Chapter 2 Disarmament, collective security and internationalism
Following his resignation from the Navy League in late 1921, Patrick Hannon – Conservative MP for Birmingham Moseley and a leading league member – declared that the ‘old Navy League has become the laughing stock of the country. From its old condition of a protagonist of the interests of sea power, it has become a bedraggled and demoralised kitchen-maid of the League of Nations Union.’1 Other Navy League stalwarts, including the naval journalist Arnold White, shared Hannon’s sentiments. Although less trenchant in his criticism, White reflected that the league ‘for some twenty-seven years has been almost the main object of my life. I have seen it grow from tiny things to great things, but now it is apparently a Branch of the League of Nations.’2 Almost a decade later, many within the Air League expressed similar concerns about the organisation’s activities and future policy. For Harold Balfour – Air League member, Conservative MP and First World War flying ace – the league’s programme was not nearly ‘aggressive enough as regards the national air strength … the policy of the Air League should be one of full blooded patriotism.’3 The league was later criticised along such lines by its former secretary general P.R.C. Groves, who argued that ‘unfortunately the Air League, though it was responsible for considerable criticism in parliament and the press, was not strong enough to carry out its propaganda on a nation- wide scale’.4
In the context of the Navy and Air League’s long-standing promotion of naval and aerial supremacy, respectively – and given the frequent accusations of militarism, scaremongering and sensationalism – such criticism is particularly striking. However, both leagues briefly embraced policies that represented fundamental departures from their traditional aims and principles. In the early 1920s, the Navy League supported the Washington Naval Conference, while in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Air League increasingly focused on civil and commercial aviation, rather than primarily promoting the military potential of flight. While bodies such as the LNU curtailed their more ardently pacific and anti-militarist supporters, both the Navy and Air Leagues attempted to rein in the more overtly militaristic elements of their respective memberships.5 Seen by many as an abandonment of the key principles of each organisation, such policies led to the loss of many rank-and-file members, a number of high-profile resignations and even threatened the existence of each league. Support for disarmament and collective security was not, however, an enduring feature of the work of either the Navy or Air League and each quickly reverted to programmes lobbying for naval and aerial supremacy.
In reflecting on the causes of the First World War, many statesmen, politicians and intellectuals concluded that, as the arms race had played a principal part, the ‘potentially destabilizing effect of armaments’ should be eliminated through disarmament.6 Such sentiments led to a series of international disarmament conferences, including the Washington Naval Conference (1921–2), the abortive Geneva Naval Conference (1927), the London Naval Conferences (1930 and 1935–6) and the unsuccessful World Disarmament Conference at Geneva (1932–4). The ‘long-standing liberal belief that international law could prevent war’ also resulted in widespread support for collective security, particularly through proposals for the internationalisation of aviation and calls for an international air police force (IAPF).7 However, the extent to which Britain’s decision-makers were committed to disarmament has been the subject of some debate. Dick Richardson, for instance, suggests that with the exception of Lord Robert Cecil, ‘the philosophical propensities of the Cabinet and the foreign policy-making elite of the country were sceptical of, if not outrightly opposed to, the whole movement for arms limitation’.8 More broadly, disarmament did not necessarily involve the reduction of armaments. As in the case of the London Naval Treaty of 1930 and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, disarmament could relate to ‘an agreement in which the level of armaments was increased rather than decreased, as it was the agreement to control that was significant rather than solely the agreement to reduce’.9 As Britain ‘could claim to be the most powerful of the great powers’ in the period, the idea that the country ‘had unilaterally disarmed in the 1920s and 1930s’ is ‘clearly untenable’.10
The post-war growth of societies dedicated to the abolition of war nevertheless testifies to an ‘upsurge in popular pacifist sentiment’. Yet, as previously noted, the distinction between ‘pacifism’ – those opposed to the use of force in any circumstance – and ‘pacificism’ – those who accepted that military intervention might on occasion be justified – is important to underline. This is especially so because, as Helen McCarthy highlights, the ‘hard-line pacifist position was held by only a small minority of British people’.11 Although disarmament was considered as ‘the great uniting issue of the interwar peace movement’, and while the interwar years may have been ‘a halcyon period for liberal internationalists’, the peace movement was not a single, unified (or necessarily unifying) phenomenon.12 Moreover, despite the ‘human tragedy and economic upheaval of the war years’, Britain remained a ‘martial nation’ and a ‘warfare state’.13
While numerous studies have explored disarmament, collective security and the internationalisation of aviation in interwar Britain, the response of the Navy League and the Air League of the British Empire – the two leading naval and aerial lobbying organisations of the period – to such issues has largely been overlooked, if not ignored entirely.14 Neither league could claim to have directly influenced specific governmental decisions regarding disarmament, but (for the most part) they provided vocal opposition and a ‘background of political pressure’ to initiatives for disarmament and collective security and drew the support of leading political figures in the process.15 Pressure groups such as the Navy and Air Leagues had the potential to shape (or contribute to) the ideological framework in which such issues were discussed, while also having the capacity to become a ‘disruptive influence’ to those advocating peace through disarmament.16 Accordingly, this chapter charts the ways in which the two leagues negotiated the rise of issues such as disarmament, arms limitation, pacifism and collective security. It also explores the interactions of both leagues with the post-war peace movement, in particular with the leading liberal internationalist organisation of the period – the LNU. In doing so, the chapter shines a light on the contested and complex attitudes to war and peace in the post-war years, while also providing important insights into the legacies of the First World War and its impact on organised militarism.
