Democracy and Peace Making: Negotiations and Debates 1815-1973 (International Relations & History)

Democracy and Peacemaking

Democracy and Peacemaking: Negotiations and Debates, 1815–1973 surveys the post-war peace settlements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the Vienna Congress of 1815, the Treaty of Versailles, the peace settlements of the Second World War, the peace talks after the Korean war and the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. These negotiations have been chosen because of their intrinsic historical importance for what they reveal about the effects of the development of democracy, nationalism and secularisation on the process of peacemaking, which had radically altered since the time of the French Revolution. Peacemakers had to contend with the contradictions and difficulties caused by the contrast between the new democratic way of negotiation and debate, and the traditional attitudes of pre-1789 European conferences, when it was rare for the government of a major European state to be replaced at the victors’ insistence, for indemnities to be imposed or for there to be any consideration for the selfdetermination of peoples involved. Democracy and Peacemaking: Negotiations and Debates, 1815– 1973 is an invaluable and up-to-date account of the process of peacemaking and draws on the most recent historical thinking. Philip Towle is Reader in International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His previous publications include Enforced Disarmament: From Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf (Clarendon, 1997).

Democracy and Peacemaking Negotiations and debates, 1815–1973

Philip Towle

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2000 Philip Towle All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Towle, Philip, 1945– Democracy and peace making : negotiations and debates, 1815–1973 / Philip Towle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Peace treaties–History. 2. Diplomatic negotiations in international disputes–History. 3. Pacific settlement of international disputes–History. 4. Democracy. I. Title. KZ1301 .T69 2000 327.1v7v09–dc21 ISBN 0-203-16500-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-25938-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–21471–8 (Print Edition)

00–036893

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

vii 1

2 Whigs and Tories in 1815: imposing a government

12

3 Bismarck and Favre in 1870: nationality and territory

29

4 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902: surrender and reconciliation

44

5 Witte and Komura in 1905: indemnities and exactions

59

6 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919: the destruction of militarism

80

7 The British debates in 1919 and 1933: victory in battle, defeat in the mind

98

8 Hitler and Churchill in 1942: objectives in war

112

9 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials

126

10 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952: prisoners of war or hostages?

147

11 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in Paris in 1969: compromise and surrender

166

vi Contents 12 Democracy and peacemaking Bibliography Index

186 195 207

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University for his advice and encouragement, and the British International History Society for inviting him to present two of these chapters to their annual conferences.

1

Introduction

Victory presented primitive societies with unlimited opportunities and simple solutions. Enemy soldiers could be killed, their women and children seized and their houses burnt, so making it difficult or even impossible for them to recover and seek revenge.1 But as the international system developed within a Christian society, or within the legacy left by that society, so Western leaders were increasingly constrained in the terms they could impose. Anything less than their complete destruction meant that the enemy might recover and seek revenge at a later stage. Yet statesmen were and are expected to bring about settlements which perpetuate the achievements of victory and, to the extent possible, justify the sacrifices of lives and treasure which the war demanded. This was all the more important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the wider public came to have a say in policy formulation and to make demands which would justify the war from their point of view and not just that of their rulers. This is a study of the way statesmen have struggled with the problems which peacemaking presents under these conditions. It is a history of the evolution of ethics, international law and diplomacy. The debates amongst the leaders of a belligerent nation or coalition and between the representatives of victors and vanquished peel away the conventions and show in the very starkest form how the Western attitude towards peacemaking has gradually evolved. Until the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars it was extremely rare for the government of a major European state to be replaced at the victors’ insistence; it was also rare for indemnities to be imposed.2 Before 1800 peace treaties usually declared amnesties for all actions committed during the war, but the 1815 settlement, particularly Marshal Ney’s execution and Napoleon’s exile to St Helena, paved the way for the war crimes trials at Leipzig, Nuremberg and Tokyo.

2 Introduction In traditional peace treaties territories were passed from one ruler to another very largely without consideration for the feelings of the people living there. This practice was condemned by eighteenth-century writers such as the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel (1714–67), and caused uneasiness in 1815, an uneasiness which grew with the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by Prussia in 1871. President Wilson (1856–1924) tried to abolish the practice by making national self-determination the norm.3 But, although it may represent majority wishes, nationalism has coexisted uneasily with democracy. From the struggle for Greek independence in the 1820s to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, self-determination has been accompanied by the expulsion or repression of minorities. In seeking justice for the majority, both stability and justice for the weak have been sacrificed. In contrast, the primary emphasis in the preamble to the peace treaties negotiated in Europe during the Renaissance and early modern period was on creating the conditions which would lead to stability, tranquillity and balance. The treaties condemned wars in the strongest terms for the sufferings and poverty they caused, and held up perpetual peace as the ideal. Taken at face value, the language used in the treaties appeared to promise a permanent solution to international problems, quite as much as twentieth-century statesmen, such as President Woodrow Wilson or Cordell Hull (1871–1955), US Secretary of State before and during the Second World War, attempted to do by establishing the League of Nations and the United Nations. To make the treaty sacrosanct and thus to increase the chances that it would be upheld, appeal was made to the Deity and to rulers’ sacred duty to preserve peace in Christendom. Justice for victims, revenge, or retribution for the violent acts committed during the war were specifically excluded because they perpetuated hostilities. Peace, not justice, was, in any case, the purported objective of the negotiations, because justice could be left to God, because injustice and suffering were central and unavoidable facets of warfare and, no doubt, because most of the injustice was perpetrated on those with no voice at the peace conference. Treaties were suffused with Christian ethics as these had evolved over the centuries. The early Christian Church had been strictly pacifist. It was forced to compromise with realpolitik as it spread across Europe. When it became the official religion of the Roman world under the Emperor Constantine (274–337) in 324, the need to defend the Empire’s borders against barbarians presented the Church with one of the most difficult problems with which its leaders had to wrestle. The conversion of individual Roman soldiers had previously taxed the Church’s elders.4 Now the problem of reconciling organised violence with Christian

Introduction 3 standards became pervasive, but state violence could be defended if it preserved stability and order, and thus protected human life. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) wrote his massive treatise The City of God after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 to justify the concept of ‘relative righteousness’, which took account of man’s sins and the inevitable compromises which the government had to make. Such relative righteousness could include the defence of the state against aggression. True justice could be achieved only by God.5 During the Dark Ages after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the impact of Christian anti-war feelings was, no doubt, often marginal. Einhard’s biography of the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne (747–814) shows that he was constantly at war, often with the encouragement of the Pope, against the non-Christian Germans, who did ‘not consider it dishonest to transgress and violate all law, human and divine’.6 But some historians have argued that a major change began to take place when the external threats subsided and trade began to revive; ‘as the year 1000 approached, war suddenly came to be seen in the Christian world as evil’.7 It was now in the power of Christians to keep the peace within Christendom, rather than to concentrate on protecting it from external threats. The Church had to discipline the instincts of the knights or warrior caste, to limit their depredations, to establish the ‘peace of God’ or to turn the knights’ energy and aggression against the non-Christian Moors. As warfare continued, successive popes summoned assemblies to inhibit the violence. Simultaneously, the kings of France in the centre of Christendom were fighting almost constantly against their barons to create stability and order by uniting their country and subduing over-mighty subjects.8 Despite the synthesis proposed by Saint Augustine and developed by his successors, the two traditions – the warrior and the Christian – continued uneasily side by side. During the Renaissance the Christian pacifist tradition was represented in the writings of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), the Spanish philosopher Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) and, to some extent, the British statesman Thomas More (1478–1535). Vives saw war as the product of greed and avarice, and as the destroyer of liberty, justice and tranquillity.9 Erasmus claimed that war is the shipwreck of all that is good in a sea of iniquity. . . . A good Prince will never make war until every method has been tried in vain to avoid it. . . . The Prince who is truly Christian will . . . reflect how desirable, how beautiful, how wholesome is peace; how calamitous and accursed war.

4 Introduction More’s imaginary Utopians ‘count nothing so much against glory as glory gotten in war’. However, they were prepared to fight in their own defence or that of their allies, and they used trickery and fomented unrest amongst their enemies to reduce casualties.10 Yet whatever More, Vives and Erasmus saw as ideal, the great figures of romance were all warriors, such as Charlemagne himself, and rulers looked to war to increase their power and prestige. They also believed that, while Erasmus’s work reflected the Christian ideal, they were forced by circumstances to follow Machiavelli’s advice that ‘a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous’.11 Post-war peace treaties reflected, or at least paid lip service to, the views of Erasmus and other like-minded writers. The horrors of war were fresh in the minds of the negotiators. Some may even have felt guilty for the part they had played in the conflict and for their departure from Christian perfection, thus they made the treaty itself a confession of past sins. Although it was presented in very general terms, the vision of war enshrined in the treaties was little different from the picture which might be sketched by a modern pacifist. The picture was kept general and care was usually taken to avoid attributing blame, so that the recent past could be forgotten as quickly as possible. The Treaty of Munster in 1648, at the end of the devastating Thirty Years War, spoke typically of ‘the long course of bloody wars which have so many years afflicted the people, subjects, kingdoms and countries . . . the public calamities . . . the deplorable consequences, inconveniences, damages and dangers . . . the pernicious effects’. The treaty then went on to talk of praying and beseeching all other Christian princes and potentates to suffer themselves to be prevailed upon by the grace of God to have compassion for, and an aversion to the miseries, ruins, and disorders which this present scourge of war has made us feel so long and so severely.12 Eighteenth-century treaties used similar language: in 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht between France and Britain appealed for an end to the ‘plundering, depredation, harm-doing, injuries, and annoyance whatsoever’. A statement linked to the collection of treaties signed in 1713, spoke of ‘all the powers of Europe finding themselves almost ruined on account of the present wars, which have carried desolation to the frontiers, and into many other parts of the richest monarchies’.13 The treaty between Britain and Spain referred to the recent war which had been carried on ‘so many years with the utmost force, at immense charge, and with almost infinite slaughter’.14

Introduction 5 Just as twentieth-century politicians have tried to perpetuate peace by crushing militarism or Nazism once and for all, so traditional peace treaties spoke of making peace perpetual. However unrealistic kings and their ministers believed such talk to be, the Treaty of Utrecht began with the declaration that it was intended to create ‘an universal perpetual peace’. Article IV spoke of the ‘peace which is restored and . . . the faithful friendship which is never to be violated’.15 The Paris Treaty between Britain, France and Spain in 1763 declared ‘there shall be a Christian, universal and perpetual peace . . . and everything shall be carefully avoided which might hereafter prejudice the union happily re-established’.16 The Treaty of Paris between France and the allies in June 1814 claimed that the signatories were animated by an equal desire to terminate the long agitations of Europe, and the sufferings of Mankind by a permanent Peace, founded upon a just repartition of force between its states, and containing in its Stipulations the pledge of its durability. Article 1 began, ‘there shall be from this day forward perpetual Peace and Friendship’ between the parties. The overt intention at least was thus to effect a permanent change in international affairs, not just a temporary settlement.17 One may contrast the pious Christian aspirations in the treaties with the realpolitik normally practised by statesmen. It was through their military campaigns that kings and generals made their mark in history and extended their power. The eighteenth-century wars they engineered may have had limited aims but they were protracted and destructive. To the mercenary armies of the period wars were a way of life, a profession. Kept together by brutal discipline, they fought on despite the very heavy casualties they suffered in the major battles and the utter inadequacy of medical treatment.18 To secure peace it was necessary to obliterate memories of the horrors perpetrated by the soldiery. The Treaty of Utrecht between Britain and Spain declared that ‘there [shall] be a perpetual amnesty on both sides, and oblivion of all things which have been made in an hostile manner committed in any place, or by any way, on one side or the other, during the late war’. Article III of the treaty between Britain and France laid down that all offences, injuries, harms, and damages . . . suffered . . . during this war, shall be buried in oblivion so that neither on one account, or under any pretence thereof . . . shall the subjects . . . give, cause,

6 Introduction or suffer to be done or given to the other, any hostility, enmity, molestation or hindrance, by themselves or by others, secretly or openly, directly or indirectly, under colour of right or by way of fact.19 Unless there was such a forthright, comprehensive and fundamental amnesty, the enmity would continue and war would break out again. The tradition of declaring amnesties continued through the eighteenth century. Article VI of the peace treaty between Britain and the United States after the War of Independence promised that there would be no more confiscation or prosecutions for acts committed during the fighting. Britain’s treaties with the Dutch and the other allies of the United States also proclaimed amnesties. Article XVI of the Treaty of Paris of 1814 which first attempted to conclude the Napoleonic Wars maintained this tradition. Specific amnesties were proclaimed by the Treaty of Vienna, which was signed in March 1815, on Swiss affairs. This included ‘a general amnesty . . . to all individuals who, led astray at a period of uncertainty and irritation, might have acted in some respect or another contrary to the present order of things’.20 But the Swiss settlement was an exception in 1815, no doubt because the allies intended to exile the French Emperor and to punish some of those, such as Marshal Ney (1769–1815), who had defected to his side.21 Due reverence was usually paid to the Deity for bringing the conflict to an end. Thus the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in April 1559 between Philip II of Spain (1527–98) and Henry II of France began, ‘God has moved the two great Princes to seek an end to the disputes and differences of the war between them, and to transform it into a good, final, complete, sincere and durable peace’.22 The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle between Britain, France and the United Provinces in 1748 announced that ‘Europe sees the day Divine Providence has pointed out for the re-establishment of its repose’. The Treaty went on to proclaim ‘a Christian, universal and perpetual peace’.23 The Treaty of Paris between Britain, France and Spain in 1763 stated: it has pleased the Most High to diffuse the spirit of union and concord among the Princes whose divisions had spread troubles in the four parts of the world, and to inspire them with the inclination to cause the comforts of peace to succeed to the misfortunes of a long and bloody war.24 But throughout the eighteenth century ideas were changing. After the corrosive scepticism of the Enlightenment it was no longer the

Introduction 7 custom for rulers to make religious oaths in order to prolong the peace. The formula used by the French and Spanish Kings at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668, where both kings ‘solemnly swear on the cross, the gospels, the canons of the mass, and on their honour, to observe all the articles’, had become totally anachronistic. Of course, such oaths had always been ignored. Erasmus lamented: such should be the good faith of Princes in the fulfilment of their obligations, that their simple promise is more sacred than any oath by another. How base then not to abide by a treaty accompanied by the utmost solemnity among Christians! Yet we see this happening every day.25 Christian references in treaty language became not only increasingly conventional but much shorter. The Treaty of Paris in 1814 and the Vienna Congress treaty the following year, ending the Napoleonic Wars, simply began with the briefest of references to the Deity. When Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825) attempted to turn the clock back and claimed that the Holy Alliance of 1815 was based on Christian principles, he evoked derision. The British Foreign Secretary dismissed his ideas as ‘sublime mysticism and nonsense’.26 The Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Crimean War in 1856, and other mid-nineteenth-century treaties, began with the briefest references to ‘Almighty God’.27 Breach of treaty had now to be punished on earth, not by God. International law thus displaced the explicitly Christian dimension of treaty making, though Western ideas continued to be influenced, often unconsciously, by centuries of Christian teaching. Reference to God has been replaced by reference to opinion to justify an argument during the negotiations. The French Foreign Minister Jules Favre (1809–80) appealed to civilised opinion to condemn the Prussian annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870–1. The British moderated their tactics during the Boer War and compensated their enemies afterwards, in part to conciliate world opinion. Both the Russian and Japanese negotiators appealed to civilised opinion to justify their attitude to indemnities in 1905. The Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), made proclamations to the working class a central element in his negotiating tactics at Brest Litovsk in 1918 and President Woodrow Wilson tried to appeal over the heads of other statesmen to their peoples in 1919.28 Democracies not only determine to destroy their enemies’ military forces but want their enemies to accept that the victors’ cause was just. Ambivalence about violence can make them shame-faced about military

8 Introduction victory and seek to associate it with a less tarnished success in the war of ideas. This can encourage democracies to be more conciliatory, as the British were with the Boers in 1902, but, when the vanquished refuse to accept the victors’ point of view, as is normally the case, it can gradually erode the victors’ faith in the peace settlement which they have imposed. Thus the Federal states eventually turned against the Reconstruction of the South and abandoned their insistence on equality for former slaves after the American Civil War. By the end of the 1870s ‘what passed for enlightened opinion [in the North] cried out to leave the South alone’. Similarly, Germany’s constant complaints about the moral basis of the settlement disillusioned Britain and the USA with the 1919 treaties. The former Confederates in the 1870s and the Germans in the 1920s successfully presented themselves as the victims of the victors’ injustices. There is still a popular, though erroneous, belief that the 1945 settlement was in every way kinder to the vanquished, even though it led to the expulsion of German minorities in Eastern Europe and the partition of the country for half a century.29 In fact, the difference after 1945 was that the Allies won the battle of ideas because their former enemies were ashamed to defend the Axis cause in public. Justice and stability are intimately related. The post-1945 settlement was exceptional; victor and vanquished usually see justice from very different points of view. Even if they share the same ethical standards, their historical experience will have created quite different outlooks. The more ‘justice’ a victor inflicts on the vanquished, the more the defeated nation may resolve to undermine the peace treaty and the less stability will result. But democratic leaders have to present their wartime objectives in simple moral terms in order to mobilise public opinion and to keep the public committed to the conflict. Enemies and particularly their leaders have to be demonised and their faults or ‘crimes’ stressed or exaggerated. Intense emotions amongst the victorious people cannot be dissipated at the end of a conflict. The modern electorate is mercurial and passionate. By the end of a conflict it usually wants to blame the vanquished for the fighting and to punish them accordingly. It is abetted in this by the lawyers, who have gradually replaced the clergy as arbiters of justice and propriety. And the lawyers want to develop international law and impose justice after a war, not to leave the enemy to god’s mercy. Some analysts have regarded the changed approach to peacemaking as a retreat to barbarism.30 It is better described as a reflection of democratisation, nationalism and secularisation, the evolution of international

Introduction 9 law and changes in the values of society. This is the sequel to a previous book, Enforced Disarmament, which looked at the policies Western democracies were able to follow when victorious. This book examines the policies they believed they had to pursue because of their nature and values. It is to the disagreements and debates between those negotiating, criticising or advocating particular peace terms that we now turn to illustrate the development of the democratic agenda for peacemaking, the sometimes contradictory nature of that agenda both in principle and practice, and the difficulties this creates for modern democratic leaders. Plainly, when one side is being or has been overwhelmingly defeated in a full-scale war, it is the debates within the victorious power or coalition which are historically most decisive and which are emphasised here. This was the case in 1815, 1919 and in the Second World War. The debates were not generally about devising terms more palatable to the losing side so that it would surrender more quickly. That appears to have been relatively rare, however attractive it might seem to strategists, because the compulsions within the democracies were so strong. If such debates occurred, they usually took place after the peace treaties were signed when the victorious powers wanted to reconcile the defeated with the status quo and to convince themselves of the justice of what they had done. Debates within a losing power can also reveal a great deal about its scale of values, as the arguments amongst the Afrikaner leaders showed in 1902. Their prime concern was the ability of their states (the Orange Free State and the Transvaal) to survive as independent entities. Only after they had conceded British control were they ready to discuss the detailed terms which London was prepared to offer. Fortunately for the Afrikaners, the British had good reason to be conciliatory at that time. Alternatively, as in 1870, 1905, 1952 and 1969, when the two sides had to negotiate on peace terms after limited wars, it was the debates between combatants which were particularly revealing. In 1870 the kernel of the debate was the right of a victorious power to increase its security by seizing territory without consulting the views of the inhabitants living there; in 1905 it was the victors’ right to impose an indemnity on the vanquished; in 1952 and, to an extent, in 1969 it concerned the treatment of prisoners of war, though this was a reflection of the wider ethical debate between the communist and democratic worlds. In most of these cases one side was increasingly victorious but there was still an element of negotiation which was absent at the end of the world wars.

10 Introduction All the debates and negotiations analysed in the following pages are chosen both for their intrinsic historic importance and for what they reveal about the effects of the development of democracy, nationalism and secularisation on peacemaking, and the contrasts between the new methods and objectives and the attitudes which prevailed at European peace conferences before the French Revolution.

Notes 1 Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilisation: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 2 Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 7, argues that indemnities were frequently imposed in the eighteenth century, but this does not appear to have been the case. 3 On the development of attitudes towards annexation see Sharon Korman, The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 4 Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972, pp. 8–10; Adolf Harnack, Militia Christi: The Christian Religion and the Military in the First Three Centuries, Philadelphia: Fortune Press, 1981. 5 Saint Augustine, The City of God, London: Dent, 1945, pp. x and xviii; Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, chapter 1. 6 Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Paperback, 1961; John Marsden, The Fury of the Northmen, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993. Pockets of civilisation survived despite the general chaos; see David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, London: Longmans, 1962, chapter 6. 7 Georges Dubuy, The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, p. 58; Brock, Pacifism, p. 25. 8 Joycelyne G. Russell, Peacemaking in the Renaissance, London: Duckworth, 1986, chapter 1; Dubuy, Legend, pp. 64 and 71. 9 Russell, Peacemaking, chapter 1. 10 Erasmus, Institutio Principis Christiani, London: Grotius Society/Sweet and Maxwell, 1921, p. 57; Thomas More, Utopia, London: Dent, 1951, pp. 107–117. 11 Russell, Peacemaking, chapter 1. For Machiavelli’s ideas see The Prince, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, p. 91, and Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, London: Fisher Unwin, undated, second book, p. 92. 12 Charles Jenkinson, first Earl of Liverpool, A Collection of Treaties of Peace, Alliance and Commerce, London: Debrett, London, 1784, reproduced New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969, volume 1, p. 10. 13 Ibid., volume 2, p. 5, article 2, and p. 8. 14 Ibid., volume 3, p. 66, article 2.

Introduction 11 15 Ibid., volume 3, p. 5. 16 Ibid., volume 3, p. 179, article 1. 17 Michael Hurst (ed.) Key Treaties for the Great Powers 1814–1914, volume 1, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972, p. 2, article 1; Jenkinson, Collection, volume 2, p. 67, Article II. 18 Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 1; William Doyle, The Old European Order 1660–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, chapter 12. 19 Jenkinson, Collection, volume 2, p. 6, Article 3. 20 Hurst, Key Treaties, volume 1, p. 33. 21 C.K. Webster (ed.) British Diplomacy 1813–1815, Select Documents Dealing with the Resettlement of Europe, London: Bell, 1921, p. 340. 22 Russell, Peacemaking, p. 242. 23 Jenkinson, Collection, volume 2, pp. 6 and 7. 24 Ibid., volume 3, p. 177. 25 Ibid., volume 1, p. 196; Erasmus, Institutio, p. 47. 26 Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna, London: Methuen, 1961, chapter 15. 27 Hurst, Key Treaties, volume 1, pp. 1 and 317. 28 Jules Favre, The Government of National Defence, Henry S. King, London, 1873; G.B. Beak, The Aftermath of War, London: Edward Arnold, 1906; Pre-war Diplomacy: The Diary of J.J. Korostovetz, British Periodicals, 1920; Leon Trotsky, My Life, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970; Woodrow Wilson, A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Albert Fried, London: Macmillan, 1965. 29 For resistance by the Confederates after the Civil War see Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971, p. 418; for a modern assessment of the Treaty of Versailles see Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elizabeth Glaser (eds) The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, Cambridge: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1998. 30 F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima, London: Mitre Press, 1968. See also Lord Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors, Oxford: Pen-in-Hand, 1950. For Christian views of war see Percy Hartill (ed.), On Earth Peace, London: John Clarke, 1944.

2

Whigs and Tories in 1815 Imposing a government

After every major war in which the Western democracies have been victorious since the French Revolution, they have insisted on the overthrow of the defeated government and its replacement with one more to their liking. Theorists argue about whether the determining factor in international relations is the international system itself, the power and nature of the particular states, or the individual people themselves. In practice, democratic leaders have attempted to change all of these after great wars. They have established new organisations, such as the Congress System or the League of Nations, to change the system; they have set out to weaken the enemy state by forced disarmament or territorial changes; they have overthrown enemy governments to change the nature of their states; and, after the Second World War, they tried to re-educate their peoples. Statesmen had no time or inclination to speculate on which of these were likely to be most effective. To avoid a repetition of the conflict, all had to be attempted. The dismissal of the German and Austrian Emperors in 1918 and the overthrow of the Nazis and the Japanese military government at the end of the Second World War caused little controversy within the democracies. Far more debate was, in fact, evoked by the decision to allow the Japanese Emperor to retain his title in 1945 than by the removal of other enemy leaders. Undoubtedly the Allies believed on both occasions that changing enemy governments was an essential step towards peace. They maintained that it was just and they hoped it would be accepted by the defeated peoples. But interference in another country to alter the fundamentals of its domestic politics was not always conventional and uncontroversial. Paradoxically, the policy was first attempted in 1815, when the peacemakers were simultaneously trying to re-establish the principle of legitimacy. The practice has come to be widely accepted in the twentieth century even though it is a contradiction in terms for democracies to

Whigs and Tories in 1815 13 impose themselves in this way. It sins against the principle of sovereignty and, if the government imposed is not accepted by the vanquished people, it is simply impractical. If the people cling to their fallen rulers, the life of the new government can be temporary at best. Such interference can work and can be in harmony with democratic principles only if it coincides with the real wishes of a substantial proportion of the defeated people, whose views had been repressed by the previous government or who had changed their opinions dramatically after their defeat. The dilemma was first encountered by the British and their allies at the end of the eighteenth century when French revolutionary forces began to overturn neighbouring governments. If British forces were able to force French armies back to their frontiers and perhaps even to overthrow the revolutionary government itself, then the British government would have to decide whether it was both possible and desirable to restore previous governments in France and elsewhere. The British Prime Minister, William Pitt (1759–1806), took a typically eighteenth-century view, arguing in 1792 that Britain could not fight simply to overthrow the French revolutionaries because it had no right to interfere in French domestic politics. He disagreed at that time with the Whig philosopher and politician, Edmund Burke (1729–97), who said that by its very nature the French Revolution was a threat to every other government and should thus be attacked and defeated at all costs.1 It was only when the French began openly to export revolution to the Austrian Netherlands and Savoy, and to encourage other peoples to revolt against their monarchs, that Pitt turned against them and came to believe that war was inevitable. Admittedly the British government was shaken by the trial of the French King, Louis XVI (1754–93), but this was not the casus belli. In November 1792 the President of the French Assembly promised that France ‘would make common cause with all peoples resolved to throw off the yoke and obey only themselves’.2 This was decisive because Pitt believed it was designed ‘to encourage disorder and revolt in every country’. At the same time, French expansion into the Spanish Netherlands was a direct threat to Britain’s strategic interests. In February 1793 Britain was thus drawn into more than twenty years of warfare, first with the French Revolutionary government and then with the Napoleonic Empire. The Tories maintained throughout that it was ‘not the form of government [in France], but its power and will to afford and maintain security to other countries, that we consider as indispensable’.3 Twelve years later, in 1805, Pitt argued that the objective in these

14 Whigs and Tories in 1815 wars was to free the rest of Europe from French domination, to establish barriers to prevent future French encroachments and to re-establish a general system of European law. It might also be desirable to restore the Bourbon monarchy to France but that was not the objective, and war should not be prolonged for that purpose. The opposition Whigs doubted that the government’s objectives were so limited and continued to see ideological objectives as the Tories’ main goal. Thus they felt their suspicions were vindicated in 1814 and 1815 when the wars approached their end and the Bourbons were seated once more on the French throne by allied armies. In both Houses of Parliament the Whigs objected passionately and repeatedly against ‘imposing’ Louis XVIII (1755–1824) on the allegedly unwilling French, as the Tories and their Continental allies were doing.4 The Whigs had cause for their concerns. They could argue that Louis was first restored in 1814 when Napoleon was forced to abdicate and exiled to Elba. But as soon as the Emperor escaped from the island the following year, the French flocked to his colours.5 It was only when the Prussians and British defeated the French army at Waterloo that the French people began obviously to distance themselves from his government. Louis returned again to his throne in the baggage of the allied armies. The Whigs maintained, quite reasonably, that allied power alone reasserted the old King’s authority against the wishes of his people. Moreover, the allies proposed in 1815 to keep an army of occupation in France for five years to make sure that the French did not again upset European security and that the Bourbons re-established themselves. The Whigs thus put their finger on the most fundamental issues to be resolved at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The principles involved in the imposition of Bourbon rule were debated at great length in Parliament before the battle of Waterloo and again the following years. In May 1815 the Tory Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool (1770–1828), argued in the House of Lords that there was no alternative, after Napoleon’s escape from Elba, but to drive him from France once again. Britain had ‘long and lamentable experience’ of trying to coexist with Napoleon. He had broken every treaty that he had signed when this was convenient to him and he had now contravened his agreement to abdicate and remain in Elba. ‘From the whole of his acts, indeed, it was obvious that a thirst for dominion, formed this person’s predominant passion, to which passion every consideration of morality and good faith was unreluctantly sacrificed’.6 The Tories did not want to admit that Napoleon was popular in France and Louis unpopular, because that would increase their dilemma and expose the undemocratic nature of what they had in mind. Rather, Liverpool

Whigs and Tories in 1815 15 maintained that the French nation had been content with Louis but the army and a minority of discontents had welcomed Napoleon back to France. Fortunately, the allies had not yet demobilised their armies and so they were in a position to fight. If they failed to take this opportunity to rid themselves of the Corsican and his family, nothing but an armed and tense peace awaited them before Napoleon would feel that the time was ripe to strike against their armies.7 The Whigs, led by Earl Grey (1764–1845), savaged Liverpool’s speech, which Grey said was ‘abounding in assertions but very sparing of every sound and general view’. Grey pointed out that the heart of the matter was ‘the right of every people to choose its own government’. The French had chosen Napoleon and, if the Tories denied this, it was probably because of the tainted nature of the sources of their information about France. Long before Napoleon came back from Elba, all the information Grey received from France stressed the unpopularity of the Bourbons. Napoleon’s return to France from Elba had simply exposed the facts.8 Grey did admit one exception to the right of a nation to choose its own government, and that was when a country by its internal arrangements threatened the security of others. But Grey could find no historical case where one ruler was proclaimed so dangerous that all others had to combine to overthrow him. ‘Vattell, in referring to this point, is compelled to go back to fabulous times for an instance of a monster so odious from his personal qualities as to induce the interposition of a foreign nation to prevent his succession’. As far as the French Emperor was concerned, after his return from exile the French government had not taken any steps which ‘demand reparation’. On the contrary, Napoleon had abolished the slave trade, thereby abandoning French ambitions in the Caribbean, and he had stressed the peaceful nature of his ambitions. Moreover, the process of time would have mellowed the Emperor, particularly as he had had opportunity in Elba to meditate on his earlier downfall. He had already endured more than most men in his lifetime, and ‘his frame must necessarily be shaken by these exertions’.9 In following this line of reasoning Grey had weakened his case. While he clung to the central issue of the right of a nation to choose its own government he remained on firm ground, but the Tories had the stronger argument when they asserted that Napoleon was a threat to peace for as long as he remained in power. Grey also dismissed Tory complaints that Napoleon had broken treaties. The allies had broken the Treaty of Fontainebleau negotiated with Napoleon on 12 April 1814. They had seized his family property in contravention of article IX and failed to pay Napoleon and his family

16 Whigs and Tories in 1815 their pensions in contravention of articles III, VI and VIII. They had given Napoleon the impression that he was about to be deprived even of the miniature kingdom of Elba in contravention of article II and that the Empress was going to lose her duchies of Parma and Placentia. Furthermore, by outlawing the French Emperor, the allies implied that they would welcome his assassination, thereby going against all civilised principles. In sum, a war to overthrow Napoleon and restore the Bourbons was, to the Whigs, ‘questionable in principle and fraught with the greatest dangers’.10 In the House of Commons the Foreign Minister, Robert Castlereagh (1769–1822), rebutted these claims, reiterating Liverpool’s argument that war was essential before Napoleon became too strong. Even if peace could be maintained with Bonaparte for a while, experience had shown that he would expand his empire. ‘Holland and the Ligurian Republic were annexed to France in time of peace. Switzerland was almost entirely annexed in time of peace’. Similarly, Napoleon tried to subvert Spain and Portugal in peace time and make them subordinate to him. It was impossible to believe that he was so changed as to abandon his old ways, and these meant that he was ‘destined for a state of unceasing activity against the tranquillity and happiness of the world’. At the moment the allies had the power and the opportunity to stop the French before they became too strong; ‘war was therefore as clearly justified on the grounds of military expediency, as on those of necessity’.11 The Whigs in the House of Commons led by Lord George Cavendish said that the government’s objective was ‘to overturn the present Ruler of France, for the sake of replacing the Bourbons on the throne’. But because of the hostility of the French people to their ancient rulers, ‘there was not the smallest chance of their restoration to power’. Consequently the war was not only dangerous but unjustified. Cavendish was backed by John Smith, who quoted Napoleon’s pleas for peace and emphasised the power of the landowners and legislature, who were wholly against war. If the allies attacked France their offensive might well fail because they would encounter not only Napoleon’s military genius but the hostility of the population, who were overjoyed at his return from Elba.12 Whig spokesmen mocked Tory claims that Napoleon had to be destroyed because he had broken international agreements. The radical MP Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844) pointed out that the Russians, Prussians and Austrians had divided Poland between them. They set up and cast down according to their will, and obliterated states from the face of Europe; delivered nations to rulers whom

Whigs and Tories in 1815 17 they abhorred, and had shown respect neither to the feelings of the people, nor to what had been called the legitimacy of sovereigns. Another MP claimed that if Britain supported only sovereigns who had kept their faith, none of Britain’s allies could receive assistance. At the very moment when the Empress Catherine of Russia was sending her troops to destroy Poland, she wrote a letter in her own hand to assure the King of Poland that she would preserve his country’s independence.13 Whig complaints about monarchical behaviour towards Poland were certainly justified. But Poland’s fate did not affect Britain directly, whereas the fate of the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal and Italy certainly did, and Napoleon had shown his determination to dominate all these countries. It was Napoleon’s aggressiveness and the threat he represented to British security which justified Tory policy. Whig arguments against the principle and practice of overthrowing a popular government were more effective. Of course, there was no way of knowing precisely what French people believed in 1815 and, even if there had been, there would have been arguments about which classes of French people should be asked their opinion. But given the reception the Emperor had on his return to France, the Whigs had the best of the argument on French propensities (as indeed Tory leaders admitted in private) and the Tories the better case over the impossibility of coexisting with Napoleon. Had this been accepted at the time it would have made the dilemma even more acute for the British. They were faced not just with a dictator whose every ambition was to extend his power, but with a dictator who had the backing of Europe’s most powerful army and of his people. Had the democracies then a right to overthrow him, as the Tories believed the British people demanded, and to impose a less popular government, and for how long would such a government survive? The weakness in the Whig position was that Napoleon himself firmly believed that, as a parvenu, he was supported by the French only as long as he was militarily successful. The leading diplomats of the age, Prince Metternich of Austria (1773–1859) and Talleyrand of France (1754–1838), as well as many of his closest advisers, frequently begged him to make peace before it was too late. All failed because he would not abandon his conquests.14 Napoleon might have been wrong, as no doubt there were many French people who admired him for his own sake and for his nonmilitary achievements, but since this was what Napoleon himself believed, the Tories were justified in arguing that he could never rest content to rule France and remain at peace with the rest of Europe. To argue that he would accept such limits in the future, as the Whigs

18 Whigs and Tories in 1815 did, was to expect the government to act in the hope that the Emperor himself had lost his ruthless energy and changed his political views. In exile later in St Helena he was undoubtedly languid, patient and philosophical, but this does not prove he would have shown the same characteristics as ruler of France.15 All these issues came up again in February 1816 when Parliament debated the treaties which the government intended to impose on France after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and his exile to the South Atlantic. In the Commons the Whigs, led by Lord Milton, utterly denied that the maintenance in France of a standing army under the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) would keep the Bourbons on the throne and quiet the situation. Rather it would ‘keep alive and . . . inflame every hostile passion; and . . . prolong the animosity of an enemy overpowered but not weakened, humiliated but not reconciled’.16 According to another MP, if monarchs were forced on the French, this would strengthen despotism across Europe as it would ‘excite in the breasts of princes more bad passions . . . as giving impunity to ambition – as favouring designs against their country – as leading to immoral excesses’. In the end, the Whigs claimed, Britain itself might be threatened by a combination of reactionary European rulers because of the nature of its democratic institutions. The Tsar of Russia, the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor had already complained about criticisms made against them within the House of Commons.17 The alleged threat to Britain seems highly exaggerated, given the absolute dominance of the Royal Navy, but ironically Castlereagh was sufficiently impressed to use the same argument himself against Prince Lieven, the Russian ambassador to London in December 1820. Referring to the Holy Alliance of the three eastern emperors which was set up to combat revolution, the Foreign Minister asked: could England, even, find safety in this system of coercion? Suppose some change should come about in this country, suppose the present public agitation should seem to you the kind of situation that requires your intervention, suppose any English monarch would authorise your help. Would not any of these hypothetical circumstances authorise the Alliance to intervene in the internal affairs of Great Britain? If Castlereagh were using the Whig’s argument because he really believed it, rather than to illustrate a point, presumably he would have claimed that in such circumstances the Royal Navy would have been divided and weakened, thus giving the Holy Alliance the opportunity to intervene in British politics.18

Whigs and Tories in 1815 19 Castlereagh and the Tories defended themselves against the charge that they had lied to Parliament throughout the Napoleonic Wars and that they had always been fighting to restore the Bourbons. Were they to prevent Louis taking the throne when he offered a greater chance of stability than any of the alternatives? We now know that the government and its representatives had done what they could in 1815 to restore Bourbon power and had dismissed the various alternatives. When the Duke of Wellington met French representatives on 29 June 1815 they had asked whether the succession of Napoleon’s son or another prince of the royal house would be acceptable. Wellington had rejected the alternatives and suggested that only a Bourbon restoration could quieten and satisfy Europe.19 On the other hand, this represented a change in British policy. Britain did not encourage the French people to rise against Napoleon the year before. The Tories were less consistent on this issue than their enemies’ accusations suggested.20 Within a few years of the end of the war the extent to which each of the British parties had accurately assessed the French political scene became clearer. As the Whigs had foreseen, the French bitterly resented the presence of allied armies on their soil, despite Wellington’s valiant efforts to moderate the soldiers’ repression. In any case, the French quickly paid the indemnities demanded by the allies, who in turn built fortresses in the Netherlands to frustrate future French expansion.21 Thus the occupation was ended in 1818. As Castlereagh had hoped, Louis was popular enough in France to keep his throne until his death in 1824. It was his reactionary brother, Charles X (1757–1836), who finally lost the throne for the Bourbons when he was driven into exile in 1830. In later years Whigs and Tories moved together in their opposition to the right claimed by Continental monarchs to interfere in any state threatened by revolution. The Tories had been in favour of intervening in French politics to remove Napoleon because he was a unique threat to European order; they were never in favour of a general principle of intervention. The Whigs did not believe that the allies were justified in intervening in 1815 to overthrow Napoleon, despite all his aggression over previous years. But paradoxically, as a wider and wider public came to make its influence felt on politics in Britain and the other democracies in the nineteenth century, it espoused interventionist principles on this issue. After major wars the public in Britain, France and the United States insisted that enemy governments should be deposed and even punished for their responsibility for the conflicts. Popular influence on politics showed that governments alone were not wholly responsible for conflicts, because the mass of people had often supported the war, but they were to be held responsible

20 Whigs and Tories in 1815 nonetheless. In 1815 and again later the myth of governmental responsibility had many advantages. If the victors are determined to impose their justice on the vanquished, punishing enemy leaders will cause less bitterness amongst the enemy people unless they are particularly attached by sentiment and tradition to their erstwhile rulers. Thus selective punishments, unfair as they often are, may succeed in reducing the tension between justice and stability. The issue was never debated so extensively and deeply in 1918 and 1945 as it had been in 1814 and 1815. The precedent set in 1815 of exiling Napoleon had reduced the protective aura surrounding all governments, but, more importantly, the Western democracies instinctively disliked the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies. Thus the Allies pursued them with a vindictive malice after their defeat in 1918. President Wilson, in particular, made it clear that the German Empire would have to be overthrown. The war was for him a crusade of the people against arbitrary government, which he persuaded himself had forced war on an unwilling people. Asking Congress for a declaration of war on 2 April 1917, Wilson claimed, ‘we have no quarrel with the German people’, only with their rulers. ‘No autocratic government can be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end’.22 Fourteen months later he argued, it has become a people’s war, and people of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved in its sweeping processes of change and settlement . . . there can be no peace obtained by any kind of bargain or compromise with the governments of the Central Empires.23 Discussing peace terms with the German government in October 1918, he told them that ‘the German people have no means of commanding the acquiescence of the military authorities of the Empire in the popular will’. If the present government were to remain in power in Berlin, he ‘must demand not peace negotiations but surrender’. Thus, for the United States, the overthrow of the existing German government was as essential a condition of peace as the overthrow of Napoleon’s government had become in 1815. But Wilson saw his campaign in a much wider context. The following year, during his campaign to persuade the American people to accept the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, he asserted, ‘if I were to state what seems to me the central idea of this treaty, it would be this: It is almost a discovery in international conventions that nations do not consist of their governments but consist

Whigs and Tories in 1815 21 of their people’. Wilson had concluded that wars were brought about by dictatorships, while ordinary people were fundamentally peaceful. He had thus fought on until ‘the arbitrary power of the military caste of Germany which once secretly and of its own single choice disturb[ed] the peace of the world [was] discredited and destroyed’.24 Wilson was uncertain whether the Allies could go further and try Kaiser William II (1859–1941) for his responsibility for the war. When the issue was discussed by the leading Allied statesmen in April 1919, the Japanese opposed a trial on traditional legitimist grounds; the Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando (1860–1952), and the US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing (1864–1928), took the legal view that there were no precedents for holding a head of state responsible for his government’s acts. Ignoring the Napoleonic example, Orlando explained that ‘a wholly new principle would be established if we sought to punish, in his character as an individual, a man who acted as an organ of the community’. The British and French Prime Ministers, David Lloyd George (1863–1945) and Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) urged Wilson of the need to establish a precedent and put responsibility for war and the breaches involved on the man who was allegedly responsible.25 War was now presented by newspapers and by some leaders as a crime, and crimes had to be committed by someone. Curiously enough, the German and Austrian ministers and generals, who had been at least as much responsible for the catastrophe in 1914 as their monarchs, were not persecuted, even when the former German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921), offered to take the responsibility on behalf of his former Emperor. The ethos had turned upside down since the eighteenth century. Then an informal league of monarchs, backed by the Catholic Church, prevented anything which reduced the aura of kingship; but in 1919 kings had become quite peculiarly vulnerable. The Church was less influential, and the feelings which in 1815 had made the Prussian Marshal Blücher (1742–1819) want to lynch Napoleon had become pervasive.26 In the event the Allies were fortunate: neither the Austrians nor the Germans made much effort to sustain or bring back their dynasties which were overthrown and exiled. Had they done so, the weaknesses of principle in the Allied position would have been dramatically exposed. The Emperor Charles I of Austria (1887–1922) was treated particularly harshly, given everything he had done after his accession in 1916 to end the First World War. When he attempted to regain the Hungarian throne in October 1921 he was exiled by the allies to Madeira, where he lived in poor conditions and died in 1922.27

22 Whigs and Tories in 1815 Germany was to be ruled until 1933 by governments which were reasonably co-operative, while the truncated states of Austria and Hungary were in no position to do anything but bow to the will of the victors.28 Thus the Tory principle, that there was a right to interfere in the political life of another country when its government made it a menace to its neighbours, triumphed almost unopposed. The issue which had caused the British Parliament most anxiety in 1814 and 1815 was simply ignored or dismissed. In 1945 the world had changed again. So extensive and horrifying were the Axis crimes against the Jews, the Poles, the Chinese and others that it was difficult for the Allies to consider negotiating with their leaders even before the full extent of their enormities were revealed. The German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler (1882–1945), offered to make peace after the fall of France in 1940, but the British government affirmed ‘their intention to prosecute the war against Germany by every means in their power until Hitlerism is finally broken and the world relieved from the curse which a wicked man has brought upon it’.29 At the Casablanca conference in January 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945) declared that the Allies would accept nothing but the unconditional surrender of their enemies, and once enemy resistance had ceased, they set about transforming their political and economic life.30 In Eastern Europe and the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union imposed socialist systems; in the West and in Japan, the US and British governments established democratic-capitalist states. Again Anglo-American policy caused little controversy in the West, even though, as one author put it in 1958, ‘it is not yet clear that defeat in war may legally become the means of forcing a people to be free’.31 In 1945 monarchies survived in the defeated nations when they had their peoples’ support and were not too deeply damaged by their association with the policy of the belligerent governments. The Allies decided that Emperor Hirohito (1901–89) was not to be held responsible for Japanese behaviour before and during the war. Thus Hirohito’s dynasty persisted, unlike the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, because it was revered by the Japanese people and accepted by the Allies.32 The Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III (1869–1947), was regarded much more ambiguously by the Italian people because of his role in bringing Mussolini to power in 1922. When Mussolini’s government collapsed in 1943, many leading Italians refused to co-operate with the King and suggested that he abdicate in favour of his grandson. The US administration was in favour of this proposal but the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, disagreed. Eventually Victor Emmanuel was persuaded to retire from public life, making his son Lieutenant-

Whigs and Tories in 1815 23 General. Victor Emmanuel abdicated completely in 1946 and his son, Umberto II, abdicated a month later, before going into exile in Portugal. The royal family’s influence and popularity had been lost by its association with the Fascists. It departed not by the fiat of the victors but by the wishes of the Italian people expressed in a national referendum. In this case at least, the democratic principle was upheld.33 Much more difficulty was created for the Allies by the propensity for Japanese politicians associated with their pre-1945 governments to regain some of their power and prestige after 1945. The US administration in Japan investigated some 2.3 million people suspected of involvement in the country’s pre-war policies. Inevitably such examinations had to be carried out rapidly and crudely, and many of those responsible for Japan’s expansionist policies were probably missed. Nevertheless, 210,287 were excluded from office by the United States.34 However, once the occupation had ended, there was little that the Allies could do to prevent them regaining their influence. This led one Western academic to conclude gloomily in 1958, ‘the artificial revolution of Japan and Germany brought no permanent stigma to those who had led their country to ruin; neither country emerged into sovereignty with any important reservations against the employment of nationalist fanatics of the thirties and forties’.35 The re-emergence of nationalist politicians contributed to the suspicions of Japanese intentions and attitudes which have revived from time to time since the Second World War. Exaggerated as they were, these suspicions were a salutary reminder of the transitory nature of the democracies’ ability to impose a government on an erstwhile enemy. Their direct power ended when their forces departed, and they had to rely on diplomatic pressure and influence. Former enemies had to believe that their leaders had been completely discredited and that the Allied cause was just, otherwise what one author has called the ‘artificial revolution’ created by the victory would gradually disintegrate.36 The opportunity to impose a government on a defeated nation is temporary and the results will be equally transient unless the victors win the battle for the mind to complement their success on the battlefield. Nevertheless, the democratic urge to anathematise enemy governments has intensified since the Second World War. The UN tried and failed after the Inchon landing in September 1950 to re-unite Korea and to extinguish the communist North Korean government. During the Vietnam War Washington was never in any position to consider imposing a government on its enemies, but during the Gulf War and the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s the issue was frequently at the centre of debate. If Allied leaders were criticised for their policy

24 Whigs and Tories in 1815 during the Gulf War, it was because UN forces had not invaded Iraq following the liberation of Kuwait. Thus they had allowed the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein (1937– ), to retain power even though he had attacked Kuwait and produced weapons of mass destruction in breach of Iraq’s treaty commitments. They had also encouraged Iraqis to rise against him, only to watch as the rebels were crushed in the north and south of the country.37 President George Bush and British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd defended their policy on the grounds that the UN had given no mandate to invade Iraq, that the Arab members of the coalition would have refused to co-operate, and that it would have been difficult to find an Iraqi leader who would be more humane than Saddam Hussein, who could hold the country together and who would have the support of the Iraqi people.38 Nevertheless, Washington has subsequently waged a cold war against the Iraqi government through economic sanctions, the encouragement of the Iraqi opposition and the establishment of air exclusion zones in the north and south of the country to prevent Iraqi military aircraft flying there. None of this has apparently unsettled the Iraqi President or made his treatment of the Iraqi people any more lenient. Thus the sufferings of the ordinary Iraqis have continued.39 Although after the Gulf War the UN was prepared to negotiate with Saddam Hussein’s representatives, during the negotiations which led to the Dayton Agreement ending the war in Bosnia, Western representatives made clear that they were not prepared to deal with the President of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadzic, or his general, Ratko Mladic, both of whom had been indicted for war crimes by the tribunal at The Hague. When the US negotiator Richard Holbrooke was asked immediately after the indictments whether they would complicate his work, he replied that he was not prepared to make a deal which absolved those who had been responsible for massacres, thus implying that the two Serbs were already convicted.40 Serbia proper was under great pressure at this stage from the economic sanctions imposed by the UN, and the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was prepared to push Karadzic into the background. Nevertheless, the account of the peace negotiations by Carl Bildt, the High Representative of the European countries, shows that however desirable Bildt believed it to be, Western insistence on forcing Karadzic to abandon his office made the establishment of peace more difficult.41 It remains uncertain whether Mladic and Karadzic will be caught and tried ‘for instigating, planning and ordering the genocide and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia’.42 Western forces stationed in Bosnia have ‘snatched’ a number of suspects but have not yet attempted to seize those the tribunal holds primarily responsible for atrocities.43

Whigs and Tories in 1815 25 President Milosevic’s own position was threatened during the Kosovan crisis in the spring of 1999 when, together with the President of Serbia, Milan Milutinovic, the Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, Nikola Sainovic, and the Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav Army, Dragoljub Ojdanic, he was indicted for war crimes.44 The Serbs were warned that they would receive no Western assistance to undo the very extensive damage to bridges, factories and power stations caused by NATO bombing while Milosevic and his colleagues remain in power. A clear pattern has thus emerged. Democratic publics will not normally accept involvement in a war if the enemy leader or leaders are not anathematised. Western governments and media anxiously test public opinion throughout a conflict by opinion polls, while government speeches contribute to the process of demonisation in order to maintain public backing for the cause. Such a policy is hardly conducive to compromise with the enemy. Frequently it means that the war will continue until one side is crushed. In 1945 Allied unwillingness to confirm that, despite the policy of unconditional surrender, they would not hold the Japanese Emperor responsible for his country’s aggression probably prolonged Japanese resistance and thus necessitated the use of the atomic bombs. During the 1990s the democracies were sometimes willing to fight but unwilling to risk the loss of any great number of their troops in regional conflicts. They anathematised their enemies, yet were often reluctant to overthrow them by force. They regarded themselves as bound by international law not to invade Iraq in 1991 and to restrict their choice of targets in Serbia in 1999. At the same time they were exhorted by international lawyers to bring enemy leaders before international tribunals for their alleged crimes. These policies have an internal logic of their own which is a reflection of the democratic crusade for justice, yet the outcome is contradictory and complex. It is bound to confuse and frustrate Allied publics and military leaders. It will prolong some wars and confrontations because it makes post-war negotiations much more difficult and may, as in 1945, sometimes make them impossible.

