAPH

PREFACE: What Happened to Us?

INTRODUCTION: The Great Civil War of the West

1. The End of Splendid Isolation

2. Last Summer of Yesterday

3. A Poisonous Spirit of Revenge

4. A Lot of Silly Little Cruisers

5. 1935: Collapse of the Stresa Front

6. 1936: The Rhineland

7. 1938: Anschluss

8. Munich

9. Fatal Blunder

10. April Fools

11. An Unnecessary War

12. Gruesome Harvest

13. Hitler’s Ambitions

14. Man of the Century

15. America Inherits the Empire

Photo Insert

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I HAVE A STRONG belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country … believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute. That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us … but there is a more serious danger, that is lest we overtax our strength. However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go. It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourself to pass beyond it.¹

—LORD SALISBURY, 1897

The Queen’s Speech

[A] EUROPEAN WAR can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples are more terrible than those of kings.²

—WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1901

Speech to Parliament

PREFACE

What Happened to Us?

AND IT CAME to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him.

—GENESIS, 4:8

A LL ABOUT US we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.

In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell. All the empires that ruled the world have vanished. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth.

Having lost the will to rule, Western man seems to be losing the will to live as a unique civilization as he feverishly indulges in La Dolce Vita, with a yawning indifference as to who might inherit the Earth he once ruled.

What happened to us? What happened to our world?

When the twentieth century opened, the West was everywhere supreme. For four hundred years, explorers, missionaries, conquerors, and colonizers departed Europe for the four corners of the Earth to erect empires that were to bring the blessings and benefits of Western civilization to all mankind. In Rudyard Kipling’s lines, it was the special duty of Anglo-Saxon peoples to fight The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease. These empires were the creations of a self-confident race of men.

Whatever became of those men?

Somewhere in the last century, Western man suffered a catastrophic loss of faith—in himself, in his civilization, and in the faith that gave it birth.

That Christianity is dying in the West, being displaced by a militant secularism, seems undeniable, though the reasons remain in dispute. But there is no dispute about the physical wounds that may yet prove mortal. These were World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years’ War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West. Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misruled accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting.

A quarter century ago, Charles L. Mee, Jr., began his End of Order: Versailles 1919 by describing the magnitude of what was first called the Great War: World War I had been a tragedy on a dreadful scale. Sixty-five million men were mobilized—more by many millions than had ever been brought to war before—to fight a war, they had been told, of justice and honor, of national pride and of great ideals, to wage a war that would end all war, to establish an entirely new order of peace and equity in the world.¹

Mee then detailed the butcher’s bill.

By November 11, 1918, when the armistice that marked the end of the war was signed, eight million soldiers lay dead, twenty million more were wounded, diseased, mutilated, or spitting blood from gas attacks. Twenty-two million civilians had been killed or wounded, and the survivors were living in villages blasted to splinters and rubble, on farms churned in mud, their cattle dead.

In Belgrade, Berlin and Petrograd, the survivors fought among themselves—fourteen wars, great or small, civil or revolutionary, flickered or raged about the world.²

The casualty rate in the Great War was ten times what it had been in America’s Civil War, the bloodiest war of Western man in the nineteenth century. And at the end of the Great War an influenza epidemic, spread by returning soldiers, carried off fourteen million more Europeans and Americans.³ In one month of 1914—the most terrible August in the history of the world, said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—French casualties … are believed to have totaled two hundred sixty thousand of whom seventy-five thousand were killed (twenty-seven thousand on August 22 alone).⁴ France would fight on and in the fifty-one months the war would last would lose 1.3 million sons, with twice that number wounded, maimed, crippled. The quadrant of the country northeast of Paris resembled a moonscape.

Equivalent losses in America today would be eight million dead, sixteen million wounded, and all the land east of the Ohio and north of the Potomac unrecognizable. Yet the death and destruction of the Great War would be dwarfed by the genocides of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and what the war of 1939–1945 would do to Italy, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic and Balkan nations, Russia, and all of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals.