‘Pacifist tendencies’
The Navy League
The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which marked Britain’s symbolic concession of parity with the US Navy, has traditionally been interpreted as ‘heralding the end of British sea power’ and as ‘one of the major catastrophes of English history’.17 Although such assessments have since been extensively revised, the response of the Navy League is nonetheless surprising. Far from condemning the treaty, the Navy League praised its ‘noble aims’ and suggested that it represented the ‘highest ideals of British policy’.18 While the league stressed that its primary object remained unaltered, ‘namely, to secure the adequate naval protection of British subjects and commerce the world over’, its argument that ‘today civilisation is not threatened by any maritime power’ and that ‘there is no alternative to competitive building of ships of war except an international naval agreement’ was remarkable when placed in the context of its long-standing promotion of British sea power.19
Enacted by V. Biscoe Tritton and Rear-Admiral Ronald Hopwood, the league’s then chairman and general secretary, respectively, the Navy League’s shift towards embracing international ideals of collective security and the preservation of peace through international agreement led to the resignation of five senior members from its Executive Committee and widespread dissent among local branches.20 As Duncan Redford argues, the failure to lobby for the maintenance of British naval supremacy led to a schism that ‘threatened to destroy’ the league.21 However, such a policy largely aligned with the political, intellectual and financial climate of the immediate post-war period. As N.H. Gibbs writes, ‘whatever the criticisms of the Treaty, it did prevent, for the immediate future, a costly naval arms race which Britain was in no state to sustain’.22 More broadly, the Navy League’s policy was short-lived.
The decision by Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government to suspend construction on the Singapore Naval Base in 1924 provided a catalyst for renewed Navy League propaganda. As Rhiannon Vickers notes, from the early 1920s internationalist, anti-war voices were highly influential in shaping Labour Party thinking on international affairs. Such influence was certainly evident in MacDonald’s decision regarding the Singapore Naval Base.23 In response, the Navy League circulated a statement to all its branches, and to the popular press, urging that ‘the essential safety of the Empire should be secured so that no foreign rival may be tempted by our weakness to reach out the hand for the “glittering prizes” which a disarmed British Empire would offer. More than any other nation we depend upon sea power.’24 At the annual GCM in 1924, Sir Cyril Cobb went further, accusing the Labour government of not having ‘a proper sense of Empire … nor do they care much whether the Navy, so far as we can judge from their actions, is in a proper position to protect not only the Empire, but all our great trade routes throughout the Empire’.25 As such comments suggest, the league had reassumed its role as ‘the public guardians of British naval supremacy’.26
Such sentiments were not confined to the Navy League. High-profile figures including Lord Curzon, Leo Amery and Winston Churchill all spoke at a public meeting organised by the Navy League to protest against the closure of the Singapore Naval Base. Other notable figures supported the league, including Stanley Baldwin, who wrote that he was ‘delighted to learn that the Navy League is taking up the question of Singapore’. Baldwin argued that ‘there are certain facts which surely no sane person can dispute: They are, that our Navy is essential to our existence, to the maintenance of our trade routes … and to the security of our Empire.’27
Building upon its policy surrounding the Singapore Naval Base, the Navy League was one of the most vocal critics of the failed Geneva Naval Conference in 1927. The conference (attended by Britain, the US and Japan) attempted to halt the building of vessels omitted from the Washington Naval Treaty. While an agreement was reached on limits to submarines and destroyers, there was a much greater unwillingness to compromise on cruiser limits. This intransigence, combined with the influence of the respective service departments, meant that the conference ended in failure.28 The British government’s refusal to compromise was, perhaps unsurprisingly, supported by the Navy League. The league published extensively on the conference in The Navy and, as in other instances, publicly traded blows with the LNU’s chairman Gilbert Murray.29 At its GCM in 1927, the league welcomed ‘any international agreements that would lessen the chances of friction between nations’, but stated that Britain had an ‘inalienable right to decide the necessary naval strength of the Empire’. Lord Linlithgow spoke more critically of ‘all those who bade us take off our armour in a world where all were armed. Either those persons were imbecile or they took the wages of England’s enemies to do their dirty work.’30 Although not expressed in such terms, Baldwin’s refusal to limit Britain’s potential naval strength was similarly supported at the Conservative Party Conference that year.31
Alongside hostility towards the Geneva Naval Conference, the Navy League denounced more wide-ranging international treaties such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an international agreement that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and, as Daniel Gorman argues, ‘signalled a normative shift towards viewing war as illegitimate’.32 Internally, the league ruled that ‘there should be no slackening nor alteration of Navy League policy due to the Peace Pact’.33 Publicly, it suggested that while ‘there is no race more desirous of peace than is the British race’, the agreement altered little in reality. The league feared that the pact would ‘encourage some people to believe the pacifist propaganda which is at present raging for great reduction in our Navy’ and stated that ‘[t]reaties, pacts, and other solemnly signed documents are all very well in their way, but, as we have learnt from bitter experience, they become “Scraps of Paper” when a nation decides on war as a continuation of policy’.34