Notes 1 For Burke’s views in 1792 see ‘Heads for consideration on the Present State of Affairs’, in Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. F.W. Rafferty, volume 5, London: Oxford University Press, 1907, p. 232. For Pitt’s views see J. Holland Rose, William Pitt and the Great War, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1911, pp. 57ff. 2 Holland Rose, Pitt, pp. 71 and 90–91. On the King’s trial see David P.

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16 17 18

19

Jordan, The King’s Trial: Louis XVI vs the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California, 1979. See George Canning, The Letter-Journal of George Canning: 1793–1795, ed. Peter Jupp, London: Royal Historical Society, 1991, p. 194; Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1793, column 341ff. See also H.T. Dickinson (ed.) Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, London: Macmillan, 1989; Christopher D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. For the various British responses to the French Revolution see Alfred Cobban (ed.) The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800, London: Nicholas Kaye, 1950. For Napoleon’s periodic appeals for peace see J.M. Thomson (ed.) Napoleon’s Letters, London: Prion, 1998, pp. 60 and 91. Henry Houssaye, 1815, Paris: Perrin, 1905; David Hamilton-Williams, The Fall of Napoleon, London: Arms and Armour, 1994, pp. 176ff. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 23 May 1815, columns 316ff., particularly column 322. For a judicious modern assessment of the massive personal influence of Napoleon on the age see Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 2. See also David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815, London: Arnold, 1992, p. 2. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 23 May 1815, column 325. Ibid., column 333. Ibid., columns 338 and 354. Ibid., column 343 passim. See also Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna, London: Methuen, 1961, pp. 221–234. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 25 May 1815, columns 395ff., particularly column 402. Ibid., column 414. Ibid., columns 431 and 438. Richard Metternich (ed.), The Memoirs of Prince Metternich, New York: Charles Scribner, 1880, pp. 539–540; Duff Cooper, Talleyrand, London: Jonathan Cape, 1964, p. 212; Nicolson, Congress, p. 42; Duke de Broglie (ed.) Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand, volume 2, London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1891, chapter 7. On St Helena see Le Comte de las Cases, Souvenirs de l’Empereur Napoléon I, Paris: Hachette, 1854; Lord Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase, London: Humphrey, 1900; N. Edwards (ed.) The St Helena Journal of General Baron Gourgaud, London: The Bodley Head, 1932. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 19 February 1816, columns 704ff. Ibid., column 780. See also Parliamentary Papers, 20 February 1816, column 748. ‘Report by Prince Lieven, Russian Ambassador in London of an interview with Foreign Minister Castlereagh concerning the Troppau Protocol’, 8 December 1820, in Mack Walker (ed.) Metternich’s Europe, London: Macmillan, 1968, p. 132. Lt.-Col. J. Gurwood (ed.) Selections from the Dispatches and General Orders of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, London: John Murray, 1841, p. 876.

Whigs and Tories in 1815 27 20 Duc de Broglie, Talleyrand, volume 2, pp.112ff.; Nicolson, Congress, p. 234. 21 Philip Towle, Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 45ff. 22 Albert Fried (ed.) A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson, New York: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 301ff. 23 Fried, Wilson, p. 334. 24 Ibid., pp. 343 and 425. The weakness of Wilson’s distinction between the benevolence of peoples and malevolence of statesmen was underlined by Churchill’s later comments on the war: see James W. Muller (ed.) Churchill as Peacemaker, Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Centre/ Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 169–170. 25 Paul Mantoux, Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Proceedings of the Council of Four, Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964, pp. 90–93 and 144–150. 26 Gurwood, Selections, p. 870 (Blucher’s name is not given in the text but it is clear who is intended). 27 See the obituaries in The Times and the Independent for 15 March 1989 of the Empress Zita of Bourbon Parma. 28 Sir George Franckenstein, Facts and Features of My Life, London: Cassell, 1939. 29 Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Their Finest Hour, London: Reprint Society, London, 1951, pp. 217–219. 30 Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, volume 2, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948, pp. 1570–1571; Edward R. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference, New York: Doubleday, 1949, pp. 49–53. 31 John D. Montgomery, Forced to Be Free: The Artificial Revolution in Germany and Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 4. 32 Allied unwillingness to say what would happen to the Emperor probably prolonged the war; see R.J.C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954, p. 132; Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. But see also the discussion in Bond, Pursuit of Victory, pp. 155ff. 33 For Allied discussions see Hull, Memoirs, volume 2, pp. 1548ff. 34 Montgomery, Forced, p. 26. 35 Ibid., p. 34. 36 Ibid. See also Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London: Vintage, 1995. 37 ‘Thousands flee as Saddam advances’, Independent, 1 April 1991; ‘Betrayal ends Iraqi rebellion in the south’, Independent, 2 April 1991; ‘Fleeing Kurds trapped at border’, Independent, 3 April 1991; ‘UN abandons Kurds’, Independent, 4 April 1991; ‘Read my lips: no action’ and ‘Million Kurds on Iran border’, Independent, 5 April 1991. 38 Lawrence Freedman and Efrain Marsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991, London: Faber and Faber, 1993, chapter 30; Douglas Hurd, The Search for Peace: A Century of Peace Diplomacy, London: Warner, 1997, p. 94. 39 See, for example, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Iraq Report, volume 2, no. 23, 25 June 1999, and volume 2, no 36, 1 October 1999.

28 Whigs and Tories in 1815 40 Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, New York: Random House, 1998, p. 90. 41 Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998, chapter 12; Carl Bildt, ‘Bosnia can have free elections’, The Times, 13 June 1996. 42 On the war crimes trials see Michael P. Scharf, Balkan Justice: The Story behind the First International War Crimes Trial since Nuremberg, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1997. See also Roy Gutman and David Rieff (eds) Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, for an examination of the legal issues and of the extent of recent atrocities. 43 ‘NATO steps warily as Bosnian Serb fugitives roam free’, The Times, 13 June 1996; ‘Bosnia alert after Serbs block capture of Mladic at arms site’, The Times, 13 August 1996; ‘Special victory’, The Times, 6 July 1997; ‘General “planned mass executions”’, The Times, 4 December 1998. 44 ‘Serb war criminals escaping justice’, The Times, 17 June 1999; ‘The men who must answer questions’, The Times, 19 June 1999; ‘The long trail to justice’, Independent on Sunday, 20 June 1999; ‘Serbs slayed 350 in orgy of violence’, The Times, 10 July 1999.

3

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 Nationality and territory

On 18 September 1870 the new French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jules Favre, set out from Paris to meet the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), and to discuss the fate of his country. To the surprise of most of Europe, German forces had quickly and decisively defeated the French armies after the outbreak of war in July and were closing in on Paris. Favre had to cross the lines and meet the victorious German forces. He passed the heart-rending spectacle of devastated dwellings, houses broken up and ransacked, debris of all kinds scattered pell-mell before the doors. . . . At the door of one poor house, three women and a child were in tears. They prayed us, on bended knees to rescue them. It was heart-rending.1 Favre’s first meeting with Bismarck took place in the chateau of HauteMaison near Montry. Favre opened the negotiations by explaining that the government of Napoleon III (1808–1873) had fallen with the defeat of his forces and that the new government wished for peace on honourable terms. Naturally he was making a distinction between the French people and the former government. The people were peace-loving, it was only the previous government which was to blame for the war and the ensuing disasters. Bismarck responded by dismissing this distinction. The French people had declared war in order to seize German territory: ‘from the time of Louis XIV you have not ceased to aggrandize yourself at our expense’.2 Bismarck’s claims were justified not only historically but also in terms of recent events. As the Prussian leader had manoeuvred to unite northern Germany, so Napoleon III had secretly demanded territorial ‘compensation’ for this process, including possibly the cession of Luxembourg or Belgium. By doing so Napoleon had tried to increase

30 Bismarck and Favre in 1870 his own popularity; territorial expansion was still the way to do so in France, as in Germany.3 According to Favre’s account, Bismarck went on to say: Germany has not sought this occasion; she seized it for her own security and this security can only be guaranteed by a cession of territory. Strasbourg is a constant menace to us. It is the key to our house and we desire to have it. Favre very unwisely replied, ‘then it is Alsace and Lorraine’, meaning that the Germans intended to seize the two French provinces.4 It would have been far better to have left the German statesman to voice so farreaching a demand, which would shake the foreign ministries and publics of Europe. Bismarck responded in turn that he was not decided about Lorraine but that he was immovable on Alsace. Favre correctly pointed out that this sacrifice would inspire France with sentiments of vengeance and hatred, leading by a fatal necessity to another war; that Alsace intends to remain French; that she might be ruled but not assimilated; that she would become from that moment an embarrassment, and perhaps a source of weakness to Germany. Bismarck replied that France would never forgive its defeat in any case but, if war had to come, Germany was determined to be in a better position to defend itself than it had been in July. This dialogue went to the heart of all the negotiations which were to follow. Favre had hoped to compensate the Germans financially for the war and so preserve French territory intact. From his own account then and later he never appears to have tried to satisfy Germany’s demands for security in other ways and so allayed Bismarck’s purported fears, perhaps because he believed them so obviously bogus. It is rare indeed for a national leader to see his country as a potential threat when it is in the midst of a catastrophic defeat. In any case he had to convince Bismarck that West European territory could not still be seized in this way. Just a short while beforehand Edward Malet (1837–1908) from the British embassy in Paris had been to see Bismarck; indeed, it was Malet’s visit which had inspired Favre’s own. However, Bismarck had not asked for the two provinces at this meeting. Instead he had insisted, ‘We do not ask for Alsace or Lorraine; France may keep them under conditions which would render them useless as a lever in making war against us, but we must insist on Strasbourg and Metz’.5

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 31 Malet could, of course, have misunderstood Bismarck, though it seems unlikely that he would have misinterpreted Prussian views on such a crucial issue. Moreover, there is other evidence that Bismarck was not in favour of seizing large areas of France at that time. On 4 September he told his publicist, Dr Busch, ‘Metz and Strasbourg are what we require and what we wish to take – that is fortresses, Alsace is a professorial idea.’ Bismarck could have changed his mind over the next two weeks, influenced perhaps by the increasing demands of the German press and those around him or by the evidence of French weakness. One of his military colleagues recorded in his diary, ‘we ought to so crush them that they will not be able to breathe for a hundred years. . . . What we need is a Blücher with his splendid hatred of France.’ But more likely Bismarck was allowing Favre to expose his weakness as a negotiator and stating an extreme position to the French Foreign Minister in the expectation that the process of negotiation would develop and a compromise would be achieved.6 Favre tried to show that Bismarck’s strategic and political ideas were old-fashioned, that trade and the development of railways ‘tended to render war more and more impossible’. Such an argument undermined Favre’s claim that the annexation of the two provinces would lead to future conflicts. It was hardly likely to convince the man who had engineered war against Denmark in 1864, against Austria-Hungary in 1866 and indeed against France in 1870. The Prussian Chancellor had had to manoeuvre between the Prussian King, Parliament, armed forces and public opinion. But he, more than any living man, knew that wars could be made and that they were not stopped by railways or the growth of trade. Favre’s claim that seizure of territory peopled by foreign nationals would be a hindrance rather than a help in a nationalistic age was dismissed by the Prussian statesman, who pointed out that France would have seized the Rhineland if it had been victorious. The discussions continued that evening in another chateau at Ferrières, where Bismarck was quartered. Again Favre tried to convince him that the French in particular were peace-loving and that economic and technical progress made for peace. Bismarck replied that wise statesmen who wanted peace did not exist in France, and that Favre might be overthrown at any moment by another coup backed by the warlike population of Paris. He cited the evidence of the French press with its bellicose statements and its attacks on Germany. Favre then suggested that the French should be given the opportunity to hold elections for a government with better authority to negotiate and to prove its peaceful propensities. Bismarck said that this would require an armistice and every delay was an advantage for France. Certainly Favre asked for Paris to be

32 Bismarck and Favre in 1870 fed during the armistice, while Bismarck wanted Strasbourg to surrender and one of the fortresses defending Paris to be handed over as a quid pro quo for the election. Favre denied that this was possible but suggested Tours as an alternative meeting place to Paris for the newly elected assembly. Bismarck was willing for deputies to be elected from each province, both occupied and unoccupied, except for Alsace and Lorraine. Favre was quick enough to point out that this was because the Germans knew the population there was ardently pro-French. Favre claims that Bismarck admitted this; however, it was not over this issue that the negotiations for an armistice initially broke down but over the Chancellor’s demand for the immediate surrender of Strasbourg.7 There was a good deal in Favre’s behaviour during this first round of negotiations to justify Bismarck’s dismissal of the French for their frivolity. In particular he saw that Favre was too emotional to be a good negotiator and many of his arguments were far too theoretical. He must also have been struck by the way Favre gave away positions and the feebleness of the ground on which he based his arguments. Favre needed to know whether Bismarck’s claims to Alsace and Lorraine were really based on strategic considerations or whether they were part of the German nationalists’ drive for supremacy and expansion. Strategic considerations could more easily be met than nationalistic urges. Yet Favre failed to make Bismarck distinguish between the two goals. Furthermore, by quickly publicising his account of the negotiations, Favre increased his countrymen’s bitterness and encouraged them to fight on. But, absolutely crucially, he committed Bismarck to his expansionist demands. Favre was a lawyer and amateur diplomat, easily manipulated in the hands of the greatest European diplomat of the second half of the nineteenth century In Britain the need to meet Germany’s strategic demands, while avoiding cession of territory, was immediately grasped by the Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone (1809–98), and other commentators. In a memorandum which Gladstone drew up in November, he listed the alternatives to annexation of the two provinces: for example, Alsace and Lorraine could be neutralised, or they could be left under French control but with all the fortresses destroyed and demilitarised.8 Favre was likely to make more progress with such suggestions, or with proposals that the fortifications of Strasbourg and other key towns alone should be under Prussian control, than with claims that Europe was becoming more peaceful. It was also a mistake to offer an indemnity so early in the negotiations. Bismarck could pretend to be offended by the suggestion that German blood could be ‘bought’. In the end he would pocket a vast indemnity as well as Alsace and Lorraine.

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 33 From the Conservative side of British politics, Lord Salisbury (1830–1903), the former Secretary for India and future Foreign Minister and Prime Minister, ridiculed Bismarck’s arguments for annexation in a long article for the October edition of the intellectual and authoritative Quarterly Review. Salisbury showed that Bismarck’s claim about the peace-loving nature of Prussian policy was as unfounded as Favre’s insistence on French peacefulness. The seizure of Silesia and the partition of Poland had demonstrated this clearly enough in the eighteenth century.9 Furthermore, it was nonsense to suggest that Germany could only be secure after seizing Alsace and Lorraine when Paris lay prostrate before its armies. The annexation of territory would permanently alienate the French, while there were other policies which would weaken them without alienating them, and thus make future wars less likely. The razing of fortresses, and the sacrifice of ships, the infliction of an indemnity which will add materially to the national debt of France, will all be effective securities for peace. They will make war difficult and costly, and therefore onerous to the taxpayer. Conversely, annexation led to weakness, for the idea that Alsace and Lorraine would gradually become ‘German’ was contrary to all modern experience of the movements of popular sentiment. In former times when national feelings were less strongly developed, populations submitted placidly to be conveyed from one state to another as the chances of war or diplomacy might decide. But the memories of nations grew more tenacious, their susceptibilities more tender every day. The spread of education and the increased freedom of discussion had almost destroyed the healing power of time. This was the heart of the matter. Salisbury saw annexation as an ‘outrage’ against the conscience of Europe and argued that Bismarck must be aware of all the disadvantages of his policy. The only conclusion was that Bismarck had been driven to his disastrous policy by the force of opinion in Germany.10 The issue was debated extensively in the Houses of Parliament with many members calling on Gladstone’s government to be more active in finding a solution which would be fair to the French. MPs argued that Europe had already learnt . . . that the inhabitants of any district ought not to be transferred against their will. . . . It was in politics

34 Bismarck and Favre in 1870 like the law of physics. It was the one firm abiding place, the one barrier against the violence of military ambition.11 One member warned that if Alsace and Lorraine, were annexed, Champagne might be taken next. Seizure of territory provided the germ of future wars because it built up so much resentment in a Europe where nationalist feeling was rising. Admittedly, such a view was not universal, some MPs reminded their colleagues that France had not been above acquiring Nice and Savoy from Italy as the price for assisting in Italian unification, and that ‘according to all long-standing usage cession of territory would be the conclusion of the war’.12 But the majority of members deprecated German aggressiveness, believing that it contravened the ‘spirit of the times’ and that it would not provide the new German Empire with security. Other actors looked for ways to satisfy Bismarck’s strategic demands. The French Empress Eugenie (1826–1920) had been forced to flee to Britain after the French defeat and the capture of her husband. She had, nevertheless, some contacts with Bismarck, who played off the various French claimants and factions against each other. In the event of a Bonapartist restoration Eugenie suggested that peace could be made on the basis of an indemnity and the cession of Cochin China, together with the ‘dismantling’ of Strasbourg, which would become a free town.13 Bismarck was not interested in South-East Asia, dismissing it with the claim that Germany was not rich enough to take on such a burden. As far as Alsace was concerned, Eugenie’s suggestions did not go far enough. Nor did he think that a neutral Alsace would protect Germany, precisely because its people would always be pro-French. Alsace and the part of Lorraine around Metz had to be part of Germany, occupied by German troops.14 No other solution offered Germany the security it needed. By this stage the German government’s demands had become firmer and compromise proved impossible, despite the disadvantages of which Bismarck was only too well aware, given the frequency with which they were reiterated. He was not a democrat, although he was adept at manipulating German public opinion, and he was impervious to the criticism in Britain and elsewhere that he was breaking the accepted conventions and storing up trouble for the future.15 The annexation of the two provinces would have caused little surprise in previous centuries. The European states were united by monarchs and defended by them. Territories were traded at the end of wars according to the balance of power which had emerged and the demands of the powerful.16 Thus many regions, including Alsace and Lorraine, had changed hands several times, because they lay between two

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 35 powerful states such as France and the Holy Roman Empire. At the Westphalia negotiations in 1648 French demands for Alsace had been one of the most difficult issues to solve, not because statesmen believed it was populated by Germans, but because the Emperor was determined, if possible, to keep it out of French hands.17 The inhabitants of regions passing from one ruler to another were, in the most successful cases, moulded by the new ruler to form a nation. If the conqueror believed that his newly acquired subjects were unreliable or rebellious, they were savagely repressed. Thus the English were kept down by the Normans in the eleventh century and the Irish were repressed by the English five hundred years later. The conquerors felt that their subjects hated everything they stood for and would rise against them whenever opportunity offered. The vanquished were utterly crushed, their houses burnt, their lands laid waste or given to others, their former leaders dispossessed or killed and their traditions outlawed. When the north of England rose against the Normans, William I (1027–87) was said to have left no village intact between York and Durham. Those who were not killed fled or starved to death, and the Normans built castles across the land from which to dominate their devastated colony.18 In the countries of Western Europe this policy of assimilation was often effective. Kings united and developed the English, French and Spanish states by force. Most of the people in these states came to speak the same language, worship God in the same way and share the same culture. In the English case the Normans were gradually assimilated, abandoning their own language. Local particularisms remained strong but, whether they were descended from the Anglo-Saxons or the Normans, whether they were wealthy or poor, they thought of themselves as English. The same nation-building process was effective in France and to some extent in Spain. But in Central and Eastern Europe multinational empires remained the norm where tsars and emperors were unable to assimilate all the peoples into one language and culture. The Ottoman Empire covered much of the Balkans, the Russian Empire stretched from Poland to the Urals and Khiva, and the Habsburgs controlled much of Central Europe and Italy. In the nineteenth century the Italians, Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenes, who were ruled by Hungarians and Austrians, became increasingly conscious of their own ‘national’ identity. Propagandists began to argue that language and ethnicity were normally identical and that international problems arose because the frontiers of the empires did not coincide with the languages spoken by the mass of the people. The Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian Empires lacked legitimacy

36 Bismarck and Favre in 1870 and logic. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), the Italian prophet of this movement, argued that natural divisions, the innate spontaneous tendencies of the peoples will replace the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by bad governments. The map of Europe will be remade. The countries of the people will rise . . . between these countries there will be harmony and brotherhood.19 How this transformation was to occur in areas where people spoke a variety of languages, and why, once segregated into their own countries, they should live at peace with one another, was unclear. Few statesmen or politicians accepted Mazzini’s agenda in its entirety but neither could most of them dismiss it completely. In 1871 Bismarck could insult French nationalism by annexing Alsace and Lorraine, yet he manipulated German nationalism to create the German Empire. His behaviour underlined the tension between strategy and the growing general belief in the justice of nationalism which was to bedevil peacemaking from that time forward. This was to be particularly obvious after the First World War when the statesmen gathered in Paris gave their blessing to the new states emerging from the wreck of the former East European empires. They found it impossible to establish frontiers which did not create intense bitterness because they left so many national minorities within the new states. They also found it hard to reconcile strategic demand with the views of the people living in the various areas. Poland needed an outlet to the sea and was thus given a ‘corridor’ through German territory; Czechoslovakia needed a defensible frontier and so it was given the German-speaking Sudetenland. Large numbers of Hungarians found themselves living in Romania and Yugoslavia. Some of these issues had been perceived long before the negotiations began in 1919. Two fundamental processes were at work. The first reaction of many statesmen to the war was to plan territorial expansion to compensate their country for losses and to justify the war to public opinion. Within a month of the beginning of the war the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921), had formulated his ‘September Programme’. This was deeply influenced by German bankers and industrialists who wanted to establish a Mitteleuropa under German influence to compete with the world power of Britain and the United States. The aim was to strengthen Germany economically and strategically so that its security could not be threatened in future. Russia would have to be pushed out of Poland, and France reduced to impotence through the loss of fortifications and iron ore-bearing regions

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 37 in the east, together with the imposition of a massive indemnity and a commercial treaty which would exclude British exports and secure the market for German industries. Luxembourg was to join the German federation; Belgium, if it remained independent, would become a vassal state to which part of France might be attached, including the Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne. Holland was to be linked with Germany, though without alienating the Dutch. Finally, virtually the whole of Europe would be united in a customs union under German domination.20 Territorial ambitions remained the basis of German war plans for most of the war, as the Treaty of Brest Litovsk with Russia showed in 1918. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 following promises that it would acquire Serbian Macedonia and Salonica, Greek Epirus, part of Thrace and possibly part of the Dobrudja. Meanwhile the Entente Powers had their own territorial ambitions and used offers of territory to win other states to their side. In the treaty of London of 26 April 1915 Italy was promised vast areas of the Balkans and the former provinces of Austria-Hungary. The southern Dalmatian coast was to be neutralised and Italy would be given control of Albania’s foreign relations. The Treaty would have left 300,000 German Austrians in the Italian part of the Tyrol, and a million Slavs would come under Italian rule in the Balkans. Romania was similarly enticed into the Entente in 1916 with promises of territory in the Banat, Transylvania and Bukovina. Outside Europe France, Britain and Italy had ambitions for extending their control in the Middle East; Japan wanted to keep the territories it had taken from Germany in China and the Pacific. Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were also determined to hold the areas they had taken from German control.21 European opinion was in two minds on these issues. On the one hand, as debates in the British Parliament had indicated in 1871, many people believed it was wrong for nations to be placed against their will under foreign control. On the other hand, they insisted that their country should be rewarded for its part in the victory by the accession of territory. Such contradictions were exposed with relish by the new Bolshevik government in Russia, which argued in 1918 that peoples demanding independence should be granted their demands. However hostile they were generally, the similarity between the Bolshevik position on this issue and popular US attitudes was obvious. The US Academy of Political Science convened a conference in Long Beach at the end of May 1917 to examine the future of US foreign policy. Opinion at the conference was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the national aspirations of small states and blithely unaware of the strategic

38 Bismarck and Favre in 1870 problems that granting those aspirations would cause and the difficulty of reconciling conflicting nations. Professor Stephen Duggan from the City University of New York claimed that any treaty which ignored the principle of nationality would fail. Like Mazzini before him, he argued that ‘the principle of nationality makes for peace’. Miran Sevasly, Chairman of the Armenian National Council of America, called for the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of an Armenian state. Charles Pergler of the Bohemian National Alliance of America claimed that ‘it has become almost axiomatic that in order to organise the world for permanent peace, the suppressed nationalities must be freed’.22 To Pergler, Sevasly and Duggan this meant above all the destruction of the various empires, whose ‘very existence is a negation of the principle of nationality’. Pergler admitted that the new Czechoslovak state which he wished to see established would incorporate very large ethnic minorities. He overcame this problem to his own satisfaction by insisting that Slavs did not persecute such groups – that was left to the Germanic peoples. His paper apparently caused little controversy at the conference. Nor did the delegates point out the paradox of a country whose very basis was assimilation, the mixing of immigrants from all over Europe to form Americans, now proposing that the opposite policy of dividing peoples should be generally applied to Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, imperial experience increased the scepticism of a number of influential experts about the practicality of national self-determination. Sir Thomas Holdich (1843–1929), the VicePresident of the Royal Geographical Society and former surveyor of the Indian frontier with Afghanistan, had published a typically realistic appraisal of the options in 1916. Holdich dismissed commentators who pronounced on nationality and frontier problems with no practical experience of the difficulties of delineation they represented. He admitted that the principle of nationality would have to be taken into account in any European settlement, but he did not believe it should always be paramount. Strategy had also to be considered and frontiers should thus, wherever possible, reflect physical geography. It was particularly useful to fix national frontiers along natural boundaries such as mountains. Holdich was also only too well aware of the problem of competing nationalisms. Unusually for his time he was a determined opponent of plebiscites, which he called the ‘most ingenious device for stirring up . . . resentments’.23 Rather the views of the people should be consulted quietly by experts sent into the area by the peacemakers. Finally, when physical geography and the preferences of the people had been consulted, clear frontiers should be demarcated. Antagonistic

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 39 peoples had to be separated to stop them committing horrendous crimes, and minorities who did not like the new arrangements should be encouraged ‘to retire into the domains assigned to them’. Ethnic cleansing would thus be an inevitable result of the peace conference.24 The following year the eminent jurist and League of Nations activist Sir Walter Phillimore (1845–1929) commended Holdich’s conclusions, particularly on the importance of attending to the wishes of the people, while looking at the same time for clear, defensible frontiers. As far as competing nations were concerned, he noted only that ‘the annexation of an unwilling nationality, gains no strength from it being ratified by a treaty . . . if there be no union of hearts rupture will come at any time’.25 Phillimore was more cautious than Pergler about pronouncing on the views of Czechs and Slovaks, of which he believed the Allies knew little. In any case, Thomas Masaryk (1850–1937) and other Czech propagandists were making claims to areas populated by Germans, and this, Phillimore correctly pointed out, would cause perpetual tension in future.26 President Wilson was not initially as enthusiastic about encouraging European nationalism as the commentators gathered at Long Beach in 1917 or indeed as many historians have suggested. He opposed giving any support to the forces calling for the break-up of the AustroHungarian and Turkish Empires. It was only after their collapse that he became increasingly associated with the nationalist cause. His Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was even less enthusiastic and deplored Wilson’s subsequent appeal to the national principle: it will raise hopes which can never be realised. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realise the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered ! What misery it will cause!27 Lansing recognised that almost all existing states were vulnerable to the principle of national self-determination. The United States had itself fought its most destructive war to deny the principle to the Southern Confederacy. Britain was vulnerable because of Ireland and its Empire. Put fully into effect, the principle of national self-determination would change the face of the world and dramatically increase international instability. When Allied statesmen met in Paris in 1919 they could not restore the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, even if

40 Bismarck and Favre in 1870 they had wished to do so. These areas were populated by a seething mass of new nations all determined to assert themselves and to expand their territories at the expense of their neighbours. Despite Holdich’s warnings and Wilson’s initial scepticism, they felt they had to implement the principle of nationality to the extent possible, and where conflicts were obvious, they did this by holding plebiscites because no other means would make the new frontiers in any way legitimate. The statesmen were bound to disappoint most of the peoples involved. Their own peoples were equally certain to be disillusioned by the selfishness, immaturity and viciousness of the emergent nations. In the end, as Holdich had forecast, the principle of national selfdetermination was to lead to ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. If minorities could be neither assimilated nor reconciled, then they would have to leave. This had been foreshadowed a century before in British proposals for compensation to Turks driven out of the new state of Greece in the 1820s.28 At least this might help them to start a new life after they abandoned their property. The sufferings and slaughter involved became clearer when some 2 million Greeks were driven out of Turkey in the 1920s. Such ‘ethnic cleansing’ was precisely what the humanitarian and liberal-minded statesmen gathered in Paris in 1919 tried to prevent through the minority treaties. These were imposed on the new East European states in the hope that they could be made to look after all their peoples and not just those from the dominant culture. The treaties were considered demeaning by the East European states and they were by no means wholly effective. They also gave Hitler and other trouble-makers the opportunity to protest against the behaviour of the Czechs and Poles. In the Second World War he attempted to ‘solve’ the problem by crushing or exterminating the Slavs and colonising the area with Germans. The East Europeans took their revenge in 1945 by driving millions of Germans from the lands which they had occupied for centuries.29 The process of ethnic cleansing continued with the partition of India, the establishment of the state of Israel, the partition of Cyprus and the numerous other colonial and post-colonial struggles which have swept the world since 1945. The lesson was reinforced in Bosnia and Kosovo when the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ came into general usage to describe this perennial aspect of nationalism. Democracies are based on popular consent and cannot, therefore, ignore public opinion when demarcating boundaries, but there is no consensus on the size a territory has to attain in order to earn the right to secede or on the time which a people has to have occupied land to give it title. The French were not going to allow plebiscites in Alsace and Lorraine in 1919 which might show how the

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 41 demography had changed there since 1871, nor were the Baltic Republics going to permit such plebiscites to establish their borders after they re-emerged from the wreck of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.30 At the same time the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Kosovan Muslims were all the victims and the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in the genocidal wars which followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. Favre’s warnings to Bismarck of the dangers of ignoring nationalism were fully justified. The annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was to cause hostility between France and Germany until it was reversed in 1919. But today it is the destructive force of unrestrained nationalism and ethnic and religious hatred with which the peacemakers have had to deal in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Not wishing to abet ethnic cleansing, they have been reluctant to make use of the financial inducements or compensation for population movements which were agreed by the Greeks in the 1820s. Here the best has been the enemy of the good. Then, as now, financial compensation can at least help the dispossessed to start a new life and may in time perhaps reduce the bitterness and hatreds to which ethnic cleansing inevitably leads. Unlike their more realistic predecessors in the 1820s, modern democratic leaders have shrunk from such morally ambiguous measures, and yet the alternatives can be much worse.31

Notes 1 Jules Favre, The Government of National Defence, Henry S. King, London, 1873, p. 12. 2 Favre, Government, p. 115. Napoleon III told the Prussians unhelpfully that he had been pushed into war by the public; see A.R. Allinson (ed.) The War Diary of the Emperor Frederick III, 1870–1871, London: Stanley Paul, 1927, interview between the Prussian King and French Emperor. 3 Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871, New York: Dorset Press, 1990, pp. 53–55. 4 Favre, Government, p. 115. 5 Sir Edward Malet, Shifting Sands or Memories of Many Men in Many Lands, London: John Murray, 1901, p. 267; Lord Lyons, A Record of British Diplomacy, volume 1, London: Edward Arnold, 1913, p. 321. 6 Dr Moritz Busch, Bismarck: Some Secret Pages of His History, London: Macmillan, 1899, p. 77. Field Marshal Count von Blumenthal, Journals for 1866 and 1870–71, London: Edward Arnold, 1903, entries of 7 and 9 September 1870, pp. 119 and 123. See also E.M. Carroll, Germany and the Great Powers, 1869–1914: A Study in Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938, pp. 67ff. 7 Favre, Government, p. 130. 8 Paul Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy, New York: Harper, 1935,

42 Bismarck and Favre in 1870

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17

18 19

Appendix 1, p. 270. For Gladstone’s views on the war see Agatha Ramm (ed.) The Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1868–1876, London: Royal Historical Society, 1952. Salisbury, ‘Count Bismarck’s circular letter to the foreign countries, 1870’, Quarterly Review, October 1870, pp. 540–556. Ibid. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 17 February 1871, column 395, speech by Auberon Herbert. Ibid., column 424, speech by Mr Horsman. For criticism of France see also the speech by Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer. Augustin Filon, Recollections of the Empress Eugenie, London: Cassell, 1920, pp. 212ff. Filon, Recollections, p. 220. In other moods Bismarck assured his intimates that the French had always despised the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine, and that they could be won over to Germany. See Busch, Bismarck, pp. 52 and 187. The possibility of separating Alsace and Lorraine from France had been discussed at length in 1815 only to be rejected on the grounds that it would alienate French opinion too deeply. See Lord Castlereagh, Correspondence, Despatches and Other Papers of Viscount Castlereagh, ed. C.W. Vane, London: John Murray, 1853, p. 445, Lord Liverpool to Lord Castlereagh, 28 July 1815, and p. 479, Lord Liverpool to Lord Castlereagh, 11 August 1815. Also Lord Castlereagh to Lord Liverpool, 17 August 1815, particularly p. 488; C.K. Webster, British Diplomacy, 1813–1815, London: G. Bell, 1921; Lord Castlereagh to Lord Liverpool, 24 July 1815, p. 350; and Wellington to Castlereagh, 11 August 1815, p. 357. See also Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 19 February 1816, column 712, speech by Mr E. Lyttleton. For French opinion of the effect of annexation on the population of the provinces see ‘L’AlsaceLorraine depuis l’annexation’ and M.A. Mizières, ‘Les Suffrances d’un pays conquis’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1870, pp. 218 and 560ff. Bismarck was, of course, a moderate expansionist compared with Moltke and the German armies; see Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 4. Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination, London: Collins, 1969, chapter 2. Leslie F. Church, The Story of Alsace-Lorraine, London: Charles H. Kelley, 1915; David Ogg, Europe in the Seventeenth Century, London: Charles Black, 1946, pp. 180–182; C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1957, pp. 426–428. H.W.C. Davis, England under the Normans and Angevins, 1066–1272, London: Methuen, 1905, chapter 1. Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man, London: Dent, 1907, p. 52. For the problems created by nationalism see J.R.V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries, London: Allen and Unwin, 1987, pp. 175ff.; Inis Claude, National Minorities: An International Problem, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, pp. 78 ff.; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 63ff.

Bismarck and Favre in 1870 43 20 Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967, pp. 101ff. 21 Charles Seymour, ‘Secret treaties and open covenants’, These Eventful Years, volume 1, London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1924, chapter 6, pp. 209ff. 22 Stephen P. Duggan, ‘Annexation and the principle of nationality’, Proceedings of the National Conference on Foreign Relations of the United States, 28 May–1 June, 1917, Long Beach, pp. 112ff. See also Charles Pergler, ‘The Austrian problem’, in Proceedings, p.139 passim. 23 Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich, Political Frontiers and Boundary Making, London: Macmillan, 1916, pp. 27, 283 and 287. See also his Boundaries in Europe and the Near East, London: Macmillan, 1918, particularly p. 65. 24 Holdich, Political Frontiers, pp. 283 and 294. 25 Sir Walter George Frank Phillimore, Three Centuries of Treaties of Peace and Their Teaching, London: John Murray, 1917, pp. 2, 14, 25 and 145. See also Coleman Phillipson, Termination of War and Treaties of Peace, London: Fisher Unwin, 1916, pp. 277ff. 26 Phillimore, Three Centuries, p. 157. 27 Quoted in Moynihan, Pandaemonium, p. 83. 28 Protocol of conference between the British and Russian plenipotentiaries, signed at St Petersburg, 23 March/4 April 1826, in Michael Hurst (ed.) Key Treaties for the Great Powers, 1814–1914, volume 1, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972, p. 168. 29 Claude, National Minorities, pp. 91 ff.; A.M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. 30 On Alsace and Lorraine see H. Wilson Harris, ‘The revision of the treaty’, Contemporary Review, March/April 1920, 117: 487; ‘The absorption of Alsace and Lorraine’, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, January 1925, 3–4: 30–46. On the Baltic Republics see ‘Latvia leadership faces strike threat over independence’, The Times, 6 May 1991; ‘Latvian poll ignores Russians’, The Times, 5 June 1993. 31 For the efforts to reduce the economic effects of the Bosnian War see Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998, p. 240ff.

4

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 Surrender and reconciliation

The Anglo-Boer War ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Vereeniging, one of the most generous post-war agreements in modern history. The victorious British helped their defeated enemies to restore and restock their farms. They granted most Boers an amnesty, they quickly offered them a constitution, they effectively allowed the Boers a veto over granting political rights to Africans and, in time, they encouraged some of the Boers to become leading figures in the British Empire. Such leniency was encouraged because Britain was itself profoundly divided about the justification for the war, with the Liberal party denouncing its conduct and motives in stridents tones. British soldiers and civilians admired the courage, determination and patriotism of their enemies, and the British public had a grudging suspicion that the vociferous criticisms made by foreigners about their military conduct and political objectives were merited by the standards which they claimed to uphold. The Conservative government wished to heal the deep internal divisions which the war had created and to reduce its international isolation. Total victory can sometimes bring out the best in democratic governments and electorates. After such success they are no longer afraid of their enemies; they have achieved their main political purpose and they may feel guilty over some of the military tactics they have employed. They can afford to make gracious concessions to the enemy over what they see as subsidiary issues which will improve their reputation with the neutral nations. When they are responsible for their enemies’ wellbeing, as they were in 1902, they may even help to repair the damages of war and to try to lessen the enemy’s humiliation and anger. After partial victories or armistices, enemies will still be seen as a threat and, if democratic troops are not in occupation of their territories, the extent of the enemies’ sufferings will be less obvious and democratic electorates will not feel responsible for their condition.

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 45 Those defeated by democratic nations may hope that they can rely on their magnanimity, though they naturally resent and sometimes fear being pushed into such reliance. Towards the end of the Boer War the Afrikaner leaders discussed their situation extensively amongst themselves and they carefully recorded these debates. The records show that the issue was whether the military situation made it necessary for them to abandon their sovereignty. They spent little time discussing the detailed peace terms. They expected the British to act with magnanimity once the Boers had conceded their sovereignty, and they were not disappointed. Between 1899 and 1902 Britain fought against the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The Boers struggled for their independence, for their right to conduct their affairs as they wished, and this right included their authority over foreigners who came to work in their goldfields. Although the Boers had been arming heavily, they felt continuously threatened by the British and declared on 9 October 1899 that they would regard themselves as being at war unless the British reduced their forces in Southern Africa. The British refused.1 The British government felt it had to support its subjects living in the Boer republics. The British had also become convinced that they could not live at peace with the Boers and that they needed to make preparations for war. Within a year of the outbreak of war, although they had suffered many reverses, the British had defeated the Boer armies. The Afrikaners then resisted for two more years by using guerrilla bands or commandos. The British eventually brought 300,000 men into the field who tried ‘to drain the sea’ in which the guerrillas were swimming. They removed the commandos’ families from the veldt, killed the cattle which could not be moved, burnt their towns and villages and concentrated them in camps under their control. They split the country into sections to be cleared of commandos by building 8,000 blockhouses and setting up thousands of miles of barbed-wire fences. Gradually these tactics worked. One after another the commandos were defeated, lost their key men and horses, and were starved into submission.2 The British government and most of the British press regarded the Boer War as a limited conflict fought between brave men who maintained civilised standards. One British official wrote soon afterwards, ‘possibly no contest was ever fought with more humanity than the late South African war’.3 Yet there were ferocious critics even in Britain of the ‘methods of barbarism’ employed to round up the Boer families, and of the failure to deal with the appalling diseases which then broke out in their camps. The Boers bitterly resented the total destruction of all they had worked for on their farms, the execution of their colleagues

46 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 who wore British uniforms for want of other clothes, the mistreatment of their women and the encouragement they felt the British gave to the Africans to rise against them. During the negotiations which brought the war to an end at the peace of Vereeniging, they talked of the danger that their whole race would be obliterated if the war continued. Judge Hertzog (1866–1942), the Boer general and future South African Premier, told his fellow Boers, ‘he doubted if there had ever been a war in which a nation had suffered as they had’, while General Louis Botha (1862–1919) claimed that British methods were ‘contrary to all international law’.4 There were abortive discussions at Middleburg in March 1901 seeking to bring the war to an end. The British commander, Lord Kitchener (1850–1916), made clear to his opposite number, General Louis Botha, that the British would now insist on the surrender of Afrikaner independence. Some historians have suggested that the Boers might have accepted this if they had not feared for the treatment of the Afrikaners within Cape Colony who had rebelled against the government. Kitchener wanted to take a conciliatory approach towards the Cape ‘rebels’ but Lord Milner (1854–1925), the High Commissioner and Governor of the Transvaal (who was not present), was obdurate. However, given the reluctance with which many commandos gave up the struggle a year later, it is debatable whether Botha could have persuaded them to come to terms in 1901. Most of those historians who have held the contrary view have followed Kitchener and Botha, who certainly blamed Milner. But Kitchener was not a good judge; he wanted to leave South Africa as soon as possible to command the Indian Army and he was inclined to belittle the difficulty of ending the war. His proposals to Whitehall swung violently between offering a general amnesty and a determination to shoot all Cape and Natal ‘rebels’. In his harsh moods he would talk of the unreconcilable and uncivilised nature of all Boers, and propose to exile permanently to the Dutch East Indies or Madagascar those who had borne arms against his forces. The British government wisely rejected his various projects, though they did allow him to issue a demand for unconditional surrender, a demand which most Boer commandos ignored.5 However, by April 1902 many Boer leaders realised that they would have to try again to make terms. They had sent a delegation to Europe to see if any of the European states would intervene on their behalf, but the British government had refused the Netherlands’ offers to act as intermediary, and no other government had come to their assistance. By passing the correspondence with the Netherlands to the Boer leaders the British gave them the opportunity to initiate discussions.

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 47 On 9 April 1902 the British helped the leaders of the Orange Free State and Transvaal (or South African Republic as the Boers called it) to meet at Klerksdorp. The British made conditions as comfortable as possible for them, even providing them with a guard of honour of twenty Highlanders, although the Boers regarded this not only as a protection against sightseers but as the British way of keeping them under observation. They felt that the British showed them all the respect due to their position as enemy leaders, but they ‘could not help thinking of what the same nation had done to our wives and children’. They also cut short enquiries from junior British officers about the ways in which Boer farms could be restocked after their surrender.6 President Steyn (1857–1916) of the Orange Free State was the most intransigent of the Boer leaders at this stage, arguing that he would rather surrender to the British unconditionally than compromise with them. Nevertheless, the representatives eventually reached agreement to see if they could make terms without actually surrendering their sovereignty, by offering a treaty of peace and friendship with the British, together with a customs, post, telegraph and railway union. They would also offer to give votes to foreigners working in the Republics, to provide equal rights to the English and Dutch languages in schools there, and to demolish the forts they had built. They enclosed the terms in a letter to Kitchener, who agreed to hold an interview at Pretoria with the Boer representatives in the marble elegance of Melrose House.7 However, since the Boers insisted that they had no authority to concede independence and the British would accept nothing less, the second round of negotiations failed. The British government cabled Kitchener, ‘we should not be prepared to consider any proposal based on the revival of the independence of the two South African States’. The Boers were then given permission to go back to the commandos for the extra authority they needed for the negotiations and to bring their representatives together. The British would have liked the Boers to consult the prisoners of war as well as those still in the field, but the Boer delegates rejected this.8 Many of the commandos they visited, particularly in the Orange Free State, insisted that the struggle should continue. For example, Christiaan De Wet (1854–1922), the commander of the forces in the Orange Free State, met one of his generals at Vrede on 22 April. The officer reported that his men were in dire conditions, existing on small amounts of maize and meat. But they would go on fighting.9 The various commandos elected representatives to take their views to the general meeting and they asked Kitchener for an armistice during the time that they would be away. Kitchener agreed that from 11 May until the delegates’ return

48 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 the commandos would ‘not be troubled by us’. Even then De Wet complained later that in some areas the British forces had continued to operate: ‘houses were burnt down, cattle carried away, maize and other grain destroyed, burghers taken prisoner, and (in one instance) shot’.10 Kitchener had refused a general armistice, but the Boers clearly felt that he had not complied with the terms of the agreement. However, in other ways the British did what they could to facilitate the movement of the Boers, who were generally pleased with the help they were given. The sixty delegates from the two states assembled in the small frontier town of Vereeniging on 15 May. Here the British had provided them with a large marquee for the main discussions amongst themselves, and other accommodation which seemed particularly plush after the hardships of the veldt. Hertzog and Jan Smuts (1870–1950) told the Boer representatives that they were not mere mouthpieces of their constituents but had the right to make decisions on their behalf.11 General Botha then began describing the military situation, the shortage of food in some areas and the absolute destitution in others. He also warned of the danger from the Africans. In one area there was a ‘Kaffir commando’ which had already made several attacks upon the burghers. The women left on the veldt were in a terrible state, driven from their homes ‘and, in some instances, treated with atrocious cruelty’.12 The Transvaal commandos now had over 10,000 men in the field, but since June 1901 they had lost 6,084, and over 3,000 of those still fighting had no horses. De Wet reported that there were about 6,000 in the Orange Free State commandos; food was very scarce, but then it had been a year before and they had still survived. One after another the Orange Free State commando leaders spoke, stressing their determination to continue the war despite their difficulties. The contrasting views of the representatives of the two republics were to persist. Most Orange Free State spokesmen wanted to go on fighting; most representatives from the Transvaal regarded this as futile. The British were aware of the differences and of the state of morale in the Transvaal. One of Kitchener’s assistants wrote of the early negotiations, ‘we feel the pulse of the Transvaalers very accurately through one of their number, who is so much for peace that he is almost more one of us than them, and tells all the results of their discussions’.13 General Smuts reported on conditions in Cape Colony, where he had been commanding some 2,600 men. He pointed out that the rest of the Afrikaners living there were unlikely to rise because, if they were captured, they would be severely punished by the British and food was very scarce to sustain guerrilla forces. Similarly, the representative from Witwatersrand stressed his abhorrence for handing the country over, but

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 49 his belief was that it was impossible to go on struggling. ‘We shall only be storing up misery for the future if we continue fighting until every man of us is a prisoner or in his grave.’14 Others spoke in the same vein. Vice-President Burger carried weight when he pointed out that they could only grow weaker, while the enemy increased in power: What will become of the women and children and the banished burghers if you still persist until your last shot has been fired? What right shall we have to intercede for these unfortunate ones when we have rejected the proposals of the English government ?15 Cleverly Burger had touched on their anxieties about their families and he had also suggested that they still had a chance to bargain over the peace terms; the longer they waited, the less bargaining power they would have. The arguments continued the following day, although the delegates agreed to the appointment of a commission to make peace ‘on satisfactory terms’ with the British and to return to lay the results before them. They could either base a compromise on ceding the gold fields, their control over foreign policy and the acceptance of a protectorate, or they could negotiate in any way which would lead ‘to a satisfactory peace’.16 The negotiations with Kitchener and Lord Milner began on 19 May, and immediately the difference between the content of these negotiations and those which had taken place amongst the Boers became very clear. The Boer delegation contained both compromisers and hard-liners including Generals Botha, De Wet and de La Rey, Judge Hertzog and General Smuts. The Afrikaners read a message to the meeting offering to cede independence as regards foreign policy and to cede some territory while retaining self-government under British supervision. The haggling then began. Milner and Kitchener said it was useless to refer the Boer offer to London as it differed widely from the terms laid down at Middleburg according to which they were now negotiating. The Boers argued that their proposal did not much differ from the British position, that there were various constitutions within the British Empire and that their offer was peculiarly suited to the Afrikaner nation. Kitchener asked whether the Boers formally accepted annexation. Smuts said that they did not do so formally but that the effect was the same. The British said that the notion of ‘supervision’ of the Boer areas by London was too vague.17 At bottom the Boer delegates were trying to find a solution which offered them the maximum possible independence and which would be

50 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 acceptable to the commandos. Milner and Kitchener had to find a solution which would appeal to London and would not lead to endless friction in future. They wanted clarity, the Boers wanted to obscure the issues. Milner claimed, ‘our proposal is six times as definite as yours’, and insisted that the British government was justified in wanting clarity. The British also pointed out that the Boer offer to cede territory conflicted with the notion that the whole was to be annexed.18 There were clear differences between Kitchener and Milner, who had told the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914), that he disliked all negotiations and would have preferred to fight to the end. It was only because of public pressure in Britain that he sought a compromise. Milner also feared negotiations between Kitchener and the Boers as his military colleague might be too accommodating.19 The Boers now wanted to know what would happen if after they signed an agreement only some of the commandos laid down their arms. As a military man, Kitchener showed himself more understanding of the problem than Milner, who talked about calling them outlaws.20 General Botha said that they were being asked to abandon honour. Kitchener and Milner denied this. De Wet, the most hard-line member of the Boer delegation, said that he believed any government of South Africa containing Kitchener and Milner would be unacceptable to the Boers. The British asked him to wait until a proposal had been agreed. A committee was then set up to draft this including Smuts, Hertzog, Kitchener and the Attorney-General of Cape Colony, Sir Richard Solomon (1850–1913). Smuts was encouraged to be conciliatory by Kitchener, who told him in private that he believed a Liberal government would soon be elected in Britain and that this would offer South Africa as a whole a constitution.21 Liberal leaders such as David Lloyd George (1863–1945) and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) had been bitterly critical of the war and would try to conciliate the Boer people. The committee suggested that the Boer commandos should immediately lay down their arms and the Boers living in exile should be allowed to return to South Africa. Prisoners would be released once they had accepted their status as British subjects. Those returning would not lose their freedom or their possessions, the Dutch language would be used in schools and courts, military administration in the Orange Free State and Transvaal would be replaced as soon as possible by a ‘representative system tending towards autonomy’, and the question of enfranchising the Africans would not be decided until after representative government had been agreed. The proposals contained detailed financial provisions so that notes and receipts issued by the Boer governments would be honoured.

