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December 07, 2011

Comments

hellblazer

<applauds>

CMcM

Rant away, but tell me where are the photos of the sinking of the Hood that compare to these of Pearl Harbour. Can't make a good programme without images after all....

Odd thing, the British Empire- it's almost absolutely forgotten in Britain. Some of this is tactical of course - 'move along now, nothing here to see' - but it's real enough for all that. Those chaps in the pith helmets might as well be Roman Centurions for all the emotional connection most folk in Brittan have with them. (none of the above applies to folk from ethnic minorities of course - they tend to have a rather sharp and well developed view of what the Empire was all about...)

guthrie

I've been on a bit of a WW2 reading binge this last year, including Churchill's memoirs, books by war correspondents and personal memoirs. However I tend to buy what I see, and in this instance there are far more books about the successful second half of the war than the disastrous first half.

It would be painful to read, but useful and interesting to have a book detailing the many mistakes made during the 1930's regarding funding the armed forces and the internal problems with out of date senior officers (Why after all were two battleships wandering about without proper air cover?). It seems that people would rather forget about Singapore, which is another of those hideous examples of stupidity at the highest level. It seems almost a fluke now that they actually had the spitfire at all and if they hadn't the battle of britain may have been lost (although the hurricanes did far more work, ultimately the spitfire was the plane to trump the german fighters)

Other points to raise include did they get the balance wrong and spend too much on long range massacre bombing, instead of on decent tanks?

guthrie

If you think about it, most of the people running the country for at least the last 10 to 20 years were in fact born at the end of the empire and achieved adulthood when it was over. Then in turn my generation have had nothing at all to do with the empire, and as for my niece and nephew (aged 4 and 6)they don't know what such a thing is.
Plus a lot of the empire mythos was surely down to the involvement of the establishment/ aristocracy, and since they've now colonised the financial sector, who needs a physical empire?

Thus nobody remembers it except racists and those directly affected to it.

chris williams

One of the ethnic minorities being, 'people who worked, or whose parents worked, for the Empire.'

I'm with you on the relative significance of Dogdick, New Hampshire, but I'm reluctantly going to disagree with Evans here, LNT though he very nearly is. The UK stayed in SE Asia for nearly 30 years after Force Z hit the bottom, keeping that Dollar Area asset in the Empire. I think this cos (a) my colleague Karl Hack also thinks it, and he knows rather more about it than me and (b) I grew up near the the uk outpost of the Malaysian Rubber Company, still going strong in the 1980s.

Also anecdotally, I'm happy to note that by the turn of the century, Malaysia had a different attitude to empire and post empire.

chris williams

Guthrie: " book detailing the many mistakes made during the 1930's regarding funding the armed forces"

That'd be a short book. They got most of it right.

Strategist

Yes, great post. I gotta say that, tho far from being a WW2 obsessive, I thought I knew a bit about it, but I really had no idea the attack on Malaya was launched the very same day as Pearl Harbor. How daft am I?
No dafter than Humphries, Tinkletits or any teenage BBC researcher I suppose, if that's any consolation.
It is extraordinary though, not a dickie bird about the Malaya anniversary on the BBC website. Yet presumably it's the day when half of those poor old guys who spent years in Japanese POW camps got captured.
Looking for reasons, I guess we celebrate our successes and deliberately forget our defeats, and for UK, Pearl Harbor was a massive result. So perhaps it's justified when looking back that Pearl Harbor was much more important than Malaya for Britain itself.
But that won't explain the BBC's news values, which I think are probably as simple as, we are clueless but this is all over CNN, ABC, Fox etc, so we'd better lead on this ourselves.


Dan Hardie

Guthrie: on the approach to war in S.E. Asia, try 'Forgotten Armies' by Christopher (C.A. Bayly) and Tim Harper. A very useful introduction: I read it during my first stay in Singapore.

On mistakes made by the UK in the approach to war- hmmm... You should probably start with some good general histories (apologies if you've already done so).

