Foreign and Defence Policy, 1934–1937

The debate over the DRC’s first report reflected not just Chamberlain’s faith in the critical role of deterrent air power, but also his views about the urgent need to employ diplomacy to avert those secondary threats which could not be contained by military means. One manifestation of this concern was Chamberlain’s ill-fated ‘limited liability’ scheme for Western Europe. During the ‘many very tiresome discussions’ in Cabinet about responses to Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference in the last quarter of 1933, Chamberlain had played ‘a very active part’ in arguing that the real problem was principally one of security rather than disarmament. The former, he argued, would always govern the degree to which it was possible to achieve the latter. As a first step towards breaking the impasse, he thus proposed that Britain should explore the potentialities of Hitler’s proposed ten year non-aggression pacts with his neighbours.20 With this in mind, Chamberlain immediately outlined for Simon a ‘limited liability plan’ consisting of mutual guarantees from Britain, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia, under which all would contribute to a joint international police force to be deployed in defence of any signatory if subjected to unprovoked aggression. In this way, collective security could be achieved without the danger of Britain being dragged reluctantly into a European war. In the corner of the document which Simon carried away with him, Chamberlain inscribed proudly, ‘This is not a paper to be read by the orthodox.’ The plan certainly provoked vigorous opposition from both ministers and the Service Chiefs. Indeed, at Cabinet on 22 March, Cunliffe-Lister became ‘very prolix’ and vehement in arguing that Britain should avoid all further entanglements in European affairs. In reply, Chamberlain repeated that Britain’s ‘greatest interest was peace in the sense of general pacification’ and that it must either play its part in this quest or resign itself to ‘the staggering prospect’ of spending £85 million on rearmament over five years while abandoning all hope of peace based on security. In Chamberlain’s view it was ‘the best thing I have ever done in Cabinet’ as its ‘overwhelming effect’ silenced even Walter Elliot, Ormsby-Gore and other members of the ‘Boy’s Brigade’.21 At the ministerial Disarmament Committee next day, however, only Thomas gave the plan full support, despite Chamberlain’s private efforts to convince Hailsham, the War

Minister, of its merits earlier in the day. The plan was then referred to the Chiefs of Staff but, as he reported wistfully to his sisters, ‘by the time they had done with it you could hardly find a piece of it as big as a halfpenny’.22 After further unsuccessful efforts to dispel what he believed to be the misunderstandings of the Services and his ministerial colleagues, Chamberlain resigned himself to defeat, consoled only by the conviction ‘that sooner or later we shall have to come back to my idea’ because it offered ‘the only chance of progress towards security … For the old aphorism “Force is no remedy” I could substitute “The Fear of Force is the only remedy”.’23 While Chamberlain hoped to contain the German threat with a combination of air deterrence and mutual guarantees, during 1934 he also laboured hard to achieve a diplomatic rapprochement with Japan to remove the fear of war on at least one front. By this juncture, the scale of the Japanese challenge was already substantial and menacing. As the Chiefs of Staff had warned in 1933, ‘the whole of our territory in the Far East as well as the coast-line of India and the Dominions and our vast trade and shipping is open to attack’, while the weakness of British defences in the region represented a constant temptation to aggressive elements within Japan. In response to this assessment, Chamberlain declared repeatedly after October 1933 that he ‘greatly regretted the weakening of Anglo-Japanese relations’ since the end of their formal alliance in 1922, because if Britain ‘could be free from all apprehension as to a conflict with Japan the situation would be greatly eased’.24 Conversely, after his embittering recent experience over war debts and the failure of the World Economic Conference, this enthusiasm for Japan was reinforced by an almost visceral contempt for pious declarations of American goodwill when unsupported by any practical action. ‘We ought to know by this time that U.S.A. will give us no undertaking to resist by force any action by Japan short of an attack on Hawaii or Honolulu’, Chamberlain angrily declared in July 1934. ‘She will give us plenty of assurances of goodwill especially if we will promise to do all the fighting but the moment she is asked to contribute something she invariably takes refuge behind Congress.’25 This preference for some sort of accommodation with Japan – if necessary at the expense of relations with the United States – became a central theme of Chamberlain’s thinking throughout 1934. During the Cabinet debate on the DRC report in mid-March, he portrayed the Japanese as ‘a sensitive people’ to whom the termination of the alliance with Britain had been ‘a great blow to their amour propre’, but – in tones foreshadowing his approach to the Sudetenland in 1938 – he ‘did not believe that there were any difficulties which frank discussion might not resolve’. In contrast, while he acknowledged the risk of antagonising America, he was profoundly sceptical of the practical value of their friendship and anxious about its effect upon Tokyo. He certainly had no intention of cooperation to ‘pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them’ at the forthcoming naval disarmament conference if this meant alienating the Japanese;26 a priority he vigorously reiterated at the Cabinet Committee on Naval Disarmament in April. Moreover, while conceding that Japanese military and economic penetration in China was a problem, both in this committee and

