The Alliance renewed the attack on what they branded Labour’s ‘unrealistic and irresponsible’ spending plans with regards to health and social services and also showed why there could be no large-scale attempt to prop up the USSR. Bevan, who was now shadow Home Secretary was easily needled by trenchant attacks on both subjects in the House of Commons most notably from Randolph Churchill who, at the age of thirty, had much of his father’s penetrating intellect, acerbic wit and ability as a speaker. [113]
Unsupported by his party and marginalised in the House, Bevan organised a back-bench revolt and with twenty-seven other disgruntled Labour MPs (all from the left or far-left of the party) resigned the Labour whip and formed a new group in the House of Commons known as the Democratic Labour Party. Soon after this, two other labour MPs defected to the Liberals. After the dust had settled in June 1941 the House of Commons looked like this,
Liberals 231
Conservatives 209
Labour 112
Democratic Labour 27
Others 36
*
The Commonwealth conference of early 1942 was a difficult one. Held in London, the atmosphere was strained by the attitude of the dominions to the UK after the debacle of 1940 and the question mark placed over the Empire by the report of the Mosley Commission. Although trade with Germany and the rest of Europe was beginning to pick up, the mismanagement of the German economy and the decline in the sizes of the other European economies under Nazi control meant that the British economy, like that of the entire globe, languished in the doldrums. The brief recession that followed the war of 1940, made promises of a ‘New Jerusalem’ financially questionable at best, particularly as comparatively high armaments expenditure was seen as essential to the maintenance of British security.
American competition in the export trade was stiff but ‘Imperial Preference’ provided a platform on which to rebuild Britain’s exports and the much-reduced volume of export goods leaving continental Europe opened new markets. Because of this, Britain suffered much less from the recession of 1941/42 than might otherwise have been the case.
When the new government of Sir Archibald Sinclair turned to foreign policy there was a very clear break with that pursued by the previous administration and this was noted by the governments of the Dominions. The Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies said, “You could tell right away, there was a new attitude about the British government, we knew then that there would be a reckoning with Germany and Italy.” [114]
The British harboured grave concerns about the Indian Ocean littoral and the plans of the Japanese and Italians. If a coalition of the two gained control of the Indian Ocean, then the Far and Middle East would be directly cut off from Britain. The geopolitical consequences would be immense. With regards to Italy it was decided to pursue a strategy of containment until Mussolini could be brought to account and Italian forces ejected from Egypt and the Horn of Africa. As Antony Eden said, “We cannot allow a man with Il Duce’s record to have his thumb on our windpipe.” [115]
The Middle East was the key to several parts of both the new British government’s domestic and foreign policies. Britain’s territories in the region were the Crown Colonies of Aden and Bushire, the protectorates of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Trucial Oman as well as the mandated territories of Iraq and Trans-Jordan. The Iraqi revolt of May 1941, although haphazard and quickly put down, was an unpleasant shock to British interests in the area and the German thrust into the Caucasus in the autumn of 1942 was the spur for drastic action. [116]
The British quickly moved substantial forces into the region, greatly strengthening their hold on Iraq. It was fortunate that many British civil servants were leaving India as independence drew closer. The British Raj had built up substantial skills in dealing with minor potentates as the British had often used Indian princes to govern India by proxy. The work was a mixture of diplomacy, flattery and cajolery and was not for the politically squeamish, but the men who had so skilfully implemented this policy now found employment in the Middle East. Some of the more imaginative newspapers saw the movement of British civil servants and troops into the region as the founding of an ‘Arabian Raj’.
Iran was an independent country, though it now found itself wooed by both Britain and Germany. Shah Reza had been installed on his throne by the British, but felt no gratitude to them and had bought Iran much closer to Germany. He even kept a signed photograph of Adolf Hitler by his bed. The British, understandably, found this irritating. It was a serious concern to the Government in London, who feared that the Abadan Oil Refinery might fall into either German or renegade Soviet hands. The refinery had produced eight million tons of oil in 1940 and was thus a crucial component of British economic life. For the Russians, Iran had always been a country of extreme strategic importance and an occupation of part or all of the country by Soviet troops, either acting on behalf of the Soviet Union or independently if the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, raised the spectre of the Germans having a pretext to invade.