Volume 1 of 'Total War', the Penguin History of the Second World, by Peter Calvocoressi, deals with Europe and North Africa and is very good. Volume 2 is a frankly eccentric look at the Asian war by another author and should be avoided. Gerhard Weinberg's 'A World At Arms' covers all theatres of the war and is well worth reading.

Max Hastings's latest - 'All Hell Let Loose'- is no doubt strongly and occasionally eccentrically opionated (haven't read all of it yet) but he knows his stuff, and everything he has written on the war is worth reading. (His view of the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign started off as sceptical and has hardened into disgust.)

The key diplomatic history of the pre-war era is agreed to be by Zara Steiner, and I must confess to not having read it, though I really must do.

'Makers of Modern Strategy', edited by Paret, Craig and Gilbert, has some useful essays on pre-war military thinkers (including a usefully sceptical look at De Gaulle's status as military prophet). I remember being rather disappointed by 'Too Serious a Business', D.C. Watt's look at pre-war European armed forces.

For well-researched popular history, Len Deighton, 'Blood, Sweat, Toil and Tears' is largely on this subject and often very good. All Deighton's books on the Second World War range between good and excellent. 'Fighter' is very strong on the British and German preparation for air war, though it's disorganised (it was his first major work of non-fiction). 'Blitzkrieg' is good on German preparations for the campaign of 1940.

Dan Hardie

Also: R.A.C. Parker's 'Churchill and Appeasement' argues that an earlier abandonment of appeasement might indeed have stymied Hitler's policies and perhaps have led to a change of regime in Berlin, although it is sceptical of some of Churchill's more optimistic claims. I haven't read Parker's companion volume, 'Chamberlain and Appeasement'.

There's an essay on how the British Army went from being the competent force of 1918* to the problem child of 1939 in the collection of Hew Strachan-edited collection of essays 'Big Wars and Small Wars'. The key word is 'how'- it really wasn't at all enlightening on the 'why'.

When I was studying the subject, the standard work on the economic aspects of rearmament was G.C. Peden's 'British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932-39' (published way back in 1979). It's thorough but it did rather look at the Treasury in isolation from the military and diplomatic context. I can't say whether there's been more recent work that does properly integrate all those strands.

No, the British Army really was a competent force in 1918- see the work of Tim Travers.

guthrie

Cool, thanks for the suggestions. I've read Sheffield "Forgotten victory" on the 1918 British war machine and how well it worked, so know about that side of things. And I've read some Fuller, and all sorts of bits and pieces, and it really is disturbing how things fell apart after WW1.
I've read Hastings "Bomber command", and know he wasn't exactly on their side in that either, although I understand he did play fair. Again, other books and my own synthesis of them basically says that bomber command promised far more than it could deliver for most of the war and pursued a wasteful and innefective strategy (ie area bombing) for too long. Once they actually switched to proper strategic bombing things got better, with the flattening of the sythetic oil plants.

Quite a number of authors and authorities, including some German ones, reckon that had the war gone hot in 1938 and everyone stood up for Czechoslovakia, Hitler couldn't have won, because the german army was too small to succeed. But again there seems to have been a large failure in intelligence and knowledge; the politicians especially hadn't a clue as to what was going on and the respective strengths and personalities involved, so made the wrong decisions.

Martin Wisse

Singapore wasn't as hideously stupid as the common myth would have it. Those guns could fire inland, but lacked the right ammunition to have much effect. Still dumb, but of a different magnitude that guns that point the wrong way.

On an unrelated note, Max Hastings comes over as a total buffoon and rightwing clown in his media appearances that I have no faith in his books. Unfair, but there you have it.

JamesP

Hastings' WW2 books are considerably better than his general media presence. Also, Sebald's ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION is worth picking up, though it considers events from a moral-literary rather than a historical perspective.

Only just started Hastings' latest, but the bombing of Japan usually gets underplayed compared to the bombing of Germany - as is the case with the Pacific War in general. The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima.

