[lit-ideas] Britain's preparedness to fight World War One
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:23:20 -0800
Here it is prior to World War One. The British as we know will be major
combatants, but what was their condition prior to that war? When the
German Military Staff considered the land war they intended to fight and
looked about them, how did they evaluate Britain? Were they afraid of
them? Did they consider them a potential threat? Did Britain embody any
sort of deterrence?
Here is what Donald Kagan writes about that on page 92 of On the Origins of
war and the Preservation of Peace:
"The British . . . relied for the security of their islands and empire on
the great superiority of their navy. Even here the unthreatening condition
of Europe allowed the British to reduce its size and still be guaranteed of
superiority over any plausible combination of the fleets of other nations.
"This happy situation permitted the British to continue their tradition
hostility to standing armies that went back at least to the seventeenth
century and allowed them to avoid the burden of military conscription
required by the Continental powers. The Liberal ideas that prevailed regard
war as the result of folly and unlikely to occur in a world increasingly
shaped by free trade, prosperity, and British ways of thinking, and they
considered the expenditure of any public money beyond the minimum as
unproductive and wasteful. 'However preeminent the British economy in the
mid-Victorian period . . . it was probably less 'mobilized' for conflict
than at any time since the early Stuarts.'"
One thinks, if one is a Geary warmonger, of how often the U.S. has been
unprepared for war. We've discussed our utter unpreparedness for World Wars
One and Two, but we can see from Kagan's words that we come by this
honestly. The German General Staff would have considered the British
ability to fight a land war as next to nonexistent, and they would have been
right. If we look at Britain's initial contribution we see that it was very
small and called an expeditionary force.
Of course the story doesn't end there because that war (and the next one)
went on long enough for Britain and America to build up their war-making
capabilities. Eventually the British and Americans acquitted themselves
quite well, but I am interested here in deterrence and neither Britain nor
the U.S. projected any. The appearance was of weakness. Our enemies
couldn't see beyond that weakness. They acted upon the appearance.
We know that some in Japan knew that the U.S. had great industrial
capability and, theoretically, could defeat Japan eventually. These experts
tried to prevent a Japanese attack against America, but the non-experts
controlled the country. They allowed themselves to be ruled by appearance,
and America appeared weak. So did Britain prior to World War one - at least
in terms of being able to fight a land war, and that is, primarily, what
World War One was.
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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