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 51 Interest-free loans would also be offered to farmers to restore their homes destroyed in the war.22 The Afrikaner representatives wanted individual receipts issued by commando leaders in the Orange Free State to be honoured; the British negotiators balked at the sums and the principle involved. The Boers argued that generosity was essential if their people were going to accept the agreement. Milner maintained that any offer to pay for the war which the Boers had waged against them was going to be resented in Britain. They were willing to try to persuade London to take over the Boer governments’ debts, but it was an ‘extravagant proposal’ to ask them to take over individual debts incurred by commando leaders.23 ‘The Commission appears to think that we have no persons behind us whose feelings and prejudices (if you use that word) we are bound to take into consideration.’ If the British stance caused difficulty for the Boer leaders, the Boer proposal would cause ‘the greatest trouble’ with the British people. General Botha countered that it was cheaper to end the war by paying the notes than to go on fighting. Milner said that the British would rather pay a much larger sum for reconstruction than pay for the war waged against them.24 They would not retain hostile feelings towards the Boers and they would hope as soon as possible to win the confidence of their former enemies. It was the British delegates’ turn to argue the virtues of obfuscation. The more they inserted financial clauses in the final peace treaty, the more difficult it would be to persuade the British government and people to accept them. Kitchener assured the Boer delegates ‘that whenever the war is over each burgher will have the absolute right to obtain consideration for his position in every way, and that his interests will be protected under the new as under the old regime’.25 The draft agreement was sent to London, and the British government accepted that the terms should be put to the Boer national representatives at Vereeniging, who would decide whether to accept them. London agreed to give £3 million towards the cost of returning the Boers to their farms and enabling them to buy cattle, food and seed. In addition the government would provide interest-free loans to be used for the same purposes. The first article as laid down by the British government was that the Boers were to surrender their arms and acknowledge King Edward VII as their sovereign. The other terms were generally as agreed in Pretoria, and the Boers in Vereeniging were to decide before the evening of 31 May whether to accept them.26 The terms as notified could not be changed. Milner read another document to the Boers stating that the burghers in Cape Colony who had risen against the British government would be found guilty of high treason. Provided they had not committed murder, their punishment would be confined

52 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 to disenfranchisement. Only those who had previously held official positions under Britain and then aided the Boers would suffer more serious penalties, though they would not be executed.27 There were long and heated discussions amongst the Boer representatives when they saw the terms, though again they made little reference to financial terms, to the treatment of the Africans or other detailed issues. Once more they turned to the feasibility of continued resistance. Those opposed to acceptance proposed that they should immediately move to a vote, while the compromisers wanted the discussion continued. If some expatiated yet again on the sufferings of the families, others asked how they could go back and face their families if they sacrificed their independence after all the losses.28 General de Wet continued to throw his weight against compromise, arguing that there were sympathisers even in Britain, that the enemy had already made some concessions and that the British were hiding Continental newspapers from them lest they saw how widely their cause was supported in Europe.29 Hertzog professed to be undecided, though he thought that the negotiations at Vereeniging and the comments by General Botha and others would demoralise the commandos. Botha said that at the beginning of the war they had had 60,000 men, they could hope for help from Europe and they had food and provisions. Now they were delighted if their women were under British protection. Many burghers were fighting on the British side, their deputation had failed to evoke support in Europe, there were 31,600 prisoners of war, and 20,000 women and children had died in the camps. It was clearly better to come to an agreement with the enemy while opportunity offered.30 General Smuts said that from a military point of view they could go on fighting, so that their cause was not lost. But from a national viewpoint all the arguments were for making terms. Their cause was becoming worse by the day; they obtained sympathy but nothing else from the United States and Europe. If they continued to fight, the British might withdraw the offer of amnesty. It was perhaps God’s will that they should lead the nation through abasement to a nobler future and a brighter day. Vice-President Burger agreed.31 It seemed to many that the splits within and between the delegations would continue beyond the deadline set by the British. But Generals Botha and De la Rey convinced General De Wet in a crucial meeting that further division would only be harmful. The delegates from the Orange Free State and Transvaal then separated to debate the issue on their own. De Wet told the Orange Free State representatives that there was no chance of securing independence and that further arguments amongst themselves would harm the nation. Finally, by 54 votes to 6, the whole

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 53 group concluded that the war could not be continued. Their reply emphasised their appalling sufferings, the destruction of their farms, the death of the women in the camps, the threat from the ‘Kaffirs’ and the lack of food which made future struggle hopeless.32 It is not often that those facing defeat record their discussions on the military prospects so extensively as the Boers did at Vereeniging in 1902. The arguments were as interesting for what they did not say as for what they did, particularly their lack of reference to financial compensation or other detailed peace terms. Their ponderings were primarily about whether they could continue the struggle and whether anything was to be gained by doing so. They focused on the state of the commandos and of their families. The political issue revolved around their sovereignty. Could they hope to be masters of their own fate, or were they doomed to become members of the British Empire?33 Fortunately for the Boers, once their independence was abandoned, the British were in a position to show magnanimity for the sufferings they had caused. The second article of the Treaty of Vereeniging laid down that prisoners and burghers in exile would ‘be gradually brought back to their homes as soon as transport can be provided and their means of subsistence assured’. Article X explained that commissions on which local people would be represented in each district would be set up for the purpose of assisting the restoration of the people to their homes and supplying those who, owing to war losses, are unable to provide themselves with food, shelter, and the necessary amount of seed, stock, implements etc., indispensable to the resumption of their normal occupations. The article pointed out that the commissioners would have £3 million to assist with reconstruction.34 Milner had realised long before the Vereeniging negotiations that extensive provisions would have to be made to restore normal life35 In December 1901 he had proposed making a census to assess the extent of the problem. Officials would then have to work out how much stock, seed and other goods would be needed for resettlement. The tiny Repatriation Department set up in April 1902 busied itself making a census of the number of prisoners in British camps. It could not assess the stock they would need or place orders in Britain, Australia and elsewhere for the necessary goods and animals.36 After the peace treaty the Department rapidly came to employ nearly a thousand officials. Resettlement was rushed, and any statistics which were available were

54 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 ignored. It would have taken months to work out accurately the losses incurred by each individual in the war. In the meantime the ploughing season would have been lost. Instead the commissions could make advances and the burghers could buy what they needed on credit.37 However, Milner insisted that records should be kept of the loans made in case the Boers subsequently made further claims against the British for their losses. In fact there were great numbers of complaints from the Boers about the inequitable distribution of the compensation, but the more broad-minded amongst them admitted its generosity.38 The local commissions decided which Boers were entitled to aid or loans. They allotted animals for ploughing and corn for the new crops. In other words, they had considerable power. Former commando leaders were often prominent amongst their members. They represented authority and they were fairly efficient. The danger was that they would favour those who had fought with them rather than those who had surrendered and been imprisoned earlier in the war. The chairmen of the commissions were resident magistrates and there were many complaints about their competence for the task. In fact, the whole process was criticised both in Britain and South Africa both for unfairness and for the incompetence or bias of those involved. Accounts were confused, funds were misappropriated, responsibilities were not clearly laid down.39 But, as with war crimes trials after a war, a balance has to be struck between justice and speed. However infuriating it was to those who were disadvantaged by the scheme or who noticed its inefficiencies, this was an inevitable consequence of the need to restore a modicum of normal life as quickly as possible. The British paid £25 to each of the Boers who had suffered from the war. The balance of the £3 million was then divided between those who had suffered more extensively. In the Orange Free State 17,747 claims were investigated and only 615 were rejected altogether. The claimants said their losses amounted to nearly £18 million, though the British assessed the claims at £8.4 million.40 Plainly the compensation was inadequate, but it was a help towards restarting normal life. Additionally the British offered £2 million for British, Africans and neutrals who had suffered from the war. Of this total, £300,000 was given to the Africans. Claims for nearly £5 million were made by British subjects and the sums available were apportioned according to what were thought to be their deserts. The British also compensated Boers who had assisted them during the fighting and paid for the food requisitioned by the army. Thus, one of the officials involved in the Orange Free State commented later, the ‘incidence of the war and the distribution of the war’s burdens were borne, not by the people of

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 55 the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, but by the taxpayers of Great Britain’.41 In a monetary sense this was true, but the effort involved for the Boers in ‘starting again’ and remaking their lives on the veldt must have been immense. It was no wonder that they ‘took advantage’ of British generosity and demanded every penny they could. The British did not ‘buy’ the Boers’ surrender at the Peace of Vereeniging because the Boers appear never to have discussed this issue in their main debates. But British generosity somewhat reduced their bitterness in later years. Some would argue that the peace of Vereeniging was so conciliatory because the war was much more limited than the world wars. The losses in men and resources between 1914 and 1918 or between 1939 and 1945 were of a very different order of magnitude. Thus, the British were able to be much more magnanimous in 1902. But this is not the whole story. The British had not been exactly generous to the Chinese and others who had fought limited wars against them in the nineteenth century. Moreover, Boer guerrilla resistance was likely to frustrate and infuriate the British army, so encouraging harsh measures against the population. On the other hand, no British soldier could deny the courage and resourcefulness of the Boers. Man for man they were recognised to be better than British soldiers, and Boer victories early in the war caused a long period of national introspection and self-doubt in the metropolis. If the Boers committed war crimes, they were against Africans, whom they frequently shot out of hand when they found them supporting the British. But this was generally too complicated for British public opinion to grasp. Radicals admired the Boers for their fight for freedom; they generally preferred to ignore the less attractive aspects of Boer behaviour. When the cost of rebuilding the republics was discussed in Parliament on 4 June 1902 and 19 March 1903, Lloyd George said ‘nobody would grudge the money’, while one of his colleagues insisted that it was necessary ‘for rebuilding farmhouses which were wantonly and uselessly destroyed . . . in violation of the usages of war’.42 Although it was the Boers who had declared war and made the initial attacks, public opinion in Europe and the United States was very sympathetic to their cause. Botha and other commando leaders were treated as heroes wherever they went in Europe at the end of the war. Crowds poured into the streets to cheer them and to demonstrate their support. This may have limited British tactics. Certainly the War Minister, St John Brodrick (1856–1942), used it as an argument for moderating Kitchener’s more repressive schemes.43 The British wanted to do what they could in the peace terms to salve their own conscience and to win over their critics at home and abroad.

56 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 The war had cost the British perhaps £228 million. Kitchener had hoped that the Transvaal and Orange Free State should raise a loan to pay for this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach (1837–1916), believed that the burden on the colonies would be too great and that the loans raised there should be for the future development of the colonies. During the war he had had to issue four loans in Britain worth £135 million. He had also increased direct and indirect taxation. Income tax went up from 8 pence in the pound to 1s 3d. At the end of the conflict his Liberal opponent warned Parliament, ‘we have to learn how much dearer it is to repair a dilapidated State than it is to destroy it. That is the enormous task we have before us.’44 Yet despite the strain involved, in her biography of her father, General Smuts’ daughter claimed that ‘after five years Britain had paid out £9,500,000 in compensation to the Boers – more than three times the amount asked for by my father at Vereeniging’.45 Peace terms offered by democracies are influenced by ethical, strategic and political factors. The more overwhelming the victory, and thus the more the conquerors are responsible for the well-being of the conquered, the more likely they are to be magnanimous. In 1902 the British had achieved their central aim, which was to incorporate the Boer Republics in their empire, the opposite to the national self-determination which President Wilson was to establish a decade and a half later as the norm. London was now responsible for the well-being of the Afrikaner people, and the more the British could conciliate their former enemies, the more stable their Southern African possessions would become.46 In these circumstances humanity and stability pointed in the same direction. Imperialism is conventionally regarded as indefensible, but liberal imperialism could be as generous, inclusive and humane as many of the emergent nationalisms were to be mean, exclusive and vicious. The British were only too well aware that their behaviour towards the Boers had been widely criticised in the United States and Europe, and had tarnished both their military and their political reputations. They were regarded as the aggressors and as the ‘Goliath’ which had used every means to crush the Boer ‘David’. The British Empire had perhaps never been so isolated as it was at this time. While the British angrily rejected foreign criticisms, they were consciously or unconsciously anxious to re-establish their humanitarian credentials. The government also wanted to close the profound political division within Britain between the pro- and anti-Boer camps. Instinctively it moved to win the battle for the mind, just as it had previously determined to win the military battles on the veldt. If the original British sin of crushing Boer independence is ignored, the Treaty of Vereeniging can be seen as one

Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 57 of the most generous peace treaties which the twentieth century was to witness.

Notes 1 For a recent history of the war see Bill Nasson, The South African War, 1899–1902, London: Arnold, 1999. See also Christiaan De Wet, Three Years War, London: Constable, 1902, p. 393. For the origins of the war see R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936, pp. 246–249 and Nasson, The South African War, chapter 1. 2 Philip Magnus, Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist, London: Arrow Books, 1961, chapter 10; The Earl of Middleton, Records and Reactions, 1856–1939, London: John Murray, 1939, chapter 12; Mrs Frank Maxwell, Brigadier General Frank Maxwell: A Memoir and Some Letters, London: John Murray, 1921, chapter 3. 3 G.B. Beak, The Aftermath of War: An Account of the Repatriation of Boers and Natives in the Orange River Colony, 1902–1904, London: Edward Arnold, 1906, p. 1. See also Robert Rhodes James (ed.) Churchill Speaks, 1897–1963: Collected Speeches in Peace and War, Leicester: Windward, 1981, p. 30. Churchill said that on the one hand, if he were a Boer, he would be fighting alongside them. On the other hand, ‘compared with other wars, especially those in which a civil population took part, this war has been on the whole carried on with unusual humanity and generosity’. 4 De Wet, Three Years War, pp. 489 and 491. 5 Magnus, Kitchener, p. 182; Ensor, England, p. 345; Johannes Meintjes, General Louis Botha: A Biography, London: Cassell, 1970, chapter 6. 6 J.D. Kestell, Through Shot and Flame, London: Methuen, 1903, p. 281. 7 Ibid., pp. 282ff. 8 Ibid., pp. 289–290. 9 De Wet, Three Years War, p. 380. 10 Ibid., p. 384. 11 Ibid., p. 406. Although this is the standard account of the discussions, Meintjes cautions against the English translation. See Meintjes, Botha, p. 102 footnote. There is a list of delegates in Kestel, Shot and Flame, p. 301. 12 De Wet, Three Years War, pp. 406–407; Meintjes, Botha, pp. 100–102. 13 De Wet, Three Years War, p. 407; Maxwell, Memoir, pp. 99–100. See also Kestell, Shot and Flame. 14 De Wet, Three Years War, p. 416. 15 Ibid., p. 422; Kestel, Shot and Flame, p. 304. 16 De Wet, Three Years War, p. 435. 17 Ibid., p. 438. 18 Ibid., p. 446. 19 Cecil Headlam (ed.) The Milner Papers: South Africa, 1899–1905, volume 2, London: Cassell, 1933, p. 334; Erskine Childers (ed.) The Times History of the War in South Africa, 1899–1902, London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1907, p. 570. 20 De Wet, Three Years War, p. 449.

58 Kitchener, Milner, Smuts and De Wet in 1902 21 J.C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts, London: Cassell, 1952, p. 83. Meinjes, Botha, p. 104, suggests that the conversation may have been between Kitchener and Botha. 22 De Wet, Three Years War, pp. 451ff. 23 Ibid., p. 456. 24 Ibid., p. 457. 25 Ibid., p. 462. 26 Ibid., p. 468. 27 Ibid., p. 469. 28 Ibid., p. 476. 29 Ibid., p. 483. 30 Ibid., p. 491. 31 Ibid., p. 495. 32 Ibid., p. 505. 33 Once they had accepted British terms, most Boer leaders regarded themselves as utterly bound to support the Empire; see Meintjes, Botha, pp. 112–119. 34 Coleman Phillipson, Termination of War and Treaties of Peace, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916, pp. 423–424. 35 Beak, Aftermath of War, p. 34. 36 Ibid., p. 36. 37 Ibid., p. 47. 38 Smuts, Smuts, p. 90. For continued pressure on the British to pardon Boers held after the war and to be generous towards their former enemies see W.K. Hancock and J. Van Der Poel (eds) Selections from the Smuts Papers, volume 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 40, 62 and 70. See also p. 25 for Smuts’ belief that ‘it is good policy to bury the memories of this war in everlasting oblivion and to close the eyes to many things that would not bear the light of day’. 39 Beak, Aftermath of War, p. 58. 40 Ibid., p. 242. 41 Ibid., p. 253. 42 Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 4 June 1902, column 1481, and 19 March 1903, column 1267. See also James, Churchill Speaks, p. 32. 43 Magnus, Kitchener, p. 184. 44 Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 4 June 1902, column 1465. 45 Smuts, Smuts, p. 90. 46 On the long-term Afrikaner views of the war see Nasson, South African War, chapter 9.

5

Witte and Komura in 1905 Indemnities and exactions

Over no other aspect of peacemaking have Western attitudes fluctuated more violently during the past two hundred years than the imposition of indemnities or reparations on defeated nations. Although they were sanctioned by Vattel and other international lawyers, the demand for indemnities was relatively rare after eighteenth-century European wars. It was the French revolutionaries and Napoleon who changed this convention by forcing their defeated enemies to pay for their own conquest. In the nineteenth century the Russians and the British forced non-European states to pay indemnities, and Bismarck ‘repatriated’ the system to Europe after his victories against Denmark, Austria and France. But Russia showed in 1905 that such payments were still regarded as bitterly humiliating and that it would rather continue its unsuccessful war against Japan than subsidise its conqueror. The cost of the First World War and the reluctance or inability of the belligerents to pay for it out of taxation made it inevitable that indemnities would play a large part in any settlement. Germany imposed reparations on the new Soviet government in 1918 and the Allies tried to compel Germany to pay reparations in the 1920s. The failure of these efforts and the bitterness they caused swung democratic opinion once more against indemnities, though Hitler and Tojo showed for a time in the Second World War that it was possible to follow Napoleonic precedent and systematically loot conquered nations. The refusal to allow the Soviets to reciprocate and strip the Western zones of Germany after 1945 exacerbated tensions in East-West relations and was one of the milestones on the path to the Cold War. Throughout the nineteenth century Russia imposed indemnities on its defeated enemies. The Ottoman Empire, in particular, was forced to pay repeatedly for its own defeat. In 1905 the boot was on the other foot. Russian forces were being comprehensively defeated by the Japanese on land and sea. Now the Japanese demanded a sufficient

60 Witte and Komura in 1905 indemnity to pay for the war. They had gained a vast booty from the Chinese after their victory against Beijing in 1895 and they were determined not to burden their growing economy with heavy debts.1 The Tsar’s government was equally determined to reject these demands, partly because of its own financial weakness and partly because it regarded such a claim as a further humiliation and a threat to its Great Power status.2 There were clear signs of the impending difficulty over indemnities even before peace talks began in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July 1905. When the Japanese minister in Washington, Kogoro Takahira (1854–1926), had discussed possible peace terms with President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) on 29 March 1905, Roosevelt advised the Japanese to abandon the idea of an indemnity as Russia would be unable to pay. Takahira denied this.3 The following week the French Foreign Minister, Theophile Delcassé (1852–1923), suggested to the Japanese minister in Paris that Russia would be happy to open peace talks if Tokyo would abandon demands for Russian territory or an indemnity. The Japanese said that they wanted talks without preconditions.4 In the middle of May the Japanese asked Roosevelt whether he thought it would be a good time to hold negotiations, but he warned that the Russians were hoping for a naval victory and suggested they wait for a while.5 After the stunning Japanese naval victory at Tsushima on 27 May, Roosevelt advised the Japanese that the time for talks had come; however, he again warned that ‘Russia’s most serious worry will be indemnity. Considering Russia’s financial difficulties, the indemnity problem will almost beyond doubt hamper progress in the negotiations.’6 At the same time, Roosevelt told the Russians that they would have to lose some territory and expect to pay for the maintenance of the 100,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands. Roosevelt told Takahira what he had said and the Japanese minister replied that when there had been reports in London that Japan would ask for an indemnity of $1,000 million, the banker Sir Nathan Rothschild (1840–1915) had said that he could raise this on Russia’s behalf under certain conditions. Takahira, who was immensely experienced, having served as his country’s Vice Foreign Minister and for many years in Washington, reminded Roosevelt that the Germans had exacted a similar amount from France in 1871, showing once again how important precedent was over such issues.7 Japan’s success in forcing indemnities from the Chinese in 1895, its spectacular victories in the Russo-Japanese War, combined with its difficulties in raising money for the war, led Tokyo to put a premium on gaining indemnities. In July 1904 the Japanese Foreign Minister,

Witte and Komura in 1905 61 Jutaro Komura (1855–1911), had listed ‘reparations for war expenditures’ as the first demand to be made on St Petersburg.8 However, given the financial and political objections which they knew the Russians would raise, the Japanese cabinet described reparations on 21 April 1905 as one of the desirable, though not absolutely necessary, conditions which they would demand in any negotiations.9 Similarly, in the instructions given to the Japanese plenipotentiaries, reparations were listed as the first of the ‘relatively necessary conditions’, above surrender of Russian warships in neutral ports, cession of the island of Sakhalin and grant of fishery rights, but below the ‘absolutely necessary’ conditions such as Japan’s freedom of action in Korea, Russian withdrawal from Manchuria and the lease of the Liaotung Peninsula.10 Roosevelt invited the Japanese and Russians to meet for peace talks at Portsmouth in New Hampshire in August 1905. Komura, now acting as plenipotentiary, gave his Russian equivalent, Count Sergei Witte (1849–1915), Japan’s terms at the first plenary session of the talks on 10 August. The ninth of these terms was that Russia was to repay to Japan ‘the actual expenses of the war’. At the second session Witte accepted most of the key Japanese demands, including Tokyo’s ‘paramount political, military and economic interests’ in Korea, the complete Russian evacuation of Manchuria and the lease to Japan of the Liaotung Peninsula. However, Witte refused to cede the island of Sakhalin (which Japan had just seized), to agree to a formal limit on the number of Russian ships in Vladivostok or to hand over warships interned in China and elsewhere. Above all, Witte rejected the proposed article 9 on indemnities: ‘reimbursement of war expenses is only to be made by a conquered country, whereas Russia is not conquered. A country could not consider herself conquered when its territory has scarcely been attacked by the enemy.’ Witte boasted that even if Japan conquered the entire maritime province including the great port of Vladivostok, his country would keep fighting. Russia had not been made to pay an indemnity when the French and British had seized Sevastopol in the Crimea in 1856, therefore St Petersburg was hardly likely to pay an indemnity now, though it was willing to pay the expenses incurred by prisoners of war.11 In the discussions within the Tsar’s government and the delegation the Russians had shown an impressive inability to put themselves in their enemies’ position. One delegate had claimed that Russia had only once before paid an indemnity, and that was after the Pruth campaign in the eighteenth century when Peter the Great had been routed by the Ottomans.12 All the occasions when St Petersburg had forced other

62 Witte and Komura in 1905 states to pay reparations were passed over because they only reinforced the Russians’ feelings of humilation.13 The distinguished international lawyer Professor Martens, from the University of St Petersburg, was more aware than anyone else of such precedents, but he maintained that to abandon Sakhalin or to pay an indemnity would only stir up so much anger in Russia as to ‘act as a firebrand in future collisions and misunderstandings’. Witte pointed out that the Japanese would want to restrict Russian power for as long as possible, hence the demand for an indemnity, but in any case, Russian power would be hamstrung for some time to come. Witte himself was hampered in the negotiations by the hard line taken by the Tsar’s government. After he had already accepted the Japanese demand for fishing rights around the Russian coasts and for control over the railway in southern Manchuria on the second day of the conference, St Petersburg asked him to reject these proposals. Even though he ignored his government’s most unrealistic demands, Witte was pessimistic about the outcome of the conference and told his assistants to find out when the next ships were leaving for Europe. The Russian government then agreed to Witte’s concessions, though he told his colleagues that the government lacked any clear plan, wished to shift responsibility onto his shoulders and combined arrogance with fear.14 For the next week Witte and Komura discussed the details of the articles they had generally agreed and their disagreements over Sakhalin. One member of the Russian delegation, Korostovetz, kept a diary which paints a vivid picture of the negotiations: Komura and Takahira were calm and well prepared with all the documents at their fingertips; Witte was nervous and restless, tearing up pieces of paper and shifting in his chair. He was less well prepared and very occasionally made unwise comments, though he was the one who ultimately gained most from the negotiations. Baron Rosen, the second member of the Russian delegation, who had been a popular Russian minister to Tokyo until the outbreak of war and was now ambassador in Washington, was calmer than Witte. He had the advantage of knowing Komura and the other Japanese delegates very well. The delegates surrounded themselves with cigarette smoke inside the negotiating chamber in the Navy Yard, while journalists surrounded them outside. Witte tried to win the press over to the Russian viewpoint by his friendly and open approach. He believed that he scored over the Japanese in these respects. No doubt he also benefited from American racism.15 Although he had served as Minister of Transport and as Minister of Finance, and was now President of the Council of Ministers, Witte’s personal position was weaker than it seemed. He was regarded by the

Witte and Komura in 1905 63 Tsar and Russian conservatives as far too liberal and he was not the Tsar’s first or even second choice as chief negotiator. It was only when the Russian ambassadors in Paris and Rome refused the offer that Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918) turned to Witte.16 He was almost inevitably going to be blamed either for allowing the negotiations to fail and thus causing further Russian defeats and loss of life, or for making concessions that were unnecessary. Komura’s position was thus stronger, not only because the Japanese forces were so overwhelmingly victorious but because the Japanese government was more united behind its demands. But there were also weaknesses in his position, stemming from the excessive expectations of the Japanese people, who underestimated the military and financial problems which would have occurred if the war had continued.17 On 17 August 1905 the negotiations reverted to indemnities. Komura passed Witte a memorandum which argued that his government was not demanding anything unusual or humiliating. During the negotiations each side appealed to public opinion. Komura claimed that the ‘whole civilised world’ accepted the justice of the Japanese demand, which rested on ‘nothing more than the recognition of the historical fact that up to this time the arms of Japan have been successful’. Witte said that his government would prefer a continuation of the war to acceptance of the financial demands: ‘Russia cannot pay the expenses which Japan has incurred in inflicting damages on Russia.’ Witte went on to argue that only if Japanese forces entered Moscow or St Petersburg would his government regard itself as defeated. Falling back on historical analogies, he pointed out that Napoleon had actually taken Moscow but had still been unable to dictate terms. In an ironic reversion to the debates between Whigs and Tories in 1815, Komura argued that this was because Napoleon fought as an individual whereas the Japanese nation was united behind the current struggle. Witte denied that Napoleon represented only himself and argued that Japan was taking advantage of its opportunity to advance its ‘egotistic interests’. Komura replied that the terms he had put forward were regarded as moderate by world opinion. Witte disputed this and, as they were unable to make progress on the issue, the two sides discussed the Russian warships interned in China. Witte cabled the Russian Foreign Minister that the negotiations were on the brink of breaking down and that this would be a disaster for Russia. The Tsar minuted on Witte’s telegram, ‘not an inch of land, not a rouble of indemnities’.18 Komura’s claim that ‘the whole civilised world’ sympathised with his country’s demands was, as he well knew, something of an exaggeration. But there were plenty of commentators who supported Japan’s

64 Witte and Komura in 1905 demands for indemnities and other forms of compensation. For example, in Britain the well-known journalist Eltzbacher argued that reparations were in order because Japan had fought a defensive war. In view of Japan’s pre-emptive attack on the Russian fleet outside Port Arthur, which began the war, such a claim was somewhat strange, but Eltzbacher suggested that the Japanese should calculate the costs of the war, including supporting widows and wounded, and the impact on trade. It should then insist on Russia paying for these. If the Russians pleaded their poverty, they should tax the nobility more heavily and reduce military expenditure.19 With the negotiations still deadlocked the following day, Komura agreed to drop the demands for the Russian warships interned in China and for limiting Russian naval forces in Asia, if the Russians would cede Sakhalin and pay an indemnity. Instead Witte proposed a confidential discussion between the plenipotentiaries in which he suggested that his instructions left him no leeway over Sakhalin and indemnities. Furthermore, the Russian people were demanding the continuation of the war. However, going against the Tsar’s demands, he asked if a compromise were possible under which Russia would cede the wealthier southern part of Sakhalin, keeping the northern part, which was necessary for the defence of the Amur River region. Komura replied, quite reasonably, that public opinion was more important in Japan than Russia and the public were demanding the whole of Sakhalin and the Ussuri River region. Japanese troops had recently seized Sakhalin but he might be able to persuade his government to accept a division of the island if Russia paid compensation for the northern part. According to the Japanese account, Witte said this seemed reasonable and offered to put the compromise to his government. Komura said that Japan would expect 1,200 million yen to secure the deal.20 Before the private session where this compromise was discussed, the Japanese decided to see if, for the first time, President Roosevelt could use his good offices to engineer a compromise and persuade the Russians to pay an indemnity. Komura sent his colleague Kentaro Kaneko (1853–1942), who had been a friend of the US President for many years, to talk to Roosevelt at his home in Oyster Bay near New York. Komura told Kaneko that Japan would insist on an indemnity of 1,000 million yen: ‘the reason is that, although our claim is called reimbursement, it is in fact nothing other than reparations for our military expenditure’.21 Subsequently Roosevelt saw the Russian emissary Baron Rosen and later wrote to the Tsar and to Witte advising them to compromise. If Japan were prepared to give up half the island of Sakhalin, it was not unreasonable for Russia to pay ‘compensation

Witte and Komura in 1905 65 for it’. Furthermore, if Russia refused the terms offered, it was likely to lose eastern Siberia.22 At the same time, according to Witte’s account, Roosevelt was leaning on the Japanese and warning them of the impossibility of seeming to make war for the sake of an indemnity: I deem it my duty to say that I do not consider her demand for an indemnity just. She has occupied no Russian territory except Sakhalin, and the latter she has still to retain. I think that Russia will refuse to pay and that the common opinion of the civilized world will support her in her refusal to pay the enormous sum which is being demanded or anything like that sum.23 The following day the President wrote again: ‘the continuation of the war for the purpose of getting from Russia a large sum of money . . . in my opinion would not be right’.24 Ignorant of these messages, Witte also began to play on the weakness of the Japanese position. He asked Komura hypothetically whether, if Russia offered to give up the whole of Sakhalin, Japan would abandon its claim to ‘compensation’ or indemnities. Komura said the compromise proposed earlier was preferable but Witte said he believed that the Russian government would never accept indemnities under whatever name.25 He had cornered the Japanese into appearing to fight for money. When Kaneko saw Roosevelt again, the President asked if 600 million yen for the return of Sakhalin and 150 million yen for the maintenance of prisoners of war would be acceptable to Japan. Kaneko told Roosevelt that the Japanese government would not agree. However the delegation was subsequently informed by Tokyo that a reduced indemnity was acceptable.26 When the Russians proved obdurate, Roosevelt again telegraphed the Tsar urging him to compromise, and it was actually the US minister in St Petersburg, George Meyer (1858– 1943), who persuaded the Tsar that Witte’s original proposal for the division of Sakhalin was not an insult to Russian honour because Russia had been in possession of the whole island for such a short time.27 The climax of the negotiations came on 28 August when the Japanese finally gave way and abandoned their claim for an indemnity. Witte had compromised to the extent of renouncing the south of Sakhalin but otherwise he had obtained everything that the Russians could have hoped. The Russian Finance Minister and future Prime Minister, Vladimir Kokovstov (1853–1943), suggested in his memoirs that this was only because of the Tsar’s absolute insistence on refusing to pay an indemnity. There is a good deal in this, but the strategy was very

66 Witte and Komura in 1905 dangerous. The Tsar was bent on rejecting any concessions over Sakhalin or indemnities and this could have led to the continuation of the war and to the loss of Vladivostok and eastern Siberia. On the other side the Japanese public were bitterly disappointed by the treaty’s failure to include indemnities. Their unrealistic and over-ambitious idea of what Komura might have achieved led to riots. For some time the US mission in Tokyo had to be guarded from attack; US diplomats were threatened and government ministers received letters encouraging them to commit suicide. The Russian public were equally unrealistic and failed to treat Witte and the other delegates with the acclaim which they deserved, even if well-informed observers realised that the peace treaty might have included much worse terms, given the unbroken series of Russian defeats.28 On both sides public opinion was belligerent and reflected irreconcilable and dangerous views about the justice of their cause. Witte’s diplomatic achievement is all the more astonishing when it is put into the context of the history of indemnities in the nineteenth century. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire lived on exactions, loot and indemnities. The revolutionaries could not afford to pay or supply their victorious armies so they lived off occupied territory.29 Once conquered, states were compelled to take depreciated French coins at their face value; they were also forced to ‘donate’ food. Between the Rhine and the Maas the inhabitants claimed that food and goods worth 257.5 million livres in hard currency had been sequestered by French armies up to 1796.30 The invaders laid down their demands in great detail. Under the armistice of Piacenza in May 1796, the Duke of Parma had to pay France 2 million livres and hand over 700 horses, together with 20 paintings as well as provisions and fodder. By the armistice of Bologna in the same year the Pope had to pay 15 million livres, 5.5 million in goods, provisions, etc. and hand over 100 paintings, busts and statues together with 500 manuscripts.31 A decade later, when Napoleon had perfected Revolutionary methods, Prussia was heavily garrisoned by French forces after its traumatic defeat. Their food, drink and heating had to be supplied by the impoverished Prussian government, which had seen much of its territory seized and its revenues halved. Each day every French soldier was to receive 71⁄2 hectograms of bread, 33⁄4 hectograms of meat, 3 decagrams of vegetables, 1⁄6 kilogram of salt and a ration of liquids composed of wine, beer or vinegar.32 In the interests of economic propriety Napoleon forced the governments which he established on the ruins of his defeated enemies to take over the debts of their predecessors as well as to pay for his wars.

Witte and Komura in 1905 67 Inevitably their indebtedness gradually increased. Bavarian debts rose from 20 million florins at the end of the eighteenth century to 105 million in 1818. Westphalian finances sank under the burdens of supporting 11–12,000 French soldiers and contributing to the imperial treasury. Napoleon kept 40,000 men in Naples in 1806 though its new ruler, Napoleon’s brother Joseph, believed it was capable of supporting only 24,000.33 Despite the system of billeting soldiers on the conquered peoples, wars would have cost the French 5,100 million francs from 1806 to 1814. However, 515 million came in indemnities from Prussia and 315 million from Austria after their various defeats. Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands all suffered exactions in the same way. Spain had to pay a ‘neutrality subsidy’ of 6 million francs in October 1803 but only succeeded by borrowing from the Amsterdam bankers and at the cost of weakening its government. The Dutch were also impoverished by the occupiers, and when Louis Napoleon became their ruler he so sympathised with their position that he was eventually sacked and disowned by his brother.34 It was hardly surprising that even those who had initially welcomed the French as liberators from the old political, religious and economic system very often turned against them. Of course there were collaborators, but many of the conquered peoples became increasingly nationalistic and anti-French. There were striking contrasts between the French and British methods of warmaking at that time. The British benefited dramatically by monopolising trade beyond Europe, but they used the profits made to provide subsidies to keep their allies in the war; the French exacted money from the conquered to maintain their empire. London sent subsidies to Austria in 1793, to Austria and Prussia in 1794–95, to Prussia in 1797, to Russia in 1799, to Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1800. The highest subsidies came in the last years of the war from 1812 onwards when the British were paying most of the European states locked in the anti-French coalition. The Waterloo campaign alone in 1815 cost the British £7 million in subsidies.35 The economists Deane and Cole estimate the British national income at £232 million in 1801 and £301 million in 1811. The total cost of war for Britain between 1793 and 1815 was £1,039 million. In other words, the cost was some three to four times the national product, and loans to just one of their allies amounted to about one-tenth of the annual national income. London cancelled all but £2.5 million of the debt to Austria after the fighting.36 At the end of the Napoleonic Wars the French indemnity was set at 700 million francs, to be paid over five years without interest.37 Given

68 Witte and Komura in 1905 the size of the French population and national product, the burden was proportionately lighter than those the French had imposed on the Prussians, Dutch and others. The reparations were supposed to be used in part for building fortifications in the Netherlands, Germany and northern Italy to prevent future French expansion. Much of the money nevertheless disappeared into national treasuries, except possibly in the Netherlands, where the Duke of Wellington oversaw the construction of the fortifications.38 Given the parlous state of the various economies after years of French domination, such peculation was hardly surprising. Unfortunately for those defeated in subsequent nineteenth-century wars, the French example proved infectious, and indemnities were increasingly common.39 Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Russians gradually pushed the Turkish Empire out of the Caucasus and the Balkans. In 1829 they defeated the Turkish armies at the battle of Adrianople and forced the Turks to accept Greek independence. At the subsequent treaty the Turkish government agreed to pay the Russian Tsar 1.5 million Dutch ducats to indemnify the ‘claims of the respective subjects and merchants . . . for the losses of the respective subjects and merchants . . . since the War of 1806’.40 The Turks also had to pay 10 million ducats for the cost of the war, although the sum could be provided in kind rather than cash. Three years later the British and French joined the Russians in demarcating the borders between Greece and Turkey. They agreed that it should be Turkey this time which should receive an indemnity of 30–40 million Turkish piastres to compensate the Sultan for his losses of territory.41 In the 1840s Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), the Whig Foreign Minister, and his Tory successors took up the Napoleonic system of indemnities. After imposing the Treaty of Nanking on China, they forced the Chinese to cede Hong Kong and to allow British merchants to trade in other ports. The Chinese were compelled to pay 6 million dollars for the opium which the British had given up in order to secure the release of their officials held by the Chinese. The Chinese also had to pay $3 million, which the British claimed they owed to their traders, and $12 million towards the cost of the war. Palmerston boasted in the Commons that this was the first British war that had paid for itself, but there were critics who were horrified by this ‘achievement’ and denounced the whole process. Lord Stanhope (1805–75), the historian and politician, told the House of Lords in May 1840, ‘whatever the result of the war might be, it would be a war of the most flagrant injustice, utterly indefensible’.42 Sino-British friction continued, and in the Treaty of Tientsin in June 1858 Britain forced the Chinese to accept a British ambassador, to open further ports to trade and to pay further

Witte and Komura in 1905 69 indemnities. Two years later the Convention of Peking modified these terms by forcing the Chinese to pay 2 million taels to British merchants for their losses in the various conflicts and 6 million taels for war expenses. China was in fact systematically looted by its enemies down to the Boxer rebellion at the turn of the century. Then again the foreign powers demanded very heavy indemnities, to be paid over forty years. Fortunately the United States and Britain eventually abandoned their claims or used them to pay for educational projects in China.43 Bismarck brought the indemnity system back to Europe during his campaigns to unite Germany under Prussian control. After the Austrians’ defeat in 1866 they agreed at the Treaty of Nikolsburg to pay 40 million Prussian thalers towards the cost of the war. Five million of this was deducted for the support which the Austrians would provide for Prussian forces on their territory until the conclusion of the agreement, and 15 million which the Danes had owed to Austria since they had been defeated by a joint Austro-Prussian force two years earlier, leaving the Austrians to pay just 20 million thalers in cash.44 Bismarck applied the same principle to much more devastating effect against France after its defeat in 1871. The treaty laid down that German forces would gradually be withdrawn as the French paid the 5,000 million francs demanded. The German garrison troops would meanwhile be maintained at French expense. Five hundred million francs was to be paid by the French within thirty days of the French government reestablishing itself in Paris, and the last of the indemnity had to be paid before March 1874. In the meantime, interest would be charged at 5 per cent. The amounts involved were considered so extraordinary at the time that many doubted the French would be able to pay. They more than covered German expenses for the war, though the French government managed to borrow the sums necessary and to end the hated occupation. The indemnity was so high that the experience fixed itself in the European mind, and many writers, like the British journalist and anti-war publicist Norman Angell (1872–1967), apparently saw this as the only nineteenth-century example of post-war indemnities.45 Meanwhile, outside Europe victors continued to impose indemnities on their defeated enemies. After the First World War Giichi Ono, councillor of the Japanese Finance Department, produced a monograph for Oxford University Press on the expenditures of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. What this detailed study showed in fact was that there were no net expenditures for Japan.46 The outlays for military and administrative expenses were just over 236 million yen. However, Japan received 311 million yen from the Chinese. This was increased by nearly 45 million yen when Japan was forced by the European powers to hand

70 Witte and Komura in 1905 the Liaotung Peninsula back to China, and interest on the indemnity amounted to nearly 9 million yen. Thus Tokyo was able to fight the war and to increase the wartime establishment of its army from 200,000 men to 600,000, all at the expense of the Chinese peasantry. It was sufficiently recompensed to give 20 million yen to the royal family, to set aside other funds to meet natural disasters and to pay off the debts incurred during the war. A committee had proposed in 1893 that Japan should move to the gold standard, and this now became possible.47 It was hardly surprising that Tokyo wished to repeat this exercise in 1905. Its failure to do so burdened Japanese government expenditure for the next decade. When Gotaro Ogawa wrote his account of the expenditures of the Russo-Japanese war in 1923, he complained, ‘even to this day, the people of Japan are groaning under a heavy burden of taxation, as a result of the war with Russia’.48 The system of indemnities had a deleterious effect on international relations in the nineteenth century because it encouraged states to feel that victory would enable them to escape the costs of war. Greed led to war, or prolonged it. Japanese ‘need’ for an indemnity could easily have led to the continuation of war in 1905. Norman Angell’s widely read study The Great Illusion, published in 1908, was an attempt to warn statesmen that the assumption that war could be made to pay was an illusion. The trouble was that war had been made to pay in 1842, 1871 and 1895. Table 5.1 gives some idea of the indemnities demanded between the French Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles. The figures in Table 5.1 take no account of the gradual increase in wealth. On the face of it, the French had to pay seven times as much in 1871 as in 1815, but the French GNP had grown between 1830 and 1870 from $8.5 billion to $16.8 billion. GDP per head had also risen by 50 per cent. German reparations were set, in turn, some thirty-three times higher in 1921 than French reparations were in 1871, but Germany was richer than France and the German GDP had more than tripled since 1871.49 No other modern peace settlement has caused so much controversy as the Versailles treaty after the First World War, and the reparations imposed on Germany were more responsible for this controversy and for the harsh reputation of the treaty than any other feature. Yet in their own terms, both the supporters and the critics of reparations had a powerful case. The victors demanded indemnities because they were, as we have seen, commonplace after decisive victories and, while Russian campaigns against the Turks or British campaigns against the Chinese might have been considered to offer no parallel, the German exaction of reparations from France in 1871 was very clearly remembered, and

Witte and Komura in 1905 71 Table 5.1 Scale of indemnities, 1808–1921 Date

Defeated state

Indemnities

1808

Prussia

140 million francs

1809

Prussia

120 million francs

Austria

85 million francs

1815

France

700 million francs

1829

Turkey

30–40 million piastres

1842

China

21 million dollars

1871

France

5,000 million francs

1877

Turkey

310 million roubles

1882

Turkey

802 million francs

1895

China

367 million yen

1900

China (Boxers)

450 million taels

1918

Soviet Union

6,000 million marks

1921

Germany

33,000 million dollars

not only in Paris. The Germans had planned, throughout the war, to recoup their costs by imposing indemnities on the Allies, and they had in fact demanded heavy indemnities from the Russians after the Russian defeat in 1917. The First World War had been particularly long, bitter and expensive, leaving the victors with debts which threatened to burden them for the next half-century. In 1913–14 the interest payable on Britain’s internal debt was 9.6 per cent of budget receipts; it was 36.4 per cent in 1925–6. Britain had paid for some 17 per cent of the costs of the war through taxation and had borrowed the rest. The other European states had relied far more on borrowing and printing money. France had raised no part of the extra costs of the war through taxation, while Germany had spent 204 billion marks and raised all but 199 billion through internal loans.50 The First World War had been fought mainly in northern France and Belgium. Much of the area was devastated, some of the havoc being wreaked deliberately by the Germans during their retreat, when they seemed determined to destroy their enemy’s industrial capacity. Even the German government admitted that it needed to make reparations for such damage, although the British Treasury official and economist Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) argued that Paris exaggerated its monetary value.51 Lloyd George and other ministers had promised the newly

72 Witte and Komura in 1905 expanded electorate that the government would exact reparations for such damage if re-elected. Both Lloyd George and the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), were afraid of appearing too liberal towards the Germans in front of their electorates, though modern historians have shown that the rapacity of the French has been exaggerated and that some of their demands were intended as a bargaining counter with the Allies.52 There were Frenchmen who naturally wanted to use reparations to keep Germany weak, though they did not initially dominate French policy at the Paris peace conference.53 Critics of the reparations argued that the German Republic needed fostering, not burdening, that reparations were not included in the fourteen points offered Germany by President Wilson to encourage Berlin to make peace,54 and that the total demanded of $33 billion was too large for Germany to pay55 and took no account of the ‘transfer’ problem, the difficulty of transferring resources from one country to another. However, at the time, the transfer issue was bedevilled by interAllied debts. Britain was, for example, to repay its debt to the United States over the next sixty-two years. Payment was to begin at $161 million a year and to grow to $180 million in the 1950s, finally ending in December 1984, sixty-six years after the end of the war. Although Britain’s debts to the United States amounted to $11,000 million or about one-third of the German reparations bill, the other fifteen Allies were also expected to transfer a similar amount to the United States to pay for the war. The knowledge that their indebtedness to the United States amounted to two-thirds of the reparations bill was hardly likely to increase Allied generosity towards Germany or to make the Allies feel that Germany had a peculiar transfer problem that did not affect themselves. In France’s case this propensity was increased by the damage to its territory, in Britain’s by the knowledge that it had lent its allies more than it had borrowed from the United States. Lloyd George suggested that a reduction or cancellation of inter-Allied indebtedness might be the answer, but this was rejected by Wilson on 3 November 1920 on the grounds that it was unacceptable to Congress or US public opinion. As it was, the interest eventually agreed on Allied loans was less than Congress was demanding and the time allowed for repayment was more than double. The Americans saw the settlement as generous; the British, comparing it with their own behaviour in the Napoleonic Wars and current proposals, saw it as unwise and parsimonious. The publication of Keynes’ book The Economic Consequences of the Peace encouraged the Germans to oppose reparations. They ignored what they had done to France in 1871, to Russia in 1918 and what they had planned to do to the French and British. The government

Witte and Komura in 1905 73 depreciated its own currency in the early 1920s to demonstrate its inability to pay without damaging the international economy. By doing so it turned its internal loans into taxation and liquidated its debts, creating a stark contrast to the position of the Allied governments. Whether the debt-free Germans could have paid the $33 billion which the Allies had demanded in May 1921 is still debated by historians. The point was that they were determined not to do so. Just as Washington failed to impose Reconstruction on the South after the American Civil War, so that democracies found it impossible to enforce payments. In the event the Germans borrowed more than they ever paid to the Allies and repudiated their obligations in the Great Depression.56 Politically and economically the experience was equally disastrous. Reparations failed so badly in the inter-war period because of German opposition that it was difficult to persuade democratic governments afterwards that they could ever be worthwhile or that war could pay.57 Yet Adolf Hitler made war profitable again in the 1940s, at least for a while, by resorting to the most ruthless Napoleonic methods. It is estimated that in 1940–1 Germany exacted £1,000 million from its defeated enemies, and the following year this rose to £1,350 millions. The French, Dutch, Greeks and others were reduced to beggary, as their food, raw materials, industrial products, art and gold were carried away.58 Typically General Doyen, the French delegate to the FrancoGerman Armistice Commission, had to plead with his opposite number in April 1941 for the inhabitants of northern France, where conditions were worst, to try to avoid mass starvation.59 Yet France was relatively fortunate compared to Greece, Poland and other ‘colonies’. Greece suffered partly because it was already poor and dependent on maritime imports of grain, which ended when the Nazis seized the country, and partly because it had few industries which the Germans could make use of to aid their war effort. Transportation within the country was hindered by German seizures; food production declined and key items, such as olive oil, were taken by the conquerors. In so far as the rationing system was effective, it provided far less than the normal level of subsistence, amounting to some 160 grams of bread a day, occasional sugar, no fats or animal protein and no soap. This compares with the 500 grams of bread, 100 grams of meat, 150 of rice, 50 of olive oil, 50 grams of sugar and 200 of milk which would have provided a subsistence diet.60 Conditions in the cities were worst, and some 1,000 people a day were dying during the first winter of the occupation in the Athens–Piraeus area alone. Black market rates for food were so high that it was impossible for the ordinary Greek to make use of this supply. What was happening was the transfer of coins, gold,

74 Witte and Komura in 1905 artwork, jewels, anything negotiable from wealthier Greeks to the Germans and their collaborators.61 The situation in Eastern Europe varied according to whether the regime was collaborationist, as in Slovakia and Hungary, or whether the particular race were destined for slavery and annihilation. Poles were amongst the worst treated. The Polish language was forbidden and hundreds of thousands of Poles and other Slavs were induced or compelled to leave for Germany to slave for the ‘master race’.62 This freed German men so that they could serve in the armed forces and avoided the necessity of forcing German women to work. Ironically, Norman Angell had devoted one whole chapter of The Great Illusion to mocking the idea that a civilised nation could loot a conquered people. He ridiculed the notion of a modern equivalent of the Vikings landing in Essex and carrying away food and other necessities. Once these were taken away, they would simply displace the products of the conqueror and cause unemployment in his country. Similarly, a conqueror who looted the Bank of England would dislocate the modern financial system when he carried the gold back to his own treasury. The very fact that small nations, like Switzerland, were often richer than larger ones showed that military power was of little use in protecting or creating wealth.63 All the policies which Angell had mocked were carried out by Germany during the Second World War but with far more brutality than he had ever dreamt possible. In his last political book, The Steep Places, published in 1947, Angell was very quiet about the line of argument which had made his reputation, although the dust jacket suggested, rightly enough, that Britain’s destitution in 1947 showed how little economic benefit a democracy gained from the war.64 Of course, it is debatable how long Hitler’s economic system could have worked. By reducing the conquered states to beggary, the Germans did undermine their economic potential. In the short term their methods may have assisted their war effort, but it was notable that by the end of the conflict Germany and Japan were almost on the same economic level as their victims. In part this was a tribute to the success of the Allied blockade, although that was not the only reason for the general economic collapse and widespread starvation.65 After the German surrender in 1945, reparation became a major issue between the victorious Allies because the Soviet sufferings had been so great that the Soviet Union believed it was justified in stripping German industry, just as the Germans had stripped Russia. On the other hand, the British and Americans argued that the only way to avoid starvation in their occupation zones was to allow factories to resume work. At the same time, they hit on the policy of taking patents and inventions from

Witte and Komura in 1905 75 Germany so that their own industry could make use of them. So-called T forces were sent into Germany to discover and detain German scientists who could assist the Allied war effort against Japan or strengthen their commercial companies. The Soviet estimate of the value of the technology taken by the two Western states was $10 billion, and the historian of the process John Gimbel has suggested that this may have been reasonably accurate.66 Despite the scepticism of their leaders, democratic electorates thus sometimes insist on exacting reparations from defeated enemies, particularly if those enemies are very obviously the aggressors, as the Germans and Japanese were in the Second World War. If governments have to respond to such popular calls, then the Anglo-American methods employed after 1945 may be the most effective way democracies can proceed. In 1945 Germany was in no position to hand over vast reserves of currency, while the seizure of food and other goods would have led to massive starvation. Even without paying reparations, the economies of the Western zones of Germany were in dire straits for some years after 1945.67 Of course, technical reparations were only of any use at all because of the modernity and efficiency of German industry; other defeated states would have much less to offer. They have also been bitterly criticised because in the process many hardened Nazis were allowed to escape so that they could pass their technical knowledge to the Allies.68 In the popular Anglo-Saxon view justice demanded both that they should answer for their crimes before the courts and that the Allies should reap some rewards for all the efforts they had expended. In the short run it was the second criterion which prevailed. So did the idea of restoring all looted art to its rightful owners. Hitler, Goering and their colleagues had sacked the public and private art collections of Europe in their search for paintings. Many were destroyed during the fighting. The main problems hindering the return of the surviving art works were the death of the rightful Jewish owners; the fact that the works had passed from hand to hand, obscuring legal titles; private looting by individual American soldiers; and the determination of the Soviet Union to keep some of the paintings to compensate in small measure for the devastation wrought by the Nazi invaders.69 At the end of the twentieth century these difficulties have still not been finally overcome. In general, however, the experience of the 1940s and later was much happier than the post-First World War experience. Crucially, the Germans and Japanese were in no position to block Allied policies and could only beg for sympathy and understanding. In any case, the British and Americans wanted to restore their enemies’ economies and to save

76 Witte and Komura in 1905 them from starvation. At the same time, technical reparations could be taken immediately rather than after the prolonged periods of wrangling which delayed cash payments in the 1920s. Above all, technical payments offered the Allies some compensation for their massive wartime expenditure. They were a reasonable compromise between public demands for indemnity and the limited ability of the vanquished to pay compensation after a prolonged and devastating war.