The Shah was canny enough to realise that although the Nazis regarded the Persians as Aryan, they saw him and his people as third-rate Aryans, debased by breeding with what the Nazis considered to be lesser peoples. The British Ambassador to Iran, Sir Reader Bullard, was happy to give the Shah copies of the writings of the Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther translated into Persian to confirm this. Above all, Reza Shah wanted to keep his country as independent as possible and the British seemed the lesser of two evils. He tried to keep up a delicate balancing act between the two powers and Tehran was, for a while, a hotbed of intrigue. However, after the armistice of 1940, German interest in Iran lessened considerably. Shah Reza was forced to the conclusion that it had only been because of Germany’s conflict with the UK and with that danger apparently eliminated, the Germans had no more use for him. Certainly Hitler’s attention was now elsewhere. [117]
Anglo-Iranian Oil had discovered several new deposits of oil in the country at Lali, Naft Safid, Gach Saran and Agha Jari, all of which were producing by 1944. [118] Demand was buoyant from Europe, and the inflow of money to the Iranian treasury was most welcome to what was essentially a self-absorbed and venal man.
The notion of an ‘Arabian Raj’ was not as far from the truth as might at first be suspected. The new British government fully intended to finance the ambitious social policies that the Liberals had promised in the election by the annexation and exploitation of as much of the region’s oil wealth as they could retain. It would have been political suicide to announce a repeal of the measures taken in the wake of the Beveridge report, but unless a source of wealth could be harnessed, then taxes would have to be increased to levels that would be destructive to Britain’s economic life. The policy was vigorously pursued by Anthony Eden to whom Sinclair was happy to delegate. Eden was an Arabist scholar, fluent in the Arabic language, considered to be a deft hand at foreign policy and justly regarded as an expert on the Middle East.
At this time the Arab nationalist movement was little more than an amorphous and disjointed counter-position to British imperialism. It had little local or international appeal and was essentially a European import to the Arab world sponsored by Berlin. In the case of Iraq and many of the other territories of the Middle East, it was completely incompatible with a highly stratified social order. It was also true that the territories which the British believed they could retain in the long-term; namely the protectorate’s of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Trucial Oman had an area roughly comparable to that of Scotland but between them an entire population of less than 300,000 people. There was a definite policy to persuade as many of them to become Crown Colonies as was possible. Bad government was endemic, revolts were frequent and as one British diplomat put it; “ The region was beset by incompetent rulers and disgruntled peoples, if ever a place was ripe for change of the more positive sort, it was the British protectorates of the Trucial coast.”
There was no plan f
or long-term inclusion of Iran into the British Empire. The British reinforcement of the region was merely a response to the German move into the Caucasus; however, the Crown Colony of Bushire housed a British Residency and guarded the oil refinery at Abadan which was controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. It was decided very early that Iraq and Jordan would become independent as soon as the international situation allowed and there was also a plan to use the threat of the removal of British restraint upon Iran and Iraq to frighten the minor nations into acquiescence.
The British were also extremely concerned at the prospect of the collapse of the Soviet Union causing a massive and potentially destabilising influx of refugees into Iran. In late 1942, large numbers of armed Soviet troops retreating before the German onslaught entered the north west of the country and camped near Ardabil. These were a remnant of the South Front under General Malinovski and numbered no more than seven or eight thousand men. They had lost most of their equipment and had little food remaining.