In line with its policy surrounding the Singapore Naval Base, the Geneva Naval Conference and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Navy League was a staunch opponent of the London Naval Conference in 1930. The conference, and subsequent treaty, set a tonnage ratio for cruisers and destroyers of 5:5:3.5 for Britain, the US and Japan, respectively (although this was not agreed upon by France or Italy), while also calling for further cuts in battleship numbers. Although the conference was welcomed by many as an important step towards curtailing international competition in naval armaments, the Navy League was less receptive.35 On the eve of the conference, the league held a public meeting at which Lord Bridgeman, first lord of the Admiralty from 1924 to 1929, welcomed the possibility of ending the international competition in warship building, but stressed that ‘nothing should be done which would impair our feeling of security and the power of the Navy to protect these islands, the Empire, and the great trade routes’. Echoing Bridgeman, Lord Lloyd wished the conference success and stressed that the Navy League desired peace, before issuing the reminder that the maintenance of a strong British fleet was a ‘matter of life and death’.36
Throughout the conference, the league sent leaflets to MPs, held various public and local branch meetings, lectured throughout the country and issued numerous statements in The Navy and in national newspapers.37 Perhaps the greatest publicity generated by the league during the conference resulted from a public meeting held in London in February 1930. At the meeting, a resolution was unanimously passed that called for ‘no further reduction in our naval forces’. Winston Churchill, principal speaker, reflected on the ‘profound and growing anxiety’ among the public and hoped that ‘amid the froth and confusion of our present situation’ the British nation would still have the ‘sanity and resolution to sustain that ancient naval power which across four centuries had so often defended good causes’.38 He added that ‘British naval requirements ought to be fixed by ourselves and ourselves alone, because our life depended on them’.39 Shortly thereafter, the LNU privately recorded its anxiety at the apparent lack of progress at the conference.40 Nonetheless, Gilbert Murray assured the LNU’s General Council that it was ‘quite clear that what I may call the militarist party – the party that objected to an agreement is beaten … They fight like a minority, they speak like a minority, they feel like a minority. This is a great thing.’41
Despite Murray’s claims, figures such as Baldwin and Churchill evidently viewed Navy League meetings as important lobbying platforms. In a letter to Lord Arthur Balfour, former prime minister, Churchill noted that he had received an informal communication from the Foreign Office prior to his address at the Navy League meeting, informing him that a ‘speech threatening the Government if they gave way any more would be extremely welcome’. In response, Churchill declared that he was going to ‘give his Majesty’s Government the support of a good hearty kick’.42 The Admiralty often viewed the Navy League in similar terms. For instance, in an Executive Committee meeting in late 1930, Commander Denny, the league’s then general secretary, revealed that the Admiralty had informed him ‘that they would like the Navy League very much to emphasise that the full amount of tonnage allotted under the Navy Treaty should be provided for’.43 If the Admiralty was cautious to publicly align itself with the Navy League, it certainly valued the league’s propagandistic work.
The Air League
Like the Navy League, the Air League was conscious of anti-war sentiment and its own militaristic appearance. Internal debates surrounding the league’s aims and objectives following Groves’s appointment as secretary general in 1927 are particularly revealing. Among his earliest initiatives, Groves proposed condensing the league’s aims into three points: ‘To secure a Home Defence Air Force equal to any other Air Force within striking distance of Great Britain, and the provision of adequate additional air force to meet the requirements of the Navy, the Army, and Imperial defence’, ‘To ensure the fullest development of British Civil and Commercial aviation’ and ‘To foster British interest in the encouragement of British Experiment and research in the Science of Aeronautics’.44 While such aims closely resembled earlier calls for an air force ‘capable of obtaining the mastery of the air’, there was some opposition to the revised policy. For example, Sempill noted that ‘objection had been raised to the first of these Aims as being militarist’ and so a special meeting of the Executive Committee was called to discuss the matter.45
At the meeting, Lieut. Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman, Executive Committee member, suggested that the wording of the league’s first aim should be altered to read: ‘To secure an adequate Home Defence Force in relation to any other air force, etc’. O’Gorman stated that while he entirely agreed that Britain should have an air force equal to any other within striking distance, many people felt the aim ‘savoured of militarism’. By altering the wording, O’Gorman argued, the league could dispel any suggestion that it was ‘too militarist’ without fundamentally altering its programme. Groves, however, rejected the proposal on the grounds that ‘in view of the peculiar vulnerability of this country to aerial attack, “equality” was the minimum requirement for national safety’. Groves stated that the proposed alteration ‘would modify a basic principle for which the League had always stood’. He then threatened to resign if the amendment was passed and so the motion was subsequently withdrawn.46
