Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War
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But the Austrians waited four weeks to act, and when they did they set in train the events that led to the European war. Yet, in the last hours before August 1, the Kaiser and Bethmann tried to pull back from a war that neither wanted. When the Kaiser returned to Berlin in late July, Bethmann, offering to resign, told him that things had gotten out of hand and an Austrian war on Serbia might now ignite a European conflagration. The Kaiser rebuked him, “You cooked this broth, and now you are going eat it.”95
Only at the eleventh hour did they begin to lose their nerve: the Kaiser first, on July 28, and then Bethmann who…frantically sought to apply the brakes…[B]ut it was the German military which ultimately secured, by a combination of persuasion and defiance, the mobilization orders, the ultimata and declarations of war which unleashed the conflict.96
After Serbia’s reply to the Austrian note, a diplomatic surrender in the Kaiser’s eyes, he wrote to Emperor Franz Josef, “[E]very cause for war [now] falls to the ground.”97 After the Austrian declaration of war and shelling of Belgrade, he wrote again, “Stop in Belgrade!”98 His diplomats and generals held up the note.
A European war, the Kaiser believed and hoped, could still be avoided. He implored his cousin, the Czar, to rescind his order for full mobilization, as Russian mobilization meant German mobilization, and under the Schlieffen Plan, that meant immediate war on France if she did not declare neutrality. And that meant marching through Belgium, which risked war with Britain and her worldwide empire.
The Kaiser wrote George V to accept his proposal that Germany not attack France if she remained neutral in a war with Russia. But when he called in Moltke and ordered him to halt the army’s advance to the frontier, a “crushed” Moltke said, “Your Majesty, it cannot be done.”99
Invoking the great field marshal who had led Prussia to its victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, the Kaiser gave Moltke a cutting reply: “Your uncle would have given me a different answer.”100
“Wounded,” Moltke returned to headquarters and “burst into tears of abject despair…I thought my heart would break.”101
In casting the Kaiser as villain in the tragedy, historians use his crude and bellicose marginal notes on state documents. But these were like the notations Richard Nixon made on his news summaries and muttered in the confidentiality of the Oval Office as the voice-activated tapes were running—fulminations and threats never carried out.
None of the monarchs—Nicholas II, Wilhelm II, George V, or Franz Josef—wanted war. All sensed that the great war, when it came, would imperil the institution of monarchy and prepare the ground for revolution. In the final hours, all four weighed in on the side of peace. But more resolute and harder men had taken charge of affairs.
To those who say the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet was a provocation to Great Britain, were not the Royal Navy’s dreadnoughts a provocation? And if France, with a population of 39 million, was maintaining an army the size of Germany’s, which had seventy million people, which of the two nations was the more militaristic?102
GERMAN WAR AIMS
COULD BRITAIN HAVE DEFENDED her honor and secured her vital interests had she not gone to war when Germany invaded Belgium? In The Pity of War, Ferguson argues “yes.”
That Britain could have limited its involvement in a continental war is a possibility which has been all but ignored by historians…. Yet it should now be clear that the possibility was a very real one. Asquith and Grey acknowledged this in their memoirs. Both men emphasized that Britain had not been obliged to intervene by any kind of contractual obligation to France. In Asquith’s words, “We kept ourselves free to decide, when the occasion arose, whether we should or should not go to war.”103
If Britain would have been judged dishonorable by not coming to the aid of France, it was only because Grey and Churchill, without the approval of Parliament, had committed her to go to war for France. Grey’s reason for tying Britain’s destiny to France was fear that a German victory would make Belgium, Holland, and Denmark vassals, give the High Seas Fleet a berth on the Channel coast, and make the Kaiser “supreme over all the Continent of Europe and Asia Minor.”104 “[But] was that really the German objective? Was the Kaiser really Napoleon?” asks Ferguson.105
Tuchman portrays the Kaiser on the eve of war as a ruler trapped, searching for a way out of the conflagration he sees coming. When Russia mobilized, the Kaiser went into a tirade against the nation that had conspired against Germany—and against the arch-conspirator, his dead uncle:
The world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired for our annihilation…that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII…. The encirclement of Germany is at last an accomplished fact. We have run our heads into the noose…. The dead Edward is stronger than the living I.106
On July 31, in the last hours before war, the Kaiser wired his cousins, Czar Nicholas II and King George V, in desperation and near despair:
It is not I who bears the responsibility for the disaster which now threatens the entire civilized world. Even at this moment the decision to stave it off lies with you. No one threatens the honour and power of Russia. The friendship for you and your empire which I have borne from the deathbed of my grandfather has always been totally sacred to me…[T]he peace of Europe can still be maintained by you, if Russia decides to halt the military measures which threaten Germany and Austro-Hungary.107
Is this the mind-set of a Bonaparte launching a war of conquest in Europe or a war for world domination? Contrast, if you will, the Kaiser’s anguish on the eve of the greatest war in history with the exhilaration of the First Lord of the Admiralty.
