Forced disarmament in the 1920s and after

Abstract

The forced disarmament of Germany and its allies contributed to the widespread revulsion against the 1919 peace treaties. By the mid 1920s British politicians and diplomats, such as Austen Chamberlain and Viscount d'Abernon, responded by advocating a political settlement with Germany and thus abandoning or weakening the disarmament measures. In contrast, the disarmament inspectors, led by General Morgan, believed in standing by the letter of the treaties and believed they were vindicated by Germany's behaviour in the 1930s. Forced disarmament has either to be accepted by the vanquished, as it was in Germany and Japan after 1945, in which case its significance gradually declines, or to be maintained by force, as the inspectors insisted in the 1920s.

Key words:

• disarmament
• forced disarmament
• Treaty of Versailles

Notes

¹Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol (London: Christophers 1932), 79.

²Philip Towle, Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War (Oxford: Clarendon 1997).

³B. Caven, The Punic Wars (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1980); and S.L. Dyson, The Creation of the Roman Frontier (Princeton: PUP 1985), 238ff.

⁴Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, All the Way (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1949), 149.

⁵Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion 1935–1946 (Princeton: PUP 1951), 1036, 1037.

⁶Lord Hankey, Political Trials and Errors (Oxford: Pen-in-Hand 1950); Viscount Maugham, UNO and War Crimes (London: John Murray 1951); Victor Gollancz, Our Threatened Values (London: Gollancz 1946); Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder (London: Granada 1983); id., The Paperclip Conspiracy (London: Paladin 1988); James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies (London: Little Brown 1997); Nikolai Tolstoy, The Minister and the Massacres (London: Century Hutchinson 1986); and Carol Mather, Aftermath of War: Everyone Must Go Home (London: Brassey's 1992).

⁷The title of Ch.3 in R.B. McCallum, Public Opinion and the Last Peace (London: Oxford UP 1944). For recent analysis of the Nazi phenomenon, see Richard J. Evans ed., special issue of Journal of Contemporary History 39/2 (Apr. 2004).

¹¹Markham, Woman's Watch, 275; C.E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto and Windus 1929), 12.

⁸James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War (Westport: Greenwood 1982). For a sympathetic account of German feelings about the peace, see Apex, The Uneasy Triangle: Four Years of the Occupation (London: John Murray 1931), 59–65, 138–50.

⁹John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe 1920). See also Violet R. Markham, A Woman's Watch on the Rhine (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1921) Ch.16. For French views of Keynes and his book, see André Tardieu, The Truth about the Treaty (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1921).

¹⁰Sir Charles Petrie, Twenty Year's Armistice – And After (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1940), 29.

¹² Public Opinion Quarterly (1940) 4/77; (1941), 5/155.

¹³McCallum, Public Opinion, Introduction. See also Leopold Schwarzschild, World in Trance (London: Hamish Hamilton 1943).

¹⁴Cantril and Strunk, Public Opinion, 1108.

¹⁵Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916 (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1925) Vol.2, 271.

¹⁶Major-General A.C. Temperley, The Whispering Gallery of Europe (London: Collins 1939), 46. The argument was reiterated by German spokesmen. See [Cambridge, Churchill College, the Noel-Baker papers], NBKR 4X/82, Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference, 4th Session, speech by Count Bernstorff, 3 Dec. 1927.

¹⁷Grey, Twenty-Five Years, 272. Grey's point was reinforced by Richard C. Richardson, ‘The Conservative government of 1924–1929 and the Disarmament Problem’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1983), 483.

¹⁸Archbishop Randall Thomas Davidson, Occasions: Sermons and Addresses Delivered on Days of Interest in the Life of Church and Nation (London: Mowbray 1925), 1ff.

¹⁹Davidson, Occasions, 67ff. For Davidson, see G.K.A. Bell, Randall Davidson: Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Oxford UP 1952).

²⁰The obligation was accepted by British governments and made them more careful about taking on League of Nations commitments. See NBKR 4X 66, reply by Ramsay MacDonald, 5 July 1924, 235.

²¹Temperley, Whispering Gallery, Chs 3, 9, particularly p.69. See also the French comments on disarmament proposals by Lord Esher, NBKR 4X 68, 1923.

²²See d'Abernon's comments on the disappearance of the balance of power in Viscount d' Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, Vol.2, diary entry for 20 March 1923, 184–6 (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1930).

²³NBKR 4X 39, Report of the Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments, 7 Sept. 1922. For French disarmament policy, see Maurice Vaïsse, ‘Security and Disarmament: Problems in the Development of the Disarmament Debates in 1919–1934’, in R. Ahmann, A.M. Birke and M. Howard, The Quest For Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918–1957 (Oxford: German Historical Institute London and Oxford UP 1993) Ch.9.

²⁴NBKR 4X 39, British government comments of 24 July 1922.

²⁵General E. Réquin, ‘The Armaments and Military Power of Germany’, Foreign Affairs 11/2 (Jan. 1933) 230–244. For the Germans' inability to see the logic in the French argument, see d'Abernon's diary entry for 9 Apr. 1923, Ambassador of Peace, Vol.2, 190.

²⁶For the Washington Treaty system, see Stephen E. Pelz, Race to Pearl Harbor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1974); and Christopher Hall, Britain, America and Arms Control 1921–1937 (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1987).

²⁷Temperley, Whispering Gallery, 210.

²⁸[Kew, The National Archives], FO [Foreign Office records]/371/10633, folio a 10. See also Salvador de Madariaga, Disarmament (New York: Coward-McCann 1929), 102.