Following Groves’s tenure, the Air League’s aims again became a feature of Executive Committee discussions. In late 1929, Dr Gerald Merton, the league’s then chairman, stressed that ‘less emphasis should be placed upon the military spirit now expressed in the first item of the “Aims” and that civil and commercial aviation should be given predominance’. He then suggested that the league should ‘change its focus … and thereby add new members of [a] more pacific frame of mind’.47 Merton felt that public confidence ‘could not alone be gained by talking of bombs and battleships’.48 Many on the Executive Committee shared such concerns. Yeats-Brown reflected that, given prevailing ‘peace views’, ‘the military idea did not appeal to people’, while Moore-Brabazon stated that the policy of the league had ‘hitherto been too much inclined to tell people that they would be murdered in their beds. This no longer frightened them … peace is what appeals to the Englishman today.’49
The Air League subsequently wrote more frequently on civil and commercial aviation, favoured the advertisement of civil, rather than military, aircraft in its publications and established plans for the creation of an International Civil Air Week. The published aims of the league also reflected this shift in emphasis. As outlined in Air and Airways, the league’s revised objectives were to ‘ensure the fullest development of British civil and commercial aviation’ and to ‘secure the maintenance of adequate air forces and of reserves for Empire and Home Defence’.50 On air disarmament, meanwhile, the league’s Executive Committee agreed in June 1930 that
It is not within the competence of the Air League to put forward, officially, disarmament schemes which are bound to be of a technical nature. It should, however, be the policy of the Air League to support the ideal of general disarmament … and to help towards a reasonable international agreement.51
Despite insisting that ‘the nation’s security is the first consideration of the League’, its reluctance to engage with questions of disarmament due to a lack of technical expertise is somewhat curious.52 This is especially so considering that the league boasted among its members, at various points, aircraft engineers, manufacturers, aviation pioneers, leading air-power theorists and figures with experience at the highest levels of the Air Ministry. As such, it was not long until divisions again arose over the league’s policy.
Following further discussions regarding the league’s aims and future work, Balfour and Yeats-Brown resigned in mid-1931. For Balfour, the league’s policy was ‘too pacific’, while Yeats-Brown criticised the ‘pacifist tendencies’ of the league.53 At the same meeting, the league dispensed of Thwaites as acting secretary general. Thwaites vacated the role, but not before informing the Executive Committee that the ‘relegation of National Defence to the background’ was a ‘radical departure from the League’s principles laid down over twenty years ago’.54 Finally, later writing on his resignation from the Air League, Groves bemoaned the influence of the league’s ‘pacifist chairman’ and stated that the league’s shift in policy was merely ‘calculated to save the face of officialdom’.55
Organised militarism and the League of Nations Union
While an influential minority within the Navy and Air Leagues may have been willing to advocate disarmament and arms limitation, there was a much greater reluctance to associate with liberal internationalist organisations such as the LNU. Whatever the ultimate failure of the League of Nations as an instrument of collective security, the LNU was a major presence within the political culture of the interwar period, ‘inspiring a rich and participatory culture of political protest, popular education and civic ritual’.56 As such, it was important to both the Navy and Air Leagues that they actively challenged the union. Correspondingly, the LNU deemed it necessary to counter the propaganda of both the Navy and Air Leagues. Indeed, both leagues frequently came into conflict with the LNU’s most senior leadership (chiefly Robert Cecil, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, David Davies and Norman Angell). While such disputes reveal much about the ways in which issues of disarmament, collective security and arms limitation played out in associational spheres, they also highlight the impact and influence of Navy and Air League propaganda.
Much of the reluctance to engage with the LNU resulted from misconceptions surrounding the union’s apparent support for unilateral disarmament – despite its explicit and repeated denials to the contrary – and over the organisation’s seemingly pacific nature. Cecil was acutely aware of this, later lamenting: ‘Our opponents of the Right had got it into their minds that the League [of Nations Union] was just a piece of unpractical pacifism, while on the Left it was said by some extremists that we were war-mongers’. The union was charged with being both a ‘piece of new-fangled pacifism’ and ‘too militarist’.57 In 1932, Norman Angell – the well-known writer, LNU member and one of the founders of the UDC – similarly queried how Lord Lloyd could accuse the LNU of ‘sentimental anti-militarism’ when the ‘commonest jibe flung by the anti-League press at the Union (and the League)’ was ‘the accusation of “militarism”’.58
By the late 1920s, the Navy League was both a vocal opponent of disarmament and an ‘unrelenting detractor’ of the LNU.59 Some within the league considered the union a ‘dangerous society’, while others spoke more caustically of the ‘bacillus of what we may call the spirit of the League of Nations Union’ which had ‘infected’ the British people.60 Lord Lloyd suggested that the LNU comprised ‘many of the worst elements in our country; friends of those who refused to fight for their country in the War’ and that the union was ‘the avowed enemy of everything that could strengthen our national life’.61 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Navy League and the LNU clashed on a number of occasions – in the press, at public meetings and even in the form of radio debates between Lord Lloyd and Lord Cecil broadcast on the BBC.62