The questions this book addresses are huge but simple: Were these two world wars, the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves, necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West?

INTRODUCTION

The Great Civil War of the West

[W]AR IS THE creation of individuals not of nations.¹

—SIR PATRICK HASTINGS, 1948

British barrister and writer

O F ALL THE EMPIRES of modernity, the British was the greatest—indeed, the greatest since Rome—encompassing a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people. Out of her womb came America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, five of the finest, freest lands on Earth. Out of her came Hong Kong and Singapore, where the Chinese first came to know freedom. Were it not for Britain, India would not be the world’s largest democracy, or South Africa that continent’s most advanced nation. When the British arrived in Africa, they found primitive tribal societies. When they departed, they left behind roads, railways, telephone and telegraph systems, farms, factories, fisheries, mines, trained police, and a civil service.

No European people fondly remembers the Soviet Empire. Few Asians recall the Empire of Japan except with hatred. But all over the world, as their traditions, customs, and uniforms testify, men manifest their pride that they once belonged to the empire upon whose flag the sun never set. America owes a special debt to Britain, for our laws, language and literature, and the idea of representative government. [T]he transplanted culture of Britain in America, wrote Dr. Russell Kirk, has been one of humankind’s more successful experiments.²

As with most empires, the sins of the British are scarlet—the opium wars in China, the cold indifference to Irish suffering in the Potato Famine. But Britain’s sins must be weighed in the balance. It was the British who were first to take up arms against slavery, who, at Trafalgar and Waterloo, were decisive in defeating the Napoleonic dictatorship and empire, who, in their finest hour, held on until Hitler was brought down.

Like all empires, the British Empire was one day fated to fall. Once Jefferson’s idea, All men are created equal, was wedded to President Wilson’s idea, that all peoples are entitled to self-determination, the fate of the Western empires was sealed. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, saw it coming: The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized.… What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!³

Twenty-five years after Versailles, Walter Lippmann would denounce Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination as barbarous and reactionary.

Self-determination, which has nothing to do with self-government but has become confused with it, is barbarous and reactionary: by sanctioning secession, it invites majorities and minorities to be intransigent and irreconcilable. It is stipulated in the principle of self-determination that they need not be compatriots because they will soon be aliens. There is no end to this atomization of human society. Within the minorities who have seceded there will tend to appear other minorities who in their turn will wish to secede.⁴

WILSON’S DOCTRINE OF SELF-DETERMINATION destroyed the Western empires.

But while the fall of the British Empire was inevitable, the suddenness and sweep of the collapse were not. There is a world of difference between watching a great lady grandly descend a staircase and seeing a slattern being kicked down a flight of stairs.

Consider: When Winston Churchill entered the inner cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, every nation recognized Britain’s primacy. None could match her in the strategic weapons of the new century: the great battle fleets and dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy. Mark Twain jested that the English were the only modern race mentioned in the Bible, when the Lord said, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.⁵

Yet by Churchill’s death in 1965, little remained. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.⁶ At century’s end, Labour Party elder statesman Sir Roy Denman looked back at the decline and fall of the nation and empire into which he had been born:

At the beginning [of the twentieth century], Britain, as the centre of the biggest empire in the world, was at the zenith of her power and glory; Britain approaches the end as a minor power, bereft of her empire.… [O]n the world stage, Britain will end the century little more important than Switzerland. It will have been the biggest secular decline in power and influence since seventeenth-century Spain.⁷

WHAT HAPPENED TO GREAT BRITAIN? What happened to the Empire? What happened to the West and our world—is what this book is about.

For it was the war begun in 1914 and the Paris peace conference of 1919 that destroyed the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires and ushered onto the world stage Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. And it was the war begun in September 1939 that led to the slaughter of the Jews and tens of millions of Christians, the devastation of Europe, Stalinization of half the continent, the fall of China to Maoist madness, and half a century of Cold War.

Every European war is a civil war, said Napoleon. Historians will look back on 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West, where the once-Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization.

