An Anglo-American Conflict?
A Sunday Times article by York Membery of January 17 1999 claimed that during the 1920s and 1930s the US military had a contingency plan for war against Britain. Called ‘War Plan Red’, this included the landing of an expeditionary force in Ireland, to be executed as a response to a British invasion of the United States from Canada, and the sending of US Marines into the British West Indies. American success at penetration and expansion into regions formerly dominated by Britain was seen as the likely cause of conflict between the two countries.
This is a startling story but should be taken with a pinch of salt. Its only real value is to remind us that in the 1920s and 1930s there was economic rivalry between the US and the UK, in Latin America, the Far East and even in Europe. In the Middle East the two powers were competing with each other for oil concessions. Certainly this was not a time characterised by any ‘special relationship’.
All the same, ‘War Plan Red’ is mad even by the standards of the times. The last serious risk of Anglo-American conflict disappeared in the 1920s following the Washington Naval Agreements. The British had had their own War Plan Green (I think that was the colour) to deal with the contingency of trouble between themselves and the Americans. That was scrapped at the end of the decade and anyway (like the American documents) existed on paper only. By 1933 the UK Chiefs of Staff had isolated Germany, Japan and Italy as the most dangerous threats to British national and to Imperial security.
General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley suggested that the scenario was absurd and must have been drawn up in an attempt to extract funds from the US Government. He may have a point – the US military in the 1930s was small and under-equipped, a threat to no-one except the neighbouring Latin American states. Only 1.5 per cent of the American national income went on defence; no other great power spent so little.(1) The US Navy was many sizes smaller than it was to become during the 1939-45 years, there was hardly any air force, and the army trained with cardboard tanks and wooden rifles. There was a real public determination in the USA, reflected by the politicians, that the country must not get involved in another war. In those days anyone running for office in the States on a ‘boost the arms industry’ ticket would have received short shrift from the electorate (and from economists too!). If you were a military planner in Washington in the early 30s, life would have been quiet; it was hard to see where the next enemy would come from without resorting to fantasy. As in Britain, the rise of Germany and Japan changed thinking – but slowly and in the teeth of much isolationist resistance.
I might add that the British War Plan surfaced at the PRO back in the late 1970s when it was discovered by Professor John Grenville (now retired) of the School of History at Birmingham University. Grenville was intrigued but his eagerness to follow this up was frustrated when the document was withdrawn the following day. He told me the story himself very shortly after it had all happened (I was researching a doctorate at Birmingham at the time).
The UK becomes a US intelligence target
Of course the old undercurrents of distrust did not go away after the foundation of the wartime Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. There is an interesting snippet in the July 1999 Monthly Review. It comes from the highly distinguished American Marxist scholar Paul Sweezy. Interviewed on the 50th anniversary of the Monthly Review, which he has co-edited since its foundation, Sweezy spoke a little about his wartime work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA).
Sweezy revealed that he worked from 1942-45 in London, then Paris, then Germany, on ‘research and analysis’, evaluating intelligence and British policy. He said – and this is the interesting admission –
‘…the fact that they would want somebody in OSS who was keeping track of British post-war thinking is because the biggest obstacle, as they still conceived it, to a freer trade world was the British empire….at no time did the United States lose sight of what the war was about from its own point of view’.
It wanted to come out as ‘top dog’ and ‘have a world organised according to its own interests and ideologies, a much more free trading world, one where US power would be able to flow out and operate all over the world as far as possible. First get rid of those Axis blocks, then the British Empire had to be dismantled; in those days the US still saw the UK as the no. 2 superpower.'(2)
Now a lot of this has been said before, notably by ‘revisionist’ historians such as Joyce and Gabriel Kolko.(3) But I am not aware that there are many witnesses of the OSS days, nor even subsequent commentators who have actually come clean and admitted to the existence of people in the outfit whose job was to spy on the British. It has no doubt been alleged – but this is proof. It would be good to know more.
Peace Plots
Lobster 37 contained a review by Simon Matthews of Richard Griffiths’ Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism. Matthews mentions two ‘bombshells’. The first concerns negotiations between the Labour MP Richard Stokes and von Papen, German Ambassador to Turkey in early 1940. The second relates to the leaking to the Nazis by Right Club member Anna Wolkoff in March the same year of British plans to seize Narvik in Norway. ‘Bombshells’ is a bit extreme. It’s been known for a long time that Stokes supported an Anglo-German peace deal (4) and indeed you could probably fill a volume the size of Wisden if you tried to write a full account of all the Anglo-German peace feelers in 1939-40. As far as the Norway campaign is concerned, the story that very important information was passed to Berlin has been around for quite a few years. I first came across this in a Searchlight article by Pauline Henri back in 1989.(5)
Later this summer the Sunday Telegraph aimed to deepen our knowledge of the efforts to avoid war altogether made during July and August 1939. On 8 August it carried an interview with Lord Aberconway, the last survivor of the group of British businessmen who had gone to meet Goering with the Government’s approval almost exactly 60 years before. The piece was by Andrew Roberts, historian and biographer of Lord Halifax (Foreign Secretary, 1938-41). As a result of his discussion with Aberconway, Roberts claimed that
‘we now know that …… Chamberlain……was willing to go far further to appease Nazi Germany, in order to dissuade Hitler from invading Poland, than was ever supposed.’
It emerges that Chamberlain and Halifax authorised the businessmen to explore the possibility of a Four Power (Britain, France, Germany and Italy) conference on the Munich model which would propose partitioning Poland in Hitler’s favour.
This is interesting new background but it does not add much at all to what we now know. There already was plenty of evidence that HMG would have done a second Munich if the Poles had been willing to concede Danzig and the Germans willing to take it without using brute force to do so. A lot of the ground is covered in my own Profits of Peace.(6) But one of the first historians to spot how far the British were prepared to go in the direction of accommodating Hitler as late as August 1939 was A. J. P. Taylor nearly 40 years ago. Taylor argued in his Origins of the Second World War, first published to enormous controversy in 1961, that Hitler had ‘blundered’ into war with Britain and France in 1939 because after so many peace approaches he couldn’t believe that they would really fight him over the status of Danzig. The evidence for this could be found in captured German documents, published in the postwar years as Documents on German Foreign Policy. But there were personal testimonies, too: in 1954 the German Press Attaché in London in 1939, Fritz Hesse, wrote that Chamberlain had offered Hitler a 25 year non-aggression pact during the late summer of 1939. So it might all be a surprise for Roberts – but it’s old news, really.
Notes
- Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), p.429.
- Interview with Paul Sweezy by Christopher Phelps and Andros Skotnos, Monthly Review vol. 51, 1 (1999), pp. 39-40
- Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power:the World and United States Foreign Policy 1945-54 (New York, 1968). It would have been nice to have been able to use Sweezy’s testimony in my ‘John Maynard Keynes and the Anglo-American Special Relationship: a reinterpretation’, Lobster 36, pp.30-38.
- See Scott Newton, ‘A Who’s Who of Appeasement’, Lobster 22 (1991), pp. 11-15; and Profits of Peace: the Political Economy of Anglo-German Appeasement (Oxford:1996), p.170.
- Pauline Henri, ‘Verge of Treason’, Searchlight, 192 (1989), pp. 9-11.
- Newton, Profits of Peace, pp.122-29.