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

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Said Sir Edward, [I]f the German fleet came down the English Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside [cheers broke out in the House] and see the thing going on practically in sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on dispassionately, doing nothing!55 Grey’s address carried the House and prepared the nation for the ultimatum that would bring a declaration of war on August 4. When he returned to his office, Grey received U.S. ambassador Walter Hines Page. Tears in his eyes, he told Page, “Thus, the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel like a man who wasted his life.”56 That evening Grey stood with a friend looking out at St. James Park as the lamps were being lit. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” said Grey. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Had the Austrians not sought to exploit the assassination of Ferdinand to crush Serbia, they would have taken Serbia’s acceptance of nine of their ten demands as vindication. Had Czar Nicholas II been more forceful in rescinding his order for full mobilization, Germany would not have mobilized, and the Schlieffen Plan would not have begun automatically to unfold. Had the Kaiser and Bethmann realized the gravity of the crisis, just days earlier, they might have seized on Grey’s proposal to reconvene the six-power conference that resolved the 1913 Balkan crisis. The same six ambassadors were all in London, including Germany’s Prince Lichnowsky, an Anglophile desperate to avoid war with Britain. Had Grey himself conveyed to Lichnowsky, more forcefully and “just a few days earlier,” that Britain would likely be drawn into a European war, writes one historian, “Berlin almost certainly would have changed its position more quickly and firmly. Austria might then have deferred its declaration of war, and Russia would have had little reason to mobilize.”70 The Great War might have been averted.

In his memoirs, Grey, too, does not give as a casus belli any imperiled vital British interest, but regards it as a matter of national honor: [Had we not come in] we should have been isolated; we should have had no friend in the world; no one would have hoped or feared anything from us, or thought our friendship worth having. We should have been discredited … held to have played an inglorious and ignoble part … We should have been hated.77 Lord Grey is saying here that Britain had to enter the war because the character and credibility of the British nation were at issue. Allies of the empire all over the world, who relied on British commitments, were watching. Had Britain not gone to war, had she stood aside as France was crushed, who would then trust Britain to stand by them? What Grey was saying is that the empire was held together by a belief that, in any crisis, the British army and Royal Navy would be there. That belief, critical to maintaining the empire, could not survive a British neutrality as Belgium and France were being assaulted, invaded, and overrun.

Since their triumph in 1906, the Liberals had seen their electoral support wither away. By 1914, Herbert Asquith’s government was on the verge of collapse. Given the failure of their foreign policy to avert a European war, he and his Cabinet colleagues ought to have resigned. But they dreaded the return to Opposition. More, they dreaded the return of the Conservatives to power. They went to war partly to keep the Tories out.

Britain resented the rise of Germany and feared that a defeat of France would mean German preeminence in Europe and the eclipse of Britain as an economic and world power. During his tour in the late summer of 1919 to sell America on his Versailles Treaty, a tour that ended when he was felled by a stroke, Wilson said in St. Louis and St. Paul: “This war, in its inception, was a commercial and industrial war.… The German bankers and the German merchants and the German manufacturers did not want this war. They were making conquest of the world without it, and they knew it would spoil their plans.”

Balfour (somewhat lightly): “We are probably fools not to find a reason for declaring war on Germany before she builds too many ships and takes away our trade.” White: “You are a very high-minded man in private life. How can you possibly contemplate anything so politically immoral as provoking a war against a harmless nation which has as good a right to a navy as you have? If you wish to compete with German trade, work harder.” Balfour: “That would mean lowering our standard of living. Perhaps it would be simpler for us to have a war.” White: “I am shocked that you of all men should enunciate such principles.” Balfour (again lightly): “Is it a question of right or wrong? Maybe it is just a question of keeping our supremacy.”

For Britain, World War I was not a war of necessity but a war of choice. The Germans did not want war with Britain, nor did they seek to destroy the British Empire. They feared a two-front war against a rising Russian Empire and a France resolute upon revenge for 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Berlin would have paid a high price for British neutrality.