The Cooks' JAPAN AT WAR: AN ORAL HISTORY is a good starting point; there's a passage in it about a mother's mourning of her two small children, killed in the firebombing, that rends my heart whenever I think about it. "When she was still able to get around I used to take her to pray at their graves. She'd pour water on them and say "Hiroko-chan, you must have been hot. Teroko-chan, you must have been hot."

Phil

On rearmament & how Britain nearly got it wrong, I thought Wesley Wark's The Ultimate Enemy was very good, although it is a bit of a hymn of praise to Desmond Morton (he of the Industrial Intelligence Centre). Not that he actually got it right - the book points out that Nazi Germany's total economic mobilisation, which he persuaded Churchill that Britain needed to emulate, was actually a complete myth: the Nazi state was a ramshackle business by British standards, and "guns before butter" was largely PR.

As for the Empire in popular culture, the Wind of Change speech was 50 years ago. When I was growing up, squaddies did tours of duty in Ireland, Germany, Cyprus and that was pretty much it (and Ireland was the one you worried about, needless to say). Benedict Anderson has an extended riff on how pilgrimages create the geographical shape of a religion, by creating a collective sense of belonging to a set of journeys and places; and secular 'pilgrimages' - the trip to London to lodge a petition, the civil service posting to Bristol or York - similarly create the shape of a nation. By the mid-60s there weren't any British Empire pilgrimages to speak of - not outbound, anyway - and the sense of an Empire decayed accordingly. Alternatively (or additionally), you could blame the EU, and the switch in orientation from the Commonwealth to Europe: the list of destinations in Big Steamers isn't that unfamiliar, but these days you'd have to add peppers from the Netherlands, apples from Hungary ect ect.

ajay

It would be painful to read, but useful and interesting to have a book detailing the many mistakes made during the 1930's regarding funding the armed forces and the internal problems with out of date senior officers (Why after all were two battleships wandering about without proper air cover?)

Because, IIRC, the carrier they were supposed to go out with had run aground. And don't forget it was 1941. Sinking battleships in the open ocean with air power alone hadn't been done before. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen had gone out without air cover, and although carrier air was vital in the defeat of Bismarck, it was so only because of a fluke hit.

The UK stayed in SE Asia for nearly 30 years after Force Z hit the bottom, keeping that Dollar Area asset in the Empire.

More than 50 years, even, if you count Hong Kong. And there are still British troops in Brunei, aren't there?

Jakob

I've only touched tangentially on the prewar rearmament stuff for the work I've done, but as far as I've been able to find, Peden is still one of the standard sources on the financial policies of rearmament, along with RP Shay's British Rearmament in the Thirties: Politics and Profits. These were based on the PRO releases of the 1970, and as far as I know haven't been substantially revised. Peden published a broader study of British rearmament in the 20th century a few years ago: Arms, Economics, and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs. For the strategic policy of the 1920s, John Ferris is the go-to guy: his Book of the Thesis is The Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919-26, and he's written a number of articles, including an interesting one challenging the effects of the ten-year rule. (Essentially he argues that the level of Treasury control over service and strategic policy was variable and far more contingent than the idea of an iron rule suggests.)

I know Chris will agree with me in recommending David Edgerton's work, especially Warfare State and England and the Aeroplane - he's released the latter as a free pdf as it's long out of print.

The major point I've taken from my reading on interwar strategic policy is that the UK was overextended with regard to its empire; it was spending more on defence than anyone else in the world, and once it was faced by threats from both Germany and Japan, it couldn't rearm faster than it did without putting its economy at risk; an economy on which it was relying to sustain it through another WWI-like conflict.

Alan Millet and Williamson Murray have a more critical perspective on the UK's interwar procurement - they've essays on the subject in their Military Innovation in the Interwar Period. They also wrote a single-volume history of the Second World War, A War to be Won, though I didn't particularly enjoy it (a bit US-centric and judgmental - though that could just be my own biases speaking); other people reviewed it well though.