In deciphering what happened to the West, George F. Kennan, the geostrategist of the Cold War, wrote, All lines of inquiry lead back to World War I.⁸ Kennan’s belief that World War I was the original catastrophe was seconded by historian Jacques Barzun, who called the war begun in August 1914 the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction.⁹

These two world wars were fratricidal, self-inflicted wounds of a civilization seemingly hell-bent on suicide. Eight million soldiers perished in World War I, twenty million more were wounded, diseased, mutilated, or spitting blood from gas attacks. Twenty-two million civilians had been killed or wounded ….¹⁰ That war would give birth to the fanatic and murderous ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, and usher in the Second World War that would bring death to tens of millions more.

And it was Britain that turned both European wars into world wars. Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.

Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.

Why did Britain declare war on Germany, twice? As we shall see, neither the Kaiser nor Hitler sought to destroy Britain or her empire. Both admired what Britain had built. Both sought an alliance with England. The Kaiser was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Thus the crucial question: Were these two devastating wars Britain declared on Germany wars of necessity, or wars of choice?

Critics will instantly respond that Britain fought the First World War to bring down a Prussian militarism that threatened to dominate Europe and the world, that Britain declared war in 1939 to stop a fanatic Nazi dictator who would otherwise have conquered Europe and the world, enslaved mankind, massacred minorities on a mammoth scale, and brought on a new Dark Age. And thank God Britain did declare war. Were it not for Britain, we would all be speaking German now.

Yet, in his memoir, David Lloyd George, who led Britain to victory in World War I, wrote, We all blundered into the war.¹¹ In his memoirs, Churchill, who led Britain to victory in World War II, wrote:

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, The Unnecessary War. There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.¹²

WAS LLOYD GEORGE RIGHT? Was World War I the result of blunders by British statesmen? Was Churchill right? Was the Second World War that wrecked what was left of the world an unnecessary war? If so, who blundered? For these were the costliest and bloodiest wars in the history of mankind and they may have brought on the end of Western civilization.

About the justice of the causes for which Britain fought, few quarrel. And those years from 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945 produced days of glory that will forever inspire men and reflect greatly upon the British people. Generations may pass away, but men will yet talk of Passchendaele and the Somme, of Dunkirk and El Alamein. Two-thirds of a century later, men’s eyes yet mist over at the words Fighter Command, the men and boys in their Hurricanes and Spitfires who rose day after day as the knights of old in the Battle of Britain to defend their island home. And in their finest hour the British had as the king’s first minister a statesman who personified the bulldog defiance of his people and who was privileged by history to give the British lion its roar. In the victory over Nazi Germany, the place of moral honor goes to Britain and Churchill. He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle, said President Kennedy, when Churchill, like Lafayette, was made an honorary citizen of the United States.

Thus the question this book addresses is not whether the British were heroic. That is settled for all time. But were their statesmen wise? For if they were wise, how did Britain pass in one generation from being mistress of the most awesome of empires into a nation whose only hope for avoiding defeat and ruin was an America that bore no love for the empire? By 1942, Britain relied on the United States for all the necessities of national survival: the munitions to keep fighting, the ships to bring her supplies, the troops to rescue a continent from which Britain had been expelled in three weeks by the Panzers of Rommel and Guderian. Who blundered? Who failed Britain? Who lost the empire? Was it only the appeasers, the Guilty Men?

There is another reason I have written this book.

There has arisen among America’s elite a Churchill cult. Its acolytes hold that Churchill was not only a peerless war leader but a statesman of unparalleled vision whose life and legend should be the model for every statesman. To this cult, defiance anywhere of U.S. hegemony, resistance anywhere to U.S. power becomes another 1938. Every adversary is a new Hitler, every proposal to avert war another Munich. Slobodan Milosevic, a party apparatchik who had presided over the disintegration of Yugoslavia—losing Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia—becomes the Hitler of the Balkans for holding Serbia’s cradle province of Kosovo. Saddam Hussein, whose army was routed in one hundred hours in 1991 and who had not shot down a U.S. plane in forty thousand sorties, becomes an Arab Hitler about to roll up the Persian Gulf and threaten mankind with weapons of mass destruction.