Once Belgium became Britain’s cause, Liberals who had opposed war only hours before enthusiastically joined the crusade. Three days after war was declared, H. G. Wells wrote in the Liberal Daily News, “Every sword drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace.… The defeat of Germany may open the way to disarmament and peace throughout the earth ….”

When Wilson took America into the war, he, too, had his Damascene moment, awakening to the truth that a European war whose origins he could not discern in December 1916, a war in which he had said both sides were fighting for the same ends, was now a “war to end wars” and “to make the world safe for democracy,” the latter “a phrase first coined by H. G. Wells in August, 1914.”90 Wilson became history’s champion of moralistic intervention. In the 1930s, others would take up the great cause and make League of Nations moralism the polestar of British policy.

[T]he war came as though King George V still possessed the undiminished prerogatives of Henry VIII. At 10:30 P.M. on 4 August 1914, the king held a privy council at Buckingham Palace which was attended by only one minister and two court officials. This council sanctioned the proclamation of a state of war from 11 P.M. That was all. The Cabinet played no part once it had resolved to defend the neutrality of Belgium.

A European war, the Kaiser believed and hoped, could still be avoided. He implored his cousin, the Czar, to rescind his order for full mobilization, as Russian mobilization meant German mobilization, and under the Schlieffen Plan, that meant immediate war on France if she did not declare neutrality. And that meant marching through Belgium, which risked war with Britain and her worldwide empire.

None of the monarchs—Nicholas II, Wilhelm II, George V, or Franz Josef—wanted war. All sensed that the great war, when it came, would imperil the institution of monarchy and prepare the ground for revolution. In the final hours, all four weighed in on the side of peace. But more resolute and harder men had taken charge of affairs.

On July 31, in the last hours before war, the Kaiser wired his cousins, Czar Nicholas II and King George V, in desperation and near despair: It is not I who bears the responsibility for the disaster which now threatens the entire civilized world. Even at this moment the decision to stave it off lies with you. No one threatens the honour and power of Russia. The friendship for you and your empire which I have borne from the deathbed of my grandfather has always been totally sacred to me … [T]he peace of Europe can still be maintained by you, if Russia decides to halt the military measures which threaten Germany and Austro-Hungary.

The British inner Cabinet, however, had persuaded itself that the Kaiser was a Prussian warmonger out to conquer not only Europe but the world. Here is Cabinet Minister Haldane: “I thought, from my study of the German General Staff, that once the German war party had got into the saddle, it would be war not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia, but for domination of the world.”108 Churchill echoed Haldane, calling the Kaiser a “continental tyrant” whose goal was nothing less than “the dominion of the world.”109 A quarter of a century later, in Great Contemporaries, Churchill would exonerate the Kaiser of plotting a war for European or world hegemony: “[H]istory should incline to the more charitable view and acquit William II of having planned and plotted the World War.”

When, a day after Britain declared war, Austria had not yet declared war on France or Russia, “Moltke told Tirpitz … that, if Austria continued to shy away, Germany—only days after declaring war—would have to sue for peace on the best terms it could get.”112 On August 6, Vienna finally declared war on Russia.

In the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great had been an ally of Pitt. During his reign, 1740–1786, “Prussia spent fewer years at war … than any other major European power.”116 In the Napoleonic wars, Prussia had been overrun and almost vanished from the map and Prussians under Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher had come to Wellington’s rescue at Waterloo. In the three wars Prussia fought between 1815 and 1914, the first was provoked by Denmark in 1864 and involved disputed duchies. The second, in 1866 with Austria, over the same duchies, was a “Teutonic” civil war of seven weeks, and a far less bloody affair than our own Civil War. On Bismarck’s advice, the King of Prussia left the Habsburg empire intact and denied himself a triumphal parade through Vienna. The third was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, declared by Napoleon III, who thought he could emulate his great ancestor and march to Berlin. What were Prussia’s territorial gains from the only wars she fought in the century after Waterloo? Two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. Is this the record of a butcher-bird nation hell-bent on world domination?