Notes 1 Giichi Ono, Expenditures of the Sino-Japanese War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1922. On the general attitude to indemnities by 1914 see Coleman Phillipson, Termination of War and Treaties of Peace, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916, pp. 269ff. 2 Kokovtsov, Count, Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, ed. H.H. Fisher, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935, p. 55; Count Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, ed. A. Yarmolinksy, London: William Heinemann, 1921, p. 135. For recent histories of the negotiations see John Albert White, The Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964; Eugene P. Trani, The Treaty of Portsmouth: An Adventure in American Diplomacy, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970. 3 Morinosuke Kajima, The Diplomacy of Japan, volume 2, Tokyo: Kajima Institute of International Peace, 1978, p. 212. 4 Ibid., p. 213. 5 Ibid., p. 217. 6 Ibid., p. 219. 7 Ibid., p. 220. 8 Ibid., p. 226. 9 Ibid., p. 232. 10 Japan had seized the Liaotung Peinsula from China in 1895 but Russia, France and Germany forced Tokyo to return it to the Chinese. Subsequently the Russians added insult to injury by taking a lease on the area themselves. 11 For the first plenary session see Kajima, Diplomacy, p. 240. For discussions within the Russian delegation see J.J. Korostovetz, Pre-war Diplomacy: The Russo-Japanese Problem, London: British Periodicals, 1920, pp. 53–59. 12 Korostovetz, Pre-war Diplomacy, p. 55. 13 Michael Hurst (ed.), Key Treaties for the Great Powers, 1814–1914, volume 1, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972, p. 193, Treaty of Adrianople, and volume 2, p. 538, Treaty of San Stefano. 14 Korostovetz, Pre-war Diplomacy, p. 68. 15 Ibid., p. 22; Witte, Memoirs, pp. 140–141; Baron Rosen, Forty Years of Diplomacy, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922, p. 26; Lloyd C. Griscom, Diplomatically Speaking, Boston: Little Brown, Boston, 1940, p. 242. 16 Witte, Memoirs, p. 134; Kokovtsov, Past, pp. 52–53. 17 Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974, p. 63.

Witte and Komura in 1905 77 18 Kajima, Diplomacy, p. 306; Witte, Memoirs, p. 154. 19 O. Eltzbacher, ‘The collapse of Russia’, The 19th Century and After, July 1905, 58: 1. 20 Kajima, Diplomacy, p. 320. 21 Ibid., p. 328. 22 Ibid., p. 331. 23 Witte, Memoirs, p. 156. 24 Ibid., p. 157. 25 Kajima, Diplomacy, p. 336. 26 Ibid., p. 329. 27 Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, Volume 2, New York: Charles Scribner, 1925, Meyer telegrams of 23 and 24 August 1905. 28 Kokovtsov, Memoirs, p. 59. Rosen, Forty Years of Diplomacy, pp. 277–278. On the situation of US diplomats in Japan see Griscom, Diplomatically Speaking, pp. 261–263. 29 Phillipson, Termination of War, p. 272. For eighteenth-century views see E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, volume 3, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute, 1916, p. 307. 30 Richard Bonney (ed.) Economic Systems and State Finance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 349–352. 31 Phillipson, Termination of War, p. 271. 32 G.F. de Martens, Nouveau Receuil de Traités, tome 1, 1808–1814, Gottingue: Dieleueil, 1817, p. 102, ‘Convention entre la France et la Prusse’. 33 Bonney, Economic Systems, p. 355. 34 Ibid., pp. 356–357. See also Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, London: Routledge, 1991, chapter 4. On Louis Napoleon see J.M. Thomson (ed.), Napoleon’s Letters, London: Prion, 1998, pp. 148–153. 35 On British subsidies see John M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793–1815, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. On British finance see Christopher D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic Wars, 1803–15, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 16ff. 36 Bonney, Economic Systems, p. 385. He calculates that British aid amounted to 5.3 per cent of the national product in 1811 and 8 per cent in 1813. For a contemporary assessment of British wealth see Joseph Lowe, ‘Past and present state of the country’, Quarterly Review, June 1825, pp. 160ff. 37 Hurst, Key Treaties, volume 1, Convention between Great Britain (Austria, Prussia and Russia) and France, 20 November 1815. 38 On Wellington’s policy see Thomas Dwight Veve, The Duke of Wellington and the British Army of Occupation in France, 1815–1818, Westport, CT: Greenwood University Press, 1992. 39 Hurst, Key Treaties, volume 1, p. 140, convention of 9 October 1818. 40 Ibid., p. 188, Treaty of Adrianople, 14 September 1829. 41 Ibid., p. 219, agreement of 21 July 1832. 42 Ibid., pp. 269–270, Treaty of Nanking, 29 August 1842. See also Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China, London: Putnam: 1964; Arthur Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959. For Stanhope’s comments see Parliamentary Papers, House

78 Witte and Komura in 1905

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52

53

54 55

56

of Lords, 12 May 1840; Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston, London: Constable, 1970, p. 259. Ridley points out that Palmerston had criticised Russian policy to the Tsar’s ambassador in 1834 when Russia demanded indemnities from Persia. Hurst, Key Treaties, volume 1, p. 358, Treaty of Tientsin, 26 June 1858, Article LV, and p. 405, Convention of Peking, 24 October 1860. Ibid., p. 431, Treaty of Prague, 3 October 1866. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, 1933, London: Heinemann, 1933, chapter 8. See note 1 above. Ibid. Gotara Ogawa, Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1923, preface. Some figures for growth rates are given in Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992, Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995, pp. 23, 30, 62, 148. See also John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920, pp. 200–201. M.J. Daunton, ‘ How to pay for the war: state, society and taxation in Britain, 1917–24’, English Historical Review, 111: 882, September 1996. On mutual borrowing during the war see Philip Dexter and John Hunter Sedgwick, The War Debts: An American View, New York: Macmillan, 1928; Harold D. Moulton and Leo Pasvolsky, War Debts and World Prosperity, Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1932; Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918, Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1985. On borrowing and taxation see Edwin R. Seligman, ‘The cost of the war and how it was met’, American Economic Review, 9: 739: December 1919; Derek H. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street, 1919–1929, London: Allen Lane, 1977, pp. 30ff. Keynes, Consequences, pp. 127–130. David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties, volume 1, London: Victor Gollancz, 1938, chapter 9; Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics: France and European Diplomacy, 1916–1923, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. This modern historical judgement flatly contradicts Keynes’s version of events, which became the conventional wisdom. See Keynes, Consequences, p. 150, ‘Clemenceau’s aim was to weaken and destroy Germany in every possible way.’ Paul Birdsall, Versailles Twenty Years After, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942, pp. 238ff. The pervasive attacks on the economic provisions of the treaty began with Keynes’s book, but for other early British criticisms of the treaty see H. Wilson Harn, ‘The revision of the treaty’, Contemporary Review, April 1920. Trachtenberg, Reparation, pp. 77ff.; Lloyd George, The Truth, pp.451ff. On Congressional attitudes towards the loans see Moulton and Pasvolsky, War Debts, pp. 65ff. For contemporary comparisons between British behaviour in the Napoleonic wars and US behaviour a century later see Edwin F. Gay, ‘War loans or subsidies’, Foreign Affairs, April 1926, 4: 394. For a modern assessment of the reparation issue see Niall Ferguson,

Witte and Komura in 1905 79

57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67

68 69

‘The balance of payments question’, in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elizabeth Glaser (eds) The Treaty of Versailles, pp. 401ff. and the comments on this by Gerald D. Feldman, pp. 441ff. James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, London: William Heinemann, 1947, p. 27; Ian D. Turner (ed.) Reconstruction in Post-war Germany: British Occupation Policy and Western Zones, 1945–55, Oxford: Berg, 1989, pp. 127ff. See also B.U. Ratchford and W.D. Ross, Berlin Reparations Assignment, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971. On Greece see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993, chapter 3; Gyorgy Ranki, The Economics of the Second World War, Vienna: Bohlau Verlag, 1993, pp. 311ff. A. Costes, La Délégation française auprès de la Commission Allemande d’Armistice, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1947–57. Mazower, Greece, pp. 34ff. Ibid. Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Angell, Great Illusion, p. 148. Norman Angell, The Steep Places: An Examination of Political Tendencies, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947. On the blockade of Japan see John Winton, Convoy: The Defence of Seaborne Trade, 1890–1990, London: Michael Joseph, 1983, p. 316. On the situation in Germany see John E. Farquharson, The Western Allies and the Politics of Food, Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985. John Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 152. W. Byford Jones, Berlin Twilight, London: Hutchinson, undated, pp. 142ff. For a recent attack on Allied treatment of Germany see James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, London: Little Brown, 1997. Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany, London: Paladin, 1987. Lynne H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, London: Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1994.

6

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 The destruction of militarism

Many British and American commentators became convinced during the First World War that Prussian autocracy and militarism had caused the conflict. This view was particularly popular amongst Liberals in Britain and Wilsonian Democrats in the United States. Viscount Grey (1862–1933), who had been British Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, typified this way of thinking. In his memoirs, published in 1925, Grey described Germany as the centre and admired pattern of a militarist continent and argued that ‘militarism and the armaments inseparable from it made war inevitable’.1 It was during these years that militarism became a common term of abuse. Before 1914 anti-military writers had frequently attacked jingoistic attitudes and emphasised ‘war’s inherent and irremediable evil’.2 They had argued that a future great war would end in economic catastrophe and that even a victorious war could not be made to pay.3 But, although the term was in use, pacifist thought had not generally focused on the dangers of militarism as such. It was after the outbreak of war in August 1914 that militarism acquired its demonic aura because of its responsibility for the carnage in the trenches. In her influential and widely read analysis of The Neuroses of the Nations, published in 1925, Caroline Playne defined militarism as the urge to increase armaments without considering the fear this would evoke in other nations.4 Such lack of empathy became pathological when combined with extreme jingoism and xenophobia. These emotions led German officers to insist before 1914 that the Reich must always strive to be the most powerful nation. This tendency, according to Playne, created the neuroses which were the subject of her book, which drove the pre-1914 arms race, which tore events from statesmen’s grasp in August 1914 and which thus ended in the bloodbath of the trenches. The problem with Playne’s definition is that it cast its net so widely. Most countries wanted to be more powerful than their

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 81 neighbours and this did not necessarily make them aggressive. Militarism may have been pervasive but it was stronger in some countries than others. In his later history of militarism the German writer and former Prussian officer Alfred Vagts defined it as ‘a domination of the military man over the civilian, an undue preponderance of military demands, an emphasis on military considerations, spirit, ideals and scales of value, in the life of states’.5 This is more helpful than Playne’s definition, not least because of its stress on values and the hierarchy within states. Even if Vagts left unclear what would amount to undue preponderance, it was clear that the constitution of pre-war Germany gave excessive power and prestige to the military caste. As Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador to Britain in 1914, wrote subsequently: this organism formed a state within a state. Unfortunately it not only possessed great influence in politics but also had the chief say in matters at Court. . . . It set up a somewhat feudalistic standard of values for the whole of our state and civic life. . . . In what other country would a statesman who had never held a military command have gone about wearing the uniform of a Cuirassier?6 It was the army of Count Moltke (1800–91) which had united Germany in Bismarck’s wars, and the army’s position in the following years reflected the key role it had played in the state’s creation. Article 63 of the new German constitution linked the army directly with the Kaiser and minimised parliamentary influence on its size and composition. In turn, the Kaiser surrounded himself with officers and allowed them to determine much of his government’s policy. The consequences were disastrous. The Schlieffen Plan for the invasion of France via neutral Belgium and Luxembourg made it certain that Britain would join Germany’s enemies in 1914 and that British Liberals, who had previously defended Germany as a centre of European culture, would reverse their stance.7 Similarly, the insistence by Field Marshals Hindenburg (1847–1934) and Ludendorff (1865–1937), the German commander and his quartermaster-general, that their government initiate unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into the war against them in 1917, producing an equally complete reversal of President Wilson’s insistence that the United States was ‘too proud to fight’.8 The German and Austrian Foreign Ministers complained constantly to each other during the Brest Litovsk peace negotiations with the Soviets in 1917 and 1918 that the German military leaders were delaying peace and insisting on a rapacious settlement.9

82 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 On these crucial occasions, and many others, the influence of the German military had been wholly reprehensible both for Germany and for the rest of the world. It reflected a structural problem in the German constitution which did indeed allow the armed forces to dominate the civilian government. All the European belligerents had struggled to obtain a proper balance between civil and military advice during the course of the fighting, but Germany had been much less effective than the other states in evolving such an equilibrium. Military influence within their governments had ebbed in Britain and France the more the war had been prolonged. British politicians had made Lord Kitchener War Minister in 1914, only to claw power back as they found him ineffective in that role.10 Similarly, as the French armed forces proved unable to drive the Germans from their soil, so the last and strongest French wartime Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, had gathered more power and reduced the role of the military.11 In Germany the reverse had been the case as Hindenburg and Ludendorff had increased their authority.12 After the war the Allies might have been satisfied by the restructuring of the German constitution to reduce the armed forces’ power and to establish a fully fledged democracy. Before 1914 the upper house or Bundesrat was the dominant force under the Kaiser, because it prepared bills and passed them to the lower house for approval. Prussia had seventeen votes in the upper house, Bavaria six and most of the other states only one. This reflected the dominant part Prussia had played in unification but created a deeply unbalanced system. Furthermore, the members of the Bundesrat were nominated by the Princes of the various states. The Reichstag or lower house was elected by manhood suffrage, but its members were unpaid to exclude the working classes, and constituency boundaries had been set in 1872 and left unchanged because any changes would have benefited the social democrats. Many of its members were mediocrities who lacked the self-confidence to challenge the government. The Chancellor was appointed by the Emperor and he, in turn, appointed all the other ministers.13 There was thus, it was clear, plenty of scope for the democratic reforms which occurred after the war. Many British statesmen, such as the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1848–1930) and J.C. Smuts, had argued during the fighting that once Germany was defeated, the peculiar dominance of the army would be broken for ever simply by the defeat.14 But the decisive nature of the Allies’ victory and their determination to avoid a repetition of the conflict made governments search for ways to reinforce the changes in German society, beyond what might occur simply through

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 83 the humiliation of the armed forces and the democratisation of the constitution. Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson argued that the ideology of ‘militarism’ had to be destroyed by ending national service in Germany and dramatically reducing the size of the German armed forces. This would strengthen the new government against the military. Through national service German officers had inculcated militarism into their people ever since their defeats at French hands during the Napoleonic Wars.15 Thus conscription had to be ended and the prevalent German ideology changed. The problem in 1919 was that virtually every industralised country except Britain and the United States had conscription without producing the effects which Anglo-Saxon liberals believed it had caused in Germany. The French had indeed been the first to introduce it at the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars. They regarded it not only as a central part of their historic tradition but also as a bulwark against military threats to the civil power. A professional army might plot to overthrow the government; a civilian army would refuse to do so because it was much closer to the people. The British and Americans took precisely the opposite view. They maintained that civilian rule was best ensured by maintaining small professional armies. Both the Anglo-Saxon and the French arguments about the ways of protecting civilian government were very crude. The British army had not seized power since Cromwell’s time, but this was not only because it was professional; in peacetime it was very small, much of it was stationed overseas, and Parliament kept it under a watchful and suspicious eye. Even so it was not apolitical (whatever the mythology suggested), and from time to time it had extensive influence on government policy.16 Conversely, national service in France did not protect the government from threatened coups. There was, after all, conscription when Napoleon I seized power and when the popular General Boulanger (1837–91) threatened to do the same in the 1880s. All these feelings and beliefs hovered below the surface of the negotiations between the Allies, and particularly between the Allied commanders and political leaders during the negotiations in Paris in March 1919. The Supreme War Council, made up of the Allies’ political leaders, appointed a military commission under Marshal Foch (1851–1929), who was Allied Commander-in-Chief from March 1918 onwards, to suggest ways in which the German army should be restricted. The explicit intention was to make it too weak to threaten peace; the implicit aim was to destroy German militarism. Foch read the commission’s report to a meeting of the Supreme War Council from

84 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 which Wilson and Lloyd George were both absent. The meeting took place in ‘the somewhat vulgar golds and faded silks’ of the Quai d’Orsay on 3 March.17 The Allied commanders proposed that the German army should be limited to 200,000 men and 9,000 officers. The men were to be conscripted for not more than one year, while the officers and non-commissioned officers would be volunteers who would have to serve for 25 and 15 years respectively. The commission proposed that a Committee of Control should be set up to verify that Germany kept to these limits.18 Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, represented Britain in the Prime Minister’s absence. Balfour, a former Conservative Prime Minister, a philosopher and a civilian strategist of some distinction, was described by Clemenceau as ‘the most cultured, the most gracious, the most courteous of adamantine men’. Winston Churchill saw him as composed, detached and uplifted.19 Balfour’s way was not to dismiss Foch’s plan with the barely veiled contempt that the British Prime Minister was to show later. Rather, he said that he wanted to discuss the proposals with the British military representatives before commenting further. Foch had pointed out that the only disagreement between the military commanders had been over the British preference for a professional over a conscript army and that British officers had been prepared to compromise and so preserve Allied unity. Apart from concerns over conscription, Balfour doubted whether it was practical to insist that German officers serve till they were 45. No doubt he believed there were all sorts of excuses the Germans might make for premature retirement, and this would create a larger reserve of officers than the Allied military commanders intended.20 Perhaps sensing the trouble to come, Foch said he was anxious not to delay discussion of these issues beyond 1 April because he believed that after that date, the Allies would have gone so far with their own demobilisation as to make it much more difficult to force the Germans to comply. The British aristocrat was not to be hustled by the French officer and responded by accusing the commanders of trying to hold a pistol to the head of the Council. He also pointed out that the commanders’ timetable would give President Wilson only four days to assess their proposals after his return to Paris.21 Balfour then brought up the question of the duration of the military clauses. The limits on the German army seemed intended to last indefinitely, but the air and naval terms were apparently of shorter duration. Foch claimed that President Wilson had defined the term ‘final’ at an earlier meeting to imply that Germany was to be disarmed indefinitely. Balfour disagreed. He urged, rather, that the demilitarisation clauses should last until Germany had fulfilled all the terms imposed

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 85 in the peace treaty and subsequently for as long as the League of Nations determined. Baron Sonnino (1847–1922), the Italian Foreign Minister, suggested that the military commission should be left to decide the issue, but Milner, the second British representative, and Clemenceau agreed with Balfour that an issue of principle was at stake. The French leader said the naval powers might be happy with temporary disarmament but ‘he himself was not prepared to sign an invitation to Germany to prepare for another attack by land after an interval of three, ten or even forty years’. He might, however, to be willing to accept Balfour’s proposal to leave the issue of the duration of the military clauses to the League of Nations provided its constitution was satisfactory.22 By 6 March Lloyd George had returned to head the British delegation and to lead the resistance to the military commission’s proposals. The Welsh radical had first made his reputation by his bitter attacks on British tactics during the Boer War and by his strong espousal of social reform in subsequent years. He had not felt strong enough to sack British military commanders for what he considered their incompetence during the war years, but the wartime experience had not increased his respect for the military profession. He went straight to the point. If 200,000 men were trained each year, in ten years the Germans would have 2 million trained men, in fifteen years 3 million and so on. Foch replied that it was the cadres, not the conscripts, who were key. With only a very limited number of officers, the Germans would be unable to use so vast a number of ill-trained conscripts. Lloyd George denied this. There would be plenty of trained officers in Germany for the next twenty-five years. In a jibe presumably aimed at Foch himself, he said he knew distinguished officers who had fought both in 1871 and in the First World War, though the two wars were separated by forty-six years.23 Foch continued to defend his position tenaciously. Not for nothing had he taken over command of the Allied armies when so many were panicking during the German spring offensive in 1918. He was much admired even by those who sometimes disagreed with him. Winston Churchill wrote later of the sagacity of his judgement and the valour of his spirit. Foch insisted that, whatever the Allies did, for the next twentyfive years the Germans would have trained officers and NCOs. But, he claimed, ‘the men now demobilised would in three or four years’ time be of little value owing to the interruption of their training’. Before the war the key to German strength was the 120,000 NCOs ‘who formed the backbone of the army’. If Germany were limited to a professional army, even if it was only 40,000–50,000 men, this would mean that all of them would be available as NCOs for training large armies. The

86 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 British Prime Minister sardonically replied that ‘he would not dare to enter into a military argument with Marshal Foch’. He then proceeded to do so, insisting that Germany should not have a larger army than Britain and offering to bring a new proposal to the table which would limit the German army far more effectively than Marshal Foch’s. The French soldier pointed out that all the Allied commanders were agreed on their proposal, but Lloyd George said it was a political as well as a military issue, and the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, came to his support.24 The Supreme War Council met again in the Quai d’Orsay on the next day. In the middle of the meeting all the military advisers except Marshal Foch and one officer representing each of the three Services from each nation withdrew. The scene was set for the showdown between the politicians and the generals. Lloyd George then tabled his proposal that all German forces should be volunteers and that they should all serve for twelve years. Their army would be limited to 200,000 officers and men, and their navy to 15,000. This would mean that Germany could not train vast forces by annual rotation as he erroneously believed Prussia had done after the French had forced it to disarm during the Napoleonic Wars. Volunteer armies were also more expensive than conscripted forces, and this would limit German adventurism. There was no discussion amongst the politicians, who all accepted Lloyd George’s suggestion. However, Foch immediately replied that none of the military representatives agreed with the proposal. General Deguotte backed him up, saying that he would never agree to Germany having a professional army because this would make it far stronger than a conscript force.25 At this stage Clemenceau, the ‘tiger’ of French politics, seemed to weaken, suggesting ‘the governments could not force the Military Authorities to change their opinions’ and that they deliberate for some days. However, the British Prime Minister was adamant. The Council must decide, and he would not allow Germany an army raised by conscription. He claimed that ‘he did not wish to say that he rejected the advice of the Generals’, but that is precisely what he clearly intended to do. Clemenceau said he was bound by the acceptance of Lloyd George’s principles. The military commission could express their views but ‘the decision would remain with the Governments’.26 And so it was to be, although the German army was still further reduced to 100,000 men to take account of Foch’s fears of a professional force, fears which he expressed in no uncertain terms at the Supreme War Council meeting of 10 March. On this occasion Clemenceau backed his Marshal’s call for further reductions in the German army,

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 87 pointing out that the French would carry the main weight of containing Germany. Lloyd George agreed that this was the case and Lansing gave his support to the new reductions, even though US military advisers were doubtful that it would leave Germany with enough troops to maintain order. Balfour was more cautious than the other politicians, pointing out that the German army would be so weak that the country would be vulnerable even to its smaller neighbours such as Poland or ‘Bohemia’. Some way would, therefore, have to be found of guaranteeing German security. President Wilson showed similar concerns when he attended the meeting on 17 March. He received assurances from Foch that the 100,000-man army would be powerful enough to suppress revolts and to defend Germany from the east.27 Germans were hardly likely to believe that this was the case, and, in retrospect, it is clear that limitation to 200,000 men, rather than 100,000, would have made the Treaty of Versailles seem slightly less unreasonable to the German people. The discussions on German disarmament had been a classic demonstration of the power of the political over the military leaders in a democracy, even when military questions were concerned. The politicians had often to defer to the generals in wartime because the immediate fate of their countries depended upon it. Now they had their revenge; ‘the frocks’, in the military’s sardonic description of their political leaders, were in command. Nothing had been said about militarism in the debate, not even about ending conscription in Germany to prevent German youth being corrupted. Lloyd George had nothing to gain from embarrassing the French and Italian leaders, who had no intention of abolishing conscription in their own countries. But it had been a clear demonstration that militarism, meaning ‘excessive’ military influence, would not prevail amongst democrats. Foch and the other military commanders were at a disadvantage in these discussions because the stalemate in the war had cast doubt on their competence and weakened their position in society. Whatever they felt about the liberal attacks on militarism – and distinguishing between militarism and military professionalism is always difficult – they could not resist their civilian ‘masters’. It had also been a clash between the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental views of conscription. Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson saw the abolition of conscription as a step towards their futuristic plans for general disarmament. Clemenceau might have resisted Lloyd George’s proposals and Sonnino would, no doubt, have followed suit, but the French leader was now at loggerheads with Foch. He may also have considered the issue relatively unimportant, hence his willingness to

88 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 encourage a compromise. In his memoirs, published in 1930, he implied that it was most important to destroy German military equipment and that, despite all the Allied efforts, the Germans had thousands of men trained in the First World War who were kept in touch with the army through ‘so-called sports clubs’. By then he was prepared to admit that the small professional army was effectively a cadre of officers and NCOs, as Foch had known it would be. As a result, he estimated that if war broke out, France would be faced not with the Versailles army of 100,000, but with 480,000 German troops.28 When Hitler ordered the rearmament of Germany in the 1930s, the small professional army which the Allies had permitted did indeed form the cadre of the new Wehrmacht, as Foch feared. Up until then German power had nevertheless been hobbled, as Lloyd George hoped. But most of the arguments in 1919 between the politicians and the generals missed the fundamental issue. This was touched on by Balfour when he brought up the question of the duration of the agreement, and by Foch when he suggested that after Allied demobilisation they would be unable to force Germany to disarm. It had come up again when Lloyd George accepted French proposals to limit the German army to 100,000 men and at the 17 March meeting when Wilson objected to the idea that Germany should notify all military orders to the Allies. On that occasion the President said that either German sovereignty would be permanently restricted or they would have ‘to reserve the right of going to war with Germany in the event of her failing to make the notification’. Clemenceau pointed out that this would apply to all the military clauses. He did not comment on Foch’s claim that demobilisation was already leaving the Allies with little power to coerce Germany militarily.29 If the Germans really turned against every aspect of their military establishment as they and the Japanese were to do after 1945, they would not want to rearm. But if neither defeat, nor the alternations in the German constitution, nor the abolition of conscription changed their attitudes, then the Allies would have to maintain the disarmament of Germany by force. In the event, Germans who were not militaristic and who felt that the army had been too powerful before 1918 could still believe that the Treaty of Versailles had set out to impose excessively drastic disarmament measures on their country. The Nazis’ popularity was based, in part, on their determination to undo this injustice, to overthrow the settlement and to restore Germany’s self-respect. Once Germany began to rearm in earnest under Hitler, the democracies had a limited opportunity to mobilise their forces and attack before this process had gone too far. Within two or three years it was too late to avoid another world war.

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 89 Lloyd George, Wilson and other liberals regarded the abolition of conscription in the enemy states, together with savage reductions in their armed forces, as the first step towards general disarmament. This view was indeed to be enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles, which laid down that ‘in order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations, Germany undertakes strictly to observe the military and naval clauses which follow’. The German army was thus allowed no heavy weaponry such as tanks and artillery. Air power was forbidden and the German navy was limited to 6 battleships, 6 light cruisers, 12 destroyers and 12 torpedo boats.30 However, the French government believed that it had to keep its own large army, even after German disarmament, because its frontiers had not been guaranteed by the promised Anglo-American alliance, because it had such extensive imperial commitments, and, above all, because it feared the revival of a Germany which would always be stronger demographically and industrially than France. What the French wanted was not disarmament but permanent French military superiority to offset Germany’s natural predominance in other areas.31 Given their experience in the First World War and German opposition from the beginning to the Versailles settlement, French insistence was hardly unreasonable. It might have been just to propose that all states disarmed down to the same level but it would have been profoundly destabilising. The British failed throughout to give the French the support they needed. Those British officers and politicians who dismissed the Wilson– Lloyd George view of disarmament often wanted to see a balance between France and Germany after 1918. They rejected the radical analysis of the causes of the war which suggested that it was the pursuit of such a balance that had led to the conflict in 1914 and that such a strategy had been outmoded by the establishment of the League of Nations. Keynes and other publicists taught the British to feel guilty over the terms they had imposed on Germany, and they were reluctant to give France a security guarantee once the Americans retreated into isolation. Thus, when Hitler began to rearm German forces, they utterly failed to respond until it was far too late to avoid another war. They had also contributed mightily to the demoralisation which was to lead to France’s defeat in 1940. The Allies tried and failed to reduce German military power permanently at the Paris conference in 1919. Their determination to destroy militarism also met with mixed results. Attitudes towards warfare were indeed changed decisively by the First World War in the democratic countries. Before 1914 Social Darwinism had been rampant, even if commentators sometimes already lamented its decline. Sir Ian

90 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 Hamilton (1855–1947), one of the most sensitive British officers, complained in 1906, ‘with our education anti-military, and our army organised on a basis of wages, we are marching straight in the footsteps of China, who one thousand years ago became so clever as to see that war was a relic of barbarism’.32 He lauded the views of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) that peace and selfishness went together, while truth, art and war were combined. Simultaneously, in the United States, the propagandist Homer Lea was warning that the Anglo-Saxon nations would be overwhelmed by the Japanese and other Orientals unless they accepted that all nations were struggling for survival and that only the fittest and most militaristic would emerge triumphant.33 The idea that weak individuals would be winnowed out by modern warfare, while the brave and strong would survive, was widely discredited by the First World War. It was the brave who had been mown down by the machine guns and impaled on the barbed wire, while the cunning, the sensible or the cowardly had found ways to survive. It was still possible to apply social Darwinism to struggles between nations, though the industrialisation of warfare meant that it would not necessarily be the state with the largest or most ferocious army which would win. Victory might go to the country with the greatest industry and hence ability to supply its forces. Much of the Social Darwinist rhetoric was thus undermined by the march of technology and the nature of modern war. But it was German militarism which the Allies hoped and failed to destroy. The widely held assumption that the German armed forces would be discredited by their defeat was a leap of faith. It had not happened with the French army in 1815 or 1871, even though the French accepted the reality of their defeat. It was all the less likely to happen with the German army in 1918 when senior commanders invented the myth that they had not been vanquished but, in Ludendorff’s words, had been forced to make terms by ‘the betrayal of the fatherland brought about by the disintegrating influence of enemy propaganda, by revolutionary agitation and finally by the outbreak of the Revolution itself’.34 Undoubtedly military influence was much weaker in Weimar Germany than it had been under Kaiser William. For a start the army was smaller, national service was abolished and anti-militarism had been increased by the losses during the war. But the new government depended upon the army to protect it from attacks by revolutionaries and by right-wing extremists. Military power within the state was the result of practical politics, not of the constitution. Thus the army’s

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 91 efforts to evade the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were never effectively stopped by the government.35 Moreover, unemployment and the reduction in the size of the army led to the emergence of large paramilitary organisations which were a constant threat to public order and democratic control. Finally, the appeal of demagogues, who wanted to make Germany great again and undo the alleged iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles, helped to undermine the Weimar government and to install the Nazis in power. Nazism, in turn, incorporated many of the worst features of militarism, particularly its jingoism and aggression. Of course it did not mean that the German army was restored to its old political and social position. German officers now had to swear allegiance to Hitler, and they were told which countries they were to attack, and how and when they were to attack them. During the war years Hitler himself took the key strategic decisions and, when senior officers attempted to resist and overthrow the Führer, their plots were exposed and they were killed slowly and painfully.36 The problem of eradicating German militarism was debated as passionately and intensely in the democracies during the Second as during the First World War. This time there was the added fear that Hitler had poisoned the minds of a whole generation of Germans and encouraged the aggressiveness which they had developed since the eighteenth century. Thus, Robert Vansittart (1881–1957), the Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and a bitter critic of the German nation, argued for both the disarmament and the ‘re-education’ of Germany. This means the remodelling of the German administration, bureaucracy and judiciary. It means the slow introduction of an entirely new spirit in German schools and churches. In other words unilateral disarmament must lead to re-education, in which the Allies must take their share without shirking.37 Vansittart believed that another generation would have to grow up inculcated with democratic and civilised values before Germany could be trusted. The novelist and essayist Charles Morgan (1894–1958) took a similarly long-term view, though he did not believe in deliberate reeducation. It was hopeless to ‘go among Germans as schoolmasters’. Their views would not be changed by propaganda but ‘by time, by the possibility that justice, patience and firmness of our administration may give it opportunity to change. . . . A great warlike nation cannot be converted. It can only be reborn’.38 Plainly Morgan and Vansittart

92 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 envisaged a very prolonged occupation of Germany by Allied forces. So did the financial journalist Paul Einzig (1897– ), who considered wistfully the possibility of handing Germany over to the Poles, only to argue that the British public would reject such a drastic solution, however apposite it might be morally. Instead, after a prolonged occupation it was possible that even Prussia would drop ‘that arrogant spirit and unbridled ambition which has been responsible for so much destruction and suffering’.39 Despite Morgan’s scepticism, Nicholas Pronay has pointed out that there were specific reasons why the re-education of Germany after the Second World War should appeal to the Americans and particularly the British. The British public schools had educated the elite during the nineteenth century in values and codes of behaviour which fitted them for ruling the Empire. Colonial administrators tried, in turn, to educate the people they ruled in democratic and civilised values. Thus it was no great leap of faith to believe that the same methods could be applied to Germany in 1945. There were also those in the Political Intelligence and News Departments of the Foreign Office who believed as early as 1918 that re-education and propaganda might be the antidote to German aggressiveness and militarism. In 1945 they had a second opportunity, and their determination was reinforced by the failure to contain Germany in the 1920s. Although the United States was less wedded in 1945 to re-education as the antidote to Germany’s militarism, American society had welded together the disparate groups of immigrants who poured into the country by teaching civic virtues throughout the school system. Some similar system could also be applied in Germany.40 Vansittart, Morgan, Einzig and the re-education enthusiasts in the government belonged to the middle or right of the political spectrum. Left-wing writers argued that German capitalism would have to be destroyed if militarism and Nazism were to be eradicated. Julius Braunthal suggested in 1943 that change requires, primarily, the destruction of the economic power of the military caste; that is, the breaking up of the great estates of the Prussian aristocracy. It requires, also, the destruction of the economic power of the iron and steel magnates and financiers. Similarly, the Labour politician Walter Padley (1916– ) claimed in 1944 that Nazism ‘cannot be finally overcome without a Socialist revolution, purging Germany of the Junkers and heavy industrialists’.41 Apart from the blame for the war heaped by Allied commentators on German militarism and on the Junkers and industrialists, many believed

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 93 that the Prussian state enshrined militaristic attitudes. In fact this view was anachronistic. The Prussian government had very often struggled against the influence of the army in the 1920s. Nevertheless, its reputation had remained constant, and on 25 February 1947 the Inter-Allied Control Council formally abolished the Prussian state, ‘which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany’.42 Some former Prussian territories had already been incorporated into the Soviet Union itself, some into Poland and some into the other Länder. The Junkers fled to the West, were killed or were dispossessed. In the German Democratic Republic, as it emerged under Soviet control, the industrialists were also swept away under the new socialist structure. The radical reforms which Padley and Braunthal had advocated were imposed by brute force from above. Prussia and the militarism with which it was popularly associated were crushed at last. In the British zone the Education Division set out to emphasise Germany’s own liberal traditions to the German people. Nazis were purged from schools and universities when these were restarted and the press was kept for a while under tight control.43 Influential Germans went on courses to the re-education centre at Wilton Park, owned by the British government, where democratic values and the liberal elements in Germany’s history were stressed. In the prisoner-of-war camps dotted around Britain the publisher Victor Gollancz and other idealists attempted to win over even those who had been most wedded to militaristic aggression and the Nazi system, a process chronicled by Matthew Barry Sullivan, who described it as surprisingly successful amongst the 400,000 POWs.44 The excessive influence of the German armed forces on society, which Payne and Vagts had described and which the army had exercised covertly in the 1920s, was at an end. This was equally true of Japan, whose military power was also shattered by the end of the Second World War. The pre-1945 Japanese governmental system had been modelled on the German constitution established by Bismarck. In the 1930s the armed forces had exercised a baleful influence, effectively driving the political parties from power and determining the aggressive imperialistic policy that was followed. To prevent this happening again, anti-militarism was specifically built into the new Japanese constitution after 1945. Article 9 begins: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as their war

94 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised. Although Japanese governments have come, with US encouragement, to ignore the spirit of this law and to maintain very substantial armed forces, defeat, American occupation and the establishment of the constitution have meant that the influence of the armed forces on Japanese public life has been greatly reduced. Japan, like post-1945 Germany, has upheld democratic standards since the Second World War. This was exactly what the peacemakers had hoped to achieve in Germany in 1919. The insistence by Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson that the Germans abolish conscription was by no means absurd, even if their plan to make it the basis of world-wide disarmament measures was unrealistic and was used later by the Nazis to excuse rearmament. The Treaty of Versailles promised both to reduce German power and to spare young Germans from military indoctrination. With the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of a second, even more devastating war, it seemed to Vansittart, Einzig and others that something more farreaching must be attempted if militarism were to be obliterated, hence the emphasis on re-education. This process was assisted by the crushing nature of the Allied victories, which had the effects that commentators had hoped for from victory in 1918. The German and Japanese armed forces really were discredited, and occupation meant that no myths could hide the nature of this victory. Even so, the various processes took time. Between November 1945 and January 1948 42 per cent of the German people continued to insist that Nazism was ‘a good thing badly carried out’, and the British occupiers believed that some 10 per cent of the adult male population remained convinced Nazis. Many historians have concluded that the German population supported rightof-centre politicians, who had the backing of the occupying powers, not because they necessarily agreed with their views, but because they saw their growth as the quickest way to restore prosperity and normality.45 In the long run the domestic power of the armed forces was dissipated not only by the Allied victories in 1945, by the imposition of socialism in the German Democratic Republic and by the deliberate spread of democratic values in West Germany and Japan. Military power was a threat to governments at a particular time in world development, when democracies were still weak and immature, when the armed forces had become professional but when societies themselves had not become so complex as to be proof against military coups. Technological and economic developments have immensely strengthened democratic institutions in the developed world and reduced military influence on

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 95 government and on the educational system. The peacemakers in 1919 and 1945 were faced with particularly grave problems because these developments were incomplete and uncertain. In the circumstances, their concern about excessive military influence and their efforts to reduce this are wholly understandable.

Notes 1 Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925, volume 2, p. 52; Lorna S. Jaffe, The Decision to Disarm Germany: British Policy towards Postwar German Disarmament, 1914–1919, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985, chapter 1. 2 William Leighton Grane, The Passing of War: A Study in Things That Make for Peace, London: Macmillan, 1912, p. x. 3 Norman Angell, After All: The Autobiography of Norman Angell, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951, pp. 143ff. 4 C.E. Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925, pp. 133ff. 5 Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, Civilian and Military, London: Hollis and Carter, 1959, introduction. 6 Prince Lichnowsky, Heading for the Abyss: Reminiscences, London: Constable, 1924, pp. 94–95. See also the contrary view in Erich Ludendorff, ‘Germany never defeated’, in These Eventful Years, London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1924, p. 269. 7 Jaffe, The Decision, p. 5; Grey, Twenty-Five Years, chapter 17. 8 Albert Fried (ed.) A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson, New York: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 297, 301 and 315. 9 Count Ottokar Czernin, In the World War, London: Cassell, 1919, pp. 223, 224 and 228. See also Fitz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967. 10 Philip Magnus, Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist, London: John Murray, 1958, chapter 15. 11 David Robin Watson, Clemenceau: A Political Biography, London: Eyre Methuen, 1974, p. 293. 12 For Ludendorff’s version of events see his General Staff and Its Problems, London: Hutchinson, 1920. 13 Prince von Bülow, Imperial Germany, London: Cassell, 1914; James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917, chapter 2; Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, chapter 2. 14 Jaffe, Decision, p. 38. 15 Payne, Neuroses, p. 150; Vagts, Militarism, pp. 191ff. 16 On the place of the British army in politics see Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; for French views of conscription see Major-General A.C. Temperley, The Whispering Gallery of Europe, London: Collins, 1939, p. 62. 17 Georges Clemenceau, Grandeur and Misery of Victory, London: George Harrap, 1930, p. 138; Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), The

96 Lloyd George and Foch in 1919

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36

37 38 39 40

Paris Peace Conference, 1919, volume 4, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943, p. 182. FRUS, Paris Peace Conference, pp. 183ff. Clemenceau, Grandeur, p. 138; Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries, London: Fontana, 1959, p. 193. FRUS, Paris Peace Conference, p. 185. Ibid., p. 186. Balfour may have been wrong to see Foch’s demands for haste as simply a way of limiting political influence and advancing his own schemes. The military advisers claimed later to have pushed constantly for greater haste to reduce the sufferings of the Germans. See Lady Wester Wemyss, The Life and Letters of Lord Wester Wemyss, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935, pp. 403 and 416–417. FRUS, Paris Peace Conference, p. 189. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., pp. 263ff. Ibid., p. 264. Ibid., p. 356. Clemenceau, Grandeur, pp. 324–326. FRUS, Paris Peace Conference, p. 358. Philip Towle, Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, chapter 4. Temperley, Whispering Gallery, pp. 60–61. Sir Ian Hamilton, A Staff Officer’s Scrap-Book during the Russo-Japanese War, London: Edward Arnold, 1906, p. 14. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, New York: Harper, 1909. Ludendorff in These Eventful Years, p. 283. For Hitler’s views of the necessity for war see D.C. Watt (ed.) Hitler’s Mein Kampf, London: Hutchinson, 1974, pp.148ff.; Hitler’s Table-Talk, 1941–1944: Conversations Recorded by Martin Bormann, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 28 and 44. H.W. Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1954. For British reactions to covert German rearmament see Richard S. Grayson, Austen Chamberlain and the Commitment to Europe, London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp. 118–119. For Hitler’s views on the army’s place see Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. 200. For German opposition to Hitler see Christopher Sykes, Troubled Loyalty: A Biography of Adam von Trott, London: Collins, 1968; Peter Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance to Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938–1945, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Right Honourable Lord Vansittart, Lessons of My Life, London: Hutchinson, undated, chapter 2. Charles Morgan, Reflections in a Mirror, London: Macmillan, 1946, pp. 154ff. Paul Einzig, Appeasement before, during and after the war, London: Macmillan, 1941, chapter 15. Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson, The Political Re-education of Germany and Her Allies after World War II, London: Croom Helm, 1985, introduction. For US policies see the chapters by Rebecca Boehling

Lloyd George and Foch in 1919 97

41 42 43

44

45

and Diethelm Prowe in Jeffrey M. Diefendorf, Axel Frohn and HermannJosef Rupieper (eds) American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945–1955, Cambridge: German Historical Institute/ Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 281 and 307ff. Julius Braunthal, Need Germany Survive? London: Victor Gollancz, 1943, pp. 208ff.; Walter Padley, The Economic Problem of the Peace, London: Victor Gollancz, 1944, pp. 163–164. C.C. Schweitzer, Detlev Karsten, Robert Spencer et al. (eds), Politics and Government in Germany, 1944–1994, Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995, pp. 9–10. Kurt Jugensen in Pronay and Wilson, Political Re-education, chapter 3. See also David Welsh, ‘Priming the pump of German democracy’, in Ian D. Turner (ed.) Reconstruction in Post-war Germany, Oxford: Berg, 1989, pp. 215ff. Matthew Barry Sullivan, Thresholds of Peace: Four Hundred Thousand German Prisoners and the People of Britain, 1944–1948, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979. For Gollancz’s view on Germany and the Germans see Victor Gollancz, Our Threatened Values, London: Victor Gollancz, 1946. Michael Balfour, ‘In retrospect: Britain’s policy of re-education’, in Pronay and Wilson, Political Re-education, p. 148. See also Diefendorf, Frohn and Rupieper, American Policy, pp. 306 and 324.