The issue of disarmament was the most frequent area of contestation between the two leagues and the LNU. In a joint memorandum issued to The Times in February 1928, the Navy and Air Leagues objected to the policy of unilateral disarmament allegedly favoured by a number of ‘extremists’ within the LNU. The memorandum stated that the two leagues disagreed with ‘those who advocate one-sided disarmament’ and that any further reduction of armaments by Britain that was not matched by other nations would ‘not only jeopardize the security of this country and the Empire but will imperil world peace’. It concluded by warning that it would be a ‘real danger to the Empire if the influence of the extremists should become supreme in the League of Nations Union’.63 Despite its tone, the piece had originally been written with a view to gaining LNU support for opposition to one-sided disarmament.64 Cecil, however, was unwilling to advocate the memorandum. As he explained to Groves, the three organisations were ‘necessarily pursuing objects which are different though not necessarily contradictory. The two Service Leagues desire to maintain the Navy and Air Force at full strength for the present. The Union is aiming at the establishment of Peace by International Co-Operation.’ While Cecil claimed there was nothing ‘necessarily antagonistic between the two points of view’, a compromise was unlikely because the ‘two Leagues are essentially national in their outlook, the Union is primarily international’.65 Displeased, Groves issued a further letter to The Times several months later in which he protested against the ‘unauthorized propaganda of these misguided extremists’ and called for the LNU’s General Council to publicly repudiate proposals for unilateral disarmament.66 A letter to the same newspaper from John Hills, the LNU’s acting chairman, agreed with Groves that the LNU did not stand for unilateral disarmament, but argued that, as the union had already made this clear, it could do little more to distance itself from such a policy.67
Despite the ‘pacificist’ nature of the LNU, and repeated assurances that it did not stand for unilateral disarmament, the Navy League made the same accusation several years later. It charged the union with trying to ‘persuade themselves and everybody else in this country that the great thing that this country owes to mankind is to disarm as quickly as possible, whatever other nations may be doing’.68 Even as late as 1936, Lily Yorke-Triscott, secretary of the Navy League’s Kensington Branch, asked Cecil ‘What protest has the League of Nations Union uttered’ against unilateral disarmament ‘which had reduced the Defence Forces of the Crown to their present condition?’69 Internally, the Navy League expressed anxiety regarding the LNU on numerous occasions.70 Publicly, however, the league suggested its own activities were ‘instrumental’ in countering the alleged ‘long-continued endeavours’ of the LNU and ‘many other pacifist societies’ to promote unilateral disarmament. It hoped that, as a result, the British public was beginning to see through the ‘fog of pacifist propaganda’.71
In response to such pronouncements, Headway stressed that ‘sections of opinion in the country might possibly wish the Union did advocate [unilateral disarmament]. But the hard fact is that it never does and never has.’72 To avoid any ambiguity, the journal printed the disclaimer: ‘Disarmament, in any reference to the subject in HEADWAY, must be understood to mean the reduction and limitation of national armaments by international agreement’.73 Key LNU figures were more explicitly critical of the Navy League. Angell described the league as ‘scare-mongers’, while Murray lambasted the ‘blindness’ of the Navy League’s ‘purely nationalist outlook’, accusing it of not confining its ‘propaganda within the limits of common sense’.74 Noel-Baker likewise spoke of the ‘Navy League mind’ in parliament, while others were dismissive of the ‘old Navy League point of view’.75 Noel-Baker described such a mindset in the following terms: ‘they never did believe in disarmament; they do not believe in it now’.76
Much like the Navy League, many within the Air League staunchly opposed the LNU. This was particularly evident following Murray’s suggestion that the Air League could prepare a proposal on international air disarmament for discussion with the LNU. Balfour was ‘entirely against such a step’, arguing that the Air League should not be ‘allying itself with a definite body of pacifism and extreme radicalism’. Sir Charles Delme-Radcliffe ‘distrusted and disliked’ the union, while Sempill felt any association would ‘undoubtedly alienate the sympathies of many supporters’. Merton suggested that while there may have been some ‘out-and-out pacifists’ within the LNU, Murray had a more balanced view in relation to disarmament. Despite such assurances, Murray’s proposal was not pursued.77
The Peace Ballot of 1934 to 1935 provided a further point of potential tension between the Navy League, the Air League and the LNU. Despite covering arms limitation, the private manufacture of armaments and the abolition of aircraft by international agreement, the two leagues provided little public opposition. The Navy League labelled it ‘misguided’, reflected on the supposedly misleading nature of the questions contained within the ballot and agreed with the suggestion that it was little more than ‘an attempt to obtain subscriptions by a fraudulent prospectus’.78 As over a million people voted against the abolition of naval and military aircraft in the ballot, the Air League merely expressed its satisfaction that ‘in spite of the blood-curdling prophecies regarding air warfare, many people still remember that war is older than aviation, and have not been deluded into the belief that the abolition of aircraft would bring peace on earth’.79
Perhaps the greatest conflict between the Air League and the LNU arose over calls for the internationalisation of aviation and proposals for the formation of an IAPF. For many liberal internationalists, the modernity, transformative qualities and the ‘inherently international nature of aviation’ offered an opportunity to bring the world closer together – although only if ‘freed from the shackles of the nation-state’.80 There was widespread faith among figures on the left that aviation could be both ‘civil and liberating’ and hopes that aviation could serve as an important technology of communication and commerce, capable of abolishing frontiers and ensuring peace.81 Yet, despite the enthusiasm for modern science, technology and the transformative potential of flight, proposals for the international control of aviation prompted significant hostility in certain quarters as the chapter will later examine more closely. Indeed, as Figure 2.1 demonstrates, the Air League was among those who dismissed such calls, pointing to the ways in which civil aeroplanes could be converted into makeshift or ‘commercial bombers’.82