If for no other reason, I'd rate Hastings because I think he writes beautifully, but he's also clearly read a lot of the literature; IMHO he's among the best of the popular historians. I re-read Deighton's Blood, Tears, and Folly recently, and I though he was too harsh on the UK's military-industrial performance; he seemed to rely a lot on Correlli Barnett, whose work needs to be taken with a big pinch of salt. He's a great writer, though, and I've enjoyed all of his histories - I think Blitzkrieg's probably the best, though I have a soft spot for Fighter, as it was one of the first proper books on the Battle of Britain I've read (these days I'd recommend Stephen Bungay's superlative The Most Dangerous Enemy as the one book to read on the Battle.)

Chris Williams

I also rate Hastings: I use him as my existence proof that 'non-historians' can write remarkably good history.

CMcM

By the mid-60s there weren't any British Empire pilgrimages to speak of - not outbound, anyway - and the sense of an Empire decayed accordingly. Alternatively (or additionally), you could blame the EU

I've always thought that there is a certain strain of mainly (but not solely) centrist-Tory political rhetoric in which, if one listens hard enough, one can detect the plaintive longing for the perceived status Empire brought with it re-directed into a pro-EU stance. Heseltine is my prime example. Unlike his opposite numbers in continental Europe I suspect his pro-EU stance was not founded in an emotional 'never again' revulsion at European War - I think it reflects a longing for the days of plumed helmets and the 'standing on the world stage'(sic) that only a more united Europe could offer in the absence of Empire.

Barry Freed

A righteous rant. And while I'm in agreement about the coverage of democratic elections globally, my only reservation is that if the cream of the British press is not decamped for East Buttfuck, Illinois (as it is said in these here parts) to cover the presedential horserace, how will I ever get any decent coverage of it?

Phil

Chris - "little Englander" is an interesting insult in this respect. The original little Englanders were anti-imperialist after their fashion - not out of any sense of empire's injustice but because they didn't think we had any business trying to civilise the world & thought we'd get on better if we just concentrated on being England. These days "little Englander" is used against opponents of submerging British sovereignty into a larger unit, not opponents of extending it over half the world. (Deep down I think there is a similar sense of what might get lost - associated strongly with 'England' rather than 'Britain' - in terms of a local-level ordinary life being allowed to go on overlooked, or else being disrupted by the noisy, expensive and unstoppable projects of an unaccountable elite. Although why it's UKIP and not EIP I don't know.)

Phil

Link. Apparently the original Little Englanders wanted the British Empire* redefined as Britain alone (possibly Britain and Ireland - this was before 1916); no Australia, no Canada, and never mind India or the African possessions.

*This sounds paradoxical, but the term doesn't imply the possession of colonies. Henry VIII first declared Britain an Empire; he may have got the term from John Dee.

Alex

For a bloggy take on '30s British strategy, procurement, and industry, Erik Lund's series on 1940 and all that is quite cool.

Chris Williams

@CMcM and the lament for Empire. Remember that one of the last great moments of imperial arrival, when satraps like, er, Lord Longford had the power to reshape the lives and institutions of millions, happened in the British Zones in the 1940s.

Dan Hardie

On Singapore and Malaya, the man who got it right was a Lt Colonel Ian Stewart, who was CO of a battalion of Argylls. Bayly and Harper's book doesn't mention him, which is a major oversight. He analysed the tactical and operational problems and came up with an excellent prediction of how the Japanese would operate.

The Malay Peninsula had an excellent road network (better than the UK road network at the time) flanked by thick jungle and rubber plantations. The British plan was to defend the Malay Peninsula by fortifying strong points on the roads, but Stewart saw that this would easily be defeated by a force capable of fighting in the jungle and outflanking the strong points. He trained his battalion up to do so, and worked out new procedures to master the tactical and communications problems that he encountered in training.

When the Japanese invaded, Stewart's Argylls- and an attached force of Royal Marines- put up a very competent defence, pretty much the only British troops to do so. Malaya and Singapore would have been very defensible if only more officers had thought through the problems as Stewart did, or just listened to him and adopted his solutions.