In the hours before war, Bethmann secretly suggested to Grey that, in return for British neutrality, Germany would agree not to annex any French territory and respect Holland’s neutrality. Grey, secretly committed to fight for France, dismissed the proposal as “impossible & disgraceful,” so great an act of dishonor “the good name of this country would never recover.”

German objectives, had Britain remained out, would not in fact have posed a direct threat to the Empire; the reduction of Russian power in Eastern Europe, the creation of a Central European Customs Union, and acquisition of French colonies—these were all goals that were complementary to British interests.125 Instead, Britain declared war, a war that would last fifty-one months and consume the lives of 702,000 British soldiers and 200,000 more from the Dominions, India, and Africa, with twice as many wounded or crippled.

The Germans would have become the dominant power in Europe, with the British dominant on the oceans, America dominant in the Western Hemisphere, and Britain’s ally, Japan, dominant in Asia. Before August 1914, Lenin had been living in a garret in Geneva. In 1917, as the Romanov dynasty was falling and Russia seemed on the verge of chaos, the German General Staff transported Lenin in a sealed train across Germany. Their hope was for revolutionary chaos in Russia that might force St. Petersburg to sue for peace. Had Britain not declared war, the war would not have lasted until 1917—and Lenin would likely have died unmourned in Geneva. And had the Bolsheviks still come to power in Russia, a victorious German army would have marched in and made short work of them.

The importance of Grey’s secret collusion with France is difficult to overstate. Had he been open with the Cabinet and sought to persuade them of the necessity of committing Britain to France, they would have rejected his alliance. France and Russia, knowing that they could not rely on the British to fight beside them, would have been far more disposed to compromise in the Balkan crisis of July 1914. By secretly committing Britain to war for France, Grey, Churchill, and Asquith left the Kaiser and German Chancellor in the dark, unaware a war with France meant war with the British Empire. Had he known, the Kaiser would have made his belated effort to abort a war far sooner and more successfully. Churchill concedes it in The World Crisis: “[O]ur Entente with France and the [secret] military and naval conversations that had taken place since 1906 had led us into a position where we had all the obligations of an alliance without its advantages.”

An anecdote related by British naval historian Russell Grenfell in his Unconditional Hatred has about it the ring of historical truth: British embroilment in the war of 1914–18 may be said to date from January 1906, when Britain was in the throes of a General Election. Mr. Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, had gone to the constituency of Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, to make an electioneering speech in his support. The two politicians went for a country drive together, during which Grey asked Haldane if he would initiate discussions between the British and French General staffs in preparation for the possibility of joint action in the event of a Continental war. Mr. Haldane agreed to do so. The million men who were later to be killed as a result of this rural conversation could not have been condemned to death in more haphazard a fashion.

In 1911, the Turks had sounded out Great Britain on an alliance, but Churchill, “with the arrogance of his class in that time, had replied that they had ideas above their station.”138 He warned the Turks “not to alienate Britain which ‘alone among European states … retains supremacy of the sea.’”139 Churchill’s insults would prove costly. On August 2, Germany and Turkey signed a secret alliance and in 1915 Turkish troops inflicted on British and Anzac troops at Gallipoli one of the greatest Allied defeats of the war. Churchill’s affront to the Turks was “an almost unbelievable act,” writes William Manchester, that tore down “a British bulwark and thereby set the stage for a disaster whose chief victim would be he himself.”

In January of 1915, half a year into the war, with tens of thousands of British soldiers already in their graves, including his own friends, Churchill, according to Margot Asquith’s diary account, waxed ecstatic about the war and his historic role in it: My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me (eyes glowing but with a slight anxiety lest the word “delicious” should jar on me).

