Hello
I’ll treat your questions in the order they happened historically -
you can always cut and paste them round if you need them in the order
you gave them.
Britain’s role in World War 1
_____________________________
Tensions were running high in Europe in the early 1900’s, and Britain
was not immune to them.
By 1910 Germany's was the largest navy in the world after Britain's,
and it was built as an offensive force with solely Britain in mind as
its opponent. A rising world power, Germany understandably didn't wish
to have its expanding overseas trade dependent on the good will of
Britain, which commanded the maritime approaches to Germany. For
Britain's part, its national security depended on its command of the
English Channel and the North Sea. In other words, what one power
wanted, the other would never voluntarily concede. By 1912 the British
felt, as the diplomat Sir Eyre Crowe put it, that "the building of the
German fleet is but one of the symptoms of the disease. It is the
political ambitions of the German Government and nation which are the
source of the mischief."
Although at first Britain saw a German "threat" in the narrow terms of
a naval rivalry, that rivalry provoked British statesmen and military
planners to pay attention to Germany's booming population and industry
and its military power. Britain feared that were Germany to dominate
France, the resulting increase in its economic strength would permit
it to outbuild the British navy. And a greatly enlarged German navy,
with access both to the North Sea and to French ports, could strangle
Britain. Britain also began to feat that it’s status as the top
"superpower" in the world was beginning to be threatened.
It was against this backdrop that events in Europe began to unfold.
Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary who eventually committed
the British Empire to the war, is reputed to have looked out his
window one evening at dusk in early 1914, and said: "The lights are
going out all over Europe. I do not think we shall see them lit again
in our lifetime."
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the
Austria-Hungarian throne, was shotin Sarajevo, Bosnia, by a Serbian
nationalist belonging to an organization known as the Black
Hand.(Narodna Obrana). Immediately following the assassination Germany
pledged its full support to Austria-Hungary, pressuring them to
declare war on Serbia, while France strengthened its backing of
Russia.
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. On July 29,
Russia ordered a partial mobilization only against Austria-Hungary in
support of Serbia, which escalated into a general mobilization. The
Germans threatened war on July 31 if the Russians did not demobilize.
Upon being asked by Germany what it would do in the event of a
Russo-German War, France responded that it would act in its own
interests and mobilized. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia,
and two days later, on France.
The German invasion of Belgium to attack France, which violated
Belgium's official neutrality, prompted Britain to declare war on
Germany. Britain was at war and World War I had begun.
Great Britain, alone among the major European nations, went to war
with an army based on voluntary enlistment, numbering just over
247,000 at the outset with 486,000 Reserves and Territorials. (By
November 1918 almost a further 5,000,000 had enlisted, over half of
them volunteers.)
The war was sucking up more than one-third of Britain’s national
product (plus the time of conscripted soldiers) for the war effort by
1916. Production became dictated by the representatives of industry's
largest customer, the military.
Although also involved in Gallipoli, Salonika, and parts of Africa,
much of Britain's war was centred on the Western Front. This was an
intricate system of trenches which ran from the Belgium coast, through
northern France, to the German border.
With all its twists and turns the length of the front is difficult to
give exactly; but at it greatest extent, in 1918, the British section
probably extended for about 75 miles. Not all this length was involved
in battle all the time, though even "quiet" parts suffered not
infrequently from shelling, and trench raids. One area, however, did
suffer from continuous, unremitting warfare - this was the area which
stretched around the Belgium town of Ypres.
Overlooked on three sides by the Germans Ypres was shelled day and
night for four years. The flat, low-lying clay land was flooded and
the millions of shells which fell into it churned it over and over
again into an impassable quagmire. During the Battle of Third Ypres
("Passchendaele") from August to November, 1917 British and
Commonwealth soldiers attacked out from these trenches and, after
suffering about 400,000 casualties, they gained not more than about
four miles of ground.
On the naval front Britain employed its sea power to defeat Germany
through a blockade. With the exception of submarines, the German fleet
spent most of the war in port holding down a portion of the Royal Navy
battle fleet. The German High Seas Fleet finally ventured out at the
end of May 1916 to battle the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, but neither
side scored a clear victory. At battle’s end, each fleet had lost
several ships, but the British suffered more heavily in tonnage, by
almost double. As late as 1918 the Grand Fleet deployed the bulk of
its assets to escort convoys to Norway.
( The German decision to embark on an all-out submarine offensive to
defeat Britain proved to be short-sighted. The Lusitania was torpedoed
on 07 May 1915 with 1200 lives lost; 139 Americans were among them. By
using submarines in this way, Germany’s leaders eventually provoked a
war with the United States. )
In the early winter of 1917, after Passchendaele had drawn to its
close, the War still had a year to run, and the Allies final three
months advance still had to be paid for with the lives of a multitude
of young British soldiers, but the "race memory" that lingers is of
the trenches, and the huge loss of life.
Four years and three months after the war started , before dawn on
11th November, 1918, British soldiers recaptured the Belgian town of
Mons. On this same day an Armistice was signed at 5 a.m. in a railway
carriage in the Forest of Compiègne in Northern France and hostilities
ceased six hours later at eleven o'clock.