Reza Shah had been building up his armed forces since 1932 and now had some 50,000 men at his command. He ordered a large proportion of this force northward to Tabriz and it seemed a dangerous confrontation was imminent. [119]
The British Foreign Office had been prescient enough to see that if the Germans took the oilfields of the Caucasus, then the end of the Soviet Union would ensue and it was critical to forestall a possible German invasion and to safeguard British oil interests in the region. While the prospect of occupying a neutral country put the British in a severe moral dilemma, the loss of British controlled oilfields could rapidly have led to the collapse of Britain itself and in that sense the situation was desperate and required extreme measures. [120] On 15th October 1942, the same day Adolf Hitler announced the end of major operations on the eastern front, the oil installations at Abadan were secured by two battalions of the Gloucestershire Regiment who made an amphibious crossing of the Shatt al-Arab waterway from Basra. Another force was landed at Bandar-e-Shahpur to secure the port and oil terminal there and a force was landed at Bushire to safeguard the British Residency.
The Shah was understandably alarmed; his previous policy of playing the British and Germans off against each other now seemed little more than foolish hubris. His confidence evaporated. It was one thing to consider the Germans to be friendly while they were issuing honeyed words through diplomats in Tehran, quite another to have a renegade force of Soviet soldiers on your territory and a panzer division on your border. He quickly invited the British in to broker an agreement that would see the Russians left as quickly as possible.
Major-General William Slim, the commanding officer of British forces in Iraq, immediately made contact with the commander of the Russian troops occupying the area around Ardabil. He promised Malinovski that they would be repatriated via Ashkhabat if they offered no resistance. Malinovski agreed and the troops were transported by sealed train from Tabriz to Shirvan and marched the last thirty miles to the border.
At that time, Hitler had no designs on Iran and was content to let it remain in the British sphere of influence. The kerfuffle on Iran’s north-west border was hardly noticed in Germany amid the general rejoicing at the victory over the Soviet Union. Reza Shah was shaken by these events, dismayed by Hitler’s ambivalence and compelled to the realisation that the British had used the crisis to bind his country closer to their Empire. All he could do was bide his time and continue the build-up of his armed forces.
From ‘Anglo-American Relations – A Study in Competitive Cooperation’ by Alan Drexel writing in the Economic History Chronicle volume 3 1978
“America is potentially our ally. America is not our friend.” [121] With this simple yet penetrating statement uttered in a cabinet meeting in early 1941, Prime Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair exposed a fallacy at the heart of British foreign policy and furthermore suggested a way to proceed in Anglo-American relations.
Since before the war of 1940, Britain had wooed America as a potential partner in the struggle with the dictatorships, but had found that American assistance always came at a high price. Successive British governments had confused the relations of Britain and the United States with the relations of Britain and the Dominions. In consequence, it was assumed by the British Government that a partnership existed between Britain and America. The Americans however simply did not see it this way. To them, Britain was just another state; one with shared antecedents and a similar outlook certainly, but essentially no more of a potential partner or opponent than any other strong democratic nation.
In some ways America had good reason to be suspicious of Britain. Partly due to American perceptions of the two countries shared history, the United States was an opponent of imperialism generally and it was certainly true that the British Empire was one of America’s chief rivals in all aspects of world trade.
Despite the general climate of optimism that prevailed in Whitehall with regards to relations with the United States, warnings were sounded. Rab Butler, a pillar of the Tory party wrote in 1938 that: “In my political life, I have always been convinced that we can no more count on America than Brazil.”
As Britain’s strategic position collapsed in the summer of 1940, the only hope of continuing the struggle was to turn to America for money. In May of that year, the Chiefs of Staff recommended that Britain’s position in the Far East could be immeasurably strengthened if the United States Navy was to deploy to Singapore as a clear signal of a willingness to defend Imperial interests in the area as a warning to Japan. Despite the general American opposition to Japanese expansion however, the United States Government would commit to no such thing. Their failure to respond left the British alone to counter Japanese diplomatic pressure, which of course was always backed up by the threat of military force. This severely complicated Britain’s strategic position.