Churchill was unafraid to break the rules of war. As he had been prepared to blockade Antwerp before the Germans invaded, so he brushed aside international law, mined the North Sea, and imposed upon Germany a starvation blockade that violated all previous norms of civilized warfare. In the war’s first week, Churchill had wanted to occupy Ameland, one of the Dutch Frisian Islands, though Holland was neutral. To Churchill, writes Martin Gilbert, “Dutch neutrality need be no obstacle.”148 Churchill urged a blockade of the Dardanelles while Turkey was still neutral. In December 1914, he recommended that the Royal Navy seize the Danish island of Bornholm, though Denmark, too, was neutral. Yet it had been Berlin’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality that Churchill invoked as a moral outrage to convince Lloyd George to support war on Germany and that had brought the British people around to support war.

How did the American people see the war in Europe? “On August 5 the British Navy dredged up and cut the German cables, and on August 6 there was not a single Berlin or Vienna dateline from the American press.”149 The First Lord had made certain the British would decide how the Americans viewed their war.

After the Italian rout at Caporetto and the defeat of Rumania and Russia, a million German soldiers had been released in 1918 to join their comrades on the Western Front for the last great German offensive of the war. By April, Ludendorff’s armies were back on the Marne and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was issuing his order recalling Nelson at Trafalgar: “With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each of us must fight on to the end.… Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.”3 In the end, the Americans proved decisive. By spring 1918, 300,000 doughboys were in France; by summer, 1,000,000. With Yanks moving into the front lines at 250,000 a month, German morale sank and the German lines buckled.

On October 5, 1918, Prince Max of Baden sounded out President Wilson on a peace based on the Fourteen Points he had laid out in January. Three days later, Wilson asked Prince Max if Germany would accept the points. On October 12, Prince Max gave assurances that his object in “entering into discussions would be only to agree upon practical details for the application” of the Fourteen Points to a treaty of peace.4 Wilson now began to add conditions. Safeguards must be provided to guarantee Allied “military supremacy” and a democratic and representative government must be established.5 Prince Max agreed. The Kaiser had to go. On October 23, Wilson took the German offer to the Allies. The British and French, after four years of bloodletting that had cost them together two million dead and six million wounded, balked at Wilson’s mild terms. Under a threat from Colonel House of a separate peace, Prime Minister Lloyd George went along, with one reservation. Britain could not agree to the second of Wilson’s points: freedom of the seas. The Royal Navy must be free to do whatever necessary to protect the empire. France succeeded in inserting a claim to full compensation “for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.”6 Matthias Erzberger, the leader of the Catholic Center Party who had urged fellow Germans to agree to an armistice, was given the thankless task of meeting Marshal Ferdinan...

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had sat with Castlereagh of England, Metternich of Austria, Alexander I of Russia, and Frederick William III of Prussia, the coalition that had destroyed Napoleon’s empire, to create a new structure of peace. At Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Germans and Russians had negotiated the terms. But though Germany’s fate was to be decided, no German had been invited, for the Allies had come to Paris to punish them as the guilty nation responsible for destroying the peace.

When German representatives were summoned to Paris to receive the terms of the Allies, they were stunned at the amputations to be forced upon them. Eupen and Malmédy were to be taken from Germany and given to Belgium. Alsace and Lorraine were to be reannexed by France. Clemenceau wanted to annex the Saar but Wilson balked. The Saar was placed under the League of Nations—de facto French control—and its coal mines given to France. The 650,000 Germans of the Saar were granted the right, in fifteen years, to vote on whether they wished to return to Germany. Should they so decide, Germany must buy her mines back. In Schleswig, a plebiscite was to be held to divide the land with Denmark. The East Prussian port of Memel was seized by Lithuania.