that on Japanese trade competition Chamberlain argued there was ‘room for both Japan and ourselves’ and he even talked of dividing China into spheres of economic influence – to the intense alarm of the Foreign Office which warned of American opposition to any encroachment on their position in China.27 Little wonder that by early May, the US Ambassador in London warned Washington that Chamberlain led an ‘important section of British opinion’ opposed to cooperation with America at the forthcoming naval conference.28 During the summer recess Chamberlain resumed his pressure in the belief that they had ‘a wonderful opportunity to do a great stroke and I am very anxious not to miss it’. Although he recognised that only Thomas supported him wholeheartedly, as so often in his career, he expected that in the absence of any other definite proposal he would gradually gather support within the Cabinet.29 During two days of unsettled weather while fishing at Dalchosnie, he drafted a Cabinet paper repeating the now familiar advantages of an AngloJapanese agreement and urging his colleagues not to be ‘frightened out of it by any fears of American objection, unless that objection be founded on really solid and reasonable grounds’.30 The draft was then sent to Simon with a ‘cunning letter’ warning that if they failed to explore the possibility, ‘what might not be said of us by future historians if we drifted into unfriendly relations with Japan, lost our Far Eastern trade to them, had to look on helplessly while she marched from one aggression to another’.31 Despite Foreign Office scepticism, Chamberlain was encouraged in this crusade by increasing indications that the Japanese were thinking on parallel lines. As a result, he was overjoyed when Simon’s meeting with the Japanese Ambassador in late September went ‘far beyond my anticipations’ – not least given Japanese assurances that there was no obstacle to the necessary undertakings about China and the definite intimation that instructions were already on the way from Tokyo regarding a pact.32 By the end of October, therefore, Chamberlain confessed that he was ‘really beginning to entertain hopes at last of a successful issue on this vastly important bit of foreign policy’.33 In order to consolidate this advance, he instructed Warren Fisher to be ‘very indiscreet’ in expressing the Chancellor’s views to the Japanese Ambassador at their meeting on 24 October, and the response was equally encouraging, although Chamberlain conceded privately he could not yet see how to overcome ‘the American obstacle’.34 In the event, when the preparatory naval conversations resumed on 23 October 1934, Chamberlain’s optimism was swiftly dispelled. The British decision to conduct separate negotiations with America and Japan appeared to be a ploy simply to play off one rival against the other, while the irreconcilable goals of Japan and America at the conference precluded all prospect of agreement. Moreover, as Chamberlain was not a member of the British delegation he lamented from the sidelines that he could ‘only pull the strings & hope the puppets will make the gestures I want’ – a forlorn hope given his contemptuous view of Simon as ‘the weak point of the Government’.35 By this stage, however, Washington had received supposedly authoritative reports to the effect that the

Cabinet’s pro-Japanese group was weakening because Chamberlain ‘was now convinced that Japan could not be trusted, that she was perhaps bluffing and that England and the United States must at the proper time take a common stand and call the bluff’.36 Although this was an exaggeration, the Japanese announcement in December that they would not renew the Washington or London naval treaties when they expired at the end of 1936 torpedoed another of Chamberlain’s grand schemes designed to maintain Britain’s Great Power status on the cheap. Even as late as the Imperial Conference in June 1937, however, he continued to talk wistfully of a rapprochement with Japan to ‘leave us free to prepare for dangers nearer home’.37