This mind-set led us to launch a seventy-eight-day bombing campaign on Serbia, a nation that never attacked us, never threatened us, never wanted war with us, whose people had always befriended us. After 9/11, the Churchill cult helped to persuade an untutored president that the liberation of Iraq from Saddam would be like the liberation of Europe from Hitler. We would be greeted in Baghdad as our fathers and grandfathers had been in Paris. In the triumphant aftermath of a cake-walk war, democracy would put down roots in the Middle East as it had in Europe after the fall of Hitler, and George W. Bush would enter history as the Churchill of his generation, while the timid souls who opposed his war of liberation would be exposed as craven appeasers.

This Churchill cult gave us our present calamity. If not exposed, it will produce more wars and more disasters, and, one day, a war of the magnitude of Churchill’s wars that brought Britain and his beloved empire to ruin. For it was Winston S. Churchill who was the most bellicose champion of British entry into the European war of 1914 and the German-Polish war of 1939. There are two great myths about these wars. The first is that World War I was fought to make the world safe for democracy. The second is that World War II was the Good War, a glorious crusade to rid the world of Fascism that turned out wonderfully well.

Not for everyone. When President Bush flew to Moscow to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day, he stopped in one of the nations that was not celebrating, Latvia, and dispelled one of these myths. He told the world that while V-E Day marked the end of Fascism … it did not end oppression, that what FDR and Churchill did to Eastern and Central Europe in collusion with Stalin will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.¹³ Bush called Yalta a sellout of free nations as shameful as Munich.

This book will argue that President Bush understated his case.

For their crimes, Hitler and his collaborators, today’s metaphors for absolute evil, received the ruthless justice they deserved. But we cannot ignore the costs of Churchill’s wars, or the question: Was it truly necessary that fifty million die to bring Hitler down? For World War II was the worst evil ever to befall Christians and Jews and may prove the mortal blow that brings down our common civilization. Was it The Unnecessary War?

CHAPTER 1

The End of Splendid Isolation

[T]HE QUEEN CANNOT help feeling that our isolation is dangerous.¹

—QUEEN VICTORIA,

January 14, 1896

Isolation is much less dangerous than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.²

—LORD SALISBURY 1896

F OR AS LONG AS he had served the queen, Lord Salisbury had sought to keep Britain free of power blocs. His policy was not one of isolation from Europe … but isolation from the Europe of alliances. ³ Britannia would rule the waves but stay out of Europe’s quarrels. Said Salisbury, We are fish. ⁴

When the queen called him to form a new government for the third time in 1895, Lord Salisbury pursued his old policy of splendid isolation. But in the years since he and Disraeli had traveled to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, to create with Bismarck a new balance of power in Europe, their world had vanished.

In the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, Japan defeated China, seized Taiwan, and occupied the Liaotung Peninsula. Britain’s preeminent position in China was now history.

In the summer of 1895, London received a virtual ultimatum from secretary of state Richard Olney, demanding that Great Britain accept U.S. arbitration in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela. Lord Salisbury shredded Olney’s note like an impatient tenured professor cutting up a freshman term paper. But President Cleveland demanded that Britain accept arbitration—or face the prospect of war with the United States.

The British were stunned by American enthusiasm for a war over a patch of South American jungle, and incredulous. America deployed two battleships to Britain’s forty-four.⁵ Yet Salisbury took the threat seriously: A war with America … in the not distant future has become something more than a possibility.⁶

London was jolted anew in January 1896 when the Kaiser sent a telegram of congratulations to Boer leader Paul Kruger on his capture of the Jameson raiders, who had invaded the Transvaal in a land grab concocted by Cecil Rhodes, with the connivance of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.