The Argylls ('5 Scots') and the Marines still exchange personnel as a result of the defence of Singapore- there was a very pleasant Marine as 2ic of the Argylls patrol base I served on earlier this year.

Dan Hardie

And thanks to Jakob, again, for some very interesting suggestions for reading (and for the correction of my mis-remembering one of Deighton's book titles).

Chris Williams

Slim also identified the tactical inability of British Empire forces to operate in jungles (as opposed to on roads through jungles) as the reason that they were run ragged in 1942. There's another, strategic explanation, which Blackburn and Hack (I have an interest to declare here, since Karl is a colleague and mate...) advance in 'Did Singapore have to fall?'. The UK plan was to occupy the Kra Ithsmus, violating Thai neutrality, in order to get there before Japanese landings, and/or hit them before they had dug in. But there was a failure of political support for the neutrality violation, so the troops on the spot had to tear up their only plan, and merely react to Japanese advances.

Also, remember that up to Spring 1940 the plan was for the 1st Submarine Flotilla to sink the invasion fleet on the way. Then Italy entered the war and it got sent to the Med and sunk.

Dan Hardie

Yes, but Slim identified the problem post-1942. Stewart did it in 1939, which is why people should have listened to him at the time. They didn't. (This is not a criticism of Slim, who wasn't posted to Singapore in the immediate run-up to the invasion- he was in the Middle East in 1940-41 - and who was undoubtedly the finest British land commander of the war.)

Dan Hardie

The Kra Isthmus invasion plan is mentioned with in Bayly and Harper. My take- which I think Bayly and Harper seem to think as well- is that it clearly wouldn't have prevented the fall of the Malay Peninsula.

The British Army would still have been operating in terrain largely dominated by thick jungle and rubber peninsulas with troops who were completely untrained in such fighting- bar the Argylls.

General Yamashita's Twenty-Fifth Army, on the other hand, had superbly trained infantry who were well prepared for both jungle warfare and for rapid advances down the Malay road network (very largely on bicycles). Moving troops to location x or y is largely pointless if your troops are unprepared and untrained, and the enemy's are the opposite.

If Yamashita's men had come up against more than one battalion capable of fighting in the jungle, however, they could have been overcome. They had, for example, an almost non-existent supply chain, which they overcame in practice by taking almost all their supplies from over-run British units. If they hadn't been over-running quite so many British units, that wouldn't have been an option.

Chris Williams

Yes, fair point: I think that the Kra plan relied on actually being on the beaches before the Japanese arrived, which was perhaps more feasible had it worked, but probably a tall order in logistic as well as political terms. Agree 100% that the smaller and worse-supplied Japanese force outfought the British all the way down the Peninsular: and once they'd got to Singapore's water supply, it didn't really matter which way the guns could point.

guthrie

Part of the issue with Singapore etc that I observe from Churchill's memoirs is that the absolute first focus was on the UK and it's defence. Hence a lack of fighters sent to the far east until it was almost too late, because a) they didn't have loads lying about spare, and b) the gvt felt it had to keep a certain strength in Britain to ensure no german attack could possibly succeed.

Which is why I try (possibly without always succeeding) to sound not so harsh on people then, because they were operating in complex circumstances, and in warfare it often isn't a matter of making mistakes, it's just making slightly fewer of them than your opponent.

The thing about Japanese using British supplies from ovverrun forces is that it didn't work when the British were able to stand firm on the road to india and bring in supplies by air. Eventually the Japanese had to retreat because they were starving to death and running out of ammo and everything.

Martin Wisse

What I always found strange about the war in Asia is that despite either being overrun by the nazis like Holland or fighting to survive like the UK, both countries went along with American opposition to Japan. You'd think they'd had other problems to worry about...

guthrie

How do you mean, Martin? Both countries wanted their empire back from the people who had conquered it.

ajay

Tricky for the UK to keep fighting the war in the Western Desert - which involved a lot of Anzac and Indian troops - if the Japanese are about to invade Australia and India.

chris y

Henry VIII first declared Britain an Empire; he may have got the term from John Dee.