‘Insidious pacifist propaganda’
The Navy and Air League’s attempts to counter disarmament and pacifism extended well beyond disputes with the LNU. For example, writing on the 1933 Oxford Union Debate – in which the Oxford Union carried the motion that ‘this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ – The Navy described those present as ‘young disloyalists yearning for notoriety … Mentally blinded by insidious pacifist propaganda these young men have failed to realise that no one is a worse enemy of peace than he who poses as a pacifist by profession.’ Rather than achieving peace through pacifism, the league asserted that the ‘only true way to avoid war is to have the will to peace and the strong arm ready and able to support that will’. The article concluded by again dismissing the resolution as ‘disloyal’, asking readers to instead remember the Oxford men who would ‘rush to the defence of their King and Country with the same glorious spirit of loyalty and devotion that was shown by those gallant others of their kind in the year 1914’.83 Others shared the Navy League’s sentiments. Churchill described the motion as ‘abject, squalid, shameless’, while Lord Mottistone maintained, more than a decade later, that the debate was so injurious to Britain’s national and imperial credibility that ‘the young men at Oxford who passed that resolution very nearly decreed the downfall of Britain and her Empire’.84
Figure 2.1 ‘And the result will be the same, whichever dropped it’
Alongside tensions with the LNU, the two leagues were critical of ‘Pacifist dreamers’, the ‘screaming farce’ of ‘Communist Anti-War Demonstration[s]’ and the ‘slash-the-Navy Socialists’.85 In turn, each league drew the ire of numerous pacifist, anti-war and left-leaning organisations. For example, in 1934 the Executive Committee of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) resolved that ‘in view of the fact that some of the speakers sent out by the Navy League have violated the principles of the Women’s Institute by attacking the League of Nations and Pacifism’ it would no longer invite Navy League lecturers to meetings.86 Navy League propaganda seemingly had some impact in such circles. Following a speech by one Navy League speaker, the NFWI’s Somerset Federation stated that while the ‘word pacifist can be the noblest title, it can also signify an obstinate and foolish idealism which would call for one-sided disarmament and a refusal to fight when in danger’.87 Lloyd met with Lady Denman, the institute’s president, and later the NFWI’s Executive Committee to discuss the matter, but, clearly unsatisfied, accused the NFWI of being a pacifist body.88 In response, Denman wrote that while NFWI members could ‘organize a meeting to advocate militarism or pacifism’ as individuals or as members of other bodies, most members believed that ‘to resist by force is morally wrong’ and that to use a meeting to attack pacifism was an infringement on the NFWI’s policy of avoiding any party political or sectarian ground.89 The NFWI’s Executive Committee further stressed that, although the Navy League might claim its work was of ‘paramount importance to the nation’, the NFWI was ‘not formed to serve as the platform for propagandistic societies’ and so would not allow the Navy League to use it as a vehicle for disseminating its message.90 Denman’s decision was much to the delight of the Daily Herald, who declared that although Lloyd ‘is sometimes credited with having ambitions to be England’s future Dictator’, he could not ‘palm the Big Navy bunk off on the women’.91
Support for, and affiliation with, the Navy and Air Leagues could prove contentious for certain politicians, with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) opposing both leagues.92 The ILP’s Midland Divisional Council even considered an emergency resolution in 1928 calling for the expulsion of members of ‘bellicose organisations’ such as the Navy and Air Leagues from the Labour Party. Although there was opposition to the resolution, others felt that membership of either league was ‘incompatible with the ideals and principles of the Labour movement’. As one member stated, if the ILP ‘stood for anything it was peace’. The same member asked how effective any member of both a patriotic organisation and the ILP would be in ‘going out to preach anti-militarism’.93 Other institutions took a similar view. For example, the Derby Council for the Prevention of War recorded its ‘strong protest’ against J.H. Thomas, Labour MP and former secretary of state for colonies, for supporting the Air League. The council called for ‘all citizens to refrain from supporting any organisation whose aims and objects include the increase of armaments’.94
Beyond the political and associational level, newspapers such as the Daily Herald were also critical of the Navy and Air Leagues, dubbing the former a ‘band of fanatics’ over its Singapore Naval Base policy and later as ‘warmongers’.95 The same newspaper expressed opposition to the Navy League’s disarmament policy in the early 1930s, stating that it was the ‘job of responsible Ministers to keep the experts under control’.96 Such criticism is important to note, especially as the Daily Herald was one of the most popular newspapers in the period and has been described as Labour’s ‘unofficial newspaper’.97 Key individuals associated with both leagues were also subject to accusations of militarism on numerous occasions. Murray considered Lord Lloyd a ‘fire-brand’, while Harold Laski, the socialist intellectual, dubbed Lloyd a ‘Supreme Autocrat’. Laski suggested that ‘[l]ife for him is a battle in which the big artillery is decisive … International peace, as Geneva views it, he looks upon as sentimental vapouring.’98 Groves, meanwhile, saw fit to dispel claims that he was a ‘militarist’ and ‘an apostle of force’ in his publications, while the fact that J.A. Chamier was reportedly referred to as ‘Bombmaster No. 1’ in certain quarters did little to endear himself, or the Air League, to liberal internationalists.99
The World Disarmament Conference, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the Second London Naval Treaty