7

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 Victory in battle, defeat in the mind

Summing up the House of Commons debate about the Treaty of Versailles on 21 July 1919 the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, felt able to congratulate himself and his fellow negotiators because there has been no fundamental criticism. There has been suggestions made . . . but in the main, it has struck me that the House as whole – I do not know that I can make any exception – has accepted this Treaty. In that respect I think they reflect public opinion outside.1 The Prime Minister was complacently turning a blind eye to some of the serious criticisms which had been made, but he was fairly reflecting the general view of the House of Commons and of the British public. Fourteen years later when the House of Commons and House of Lords debated international affairs, they took a very different attitude towards the Versailles Treaty. They had few specific suggestions on how it should be improved, but the conventional view was now clearly sullen, critical of Allied policy in 1919 and revisionist. The British and French statesmen who had negotiated the agreement had become a beleaguered minority, publishing a whole series of books defending their handiwork, but this had been bitterly opposed by Germany and its allies. British leaders had been quickly abandoned by some of the officials and diplomats who had worked for them in Paris, and popular opinion has accepted their revisionist and critical view ever since, however much at odds it now is with the views of many historians.2 The increasing criticism of the treaty in the 1920s reflected the democracies’ failure to win the battle over ideas, the struggle for the moral high ground to complement their military victory. Indeed, for a minority the two victories were mutually exclusive. As we have seen in the previous chapter, many liberals and pacifists looked on the military hierarchy with a mixture of fear, scepticism and contempt. They could

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 99 not be expected to like or admire that hierarchy simply because it belonged to the Allies. They might sentimentalise the individual fighting man but the officers were fair game for their derision. They even felt a certain guilt and shame about the Allied victory because it depended upon superior military power. That shame could be reduced only if the enemy also believed that their surrender and the peace imposed upon them was just. As Lloyd George put it in 1919, to achieve redress our terms may be severe, they may be stern and ruthless, but at the same time they can be so just that the country on which they are imposed will feel in its heart that it has no right to complain. But the majority of Germans complained vociferously and continuously, and they were encouraged in their protests by Keynes and his followers. They did not believe that their country was responsible for the outbreak of war, that they should be made to pay reparations, that the 1919 frontiers were fair, that they should be disarmed and that their fellow citizens should be tried for their alleged crimes.3 They turned the Allies’ moral sentiments back upon themselves. And so the German and Allied critics worked together to undermine the moral authority of the peace settlement until by 1933 it could find few defenders even in the British Parliament. On 21 July 1919 the situation was very different. The chairman of the independent Liberals, Sir Donald Maclean (1864–1932), led the congratulations to the Prime Minister.4 He doubted whether the Kaiser should be tried in London, as the government suggested, though he was in favour of holding the trial in a neutral state. As far as the general terms of the peace were concerned, he warned of the tensions in the Balkans, Central Europe and, above all, Russia. But he believed that the League of Nations was a ‘bright and shining hope’ for solving international problems. John Clynes (1869–1949), the Labour leader, joined in the praise for Lloyd George.5 Of course there were deficiencies in the treaty, and he quoted the resolution passed by the Southport conference of his party on the subject, which foreshadowed many of the later criticisms. It called for the speedy admission of Germany to the League of Nations and the revision of some of the ‘harsh provisions’ of the treaty ‘as a first step towards the reconciliation of peoples and the inauguration of a new era’. In particular, the Labour Party was worried that the reparations imposed on the German people might be too heavy and that the principle of self-determination had not been rigorously followed. Clynes cited the case of Birnbaum, a wholly German town

100 The British debates in 1919 and 1933 which was now within the newly established state of Poland. Lloyd George replied that all the surrounding countryside in Posnania was solidly Polish and Birnbaum could not become a German enclave within an independent Poland. Even the Irish Nationalists did not claim that parts of Liverpool should be handed to an independent Ireland because it was inhabited by people of Irish descent.6 At this time Clynes, and other Labour spokesmen, understood the difficulties of demarcating frontiers in Eastern Europe, for his general view of the treaty was that ‘with all its blemishes, it is the work of men who . . . must have acted with the motives of the highest patriotism and with the highest and noblest considerations for human government’, and that Lloyd George, in particular, should be congratulated for his achievements. Labour members within the government coalition were represented by George Barnes (1859–1940), who claimed that the treaty was largely the work of the Prime Minister and that the reparations clauses which had been criticised were ‘quite within the limits of justice, having regard to what the Government of Germany have done’.7 There were critics of some aspects of the treaty on the back benches. Colonel Murray talked about the ‘territorial sores’ left behind, though he was still willing to quote Benjamin Franklin on the US Constitution: ‘it astonishes me . . . to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does’.8 Similarly, Colonel Burn congratulated Lloyd George on his achievement. There were disadvantages with the agreement, but ‘taken as a whole, I think that there is little to which we can take exception’. Coming from the right, he felt that the indemnities imposed were, if anything, too small and should be paid back over the next thirty to forty years.9 It was left to a radical, Commander Kenworthy, to voice real dissent, first because so little time had been allowed for debate on the treaty compared with the time spent by their predecessors in 1815 when, he believed, they had actually ‘swayed Governments’. Kenworthy claimed to be speaking for the ‘very large body of opinion outside this House which certainly disapproves of the whole course of the proceedings in Paris’.10 Kenworthy quoted previous speeches by Lloyd George maintaining that they were fighting not against the German people but against its leaders, that they would not break Germany apart after victory and that they hoped Germany would become democratic and dispel the military domination of its past. Instead, ‘these fine ideals have been lost sight of’ in the treaty. Germany was condemned to slavery by the financial clauses and, to make some amends, it should have one of its colonies returned as a mandated territory. There should be total universal disarmament, while the League should facilitate change in

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 101 Southern Europe and elsewhere, instead of trying to preserve territorial integrity. The German–Polish border should have been demarcated by a commission from the two countries as the armistice had promised, because unless Poland could find an acceptable status quo and befriend its neighbours, in twenty years’ time it would be sandwiched between two far more powerful and hostile states, thereby sowing the ‘seeds of a future war’.11 Before Lloyd George responded, Sir Samuel Hoare (1880–1959), who was to become Foreign Secretary in 1935, rose to defend the Prime Minister, claiming that no other MP agreed with Kenwood’s criticisms.12 The Prime Minister then ably defended himself from the right and the left: from those like Horatio Bottomley (1866–1933), the strident right-wing MP, who said that the government had failed to fulfil its election promises and exact enough reparations from Germany, and from those like Kenworthy who felt the settlement was far too harsh.13 They had fulfilled their promises by exacting reparation for British merchant ships and pensions. They only planned to take from Germany what it was capable of paying. The territorial settlement was as fair as they could make it, given the way the nationalities were mixed up in Eastern Europe, and they proposed to subject the Kaiser to a fair trial to prove that no one could wage aggressive war in future. It was a masterly performance and he could congratulate himself that there were so few dissenting voices and the criticisms so muted.14 Of course, as Kenworthy pointed out, the MPs had had limited time to meditate on the details of the treaty and there were criticisms of these details, but they were not extensive. The general mood was laudatory, if not ecstatic. The position in 1933 could hardly have been in a greater contrast. In Germany Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor in January 1933 determined to overthrow the Versailles settlement, and was already introducing far-reaching anti-Semitic laws. In the Far East the Japanese were undermining the League of Nations, having seized Manchuria and begun to expand into the rest of China. On 30 March Lord Cecil opened a debate on foreign affairs in the House of Lords. In 1919 he had been singled out for praise by Maclean and Clynes. He was indeed congratulated almost as often as the Prime Minister because of his well-known part in shaping the League of Nations. Now he expatiated on the sufferings of the German Jews at the hands of the new Nazi government.15 For fifty years there had been agreement in Europe that the treatment of minorities was a matter of international concern. Even if the 1919 treaties had not imposed particular obligations on Germany to treat its minorities with respect, they had certainly imposed such duties on the East European states, and Germany had been one of the

102 The British debates in 1919 and 1933 leading states in complaining about any infringement of those requirements. The British government should, therefore, remind Germany of its own obligations. Here Cecil began to lose touch with his realistic appraisal of the new German government, because he still wanted the British government to carry out what he saw as its disarmament obligations in the Treaty of Versailles. The Disarmament Conference was meeting in Geneva at that time and the government had taken the decision to present it with a treaty text in order to try to move the debate forward. Cecil believed this was highly commendable, though he said that the government could have offered far more concessions over tanks, aircraft and capital ships than it had done so far.16 He was still living in the world of the League and of the 1920s, whereas international politics had moved into the world of Tojo and Hitler, of death camps, massacres and paltry excuses for aggression. Organisations like the League of Nations were of interest to the aggressive regimes only as long as they provided cover for their plans for domination, for genocide and enslavement. The two contrasting parts of Cecil’s speech – his lament for the German Jews and his plea for disarmament – admirably reflected the difficulties which men of good will were to have reconciling their wishes with the actual situation confronting them. Cecil was determined to defend at least two aspects of the 1919 settlement: the founding of the League and the commitment to disarmament. The next speaker, Lord Ponsonby (1871–1946), was more comprehensively critical and set the tone for the debate.17 Ponsonby was a lifelong pacifist who had been Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the 1924 Labour government and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1931. In 1933 he was leader of the Labour opposition in the House of Lords. He argued that no peace treaty lasted for more than a few years and that the 1919 treaties were ‘both vindictive and strategic’. He believed that such treaties should never be concluded immediately after a war or by those who had been fighting. How affairs were to be conducted before a peace treaty was made, who would eventually conclude such an agreement and why strategic concerns were so contemptible were left equally unclear in Ponsonby’s speech. What was needed now, Ponsonby declared, was to abandon disarmament of the type proposed in Geneva and convene the Great Powers together, as the Italian leader Benito Mussolini suggested, to heal the ‘sore places’ of Europe.18 Later in the debate Lord Dickinson blamed the failure to admit Germany to the League of Nations in 1919 and to protect German minorities in Eastern Europe for the current bitterness amongst the German people.19 The democracies had not fulfilled the disarmament

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 103 obligations they had accepted in the treaty. Germany should be allowed armed forces equal to those of the other European states, and Article 231 of the treaty, under which Berlin accepted responsibility for the war, should also be revoked. Even in France public opinion had accepted that the treaty should be revised. Following Dickinson, the Earl of Iddesleigh (1901–70) was equally enthusiastic for treaty revision, which he said brooked no delay. His generation might have to fight for the treaties and this made them all the more delighted that the French were now willing to accept revision of the frontiers set up in 1919.20 Iddesleigh was to be proved right about the need for his generation to fight, and he was himself to serve with the Welsh Guards throughout the Second World War. Viscount Hailsham (1872–1950), the Secretary of State for War and leader of the House, then rose to deprecate any suggestions that the League should bring economic pressure to bear on Tokyo because of Japanese actions in Manchuria.21 He also denied that the government had any standing to protest to Berlin on behalf of the German Jews as this would be regarded as ‘unwarranted interference’. Plainly the government was unwilling to do anything which could antagonise Tokyo or Berlin, or defend the principles of minority rights and freedom from aggression which MPs had thought were established in 1919. Two weeks later the House of Commons debated the same issues. Clement Attlee (1883–1967), the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, began the debate by condemning the idea that Europe’s future should be decided, as Mussolini suggested, by the four Great Powers, Germany, Italy, France and Britain.22 The 1919 treaties should be revised by all the nations, and not because Germany was threatening violence. Hitler was promising a ‘reintroduction of death in the near future’ but it was unwise to give in to such threats. The last war had been fought to make the world safe for democracy; the League was supposed to be a league of democracies and yet they were now faced with dictatorships everywhere in Eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia and Austria. For this situation the western democracies – Britain, France and the USA – were largely to blame because of their policies since the war.23 Britain should make clear to Germany that it would be impossible to make any territorial changes and to give territory to Germany containing minorities when it was behaving in its present fashion towards the Jews. Similarly, Britain should take action now that Japan had been condemned for aggression in Manchuria and encourage other states to ban weapons exports to Tokyo. The former Conservative Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) rose to make a speech which Colonel Wedgwood called

104 The British debates in 1919 and 1933 the finest in his career and to add his voice to those who warned against treaty revision in the face of German threats.24 Britain had been making concessions to Berlin for years, but ‘of which of these concessions can it be said at this present moment that it has tempered feeling in Germany, that it has produced that friendly spirit that those who made it desired to promote?’. No doubt he spoke with some bitterness as the author of the Treaty of Locarno, which was supposed to draw Germany into the group of satisfied nations. He now argued that it was particularly unwise to talk of revision in the face of recent events in Germany. In any case, he pointed out, the Italians were not proposing to give up their territory or to drop their opposition to an anschluss between Germany and Austria, any more than the British government was proposing to hand back Tanganyika or another former German territory. Other MPs took the same view of the disadvantages of revising the treaties at that point, even if they should have been revised before. Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946), the social reformer and member for the English Universities, suggested they should have refrained from ‘the infliction of crushing burdens and some unnecessary humiliations’ but that it would be disastrous to bow before German threats.25 She was to fight throughout the 1930s against the government’s policy of appeasement. But Captain Cazalet argued that ‘unless Europe can at the same time revise certain aspects of the Treaty of Versailles and other treaties, the treaties themselves will be torn up’. While MPs had commended the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and other empires in 1919, now Cazalet said that he thought that a similar multinational organisation was the only hope for the future of Eastern Europe.26 Revisions of the 1919 settlement were essential, and if they emerged with the backing of the four powers then they had his support. It was left to the maverick Conservative MP Winston Churchill to make a brilliant, balanced and perceptive defence of the Versailles settlement. Above all he stressed the damage which the habit of denouncing and abusing the settlement had already done and the way its defects had been exaggerated.27 The treaties had been based on the principle of nationalism and self-determination. If there were anomalies, these were inevitable since the nations were so intermingled in Eastern Europe. They could be separated only by population movements of the type witnessed in Greece and Turkey. ‘The more you wish to remove the anomalies and grievances the more you should emphasise respect for the Treaties.’ All the Little Entente states now felt threatened by the calls for revision. It was easy to forget that the settlement led to the reemergence of Poland and Bohemia, and the birth of the Baltic Republics and of other small nations. Churchill flatly denied that Germany had

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 105 been subjected to a ‘Carthaginian’ peace even if this were now an ‘unfashionable’ opinion. Germany had lost little territory except Alsace and Lorraine.28 The Germans had paid £1,000 million but borrowed £2,000 million. Versailles was different from the treaty of the Brest Litovsk type which Germany would have imposed had it been victorious. Granting Germany equality of armaments was the most dangerous demand to make . . . as surely as Germany acquires full military equality with her neighbours while her own grievances are still unredressed and while she is in the temper which we have unhappily seen, so surely we shall see ourselves within measurable distance of a European war. Churchill went on to denounce the British proposal to the Geneva Disarmament Conference which would have involved a reduction in French armaments from 700,000 to 400,000. Why did public attitudes towards the Treaty of Versailles change so radically between 1919 and 1933 that Churchill’s had become a lonely and unpopular voice? Largely because Allied attitudes towards the settlement had fragmented while the Germans remained solidly hostile. The victors became suffused with guilt for their failure to produce a settlement which was as acceptable to the vanquished as it was to themselves. They wished to be regarded as the guardians of international morality; they wanted the settlement to be seen as just, and President Wilson had promised that this would be the case. Constant complaints from Germany undermined this vision of the settlement. No matter how many times Churchill pointed out that Germany had imposed a far more rapacious peace on Russia in 1918 and that the treaties had liberated Poland and the other East European states, there were always nagging doubts which were exacerbated by German pleas. Democracies like to feel that they have right on their side as well as might. Published accounts of the peace conference were also often very damaging. Keynes’ attack, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, set the trend in 1920.29 Despite its title his book was not just about the economic consequences; it was a diatribe against Lloyd George, Clemenceau and particularly Wilson, and against almost every aspect of the treaty from its territorial provisions to the methods by which it was negotiated. The US President was dismissed as slow and incompetent, a preacher suddenly landed in a den of thieves. The editor of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed, reviewed the book on 5 January 1920, dismissing its author for his political inexperience and his ingenuousness. He went to the heart of the matter by complaining that

106 The British debates in 1919 and 1933 the book placed the Allies and Germany on the same moral level.30 But many influential journalists took their cue from Keynes and attacked the failure to produce a just settlement. For example, Valentine Williams, the experienced and balanced correspondent of the Daily Mail, criticised the Prime Minister’s dismissal of expert advice and represented the conference as a clash between the diplomats and politicians, with victory going to the second. He was equally unimpressed by Wilson and by the mood of the crowd in Paris who stoned the German delegation and even threatened their lives. He admitted to being influenced himself at the time by anti-German feelings and he expatiated his guilt through his criticisms of the settlement.31 Radical commentators like the political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932) also followed Keynes’ lead in their books on international affairs. Dickinson argued in 1923 that disillusionment began when the Soviets published the secret treaties and showed that the Allies had territorial ambitions. He was himself convinced that these were their only motives for the war; ‘all the rest was cant to keep the stream of young men flowing to mutilation and death’.32 Again Dickinson held the Germans and the Allies equally responsible for the war. While departing from Keynes in his praise for Wilson’s aims, he felt that ‘the bad men won the day [in Paris] for, as is usual, they were cleverer than the good’. He criticised the settlement for not allowing the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine the opportunity to vote on their return to France and the French for demanding the left bank of the Rhine. He found fault with the Eastern settlement for creating the Polish corridor and the new Czech, Polish and Yugoslav states because they contained national minorities.33 How this was to be avoided without very large-scale population transfers, he did not explain. All in all, he wrote, ‘the policy thus adopted [in Paris] means the perpetuation in Europe of fear, hatred, and rage; it means a new war, when the new conditions arise to make it possible’. Memoirs by soldiers and by diplomats were often equally critical. In 1922 C.E. Montague’s Disenchantment began the flood of anti-war accounts by former soldiers. Montague (1858–1929) was for many years a journalist on the Manchester Guardian and a respected drama critic. He argued that the victorious soldiers behaved well when they invaded Germany and wanted to see their former enemies properly treated. It was those desk-bound officers who had hidden for the duration of the war far from the battle zone who began to mistreat the German people. ‘Not everybody, not even every non-combatant in the dress of a soldier had caught that shabby epidemic of spite. But it was rife.’ Years later General Sir Aylmer Haldane, who commanded some

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 107 of the invading units, painted a more complex picture. Montague heard the Highlanders fraternising with Germans and sympathising with their predicament. Haldane noted that the First Gordon Highlanders had taken their revenge on the Germans for a massacre committed near Mons at the beginning of the war in 1914.34 Paradoxically it was Montague’s book which was influential in creating the general climate of shame. Harold Nicolson (1886–1968) was a second secretary in Paris in 1919. His still widely read account of the conference, Peacemaking, 1919, appeared in 1933 and continued to bolster the revisionist case. In his view it was impossible in 1919 ‘to devise a peace of moderation and righteousness’. The diplomat turned politician and writer was almost as dismissive as Keynes had been of Wilson and his works. He believed that the President was bored with the Fourteen Points by the time the conference began and that he could only be understood if one remembered his ‘strong strain of fanatical mysticism’.35 If former advisers at the Paris conference despised the treaty and its creators, what, many asked, could be said for the agreement? It was in vain that Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Tardieu, House and other negotiators explained the pressures of time and circumstance under which they had laboured in Paris. They lacked the ability to popularise their case which Keynes and Dickinson possessed in abundance. Strong on detail and short on simplistic solutions, their books found a much more limited market and were dismissed as self-serving. Nor were the indictments confined to the Treaty of Versailles; in 1928 Sir Robert Donald (1860–1933), the longterm editor of the Daily Chronicle, published The Tragedy of Trianon: Hungary’s Appeal to Humanity, which accused the Allies of imposing peace on a ‘mutilated frame’ and of placing millions of defenceless Hungarians in the unkind hands of the Czechs and Romanians.36 This flood of criticism continued unabated even though Keynes’ economic analysis was quickly undermined by the march of events. Germany was not ruined by the loss of its merchant fleet and coalfields. Other fields were discovered to supply its furnaces, and ships were quickly built to revive the ports. With the help of Allied loans, prosperity was restored after 1924 and the country came again to occupy a leading place in the European economy. But neither the arguments of Keynes’ detractors nor the facts on the ground made any difference. Even after Étienne Mantoux’s effective demolition of Keynes’ book was published as The Carthaginian Peace, the popular view of the settlement has remained the same.37 In 1944 the Oxford historian R.B. McCallum published an excellent history of British attitudes towards the settlement. McCallum showed

108 The British debates in 1919 and 1933 that the 1919 general election had not changed the treaties and made them more repressive, as Keynes and his successors had suggested.38 It was most unlikely that the Liberals, who were defeated, would have altered, or even tried to alter, government policy on reparations, war crimes trials and frontiers. The new MPs made little contribution to the debates on the treaties, and Keynes’ propagation of the description of them as ‘hard-faced men’ who had done well out of the war blackened their reputation without any proof or analysis of their views and comments. McCallum argued that a coalition of pacifists, younger people rebelling against their parents and Conservatives who blamed Lloyd George and Wilson for espousing national self-determination came to be united in their hostility to the 1919 settlement.39 Thus was the battle for the moral high ground lost. Comparison with the post-1945 settlement shows the difficulties under which Allied statesmen were labouring in 1919. After 1945 few Germans or Japanese of any note were prepared to argue in public that their wartime cause had been just, and those who did so were immediately subject to vituperation. German and Japanese leaders for the most part laboured to make the settlement work to their country’s best advantage; they were not constantly trying in public and private to undermine it. If they had done so, they would have been subjected to intense international pressures. On the other side, Allied public opinion continued to believe that the war and the succeeding settlement had been just. Thus the Allies won the battle of ideas after 1945, and even half a century afterwards Japanese leaders were being pushed to apologise for their country’s actions and to compensate Allied POWs for their sufferings.40 At the same time, German companies were being asked to pay compensation for the slave labourers who had worked for them in the war years. The war crimes trials, the weakening of Germany and the removal and execution of the former leaders were all largely accepted. Only the wartime Allied bombing raids, the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945 and the compulsory return of exiled Soviet and Yugoslav citizens to their homelands continued to prick the conscience of the Allies.41 The 1919 settlement was in some ways harsher than the Peace of Vereeniging. As we have seen, this compensated the Afrikaners rather than demanded reparations from them, largely avoided war crimes trials and quickly gave power back to the Boer leaders. The conduct of the negotiations was also both more dignified and more astute than in 1919 because the Boer leaders were treated with great respect. They were, to some extent, implicated in the settlement, whereas the German negotiators could rightly claim that their views were ignored. The Allies were

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 109 afraid in 1919 of allowing German statesmen to manipulate them as they felt Talleyrand had manipulated the victors in 1815. They were also afraid of their publics. But the settlement would have gained immeasurably if German negotiators had been involved in the talks. They would have been forced to show why the Allies could not impose reparations as the Germans had imposed reparations on their enemies, and they would have had to deploy demographic arguments against the territorial settlement and security considerations against the disarmament clauses. On all these issues, if the Allies had a case, they should not have been afraid of putting it to enemy representatives. Above all, the 1919 settlement was both dignified and bedevilled by the principle of self-determination. In contrast, the Treaty of Vereeniging totally denied Boer rights to decide their future, though in practice this was to show the great advantages of liberal imperialism. The 1919 settlement encouraged the new states to become democracies, and the peacemakers were realistic enough to build in safeguards on their treatment of national minorities, however ineffective these proved in the long run. It made the colonial powers answerable to the League of Nations for the administration of the nations they had conquered. If the territorial settlement was imperfect, it was a great deal less brutal than the settlements of 1871, 1905, 1945 and 1953. Its deficiencies were largely a result of the endemic rivalries between the nations in Central and Eastern Europe rather than of the statesmen who drew up the settlement. That Western publics became convinced of the opposite was a tragedy for all concerned and a major cause of the Second World War.

Notes 1 Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 21 July 1919, column 1039. 2 Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elizabeth Glaser (eds) The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, Cambridge: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1998. 3 G. Lowes Dickinson, War: Its Nature, Cause and Cure, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923, p. 105; The Memoirs of Count Bernstorff, London: William Heinemann, 1936, pp. 21ff. On contemporary pacifism see Robert and Barbara Donington, The Citizen Faces War, London: Victor Gollancz, 1936. 4 Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 21 July 1919, column 955. 5 Ibid., column 958. 6 Ibid., column 960. 7 Ibid., column 966. 8 Ibid., column 1024. 9 Ibid., column 1025. 10 Ibid., columns 1028–1036. 11 Ibid., column 1034.

110 The British debates in 1919 and 1933 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., column 1036. Ibid., column 1039ff. Ibid. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 30 March 1933, column 193. Ibid., column 202. For Cecil’s more considered views on this period see Viscount Cecil, All the Way, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949, pp. 199–210. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 30 March 1933, Column 208. Ibid. Ibid., column 217. Ibid., column 224. Ibid., column 230. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 13 April 1933, column 2740. Ibid., column 2743. Ibid., column 2755. Ibid., column 2764. Ibid., column 2771. Ibid., column 2787. For Churchill’s other speeches on this theme see Robert Rhodes James (ed.) Churchill Speaks: 1897–1963, London: Windward, 1981, pp. 546–663. Ibid., column 2790. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. See also J.M. Keynes, The Collected Writing of John Maynard Keynes, volume 17, ed. Elizabeth Johnson, Macmillan/Cambridge University Press, 1978. For comments on Keynes by another Treasury official see Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, London: Collins, 1937, pp. 239–240. ‘A candid critic of the peace’, The Times, 5 January 1920. Valentine Williams, The World of Action: An Autobiography, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938, chapter 25. Older officials often agreed with Williams’ view; see Lord Hardinge, Old Diplomacy: The Reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, London: John Murray, 1947, pp. 229, 232, 240 and 260. Dickinson, War, p. 90. Ibid., p. 96. C.E. Montague, Disenchantment, London: Chatto and Windus, 1922, pp. 186ff.; A Haldane, A Soldier’s Saga: The Autobiography of General Sir Aylmer Haldane, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1948, pp. 363ff. For an account of the poverty of Germany in 1919 see Harry J. Greenwall, Around the World for News, London: Hutchinson, undated, pp. 49ff., but note Hardinge’s views on German conditions, Old Diplomacy, p. 260. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919, London: Constable, 1933. Sir Robert Donald, The Tragedy of Trianon: Hungary’s Appeal to Humanity, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1928. Étienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes, London: Geoffrey Cumberlege/Oxford University Press, 1946. R.B. McCallum, Public Opinion and the Last Peace, London: Oxford University Press, 1944, pp. 30ff. Ibid., pp. 99ff.

The British debates in 1919 and 1933 111 40 ‘Japan’s mixed messages over war’, The Times, 16 August 1999; for the continuing interest in the subject see Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London: Vintage, 1995. For pressure on German companies to compensate former slave workers see ‘Auschwitz loan link hits bank takeover’, The Times, 5 February 1999; Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘Hitler’s long shadow’, The Times, 18 February 1999; ‘Firms fund a bitter lesson on Nazi era’, The Times, 27 February 1999. 41 On the ethnic cleansing in 1945 see A.M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; W. Byford Jones, Berlin Twilight, London: Hutchinson, undated, pp. 16 and 56. On the return of exiled Germans and Yugoslavs see ‘War crimes charge against Aldington monstrous, QC says’, The Times, 4 October 1989; ‘Peer tells of unhappiness at order’, The Times, 12 October 1989; ‘Order to repatriate Cossacks horrified officer, jury is told’, The Times, 11 November 1989; Sir Carol Mather, Aftermath of War: Everyone Must Go Home, London: Brassey’s, 1992. For continuing debate on strategic bombing see Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945, London: Hutchinson, 1983, chapter 26; John Terraine, A Time for Courage: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939–1945, New York: Macmillan, 1985 (published in Britain as To the Right of the Line), pp. 503ff.

8

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 Objectives in war

In the Second World War democratic leaders concentrated on winning the war itself, dictators on their plans for reshaping the world. For dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, wars were a means to vast and ambitious ends; for twentieth-century democratic leaders they were increasingly seen in negative terms, as a way to restore the status quo ante, which they associated with both stability and justice. Dictators were imaginative and constructive for their own purposes; democrats were often so exhausted by the demands of war that when post-war peace conferences began, they had very little energy to initiate and realise new schemes. It was usually left to publicists and civil servants in the democracies to consider new approaches to international order. This dichotomy between dictators and democratic statesmen had not always been so sharp. After the Napoleonic Wars the British clung to Trinidad, Tobago, Malta, Cape Colony, Mauritius and the Seychelles. These had come their way during the fighting, even if they had not originally planned to take them. During the rest of the century the British, French, Belgians and Germans divided Africa and South-East Asia between them. Thus, European democracies either hoped for territorial gain from victory or promised such gains to their allies in the First World War, but once Woodrow Wilson’s intervention made it unacceptable to seize territory in warfare, then wars tended to lose all positive purpose as far as they were concerned.1 The situation was very different in Nazi Germany. On 8 August 1942 the Reichsminister, Martin Bormann (1900–45), recorded Hitler’s conversation with his guest, the Reichsarbeitsführer Hierl. Hitler expatiated on the valour of his troops, who had advanced deep into Russia and reached the Crimea. There they had, so he claimed, already become self-supporting. The struggle in the region was like the United States’ wars against the ‘Red Indians’, in other words against what he saw as primitive peoples. The German army was living by looting the vicinity

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 113 and the Russians were retaliating with guerrilla attacks. As the Germans established themselves, they should set up a new currency in the region and start trade fairs. Then the Saxons should export baubles to the primitive peoples who were left in the region. In the north, St Petersburg would have to be obliterated if the Russians tried to retake it, as Germany could allow no rival on the Baltic. Amongst the peasantry in those regions there were still descendants of the Goths and these should be won to the German side. They could now breathe freely and were for the first time to be paid for their produce.2 At lunch on the following day the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler (1900–45), the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946), and some of the Gauleiters were the leading guests. Hitler told them that Germany would allow no British influence on the Continent, where he would bring order through harsh rule. The Balkans might be left to themselves for a while, though Germany could export arms there and shed no tears over intra-Balkan wars. The Austrians, who were more pan-German than the Germans, should be encouraged in their ambitions to take over the Hungarians and Slovenes. The whole region should export food to Germany. Spaghetti factories could be built there and 10 to 12 million tons of grain a year exported to the Reich. Repression would be necessary: ‘anyone here who gets ideas above his station and beyond the confines of his farm must be sharply jumped upon’.3 No doubt Himmler and the others knew what this portended for the Balkan peoples. That evening the Gauleiters remained as Hitler’s guests. His comments reflected both his triumphalism and the views of the geopoliticians who had exercised such a baleful influence in the 1930s. He told the guests of the riches in grain and oil which the Ukraine would produce for Germany. After the war Germany would be self-supporting in everything, including cotton. Only coffee would perhaps be missing, but even that might be rectified by seizing some colony. ‘Timber we shall have in abundance, iron in limitless quantity, the greatest manganese-ore mines in the world, oil – we shall swim in it.’ Not only would Germany be rich and work a pleasure, but communism would have been destroyed. Without Nazi Germany Europe would have been overrun before 1942 by Stalin’s communist hordes. Instead, in a hundred years’ time millions of blond German peasants would be flourishing in the colonial territories to the East.4 Two days later the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer (1905–81), and General Reinecke were the guests. Hitler stressed to them the importance of making the Reichsmark the most stable and strongest currency in the world. Germany would rid itself of its war debts within

114 Hitler and Churchill in 1942 ten years, the only belligerent able to do so. Then it would be able to concentrate on colonising the lands taken in the East. If the British wanted to make peace, he would probably agree without forcing them to pay an indemnity, because Germany had already been paid. The real profiteers of this war are ourselves, and out of it we shall come bursting with fat! We will give back nothing and take everything we can make use of. And if the others protest, I don’t care a damn! Unlike other countries’ colonies, Germany’s conquests were next door waiting to be exploited, and for this peace was needed with the British and Americans.5 Evidently, before the fighting intensified in the west and Roosevelt enunciated the doctrine of unconditional surrender, the Führer had no idea that he was involved in a total war with the democracies which could have only one outcome. He still believed that Churchill and Roosevelt would allow Germany to rule the Continent and keep its peoples enslaved. Hitler went on that night to attack the ‘parson clique’ in Germany, the Christian priests, who were so often the subject of his wrath when he was alone with his ‘courtiers’. One day he would destroy them and, in the meantime, he was watching them. ‘We have no use of a fairy story invented by the Jews. The fate of a few filthy, lousy Jews is not worth bothering about.’ Thus he hinted at the destruction of European Jewry, which was, from his point of view, alongside the colonisation of the East and the obliteration of communism, the main positive function of the war. At the same time he believed the Catholic Church wanted the Nazis destroyed. Indeed, in these discussions Hitler frequently made it clear that, in the end, he regarded the Churches, with their emphasis on humanitarianism and love, as his greatest enemies. Christianity’s ‘invention’ was the heaviest blow ever struck against humanity, and Bolshevism was its result. Had he been in Mussolini’s place, he would have thrown the Pope and his priests from the Vatican. Everything possible would be done to eradicate them when he felt strong enough to do so. The Jews were to be extirpated during the war and the Christian Churches afterwards.6 German Christians who were hoping that Nazism and Christianity could live in harmony, or who believed that they could avoid trouble by ‘keeping their heads down’, were in a for a rude shock. At the moment when Hitler was telling his associates about his future plans for colonising Russia, making peace with the democracies and destroying the Jews and the Christian Churches, Churchill’s concerns, as represented in his memoirs, in his telegrams and in the diary of his

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 115 doctor, Lord Moran, were about fighting the war. He had decided to fly to Cairo to assess whether a change in the British military command there was now necessary. He would then go on to Moscow to tell Stalin and his colleagues about Anglo-American military plans. Once he was in Egypt, Churchill’s suspicions that the army lacked leadership and that there were too many soldiers drawing their pay and not fighting, were confirmed. He replaced Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884–1981) with General Harold Alexander (1891–1969) as Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, while Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976) took over the Eighth Army.7 On 7 August 1942 Lord Moran had a long conversation with the South African Premier, Jan Smuts, who had travelled to Egypt to join in the discussions. Smuts insisted that Churchill was irreplaceable as war leader because he was a man of ideas. However, Smuts did not have much luck persuading Churchill to use his vaunted imagination on nonmilitary subjects when they were in Cairo. The South African leader tried to convince Churchill the profit motive had been superseded in economic affairs, but Churchill was not interested. Smuts told Churchill that the Indian Congress leader, Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), was a man of God who appealed to religious motives and that Churchill had failed to galvanise his people by such an appeal. Churchill responded flippantly that he had made more bishops than anyone since Saint Augustine. Smuts, who was deeply religious, did not see the joke.8 Three days later Churchill was in the capital of what he called in his memoirs ‘this sullen, sinister Bolshevik state’, meeting Stalin for the first time and explaining in a four-hour interview with the Soviet leader why the democracies could not open a second front that year by invading Europe.9 The first part of the meeting was exceedingly gloomy, as well it might be, given the presence of German invaders deep in the Soviet Union and the genocidal policy they were carrying out.10 It was only when Churchill began to talk about the Bomber Command raids on Germany and how they were affecting German morale that the atmosphere began to improve. Stalin urged the raids forward. The atmosphere was further lightened when the Prime Minister said that there would be a landing by the Western armies that year in French North Africa. Stalin said this would weaken General Rommel (1891–1944) and his Afrika Corps, expose the Italians to Allied attack, set the French and Germans against each other and keep Spain neutral. He hoped God would prosper the undertaking.11 The next day, so Churchill recalled, was ‘Blenheim Day’, the day in 1704 when his famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, won his greatest victory. At noon Churchill had a harmonious discussion with

116 Hitler and Churchill in 1942 the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), and did not visit the Soviet dictator until eleven in the evening. Then Stalin launched into bitter and sarcastic criticisms of the Allies and particularly of the British army. The Soviets were losing 10,000 men a day while the British army was doing nothing because it was frightened of the Germans. The democracies had broken their promise to launch a ‘second front’ in 1942 and so to take the weight of the German attack off the Soviets.12 All this wounded Churchill because, no doubt, he was himself deeply disappointed by Britain’s military setbacks. British forces had lost Singapore and Burma, and had been pushed back by Rommel in the desert. He was now subject to scathing criticism in the House of Commons for his failure to lead Britain to victory. On 14 August there was an official dinner in the Kremlin at which the atmosphere between the Prime Minister and the Soviet leader was less tense. Stalin told Churchill about a visit to Moscow some years before by the Conservative MP, Lady Astor (1879–1964), who had informed him that Churchill was finished as a political leader. Nancy Astor, who had been a leading proponent of appeasement and a bitter critic of Churchill in the 1930s, blamed him for British intervention during the Russian civil war. Churchill confirmed that this was so and asked Stalin if he had forgiven him. Stalin said that the past belonged to God.13 The following day the conversations between the military staffs were abortive because the Soviet generals were unable to talk openly to their British colleagues. On the 15th Churchill dined with Stalin from 8.30 until 2.30 in the morning. Stalin criticised the British handling of the convoys to Murmansk, which had been badly mauled by German attacks. Churchill replied that the British understood sea warfare. The sole time they apparently talked seriously about political matters only partly related to the war was when Churchill asked whether Stalin had found the strains of the war greater than the strains of collectivising agriculture in the 1930s. Stalin replied that collectivisation was more difficult because he was dealing with 10 million people. The Soviet Union needed collective farms because otherwise the peasants let their tractors fall to pieces. Some of the Kulaks who opposed this policy were settled in the province of Tomsk or Irkutsk, ‘but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their labourers’. Stalin went on to claim that grain production was now much greater and more varieties of seeds were grown.14 Thus were the great purges justified and blame for the millions of deaths transferred from Stalin himself to the peasants. The contrast between Hitler’s recorded conversations at this period and Churchill’s is striking. Of course, the British and Soviets were at their lowest ebb in August 1942 and so they had to focus more on

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 117 fighting, while the Nazi empire was now at its greatest extent and could celebrate what it had already achieved. Militarily the Führer was happy with the status quo. He would have to concentrate more on the war itself in later years.15 But even when the British and Americans had begun to reverse the tide, Churchill kept his mind on military issues. In the back of his memoirs he reproduces his telegrams. Between June 1943 and May 1944 he records 210 telegrams, of which a mere 27 might, by stretching a point, be said to be concerned with the post-war situation.16 In October 1943 he warned his ministers to be ready with plans for the transition to peace, but the bulk of his telegrams relate to military matters or deal with trivial issues. He was, for example, hopeful that films might be used in schools, determined that the Ministry of Works and Buildings should provide 3,000 cottages for agricultural workers and insistent that prefabricated homes should be shown widely around the country to demonstrate their utility.17 Admittedly Churchill’s mind did very occasionally turn to more important post-war problems. He worried about the growing British debt to India, which he believed would be larger than the debt to the United States after the previous war. He protested against the idea that the ‘Big Three’ should try to dominate the world economically and politically through the United Nations.18 Their task in peace should, he noted suggestively, only be to prevent the outbreak of wars, not to coerce others. In other words, the newly established United Nations, which was to replace the League of Nations, was to react, not to initiate; innovations could be left to the slow but necessary workings of the international economy and natural political changes. Churchill is usually represented, and not unjustly, as a diehard imperialist. Yet he told Sir Edward Bridges (1892–1969), the Cabinet Secretary, in July 1943 that the spread of the English language around the world would be a gain for us far more durable and fruitful than the annexation of whole provinces. It would also fit in with my ideas of closer union with the United States by making it even more worthwhile to belong to the English-speaking club.19 However much he defended the existing British Empire and resisted the idea of giving independence to India, he was perceptive enough to see that Britain’s influence in the world was going to depend on the English language more than anything else. Half a century later the BBC, Reuters, the London publishers and think-tanks are indeed the main influences which Britain can bring to bear on international affairs.

118 Hitler and Churchill in 1942 As for the European post-war territorial settlement, and particularly the borders of Poland and Germany, Churchill tried to avoid facing up to the problems for as long as possible. He warned the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden (1897–1977), not to unite opposition in Parliament by raising such issues. ‘At a peace conference the position can be viewed as a whole, and the adjustments in one direction balanced by those in another. There is therefore the greatest need to reserve territorial questions for the general settlement.’20 The Prime Minister was right to emphasise how divisive such questions would become, but wrong to avoid addressing them altogether. He wanted to postpone the difficult political issues and focus on the more immediate military questions. Thus, at the Quebec conference in September 1944, he initially opposed the plans proposed by Henry Morgenthau (1891–1967). Morgenthau, who had great experience as US Treasury Secretary from 1934 to 1945, wanted to destroy German industry and turn the country into an agricultural nation. Churchill was initially shocked by the suggestion, then suddenly reversed his stance. US officials and historians have explained this by reference to the promise to give Britain $3,500 million in munitions aid and $3,000 million in other aid before the defeat of Japan.21 Certainly Churchill was impressed by these promises and told one of his secretaries, John Colville, that they were ‘beyond the dreams of justice’, but this would seem to be only part of the story. Churchill was evidently influenced by the views of his PaymasterGeneral, Lord Cherwell (1886–1957), who told him that the Morgenthau plan would eradicate a major economic competitor. Those closest to him knew he had failed to give much thought beforehand to peacemaking. Moran wrote: We may well ask how the Prime Minister came to Quebec without any thought-out views on the future of Germany, although she seemed to be on the point of surrender. The answer is hardly in doubt. He became so engrossed in the conduct of the war that little time was left to plan for the future. Moran thought that Churchill was bored by the issues which would trouble a peace conference and was ‘frittering away his waning strength on matters which rightly belonged to soldiers’. This was too dismissive. In a very important move the Prime Minister had persuaded Roosevelt at the conference that British forces should take part in the attack on Japan after Germany’s surrender. But it was also true that he was pessimistic about Britain’s economic future after the war, that he had no ideas about how to improve the prospects, and felt that all he could

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 119 do was see that victory was achieved and the soldiers had homes when they returned. Cherwell had apparently shown him that there was something constructive he could do, however misguided he was in believing that Britain would benefit in the long run from Germany’s ruin.22 Churchill was an extreme case, but other democratic leaders preferred to think about war rather than about peacemaking. Ill and exhausted, Roosevelt unconsciously did his best to wreck the work of his planners, particularly after the arguments about the Morgenthau Plan exposed the inherent difficulties. For months he refused to allow Cordell Hull and others to discuss what was meant by the Allied demand that the Axis should surrender unconditionally or to explain to enemy peoples that it did not mean their utter destruction. Instead he kept coming up with a puerile story about the Confederate surrender after the American Civil War, when the Northern commander, General Grant (1822–85), allowed the vanquished troops to keep their horses so that they could cultivate their fields.23 How the Germans were supposed to know that they could ‘keep their horses’, especially in the face of leaks about the Morgenthau Plan, remains a mystery. During the last years of the Second World War Roosevelt showed an utter inability to grapple with the problems of peace; indeed, in his weakened state he was totally unwilling to face them. On the way to the Yalta conference, through illness or indifference, he completely ignored the briefs prepared for him on the crucial forthcoming negotiations As Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes (1879–1972), commented later, not until the day before we landed at Malta did I learn that we had on board a very complete file of studies and recommendations prepared by the State Department. . . . Later, when I saw some of the splendid studies I greatly regretted they had not been considered on board ship.24 On many issues Roosevelt ignored his own Secretary of State, who when he came to write his memoirs found it difficult to hide his frustration. One might say that Roosevelt was exceptional because of his illness, just as Churchill was exceptional because of his fascination with military affairs, and that another President would have concentrated more closely on peace terms. But despite the plans for territorial expansion previously mentioned, the situation was not that much different in the First World War. In Britain the first wartime Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith (1852–1928), and his successor, David Lloyd George, focused

120 Hitler and Churchill in 1942 on the war rather than on peacemaking. Erik Goldstein’s account Winning the Peace shows how late in the war British governments began to think about the issues involved. Planning for the end of the war began in August 1916, exactly two years after it had started. Even then, few of his Cabinet Ministers responded to Asquith’s questions on the subject. David Watson’s study of the French leader, Georges Clemenceau, and Marc Trachtenberg’s examination of Reparation in World Politics demonstrate that, while junior French ministers and officials did plan for the future, Clemenceau kept his own council, determined to give no hostages to fortune, to make no promises to his own people and to drive the best bargain he could for the French people at the peace conference.25 Given the revolutionary nature of the changes in war aims brought by US entry into the war, it might be supposed that President Wilson was exceptional amongst democratic leaders in concentrating on peacemaking rather than warmaking. His published papers show that this was, at best, a half truth. For example, from 13 May to 13 June 1918, when he could be expected to be particularly concerned about the peace terms, very little of his correspondence actually refers to such questions.26 He was under considerable pressure by various groups to expand on the concept of the League of Nations and he was deeply troubled by the onset of civil war in Russia. These two issues aside, his correspondence focused on military questions and on internal American affairs. Of course, there were exceptions: on 21 May Lansing, the Secretary of State, sent him information about Italy’s attitude towards the possible establishment of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states. He was also passed a message from Balfour to Lord Reading (1860–1935), the British ambassador, that suggested encouraging the subject nationalities to rise against Austria, and discouraging US negotiations with the Austrian government. On 30 May Wilson said that he regarded this as unfortunate, and disliked ‘setting the Austrian people against their own government by plots and intrigues’. On 2 June the Australian Prime Minister, William Hughes (1862–1952), told the President that if Germany recovered any of the Pacific islands, it would be a threat to his country. On 11 June Wilson’s confidant Colonel Edward House (1858–1938) reported on discussions with the Swiss minister about peace terms. But all these reports and discussions occupy only a small part of Wilson’s papers for the period. Even if he wanted to focus on post-war plans, more immediate issues kept crowding in on him.27 A number of other major factors limited Wilson’s concentration on peace terms. He felt inhibited by the division between the Allies over territorial issues. When the United States declared war in 1917, the British and French wanted to send senior delegations to Washington to

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 121 discuss outstanding issues. Wilson received Balfour and the French representative, René Viviani (1862–1925), only because it would have been churlish to refuse. He told Colonel House: England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, amongst other things, be financially in our hands.28 But it was impossible to force them to abandon their ambitions during the war and unwise to expose inter-Allied disputes. House had extensive discussions with the British Foreign Secretary but Wilson wanted these to be represented as unofficial.29 The President’s suspicions must have been reinforced when Balfour handed over the main secret treaties on 18 May. Even though he did not give the US leader all the treaties and agreements, the sheer extent of the territorial promises was all too clear. In fact, the division with Britain was quickly healed because British leaders realised how opinion was moving against annexations and went along with this development. Aligning himself with US views, Lloyd George told the British trade unions on 5 January 1918 that ‘a territorial settlement must be secured based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed’. The problem at the peace conference was going to be persuading the Italians, the French, the Japanese and the British Empire delegations that annexation was no longer acceptable.30 In both world wars, if the democratic leaders had to concentrate on winning the war and on immediate political problems, junior officials and commentators were much more eager to try to use the war to reshape the future. They often argued that only by making drastic economic and political changes could subsequent wars be avoided. Commentators had time to think about the future; they were not burdened with day-to-day military problems and they did not have to worry about persuading allies of the virtue of their proposals. In the First World War Wilson’s correspondence shows how much faith was placed amongst the public in the United States and Britain in the establishment of a ‘league to enforce peace’. By the Second World War the failure of the League of Nations had shifted the focus from that level of analysis to economic issues and to the possibility of establishing a European federation. E.H. Carr (1892–1982), the former diplomat and major influence behind the leading articles which appeared in the war years in the London Times, was typical of this current. In 1942 he published Conditions of Peace, which attacked laissez-faire capitalism,

122 Hitler and Churchill in 1942 nineteenth-century-style democracy and national self-determination. Free trade or economic orthodoxy had undermined the peace settlement after 1918 and, even when the democracies had abandoned orthodoxy in the Great Depression, they had done so only as a last resort and with regret. ‘In these circumstances economic inventiveness, like military inventiveness, was honoured and practised only among the dissatisfied Powers.’31 Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had been far more successful and constructive than the rulers in the democracies, who looked to the past as an ideal age and tried to preserve their own privileges. In Carr’s view peace and security could be achieved only by political, social and economic change. Britain and other democracies must respond by recognising the deficiencies of formal democracy, by moving towards economic equality and by strengthening the citizen visà-vis industry.32 Carr was part of a general movement for a broadly ‘socialist’ solution of British and world problems. Left-wing publishers like Victor Gollancz (1893–1967) issued a whole series of books which called for the creation of an ‘international economic system, planned under social direction by an international political authority. And that means that we must build a Socialist United States of Europe, and move towards a World Socialist Union’.33 Such writings reflected and created the climate of opinion which prevailed in Western Europe after the Second World War. Labour Party leaders in Britain were quietly planning to establish the foundations of the welfare state and to nationalise key industries.34 Meanwhile, the French financial expert Jean Monnet (1888–1979) and other Europeans were setting out the ideas which were to lie behind the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Economic Community. In their view, Europe’s nations were too small to provide a decent standard of living for their peoples; united they could do much better, rival the United States and prevent the outbreak of another European war.35 Meanwhile, in the United States the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic system were being planned. Bretton Woods would break down the economic barriers between nations and stabilise currencies, so making possible the revival of the world economy after the Second World War.36 It is thus not true to say that the Western democracies were without ideas for improving the world after the end of the fighting in 1945. But these ideas circulated amongst commentators, civil servants and junior politicians, while national leaders focused on the military campaigns. Most ideas emerging in the democracies were also designed to prevent the outbreak of a future war. Hitler, like Napoleon before him, saw war as a means to an end. The democracies regarded war as an enormity to

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 123 be avoided except as a last resort, even when they still believed that victory might bring territorial gain. Once the fighting began, democratic leaders focused all their attention on the war, while Hitler boasted of the revolutionary changes he was going to make to society. For dictatorships war was a means to an end; for democracies total war was a wretched affair, only slightly alleviated by the courage shown by the troops, the strategic skills of Western military and civilian leaders and the fortitude of the civilian population. According to the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, ‘no one starts a war – or rather no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it’.37 The dictators Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo came closest to adopting this dictum. Napoleon wanted to dominate and reform Europe. Hitler intended to control Europe, colonise Russia and Eastern Europe, and eradicate communism, the Jews and the Christian Churches. Mussolini hoped to re-create the glories of the Roman Empire. The Japanese leader, Hideki Tojo (1885–1948), wanted to drive the Europeans from Asia and establish a co-prosperity sphere under Japanese control. Democracies generally declared war for negative reasons and made up their positive aims as the war progressed. These could be farreaching, as the attack on militarism and the plan to establish a League of Nations showed in 1919. On the other hand, Churchill’s aims in the Second World War were almost wholly negative, and it was left to the United States to press for a reconstituted international organisation and a reform of international economic affairs to reduce protectionism. Otherwise it was economists, officials and socialists who made the case for a European federation and a radical shake-up of the Western economies. Such ideas developed despite the focus of the Allied leaders on winning the war and their determination to postpone consideration of the peace settlement for as long as possible. They fought to prevent the world being reshaped according to Axis ideals, rather than to shape it to their own.

Notes 1 For an analysis of the changes see Sharon Korman, The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 2 Hitler’s Table-Talk: Hitler’s Conversations Recorded by Martin Bormann, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 621. See also Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939, pp. 46–48. For a modern assessment of Hitler’s view on the instrumentality

124 Hitler and Churchill in 1942

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

of war see Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 7. Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. 622. Ibid., p. 623. Ibid., p. 625. Ibid. For Hitler’s other attacks on the Churches see pp. 7, 76 and 145. See also Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 57–65. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, London: Constable, 1966, p. 51. For other descriptions of Churchill’s attitudes see Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide and Triumph in the West, London: Grafton Books, 1986; John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1953, London: Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1985. Moran, Winston Churchill, p. 52; Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate, volume 4, London: Reprint Society, 1953, pp. 374ff. Churchill, The Second World War, volume 4, pp. 388ff. Ibid., p. 391. For a recent history of the fighting see Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, London: Viking, 1998. Churchill, The Second World War, volume 4, p. 392; Moran, Winston Churchill, p. 55; F.L. Loewenheim, H.D. Langley and M. Jonas (eds) Roosevelt and Churchill: The Secret Wartime Correspondence, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1976, particularly document 75, pp. 234ff. Churchill, The Second World War, volume 4, p. 396. Ibid., p. 402. For Astor’s attacks on Churchill see Robert Rhodes James (ed.) Churchill Speaks, London: Windward, 1981, pp. 654 and 660. Churchill, The Second World War, volume 4, p. 406. H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London: Pan Books, 1952, pp. 140ff. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, volume 5: Closing the Ring, London: Reprint Society, 1954, pp. 497ff. Churchill, The Second World War, volume 5, p. 519. On films see p. 524, and on debts to India, p. 24, telegram to Lord Privy Seal, 7 May 1944. Ibid., p. 548, telegram to Foreign Secretary, 25 May 1944. Ibid., p. 502, telegram to Sir Edward Bridges, 11 July 1943. The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning, London: Cassell, 1965, pp. 504ff. For Churchill’s own views on his position see The Second World War, volume 5, pp. 228, 238, 284 and 314–316. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, volume 2, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948, p. 1612. For the US point of view see Hull, Memoirs, volume 2, pp. 1571–1574. On Cherwell’s influence see Moran, Struggle, p. 178. See also Colville, Fringes, p. 515, and Bryant, Triumph, p. 277. Hull, Memoirs, volume 2, p. 1570. James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, London: William Heinemann, undated, p. 23. Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy Peace Planning and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 9. On France see David Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography, London: Eyre Methuen, 1974, pp. 338ff. Marc

Hitler and Churchill in 1942 125

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, chapter 2, p. 29 passim. Woodrow Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, volume 48, ed. Arthur S. Link, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 3–309. Ibid., pp. 96–97, 114, 205–206, 228, 289, 318–319. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters: War Leader, volume 7, London: Heinemann, undated, footnote, p. 43. Ibid., p. 37. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, volume 1, London: Odhams Press, 1924, pp. 1491–1492 and 1510. Edward Hallett Carr, Conditions of Peace, London: Macmillan, 1942, introduction. Ibid., pp. xix and xxii. Julius Braunthal, Need Germany Survive? London: Victor Gollancz, 1943, preface and p. 228; Walter Padley, The Economic Problem of Peace, London: Victor Gollancz, 1944, pp. 163 and 164. For a very critical view of this policy see Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. Jean Monnet, Memoirs, London: Collins, 1978, p. 222. Hull, Memoirs, volume 1, pp. 250ff. gives an idea of the background to the free trade policies espoused by US leaders at the end of the Second World War. W.M. Scammel, The International Economy since 1945, London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 14–18. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (eds) Carl von Clausewitz on War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 579.