These two challenges, from a jingoistic America that was now the first economic power on earth, and from his bellicose nephew in Berlin, Wilhelm II, revealed to the future Edward VII that his country was without a friend in the world and steps to end British isolation were required ….⁷

On December 18, 1897, a Russian fleet steamed into the Chinese harbor of Port Arthur, obliging British warships to vacate the area.⁸ British jingoes became apoplectic.⁹ Lord Salisbury stood down: I don’t think we carry enough guns to fight them and the French together.¹⁰

In 1898, a crisis erupted in northeast Africa. Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who had set off from Gabon in 1897 on a safari across the Sahara with six officers and 120 Senegalese, appeared at Fashoda in the southern Sudan, where he laid claim to the headwaters of the Nile. Sir Herbert Kitchener cruised upriver to instruct Marchand he was on imperial land. Faced with superior firepower, Marchand withdrew. Fashoda brought Britain and France to the brink of war. Paris backed down, but bitterness ran deep. Caught up in the Anglophobia was eight-year-old Charles de Gaulle.¹¹

In 1900, the Russian challenge reappeared. After American, British, French, German, and Japanese troops had marched to the rescue of the diplomatic legation in Peking, besieged for fifty-five days by Chinese rebels called Boxers, Russia exploited the chaos to send a 200,000-man army into Manchuria and the Czar shifted a squadron of his Baltic fleet to Port Arthur. The British position in China was now threatened by Russia and Japan.

But what awakened Lord Salisbury to the depth of British isolation was the Boer War. When it broke out in 1899, Europeans and Americans cheered British defeats. While Joe Chamberlain might speak of the British enjoying a ‘splendid isolation, surrounded and supported by our kinsfolk,’ the Boer War brought home the reality that, fully extended in their imperial role, the British needed to avoid conflict with the other great powers.¹²

Only among America’s Anglophile elite could Victoria’s nation or Salisbury’s government find support. When Bourke Cockran, a Tammany Hall Democrat, wrote President McKinley, urging him to mediate and keep America’s distance from Great Britain’s wanton acts of aggression, the letter went to Secretary of State John Hay.¹³

Hay bridled at this Celtic insolence. Mr. Cockran’s logic is especially Irish, he wrote to a friend. As long as I stay here no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England. Hay refused even to answer Bourke Cockran’s fool letter to the president.¹⁴

Hay spoke of an alliance with Britain as an unattainable dream and hoped for a smashing imperial victory in South Africa. I hope if it comes to blows that England will make quick work of Uncle Paul [Kruger].¹⁵

ENTENTE CORDIALE

SO IT WAS THAT as the nineteenth century came to an end Britain set out to court old rivals. The British first reached out to the Americans. Alone among Europe’s great powers, Britain sided with the United States in its 1898 war with Spain. London then settled the Alaska boundary dispute in America’s favor, renegotiated the fifty-year-old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and ceded to America the exclusive rights to build, operate, and fortify a canal across Panama. Then Britain withdrew her fleet from the Caribbean.

Writes British historian Correlli Barnett: The passage of the British battlefleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific would now be by courtesy of the United States, and, with America’s defeat of Spain, The Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, now American colonies, were gradually closed to British merchants by protective tariffs, for the benefit of their American rivals.¹⁶

Other historians, however, hail the British initiative to terminate a century of U.S.-British enmity as The Great Rapprochement, and Berlin-born Yale historian Hajo Holborn regards the establishment of close Anglo-American relations as probably by far the greatest achievement of British diplomacy in terms of world history.¹⁷

With America appeased, Britain turned to Asia.

With a Russian army in Manchuria menacing Korea and the Czar’s warships at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, Japan needed an ally to balance off Russia’s ally, France. Germany would not do, as Kaiser Wilhelm disliked Orientals and was endlessly warning about the Yellow Peril. As for the Americans, their Open Door policy had proven to be bluster and bluff when Russia moved into Manchuria. That left the British, whom the Japanese admired as an island people and warrior race that had created the world’s greatest empire.