The World Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva on 2 February 1932 with representation from fifty-nine nations, including all major powers, to discuss the global reduction of armaments. The conference, long in the making after a Preparatory Commission had been established in 1925, met with millions of petitions from across the world expressing hopes for peace.100 Yet, French demands for security and an international police force combined with German calls for military equality meant that proceedings soon stalled. After extensive deliberations, Germany withdrew from both the conference and the League of Nations in October 1933. The conference was formally adjourned in June 1934 before ultimately ending in failure. As a result, disarmament was ‘removed from the international agenda, and the major world powers embarked on an apparently inevitable process of rearmament’.101
The Air League
Questions regarding the Air League’s policy relating to the forthcoming World Disarmament Conference were initially raised by Alan Bott in July 1931. While Bott stressed that a definite policy was required, others on the Executive Committee were more reticent, stating that it was ‘difficult to formulate policies on specific questions such as “parity” until it was known what other nations were prepared to do’.102 Nevertheless, Bott maintained that it was ‘advisable to set up machinery to ascertain the views of experts in the many spheres of aviation’ so that the league could ‘formulate a definite policy and be ready to engage in opportune propaganda when the chance arose’.103 While a sub-committee was formed to consider Bott’s proposals, the Executive Committee instead aligned itself with J.M. Kenworthy’s suggestion that the league ‘would be well-advised to abandon all further action [regarding the Disarmament Conference] as the subject was extremely complicated and one which was beyond the scope and capabilities of the League to deal with’.104 Similar sentiments were echoed by Frederick Guest in his capacity as chairman. Addressing the Executive Committee, Guest asserted that, while ‘there was a section of the public that maintained that the Air League should follow the Navy League’s principle by pressing for increased armaments’, he thought that there was ‘no great need’ to pursue such a policy and that the ‘greater part of the League’s energies should be directed towards the development of civil and commercial aviation’.105
At the Air League’s AGM in July 1932, the Duke of Sutherland reflected that, while the league retained a ‘strong position in the world of aviation’, the World Disarmament Conference had undoubtedly curtailed the organisation’s propagandistic work. Nevertheless, he warned that it would be necessary for the league to formulate a new policy regarding ‘Military Aviation if the Disarmament Conference lasted many more months’. Conversely, Thwaites suggested that it was not the advent of the Disarmament Conference, but the league’s ‘decision to abandon its Military Policy’ which had restricted its activities.106
The league’s state of inertia regarding the conference came to an end with the issuing of a memorandum, written in conjunction with the RAC and RAeS, to national newspapers and every MP in late 1932. The memorandum was published in response to a parliamentary debate in November 1932 in which Guest had pressed the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the coalition National Government, on ‘whether it is clear that nothing in the line of the abolition of the Air Force can possibly take place without the permission of the House’. MacDonald’s response that the ‘Government must be free to negotiate the abolition or the extension of anything’, but that any negotiations would be conducted with the understanding that ‘final consent remains with this House’, was clearly not enough to assuage the Air League.107 In the memorandum, the league claimed that MacDonald had granted ‘plenary powers’ to the country’s representatives at Geneva. It declared that ‘Great Britain has for years past adopted an air policy which virtually amounts to universal disarmament. It has profited us nothing.’ For the Air League, ‘only the possession of adequate air forces can give us a reasonable measure of security at Home and Overseas and enable us to seek World Peace and ensure it’.108
As leader of a coalition government, MacDonald placed great emphasis on ‘consensus in policy-making based on the national interest’.109 The Air League, therefore, provided at least some measure of popular opinion on which the Air Ministry could draw upon in challenging calls for the abolition of aerial bombing from a number of high-ranking officials in the Cabinet and Foreign Office.110 As further examined in Chapter 4, the Air League advanced the Air Ministry’s cause by vigorously lobbying for the RAF’s continued role in maintaining imperial security. As the 1932 memorandum declared, aeroplanes ‘judiciously employed in our Overseas Empire, have proved the most practicable means of preserving peace over large areas of the world’s surface without an incalculable expenditure of blood and treasure’. The league asserted that proposals for the abolition of military and naval aircraft and the internationalisation of civil aviation would not only ‘endanger our national security in these islands’ but would render impossible the ‘discharge of our Imperial responsibilities’.111
Such statements were timely, particularly as the Air Ministry’s main justification in opposing proposals for the abolition of aerial bombing during the World Disarmament Conference was the RAF’s role in policing the empire.112 While it is difficult to measure the influence of the Air League’s work in this regard, its opponents certainly felt the league had some influence. Noel-Baker bemoaned the league’s opposition to the conference and disarmament at length in The Private Manufacture of Armaments.113 Similarly, in his statement to the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms, Noel-Baker noted that the activities of ‘ “Patriotic” Societies’ concerned with air power (the Air League being at the forefront of such organisations) were ‘particularly intense’ during the World Disarmament Conference.114 He asserted that the campaign of those with ‘air interests’ was a ‘principal factor in defeating the success of proposals for Air Disarmament’.115 More broadly, while Patrick Kyba notes that ‘organised anti-disarmament pressure group activity’ was ‘slight’ at the time of Geneva, the Navy and Air Leagues were among the few organisations to protest the Conference.116
