Britain's Europe by Brendan Simms

Author:Brendan Simms
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141983899
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

For this reason, Baldwin warned Parliament in July 1934, during a debate on the expansion of the RAF, that ‘since the days of the air, the old frontiers are gone.’ ‘When you think of the defence of England,’ he continued, ‘you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.’43 It was a statement which could, in fact, have been made two hundred years earlier. The emergence of air power, in other words, had not so much transformed traditional British geopolitical vulnerabilities as confirmed them.

For the moment, however, there was no enthusiasm for actually confronting Hitler. Suspicion of France, widespread since its perceived bullying of Germany in the 1920s, persisted. Cooperation with the United States was complicated by continuing tension over First World War debts.44 Moreover, many within government felt that the status quo was untenable, that Germany had a right to rearm, within limits, and that the wrongs of Versailles should be redressed. The general sense was that Hitler should be ‘appeased’ by leaving him a free hand in central Europe while standing firm against demands for the return of colonies and any threat to France or the Low Countries.45 There was a widespread hope in the first years after 1933 that Nazism could be contained, that it was ‘not for export’, and that peaceful coexistence between the west and the totalitarian powers was possible. ‘We shall never get far,’ in the work of mediation, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain told Parliament, ‘unless we can accustom ourselves to the idea that the democracies and the totalitarian states are not to be ranged against one another in two opposing blocs’. Much better, he argued, for Britain to ‘work together’ with its rivals and thereby ‘facilitate the international exchange of goods and the regulation of international relations in various ways for the good of all’.46

The challenge of Hitler had a considerable impact on British domestic politics in the 1930s. A bitterly contested by-election at Fulham in October 1933 was dominated by the question of rearmament and won by the candidate opposed to greater military expenditure.47 In the 1935 general election, both major parties were opposed – Labour strongly so – to large-scale rearmament, and the victorious Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin later notoriously admitted that any other position would have led to his defeat. At the heart of this hesitation was widespread fear of bombing, which was generally believed to cause hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilian casualties. The subject dominated Commons debates on foreign policy and rearmament in 1933–4, with the result that press, parliamentary and public interest in national security largely exhausted itself in demanding increased provision for air defence; it was expected that Hitler would be contained and in the end defeated by naval blockade. Basil Liddell Hart, the renowned military historian and commentator, spoke of a traditional British ‘indirect approach’. It had the merit of combining restraint with economy. There was hardly any

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