The British inner Cabinet, however, had persuaded itself that the Kaiser was a Prussian warmonger out to conquer not only Europe but the world. Here is Cabinet Minister Haldane: “I thought, from my study of the German General Staff, that once the German war party had got into the saddle, it would be war not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia, but for domination of the world.”108 Churchill echoed Haldane, calling the Kaiser a “continental tyrant” whose goal was nothing less than “the dominion of the world.”109
A quarter of a century later, in Great Contemporaries, Churchill would exonerate the Kaiser of plotting a war for European or world hegemony: “[H]istory should incline to the more charitable view and acquit William II of having planned and plotted the World War.”110
Indeed, how could a country with but a narrow outlet to the North Sea, in the heart of the smallest continent, dominate a world that included France and her overseas territories, the Russian empire, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, Latin America, Japan, China, and a British Empire that encompassed a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people?
“Conscious of the shadow of the dead Edward, the Kaiser would have welcomed any way out of the commitment to fight both Russia and France and, behind France, the looming figure of a still-undeclared England,” writes Tuchman.111 On the cusp of war, the Kaiser was in near despair and the German General Staff in near panic to get its armies marching before the nation was crushed between France and Russia. When, a day after Britain declared war, Austria had not yet declared war on France or Russia, “Moltke told Tirpitz…that, if Austria continued to shy away, Germany—only days after declaring war—would have to sue for peace on the best terms it could get.”112 On August 6, Vienna finally declared war on Russia.
In his 2007 History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, historian Andrew Roberts, contradicting Churchill, who had concluded the Kaiser blundered into war, insists Wilhelm II had “gargantuan ambitions” and that his High Seas Fleet fleet was “an invasion fleet.”113 Quoting Fromkin on what was at stake in 1914, Roberts writes, “It was about the most important issue in politics: who should rule the world?”114
But was it? Was the Kaiser out to “rule the world”?
THE BUTCHER-BIRD OF EUROPE?
IN DEFENSE OF THE declaration of war on Germany, it is yet said that Britain had to save the world from “Prussian militarism”—the relentless drive for world domination of the Teutonic warrior race. Yet, in retrospect, this appears a modern myth not unlike the infamous Black Legend, in which the English once held that only evil emanated from Catholic Spain. Looking back on the century 1815–1914, from Waterloo to the Great War, Germany appears to have been among the least militaristic of European powers.115
Nation
Number of Wars
Britain
10
Russia
7
France
5
Austria
3
Germany
3
From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records. And if Germany had not gone to war in forty-three years, and the Kaiser had never gone to war in his twenty-five years on the throne, how can one call Germany—as British statesmen did and British historians still do—the “butcher-bird of Europe”?
In the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great had been an ally of Pitt. During his reign, 1740–1786, “Prussia spent fewer years at war…than any other major European power.”116 In the Napoleonic wars, Prussia had been overrun and almost vanished from the map and Prussians under Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher had come to Wellington’s rescue at Waterloo. In the three wars Prussia fought between 1815 and 1914, the first was provoked by Denmark in 1864 and involved disputed duchies. The second, in 1866 with Austria, over the same duchies, was a “Teutonic” civil war of seven weeks, and a far less bloody affair than our own Civil War. On Bismarck’s advice, the King of Prussia left the Habsburg empire intact and denied himself a triumphal parade through Vienna. The third was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, declared by Napoleon III, who thought he could emulate his great ancestor and march to Berlin.
What were Prussia’s territorial gains from the only wars she fought in the century after Waterloo? Two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. Is this the record of a butcher-bird nation hell-bent on world domination?
In 1914, Churchill denounced Wilhelm II as a Prussian war-lord out to take over the world. Yet the Kaiser had never fought a war in his twenty-five years in power and he had never seen a battle. In the two Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, it was he who had backed down. The German army had never fought the English and indeed had not fought a battle in nearly half a century. Churchill, however, was already a veteran of wars. He had seen action with Sir Bindon Blood on the Northwest Frontier. He had ridden with Kitchener’s cavalry in the massacre of the Dervishes at Omdurman in the Sudan. He had been captured riding in an armored train in the first days of the Boer War, been held as a POW, escaped, and then marched with the British army to the relief of Ladysmith. Britain had engaged in many more wars than Germany in the century before Sarajevo, and Churchill had himself seen more war than almost any soldier in the German army.
THE “SEPTEMBER PROGRAMME”
TRUE, WHEN GERMANY APPEARED to be on the road to swift victory, Bethmann-Hollweg issued his September Programme, which called for the annexation of the northeast coast of France. But the Programme was put out only after Britain had declared war. No historian has found any German plan or official document dated prior to August 1, 1914, that called for the annexation of Belgian or French territory.