²⁹William H. Honan, Bywater: The Man Who Invented the Pacific War (London: Macdonald 1990). See also Hector C. Bywater, Navies and Nations: A Review of Naval Developments since the Great War (London: Constable 1927); and Sea-Power in the Pacific: A Study of the American-Japanese Naval Problem (London: Constable 1934). Similarly, Anglo-French bickering over land armaments frustrated proceedings at Geneva but never seriously threatened a war between the democracies. See Temperley, Whispering Gallery, 60.

³⁰Honan, Bywater, 106. [Kew, The National Archives], CAB[inet papers]/23/47, ‘Statement of policy in regard to Singapore’, 8 Mar. 1924.

³¹Tardieu, Truth about the Treaty, 17, 127.

³²Richard Butler, Saddam Defiant: The Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Crisis of Global Security (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2000).

³³J.H. Morgan, Assize of Arms: Being the Story of Germany and her Rearmament 1919–1939 (London: Methuen 1945) Vol.1, 18. Firmness did not always lead to a deterioration in relations. See Roddie, Peace Patrol, 13, 78.

³⁴Roddie, Peace Patrol, 13. See also the comments by Lord Newton, House of Lords Debates, 1 Apr. 1925, col.883.

³⁵Butler, Saddam Defiant, 1.

³⁶Gary Milhollin, ‘The Iraqi Bomb’, The New Yorker, 1 Feb. 1993.

³⁸Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hitler's Table-Talk: Hitler's Conversations Recorded by Martin Bormann (Oxford: OUP 1988) diary entry for 5 Apr. 1942, 406.

³⁹Roddie, Peace Patrol, 82.

³⁷Roddie, Peace Patrol, 100; Towle, Enforced Disarmament, Ch.4.

⁴⁰[Kew, The National Archives], WO/32/4091, Letter from the War Office to Foreign Office, 14 Feb. 1933.

⁴¹Morgan, Assize of Arms, 16.

⁴²Major General the Hon. Sir Francis Bingham, ‘Work with the Allied Control Commission in Germany: 1919–1924’, lecture at the Royal United Services Institution, 8 October 1924, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute LX1X/476 (February–November 1924), 749–50.

⁴³For contemporary estimates of the effects of blockade, see Maurice Parmelee, Blockade and Sea Power (London: Hutchinson 1925); and Louis Guichard, The Naval Blockade 1914–1919 (London: Philip Allan 1930).

⁴⁴Morgan, Assize of Arms, 19.

⁴⁵For arguments at the League over inspection in negotiated disarmament agreements, see Temperley, Whispering Gallery, 64.

⁴⁷D'Abernon, Ambassador of Peace, Vol.2, diary entry for 7 Feb. 1923, 167.

⁴⁶For the negotiation of the agreement, see FO/115/28, FO/115/29 and FO/115/30.

⁴⁸Roddie, Peace Patrol, 83.

⁴⁹ House of Lords Debates, 3 Mar. 1925, col.349 and 1 Apr. 1925, col.876.

⁵⁰D'Abernon, Ambassador of Peace, Vol.1, 2.

⁵¹Petrie, Twenty Years’ Armistice, 86.

⁵²Temperley, Whispering Gallery, 54. See also Carolyn Kitching, ‘Locarno and the Irrelevance of Disarmament’, in Gaynor Johnson ed., Locarno Revisited: European Diplomacy 1920–1929 (London: Routledge 2004) Ch.9, 161–77. For a general attack on British policy, see Richard C. Richardson, The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy in the 1920s (London: Pinter 1989).

⁵³ House of Commons Debates, 18 Nov. 1925, cols419–523.

⁵⁴ House of Commons Debates, 2 Feb. 1926, col.34.

⁵⁵Morgan, Assize of Arms, Vol.1, xi. The draft of volume 2 was used by John P. Fox in 1969. See John P. Fox, ‘Britain and the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control, 1925–26’, Journal of Contemporary History 4/2 (Apr. 1969) footnote 4.

⁵⁶W.N. Medlicott, Douglas Dakin and M.E. Lambert, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Series 1a, Vol.5 (London: HMSO 1973), 116, ‘Mr Henderson (Paris) to Sir A. Chamberlain’, 19 June 1928.

⁵⁷Morgan, Assize of Arms, Vol.1, xv.

⁵⁸J.H. Morgan, ‘The Disarmament of Germany and After’, Quarterly Review (October 1924), 415ff.

⁵⁹For the Iraqi experience, see Steven Mataija and J. Marshall Beier, Multilateral Verification and the Post-Gulf Environment (Toronto: York University 1992); Michael V. Deaver, Disarming Iraq: Monitoring Power and Resistance (Westport, CT: Praeger 2001); Jean E. Krasno and James S. Sutterlin, The United Nations and Iraq: Defanging the Viper (Westport, CT: Praeger 2003); and Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon 2004).

⁶⁰[Kew, The National Archives], ADM[iralty Papers]/116/3275, ‘Supervision and Control’, 1933. See also the comments by Lord Newton, House of Lords Debates, 1 Apr. 1925, col.883.

⁶¹D'Abernon, Ambassador of Peace, Vol.1, 6.

⁶²Philip Towle, ‘British Security and Disarmament Policy in the 1920s’, in Ahman et al., Quest for Stability, Ch.7.

⁶³Morgan, Assize of Arms, 251.

⁶⁴ Public Opinion Quarterly, 9 (1945), 91. US people believed both Germany and Japan should be permanently disarmed, see 95.

⁶⁵Schwarzschild, World in Trance, 276.