9

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials

The leaders of the ‘Big Three’ anti-Nazi powers – the Soviet Union, United States and Britain – met at Teheran in November 1943 to concert future policy and to decide what to do with their enemies after their victory. It was their first joint meeting. Over dinner the leaders proposed toast after toast and the evening became increasingly festive. Stalin enjoyed himself by teasing Churchill, a habit which the Prime Minister claimed to have enjoyed until the conversation turned to the ‘liquidation’ of the German General Staff. The Soviet leader insisted that the German military system depended on 50,000 staff officers and technicians. If they were destroyed, the whole ‘German problem’ would be solved.1 Stalin’s view of the importance and malevolent influence of the General Staff was by no means unusual. Indeed, it was strikingly similar to Foch’s view in 1919, and Sumner Welles, Roosevelt’s former aide and confidant, took the same view in the Second World War. In Time for Decision, published in 1944, Welles argued that the Staff had been responsible for all the German threats to international order since the French Revolution. ‘Whether their ostensible ruler is the Kaiser, or Hindenburg, or Adolf Hitler, the continuing loyalty of the bulk of the [German] population is given to that military force controlled and guided by the German General Staff.’ Welles believed that the Nazis and the General Staff had so dominated the schooling system in Germany that it would take a generation to change their views and make the country ready for democracy. ‘A wholly new spirit must be brought to life within the German people, and a totally new concept of what is worth living and striving for’. To combat the threat the only sensible policy was to insist on free dissemination within Germany of information from outside, to divide the country into a number of separate states and to abolish the General Staff while demilitarising the country completely.2

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 127 What was unusual, then, was not Stalin’s analysis but his brutal proposal at Teheran to ‘liquidate’ the General Staff. Against the background of the purges and mass executions in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Stalin’s suggestions could not be dismissed as frivolous. Indeed, they reminded a few of those present of something the Western representatives tried to push to the backs of their minds: the very different standards and ideals of the various members of the alliance. The Soviet Union was a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship; the United States and Britain were liberal capitalist democracies. Stalin himself had ordered the destruction of a large part of the Polish officer corps after the conquest of the country in 1939. After listening to the Soviet leader’s comments, Churchill immediately protested: ‘the British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions. Even if in war passion they allowed them to begin they would turn rapidly against those responsible after the first butchery had taken place’.3 Churchill had seen how the public had first fêted Lloyd George and then rounded on him for his handling of the peace conference in 1919. Hatreds quickly evaporated and politicians who were thought to be too much influenced by them were made to regret their actions. The authors of a recent study, Churchill as Peacemaker, point out that in any case, if he sometimes argued that war was coming and preparations should be made accordingly, from the Boer War to the end of his career he was usually an advocate of lenient peace treaties. Thus it was not just that Western publics would eventually forgive their enemies. If war was a normal, sometimes inspiring, though always unfortunate part of life, then there was no excuse for victimising those who had been fighting on the other side. It is a revealing comment on the passions widespread at the time that the only occasion when Churchill failed to observe this dictum was in some of his speeches at the end of the First World War.4 The British Prime Minister claimed to prefer to be shot himself than to give an order to shoot tens of thousands of Germans. Roosevelt wanted to maintain the party spirit and tried to make a joke of the situation by suggesting that 49,000 might be killed rather than 50,000. He was more concerned than Churchill to forget the nature of Soviet society and to co-operate closely with the Russians. At this stage his son, Elliott, unwisely intervened to say that the US Army would support Stalin’s proposal. Churchill walked off into a neighbouring room and sat in the dark until Stalin and Molotov fetched him back, declaring that they were only joking.5 Stalin may genuinely have seen the German General Staff as a main cause of aggression. He reverted to the subject again in May 1945 when the former US Commerce Secretary, Harry Hopkins (1890–1946), was

128 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials in Moscow. Stalin told Hopkins that all the Staff officers should be imprisoned for 10 to 15 years. It is also true that many more than 50,000 Germans had committed what would normally be regarded as capital offences by ordering the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Yugoslavs, Russians and others. If Roosevelt was unrealistic about the nature of the Soviet regime, Churchill often forgot the psychopathic character of the Nazi government and the extent of its crimes. Paradoxically, this was because he also tended to blame the German army and the Prussians for German actions in both world wars, instead of seeing Nazism as something quite new and peculiarly demonic.6 Under Hitler thousands of Germans became guards for the concentration camps where millions of Jews and others were murdered; thousands killed civilians and burnt their villages as reprisals for their guerrilla actions. Indeed, this had become so much the standard policy in Russia, Poland and the Balkans that those involved could hardly remember individual massacres.7 In Elliott Roosevelt’s account of the evening in Teheran, Stalin was making a proposal to execute war criminals: I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all Germany’s war criminals – justice before a firing squad. I drink to our unity in dispatching them as fast as we capture them, all of them and there must be at least fifty thousand of them.8 On the other hand, according to Churchill, the Soviet dictator was not asking for conviction for individual crimes; his objective was to end German military power by destroying its military system. One could argue that it was this military power which made all the individual crimes possible, as Sumner Welles had done, but Churchill did not believe that this justified mass executions.9 It might appear from the Teheran discussion that the Americans and Russians agreed on summary mass executions and the British were more squeamish. But this was not in general the case. As early as 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill had threatened punishment for the massacre of hostages and other civilians, but the form of punishment had not been made clear.10 The following year the representatives in London of the nine occupied European countries had met and called for punishment for crimes. Their views were backed by the governments of the three major allies. In 1943 the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) was established to collect information on war crimes.11 The Moscow Foreign Ministers conference in November 1943 also laid down that those allegedly responsible for crimes in occupied states

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 129 would be returned for trial where the crimes had taken place, ‘according to the laws of those liberated countries and of the free Governments which will be erected therein’.12 In the meantime, the UNWCC’s progress was blocked by the difficulty of finding evidence when most of Europe was still under Nazi control and when the Allies’ main efforts were devoted to defeating the Axis rather than sorting out post-war policy. But while there might be agreement on the handling of crimes by lesser officials and officers, there was a deeper disagreement about what to do with Hitler and his immediate associates if they were captured. Most of the senior participants changed their position from time to time as they wrestled with the issues. Sometimes Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden, Churchill and others suggested that summary executions were the appropriate answer.13 In Washington it was Henry Morgenthau who, once he had taken up the issue, consistently demanded the toughest and most precipitate penalties.14 The Secretary for War, Henry Stimson (1867–1950), led the faction who opposed summary execution and wanted to try the Nazi leaders for their responsibility for war crimes, for their aggression, for their crimes against humanity and for the conspiracy which lay behind their policies.15 Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, claimed in his memoirs to have been a consistent supporter of the Morgenthau line on this issue. At the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ conference the Soviets wanted ‘stern, swift justice’; Eden pronounced himself in favour of trials, though he stressed that he was expressing his personal opinion; Hull said he wanted to bring ‘Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their accomplices . . . before a drumhead courtmartial’. Molotov and his delegation cheered. At that stage Hull believed a formal trial, among other disadvantages would enable the archcriminals to manufacture a vast network of claims and pretences embodied in a fraudulent defence. This, carefully thought out and prepared, would be passed on to the German, Italian and Japanese populations to be taught them as gospel truth.16 Hull claimed that it was only after he left the State Department that his views were formally rejected. Hull’s memoirs give the impression that the British were against him but, in fact, for most of the time Churchill, backed by his Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon (1873–1954), who opposed mass executions, believed that the Nazi leaders should be dealt with summarily by agreement amongst the national leaders, as Napoleon had been in 1815.17 It was through US efforts, and particularly through

130 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials the efforts of Stimson, the army leaders, including the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall (1880–1959), and senior judicial authorities, such as Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), that the decision was eventually taken to hold the Nuremberg trials for senior Nazis and the Tokyo trials for their Japanese equivalents. The controversy surrounding the trials continued throughout the judicial process, as British parliamentary debates made clear. Opposition to the trials of Nazi leaders was led in the House of Lords by Bishop George Bell of Chichester (1883–1958) and by Lord Hankey (1877–1963), a former Royal Marine and Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. According to Hankey’s view, the mistakes in Allied policy began with the demand for unconditional surrender enunciated by Roosevelt at Casablanca on 20 January 1943. This epitomised the spirit of passion and revenge, rather than reason and justice.18 That was a great gift to Goebbels’ propaganda, rallied the disillusioned German people to Hitler, strengthened the resistance of the enemy and greatly prolonged the war by making it impossible for the allies to offer peace on less humiliating terms in either the west, or the far east.19 The threat the following November to punish the Nazi leaders ‘postponed peace sine die, because it threatened everybody who could make peace; they were told that they were all to be killed or imprisoned’. But for such threats a German military leader would have been able to overthrow Hitler and negotiate terms, just as the Italians had overthrown Mussolini.20 Thus, Hankey blamed unconditional surrender and the threat of trials for prolonging the war, allowing the Soviet Union to dominate Eastern Europe and creating bitterness amongst the former enemies. He denied that the threats moderated Nazi and Japanese behaviour during the war and he commended the aide-mémoire by Sir Alexander Cadogan (1884–1968) which was handed to the Americans in April 1945. This warned that it would be difficult to convict Hitler and his entourage of aggression because ‘these are not war crimes in the ordinary sense, nor is it at all clear they can be properly described as crimes under international law’.21 Aggression was always difficult to prove or define but, in Hankey’s view, the Soviets, the Poles, the French and the British could be said to be as guilty of this as other nations. The seizure of Vilnius by the Poles in 1923, the occupation of the Ruhr by the French in 1923 and the bombardment of the French fleet in Mers-el-Kebir by the British on 3 July 1940 were cases in point.22 The defendants at Nuremberg and

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 131 Tokyo were unable to cite such examples or to give the political background to their countries’ policies before the Second World War which would have explained the wrong done to them at Versailles and the mistakes in the policies of the democracies. Thus Hankey took the conventional view of the Treaty of Versailles. His claim that the French occupation of the Ruhr equated with German behaviour in Poland and the Soviet Union or Japanese treatment of the Chinese seems no more balanced after half a century than it seemed to many at the time. He had failed even more radically than Churchill to grasp the nature of the Axis regimes and their determination to exterminate or enslave whole races who fell under their control. Hankey dismissed the idea that it was possible to destroy an ideology like Nazism by force or by the judicial process. He was scathing about all the post-war trials, which had ‘resulted in the judicial persecution and often death of countless and often innocent people – kings, statesmen, cardinals, politicians, generals, diplomats’.23 Because he failed to name the individuals who suffered, it is difficult to assess these claims, but he was presumably alluding primarily to communist behaviour in Eastern Europe. However, anti-communists suffered there not because of the judicial process but because of the communists’ determination to eliminate them. Hankey was confusing the means with the cause and trying to blacken the whole process by association. He quoted with approval the dissenting judgement at Tokyo of the Indian judge Radhabinode Pal, that the so-called trial held according to the definition of crime now given by the victors obliterates the centuries of civilisation which stretch between us and the summary slaying of the defeated in war. A trial with law thus prescribed will only be a sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.24 In Hankey’s eyes, as in Pal’s, a deplorable precedent had been set for future wars which would perpetuate conflict, while the spectacle of democratic judges sitting alongside their Soviet equivalents was ‘cynical and revolting’ when the Soviets had ‘perpetrated half the political trials in the calendar’.25 It was wrong to prosecute officers who had simply been responsible for military planning and it was also wrong not to accept the plea from junior officers that they were acting under orders when they committed atrocities. This was ‘just placing a premium on cowardice and escapism in the proper carrying out of orders’. In sum, vengeance should be left to the Lord, as it had been before 1815, and the whole judicial process should be brought to a halt.26

132 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials Hankey’s was an extreme position, and one which he restated at length in Politics, Trials and Errors, published in 1950. But there were many who agreed at least with some of his arguments, particularly amongst the clergy and professional soldiers. The former Commander of the British Home Fleet, Admiral the Earl of Cork and Orrery (1873–1967), backed up Hankey’s arguments in the House of Lords against dismissing the plea of acting under orders. He cited the case of a sub lieutenant on a German submarine who was executed for obeying his commanders’ orders to fire at seamen clinging to the wreckage of a merchant ship; ‘the boy received an order and he had no time to consider or discuss whether or not what he was ordered to do was legal’.27 The Earl said that most British officers agreed that ‘everyone should be able to trust his superior and to carry out without question an order from him. And the superior ought to be able to depend on implicit obedience’. He also suggested that ‘hard’ decisions had sometimes to be taken; the submarine was trying to hide its presence, and from a military point of view this was a reasonable action to take. Similarly, in Burma a British patrol had captured some twenty Japanese soldiers and, because they could neither march them with the patrol nor abandon them in the jungle, they had taken the decision to kill their captives. The Earl wanted to know whether this would be considered a war crime.28 Bishop Bell of Chichester represented the doubts of many clerics about the war crimes trials because they instinctively preferred the eighteenth-century inclination to leave justice to God, even if, with the progress of secularisation, they did not always feel it was effective to express the point in that way. Bell was, however, unusual in his willingness to express his doubts in the most trenchant terms. He had created a stir during the war by attacking Britain’s strategic bombing policy. Subsequently he criticised the moral and legal basis of the war crimes trials. In his view the trials took far too long, and were concerned only with the crimes of the vanquished, ignoring the victors’ offences. The accusation of crimes against peace, made against Nazi leaders, stood on weak legal foundations. As far as the trials of serving officers were concerned, he cited paragraph 443 of the British Manual of Military Law, that ‘members of the armed forces who commit such violations of the recognised rules of warfare as are ordered by their Government or by their Commander are not war criminals and cannot therefore be punished by the enemy’. The Bishop said that the trials had failed to distinguish sufficiently between those, like Hitler, who gave the evil orders and the military men and diplomats who carried them out. Thus, Von Weizsacher (1882–1951), the Permanent Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry from 1938 to 1943, had recently been sentenced to

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 133 seven years in prison, even though the judges accepted that he had remained in office partly to try to mitigate the worst effects of the regime.29 Just as the clerics often leant to the eighteenth-century approach, so many of Britain’s most distinguished lawyers naturally wanted to establish and develop the role of international law. Lord Lawrence (1880–1971), who presided over the Nuremberg Trials, defended the proceedings in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in December 1946. Far from being dilatory, he argued fairly enough that what was extraordinary, in the chaotic situation prevailing in Europe, was that the cases had been handled so quickly. Lawrence argued that the trials’ critics never really faced up to the alternatives. The leading Nazis would have been murdered if the desire for justice and for revenge had not been channelled into the war crimes courts. As Lord Justice Birkett (1883–1962), the former criminal lawyer and Liberal MP, told the same institute in March 1947, there was such a wave of feeling, such a call and a cry for retribution, that it was essential, unless worse should befall, that it should be guided into proper channels . . . otherwise there would, in my judgement, have been a perfect blood-bath throughout Europe. The trials had been carried out fairly with the accused able to call on any lawyers they wished for. As for the suggestion that aggressive war were not a crime, ‘no defendant was condemned to death or even to imprisonment for this crime alone’.30 Lawrence and Birkett believed that the trials were a justified response to the enormities for which the Nazis were responsible. But, after fifty years, their claim that the trials discouraged those who had suffered from taking the law into their own hands seems less well founded. Neither the Jews who had managed to survive in Europe, nor the prisoners of war who had suffered at Japanese and German hands, generally revenged themselves on their former oppressors who escaped Allied tribunals. Of course, there were lawyers who dissented from the views expressed by Lawrence and Birkett, just as there were clerics who disagreed with Bishop Bell. Lord Maugham (1866–1958), who had been Lord Chancellor from 1938 to 1939, was the most senior legal dissenter, publishing his views in book form in 1951. On the other hand, the Labour Lord Chancellor in 1949 was an ardent defender of the trials and a bitter opponent of Hankey, Maugham and their group. In the May 1949 debate in the House of Lords he dismissed Hankey as a ‘wellmeaning theorist’ who set about fitting the facts to his preconceived

134 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials ideas and was otherwise notable for the ‘extraordinary inaccuracy of his statements’. These were strong words for the House of Lords at that time and they reflected powerfully held emotions.31 Some of those who had earlier been critical of the principle of establishing war crimes trials had now come round to defending them. This was most particularly true of the wartime Chancellor, Lord Simon, who now declared, ‘I believe the principles laid down in the [Nuremberg] Charter were in themselves perfectly just and were in accordance with international law.’ Simon emphasised that it had always been assumed that it would be impossible to condemn all those guilty of capital offences but that examples would be made and the habit of holding such trials established. Simon agreed that Bishop Bell’s quotation from the British Manual of Military Law was accurate but suggested that this was a temporary mistake based on the views of a particular edition of the Oppenheim work on international law. This was corrected in the next edition, and the Manual was also changed accordingly.32 All this may have been accurate, but it did little to strengthen the Allies’ case. It also reflected a genuine dilemma. If one took the extreme hierarchical position, no one but the dictator himself would be responsible for atrocities committed at lower levels. If one took the opposite position, it was difficult to see how military operations could be carried out because junior officers would be constantly objecting that particular actions were immoral or illegal. For Hankey and other critics of the war crimes trials, the post-1918 experience showed their futility and stirred up bitterness amongst the defeated peoples. For Allied leaders, by contrast, the First World War experience justified their post-1945 policy. After 1918 the Germans had refused to hand over war crimes suspects for trial by the Allies. They had eventually been allowed to try their own officers at Leipzig for war crimes.33 The result had been a fiasco, with only a handful of convictions, and even those offenders were permitted to escape. In recent years historians have taken to ridiculing the allegations of war crimes against German forces in the First World War. One recent history expressed the general view that a few of the stories of German atrocities were accurate, but ‘most of those about raped Belgian nuns and impaled babies [were] not. They had sprung from the lurid imaginations of the pressroom’. In fact, the French government had reprinted an extensive range of captured German documents early in the war describing the ferocious reprisals taken against Belgian and French civilians for the actions of guerrillas.34 These had not originated ‘in the pressroom’. There were exaggerations in the press, but the recent tendency to play down the complaints about German reprisals has been equally exaggerated.

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 135 After both the First World War and the Second the basic issue was whether it was not wise to see such ‘crimes’ as a normal and even inevitable aspect of war, and to insist, in Burke’s words, that ‘the offences of war are obliterated by peace’. Thus the ‘wounds’ would disappear more quickly than if their memory were kept alive by trials of the alleged perpetrators. As we have seen in the Introduction, this was essentially the pre-modern attitude and explains why a blanket amnesty was included in most traditional peace treaties. The arguments advanced by Hankey, and even from time to time by Churchill, savoured very much of the pre-1789 world. Nor was this surprising. Churchill was steeped in the history of the first Duke of Marlborough; both he and Hankey also represented a typical military position. Admiral Wemyss, the First Sea Lord, was ‘aghast’ in 1919 when he met a distinguished lawyer who wanted to try the Kaiser. The American admiral William Leahy (1875–1959) summarised this viewpoint a generation later when he claimed, ‘the execution of leaders of the Axis governments is a reversion to barbarism of pre-Christian days’.35 It is clear why this outlook became a minority position. With the development of the press the majority of people knew, or thought they knew, much more about what was happening during a war than had been the case in previous centuries. The educated minority knew in the seventeenth century, through rumour and pamphlets, something about the destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War. The War of the Spanish Succession was debated in Britain by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and other pamphleteers. Swift’s devastating pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies, which called on Britain to make peace even if its allies wished to continue the war, sold 11,000 copies within a month.36 But these debates were mainly for the educated population of London and those surrounding the Members of Parliament. Diaries kept by countrymen in the eighteenth century and before show how distant wars often seemed. Parson Woodforde, the vicar of a remote Norfolk parish at the end of the eighteenth century, illustrates the point admirably. He was much more interested in neighbouring events than distant ones, and only very occasionally commented on the continuing war against France. Even amongst political circles in London the news of war was far less voluminous than it was to become in subsequent conflicts. The letters of the rising Tory politician George Canning (1770–1827) show him much less obsessed with what was happening in the European war than politicians were to become a century later.37 From London news trickled out to the Norfolk countryside, sometimes in the papers and sometimes passed from person to person.

136 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials However, the information was brief and superficial. Woodforde appears, for example, to have had little understanding of the scale and issues at stake in the conflict. But as the press developed, people were kept more closely in touch. War correspondents accompanied the armies to the battlefield and reported immediately on the course of events. They were tolerated by the commanders and some, like The Times’ correspondent William Howard Russell (1821–1907), were well known to leading statesmen, such as Bismarck, and were treated as distinguished guests. At the same time Bismarck kept his own writer or propagandist, Dr Moritz Busch, at his side during the wars so that he could influence the press.38 Once the telegraph was invented, news from some battlefields could reach the public within days of the events themselves. Sketches and later photographs added to the impression of verisimilitude. Reports of massacres and bloodshed were now much more real.39 Partly as a consequence of these developments, the attitude towards warfare also began to change. In medieval times and before, war must have seemed to the mass of people very similar to a natural event – a plague, an earthquake or a whirlwind which swept down on them and sometimes changed their lives for ever. It also offered young men an escape from the boredom of rural life and a chance to seek fame and fortune. Of course, many scholars did not see it that way, and Erasmus and other Christian writers never ceased to lament the sufferings of war.40 Most statesmen were also only too well aware of the ruinous cost of waging war even for a victorious power. But such debates were for the universities, senior clerics and government circles; they were far removed from the conceptions of the average peasant, or even from those of a country parson such as Woodforde. Once wars came generally to seem man-made and avoidable events, and something of the scale of the destruction they brought became clear to all, then the public wanted to hold individuals to account for their onset. At the same time, and most importantly, secularisation made them increasingly unwilling to leave vengeance to God. There had already been very occasional examples of this spirit in civil wars. In Britain, after the defeat of the Royalist forces and the capture of Charles I, he was said by his accusers to have ‘traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament’. As a result, ‘much innocent blood of the free people of this nation hath been spilt, many families have been undone, the public treasure wasted and exhausted’. Thus Charles alone was ‘guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation’. In such rare cases an individual was called to account for the outbreak of war and the destruction it caused, but the circumstances were exceptional.41

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 137 The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars began to spread demands for such trials and to make defeated governments vulnerable for their actions. There was enough public anger in Britain and particularly in Prussia against France in 1815 to make it very difficult for governments just to negotiate a traditional peace treaty with an amnesty for all crimes. Feelings were whipped up by the press. Thus The Times commented, on Napoleon’s escape from Elba in 1815, that the life of the ‘hypocritical villain’ had been unwisely spared by the allies and looked forward to hearing ‘that the arch-traitor has been delivered over to the disgraceful death he has so long and so richly merited’. Correspondents wrote to the newspaper calling for his execution or for him to be ‘for ever immured in the silence and secrecy of a dungeon’.42 The Prussian army would have agreed with this view; thwarted, the Prussians vented their anger by mistreating the French public during the occupation of France to such an extent that Wellington, the commander of the allied armies, was constantly trying to rein them in and King Louis claimed that only age and infirmity prevented him from leading the guerrilla resistance of his people against such persecution.43 At the time, those, like Talleyrand, who wished to draw a veil over the past within France and thus heal the divisions between Legitimists, Republicans and Bonapartists were over-ruled. Talleyrand wanted the king to dispense with all measures of severity, excepting that all those peers of the Chamber of 1814, who had consented to be part of the Chamber of peers created by Napoleon during the hundred days, should forfeit their seats. But despite his position and experience, he was ignored, and Joseph Fouché (1763–1829), the Chief of Police from 1799 to 1815, drew up a list of 100 people who should be prosecuted. Talleyrand managed to reduce this to 57 and to warn many of them ‘so that they might escape if they thought proper’. The result was the trial and execution of Marshal Ney (1769–1815), while in the provinces royalists were massacring the Bonapartists and Jacobins who fell into their hands.44 The general drift towards war crimes was particularly obvious in the nineteenth century when the Anglo-Saxon democracies were belligerents. The commandant of a notorious prison where Federal troops were kept during the American Civil War was executed after a widely publicised trial when the North was victorious. The British excluded certain offenders from the general amnesty they declared for the Boers at the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902.45 The Americans tried some of their own officers for offences committed during the suppression of the revolt

138 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials in the Philippines.46 The notion of the law of war was also popularised by the two Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. Laws implied breaches and thus punishments. Commentators watched the RussoJapanese War of 1904–5 anxiously to see whether the new laws could be made to work Their conclusions were generally optimistic.47 During the First World War Allied journals produced a steady of stream of articles on the issue. The influential Nineteenth Century, for example, had articles on war crimes in September 1916, September 1918 and October 1918. The timing of the articles was no doubt significant. There was little point in concentrating on the subject in 1917 when the chance of an Allied victory seemed to have receded with the Russian Revolution and the tightening submarine blockade on Britain. But when the Allies were winning, all the articles demanded that those enemy guilty of war crimes should be punished. One writer argued in September 1916 that not only should the criminals ‘whoever they may be and whatever their position’, to quote the Prime Minister’s recent words, be tried and punished after the war, but the actual perpetrators of war crimes upon their capture should at least be earmarked.48 Another insisted that ‘we ought to wreak vengeance on [the war’s] authors’ and proceeded to claim that this was in accordance with religious and legal texts: ‘ours is, in the strictest sense of the word, a holy war: a war in defence of civilisation and of that moral law upon which civilisation rests’.49 At the end of the war one writer launched into an attack on the Pope for proposing a compromise peace and argued that the massacres of Belgian clergy at the beginning of the war made clemency impossible.50 The lawyers were more influential than the clergy. The Lord Justice of Appeal, Sir Walter Phillimore, argued in 1917: retribution, no doubt, there should be. It is an element not to be forgotten, and it will be a great gain if some penalty can be exacted, sufficient to act as a deterrent and to prevent powerful states from taking war in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly. . . . If the time has not come, it will soon come, when war will be recognised as such a calamity . . . that not only should the aggressor state, and with the state all its citizens collectively, suffer, but the rulers or statesmen who have caused or induced their nation to enter into war should pay in person.51

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 139 If, for the moment, this were impossible, the Allies should still insist on punishing war crimes because ‘such punishment . . . will render the present criminals incapable of further crime and deter others in the future’.52 Another legal writer, Coleman Phillipson, similarly attacked the general principle of amnesties, particularly if they affected those guilty of treason. ‘A general amnesty clause, exonerating all indiscriminately who have compromised themselves in the war, means a condonation of crimes aiming at the very foundation of political society’.53 By the end of the war the enemy had thus been condemned by lawyers, politicians and the media, and the impetus they had given to public feeling could not be reversed at a stroke. Laying out Britain’s war aims in January 1918, Lloyd George told the trade union movement, ‘there must be reparation for injuries done in violation of international law. The Peace Conference must not forget our seamen and the services they have rendered to, and the outrages they have suffered for, the common cause of freedom’.54 Eighteenth-century governments could have ignored public opinion or waited until the anger had abated. This seemed impossible to the democratic leaders of the time. Lloyd George told the House of Commons that trying the Kaiser not only would be just but would change the attitude towards war: you will never put an end to war till you alter the whole attitude towards it, and the point of the trial is that for the first time you treat the man who had organised, deliberately and wantonly, war for personal aggrandisement . . . you treat him for the first time – you stamp his action as felony.55 The public desire for vengeance gradually declined after the war, although there was still anger when the Dutch government refused in January 1920 to hand the Kaiser over for trial. Bravely, the Dutch said that they would associate themselves in the future with an international tribunal but, in the meantime, ‘the Government of the Queen can admit up to the present no other duty than that imposed upon it by the laws of the realm, and the national traditions’. Furthermore, it went on, ‘the expression of the secular tradition has made of that country from all times a land of refuge for the vanquished in international conflicts’.56 Gradually, as passions cooled, anger against the Dutch for not handing over the Kaiser and against the Germans for not extraditing lesser ‘criminals’ abated. By March 1920 some British commentators were willing to admit that

140 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials it is the extreme of unwisdom to bring such a pressure to bear upon the existing government in Germany as would have the effect of breaking it down and throwing the German Realm into chaos [as] is now fairly obvious to everybody.57 Yet that was precisely what might have happened if the Allies had persisted in attempts to make the government hand over popular German military and political leaders. During the Second World War public opinion and the brutality of the Axis regimes was going to make any return to pre-1789 amnesties even more difficult, whatever Hankey and Bishop Bell may have suggested. If trials were not accepted, then some other solution was held to be necessary. Most of the public disagreements were about how extensive the punishments should be. Thus the American commentator William Ziff wrote, in The Gentlemen Talk of Peace, published in 1944: it is almost useless to expect that the criminals will be brought to the bar of justice and tried for their crimes. If the past is any token, few will suffer penalty despite the unpardonable nature of their offences. The punishment of isolated ruffians may be expected to be taken care of by outraged individuals. . . . The rest will escape. The single sensible remedy is exile. All leaders of the Nazi party from the smallest district functionary to Hitler should be removed from Europe and exiled in some colony such as Devil’s Island or Madagascar. To these should be added all professional army officers. All of these persons should be transferred without their wives, since the intention is not the colonisation of Germans but a cure for the European carcinoma.58 Ziff imagined that a quarter of a million might thus be removed for the rest of their lives. Popular anger against individual Germans became much greater after the discovery of the death camps. The British embassy in Washington reported on 28 April 1945 a ‘hardening of sentiment’ and went on to say, ‘whatever the realities of any tendencies to a “soft peace”, the public expression of them from any responsible quarter would be most bitterly unwelcome at this moment’.59 Further controversy was aroused by claims from former Congressman and member of the American Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes Henry Pell that some of the massacres could have been stopped by firm warnings of the intention to punish those responsible.60 On 6 May the embassy continued, ‘accounts of German concentration camps continue to pour in, and the violence of anti-German feeling generated by this shows no sign

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 141 of abating’. The embassy believed that American anger against Germany now equalled anger against Japan.61 By 13 May the ‘hard peace’ school was very much in the ascendant, though the embassy expected it to decline again as ‘American (like other) opinion cannot long bear the contemplation of the very disagreeable and its grimmer implications’. So indeed hostility to the defeated nations did decline, as Churchill and others had predicted and indeed hoped. But Nazi atrocities were of such a nature that Germany and other nations did not reject the principle of the trials or disparage them even decades afterwards. Hankey misjudged the situation because he had never really grasped the nature of the Nazi regime. Lapses of taste by Hankey’s colleague F.J.P. Veale, who equated the Nuremberg trial with the concentration camps, simply hardened opinion amongst those who kept abreast of the debate. For half a century afterwards intermittent trials were held of Nazis who had been hidden by friends from the wrath of the courts. Paul Touvier, former leader of the pro-Nazi militia in Lyons, was hidden by a French Catholic priory until 1989 and protected by the Archbishops of Lyons.62 Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in Lyons, was not jailed for life until 1987 after being used for some years by US intelligence agencies and then hiding in Bolivia.63 Erich Priebke, a former SS captain, was jailed in July 1997 for his part in the killing of 335 civilians in Nazioccupied Rome in 1944.64 Maurice Papon, Secretary-General of the Gironde region from 1942 to 1944, was convicted in April 1998 for his part in the murder of the 76,000 French Jews, though freed on the grounds of ill health.65 Despite the criticisms by Bell, Hankey and others, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials have reinforced the democratic tendency to demand that enemies held responsible for attacks on civilians or mistreatment of servicemen should be brought to justice. On 2 September 1990 the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1925– ), warned the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein (1935– ), that he would face charges if innocent hostages were injured or killed during the Gulf War: If anything happened to those hostages then sooner or later when any hostilities were over we would do what we did at Nuremberg and prosecute the requisite people for their totally uncivilised and brutal behaviour. We are making due note of the people who do it, because in these days they cannot say ‘we were only acting under orders’.66 The establishment of an international court to try alleged offenders from contemporary wars shows the intention to reduce one of the main

142 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials criticisms of the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials, that they represented victors’ justice.67 Preferable though international trials will be to trials by victors’ courts, they will still be cumbersome and so expensive that only handfuls of suspects will ever be brought before them. More importantly, they may widen the divisions between or within nations. One innovation and possible alternative was represented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. When multiracial elections were held in South Africa the fear was that revenge might be sought by the black majority against the millions of whites living in the country, and particularly those who had been closely identified with apartheid. At the same time, complete amnesty for all the tortures and murders committed by the previous government seemed impossible. The establishment of the commission under Bishop Desmond Tutu (1931– ), where the truth about past repression could be established and some of those responsible could admit their misdemeanours, represented a compromise and a brave attempt to heal the wounds left by the past. Not surprisingly, the commission has by no means satisfied all the hopes placed in it, but it was a real innovation and offered a way of assuaging popular anger, allowing passions to die down, exposing past wrongs and perhaps even healing divisions within a bitterly polarised society. It had the further advantage over trials that it did not demand the time-consuming and expensive preparations which the legal system rightly demands.68 No doubt Tutu saw it as a Christian alternative to the legal solution established after 1945. Such a system might be adapted to supplement war crimes trials in the future. It could not replace trials because suspects were persuaded to tell the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about their past behaviour as an alternative to facing trial in the courts. Moreover, war crimes trials reflect very basic democratic attitudes, however grave their disadvantages. In particular they epitomise the secular democratic beliefs that particular individuals should be held responsible for war and for breaches of international agreements during the fighting, and that judgement must take place in this world and cannot be left to God. Such trials also reflect the democratic idea that victory is not complete unless the vanquished accept the victors’ beliefs. To an extent this was achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945, where the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials helped to consolidate the process by exposing the evidence against the former leaders. But the justice of the victors’ cause was not accepted in Germany in 1919, nor is it accepted in Iraq today or in much of the former Yugoslavia. In such cases trials or threatened trials simply exacerbate the bitterness of defeat. Victors have to weigh the disadvantages of keeping the memory of past outrages and old disputes

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 143 alive by holding prolonged hearings against the possibility that trials may deter future offences, consolidate international norms, compel armed forces to teach international law to their servicemen and assuage the bitterness of those whose relatives have died.

Notes 1 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, volume 5: Closing the Ring, London: Reprint Society, 1954, p. 294. For a British military view of the conference as a whole see Arthur Bryant, Triumph in the West, 1943–1946, London: Grafton Books, 1986, chapter 2. 2 Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944, p. 261. 3 For Churchill’s comments see note 1 above. On Stalin’s purges see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, London: Collins/ Fontana, 1973. On Poland in the Second World War see R. Umiastowski, Poland, Russia and Great Britain, 1941–1945, London: Hollis and Carter, 1946. 4 James W. Muller (ed.) Churchill as Peacemaker, Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center/Cambridge University Press, 1997. On Churchill’s speeches in 1918 see Robert Rhodes James (ed.) Churchill Speaks: 1897–1963, London: Windward, 1981, pp. 368–370. 5 Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946, p. 188 passim. See also Robert E. Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, volume 2, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949, pp. 893–894. 6 ‘The core of Germany is Prussia. This is the source of the recurring pestilence.’ Churchill, Second World War, volume 5, pp. 135, 228 and 284. 7 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, London: Macmillan, 1957; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, London: Viking, 1998; Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. 8 See note 5 above. 9 Ibid. 10 Bradley F. Smith, The Road to Nuremberg, London: André Deutsch, 1981; Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, volume 2, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948, p. 1183; Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial, London: BBC Books, 1995, p. 21. 11 Hull, Memoirs, p. 1184. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 1289; Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning, London: Cassell, 1965, p. 358. Eden’s statement on 17 December 1942 on the mistreatment of the Jews brought the House of Commons to its feet. 14 Smith, Road, pp. 20ff. 15 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, New York: Harper, 1948, chapter 22. 16 Hull, Memoirs, p. 1289; Sherwood, Hopkins, volume 2, p. 712: ‘Hull said

144 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33

34 35

36

he hoped that we could find a way to avoid any longwinded trials of Hitler and his principal associates after the war.’ Tusa and Tusa, Nuremberg, pp. 25–26. The Rt Hon. Lord Hankey, Politics Trials and Errors, Oxford: Pen-inHand, 1950, chapter 2. For Hankey see also Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, 1931–1963, volume 3, London: Collins, 1974, pp. 641ff. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 5 May 1949, column 399. Ibid. Hankey, Politics, pp. 7–8. Ibid., pp. 13ff. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 5 May 1949, column 400. Hankey, Politics, pp. 26 and 133–135. See note 23 above. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 5 May 1949, column 405. Ibid., column 406. On the Earl see Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery, My Naval Life, 1888–1941, London: Hutchinson, 1943. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 5 May 1949, column 408. Ibid., column 376ff. On Bishop Bell see the obituary in The Times, 4 October 1958. Adolf Eichmann’s lawyer made the same point at his trial about the legal handbook; see Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, London: Heinemann, 1962, p. 266. The Rt Hon. The Lord Justice Lawrence, ‘The Nuremberg trial’, International Affairs, 1947, 23: 151; and Justice Birkett, ‘International legal theories evolved at Nuremberg’, International Affairs, 1947, 23: 317. Viscount Maugham, UNO and War Crimes, London: John Murray, 1950. Maugham was particularly critical of the notion of trying people for planning ‘aggressive war’. For Maugham’s career see his obituary in The Times, 24 March 1958. Parliamentary Papers, House of Lords, 5 May 1949, columns 393ff. For Simon see Viscount Simon, Retrospect: The Memoirs of the Rt Hon. Viscount Simon, London: Hutchinson, 1952. James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982. For a very critical eyewitness account of British preparations for the trials see H.J. Greenwall, Round the World for News, London: Hutchinson, undated, p. 54. Tusa and Tusa, Nuremberg, p. 17; J.O.P. Bland, Germany’s Violations of the Laws of War, 1914–1915, London: Heinemann, 1915. For traditional approaches see Fred L. Israel (ed.) Major Peace Treaties of Modern History, 1648–1967, New York: Chelsea House/McGraw-Hill, 1967, volume 1, p. 9; Lady Wester Wemyss, The Life and Letters of Lord Wester Wemyss, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935, p. 405; Henry L. Adams, Witness to Power: The Life of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985, p. 308. For Burke’s view see Edmund Burke, The Works of Burke, volume 5, ed. F.W. Raffety, London: Oxford University Press, 1907, pp. 280–287. It is notable that he was generally in favour of post-war amnesties but believed that the Jacobins had to be tried for their crimes inside France. Michael Foot, The Pen and the Sword: Jonathan Swift and the Power of the Press, London: Collins, 1984, chapter 11.

Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 145 37 David Hughes (ed.) The Diary of a Country Parson, London: Folio Society, 1992, pp. 390, 395 and 396; George Canning, The Letter-Journal of George Canning, ed. Peter Jupp, London: Royal Historical Society, 1991. 38 Roger Hudson (ed.) William Russell, Special Correspondent of The Times, London: Folio Society, 1995, chapter 9; Moritz Busch, Bismarck: Some Secret Pages from His History, London: Macmillan, 1899. 39 For Gladstone’s attacks on ‘Turkish atrocities’ in the Balkans see R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914, Oxford: Clarendon, 1936, p. 45. 40 Erasmus, Institutio Principis Christiani, Grotius Society Publication no. 1, London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1921. 41 Samuel Rawson Gardiner (ed.) Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 356ff. For other early war crimes trials see Roy Gutman and David Rieff (eds) Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, New York: Norton, 1999, p. 374. 42 ‘Napoleon escapes from Elba’, The Times, 11 March 1815; ‘Aftermath of Waterloo’, The Times, 8 July 1815; ‘A dungeon for Napoleon’, The Times, 5 August 1815; see also Harold Kurtz, The Trial of Marshal Ney: His Last Years and Death, London: Hamish Hamilton, London, 1957, chapter 20. 43 T.D. Veve, The Duke of Wellington and the British Army of Occupation in France, 1815–1818, Westport, CT: Greenwood, Westport, 1992; Charles Maurice Talleyrand, Memoirs of the Prince of Talleyrand, volume 2, ed. Duke de Broglie, London: Griffith Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1891, p. 176, Louis to Talleyrand, 21 July 1815. 44 Broglie, Talleyrand, p. 170. 45 Coleman Phillipson, Termination of War and Treaties of Peace, p. 423, Treaty of Vereeniging, article IV 46 Howard S. Levie (ed.) Documents on Prisoners of War, International Law Series volume 60, Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1979; Leon Friedman, The Law of War: A Documentary History, volume 1, New York: Random House, 1972. 47 Ibid. 48 Hugh L. Bellot, ‘War crimes, their prevention and punishment’, Nineteenth Century and After, September 1916, 80: 636, quoting Professor Amos Hershey. See also Edgar Crammond, ‘The Reckoning’, Nineteenth Century and After, August 1916, 80: 221. 49 W.S. Lilly, ‘Vengeance’, Nineteenth Century and After, September 1918, 84: 401. See also A. Shadwell, ‘Is peace possible?’, Nineteenth Century and After, July 1918, 84: 1: ‘when a detected thief throws away a stolen object it is not because he is chastened but in order to avoid chastening. . . . Accommodation with the Germans as they are is impossible because bad faith is a cardinal article of their policy.’ 50 Francis Gribble, ‘The treatment of prisoners in Germany’, Nineteenth Century and After, July 1916, 80: 73. 51 Sir Walter Phillimore, Three Centuries of Peace and Their Teaching, London: John Murray, London, 1917, pp. 2 and 163. 52 Ibid., p. 168. 53 Phillipson, Termination, p. 250.

146 Bishops, lawyers and war crimes trials 54 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, volume 2, London: Odhams Press, 1936, p. 1516. 55 Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 21 July 1919, column 1049. 56 Willis, Prologue, pp. 104–112; ‘The Kaiser extradition refused’, The Times, 24 January 1920. 57 Edwyn R. Bevan, ‘The demand for German war criminals’, Contemporary Review, 117: 305, March 1920, 117: 305. See also H. Wilson Harris, ‘The revision of the treaty’, Contemporary Review, April 1920, 117: 487. 58 William B. Ziff, The Gentlemen Talk of Peace, New York: Macmillan, 1944. 59 H.G. Nicholas (ed.) Washington Despatches, 1941–45, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981, p. 551. 60 Ibid., p. 552. 61 Ibid., pp. 553 and 560. 62 ‘French clergy shielded man charged with war crimes’, The Times, 7 January 1992; F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism, London: Mitre Press, 1968. 63 Obituary of Klaus Barbie, The Times, 27 September 1991. 64 ‘Priebke jailed after second massacre trial’, The Times, 23 July 1997. 65 ‘Papon guilty of war crimes’, The Times, 3 April 1998. 66 ‘Angry Iraqis scorn Thatcher war crimes call’, The Times, 3 September 1990. 67 Michael P. Scharf, Balkan Justice: The Story behind the First International War Crimes Trial since Nuremberg, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1997, pp. 226ff.; ‘UN plans new court for war crimes’, The Times, 25 June 1998. 68 ‘Flawed inquiry proves only time can heal wounds of past’, The Times, 29 October 1998; ‘Accused leaders decry “biased report”’, The Times, 30 October 1998.

10 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 Prisoners of war or hostages?

The sacrifice demanded of young soldiers and particularly of conscripts in wartime burdens the conscience of Western liberal democracies. Fears for their fate may be temporarily eclipsed by hatred for the enemy or euphoria over victories, but they are not forgotten. For democratic states the rights of the individual are at the centre of politics. To demand that individuals lay down their lives for the sake of the whole is a contradiction which can be accepted by society only as a temporary aberration, bearable if it is restricted to the maximum extent possible and if the cause is presented as a struggle between good and evil. In battle, lives must not be expended if the same tasks can be accomplished by machines and explosives, while casualties must be rushed from the battlefield and receive the best possible medical attention. Prisoners of war (POWs) have to be rescued, exchanged or protected by international law and mutual deterrence. Even before the democratisation of society, the return of POWs often occupied an important place in European peace conferences. In medieval times wealthy prisoners were regarded as the personal possession of their captors, to be ransomed after the conflict.1 Ordinary soldiers made their way homewards as best they could. As the international system developed, most peace treaties specified that prisoners were to be returned to their home country immediately after their entry into force. The exceptions were those between the Christian and the Turks, which sometimes excluded those prisoners who had been converted during their captivity.2 The legal protection POWs were offered during the fighting was greatly increased in the nineteenth century. Yet in the First World War the alleged mistreatment of POWs still caused a good deal of bitterness between the belligerents, and the laws were tightened up again in 1929.3 Unfortunately, such laws were utterly disregarded by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Japan in the Second World War, and millions of POWs died of starvation, disease, brutality and overwork.4

148 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 It was against this background, and the ever-widening gulf between democratic and dictatorial powers in their behaviour towards POWs, that their treatment and fate became one of the prime reasons for the prolongation of the Korean War from January 1952 to July 1953. The war began in June 1950 when communist North Korean forces attacked the conservative Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south, hoping to overrun the peninsula and form a united communist Korea.5 These intentions were almost achieved; the South Korean army was broken and sent reeling down the peninsula towards Pusan. However, the Truman administration intervened as part of its world-wide drive to prevent the expansion of communism, and other United Nations member states rallied to the Southern side.6 The war swayed backwards and forwards through the rest of 1950 with the UN forces destroying most of the North Korean army after landing to its rear at Inchon near Seoul. Subsequently the UN’s attempt to reunite the peninsula under Southern control failed in the winter of 1950, when the Chinese entered the war and drove UN forces beyond Seoul. Eventually the United States and its allies managed to recapture the Southern capital and to re-establish their front line not far north of the 38th Parallel, where the peninsula had been divided when the war began. On 8 July 1951, just over a year after the Northern attack, armistice talks opened between military delegations from the two sides. It was to take almost exactly two more years, 575 regular meetings between the negotiators and 18 million words exchanged before an armistice was signed.7 The communist negotiators were led by Lieutenant-General Nam Il from North Korea, who was accompanied by two other North Korean delegates and by two Chinese. The UN delegation was initially led by US admiral Turner Joy (1895–1956), who was accompanied by three other US officers and Major-General Paik Sun-yup from South Korea. There was a great difference between the age and backgrounds of the two sides. At 57, Turner Joy was a senior American admiral with extensive experience serving in the US warships Lexington and Louisville in the Second World War and as commander of Cruiser Division Six in the push towards Japan in 1945. By 1950 he had become Commander of the US Naval Forces Far East.8 General Nam Il was believed by the US delegation to be in his thirties. He had graduated from a Manchurian university and become a teacher in the Soviet Union, returning to Korea with the communist forces in 1945. General Farrar-Hockley, the official British historian of the war, gives Nam Il’s year of birth as 1911, and suggests that he was a former schoolmate of Kim Il Sung, the North Korean ruler, and that by 1951 he was Vice-Premier and Chief of Staff to the (North) Korean People’s Army (KPA). The leading Chinese

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 149 negotiator, General Hsieh Fang, had been educated at a university in Moscow and had become chief propagandist of the Political Department in Manchuria. The communist negotiators were political generals, the Americans were fighting commanders.9 One of the recent historians of the negotiations has suggested that the Truman administration was mistaken to allow them to be monopolised by serving officers and that they were peculiarly ill-suited to achieve the compromises necessary to reach agreement. It is indeed unusual for modern states to be represented in this way, but there is no evidence that military officers are inherently bad at negotiating or that they will be more reluctant to compromise than their civilian colleagues. They tend to value stability more than justice and they know the sacrifices that warfare demands. Kitchener was generally more accommodating than Milner at Vereeniging; Foch was willing to allow the Germans to continue with conscription in 1919, unlike Lloyd George; Stimson and the US army commanders in the Second World War objected to the execution without trial of enemy leaders. In the case of the Panmunjom negotiations, it was the State Department which insisted that the West should take a hard line on the repatriation of Northern POWs, and the military who would have been willing to compromise to ensure the return of their own POWs in communist hands. On the other hand, the vocabulary used by the US military negotiators at Panmunjom shows that they were bitterly anti-communist, they found it difficult to sit through communist diatribes and they were pessimistic about negotiating an end to the war. In his memoirs, General Mark Clark (1896–1984), the last UN commander, accused the West of being ‘all too prone to grant concessions, to placate, to appease, to ward off some real or imagined threat’. He advised the administration that the war could be won by building up South Korean forces, unleashing the Nationalist Chinese against the mainland and using atomic weapons. Admiral Turner Joy, the UN truce negotiator, believed that the communists were totally unscrupulous; ‘they are not impressed by logic nor are they remotely concerned with morality’. Bitter antagonism towards the other side was enhanced because it was the first time for more than a century that the United States had been unable to dictate terms to a defeated enemy, and this required a major adjustment to the thinking of all those involved on the American side in the armistice negotiations.10 Initially the UN theatre commander, General Matthew Ridgway (1895–1993) had proposed using the Danish hospital ship Jutlandia as the site of the armistice talks. The North had suggested the village of Kaesong near the 38th parallel, and it was here that the first talks began. The UN negotiators and journalists were housed at Manson or

150 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 Munsan-ni 20 miles south-east of Kaeson and 14 miles east of Panmunjom. But Kaesong was within communist lines at that time and the UN delegates felt that the North took advantage of this to present the UN negotiators as representatives of the defeated side. They tried to prevent journalists entering the area and occasionally halted UN couriers. Thus, when the North broke off the negotiations for nine weeks from 23 August to 24 October 1951, General Ridgway insisted that a new site should be chosen for the talks, hence the move to Panmunjom, which was between the two battle lines.11 This was a more satisfactory location for the UN, though the bleak site was frozen by the Korean winters and blasted by the harsh sun of the summer. It was also the location for bizarre competitions between East and West. When the UN delegates had a tent set up as lavatory, the communists built one of wood; when the UN delegates put a small UN flag on the negotiating table, the communists put a larger North Korean one; when the West built huts for their sentries, the communists constructed equivalents and painted them gaudy colours; when the UN delegates arrived in a large car, the communists took to coming in an equally large vehicle. There were competitive elements of this type at the Westphalia conference in 1648 and elsewhere, but the Panmunjom negotiators combined farce with tragedy in a particularly poignant fashion.12 Before the talks began, the communists had been demanding that all foreign forces be withdrawn from the Korean peninsula, that Korean affairs be organised only by Koreans, that the United States cease to protect Taiwan and that the People’s Republic of China be admitted to the UN.13 In the talks themselves the communists dropped these far-reaching and unrealisable demands, and the chief issues on the agenda became the establishment and location of a demilitarised zone between the North and South, the nature and composition of the organisation to supervise the armistice, the withdrawal of foreign forces from the peninsula, rebuilding of airfields during the armistice, and return of POWs.14 The UN forces wanted to keep the battle line they had captured because this was more defensible than the old 38th Parallel. The Northern side objected because they believed that a return to the status quo ante had been agreed before the talks began, because the change meant that they had lost territory, because the UN would gain military advantages from the new line, and because they attached symbolic importance to the 38th parallel.15 Eventually, however, the Northern negotiators tacitly accepted that the battle line would have to become the armistice line. They also dropped the demand that all foreign forces should withdraw from the peninsula. US negotiators were inclined to suggest that the communists refused to compromise, but