As for Sir Roy Denman’s point—“The High Seas Fleet based on the Channel ports would have been for Britain an unacceptable danger”—had Britain demanded guarantees of no German naval bases on the Channel coast, Bethmann and Moltke would readily have given them.117 The Royal Navy could have guaranteed it, as the war demonstrated, when the German fleet left Kiel only once, for the Battle of Jutland. Germany had nothing to gain from war with Britain and much to lose should Britain blockade her, sink her merchant fleet, seize her colonies, and bring the empire in against her. “Had Britain, in fact, stayed out, it would have been foolish [for Germany] to have reneged on such a bargain.”118
In the hours before war, Bethmann secretly suggested to Grey that, in return for British neutrality, Germany would agree not to annex any French territory and respect Holland’s neutrality. Grey, secretly committed to fight for France, dismissed the proposal as “impossible & disgraceful,” so great an act of dishonor “the good name of this country would never recover.”119
Yet Britain had stood aside in 1870 as Prussia invaded France.
What were the other war aims of the September Programme?
A) A war indemnity from France for fifteen or twenty years to prevent her rearmament and a commercial treaty giving German products equal access to French markets.
B) An economic association of France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden, and Norway, led by Germany; a customs union, not a political union.120 Fifteen years earlier, the Kaiser had proposed a United States of Europe to challenge America for world economic supremacy.121
C) Cession to Germany of territories to enable her to unite her African colonies into a single bloc.
D) A Holland independent, but united economically with Germany, and perhaps a defensive alliance.
E) Poland and the Baltic states to be extracted from Russia with Poland becoming independent. The Baltic states would either be given independence or be annexed by Germany or Poland.
“[E]ven in anticipating a military victory,” writes American historian David Calleo, “Germany’s actual territorial expansion in Europe was to be relatively modest.”122 Would these war aims have posed a threat to Britain?
“Did they imply a Napoleonic strategy?” asks Ferguson.123
“Hardly. All the economic clauses of the September Programme implied was the creation—some eighty years early, it might be said—of a German-dominated European customs union…. Germany’s European project was not one with which Britain, with her maritime empire intact, could not have lived.”124
German objectives, had Britain remained out, would not in fact have posed a direct threat to the Empire; the reduction of Russian power in Eastern Europe, the creation of a Central European Customs Union, and acquisition of French colonies—these were all goals that were complementary to British interests.125
Instead, Britain declared war, a war that would last fifty-one months and consume the lives of 702,000 British soldiers and 200,000 more from the Dominions, India, and Africa, with twice as many wounded or crippled.126
What would have happened if Britain had declared neutrality and stayed out? The Germans would have triumphed in France as in 1870 or there would have been a stalemate and armistice. The United States would not have come in. No American or British soldiers and many fewer French and Germans would have died. A victorious Kaiser would have taken some French colonies in Africa, which would have replaced one British colonial rival with another. The Germans would have gone home victorious, as they did in 1871.
Russia would still have been defeated, but the dismantling of Russia’s empire was in Britain’s national interest. Let the Germans pay the cost, take the casualties, and accept the eternal enmity for breaking it up. A triumphant Germany would have faced resentful enemies in both France and Russia and rebellious Slavs to the south. This would have presented no problem for the British Empire. The Germans would have become the dominant power in Europe, with the British dominant on the oceans, America dominant in the Western Hemisphere, and Britain’s ally, Japan, dominant in Asia.
Before August 1914, Lenin had been living in a garret in Geneva. In 1917, as the Romanov dynasty was falling and Russia seemed on the verge of chaos, the German General Staff transported Lenin in a sealed train across Germany. Their hope was for revolutionary chaos in Russia that might force St. Petersburg to sue for peace. Had Britain not declared war, the war would not have lasted until 1
917—and Lenin would likely have died unmourned in Geneva. And had the Bolsheviks still come to power in Russia, a victorious German army would have marched in and made short work of them.
Germany, as the most powerful nation in Europe, aligned with a free Poland that owed its existence to Germany, would have been the western bulwark against any Russian drive into Europe. There would have been no Hitler and no Stalin. Other evils would have arisen, but how could the first half of the twentieth century have produced more evil than it did?
Had Sir Edward revealed to the Cabinet his secret discussions with France and the moral commitments they implied—that Britain must go to war if France were invaded—his policy would have been rejected by the Cabinet and repudiated by Parliament. Churchill later admitted as much:
[If in 1912] the Foreign Secretary had, in cold blood, proposed a formal alliance with France and Russia…the Cabinet of the day would never have agreed to it. I doubt if four ministers would have agreed to it. But if the Cabinet had been united upon it, the House of Commons would not have accepted their guidance. Therefore the Foreign Minister would have had to resign. The policy which he had advocated would have stood condemned and perhaps violently repudiated; and upon that repudiation would have come an absolute veto upon all those informal preparations and noncommittal discussions on which the defense power of the Triple Entente was erected.127