Henry used "Empire" to mean entirely autonomous and owing no fealty to anyone else. I'm not sure where that sense of the word comes from, but it's intriguing that it would make today's isolationists like UKIP the only imperialist game in town.

Chris Williams

Martin's got a point: why provoke war with Japan in 1941 if you can possibly avoid it, given how it's going to re-open the question of naval supremacy closed by Mers-el-Kebir and Taranto? But remember that one of the reasons that WSC ordered Force Z to Singapore was in a vain attempt to act as a deterrent to Japanese aggression before the fact. As we now know, it was by no means big enough for the Japanese to care one way or the other, especially after Formidable ran aground.

It's worth checking out Kershaw's _Fateful Choices_ about the interplay of US / UK / Germany / Japan relations during 1941: I think that the answer to Martin's question is that the UK was quite happy to back US intransigence to Japan, thus risking Japan entering the war, because its number one aim was to get the USA into the war, after which, eventual victory would be nearly certain.

As for the Dutch government: it was based in London and thus I doubt it had total freedom of action over those big geopolitical issues. Also, the oil of the NEI was precisely what Japan was after (along with the right to continue the conquest of China): any deal between Japan and the US/UK might have involved selling out the Netherlands (and, of course, the Indonesians).

PS - I wouldn't rely on WSC's memoirs for anything other than "This is the way WSC wanted things to have happened"

ejh

at which point half of the entire British political media will be in the process of decamping to Dogdick, Iowa

One of whom - I forget the bastard's name - was doing precisely that on Newnight on Wednesday evening. (I've been in the UK this last week and therefore had the pleasure of watching not only Newsnight but Masterchef.) He particularly offended me by using the term "momentum" (Newt Gingrich has it, apparently) although I suppose it could be key to some kind of drinking game.

Keir

Empire, meaning autonomous, comes from the Roman Empire, via various bits of late Imperial and post-Roman culture. It predates the use of empire to mean overseas possessions by hundreds of years.

(in particular compare king/emperor, and the position of the Holy Roman Emperor. Also note that many kings were imperial, but not emperors. )

Phil

I'm not sure how orthodox this reading is. The OED has a sense of "Supreme and extensive political dominion; esp. that exercised by an ‘emperor’ (in the earlier senses: see emperor n. 1, 2), or by a sovereign state over its dependencies." going back to 1400; the reference to dependencies there is significant. What's more, a separate but related sense - "An extensive territory (esp. an aggregate of many separate states) under the sway of an emperor or supreme ruler; also, an aggregate of subject territories ruled over by a sovereign state." - has citations going back to 1297 ("All thys were of hys anpyre.": it was clearly a word that suggested extensive and various landholdings. The Henrician meaning - "A country of which the sovereign owes no allegiance to any foreign superior." - appears with Henry VIII and seems pretty much unique to him; there are no citations before him and only one after, which is from Blackstone.

john b

the UK was quite happy to back US intransigence to Japan, thus risking Japan entering the war, because its number one aim was to get the USA into the war

This isn't even controversial, surely? It's more or less the GCSE history reading (in 1995 at least; I suppose things may have changed since then...)

chris williams

It's not controversial, but the diplomacy of 1941 in practice got remarkably complex, as Kershaw's 'Fateful Choices' brings out. Lots of people wanted war, but they didn't all want the same war at the same time.

discount jordan shoes

extensive political dominion; esp. that exercised by an ‘emperor’ (in the earlier senses: see emperor n. 1, 2), or by a sovereign state over its dependencies." going back to 1400; the reference to dependencies there is significant. What's more, a separate but related sense - "An extensive territory (esp. an aggregate of many separate states) under the sway of an emperor or supreme ruler; also, an aggregate of subject territories ruled over by a sovereign state." - has citations going back to 1297 ("All thys were of hys anpyre.": it was clearly a word that suggested extensive and various landholdings. The Henrician meaning - "A country of which the sovereign owes no allegiance to any foreign superior." - appears with Henry VIII and seems pretty much unique to him; there are

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