On January 30, 1902, an Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed. Each nation agreed to remain neutral should the other become embroiled in an Asian war with a single power. However, should either become involved in war with two powers, each would come to the aid of the other. Confident its treaty with Britain would checkmate Russia’s ally France, Japan in 1904 launched a surprise attack on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur. An enraged Czar sent his Baltic fleet to exact retribution. After a voyage of six months from the Baltic to the North Sea, down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, the great Russian fleet was ambushed and annihilated by Admiral Heihachiro Togo in Tshushima Strait between Korea and Japan. Only one small Russian cruiser and two destroyers made it to Vladivostok. Japan lost two torpedo boats. It was a victory for Japan to rival the sinking of the Spanish Armada and the worst defeat ever inflicted on a Western power by an Asian people.

Britain had chosen well. In 1905, the Anglo-Japanese treaty was elevated into a full alliance. Britain now turned to patching up quarrels with her European rivals. Her natural allies were Germany and the Habsburg Empire, neither of whom had designs on the British Empire. Imperial Russia, Britain’s great nineteenth-century rival, was pressing down on China, India, Afghanistan, the Turkish Straits, and the Middle East. France was Britain’s ancient enemy and imperial rival in Africa and Egypt. The nightmare of the British was a second Tilsit, where Napoleon and Czar Alexander I, meeting on a barge in the Neiman in 1807, had divided a prostrate Europe and Middle East between them. Germany was the sole European bulwark against a French-Russian dominance of Europe and drive for hegemony in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—at the expense of the British Empire.

With Lord Salisbury’s blessing, Joe Chamberlain began to court Berlin. England, Germany and America should collaborate: by so doing they could check Russian expansionism, calm turbulent France and guarantee world peace, Chamberlain told future German chancellor Bernhard von Bulow.¹⁸ The Kaiser put him off. Neither he nor his advisers believed Britain could reconcile with her old nemesis France, or Russia, and must eventually come to Berlin hat-in-hand. Joe warned the Germans: Spurn Britain, and we go elsewhere.

The Kaiser let the opportunity slip and, in April 1904, learned to his astonishment that Britain and France had negotiated an entente cordiale, a cordial understanding. France yielded all claims in Egypt, and Britain agreed to support France’s preeminence in Morocco. Centuries of hostility came to an end. The quarrel over Suez was over. Fashoda was history.

The entente quickly proved its worth. After the Kaiser was persuaded to make a provocative visit to Tangier in 1905, Britain backed France at the Algeciras conference called to resolve the crisis. Germany won economic concessions in Morocco, but Berlin had solidified the Anglo-French entente. More ominous, the Tangier crisis had propelled secret talks already under way between French and British staff officers over how a British army might be ferried across the Channel to France in the event of a war with Germany.

Unknown to the Cabinet and Parliament, a tiny cabal had made a decision fateful for Britain, the empire, and the world. Under the guidance of Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, British and French officers plotted Britain’s entry into a Franco-German war from the first shot. And these secret war plans were being formulated by Liberals voted into power in public revulsion against the Boer War on a platform of Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. Writes historian Robert Massie,

[O]n January 16 [1906], without the approval of either the Prime Minister or Cabinet, secret talks between British and French staff officers began. They focussed on plans to send 100,000 British soldiers to the Continent within two weeks of an outbreak of hostilities. On January 26, when Campbell-Bannerman returned to London and was informed, he approved.¹⁹

AS CHURCHILL WROTE decades later, only Lord Rosebery read the real meaning of the Anglo-French entente. Only one voice—Rosebery’s—was raised in discord: in public ‘Far more likely to lead to War than Peace’ in private ‘Straight to War.’²⁰ While praising Rosebery’s foresight, Churchill never repudiated his own support of the entente or secret understandings: It must not be thought that I regret the decisions which were in fact taken.²¹

In August 1907, Britain entered into an Anglo-Russian convention, ending their eighty-year conflict. Czar Nicholas II accepted Britain’s dominance in southern Persia. Britain accepted Russia’s dominance in the north. Both agreed to stay out of central Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Great Game was over and the lineups completed for the great European war. In the Triple Alliance were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Opposite was the Franco-Russian alliance backed by Great Britain, which was allied to Japan. Only America among the great powers remained free of entangling alliances.