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 151 these were very major concessions suggesting that they, or their masters, did want to reach agreement. By the beginning of 1952 the negotiations centred on two or three issues. First, the communists were still demanding that the Neutral Supervisory Commission, which would carry out the armistice terms, should include the Soviet Union. The West rejected the ‘neutrality’ of a state which had supplied one side with weapons and whose pilots appeared to be flying combat missions. Second, the UN objected to the rebuilding of airfields during the armistice, because it would give the communists the opportunity to recover from their losses and benefit from the pause in the fighting should the war break out again. The North, by contrast, argued that any limitation on such reconstruction was an infringement of its sovereignty.16 The UN would have gained most from an agreement because its aircraft had demolished the Northern airfields and dominated the sky for most of the war. A ban on rebuilding airfields would only have been agreed by the North had it been unable to go on with the struggle. Otherwise it would refuse, just as Witte refused to agree to demilitarise Vladivostok and limit the Russian Pacific Fleet in 1905 and, indeed, as the UN refused in 1952 the Northern proposal to withdraw all foreign forces from the peninsula and insisted on the right to replace its forces in the peninsula with fresh troops during the armistice. The other key issue in the negotiations was the return of POWs at the end of the conflict. As the war had swayed backwards and forwards, millions of civilians had fled or been forced to leave their homes, breaking up their families and abandoning their villages. Hundreds of thousands had been conscripted into the armies on the two sides. The UN wanted ‘voluntary repatriation’, meaning that each POW and each displaced civilian would have the right to choose whether they wished to live in the North or the South. The communists wanted all the POWs in UN hands returned to them at the end of the conflict. The communists first claimed to hold about 70,000 POWs but later admitted to only about 10,000. The UN believed that they had impressed the rest into their army. The UN forces held about 132,000 POWs after their successful landing at Inchon and later actions. These were, however, heterogeneous; 20,720 were supposedly Chinese volunteers but actually members of the People’s Liberation Army; some were South Koreans who had been pushed into the Northern army; the rest were genuine ‘Northerners’, although this did not necessarily mean that they wanted to return to the North.17 On their side, the Northern negotiators constantly quoted Article 118 of the Geneva Convention of 1949, which stated, ‘prisoners of war

152 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of hostilities’.18 This had been the general rule in Europe for centuries, but the West had wanted the law spelt out clearly in 1949 because the Soviet Union had kept hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese POWs for years after the Second World War slaving to rebuild the economy. It was also generally assumed that POWs would want to return to their homes. However, there was another experience at the end of the Second World War which was to evoke controversy in the West for decades to come. The West had returned tens of thousands of Russians, Cossacks and others to the Soviet Union. Yugoslavs had been sent back to their own country despite their bitter feuds with the new Tito government. Many had violently resisted as they knew they were going to their deaths.19 Some of the senior officers involved in the Korean War had also been involved in this repatriation process. They believed that there would be little chance of communist forces surrendering or defecting in future wars if they knew they would be repatriated at the end of the conflict. Yet the UN’s military negotiators felt they had primary responsibility for Allied POWs in communist hands. The POWs and other responsibilities were discussed by the UN commander, General Ridgway, Admiral Turner Joy and other senior officers at a meeting at Manson on 17 December 1951. Ridgway arrived at 5 p.m. but the delegations were awake until two the next morning working out the implications of the meeting. The officers were anxious that if the principle of voluntary repatriation were accepted, the communists would use it in future wars to claim that Allied POWs did not want to return home. They were also rightly worried that the principle of extending asylum to POWs who asked for it would be ‘so appealing to humanitarian sentiment, that once it is announced and publicised, the demand by our people to stand or fall on this proposal may preclude ultimate abandonment of this position’. The UN hoped to exchange those POWs who wanted to return North on a one-to-one basis for allied POWs in communist hands. Once the communists had run out of POWs to exchange, the negotiators hoped that they would exchange civilians who had been abducted and wished to return. Ridgway and his colleagues were sceptical as to whether such an exchange could be negotiated, though the ROK general present said that he would have to withdraw from the delegation if the UN abandoned the attempt to have the civilians returned. Yet despite all these problems over POWs, the senior officers unanimously agreed that the question of airfield refurbishment during the armistice would be the key to the negotiations. On this the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington dissented. They were willing to

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 153 compromise with the Northern side, as they saw that they could not prevent the reconstruction of airfields over any extended period.20 Despite their personal reservations about the likely success and indeed desirability of their strategy, the UN negotiators continued to push at Panmunjom for the principle of voluntary repatriation. On 2 January 1952 they argued that many South Korean POWs, civilians and deserters had been incorporated into the Northern army. The UN believed that they had been forced to enlist and that this was a breach in the laws of war. The 16,000 nationals from South Korea who had been incorporated into the Northern armies and subsequently captured by the UN should now be allowed to decide where they wished to live. Similarly, southerners who had been taken by the North and were still in their army should be permitted to decide their own fate. So should the 116,000 North Koreans and Chinese volunteers who were held by the UN. Neither side would be happy if the other side had the final say on the fate of POWs; some neutral body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), was therefore needed to assess prisoners’ opinions.21 At the meeting on the next day the UN negotiators accused the communists of not wanting peace and of intending to build up their airfields during an armistice so that the conflict could continue. Hsieh replied that, despite UN propaganda, the communists’ intentions were peaceful. The UN had extended the war by threatening China’s border at the end of 1950 and thus brought the People’s Volunteers into the conflict. He rejected the notion that airfields should not be restored during the armistice because this would be an interference in their sovereignty. Finally, the communists denied that anyone was forced to fight on their side; only volunteers or ‘awakened Korean patriots’ joined their armies.22 So the debate and the exchange of insults went on through successive days. On one occasion neither side had anything to propose and the negotiators sat in silence for more than two hours. Generally the POW and the various political issues prevented any meeting of minds. The communists argued that the UN principle of voluntary repatriation reflected their determination to hand large numbers of POWs to ‘certain friends’ in South Korea and Taiwan, in other words to Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) and Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975). They dismissed the UN proposals as ‘absurd, unreasonable and ridiculous’. On 5 January the subcommittee dealing with POWs met for three hours and ten minutes. The communists denied that the UN command in Korea represented the US people; rather, they were a handful of warlike people who dominated society. They also denied that the ICRC was neutral or

154 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 that it was either legal or possible to screen all POWs to see if they wished to be repatriated. The UN delegates were reminded by communist comments on the next day, a Sunday, that they objected to the very existence of the government of the Republic of Korea.23 From 7 to 13 January Admiral Turner Joy returned to Tokyo to confer with General Ridgway on ways of breaking the deadlock in the talks. Ridgway had complained to Washington about leaks to the press in Washington which suggested that the UN was prepared to make more concessions in the negotiations. These were all the more important because it was at this stage that the Joint Chiefs of Staff made clear to Ridgway that if the airfields issue were the only one separating the two sides, they would not want it to prevent an armistice. The reply from Tokyo argued that, in any case, UN forces in the ROK would be insufficient to deter a Chinese attack in future and that the proposed concession on airfields would further weaken their position. They also pointed out that the communists would be expecting concessions by the UN because of the press leaks.24 In the meantime, on behalf of the UN, US admiral Libby resubmitted their proposals of 2 January to the communist negotiators. He suggested that in the first phase the North should exchange the POWs they held who elected for repatriation to the South, and the UN would return equal numbers who chose to go to the communist side. Subsequently the UNC would return those POWs who asked to go north in return for foreign civilians held by the North and Koreans who, when the war began, resided in the South and wanted to return there. ICRC delegates would be permitted to interview all returning personnel at the point of exchange to ensure that they really wanted to be repatriated.25 The communists insisted that all Southern citizens and deserters who had joined the KPA had done so voluntarily. Admiral Libby charged that the North was afraid of the ICRC interviewing such people because the truth would be revealed. Furthermore, they did not intend to release the thousands they had taken north with them. On 14 January the UN negotiators argued that under their scheme only those who wanted to be repatriated would be, thus the communists had nothing to lose by allowing interviews. On the following day the Northern spokesman, Lee, claimed that the UN was proposing to deny POWs their right to repatriation under international law and that ‘free choice is absurd. It is a violation of article 118. It is to deprive POWs of their rights.’ The UNC added the word ‘forced’ to repatriation to deceive POWs and people of the world.26 Later historians have emphasised one irony in the UN’s position. Although the treatment of POWs was dominating the negotiations and

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 155 US officials were anxious about the fate of their soldiers in communist hands, POWs taken by the UN were also being very poorly treated. The problem was that so many had been captured after the Inchon landing that they were inadequately housed and guarded. Many of the guards were fervently anti-communist South Koreans and they also relied on pro-Western Chinese to manage the Chinese POWs. Both the South Korean and the Chinese guards were brutal and undisciplined. An official from the US Embassy in Seoul reported on 14 March 1952 that the trustees were forcing POWs to sign petitions asking for transfer to Taiwan. ‘Beatings, torture and threats of punishment are frequently utilised to intimidate the majority of Chinese POWs.’ In his view such methods were totally counter-productive and were making the POWs more pro-communist. The US ambassador disagreed, reporting to the State Department in May that torture and beatings might have reduced the number saying they would want to return to China by about 2,000. Whether or not this was accurate, the mistreatment of POWs captured by the UN was a major factor in the violence which broke out frequently in the camps and which seriously embarrassed the UN negotiators. It also undermined UN claims to be struggling to uphold POW rights.27 In the meantime there were military, political and ethical arguments between the UN commanders and the South Korean government under President Syngman Rhee, between the State and Defense Departments in Washington and between the various nations contributing to the UN forces. Syngman Rhee was opposed to the negotiations because he wanted to reunite the peninsula by force, a position he maintained to the end. On 30 June 1951 he had demanded the withdrawal of the Chinese forces, disarmament of North Korean communists and guarantees that no external power would assist them.28 Such demands were clearly not negotiable and had been tacitly ignored by the US administration. Meanwhile Rhee’s attacks on the negotiations continued. In mid-February 1952 the US ambassador in Korea, John Muccio (1900–89), decided that ‘it was time for me to make President Rhee aware of the fact that we knew of some of his more nefarious manoeuvres’. Rather than argue with Rhee, Muccio had found it better practice to state his views and then to return on a later occasion for discussions. On this occasion Rhee had to leave his sickbed, where he had been suffering from a persistent cold. Muccio reminded him that because of the number of journalists and intelligence agencies, Korea was like a goldfish bowl. Thus, it was well known that in a speech to the people of Seoul on 28 January, he had attacked the late General Walton Walker (1899–1950), who had been Ridgway’s predecessor as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea. Muccio reminded Washington that Rhee

156 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 frequently harangued his people on the theme of ‘no ceasefire’ and ‘on to the Yalu’. He told Rhee that they were aware that he encouraged ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations against the negotiations. Rhee responded that he should tell President Truman that he would never accept a ceasefire.29 Muccio kept the Assistant Secretary of State briefed about the situation in Korea, arguing that Rhee was becoming increasingly recalcitrant and senile. No Korean had the courage to stand up to him, and the few alternative political leaders were weak and ineffective. The US embassy could not take a partisan stand in elections but Rhee and his colleagues should be made to understand ‘the serious consequences of their use of political intimidation and realise that totalitarian tactics would be bound to prejudice future UN support for the ROK’.30 Muccio was also evidently worried that the CIA might interfere in the elections without discussing the situation with him. He believed that such interference could easily go awry.31 In London the Churchill government was firmly behind the United States on most issues, though it was more critical of Rhee and encouraged the United States to consider a coup against him.32 It was also facing parliamentary criticism for backing US policy in Korea and not insisting on being consulted about major changes in policy. While the Labour government under Clement Attlee (1883–1967) had been in power it too had supported the UN, but the left of the Labour Party had never been happy with this role. Now that it was out of power the left could have its say. It could point to the brutalities perpetrated by Rhee’s government, to the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy on behalf of such a dictator, and it could build up the myth that the war had, in fact, been started by him. The radical Labour MP Michael Foot (1913– ) criticised the government for not insisting that the US administration keep it informed of decisions and the US administration for allowing ‘authority to be usurped by the military chiefs [thereby running] the very gravest risks of the enlargement of the whole war’. He also claimed that many Americans hoped to use the war to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power in China and criticised Labour Party leaders for not attacking the government more ferociously. Barbara Castle (1911– ) accused the US administration of sabotaging the peace talks by branding the Chinese as aggressors, of encouraging Chiang Kai-shek’s aggression and of hoping to win by military force rather than compromise. She attacked the screening process for POWs because they were browbeaten by the military men involved, and pointed out that this led to rioting in the camps. Less radical members of the Labour Party, like Woodrow Wyatt (1918–97), Kenneth Younger (1918– ) and Denis

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 157 Healey (1917– ), claimed that because of their failure to consult with London, Americans had lost their liberal reputation in Asia and were everywhere looked on ‘as reactionary imperialists of a monstrous and fearful kind’. Healey was particularly critical of US reluctance to recognise communist China and thus to encourage a possible Sino-Soviet split, while Younger thought that the United States ignored the interests of its allies in Hong Kong, Malaya and Indo-China.33 Some officers and administrators in Washington were naturally impatient at such criticisms and with the difficulties faced by the British government. At a meeting in Washington on 6 February to discuss whether a show of force would push China towards negotiating, Admiral William Fechteler (1896–1967), the Chief of Naval Operations, had deprecated concern for British sensitivities.34 Officials had their own struggles to contend with. The Defense Department was deeply concerned about the safety of US POWs. It had good reason. During the Second World War Korean soldiers had often guarded Allied POWs in Japanese camps. They had acquired an appalling reputation for brutality, as they took revenge for their humiliation at Japanese hands by attacking the POWs.35 Everything the United States knew about communist, and indeed South Korean, behaviour during the Korean War suggested that the treatment of Allied POWs would be equally brutal.36 On the other hand, the State Department was increasingly concerned that the treatment of North Korean and Chinese POWs should reflect the Western values they were defending in the Cold War. On 4 February officials in the State Department had drafted a memorandum which proposed that the UN should find out which POWs refused to return North. If no progress were made in the negotiations, these should simply be released and their names removed from POW lists, thus facing the communists with a fait accompli.37 However, other officials were reluctant to recommend such methods because of the danger of reprisals against the UN’s prisoners in communist hands. When the issue was discussed at a meeting on 5 February, many of those, including Admiral Fechteler, who had agreed with the original memorandum began to retract their position. Thus State Department officials agreed not to propose any new initiatives and to persuade Senators who were thinking of proposing a resolution on voluntary repatriation that this would be counter-productive at that time.38 On 7 February State and Defense Department officials met together. Virtually all Defense Department officials were in favour of repatriating all communist POWs in UN hands, whether or not they wished for repatriation. State Department officials disagreed. The path to new initiatives in the area seemed blocked.39

158 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 On 8 February 1952 the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson (1893–1971), presented a memorandum to President Truman pointing out that the POW issue would shortly become the only fundamental question separating the two sides. The memorandum stressed the anxieties over the fate of the 3,000 American and 8,000 other UN POWs held by the communists. But it also emphasised that any agreement which led to the use of force to compel POWs to return North ‘would be repugnant to our most fundamental moral and humanitarian principles on the importance of the individual and would seriously jeopardize the psychological warfare position of the United States in its opposition to Communist tyranny’.40 Acheson expressed the opposite fears to those harboured by Ridgway and his colleagues at the 17 December meeting. He warned that domestic and international opinion might support the position he was advocating until it became clear that it could lead to a continuation, and even spread, of the war; then support might decline. In the meantime, he recommended that the United States should maintain its existing policy. When the issues were presented shortly afterwards to General Ridgway, he agreed with this position, though he also stressed the basic dilemma. The UN commander said that he had always given priority to protecting Allied POWs in communist hands but that there was no sign of the communists accepting the principle of voluntary repatriation for POWs in UN hands. He asked the administration to give him final guidance on the issue so that he could push for what the United States wanted. Accordingly, the question was discussed again by the President and his most senior advisers, including Dean Acheson and Frederick Lovell (1894– ), the Secretary of Defense, on 27 February. After hearing the arguments, Truman backed the State Department’s view and decided that the United States would not agree to the forced repatriation of communist POWs, despite the danger of reprisals against allied POWs and of extending the war. General Ridgway was instructed accordingly.41 Meanwhile, embarrassments over the handling of POWs in UN hands were considerable. The communist POWs apparently kept in touch with Northern policy through agents who allowed themselves to be captured. Once in the camps they gave the other POWs their orders. In March 1952 they seized a camp commandant, General Dodds, and held him to ransom. They demanded that they should be allowed to form a POW association, provided with telephones between the various camps, and given writing materials and even lorries. They also insisted that the policy of ‘voluntary repatriation’ and the screening of POWs to see whether they wished to return should be dropped. To secure

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 159 Dodds’ release the officer in command agreed that there would be ‘no more forcible screening . . . nor would any attempt be made at normal screening’. The new UN commander, Mark Clark (1896–1984), denounced the agreement and ordered that the camps should be retaken and authority re-established. Thirty-one POWs were killed and 139 injured in the process. It was a great propaganda victory for the communist negotiators at Panmunjom, who argued that it showed the extent of the support for their policy in the camps and the brutality of the UN camp regime.42 Despite the hubbub and the inherent difficulties, the UN position on voluntary repatriation remained constant through the change from the Truman to the Eisenhower administration, through a six-month break in the negotiations, arguments between the Western countries and months of fighting and negotiating. On 28 April 1952 Admiral Turner Joy presented the West’s ‘final’ position to the communists. As part of a package, he offered to drop the UN proposal prohibiting the construction of military airfields and to compromise over the Neutral National Supervisory Commission by omitting the Soviet Union but leaving in the Czechs and Poles. However, he stood by the principle of voluntary repatriation of POWs. By then the UN had told the communists that only 70,000 of the POWs they were holding hoped to return to the North. Turner Joy wanted the West simply to recess the negotiations if the communists did not accept this package. And this was in fact done in October 1952 some months after his departure from the scene and replacement as negotiator by General William Harrison.43 At that time there were also arguments between the outgoing Truman administration and the British, Canadians and Indians, who wanted to take a more accommodating line at the UN General Assembly over POWs. They suggested that POWs who agreed to this should be repatriated. Those who refused should be handed to an international commission. This seemed not unreasonable, except that there was no clear indication of their eventual fate. Acheson objected both to the General Assembly’s interference at that stage of the negotiations and to the obfuscation about the fate of the prisoners. Acheson blamed Selwyn Lloyd (1904–78), who was then British Minister of State, the Indian politician Krishna Menon (1896–1974), and the Canadian Lester Pearson (1897–1972), who was President of the General Assembly, for the controversy which threatened to break the formerly united Western line on the issue. Eventually the resolution was amended in ways acceptable to Acheson, although his memoirs show how sore the debate left him. It outlined a compromise under which prisoners would be handed to a commission which would carry out its duties within three

160 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 months of an armistice, thereby preventing the POWs being kept in suspense indefinitely, as Acheson had feared would be the case.44 In the end the resolution was to offer an escape from the deadlock which had been reached. In March 1953 Stalin died and the communists for the first time agreed to exchange sick and wounded POWs. Whether or not Stalin’s death was the vital factor, the agreement was a clear sign that the stalemate was over, and the exchange was implemented the following month. The first full-scale meeting of delegations since October 1952 opened on 26 April 1953. At that stage the communists proposed that POWs who did not want to be repatriated should be removed to a neutral state outside Korea, where the representatives of nations to which they belonged should have access to them and be able to ‘eliminate their apprehensions’ about their return. General Harrison argued that it would be unnecessary, costly and slow to take the POWs out of Korea; the neutral state could interrogate them within the peninsula. The two sides also disagreed over which states should be considered neutral, and it was not until 8 June that agreement was reached.45 The South Korean President, Syngman Rhee, was still determined, if possible, to wreck the agreement and accordingly released the POWs in his hands, rather than hand them over to neutrals.46 On 18 June 27,000 anti-communist POWs were released from the camps and Rhee’s government called on the population to ‘help these patriotic youths’.47 The communist states protested strongly, demanded the return of the POWs and accused the UN of collusion with Rhee’s government. General Mark Clark utterly denied this and pointed out that Rhee’s troops had been guarding the camps. Despite this setback, the North had evidently decided that the time had come to call a halt. On 8 July they agreed to resume discussions and at 10 a.m. on 27 July, after a last disagreement over who should sign the agreement, Generals Harrison and Nam Il signed the armistice.48 This specified that all POWs who insisted on repatriation should be handed over within sixty days. Accordingly, 75,801 were sent from south to north and 12,773 in the opposite direction. The remaining POWs (22,604 from the South and 359 from the North) were to be passed to the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission operating within Korea and made up of Poles, Czechs, Swiss and Swedes.49 An Indian custodial force under General K.S. Thimayya was to guard the POWs at this stage and to act as the umbrella under which the commission would operate. Since Syngman Rhee refused to have Indian troops on South Korean soil, they had to be flown to the demilitarised zone (DMZ) by helicopter.

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 161 Until they were moved to the DMZ, non-repatriates from the UN side remained under pressure not to ‘give way’ and were trained in the responses they might give to Chinese and North Korean suggestions that they return home. Once in the DMZ they refused to see communist representatives singly because of the pressure to which they might be subject and they continued themselves to be subject to threats from leaders of their own group. Similarly, the twenty-three Americans and one Briton in the Northern camps who refused repatriation also insisted on acting as a group. The Indian forces involved protested against the intimidation which they believed was practised both against themselves and against the non-repatriates.50 In the end the UN never persuaded the North to hand over the 100,000 civilians whom their forces had abducted from the South. It was an unsatisfactory finale to what should have been a genuinely democratic exercise, allowing freedom of choice. What it actually showed were the practical difficulties involved in allowing such choice, given the tense and bitter atmosphere prevailing. The armistice talks had been notable for a number of features, not just their length. Over the past two hundred years the Western democracies have often been able to dictate terms at the end of wars. In 1815 and again in 1918 they insisted on the overthrow of the enemy government before negotiations could take place. In 1945 there was simply no question of negotiating with the Axis governments. The talks which ended the Korean War were thus unusual because the war was a stalemate and the negotiations had to take place with the government which, in Western eyes, had begun the war. They were also unusual because the prime negotiators were serving officers, which suited the West because the United States had not recognised either the North Korean or the Chinese governments and military negotiations implied less tacit acceptance of their status.51 The Panmunjom talks were characterised by the utter lack of diplomatic niceties between the two sides. In 1902 the Boers were embittered because the British had burnt their houses, killed their animals and concentrated their families in camps, where many had died. But the Vereeniging negotiations were carried on in a diplomatic and civilised atmosphere. There was no abuse between the two sides and the British did everything possible to make the Boers feel comfortable. At Portsmouth in 1905 the negotiations could hardly have been described as friendly, yet protocol was preserved between Japanese and Russians. Even in 1919, although the peace terms were imposed on the defeated Central Powers, the two sides did not generally show cordial loathing and contempt for each other. They did not refer to each other

162 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 as bandits or worse. The evolution of Western and totalitarian states had reduced diplomatic courtesies. Nazi and Japanese leaders had, after all, been put on trial and executed after the Second World War. Communist practice and the passions of the Cold War completed the process and destroyed the conventional niceties altogether. There was absolutely no trust between the two sides. Undoubtedly this contributed to the conviction held by Turner Joy, Ridgway, Clark and others that the communists were quite peculiarly unwilling to compromise. Each side made concessions but with such bad grace that the other side believed it was merely the consequence of military pressure. Only the military balance between them and the cost of prolonging the war, together with the danger of a wider and possibly nuclear war, kept the two sides negotiating at all, and the political conference which was to succeed the armistice was a total failure as far as Korea was concerned. North and South Korea remain to this day locked into a tense and dangerous confrontation. Historians should be impressed by the compromises made by both sides at Panmunjom, the determination to resist Syngman Rhee’s efforts to disrupt the conference and the ingenuity which finally led to an armistice. Even if the UN weakened its case over POWs by allowing its guards to mistreat them, Acheson was correct to see the issue as a touchstone of the ideological conflict between East and West. For democracies, individuals are at the centre of society, however paradoxical it may seem to sacrifice more lives and prolong the war in order to rescue those who have already been captured.52 This is a reflection of the more general paradox which democracies face when they ask their citizens to sacrifice their lives in the ‘common cause’ and which makes democracies so ambiguous about the whole notion of warfare. This, in turn, makes them particularly prone to wage unlimited crusades, to hurl abuse at their enemies and to put their leaders on trial after the fighting. The Panmunjom talks put the treatment of POWs at the centre of any peace negotiations between an authoritarian and a democratic nation, where they have remained ever since. The return of US POWs was, from Washington’s point of view, a vital issue in the negotiations to end the Vietnam War. It was also the major cause of the bitterness between Washington and Hanoi over the following decade because many Americans erroneously believed that US POWs were still in Vietnamese hands. It has figured very high on the agenda of talks between the Arabs and Israelis.53 POWs and other captives have become hostages who can be used to force concessions, as the Iraqis attempted during the Gulf War and the Bosnian Serbs attempted a decade later. The vulnerability of POWs greatly increases the reluctance of democratic states to risk their

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 163 troops in battle. It is both a central weakness of democracies and a tribute to their concern for the individual.

Notes 1 For a legal history of the issue see Howard S. Levie (ed.) Documents on Prisoners of War, International Law Series volume 60, Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1979. See also Leon Friedman, The Law of War: A Documentary History, New York: Random House, 1972. 2 The Treaty of Kainardji of 21 July 1774 between Russia and Turkey, in Librarian and Keeper of the Papers (ed.) Treaties and C. between Turkey and Foreign Powers, 1535–1855, London: Foreign Office, 1855, p. 473, article 25. 3 Friedman, Law of War, p. 488 passim. For complaints during the First World War see Francis Gribble, ‘The treatment of prisoners in Germany’, The Nineteenth Century, July 1916, 80: 73, and D.J. McCarthy, The Prisoner of War in Germany, London: Skeffington, 1918. 4 Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, London: Macmillan, 1957; William F. Nimmo, Behind a Curtain of Silence: Japanese in Soviet Custody, 1945–1956, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. 5 Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, London: HMSO, 1990, chapter 2. 6 Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956, p. 349ff.; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970, pp. 414ff. 7 Walter G. Hermes, Truce Tent and Fighting Front, Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966; William H. Vatcher, Panmunjom: The Story of the Korean Armistice Negotiations, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973; Allan E. Goodman, Negotiating while Fighting: The Diary of Admiral C. Turner Joy, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1978; Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1990; Sydney D. Bailey, The Korean Armistice, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. 8 Bailey, Korean Armistice, p. 70. 9 Farrar-Hockley, Korean War, volume 2, chapter 13. 10 Foot, Substitute, pp. 11–14 and 212; Mark W. Clark, From the Danube to the Yalu, London: George Harrap, 1954, pp. 10, 13 and 15. 11 Vatcher, Panmunjom, pp. 72–73. 12 Ibid., pp. 75–76. 13 Ibid., chapter 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., pp. 46–47 and 52; Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 535; Goodman, Negotiating, p. 4. 16 Goodman, Negotiating, p. 190. 17 Clark, From the Danube, p. 42; Vatcher, Panmunjom, pp. 136–137. 18 Hermes, Truce Tent, p. 135 passim. 19 Sir Carol Mather, Aftermath of War: Everyone Must Go Home, London: Brassey’s, 1992.

164 Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53

Goodman, Negotiating, p. 152. Ibid., pp. 175–179. Ibid., pp. 179–181. Ibid., pp. 185–188. Ibid., pp. 188–194. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 194–196. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954 (FRUS) volume 15, Korea, Washington, DC: US Printing Office, 1984, pp. 98–99; Foot, Substitute, chapter 5. Vatcher, Panmunjom, p. 24. FRUS, volume 15, pp. 47–52. Ibid., pp. 50 and 64. Ibid., p. 51. Jon Yil Ra, ‘Political crisis in Korea’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27(2): 301, April 1992. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1 July 1952, columns 262, 290, 293, 297, 315, 326, 328, 330, 338 and 357. FRUS, volume 15, p. 40. Donald Smith, And All the Trumpets, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954, p. 117 passim; Kenneth Harrison, Road to Hiroshima, Adelaide: Rigby, 1983, p. 144. For the treatment of POWs see S.J. Davies, In Spite of Dungeons, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954; Clark, From the Danube, chapter 19. FRUS, volume 15, pp. 35–38. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 68–69. Clark, From the Danube, chapter 4. Goodman, Negotiating, p. 437; Vatcher, Panmunjom, p. 167. Acheson, Present at the Creation, pp. 697–705; Sir Anthony Eden, Full Circle, London: Cassell, 1960, pp. 22–28; Evelyn Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986, pp. 49ff. Vatcher, Panmunjom, pp. 188–194. Bailey, Korean Armistice, p. 134; FRUS, volume 15, pp. 1200ff. FRUS, volume 15, pp. 1200ff.; Clark, From the Danube, p. 263. Bailey, Korean Armistice, p. 138; Clark, From the Danube, p. 277. Foot, Substitute, p. 190; Bailey, Korean Armistice, p. 144. Foot, Substitute, p. 194. Ibid., p. 10. The negotiations to end the Bosnian War were stalled for a while when an American journalist fell into Serbian hands. The Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was astonished that so much energy could be expended and the success of the conference threatened over the fate of one journalist. See Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, New York: Random House, 1998, pp. 243, 246 and 254. ‘Syrians put terms for release of POW lists’, The Times, 1 November 1973; ‘Israel discloses that 1,854 men were killed in action and 1,800 injured are still in hospital’, The Times, 7 November 1973; ‘Israel accuses Syria of

Turner Joy and Nam Il in 1952 165 murdering troops taken prisoner’, The Times, 9 November 1973; ‘Mrs Meir attacks Syria over prisoners of war’, The Times, 13 November 1973; ‘Israeli prisoners tell of torture by Egyptians’, The Times, 4 December 1973. See also Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, New York: Norton, 1999, pp. 28–37.

11 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in Paris in 1969 Compromise and surrender

In many of the previous wars analysed in this book democratic powers could dictate terms to their enemies. The United States was not in that position in 1952 or again in 1968 when serious negotiations began to end the second Vietnam War. Moreover, it was faced, as in Korea, by an enemy with completely different values and negotiating tactics. This created some of the same sorts of problems of communication as the negotiators had encountered at Panmunjom, although there was less abuse exchanged in Paris between the delegations, at least in the secret sessions. The US Congress, public and media were all deeply involved in US policy-making, even if the Nixon administration negotiated the final agreement with North Vietnam. The Boer leaders debated their worsening military situation in private in 1902 and agonised over the need to make terms with the British. US debates on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s were carried on in the pages of the New York Times, Time magazine and the Washington Post. They were also carried on across America in the households, the factories and the university campuses. Thus the North Vietnamese negotiators were able to cite the state of US public opinion as one reason why the South Vietnamese and their American allies could not win the war and why Washington’s negotiators should make terms.1 The public nature of these debates complicated policy-making, but the basic problem was much deeper. Washington was seeking a compromise with Hanoi when the second Vietnam War was a zero-sum game. Either South Vietnam would be united with the North under a communist government, as indeed happened in 1975,2 or it would exist independently under a non-communist regime. The United States had entered the war to support the independence and non-communist character of the government in Saigon (the capital of South Vietnam; now Ho Chi Minh City); Hanoi had entered it to complete the process

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 167 of nation-building begun after the Second World War, to expel foreign influences and to establish a united communist state incorporating all Vietnamese territory. The North Vietnamese party manifesto published in December 1968 laid down that Hanoi must ‘conquer the South and transform it into a socialist state’, although negotiations with Washington could be used to achieve this.3 In the early 1960s the North Vietnamese and their agents in the South were undermining the Southern government and driving its agents from the countryside. Under Presidents Kennedy (1917–1963) and Johnson (1908–1973) the United States gradually threw more and more of its military power behind the South Vietnamese until by 1968 it had forces numbering more than 500,000 in the country. The North Vietnamese adopted a classic Maoist approach, employing guerrilla warfare while they were not powerful enough to challenge Southern forces, then moving to a more conventional style of warfare when opportunity arose. Increasingly they also used regular Northern forces in the struggle. This presented Saigon and Washington with the choice between concentrating on winning the guerrilla battle by adopting classic counter-insurgency tactics and trying to befriend and protect the peasantry, or concentrating on the conventional battles with the battlehardened Northern forces.4 Confronted with this dilemma, they were unable to win either battle and profoundly alienated a large segment of the educated public in the United States and elsewhere in the West. This alienation was caused in large part by the widespread use of bombers over both parts of Vietnam, which, given the inaccuracy of aiming equipment and the limitations of US intelligence, inevitably caused civilian casualties. Yet bombing was the only way the United States and its Vietnamese allies could take the offensive. They had very few other pressures which they could bring to bear on Hanoi.5 The communists’ Tet offensive in January and February 1968 is generally seen as the turning point in the war. Their forces suffered very high casualties but they temporarily captured numerous Southern towns and thus convinced many highly placed Americans that the United States was not winning and was unlikely to do so in the future. Faced with violent opposition at home and no sign of victory in the field, President Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for a second term, to offer to halt the bombing of North Vietnam and to try to negotiate terms with Hanoi.6 Johnson’s successor as President, the Republican Richard Nixon (1913–94), also concluded that there was no chance of military victory short of the use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, the destruction of the dikes which irrigated North Vietnamese fields or

168 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 invasion of the North from the South.7 None of these options was politically feasible. Some of Nixon’s advisers recommended that he should withdraw US forces immediately and blame his Democratic predecessors for the impossible position in which he was placed. But Nixon was unwilling to abandon the South Vietnamese government and the fight against communism. Not only was he passionately and profoundly committed to that conflict, but he also feared the loss of credibility the United States would suffer from the abandonment of its allies.8 Instead, Nixon’s administration tried to placate US critics by continuing with the talks already begun with the North Vietnamese under the previous administration.9 Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird (1922– ), believed that it would be possible to withdraw US forces gradually from Vietnam while building up the Southern armed forces so that they could defend themselves.10 US and Vietnamese officials had been suggesting for some time that this was possible. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu (1923– ) told a national television audience on 31 December 1968 that his government was ready for US withdrawal to begin.11 No doubt Thieu felt that the state of US opinion rendered some reductions inevitable and that it was best to make a virtue of necessity. Given the scale and intensity of the US commitment, he could not believe that they would withdraw completely. This appeared to give the United States one bargaining counter in the negotiations with Hanoi since it could offer to withdraw its forces if the North Vietnamese reciprocated. Nixon believed, however, that he had to begin the withdrawals to placate US public opinion long before any concessions had been made by Hanoi, thus fatally undermining this ploy.12 By July 1972 there were only 49,000 US troops left in the South, less than one-tenth of the number when the Republicans had taken office. Formal talks with Hanoi began under the Johnson administration in May 1968, although there had been spasmodic, indirect and tentative discussions before this. To show the importance they attached to the outcome, the Democrats sent the veteran statesman and diplomat Averell Harriman (1891–1986) to meet with the North Vietnamese in Paris. Cyrus Vance (1917– ), the former Secretary of the Army, went as his deputy.13 The question of expanding the talks to include the government in Saigon and the communist guerrillas’ political arm, the National Liberation Front (NLF), dogged the first months of negotiations. The South Vietnamese government was suspicious of the contacts between Washington and Hanoi which could decide its fate, but equally wary of involving itself in talks with its irreconcilable enemies. The opposition presidential candidate in 1967, the lawyer

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 169 Truong Dinh Dzu, had been sentenced to five years in prison for advocating talks with the NLF in interviews with The Times and United Press International.14 Thieu’s government was very reluctant to recognise the existence, let alone the equality, of the NLF, but he was also well aware of the limits of US patience and of Washington’s determination to proceed with the negotiations.15 If there had to be talks, Saigon wanted only two sides to be represented, communists and non-communists. The issue was reflected in the prolonged and much ridiculed negotiations in Paris about the shape of the table where the expanded discussions would take place. The North Vietnamese wanted a square table with each party occupying one side, the United States wanted two separate tables or a doughnutshaped arrangement with the United States and Saigon occupying one table facing the North Vietnamese and NLF on the other.16 It was only in January 1969, after weeks of negotiations, that agreement was reached on a round table and the issue of the number of participants was side-stepped, with none of the teams of negotiators having their names on the table. Effectively, however, the North Vietnamese had their way as the NLF was clearly represented.17 Cyrus Vance agreed with Hanoi’s representative, Colonel Ha Van Lau, that each of the four delegations would have the right to speak separately, keep its own recording apparatus in the conference room at the Hotel Majestic and give its own press briefings.18 There was still disagreement on what the talks should be called, the Conference on Vietnam according to the Communists, or the Paris Meeting on Vietnam according to Washington. The talks could proceed without agreement on such details, but the arguments reflected the bitterness between the combatants and the intractability of the issues.19 By this stage Saigon had already appointed Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky (1930– ) as co-ordinator or supervisor of its delegation, with Pham Dang Lam as head of delegation. Ky was a controversial figure, a rival to President Thieu, an air marshal and an unbending supporter of achieving victory through force. But he was very popular with many South Vietnamese. On his arrival in Paris he was welcomed by hundreds of well-wishers.20 The NLF delegation was headed by Tran Buu Kiem and Mrs Nguyen Thi Binh, then the NLF’s ambassador at large and later its Foreign Minister.21 Nixon appointed the former Republican Congressman and his running-mate in the failed 1960 attempt on the presidency, Henry Cabot Lodge (1902–85), as his chief representative to the talks. Lodge had been US ambassador in Vietnam and was well acquainted with the situation there. He was also a friend of Ky.22 The four delegations agreed that they would brief the press after each

170 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 meeting at the press centre of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. The order of the briefing would reflect the sequence in which speeches had been made at the session. Competition between the delegations would also mean that little or nothing of what was said would be kept secret.23 The first formal session of the new talks began on 26 January and immediately revealed the political chasm between the communists and non-communists, and the behavioural gap between the US delegates and the Asians. The meeting lasted six hours, including a South Vietnamese speech of two and a half hours and a twenty-five minute speech by Henry Cabot Lodge. The US negotiators revealed their main objectives in the talks by proposing the re-establishment of the demilitarised zone between North and South Vietnam and further exchanges of POWs. Lodge also suggested that any future agreement would have to be supervised by a more effective international control commission than had been found possible after the Geneva agreement partitioning Vietnam in 1954. It should include representatives from nations in the region.24 The other three delegations’ speeches were lengthy restatements of their view of recent history and their own legitimacy. Saigon announced its terms for a ceasefire on 27 January. The Foreign Minister, Tran Chanh Thanh, told the press that this could take place only after the withdrawal of Northern forces. Presciently he warned that after a ceasefire the communists might try to raise flags all over South Vietnam to claim that they were in occupation of the countryside. Above all, Thanh rejected the idea of a coalition with the NLF.25 Otherwise, Saigon’s position was in line with US statements at the second session of the talks when Lodge called for the re-establishment of the demilitarised zone (DMZ), followed by the withdrawal of all nonSouth Vietnamese forces. In the communist view, US aims in proposing to re-establish the zone were ‘to force the South Vietnamese population to lay down their arms and the North Vietnamese population to abandon its rights to help its brothers in the struggle against aggression’. The communists called for the ending of US aggression and the unilateral withdrawal of its forces. Again the session dragged on with bitter attacks between the delegations for six and a half hours.26 In the third session on 6 February, Tran Buu Kiem, leader of the NLF delegation, said that the US ambassador in Saigon was the governorgeneral of an American colony. The Saigon administration was not only a puppet government but ‘corrupt from top to bottom’.27 A week later the NLF said that the withdrawal of US forces would allow the South Vietnamese to settle their own affairs in accordance with the political programme of the NLF. The South Vietnamese retorted by accusing the

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 171 NLF of waging a war of aggression and Lodge warned that it would alienate the South Vietnamese and indeed world opinion if it continued to block constructive negotiations.28 Meanwhile, the press were very quickly tiring of reporting negotiations which appeared to be occupied by the ritual exchange of insults and the restatement of familiar positions. In May 1968 2,000 journalists from all over the world had descended on Paris for the initial talks; by March 1969, even though all the parties were now involved and issues of crucial importance to the Vietnamese people were under discussion, only eleven were left. The Sunday Times printed an article on 9 March by Nicholas Tomalin in Saigon and David Leitch in Paris juxtaposing events during one day of the talks with the simultaneous and continuing bloodshed in Vietnam. The authors’ point was the contrast between the deaths in battle and the apparently endless and pointless abuse exchanged in Paris.29 But the various positions were evolving. Towards the end of March, in a reversal of his previous stance, President Thieu proposed direct and secret talks between his government and the NLF.30 Plainly he had moved a long way in his willingness to negotiate. Before Nixon had taken office, his new National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger (1923– ), had written an article for Foreign Affairs arguing that three separate negotiations were needed under the general aegis of the formal Paris talks: between Hanoi and Washington; between the NLF and Saigon; and finally, in an international forum which would strengthen the agreements reached elsewhere and establish observer forces to oversee any terms agreed.31 Thieu was apparently offering to begin the second of these negotiations. On 7 April he outlined a six-point peace plan which included economic co-operation between North and South and international involvement in South Vietnam after a ceasefire.32 Ky backed up his President’s comments by offering to negotiate in Hanoi: ‘the Vietnam war is a Vietnamese problem and I think it would be better solved by a conference in Vietnam, even in Hanoi’.33 In what was a vital and revealing move, even though it received negligible publicity at the time, Tran Buu Kiem rejected these offers immediately and contemptuously.34 Hanoi had nothing to gain by granting any status to Thieu’s government. The second forum in the Kissinger plan was vetoed and never revived. Instead, on 8 May Kiem put forward the communists’ own ten-point peace plan.35 The plan called for the acceptance of the national rights of the Vietnamese people ‘as recognised by the 1954 agreements’ and the withdrawal of US and Allied troops ‘without posing any conditions whatsoever’. The position of Vietnamese armed forces in the South

172 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 would be decided by Vietnamese parties amongst themselves after the holding of ‘free and democratic general elections’ to produce a coalition government. During the period before these elections there would be no attempt to impose a solution, and exiles would be allowed to return. Under the sixth principle the new South Vietnam would carry out a foreign policy of peace and neutrality, accepting economic and technical aid without political preconditions; the reunification of Vietnam would occur step by step without foreign interference, while both zones would observe the 1954 agreements restraining them from having foreign bases on their soil or joining alliances. Under the ninth principle there would be negotiations on returning POWs but, ominously, these were linked with the United States accepting responsibility for the war and thus implicitly with the payment of reparations. Finally, US withdrawal should take place under international supervision.36 The South Vietnamese government did not reject the ten principles altogether. If President Thieu genuinely wanted secret talks between his government and the NLF, and that was the only way he was going to have a direct impact on the negotiations, he had nothing to gain by making such negotiations impossible. He was also no doubt wary of further alienating US opinion and appearing utterly intransigent.37 Pham Dang Lam conferred in Saigon about the proposals. His press briefing went to the heart of the problem. He wanted elucidation about what the NLF meant ‘by the principle of self-determination, by non-intervention, and by democratic government’. He also made clear Saigon’s opposition to coalition government.38 This was the crucial point underlined a few days later by President Thieu, who asserted repeatedly and emphatically that he would never agree to such a government. Nor was this very surprising, even though proposals of this sort recurred throughout the negotiations and were seriously discussed by Western commentators, including Henry Kissinger in his Foreign Affairs article. The Daily Telegraph correspondent covering the Paris talks wrote on 13 May about the prospects for such a coalition and the need for Thieu to establish a broad noncommunist coalition which could join a government with the NLF. Even one of the Saigon newspapers discussed the possibility of such a coalition, provided the NLF could not take over the presidency or the Prime Minister’s position.39 A coalition sounded reassuringly democratic and familiar, and that was, no doubt, why the term was chosen by Hanoi. All communist systems might be said to be coalitions in that there is no opposition outside the government. Nixon and the anti-communists knew what had happened in every East European state after 1945 when communists

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 173 had formed coalition governments. In Hungary, for example, the noncommunist parties were resoundingly victorious in the November 1945 elections. Backed by the Soviet occupation forces and 50,000 political police, the communists then set about intimidating and weakening the other parties. By 1948 the process was complete: the social democrats were amalgamated with the communists and the other party leaders had been imprisoned, executed or forced into exile.40 Kissinger himself had written in his Foreign Affairs article, ‘It is beyond imagination that parties that had been murdering and betraying each other for 25 years could work together as a team giving joint instructions to the entire country.’ Neither side would willingly give up their armed forces, and a coalition would either mean the total collapse of the Southern government or the continuation in some form of the struggle. No wonder President Thieu persuaded South Korean President Park to join with him at the end of May 1969 in denouncing the idea of forming a coalition government in Saigon.41 Park’s forces were also fighting alongside the Americans in Vietnam and he was confronted with an enemy in Pyongyang as implacable as Hanoi. In Washington the administration was reported to be studying the NLF’s ten-point plan, though many politicians, including Michael Mansfield (1903– ), the Senate majority leader, immediately welcomed them as a possible basis for discussion.42 Meanwhile, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, the US delegation in Paris was constantly proposing initiatives to try to move the negotiations forward, initiatives which Kissinger implies were often ill-advised and were rejected by the administration. The Secretary of State, William Rogers (1913– ), was also willing to give away positions that Nixon and Kissinger believed were essential.43 At the same time, Kissinger comments, ‘we knew too little of Hanoi at this point to understand that its leaders were interested in victory, not a ceasefire, and in political control, not a role in free elections’. Nixon and Kissinger were not as naïve as this suggests.44 They were caught between the demands of US public opinion, their hopes of improving relations with Beijing and Moscow, the desperate struggle by non-communist South Vietnamese to survive and the determination of Hanoi to achieve its goals. In the negotiations, both public and secret, the North Vietnamese urged that President Thieu should be overthrown, the United States should withdraw its forces and more acceptable political groups in the South should form a coalition with representatives of the guerrilla movement. It seems possible that Hanoi really believed the United States would overthrow the South Vietnamese government, even though this would have been a betrayal of everything that the United States had

174 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 stood for in its struggle against communism in general and in the Vietnam War in particular. The North Vietnamese knew that the CIA had been party to the overthrow of Thieu’s predecessor, that the war was loathed by powerful segments of US opinion and that Nixon badly wanted a settlement so that he could concentrate on other issues. Many Americans were unsympathetic towards Thieu’s dictatorial government and hated the war more than they disliked the prospect of a communist victory. As in the Korean War, the United States regarded the recovery of its servicemen held by the communists as a major war aim. Again this wellpublicised objective became a source of great weakness. Washington’s concern for their safety made the POWs into de facto hostages, whose conditions could compel the United States to compromise. US negotiators had very little that they could offer Hanoi in return except Thieu’s downfall and the possibility of economic subsidies to repair some of the damages of war.45 Hanoi tried throughout the talks to give the impression that the NLF was a separate movement, the representatives of the South Vietnamese people, while Thieu’s Saigon officials were simply US agents. In fact Thieu had very strong views of his own; he had to bend to US wishes but he was not simply Washington’s agent, as Hanoi well knew and the US administration often had reason to regret. Washington might be able to encourage his overthrow but, while he remained in power, Thieu would represent the armed forces and the middle-class elements in South Vietnamese society. Hanoi had to diminish his standing by excluding his representatives from the negotiations.46 Despite Hanoi’s claims, South Vietnam would have retained its separate identity had it won the war; indeed, victory would have greatly increased its independence from Washington. When it lost, the NLF disappeared into the oblivion from which it had been raised for Hanoi’s convenience, and its leaders were consigned to trivial positions so that Hanoi’s officials could take over the South. Meanwhile, both the fighting and the steady withdrawal of US forces continued. In May 1970 US and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia. Communist forces in South Vietnam had been supplied either down the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos and Cambodia or through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The invasion was intended to interdict, or at least hamper, these links, and very large quantities of weapons were recovered. However, it exacerbated the divisions in US public opinion and, though it made communist operations more difficult, it was far from decisive.47A subsequent attempt by South Vietnamese forces to cut the trail in Laos in February 1971

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 175 was less successful. It further convinced many Americans of the incompetence of Saigon’s forces and the likely failure of Laird’s Vietnamisation of the war. Saigon blamed its shortcomings on Washington’s unwillingness to provide adequate air support; Kissinger emphasised poor planning, lack of mobility in the South Vietnamese forces and failure to provide ground controllers who could communicate with US pilots.48 The administration saw such offensives as a way of inducing Hanoi to accept a compromise settlement, but the North still appeared to be clinging to the hope of a military victory even while US forces remained. At the end of 1971, when US intelligence reported signs that an invasion of the South was imminent, Nixon resumed the bombing of North Vietnam halted by Lyndon Johnson just before the end of his presidency. In an effort to reduce public opposition to these attacks, Nixon revealed to the public for the first time on 25 January 1972 that secret talks had been continuing for some months with Hanoi’s representatives. At the same time Saigon became aware of the drift of US policy. Thieu realised that Washington might abandon the effort to persuade Hanoi to withdraw all its forces from the south and that, conversely, the Americans might pull all their forces out of the country instead of keeping a residue as in South Korea.49 The secret negotiations have subsequently been described in much detail in Kissinger’s memoirs. Kissinger first persuaded Nixon to offer such talks in November 1969 but the North only actually agreed to them the following February. In the greatest secrecy Kissinger would fly across the Atlantic, stay under an assumed name in the house of the US military attaché in Paris, General Vernon Walters (1917– ), and meet with Le Duc Tho in a factory foreman’s house on the outskirts of Paris. The purpose of this secrecy was presumably to avoid press intrusions, to minimise leaks from the administration and to keep Thieu’s government quiet. During Easter 1972 the North Vietnamese staged a massive conventional attack on South Vietnam. Still supported by US aircraft, the South Vietnamese failed to break, although they were forced to allow the North Vietnamese to begin a permanent occupation of large areas of the country. It was after this failure to overrun the entire country that the Northern negotiators agreed for the time being to accept Thieu’s continuation in office. This removed the main obstacle, as far as Hanoi was concerned, for the formal agreement of 27 January 1973. Most of its provisions were in place by 8 October 1972, the day which the Southern government called ‘the darkest day in the history of the Republic of Vietnam, the day of betrayal by its closest ally’.50