The Hanseatic League port city of Danzig, German for centuries, was declared a Free City and placed under League of Nations administration and Polish control. East Prussia was separated from Germany by a “Polish Corridor” that put a million Germans under Warsaw’s rule. Versailles stripped from Germany one-tenth of her people and one-eighth of her territory. Germany’s overseas empire, the third largest on Earth, was wholly confiscated. All private property of German citizens in German colonies was declared forfeit. Japan was awarded the German concession in Shantung and all German islands north of the Equator. The German islands south of the Equator went to New Zealand and Australia. Germany’s African colonies were divided among South Africa, Britain, and France. Germany’s rivers were internationalized and she was forced to open her home market to Allied imports, but denied equal access to Allied markets. Territories cut away, colonies gone, Germany was to have her limbs broken so she could never fight again. Germany was forbidden ever again to build armored cars, tanks, heavy artillery, submarines, or an air force. The High Seas Fleet was seized as war booty, as was the German merchant fleet. Her navy was to consist of six small battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo boats. The General Staff was abolished and the army restricted to one hundred thousand men.

Keynes, who was with the British delegation, would return home to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the savage book charging the Allied leaders with having crafted a vindictive peace that must, by crushing Germany with debt, set the stage for a new war.

In 1920, the Allies would set the final bill for reparations at thirty-two billion gold marks, an impossible sum. Under Article 231 of the treaty, the “war guilt clause,” Germany was forced to confess to and accept full responsibility for causing the war and all the damage done. Under Article 227, the Kaiser was declared a war criminal to be arrested and prosecuted.

Today, men do not appreciate what Versailles meant to the Germans, who, triumphant in the east, believed they had laid down their arms and accepted an armistice and peace in the west based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. British Labour leader Sir Roy Denman offers this analogy: These terms are difficult to bring home to British readers. But, supposing that Britain had lost the U-boat war in 1917 and Germany had imposed an equivalent peace; it could have meant British recognition that its policy of encirclement [of Germany] had caused the war; confiscation of British colonies and the British merchant fleet; Dover and Portsmouth occupied; the Royal Navy reduced to half a dozen destroyers; south-east England demilitarised; Liverpool a free port, with a corridor under German rule to Harwich; crippling reparations. No post-war British government would have accepted this indefinitely.

WHY DID THE GERMANS SIGN? Germany faced invasion and death by starvation if she refused. With her merchant ships and even Baltic fishing boats sequestered, and the blockade still in force, Germany could not feed her people. When Berlin asked permission to buy 2.5 million tons of food, the request was denied. From November 11 through the peace conference, the blockade was maintained.

U.S. warships now supported the blockade. “Once lead this people into war,” Wilson had said in 1917, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”30 America had forgotten. The blockade was responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children after the Germans laid down their weapons and surrendered their warships. Its architect and chief advocate had been the First Lord of the Admiralty. His aim, said Churchill, was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”31 On March 3, 1919, four months after Germany accepted an armistice and laid down her arms, Churchill rose exultant in the Commons to declare, “We are enforcing the blockade with rigour, and Germany is very near starvation.”

At Scapa Flow, naval base of the Grand Fleet in the Orkneys, northeast of Scotland, where the High Seas Fleet had been interned, Adm. Ludwig von Reuter, rather than surrender his warships, ordered them scuttled. With a signal from the flagship at noon on June 19, German sailors pulled the sea cocks, sending ten battleships, nine armored cruisers, eight heavy cruisers, fifty torpedo boats, and one hundred submarines to the bottom.54 As the unarmed German sailors fled in lifeboats, they were fired on by enraged British sailors.55 Not until July 12, 1919, did the Allies fully lift the starvation blockade. When Admiral von Reuter returned to Wilhelmshaven in 1920, thousands of Germans thronged the docks to hail him as “the last hero” of the High Seas Fleet. The Germans felt utterly betrayed—and blamed America. “President Wilson is a hypocrite and the Versailles Treaty is the vilest crime in history,” said the social democrat Scheidemann, who had brought down his government rather than sign.

From the hour of signature, the Germans never felt bound. Said Vorwarts, the unofficial voice of Berlin, “We must never forget it is only a scrap of paper. Treaties based on violence can keep their validity only so long as force exists. Do not lose hope. The resurrection day comes.”