YOU HAVE A NEW WORLD

BRITAIN HAD APPEASED AMERICA, allied with Japan, and entered an entente with France and Russia, yet its German problem remained. It had arisen in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. After the French defeat at Sedan and the abdication of Napoleon III, a united Germany stretching from France to Russia and from the Baltic to the Alps had emerged as the first power in Europe. Disraeli recognized the earthshaking importance of the unification of the German states under a Prussian king.

The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of the last century.… There is not a diplomatic tradition, which has not been swept away. You have a new world.… The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.²²

BISMARCK HAD ENGINEERED the wars on Denmark, Austria, and France, but he now believed his nation had nothing to gain from war. She had hay enough for her fork.²³ Germany should not behave like a nouveau riche who has just come into money and then offended everyone by pointing to the coins in his pocket.²⁴ He crafted a series of treaties to maintain a European balance of power favorable to Germany—by keeping the Austro-Hungarian Empire allied, Russia friendly, Britain neutral, and France isolated. Bismarck opposed the building of a fleet that might alarm the British. As for an overseas empire, let Britain, France, and Russia quarrel over colonies. When a colonial adventurer pressed upon him Germany’s need to enter the scramble for Africa, Bismarck replied, Your map of Africa is very nice. But there is France, and here is Russia, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa.²⁵

As the clamor for colonies grew, however, the Iron Chancellor would succumb and Germany would join the scramble. By 1914, Berlin boasted the world’s third largest overseas empire, encompassing German East Africa (Tanganyika), South-West Africa (Namibia), Kamerun (Cameroon), and Togoland. On the China coast, the Kaiser held Shantung Peninsula. In the western Pacific, the House of Hohenzollern held German New Guinea, German Samoa, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline islands, and the Northern Solomons, of which Bougainville was the largest. However, writes Holborn,

Not for a moment were Bismarck’s colonial projects intended to constitute a revision of the fundamentals of his continental policy. Least of all were they designs to undermine British naval or colonial supremacy overseas. Bismarck was frank when he told British statesmen that Germany, by the acquisition of colonies, was giving Britain new hostages, since she could not hope to defend them in an emergency.²⁶

By 1890, Bismarck had been dismissed by the new young Kaiser, who began to make a series of blunders, the first of which was to let Bismarck’s treaty with Russia lapse. This left Russia nowhere to turn but France. By 1894, St. Petersburg had become the ally of a Paris still seething over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. France had broken free of the isolation imposed upon her by Bismarck. The Kaiser’s folly in letting the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse can hardly be overstated.

While Germany was a satiated power, so far as Europe itself was concerned, and stood to gain little from a major war on the European continent, France and Russia were expansionist.²⁷ Paris hungered for the return of Alsace. Russia sought hegemony over Bulgaria, domination of the Turkish Straits to keep foreign warships out of the Black Sea, and to pry away the Austrian share of a partitioned Poland.

More ominous, the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 stipulated that a partial mobilization by any member of the Triple Alliance—Austria, Italy, or Germany—would trigger hostilities against all three.²⁸ As George Kennan writes in The Fateful Alliance,

A partial Austrian mobilization against Serbia, for example (and one has only to recall the events of 1914 to understand the potential significance of this circumstance) could alone become the occasion for the launching of a general European war.²⁹

PUTTING THE KAISER DOWN

THOUGH BOASTFUL AND BELLIGERENT, the Kaiser had never plotted to bring down the British Empire. The eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, proud of his British blood, he had rushed to her bedside as she sank toward death and softly passed away in my arms.³⁰ He had marched in the queen’s funeral procession. The new king, Edward VII, was deeply moved. As he wrote his sister, Empress Frederick, the Kaiser’s mother who had been too ill to travel to the funeral, William’s touching and simple demeanour, up to the last, will never be forgotten by me or anyone. It was indeed a sincere pleasure for me to confer upon him the rank of Field Marshal in my Army.³¹ At the luncheon for Edward, the Kaiser rose to declare:

I believe that the two Teutonic nations will, bit by bit, learn to know each other better, and that they will stand together to help in keeping the peace of the world. We ought to form an Anglo-Germanic alliance, you to keep the seas, while we would be responsible for the land; with such an alliance not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission.³²

[B]y dint of his mother’s teaching and admiration for her family, [the Kaiser] wanted only good relations with Britain, writes Giles MacDonogh, biographer of Wilhelm II.³³ It was a British alliance for which [the Kaiser] strove all his professional life ….³⁴

Why did the Kaiser fail? Certainly, his ministers who goaded him into collisions with England with the Kruger telegram and in the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 bear much of the blame. But MacDonogh lays most of it on British statesmen and their haughty contempt of the Kaiser and Germany:

Faced by his Uncle Bertie [Edward VII], or high-handed ministers such as Lord Salisbury or Sir Edward Grey, he felt the British put him down; they treated him as a grandson or nephew and not as the German emperor. Germany was never admitted to full membership of that board of great powers. He and his country were patronised, and he took it very personally.³⁵

When the Kaiser once inquired of Lord Salisbury where he might have a colony that would not be in the way of the British Empire, the great peer replied, We don’t want you anywhere.³⁶

When Edward VII paid a visit to Kiel during the Russo-Japanese war, and the Kaiser suggested that Russia’s cause was that of Europe, and that a Japanese victory over Russia would bring the world face to face with ‘the Yellow Peril,’ Edward had laughed in his face, and for eighteen months thereafter the personal relations between uncle and nephew sank to the lowest point which they ever reached.³⁷

Yet on the death in 1910 of Edward VII, who detested the nephew he called Willy, the Kaiser again sought reconciliation with a grand gesture. He sailed to England and marched in Edward’s funeral—in the uniform of a British field marshal. As he strode behind Edward’s casket, the Kaiser’s feelings, Barbara Tuchman writes, were mixed. There was nostalgia for the great royal family to which he, too, belonged, but also

a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany’s encirclement. Edward, his mother’s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is.³⁸

As his clumsy courtship failed, the Kaiser tried to force Britain to pay heed to him and to Germany with bellicose intrusions in African affairs. But where the British chose to appease the Americans, with the Kaiser they took a different course. And beyond the enmity between Wilhelm II and Edward VII, the Kaiser had, even while Queen Victoria was alive, committed one of the great blunders in German history. He decided to challenge Britannia’s rule of the waves with a High Seas Fleet. The building of the German Fleet, writes Massie, ended the century of Splendid Isolation.³⁹

THE HIGH SEAS FLEET

SEVERAL FACTORS LED to the fateful decision. Soon after he ascended the throne, the Kaiser was mesmerized by an 1890 book by U.S. naval captain A. T. Mahan, a tall beanpole of a man, with a great bald dome rising above calm hooded eyes.⁴⁰ Mahan was more scholar than sea dog. His thesis in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History was that it had been the Royal Navy, controlling the oceanic crossroads of the world, that had ensured the defeat of Napoleon and made Great Britain the world’s preeminent power. Navalists everywhere swore by Captain Mahan. It was at Mahan’s recommendation that Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had put Admiral George Dewey in command of the Pacific Squadron of six battleships and three cruisers that steamed into Manila harbor in 1898 to sink the Spanish fleet before breakfast.

The Japanese had made The Influence of Sea Power a textbook in their naval and war colleges. But nowhere was Mahan more a prophet with honor than in Imperial Germany.⁴¹ ‘I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,’ the Kaiser wrote in 1894. ‘It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by all my captains and officers.’⁴² When France was forced to back down at Fashoda, the Kaiser commiserated, The poor French. They have not read their Mahan!⁴³

It was in 1896 that the Kaiser came to appreciate what it meant to be without a navy. After he had sent his provocative telegram to the Boer leader Kruger, congratulating him on his capture of the Jameson raiders, which had enraged the British, the Kaiser discovered he was impotent to intervene to help the Boers. Any German convoy ordered to East Africa must traverse the North Sea, the East Atlantic, and the