176 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 Nguyen Tieu Hung, an American economics professor, adviser to President Thieu and eventually Minister of Economic Development in Saigon, has given an insider’s account of the South Vietnamese position at this time. South Vietnamese distrust for Kissinger grew with the development of détente between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, Thieu resented US subsidies to South Vietnamese opposition parties. Washington saw these as a way of making elections there look more democratic; Thieu saw them as signs of disloyalty and feared that the CIA might overthrow him just as it had encouraged the overthrow of his predecessor. Thieu had tried to help Nixon’s election campaign in 1968; now he expected reciprocity, not enmity. Thieu also believed that Kissinger underestimated South Vietnamese successes against the communists. When Kissinger visited Saigon in April 1972 he expected the US National Security Adviser to respond to these successes. Instead, he found him ready for ever more farreaching compromises with Hanoi at Saigon’s expense. As a Vietnam war veteran, Alexander Haig, Washington’s other emissary, had more credibility in Saigon but, when Thieu remained opposed to the peace deal Kissinger had negotiated in Paris, Haig told him that the United States would be forced ‘to take brutal action’ against his government. At the same time Nixon wrote a series of letters telling Thieu that he was determined to go ahead with the peace deal and promising in the strongest possible terms that the United States would support South Vietnam if the fighting continued: We must bear in mind what will really maintain the agreement. It is not any particular clause in the agreement but our joint willingness to maintain its clauses. I repeat my personal assurances that the United States will react very strongly and rapidly to any violation of the agreement.51 Kissinger made every effort to produce a settlement before the US presidential elections in October 1972. However, Nixon was not as enthusiastic about an agreement at that time if it were going to involve publicly coercing President Thieu. On the central issue which worried the South Vietnamese, the presence of communist forces in the South, Kissinger knew that the North Vietnamese could not even be persuaded to admit openly they had forces there, but he argued that if the supply routes could be cut off by agreement, they would either withdraw or become ineffective.52 According to Nixon’s account, there was also disagreement with Hanoi until just before the elections about the release of communists held by the Southern government and about the ability of the United States to resupply Southern forces. The South Vietnamese

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 177 continued to demand withdrawal of Northern forces, re-establishment of the DMZ as a secure border, and dropping of references to a National Council of Reconciliation and Concord which might be cover for a coalition government. Hanoi published the essence of the agreement only days before the elections to show that it was the United States and its ally which were dragging out the talks.53 In the elections Nixon won 60.7 per cent of the votes against 37.5 per cent for George McGovern (1922– ), who built his campaign round demands for an immediate bombing halt and withdrawal of US forces. Buoyed by this success, Nixon sent Kissinger back to Paris to try to negotiate concessions from Hanoi which would encourage Thieu to support the agreement. The South Vietnamese representatives in Paris were briefed on developments by Kissinger, but they felt excluded and ill-informed, and subsequently claimed that they learnt more from gossip amongst the Vietnamese community than they learnt from Kissinger’s briefings. Hanoi at first appeared to make some concessions in the negotiations but agreement eventually proved impossible and the talks collapsed. Kissinger believed that disagreement between Saigon and Washington, and growing dissent in the United States, had made Hanoi overconfident that it could achieve everything without concessions. Just before Christmas Nixon ordered the laying of mines in Haiphong Harbour, through which most of North Vietnam’s trade passed, and a new and very heavy bombing campaign against Hanoi. Nixon and Kissinger were convinced that these attacks made the North more willing to meet some US demands and thus produced the January 1973 agreement.54 It is still difficult to read the ‘Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam’ as anything but a great humiliation for the United States and an ultimately fatal setback for the South Vietnamese. Article 1 began, ‘the United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognised by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam’. In singling out the United States, the article clearly implied that it was Washington which had previously denied Vietnamese sovereignty and integrity, as Hanoi had always contended.55 Article 2 said that the ceasefire would begin on 27 January 1973, when the United States will stop all its military activities against the territory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam by ground, air and naval forces, wherever they may be based, and end the mining of the territorial waters, ports, harbours and waterways of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

178 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 Again all the emphasis was placed on Washington and no reference was made to Hanoi’s military actions, which Washington had always claimed had produced its own defensive military responses. Article 3 stated that as soon as the ceasefire went into effect, US forces and those of its allies would remain in place pending the implementation of the plan for troop withdrawals. Article 4 laid down that ‘the United States will not continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Vietnam’, while article 6 said that within sixty days of the signature the forces of the United States and its allies should be withdrawn from the country and article 15d implied that their presence was an infringement of the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam. There was no mention in these articles of North Vietnamese forces. Implicitly Washington seemed to be accepting that their presence was legitimate. Furthermore, according to the agreement, there was not one South Vietnamese government but two South Vietnamese parties which were placed on the same level, precisely what Washington and Saigon had tried to avoid at the open Paris talks. The non-communist government in Saigon was equated with the political wing of the communist forces in the South. Consequently, the Southern government signed only after Nixon wrote to Thieu on 16 January that the United States would, if necessary, sign the agreement without Saigon’s concurrence: ‘I shall have to explain publicly that your government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of US economic and military assistance’.56 Faced with this ultimatum, the agreement was signed by Tran Van Lam, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Vietnam. It was also signed separately by Nguyen Thi Binh, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. According to articles 10 and 12, these two parties, who would not even sign on the same page of the agreement, were to avoid all armed conflict and to establish a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, a preliminary, no doubt, for the sort of coalition which Saigon had always sought to avoid. Under article 11, they were, apparently, to ‘ensure the democratic liberties of the people: personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of organisation, freedom of political activities, freedom of belief, freedom of movement, freedom of residence, freedom of work, right to property ownership, and right to free enterprise’. Yet none of the Vietnamese parties had shown respect for these principles. North Vietnam was a closed totalitarian state with no free press, no opposition parties, not the slightest sign of freedom of movement or belief. South Vietnam was a typical corrupt Third World dictatorship which had tortured opponents

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 179 and imprisoned them without trial. Both governments paid lip service to the ethics of democracy to please the United States and international public opinion. Article 11 can be regarded either as a ludicrous attempt by the United States to save face or as its only victory in the war. As Chapter 7 showed, democracies need to win the war of ideas as much as military victories. In this case Kissinger had persuaded democracy’s most successful and deadly enemy to pay lip service to the principles of John Locke and George Washington, even to the notions of private property and free enterprise, which undermine the whole Marxist organisation of society. Hanoi had not the slightest intention of abiding by such principles and may have dismissed the clause as a farrago of nonsense. If so, this was a gross miscalculation. Within a decade the unravelling of world communism was to be under way. The January 1973 agreement and the subsequent communist victories in Indo-China were the high-water mark of communist expansion before the erosion of communist societies through the spread of democratic ideas and the success of Western capitalist economies became ever more obvious. In 1919 the democracies won the war and lost the peace; in 1973 the United States and its allies lost the war but they eventually won the peace. Article 11 was a unique victory for Kissinger’s tactics in 1973. Article 15, which laid down the basis for reunification, meant that the South would eventually be absorbed by the North. Both sides were to agree to the process of reunification ‘without coercion or annexation by either party’, yet the North was hardly going to abandon communism, it was not going to allow the establishment of non-communist parties, it was not going to permit the former South Vietnamese ministers, officials and military leaders to remain in office. It was, at best, going to sentence them to be re-educated over very long periods in jungle camps.57 Virtually the only analyses of the 1973 agreement which have defended it were those written by Kissinger and Nixon themselves, although their defences were somewhat different. Kissinger claimed that ‘the agreement could have worked. It reflected a true equilibrium of the forces on the ground.’58 In other words, there could have been a standoff with each side afraid to strike because of the other’s power and even perhaps willing to see the value of compromise. On the other hand, Nixon saw the agreement as just another stage in the war. He wrote in 1985, ‘On 27 January, 1973, almost twenty years after the French had lost the first Vietnam War, we had won the second Vietnam War. . . . We had redeemed our pledge to keep South Vietnam free’.59 The United States had sent large quantities of weaponry to the South in the period before the agreement, including M-48 tanks, 175 mm guns, UH-1

180 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 helicopters, gunships, fighters and light bombers. According to his calculation, there were 450,000 troops in the regular Southern army, together with 325,000-strong regional forces and 200,000-strong popular forces. The North Vietnamese had 600,000 troops but these were spread across Indo-China and they had suffered heavy losses. In Nixon’s view Congress had only to continue to supply Saigon with sufficient funds and arms, and the South Vietnamese regime would win the ensuing struggle. Nixon’s calculations were, however, the typical product of a civilian mind. The South was entirely on the defensive, and with so many towns and villages to defend it needed far more men and resources than its adversaries. Demoralised and badly led by its commanders, the Southern army gradually collapsed.60 It was obvious immediately after the January agreement that the war would go on, the only difference being that the United States would not be directly involved in the fighting on the ground. Both the communists and the non-communists struggled to control the most territory and, above all, the most people.61 For a time it seemed from reporters’ accounts that the non-communist forces were extending the area under their control, though the most prescient reports were pessimistic about the South’s ability to survive for any length of time.62 The communist government in Hanoi was now generally recognised, Saigon was not. Strategically Hanoi was taking the offensive; Saigon was on the defensive, and that in itself was demoralising.63 The ordinary South Vietnamese had become much more prosperous when US forces had been stationed there. But their withdrawal and the reduction in US aid meant that the South was becoming poorer, while inflation and unemployment were rising. Opposition from South Vietnamese Buddhists increased, forcing Thieu to sack 400 field-grade officers and many of his own staff. Through 1974 and early 1975 the South Vietnamese steadily lost territory until, at the end of April 1975, following a series of dramatic communist victories, Saigon surrendered and the whole of Vietnam became communist. The South Vietnamese government blamed the United States for not keeping its promises of support. Nixon and Kissinger failed to tell Congress about their promises to Saigon, and in any case Congress would have refused to accept the validity of such commitments.64 The negotiations between US and North Vietnamese representatives between 1968 and 1973 had many unusual features. In 1870 the French were clearly losing the war against Prussia and in 1905 the Russians had lost every battle against the Japanese. Their ability to inflict damage on their enemies was very limited and they had to make what terms they could. But the United States was still able in 1973 to bomb the North

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 181 Vietnamese, to mine their harbours and to do battle with their ground forces. If the US people had been willing to continue the struggle, they could certainly have done so. Conversely, Washington could simply have completed the withdrawal of its forces and abandoned all negotiations with Hanoi, whether or not it had continued to send supplies to Saigon. The historian must ask what US negotiators were trying to achieve. In his Foreign Affairs article Kissinger had argued that they should first seek to agree with the North Vietnamese on ultimate goals. But this was completely impossible, and he made no suggestions as to what such goals might be. On the other hand, Kissinger and Nixon were not simply negotiating about US withdrawal, because that was within Washington’s unilateral control. Nor could the talks have been about persuading Hanoi to allow a decent interval after US withdrawal before taking over the whole country because that was not within Hanoi’s control. To that extent Nixon was right: the South Vietnamese could fight on and the duration of the struggle would depend upon the military situation. The North and South Vietnamese governments must have puzzled over Washington’s aims. The North seems to have hoped until 1972 that Washington would end the war on Northern terms by overthrowing Thieu and allowing the installation of a ‘coalition’ government in Saigon. Southern leaders struggled vainly in 1968 to convince the United States that negotiations were pointless in a war which could only end with the victory of one side or the other. Early in 1969 they saw that Washington was determined to compromise and that they would have to co-operate. Their only hope was then to prolong the negotiations and to placate US public opinion by appearing as reasonable as possible. Above all, they tried and failed to persuade Washington to provide the resources for the continuing war. Nixon’s analysis of the realities in Vietnam was very similar to Saigon’s. At the same time he believed the US people wanted negotiations, the withdrawal of their forces from Vietnam and the return of their POWs. Very well, they would have all three. Meanwhile, the South Vietnamese would be groomed to fight the ground war. In this way Saigon could defend itself almost indefinitely or until Hanoi abandoned the struggle. But this depended upon convincing the US people and Congress that he had done everything possible to end the war, that the North Vietnamese were the aggressors and that the United States should continue funding Saigon and providing it with air support. The South Vietnamese believed Nixon had betrayed them. Nixon maintained that Congress had undermined the agreement. Congress insisted that Saigon was doomed by its own failings and that the United States had sacrificed

182 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 enough of its blood and treasure in such a dubious cause. It was not committed by Nixon’s promises to Saigon, even if it had known of their extent. Kissinger, like many negotiators, sometimes came to believe that a compromise really might be achieved by his diplomatic skills, even if in this case they were displayed in a tiny room in a Paris suburb. Such a miracle would have left South Vietnam non-communist, ended the fighting and rescued the POWs. Only this can explain the arguments about the detailed provisions of the January 1973 agreement, which were never likely to make much difference and certainly failed to do so. It also explains the apparent naïveté of some of the comments in the Security Adviser’s memoirs and his occasional admission of bewilderment and anger that the North Vietnamese had no intention of compromising. To be fair to Kissinger, the Southern government also behaved sometimes as though the negotiations were meaningful and as though the ‘concession’ that the North Vietnamese could retain forces in the South really was fatal.65 In the end, most of those involved found it difficult to distinguish appearance and reality. In losing, the United States and its allies had, in the short term, to abandon almost every aspect of those democratic objectives which they had imposed on their enemies in 1919 and 1945. It was Washington which, in Hanoi’s eyes, should pay reparations. It was the South Vietnamese leaders who would be overthrown and then condemned to suffer for their crimes. It was the capitalists and democrats who would be re-educated. Of course, the greatest sufferings were amongst the South Vietnamese, not amongst the Americans, who refused to pay reparations and, once their POWs were returned, turned their backs on the whole region. Only article 11 gave some idea of what the United States would have liked to achieve. Because the greatest military power in the world was humiliated in this way, there was more theatre, more justification before public opinion and history, involved in these negotiations than in the previous ones discussed in this volume. Favre, Witte, Lloyd George, Churchill and Truman wanted to be remembered for their diplomatic coups and their statesmanlike vision, but that was to be a by-product of their negotiations, not their central purpose, which was to end the various wars to the advantage of their own country. The 1973 agreement made no difference to the course of the war or the fate of South Vietnam. It is remarkable rather for the humiliating language which Kissinger and Nixon were willing to accept in a bid to cover their country’s retreat and in their desperation to reach an agreement.

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 183

Notes 1 Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978, p. 446; Henry Kissinger, The White House Years, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and Michael Joseph, 1979, p. 444. 2 Frank Snepp, Decent Interval: The American Debacle in Vietnam and the Fall of Saigon, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. 3 ‘Hanoi No. 3 mocks Paris peace talks’, Sunday Times, 8 December 1968. 4 Henry A. Kissinger, ‘The Vietnam negotiations’, Foreign Affairs, January 1969, 47(2): 211. 5 See the series of articles by the novelist Mary McCarthy based on a visit to North Vietnam, ‘Waiting for the all-clear’, Sunday Times, 26 May 1968. See also Philip Towle, Pilots and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft in Unconventional Warfare, London: Brassey’s, 1989, particularly p. 170. 6 Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 269 and 322. 7 ‘Nixon’s Vietnam offer of withdrawal of forces and a free choice for south’, The Times, 16 May 1969; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 391–392. 8 Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 396ff. 9 See note 7 above. 10 Nixon, Memoirs, p. 392. 11 ‘Saigon set for US to go’, The Times, 1 January 1969; ‘US plans cuts in Vietnam’, Sunday Times, 19 January 1969. 12 ‘Nixon hopes for Hanoi response to troops cuts’, The Times, 11 June 1969; Nixon, Memoirs, p. 392. 13 ‘American fear of prolonged negotiations’, The Times, 2 November 1968. 14 ‘Vietnam politician given five years’, The Times, 27 July 1968. 15 ‘Mr Vance talks with S. Vietnamese’, The Times, 10 December 1968; ‘Hanoi rejects US talks formula’, The Times, 7 January 1969. 16 ‘Talks on Vietnam tomorrow’, The Times, 17 January 1969. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 For South Vietnamese views see Nguyen Tuen Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter, ‘Secret commitments in President Nixon’s foreign policy’, in Leon Friedman and William F. Levantrosser (eds) Cold War Statesman and Patriot: Richard M. Nixon, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. 20 ‘Liberation not Ky’s objective’, The Times, 9 December 1968: ‘Ky hopeful about Paris talks’, The Times, 24 January 1969. 21 ‘New proposals on Vietnam talks’, The Times, 13 December 1968. 22 Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 231, 263 and 265. 23 ‘New US negotiator in Paris feels hopeful’, The Times, 21 January 1969; ‘Ky warns communists on eve of Paris peace talks’, The Times, 25 January 1969. 24 ‘US proposes new Vietnam control commission’, The Times, 27 January 1969. 25 ‘Saigon’s basic terms for a cease-fire’, The Times, 28 January 1969. 26 ‘Vietnam peace talks bogged down by first step dispute’, Daily Telegraph, 31 January 1969. 27 ‘Gulf remains at Vietnam conference’, The Times, 7 February 1969. 28 ‘Vietcong demand that allies withdraw’, The Times, 14 February 1969. 29 ‘A day in search of Vietnam peace’, Sunday Times, 9 March 1969.

184 Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

‘Peace talks with Vietcong offered by Saigon’, The Times, 26 March 1969. See note 4 above. ‘Saigon offers chance of serious talks’, The Times, 7 April 1969. ‘Ky willing to attend talks in Hanoi’, The Times, 28 March 1969; ‘Viet Cong reject Thieu’s offer of talks’, Daily Telegraph, 28 March 1969. ‘Saigon talks offer rejected by NLF’, The Times, 28 March 1969. ‘Paris peace talks are revitalised by new NLF 10-point peace plan’, The Times, 9 May 1969. Ibid. ‘Saigon willing to discuss NLF peace plan’, The Times, 12 May 1969. Ibid. ‘Moscow may hold key to Vietnam talks’, Daily Telegraph, 13 May 1969. Jörg K. Hoensch, A History of Modern Hungary, 1867–1986, London: Longman, 1988, chapter 5. See also Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution, London: Methuen, 1950, chapter 8; Alan Palmer, The Lands Between, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970, chapter 13. ‘Thieu says “never” to a coalition’, The Times, 31 May 1969. ‘Washington weighs up NLF’s plan for peace’, The Times, 10 May 1969. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 263. Ibid., p. 442. Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 859ff. See note 34 above. President Thieu also worried that Washington might organise his overthrow; see Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schechter, The Palace File, New York: Harper and Row, 1986, p. 28. Nixon, Memoirs, p. 498; ‘US tanks link up with airborne troops’, The Times, 4 May 1970; ‘US claims to have killed 3,224 in Cambodia’ and ‘Crisis of confidence in the White House’, The Times, 8 May 1970; ‘Softer Nixon line as thousands mass for Washington march’, The Times, 9 May 1970; ‘US timetable in Cambodia feared too short for job’, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 1970. Hung and Schechter, The Palace File, p. 43; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1002ff. Nixon, Memoirs, p. 585; Hung and Schechter, The Palace File, p. 47. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 439. See also note 19 above. Hung and Schechter, The Palace File, pp. 121–125. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1308. Ibid., p. 1446 passim; Nixon, Memoirs, p. 741. The agreement is reprinted in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Survival, March/April 1973, pp. 81–97, and Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975, pp. 319ff. For an attack on US policy throughout the negotiations see Seymour Hersh, Kissinger: The Price of Power, New York: Summit Books, 1983. See note 54 above for the text of the agreement. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1469. Frank Snepp, Decent Interval, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, pp. 476ff. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1470. Richard M. Nixon, No More Vietnams, London W.H. Allen, 1986, p. 164.

Cabot Lodge and Tran Buu Kiem in 1969 185 60 For a trenchant criticism of the Nixon strategy for fighting the war at second hand see Porter, A Peace Denied. 61 For an excellent analysis of the balance of forces just before the South Vietnamese collapse see Maynard Parker, ‘Vietnam: the war that won’t end’, Foreign Affairs, January 1975, 53(2): 352. 62 Peter Schmidt, ‘Asian Journey’, Encounter, September 1973. 63 Dennis Duncanson, ‘South Vietnam: détente and reconciliation’, International Affairs, October 1973, 49: 554. 64 On the situation in South Vietnam see Snepp, Decent Interval. For the Vietnamese government’s view of its betrayal see Hung and Schechter, The Palace File. 65 Hung and Schechter, The Palace File. See also note 19 above.

12 Democracy and peacemaking

The wars which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s illustrated the whole gamut of democratic peacemaking policies. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the widespread massacres of civilians in Croatia and Bosnia outraged Western opinion and led to military intervention in both cases. The Iraqi and the Serb leaders were demonised by the Western media, and international war crimes tribunals were established for the first time since the 1940s to try those allegedly responsible for the massacres in former Yugoslavia. During the peace talks at Dayton, Western negotiators warned that Bosnian Serb leaders might be tried, and during the Kosovan crisis in the spring of 1999 the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was also indicted. The problems involved in trying to sort out the various national or religious groups in former Yugoslavia bedevilled the peace plans and illustrated the difficulty of finding a just solution. The NATO allies bombed Serbia in spring 1999 to prevent the repression of the Kosovan Muslims and ended by presiding over the expulsion of the Serb minority from Kosovo. All this is in marked contrast with the agenda of peacemaking before the French Revolution, though the contrast is habitually unremarked. The British debate before the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713 concentrated on the nation’s interests, though the terms were restricted by the inhibitions created by centuries of Christian teaching and the evolution of international custom. What was to be gained by continuing the war against France? Could Louis XIV’s forces be defeated and to what advantage would this be for Britain? Were Britain’s allies bearing a fair share of the military and financial burden? There was naturally no talk of war crimes trials. There was no talk of reparations and little of disarmament or prisoners of war. Negotiations were often carried on in secret and brought charges of betrayal from Britain’s allies, but they were otherwise continued without abuse and with decorum.1

Democracy and peacemaking 187 The democratic agenda which has partly replaced traditional concerns may be a necessary feature of the Western form of government. Many of its features, such as its concern for Allied POWs, are commendable, if weakening. But it throws up the problems which have been discussed in the previous chapters. Some policies contradict others, some are impractical and some are designed to satisfy passing demands. Thus the statesmen who try to negotiate peace settlements are subsequently only too often the targets of criticism, even if they were trying to shape policy according to the calls of the media and the electorate. Myths have become a part of peacemaking because otherwise democracies would have had to face the contradictions in their policy. The fundamental myth has been that, though a particular war might be a ‘crime’, the aggressive actions were only plotted by the government of the enemy country and lacked the support of the mass of the people. Many of the arguments between Whigs and Tories in 1815, between Favre and Bismarck in 1870, between Witte and Komura in 1905 and amongst Allied leaders in 1919 and 1945 revolved round this question. Plainly governments were more responsible for past wars than their peoples, but Napoleon was widely welcomed on his return from Elba to France in 1815, war against Prussia was popular in France in 1870, there were public demonstrations in favour of war in most European capitals in 1914 and Hitler was elected by the German people. Napoleon III and Hitler may both have stirred up belligerent feelings, but they were abetted by other segments of society and they worked on those feelings they knew were latent amongst the people. The basic paradox about peacemaking is that the more foreign policies have come to reflect popular opinion over the past decades, the more victorious powers have pinned responsibility for beginning the war on defeated governments. The second paradox, which is a consequence of the first, is that victorious democracies have tried to impose new governments on their vanquished enemies, or at least to exclude previous leaders. Yet there is an evident contradiction between such a policy and the belief in the right of a people to choose their own government. It may be possible to remove the vanquished government, but only if the enemy people have turned against their previous leaders because of the humiliation and suffering for which they are held responsible. A government imposed by the victors without any popular support is bound to fall in the long run and former leaders are likely to be restored unless they have been discredited. This leads victorious states naturally to the urge to change the minds of, to ‘re-educate’, the enemy peoples. Of course, if democratic leaders really believed that the government alone in the enemy state was

188 Democracy and peacemaking responsible for the war then there would be no need to change the minds of the mass of the people. But since they recognise that this is, at most, a half-truth, they have also tried to change the minds of the enemy people, by abolishing conscription in Germany in 1919 and by reeducation after 1945. Such policies did not appear very promising, yet the German armed forces never regained the place they had held in society before 1914, and both militarism and Nazism are today regarded with abhorrence by the vast majority of German people, though the efforts of the victors were much less important in achieving this transformation than general changes in society. Re-education is part of the central democratic aim of winning the war of ideas to complement their military victory. This did not matter enough to Bismarck to prevent him annexing Alsace and Lorraine, but it did matter to the British during the Boer War. They wanted to make the Peace of Vereeniging as accommodating as possible to win over the Boers and to placate international opinion. Similarly, President Theodore Roosevelt deftly played on Japanese fears of isolation and doubts about the justice of their demands to push them into a peace in 1905 without imposing indemnities on the Russians. The post-1919 period saw the most spectacular failure by the victorious countries to win the war of ideas. Undoubtedly the criticisms of their policies were exaggerated, but they undermined the Allied determination to stand by the Paris treaties and paved the way for the appeasement of Germany in the 1930s. By contrast, the 1945 settlement was successful because Axis behaviour was so unspeakable that there were few in the democracies who dissented from the policies followed in 1945, and even the vanquished states tended to accept the justice of the Allied cause. The 1945 settlement saw the burgeoning of the policy of re-education, but democracies are in danger once again of undermining their own beliefs if they put too much emphasis on this process. Ultimately democracy depends upon people making up their minds about political issues, and attempts by governments to manipulate, to spread propaganda or ‘brainwash’ the electorate are rightly regarded as highly dubious, the policies of totalitarian rather than liberal democratic behaviour. Only perhaps in the highly unusual circumstances in which democracies found themselves in 1919 and 1945, after years in which they had poured out propaganda in favour of their cause and with absolute priority now given to the maintenance of the victory they had achieved at so much cost, could such deviations be seriously considered by democratic leaders. Re-education, if it is tried at all, has to be a very temporary aberration if it is not to undermine the fundamental tenets of democratic liberalism.

Democracy and peacemaking 189 If the relationship between government and the governed in enemy states causes great problems for democratic leaders at the end of wars, so does the relationship between the people and the land they inhabit. Propagandists made it seem in 1919 as if the issue was an easy one. If the enemy control territories which are claimed by others, hold plebiscites after victory and the opinions of ‘the people’ can be discovered, then territories can be allocated appropriately. The problems were only too obvious in many areas. Countries need defined and preferably defensible frontiers, and these can often not be achieved without ignoring the opinions of at least some of the people in the area. The issue was addressed by the victors in 1919 when they imposed treaties on the new states of Eastern Europe under which their treatment of minorities was to be monitored internationally. In the long run, however, the minority treaties were unable to stabilise Eastern Europe, and Hitler used the grievances of the German minority in Czechoslovakia to destroy the new state.2 In the nineteenth century statesmen faced the problem of disaffected and fearful minorities most frequently in the Balkan states as they emerged from Turkish rule. At that time they took a justifiably pessimistic view of the prospects of cohabitation between minorities and majorities. As a result, they offered compensation to those minorities whom they expected to flee from their homes rather than be ruled by the new states. The Treaty of London of July 1827 for the pacification of Greece set the trend. Article 11 foresaw the total separation of the Greek and Turkish peoples. Turks compelled to abandon their homes in the areas now ruled by Greeks would be compensated appropriately. The twentieth century has generally been less realistic, and the results have been a great deal bloodier in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The German inhabitants were driven from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia in 1945, and many nationalities in the former Yugoslav state have also been ethnically cleansed without compensation in the 1990s. National minorities have been driven from vast areas of the Third World since independence. Liberal democratic ideals have been utterly unable to stabilise areas occupied by feuding clans. 3 Because democratic electorates usually believe that wars were forced upon them by their enemies, they have argued that they should be compensated financially for the consequent damages. Although such indemnities became the norm in the nineteenth century, the bitterness this caused was only too clear in France in 1871. The Russo-Japanese War could easily have continued over the Russian refusal to pay an indemnity in 1905. Only international pressure and the increasing financial strain on Japan persuaded the government in Tokyo that it

190 Democracy and peacemaking was better to abandon the claim. This experience might have encouraged the victors in 1919 to abandon claims for compensation. But the destruction wrought by the war, the passions excited amongst the peoples and, above all, the very heavy indebtedness of the victors all made it seem that reparations were nothing but natural justice. In the event, they proved impractical in the face of German opposition, and the victors also began to doubt their wisdom. Only a Napoleon or a Hitler, who has no interest in justice, can squeeze large sums from vanquished enemies after major wars, and even they can probably do so only in the short run. The democracies were wise to settle for reparations in kind in 1945 and unwise to try to squeeze reparations from the Iraqis in 1991.4 If imposing reparations on the vanquished seems to victorious peoples a matter of natural justice, so does the establishment of tribunals for trying individuals allegedly responsible for wartime crimes. The opponents of this policy argue that all wars are fiendishly cruel and that victors will not deter future cruelties by trying those allegedly responsible for previous ones. More generally they believe that personal and political morality should be distinguished. Bismarck summarised the classic view in September 1870: public opinion is only too much disposed to treat political relations and events from the standpoint of private morals, and, amongst other things, to demand that in international conflicts the victor, guided by the moral code, should sit in judgement upon the vanquished, and impose penalties not only for the transgressions of the latter towards himself, but also, if possible, towards others. Such a demand is utterly unjustifiable. To advance it shows an utter misapprehension of the nature of political affairs, with which the conceptions of punishment, reward, and revenge have nothing in common. To accede to it would be to pervert the whole character of politics. Politics must leave to Divine Providence and to the God of Battles the punishment of princes and peoples for breaches of the moral law.5 The statesman, in Bismarck’s view, should confine himself to securing the interests of his country. As a result, he did not mistreat the defeated French Emperor in 1870; it was the French guerrilla fighters who were the objective of his wrath because they created an unlimited war between peoples rather than a limited conflict between armies. Today Bismarck’s suggestion that justice should be left to God is unlikely to carry weight in an increasingly secular age.6 The insistence that all wars are so cruel that crimes cannot be isolated seems to

Democracy and peacemaking 191 democratic leaders and electorates like a cry of despair. Very often they refuse to accept that their own methods of making war are reprehensible, even though they seemed so to their enemies at the time and to some historians afterwards, particularly burning farms and concentrating women and children in camps to undermine the Boer commandos, blockading German sea lines of communication between 1914 and 1918 to starve the people into surrender and bombing enemy cities in the Second World War to undermine civilian morale. Each belligerent tries to stigmatise the strategies of its enemies and to justify its own. Thus the British condemned submarine attacks on merchant shipping in the First World War and the French condemned German reprisals against civilians whom they blamed for guerrilla resistance. Nevertheless, international agreements are a benchmark against which actions can be judged, and individuals believed responsible for infringements can be brought before courts. Trials may, however, take months or years, they remind the former belligerents of the barbarities of conflict and they can rekindle the antagonisms which led to war. It was largely for these reasons that traditional peacemakers followed clerical advice, generally eschewed such enterprises and proclaimed blanket indemnities.7 The behaviour of the Axis regimes in the Second World War, particularly the attempted genocide and enslavement of other nations, strengthened the hands of Stimson and others in the democratic states who were demanding the trial of German leaders. But, as Bismarck saw, there is an inherent propensity in democracies to hold enemies responsible for the enormities of war and there are no signs that the international community has abandoned the search for post-war justice. Recent events in former Yugoslavia and parts of Africa have hardened the determination to establish a permanent international court to try offences.8 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa cannot unfortunately become the general model. Democratic electorates demand that governments impose certain standards on their enemies, but they are not necessarily satisfied by the results. Paradoxically, it is the Vereeniging agreement of 1902 which has received least criticism since it was negotiated, precisely because it departed from the general pattern of democratic peace treaties. Far from imposing reparations on the defeated Boers, it compensated them for their losses. Although it liquidated the Boer governments, individual Boer leaders were involved in the process of compensation and quickly regained positions of authority. Some war crimes trials were held but these were minimised because of the effect they had on Anglo-Boer relations. The aim of British policy in subsequent years was to conciliate

192 Democracy and peacemaking the Afrikaner population. In that case British ministers were constrained by international opinion, by their own uneasy conscience about their military tactics and by the force of parliamentary criticisms of their policies. The democratic agenda has also been constrained when the belligerents reached a military stalemate, as in the Korean War. In recent years democratic leaders have made major concessions in order to bring guerrilla or terrorist campaigns to a close. In many ways this is surprising given the indiscriminate nature of this type of warfare, but the dissidents’ ability to continue their campaigns for years or even decades has forced governments to compromise. Thus the Israelis have had to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its leader Yasser Arafat because they represent the Palestinian people and because they have to be conciliated if peace is to be restored to the Middle East. Similarly, after three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, British governments have been forced to negotiate with Sinn Fein and even to accept its representatives as members of the government of the province. As part of the compromises proposed, the April 1998 Agreement on Northern Ireland provided for ‘an accelerated programme for the release’ of convicted terrorists.9 The contrast between the threats made by NATO leaders against Serb leaders for alleged crimes and the policy of concessions to Northern Irish terrorists who were imprisoned for proved crimes is instructive.10 Such compromises and concessions move the agenda away from the implementation of justice, which can usually be combined with stability only when, as in 1945, the vanquished have lost the battle of ideas as well as the military campaign. Nevertheless, the democratic agenda for peacemaking meets too many of the demands of the Western publics to be abandoned except under pressure and on an ad hoc basis. Indeed, the establishment of a permanent war crimes tribunal means that the agenda is becoming more deeply entrenched. This may be justified by the enormity of the offences, but it will lead to increased friction between governments in the future. The attempt by European states to try the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, despite the opposition of the Chilean government, shows the spread of the idea that legalistic answers can be found to political problems. Pinochet’s counsel warned the British Law Lords in November 1998 that removing the immunity given to national leaders could have serious repercussions on the safety of other national leaders, including Britain’s own. Chilean representatives also complained that the trial was undermining their sovereignty.11 In this case Chile was too weak to retaliate, but other states may not be so disadvantaged. The democratic agenda has always had a price. It will

Democracy and peacemaking 193 become more obvious over the next decades when there will be a real danger that legal disputes will replace territory as the prime cause of warfare.

Notes 1 George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Peace and the Protestant Succession, London: Longmans, Green, 1934; B. Van’t Hoff (ed.) The Correspondence of John Churchill and Anthonie Heinsius, Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1951; Beatrice Curtis Brown (ed.) The Letters and Diplomatic Correspondence of Queen Anne, London: Cassell, 1958; Michael Foot, The Pen and the Sword, London: Collins, 1984. The author of British policy, Bolingbroke, in his much later defence of the Treaty of Utrecht, discussed such projects as reducing French fortifications and even changing the French government; see Viscount Bolingbroke’s Defence of the Treaty of Utrecht, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932, p. 123. He dismissed ideas of changing the French government as ‘chimerical’ but believed some greater measure of forced disarmament than the demilitarisation of Dunkirk might have been possible. 2 For discussion of the problem of minorities see Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich, Political Frontiers and Boundary Making, London: Macmillan, 1916; Inis Claude, National Minorities: An International Problem, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955; Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination, London: Collins, 1969; J.R.V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries, London: Allen and Unwin, 1987; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 3 For the London Treaty see Michael Hurst (ed.) Key Treaties for the Great Powers, volume l, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972, p. 181; for the fate of the German minorities in 1945 see A.M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. 4 United Nations Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Situation between Iraq and Kuwait, New York: UN Department of Information, December 1991. 5 Dr Moritz Busch, Bismarck: Some Secret Pages of His History, London: Macmillan, 1899, p. 88. 6 Owen Chadwick, The Securalisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 7 For the Christian view of the ideal see St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 12, verses 19 and 20: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shall heap coals of fire on his head.’ 8 Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, New York: Norton, 1999. See also Michael P. Scharf, Balkan Justice, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1997. 9 The Agreement Reached in the Multi-party Negotiations, British government publication, [April 1998], p. 25, section on Prisoners, paragraph 1. See also ‘Terrorist release plan tests Blair’s pledges’, The Times, 5 June 1998; ‘MPs demand end to releases’, The Times, 28 January 1999.

194 Democracy and peacemaking 10 See the reflections in Eamon Collins, Killing Rage, London: Granta Books, 1997. For Collins’ fate see ‘Collins shunned in death as in life’, The Times, 30 January 1990. 11 ‘British leaders “could share Pinochet’s fate”’, The Times, 12 November 1998.

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Index

Acheson, Dean, and Korean War 158, 159, 162 Aix-la-Chapelle Treaty (1668) 7 Alexander I, Tsar, and Holy Alliance 7 Alsace, seizure of (1870) 30ff American Civil War 8, 137 American War of Independence 6 amnesty 2, 5–6, 135, 138–9 Angell, Norman, and reparations 70, 74 art, looted in war 75 Asquith, Herbert, war aims 119–20 Balfour, Arthur 82, 84 Bell, Bishop 132 Bethman, Hollweg: and German policy in First World War 36–7; offers to take responsibility for Kaiser William 21 Bildt, Carl 24 Birnbaum 99–100 Bismarck, Otto von: and indemnities imposed on Austria 69; interpretation of policies 31ff, 136; and negotiations with France 29ff; and war crimes trials 190 Blucher, Marshal, and execution of Napoleon 21 Boer War 44ff; and Brodrick 55; and Chamberlain 50; compensation for Boer losses 51ff; and De Wet 47, 52; and Judge Herzog 46, 52; and Kitchener 46ff; parliamentary

debates on 55; and President Steyn 47; and Smuts 48, 50; UK taxation for 56 Bormann, Martin, and German war aims 112–13 Bosnia: peace settlement 24; war in 24–5, 186 Botha, Louis, and Boer War 46ff Boxer Rebellion 69 Braunthal, Julius, and social changes in Germany 92 Brest Litovsk Treaty (1918) 7, 37, 71 Britain: and Boer War 44ff; and Korean War 156–7; post-First World War debts 71; public opinion 107–8; public opinion and 1919 peace settlement 98ff; subsidises allies in Napoleonic War 67–8; views on intervention 18 Brodrick, St John, and Boer War 55 Burdett, Sir Francis, criticises government policy towards Napoleon 16–17 Burke, Edmund, and French Revolution 13, 135 Busch, Maurice, interprets Bismarck’s policies 31ff, 136 Byrnes, James, and war aims in Second World War 119 Carr, E.H., and war aims in Second World War 121–2 Castle, Barbara, criticises US policy in Korean War 156

208 Index Castlereagh, Lord, and 1815 settlement 14, 18 Cateau-Cambrésis Treaty (1559) 6 Cavendish, Lord George, attacks government efforts to overthrow Napoleon 16 Cecil, Lord, and Germany in 1933 101–2 Chamberlain, Joseph, and Boer War 50 Charlemagne, Emperor, and warfare 3–4 Charles I, Emperor of AustriaHungary, treatment of by Allies 21 Charles I, King of England, trial of 136 Charles X, King of France 19 China: enters Korean War 148; forced to pay indemnities 68 Christianity: Constantine’s conversion to 2; and warfare 1ff Churchill, Sir Winston; conversations with Stalin (1942) 116; defence of 1919 Peace settlement 104; and Italian monarchy 22; and spread of English language 117; war aims in Second World War 114ff; and war crimes trials 126–9 Clark, General Mark: criticises Western leadership 149; orders POW camps retaken 159 Clausewitz, Carl von, and war aims 123 Clemenceau, Georges: and disarmament of Germany 86; and trial of Kaiser William 21; and war aims 120 Clynes, John, and 1919 Peace settlement 99 conscription 83 Constantine, Emperor, and conversion to Christianity 2 Cork, Earl of, and war crimes trials 132 Crimean War 7 De Wet, Christian, and Boer War 47, 52

Defoe, Daniel, and War of Spanish Succession 135 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, and First World War 106 Eden, Sir Anthony: and Second World War aims 116; and war crimes trials 128 Einzig, Paul, and treatment of Germany (1945) 92 Eltzbacher, O., and Russian indemnities (1905) 64 Erasmus Desiderius, and warfare 3, 7 ethnic cleansing 40–1, 189 Eugenie, French Empress, and 1870 negotiations 34 Favre, Jules, and negotiations with Germany (1870–1) 7, 29ff First World War; causes of 80; and Dickinson 106; and economic consequences of peace 105, 107; French war aims 120; German policy in 36–7; German war plans 81; Italian ambition in 37; peace settlement (1919) 39, 98ff, 104, 106, 107; reparations 70, 71–2, 73, 74, 89, 99; and retribution 138–9; and territorial settlement (1919) 36ff, 99–100 Foch, Marshal, and disarmament of Germany 85ff Fontainbleu Treaty (1814) 15 Foot, Michael, criticises US policy in Korean War 156 France: and Empress Eugenie 34; and 1815 indemnities 67–8, 71; and 1871 indemnities 69, 71; negotiations with 29ff; occupations of 18, 19, 68; war with Prussia (1870) 29ff; Revolutionary Wars 13ff Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) 29ff; and Gladstone 32; parliamentary debates on 33ff; peace negotiations 30–2 French Revolution: British policy towards 14ff; and Burke 13, 135

Index 209 Germany: Allies seize patents in 1945 75; and disarmament 82, 84, 85ff; exploitation of conquered territories 73, 114ff; First World War policy 36–7; French negotiations with (1870–1) 7, 29ff; government (1918) 20–1; looting of art works 75; and Lord Cecil 101–2; militarism of 80ff; national war aims 112–13; pre-1918 Constitution 82; re-education of 91–3, 187–8; reparations 70, 71–2, 73, 74, 89, 99; and Smuts 82; social changes in 92; treatment of (1945) 92, 140; and US war aims 120–1 Gladstone, William, and Franco-Prussian War 32 Greece: ethnic cleansing in 40; sufferings in Second World War 73 Grey, 2nd Earl of, and peace terms with France (1814–15) 15 Grey, Viscount, and causes of First World War 80 Gulf War 24, 44, 141 Haig, Alexander, and Vietnam War 176 Hamilton, Sir Ian, and Social Darwinism 90 Hankey, Lord, and war crimes trials 130–4 Hertzog, Judge, and Boer War 46, 52 Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, and taxation for Boer War 56 Himmler, Heinrich, and German war aims 113 Hindenburg, Field Marshal, and German war plans 81 Hirohito, Emperor, treatment of in1945 22, 25 Hitler, Adolf: despoliation of Poland by 74; exactions from conquered peoples 73–4; offers to make peace (1940) 22; orders German rearmament 88, 91; war aims 112ff

Ho Chi Minh Trail 174–5 Holdich, Sir Thomas, and border settlements 38–40 Holy Alliance 7 Hull, Cordell: and war crimes trials 129; and warfare 2 Hung Nguyen Tieu, and South Vietnam government 176 Hurd, Lord Douglas, and Gulf War 44 Hussein, Saddam, and Gulf War 24, 141 indemnities 66, 68, 69–70, 71ff, 77ff, 139, 189–90 Israel 162, 192 Italy: ambition in First World War 37; collapse of government (1943) 22 Japan: Second World War aims 75, 123; treatment after 1945 88, 93–4; victory over Russia (1904–5) 59ff Karadzic, Radovan 24 Kenworthy, Commander, attacks 1919 peace settlement 100–101 Keynes, John Maynard: and Economic Consequences of the Peace 105, 107; and German reparations 71–2, 89, 99 Kiem Tran Buu, and Vietnam War 169, 171 Kissinger, Henry, and Vietnam War 171ff Kitchener, Field Marshal Lord: and Boer War 46ff; as War Minister (1914) 82 Kokovstov, Vladimir, and Russo-Japanese negotiations (1905) 65 Komura, Jutaro, and Portsmouth negotiations (1905) 61ff Korea: in 1950–3 147ff; Japanese conquest (1904–5) 61 Korean War 158, 159, 162; armistice talks 148ff, 153ff; British presence in 156–7; Chinese entry into 148; criticism

210 Index of US policy in 156; and Selwyn Lloyd 159; and Menon 159; and Muccio 155–6; parliamentary debates on 33ff Laird, Melvin, and Vietnam War 168 Lansing, Robert: and nationalism 39, 120; and treatment of Kaiser William 21 Lawrence, Lord, defends war crimes trials 133 Leipzig trials 134 Lichnowsky, Prince, and German militarism 81 Lieven, Prince, and British views on intervention 18 Lloyd George, David: and Boer War 55; and German indemnities 72, 139; and German Kaiser 21; and militarism 80ff; and Peace settlement (1919) 98ff Lloyd, Selwyn, and Korean War 159 Lodge, Henry Cabot, and Vietnam War 169 Louis XVI, execution of 13 Louis XVIII, restoration of 14, 19 McCallum, R.B., and British public opinion 107–8 Machiavelli, Nicolo, and realism 4 Maclean, Sir Donald, defends Peace settlement 1919 99 Malet, Edward, and Franco-Prussian negotiations (1870) 30–2 Mansfield, Senator Michael, and Vietnam War 173 Mantoux, Etienne, and Peace settlement 1919 107 Maugham, Lord, criticises war crimes trials 133 Mazzini, Giuseppe, and nationalism 36ff Menon, Krishna, and Korean War 159 Meyer, George, and Portsmouth negotiations 65 militarism 80ff, 188 Milner, Alfred, Lord 46ff

Milosevic, Slobodan, and Bosnian War 24–5, 186 Milton, Lord, and occupation of France (1815) 18 Monnet, Jean, and Second World War aims 122 Montagu, C.E., and peace settlement 1919 106 Moran, Lord, and Churchill’s war aims 115, 118 More, Sir Thomas, and warfare 3–4 Morgan, Charles, and re-education of Germany 91 Morgenthau Plau 118 Muccio, John, and Korean War 155–6 Mussolini, Benito, and collapse of government (1943) 22 Nam Il, General, and Korean War armistice talks 148ff Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte): begged to make peace 17; British policy towards 14ff; efforts to overthrow 16; exactions from conquered peoples 67–8; treatment of (1814 and 1815) 14, 15, 17, 137 Napoleon III, and Franco-Prussian negotiations (1870–1) 29ff Napoleonic Wars 13; British subsidies to allies in 67–8; Parson Woodforde on 135–6; and 1815 settlement 14, 15, 18 nationalism 35ff, 56, 109, 120, 189 Ney, Marshal, execution of 1, 137 Nicholas II, Tsar, and RussoJapanese war 62ff Nicolson, Harold, and peace settlement (1919) 107 Nixon, Richard, and Vietnam War 167ff Orlando, Vittorio, and treatment of Kaiser William 21 Palestine 162, 192 Palmerston, Lord, and indemnities 68 Paris Peace Conference (1919)

Index 211 39–40, 106; attack and defence of 98ff; and indemnities 71ff; and militarism 80ff; and Nicolson 107; and Phillimore 39; and Sonnino 85 Parliamentary debates: on Boer War 55; on Franco-Prussian war 33ff; on Korean War 156; on restoration of Bourbons 14ff; on 1919 settlement 98ff; on war crimes trials 130ff Phillimore, Sir Walter; and First World War peace settlement 39; and retribution 138–9 Pitt, William, and war with France 13 Playne, Caroline, and militarism 80 Poland: despoliation by Hitler 74; partition of 16, 33 Portsmouth negotiations (1905) 59ff, 65 prisoners of war, treatment of 147ff, 174 Prussia: abolition of (1947) 93; and General Staff 126ff; indemnities to Napoleon 66; policy attacked 33; war with France (1870) 29ff reparations 70, 71–2, 73, 74, 89, 99 Ridgway, General Matthew, and Korean armistice talks 149ff Roosevelt, Franklin, and unconditional surrender 22, 119 Roosevelt, Theodore 60ff Rosen, Baron, and Portsmouth negotiations 62ff Russia: collectivisation in 116; indemnities (1905) 64; Japanese victory over (1904–5) 59ff; and return of emigrés (1945) 152 Russo-Japanese war 62ff St Helena 1 Sakhalin Island 61ff Salisbury, Lord, attacks Prussian policy (1870) 33 Second World War: and Churchill 114ff; and Eden 118; Greek suffering in 73; and

unconditional surrender 22, 119; war aims 75, 112ff Sino-Japanese War (1895), and indemnities 69–70 slave labour 74 Smuts, Jan: and Boer War 48, 50; and Germany (1919) 82 Social Darwinism 89–90 Sonnino, Baron, and peace negotiations (1919) 85 South Vietnam, government of 168ff Soviet Union see Russia Spanish Succession, War of 135 Stalin, Joseph: conversations with Churchill (1942) 116; death of 160; and war crimes 126–7 Steyn, President of Orange Free State, and Boer War 47 Syngman Rhee, and Korean armistice talks 153ff Takahira, Kogoro, and Portsmouth negotiations (1905) 60ff Talleyrand, Prince: and amnesty 137; begs Napoleon to make peace 17 Teheran Conference 126ff Tet offensive (1968) 167 Thieu Nguyen Van, and Vietnam War 168ff Thirty Years War 4 Tientsin Treaty (1858) 68 Tojo, Hideki, and Japanese war aims 123 Trotsky, Leon, at Brest Litovsk 7 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 142, 191 Turkey, ethnic cleansing in 40 Turner, Admiral Joy, and Korean war armistice talks 148ff Tutu, Bishop Desmond 142 United States, war aims 120–1 United States Academy of Political Science (1917) 37–8 Vagts, Alfred, definition of militarism 81 Vance, Cyrus, and Vietnam War 169

212 Index Vansittart, Lord Robert, and re-education of Germany 91 Vattel, Emmerich de, and morality of warfare 2, 15 Vereeniging Treaty (1902) 44ff, 108–9, 191 Versailles Treaty (1919) 36ff, 80ff Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, abdicates 22–3 Vietnam War 166ff; and Haig 176; and Kiem Tran Buu 169, 171; and Kissinger 171ff; and Laird 168; and Lodge 169; and Nixon 167ff; and Senator Mansfield 173; and Thieu Nguyen Van 168ff; and Vance 169 Vives, Juan Luis, and morality of warfare 3 war correspondents 136, 164 war crimes trials 1, 126ff, 190; and Bishop Bell 132; and Bismarck 190; and Churchill 126–9; criticism of 133; defence of 133; and Earl of Cork 132; and Eden 128; and Hull 129; and Lord Hankey 130–4; parliamentary debates on 130ff; and Welles 126 warfare: and Charlemagne 3–4; and

Christianity 1ff; and Erasmus 3, 7; and Hull 2; morality of 2, 3, 15; and More 3–4; and Vattel 2, 15; and Vives 3 Welles, Sumner, and war crimes trials 126 Wellington, Duke of, and occupation of France 19, 68 Whigs, attack on British policy towards French Revolution and Napoleon 14ff Witte, Sergei, and Portsmouth negotiations 59ff William II, Kaiser; overthrow of 21; treatment of 21, 22; trial of 21, 99, 139 Wilson, Woodrow: and decision to declare to war 81; and German disarmament 87; and German government in 1918 20–1; and possible trial of Kaiser 99; war aims of 120–2 Woodforde, Parson, and French wars 135–6 Yugoslavia, break up of 2, 24–5, 41 Ziffe, William, and treatment of Germans in 1945 140