Fourth, the Czechs knew what they wanted and were resolute and ruthless in taking it. As Hungary and Austria were reeling in defeat in 1918, Czech troops moved into Slovakia. They then seized the Polish enclave of Teschen, “whose coal heated the foyers and powered the industry of Central Europe from Krakow to Vienna,” and occupied German Bohemia, which would come to be known as the Sudetenland.70 Masaryk told Parliament, “The Germans will have to be satisfied with self-determination of the second class ….”71 Clemenceau supported the Czech seizures. By the time Masaryk, Beneš, and the Allies were finished, they had created in the new Czechoslovakia the tenth most industrialized nation on earth, having stripped Austria and Hungary of 70 to 80 percent of their industry, from china and glass factories to sugar processors … to the breweries of Pilzen and the Skoda works producing world-class armaments, locomotives, autos, and machinery. The wealth these companies generated would make Czechoslovakia coveted by Germany and envied by its other, less amply endowed neighbors.

By the Treaty of Trianon, signed June 4, 1920, Hungary was mutilated, the kingdom reduced from an imperial domain of 125,000 square miles to a landlocked nation of 36,000. Transylvania and the two million Hungarians residing there went to Rumania as a reward for joining the Allies. Slovakia, which a predominantly Catholic Hungary had ruled for centuries, was handed over to the Czechs. Other Hungarian lands went to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. A slice of Hungary was even ceded to Austria.

Hungarians regarded the imposed peace of Trianon as a national crucifixion, the greatest national disaster since the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, which led to a century and a half of Ottoman occupation.

The winners at Paris were the Czechs, Rumanians, and Serbs. The losers were the Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Russians. The Italians felt cheated of what they had been promised in the Treaty of London. The Poles felt they had been denied Teschen because of favoritism toward the Czechs. Thus was Europe divided between satiated powers, and revisionist powers determined to retrieve the lands and peoples that had been taken from them. With the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon, and Neuilly, the Allies at Paris had made a dog’s breakfast of Europe. For America, they had stripped the Great War of any morality. When Wilson came home with a peace that denied the defeated their right of self-determination, made a mockery of his Fourteen Points, honored the secret treaties he denounced, and enlarged the British, French, Italian, and Japanese empires by a million square miles and tens of millions of subjects, Americans concluded that their 116,000 sons died for nothing.

Lloyd George sensed the tragedy the Allies were setting in train. Perhaps with Burke in mind—“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom”—he retired to Fontainebleau on the last weekend of March and wrote one of the more prophetic documents of the century: You may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police force and her navy to that of a fifth rate power; all the same, in the end if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919 she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors.… Injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven …. I am, therefore strongly averse to transferring more Germans from German rule to the rule of some other nation than can possibly be helped. I cannot conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land.

The treaty writers of Versailles wrote the last act of the Great War and the first act of the resurrection of Germany and the war of retribution. Even in this hour men saw what was coming: Lloyd George in his Fontainebleau memorandum; Keynes as he scribbled notes for his Economic Consequences of the Peace; Foch (“This is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years”); and Smuts (“This Treaty breathes a poisonous spirit of revenge, which may yet scorch the fair face—not of a corner of France but of Europe).”

Versailles had created not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace. Wedged between a brooding Bolshevik Russia and a humiliated Germany were six new nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The last two held five million Germans captive. Against each of the six, Russia or Germany held a grievance. Yet none could defend its independence against a resurrected Germany or a revived Russia. Should Russia and Germany unite, no force on Earth could save the six.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE CAME out of Paris the great beneficiary of the Great War. The Hohenzollern, Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires had crashed in ruins. The challenge of a Wilhelmine Germany that had surpassed British production by 1914 was history. Germany was no longer a great power. The High Seas Fleet, the greatest threat to the Royal Navy since Trafalgar, had committed suicide at Scapa Flow. Britain had taken over Germany’s Atlantic cables and most of her merchant fleet to compensate for the loss of 40 percent of her own to U-boats. Germany’s islands in the South Pacific had been mandated to Australia and New Zealand. German South-West Africa had gone to South Africa. German East Africa (Tanganyika) had become a British mandate. The Cameroons and Togoland were divided between Britain and France. Mesopotamia and Palestine, taken from the Turks, had gone to Great Britain. Out of the war fought to make the world safe for democracy, the British Empire had added 950,000 square miles and millions of subjects.