At the end of June 1940, the Japanese, knowing that the British were at full stretch with the war in Europe, demanded the withdrawal of all British military assets from the Japanese controlled areas of China; the cessation of supplies to the Chinese via Hong Kong, and the closure of the Burma Road which was the main supply route to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese forces. The British fear of a German invasion of southern England meant that most of the fleet in the Far East had been withdrawn to home waters leaving Britain desperately vulnerable in the region. Try as they might, the British could not wrest a firmer policy from the Americans. The Dalton Government saw no option other than to try and mollify Japan. There was even talk of a revival of the Anglo-Japanese alliance but this was both politically and morally unacceptable.
There was one area in which the British and the Americans were in complete agreement. This was in supporting and developing functioning governments behind the Ural Mountains and in China that might someday be sufficiently strong to assist in the destruction of the Fascist regimes.
From ‘The Presidency of Wendell Willkie’ by Siobhan McCormick, Pelham House, 2004
With the collapse of the USSR and the resulting chaos within the former borders of that country, the United States stood alone as the only functioning democracy not constrained by a peace treaty with the Nazis (like Britain) or too close to Nazi Germany and too weak to be anything other than co-operative (like Sweden). The Americans knew that it was not in their interests to have a single power dominating Europe. Public opinion was firmly anti-Nazi; but, after the Ware Wolves scandal, also anti-Soviet. Willkie’s administration could not be seen to be actively supporting the new Soviet Government formed in early 1943 after Stalin and Molotov were assassinated. This was done by a cabal consisting of Larentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD; Lazar Kaganovitch, Commissar for Turkestan [122] and Nikolai Bulganin, one of the members of the State Defence Committee who then took control of what remained of the USSR.
The Germans now occupied some 95% of the former Soviet Union’s coal and oil producing areas, but during 1941 and 42 much of the surviving production plant had been moved from
its bases in the west of the country to new locations east of the Ural Mountains. These factories were all still extant and largely undamaged, but the scarcity of fuel and the attendant shortages of electricity meant that they were mostly idle.
The new Soviet leader’s first task was to reunite the country. In the economic and social collapse that occurred in the winter of 1942 to 43, several new polities had sprung up within the former borders of the Soviet Union. Some were nationalist movements in the Turkic-speaking Soviets of the southern USSR, some were just ad-hoc alignments of groups of former soldiers. All were ruthlessly crushed between 1943 and 1947 and in this, the Red Army was assisted by imports of oil and other supplies through Iran’s north eastern border.
To facilitate this supply, a spur was built off the Garmshar to Masshad railway from Shirvan to Ashkhabad. Once at Ashkhabad, these exports were on the Russian rail network and able to reach the temporary capital at Sverdlovsk within three days. The Shirvan to Ashkhabad line opened in 1944. Shah Reza was not happy about selling oil to the rump Soviet Union, but his British sponsors forced him to do it, worsening their relations. By 1943, the Shah was a sick man and quite susceptible to the threat that if he did not do as the British asked, his son would not be permitted to inherit the throne.
The imports of oil went unnoticed by the Germans. Like its counterparts in the UK and elsewhere, the German spy network in Iran was deeply compromised by British Intelligence. Most German spies in Iran were in the pay of MI5. A few reports did get through to Germany, but the head of the Abwher (Wilhelm Canaris) failed to pass them on. The Germans sent regular reconnaissance flights over the unconquered areas of the Soviet Union and most of these were undertaken by Focke-Wulf FW 189 aircraft operating from bases at Baku and Geryev. However, these aircraft had a maximum radius of action of only 800 kilometres with extra fuel carried in drop tanks. This meant that only the rail head at Ashkhabad and the section of line between Aralsk and Orsk could be covered by them. In this respect German efficiency worked against them, the reconnaissance flights were performed at regular intervals and were predictable. The trains on the ‘visible’ section of the line ran only at night, in bad weather, or when German reconnaissance aircraft could be relied on not to be present.
The Peace of Amiens Page 24