The Effect of the war on Britain
________________________________
Along with the battles of Mons, Loos, the Somme, Ypres, and
Passchendaele, the statistics are probably known to most people in the
United Kingdom: the 60 percent casualty rate that tore apart the
British Expeditionary Force in the first three months of the war, the
60,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the
723,000 British dead by the end of the war (twice as many as in the
Second World War) and the 2 - 2.5 million injured who carried the
memory with them for the rest of their days.
Although the majority of the British dead came from the working class,
officers, drawn mostly from the upper classes, paid a
disproportionately high price: for mobilized men overall the death
rate was about 12 percent, but for graduates of Oxford and members of
the peerage it was 19 percent, and for graduates of the fifty-three
boarding schools where statistics are available it was 20 percent. Not
since the Wars of the Roses had the aristocracy suffered such losses.
The British elite truly lost a generation, and that is reflected in
much of the poetry and literature of the period immediately after the
war.
The experiences of the war lead to a sort of collective national
trauma afterwards, not just for Britain, but for all the participating
countries. The optimism of the early part of the century was entirely
gone and those who fought in the war became what is known as "the Lost
Generation" because they never fully recovered from their experiences.
The trauma done to a generation was added to by the financial costs of
the war. Disability insurance for war veterans, unemployment insurance
so that returning soldiers did not have to beg in the street because
postwar readjustment was slow, mammoth government expenditures to
repair war damage, plus mammoth government expenditures to pay off the
war debt--all these placed stresses on and required huge amounts of
money the country could scarce afford.
Britain’s trade abroad was also affected. After the war, the British
found themselves exposed to American, Latin American, and Japanese
competition in their export markets. The interruption of wartime
exports from Britain stimulated textile and iron production in Asia
and in Latin America, and Britain lost much of its former power as a
great trade nation.
Another consequence of the war was to change the face of British
politics. The returning soldiers were heroes: they deserved a land fit
for heroes. Working class soldiers who had died in enormous numbers
for the state could not be deprived of the vote. The result was the
rise of the political left. In Britain, for example, where less than
half of adult males could vote before World War I, the socialist
Labour Party multiplied its vote sevenfold in the election of 1918.
Other, less concrete changes came about in the Empire itself,
including the growing assertiveness Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
for whom fighting the Empires battles led to increased national pride
and a greater reluctance to remain inferior to the British.
During mid-1918, Europe was hit by Spanish flu and an estimated 25
million people died. This added to the feeling of bitterness that ran
through Britain and Europe and this anger was primarily directed at
Germany.
Britain’s reaction to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919
________________________________________________________
Lloyd George was the focal point for Britain’s reaction to the Paris
conference. ( He became British prime minister in 1916 and remained so
through the rest of the war. He won a crushing election victory in
Britain in December, 1918, under the banner of 'making the Germans
pay')
He understood the necessity to punish Germany but not to the extent
that she would never be able to participate in European politics
again. (The French demanded the total overthrow of German business but
Lloyd George was astute enough to realise that Europe needed a strong
German economy and tried to ensure that Germany was not completely
humiliated. He is also quoted as saying that he did not want the
people of Germany to become so disillusioned with their government
that they turned to communism.)
The big question was to how much money and resources Germany should be
made to pay, or what sanctions the allied powers would be willing to
employ. The British originally demanded a much larger reparations bill
than the French or the Italians. Since the allies could not agree,
they postponed the question of the reparations that would be demanded
to a subsequent conference, but required that Germany pay, as a first,
down payment, an amount equal to some fifty percent of a post-war
year's national product. Lloyd George was satisfied with this deal at
the time.
However, he could not neglect the voice of British public opinion. The
"Hang the Kaiser" campaign was riding high in the British press and
many British people wanted to see Germany punished. Alongside this The
Royal Navy had its eyes on the German fleet and the foreign office had
its eyes on Germany and its Turkish colonies.
So Lloyd George had to walk a difficult path leaning towards the
punishment lobby of the French but at the same time listening to the
likes of John Maynard Keynes, who put forward the idea that a punished
Germany would be of little use for the other economies of Europe and
would lead to greater problems in decades to come.
Lloyd George was mostly happy with the outcome of the eventual treaty
of Versailles, and was able to sell it to the British people as a
"punishment" for the Germans. However many British economists were of
the Keynesian view, and saw the treaty as too severe, recognising that
it would lead to problems for the German economy in the not too
distant future.