BRITISH GAINS, HOWEVER, had not come without costs. The war had proven the disaster Norman Angell had predicted in his 1909 The Great Illusion. The total number of fatalities for the British empire as a whole was 921,000: the originator of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Sir Fabian Ware, calculated that if the dead were to march abreast down Whitehall the parade past the Cenotaph would last three and a half days.93 The highest casualty rate had been among young British officers, striking home with all the leaders of Britain’s great parties. The Liberals’ Asquith, Labour’s Arthur Henderson, and the Irish Nationalists’ John Redmond had each lost a son. The Unionists’ Bonar Law had lost two. British debt was fourteen times what it had been in 1914. While it appeared to the world that the British Empire had made out wonderfully well, Britain had sustained losses, tangible and intangible, from which she would never recover.

Wilson’s sermons on “self-determination” and Lloyd George’s hymns to the “rights of small nations” had been heard beyond the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. The genie of nationalism was out of the bottle. Balfour had promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. To defeat the Turks, T. E. Lawrence had stirred up the smoldering embers of Arab nationalism. Not a day passed that some popular leader did not arrive in the lobby of Wilson’s hotel to plead for independence for a province or colony he had never heard of. At Paris, British diplomat Harold Nicolson spoke of “that sense of a riot in a parrot house.”96 A “chastened Wilson” returned to tell Congress: “When I gave utterance to those words [that “all nations had a right to self-determination”] I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.”

While Germany had been diminished, a more formidable rival had arisen. World financial leadership had passed to a United States that had profited from selling to the Allies while avoiding heavy combat until the summer of 1918. America had shown herself to be a mighty military power, perhaps the greatest. From three hundred thousand men in arms in 1917, she had raised an army of 4 million and transported two million soldiers to France, where they had been decisive in the final victory. Britain had ceased building warships in 1918. America had just begun. By 1921, the United States had become the first nation in a century to achieve naval parity with Great Britain. And an epidemic of Anglophobia had broken out in America over the belief that the British Empire had gorged itself in a war where 116,000 Americans had made the supreme sacrifice to make the world safe for democracy.

France and Britain got the peace they had wanted. Twenty years later, they would get the war they had invited. And the next time Britain rang for help, America would take her time answering the call. The Yanks would not be “coming over” until after France had been overrun and Britain thrown off the continent at Dunkirk. Americans’ bitterness over the belief they had been played for fools was something the British never understood. I yet recall hearing, as a child in the 1940s, of how the British had cut the cables, how the Lusitania had been carrying contraband, how the tales of German atrocities in Belgium had been lies, how the British had sent “Black and Tans” to shoot down Irish patriots, how we had been deceived by “lying British propaganda” into sending our boys into a war “to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

What alarmed Churchill was the prospect of civil war in Germany, leading to a dictatorship of Right or Left. Communist coups had briefly succeeded in Budapest and Bavaria, and an attempt had been made to seize power in Berlin. All had been brutally suppressed by German Freikorps. There was fear that a man of the right like Gen. Erich Ludendorff might sweep aside the democratic regime that had arisen on the Kaiser’s abdication but been discredited in many German eyes by having submitted to the Allied diktat at Versailles. In March 1920, the Kapp putsch, a rightist attempt to seize power in Berlin, was blocked only by a general strike called by the Social Democrats. Churchill had perceived the real threat: Germany was now so prostrate she could no longer fulfill her ancient duty—to keep the Russians out of Europe.