Hope this summarises things OK for you. The links below will help you
in any further investigation needed
Willie-ga
A nice summary of the peace negotiations and consequences
History Learning Site: Treaty of Versailles
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/treaty_of_versailles.htm
The treaty of Versailles in full from the World War One document
archive.
http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/versailles.html
Restoring the Pre-World War I Economy - a chapter from "Slouching
Towards Utopia?: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century" by
Bradford DeLong, University of California at Berkeley and NBER
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/Slouch_Restoring11.html
A chronological history of the great war's events
http://users.tibus.com/the-great-war/events.htm
The history of the British Army in the Great War
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/2354/Britishhistory.html
Transcripts of newspaper articles from the British Newspaper "The
Daily Mirror" on the outbreak of the war
BBC history pages
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwone/mirror01_01.shtml |
Clarification of Answer by
willie-ga
on
19 Oct 2002 01:12 PDT
Hello
The Treaty of Versailles was a result of negotiations at the Paris
Peace Conference ( so the section I’ve already given you could just as
easily be called "Britain’s response to the Treaty of Versailles" and
still be valid )
The treaty was signed on June 28th 1919 after months of argument and
negotiation amongst the US, France and Britain.
Here’s a study of Lloyd George’s stand on the negotiations from the
"History Learning" page I gave you earlier as to what the treaty
should contain.
"He was a politician and politicians needed the support of the public
to succeed in elections. If he had come across as being soft on
Germany, he would have been speedily voted out of office. The British
public was after revenge and Lloyd George's public image reflected
this mood. "Hang the Kaiser" and "Make Germany Pay" were two very
common calls in the era immediately after the end of the war and Lloyd
George, looking for public support, echoed these views."
"However, in private Lloyd George was also very concerned with the
rise of communism in Russia and he feared that it might spread to
western Europe. After the war had finished, Lloyd George believed that
the spread of communism posed a far greater threat to the world than a
defeated Germany. Privately, he felt that Germany should be treated in
such a way that left her as a barrier to resist the expected spread of
communism. He did not want the people of Germany to become so
disillusioned with their government that they turned to communism.
Lloyd George did not want Germany treated with lenience but he knew
that Germany would be the only country in central Europe that could
stop the spread of communism if it burst over the frontiers of Russia.
Germany had to be punished but not to the extent that it left her
destitute. However, it would have been political suicide to have gone
public with these views."
The terms of the treaty were finally agreed, and there’s a nice
summary of them, again on the History Learning site
( http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/treaty_of_versailles.htm )
Here are the terms of the treaty, and how Britain saw them:
- The League of Nations was to be created.
This did happen even if Germany was initially excluded from it.
Britain was all for this, as they saw it as a coalition of countries
that would ensure another war never happened.
- Land had to be handed over the Poland, France, Belgium and Denmark.
This did happen - all the land Germany was required to hand over, was
handed over. Britain was happy as this as they saw it as a reduction
in German influence in the region. However some commentators were
worried that too much land was being traded, and that people who
traditionally thought of themselves as being German, were now being
told they were French. They understood that this would only lead to
future tensions.
- All overseas colonies were to be handed over to the League.
This did happen, and Britain was happy that German trade influences
across the world were broken and hoped that they could take advantage,
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the main report, the Latin American
countries had already made large inroads in World trade, and Britain
never recovered its former position.
- All land taken from Russia had to be handed back to Russia.
This did happen though land in the western area became Latvia,
Lithuania and Estonia in keeping with the belief in national
self-determination. However Britain was worried at the amount of
strength retained by Russia, and saw it as a potential for the further
spread of Communism.
- Germany’s army had to be reduced to 100,000 men.
On paper this happened, and Britain was happy that the military might
of one of its greatest adversaries was broken. They hoped that Germany
would never again rise as a world military power.
- Germany’s navy was reduced to 6 battleships with no submarines.
Britain was happy in that the British Navy was once more the dominant
navy in the North Atlantic, and thought they could retain Britain’s
power of the seas.
- Germany was forbidden to unite with Austria.
This happened, and Britain was happy as it meant that their perceived
"enemies" were split and disunited.
- Germany had to accept the "War Guilt Clause" and pay reparations.
Britain was happy to be receiving some monetary "payment" for the war,
but it was nowhere near enough to cover the outlays required as most
of the prepayments went to France and Belgium to cover the devastating
damage in those countries.
The treaty had determined that payment could be in kind or cash. The
figure was not set at Versailles - it was to be determined later. The
Germans were told to write a blank cheque which the Allies would cash
when it suited them. The figure was eventually put at £6,600 million -
a huge sum of money well beyond Germany’s ability to pay. As mentioned
in the main report, many economists, Keynes included, recognised that
Germany would never be able to afford repayments, and this would lead
to problems later.
Here’s another quote from the History Learning page on what happened
next:
"Germany signed the Treaty which meant that she accepted this term on
paper - if not in fact. Germany did try and pay reparations when she
could do so. She did not refuse to pay in 1922. She simply could not
produce what was needed that year and this lead to the French invasion
of the Ruhr. In the 1920’s it was the Allies who took the decision to
reduce reparations and eased Germany’s plight in so doing. The first
instance of refusal to pay reparations came in 1933 when Hitler
announced that Germany would not pay."
So in summary the Treaty seemed to satisfy the Britain as a whole as
in their eyes it was a just peace as it kept Germany weak yet strong
enough to stop the spread of communism; kept the French border with
Germany safe from another German attack and created the organisation,
the League of Nations, that would end warfare throughout the world and
fend of the growing menace ( as they saw it ) of Communism.
Hope that covers it
Willie-ga
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