The Navy League
In his final address as Navy League president before being replaced by Lord Lloyd, Linlithgow warned that ‘any extremes on the part of the League, any jingoism or any sign by which it might lead to the charge of being cranky, would deprive the League of its useful services’.117 Despite describing the LNU in similar terms, some within the league feared being labelled as ‘unreasonable extremists’.118 On its propaganda surrounding the World Disarmament Conference, the league was also careful to stress that it did not make it ‘a society in aid of militarism’ and that the league’s policy was not one of ‘swank and swagger’, but of self-preservation.119 Despite such fears, Noel-Baker reflected that the ‘sinister support for the military-industrial complex had some importance [at the time of the World Disarmament Conference], since it created the illusion of public support for the militarist Ministers in the Government’.120
Navy League pronouncements throughout the World Disarmament Conference did little to prevent accusations of jingoism or militarism. The league’s New Year message in 1933, for instance, declared that the nation could no longer be ‘fettered and bound by treaties which denied us the right exercised since the days of the Saxon Kings to maintain the sea power that our special national conditions demand’.121 While the Air League was initially reluctant to comment on the World Disarmament Conference, the Navy League was far more vocal in its criticism. In The Navy, national newspapers and in letters to MPs, the league called for the navy to be built to the maximum level permitted by the London Naval Treaty which it stressed was necessary to safeguard the nation, its commerce, trade and communications.122 The league warned that the nation must
be careful lest the spirit of patriotism and self-sacrifice … be undermined by uninformed clamour, and lest we come to rely too far upon the security provided by paper pacts, which have often proved an illusion in the past and have even been the cause of war itself … Now, more than ever, the peace of the world can be maintained by the existence of an efficient British Fleet.123
Ministers were keenly aware of the Navy League’s influence. When Neville Chamberlain, then chancellor of the exchequer, proposed significant budgetary cuts for the Army and Royal Navy in favour of increased spending on the RAF at a Cabinet meeting in June 1934, Stanley Baldwin, then lord president of the council, warned of the potential response from the Navy League both in parliament and throughout the country.124
Following the failure of the World Disarmament Conference and the government’s 1935 Defence White Paper, the first in a series of annual defence policy reviews, the league claimed ‘a large measure of credit for the fact that the Government has at last recognised “that adequate defences are still required for security and to enable the British Empire to play its full part in maintaining the peace of the world”’.125 Nevertheless, it admitted that ‘constant and ever-increasing effort’ was required to ensure that ‘our Defence Forces are without further delay put on a footing adequate to safeguard our Empire against potential dangers’. This was especially so following the revelation of the Luftwaffe and the public announcement of German rearmament.
The disclosure of Germany’s naval and submarine programme in the spring of 1935 prompted particular alarm among some within the Navy League. Yet, Lloyd tempered demands for an acceleration of Britain’s naval armaments.126 The Navy was similarly reluctant to offer immediate comment following the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (which fixed the German navy to a tonnage ratio of 35 per cent the size of the Royal Navy).127 Lloyd did, however, address the House of Lords, where he questioned the decision to accept the agreement, an infringement of the terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, without consulting France or Italy, and stated that this ‘was bound to be painful to our old Allies’. He concluded by stressing that ‘Naval security was far more important than naval limitation … this agreement was enfeebling throughout and strengthening of all the forces which were bad to this country and the world’.128 Despite Lloyd’s criticism, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement – and subsequent London Naval Treaty – should not be interpreted as ‘symptomatic of Britain’s great power decline’. Instead, they prevented a ‘naval race from breaking out before Britain was ready to win it’. Moreover, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement ‘committed Germany to a long-term pattern of naval development that was, from the Admiralty’s viewpoint, the least dangerous and disruptive’ which tied ‘the German navy to build a small, balanced fleet – one that the Royal Navy could easily contain’.129
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was followed shortly by the second London Naval Conference of 1935 to 1936. Convened on 9 December 1935 after extensive discussion, attendees included Britain, the US, France, Japan and Italy. At the conference, Japanese delegates asserted that the three leading naval powers (Britain, the US and Japan) should agree a common upper tonnage limit and that each should be free to distribute that tonnage between vessels of any size and class in relation to their respective strategic commitments. When no agreement was reached over Japanese demands for a common upper limit (parity), Japan withdrew from the conference.130 Further discussions centred around qualitative limitations – principally gun calibres and the tonnage of certain vessels – rather than limitations on the overall size of fleets and was eventually signed by Britain, the US and France in March 1936.131 Not only was the treaty celebrated within the Admiralty as a ‘diplomatic triumph that would ensure Britain’s place as the world’s greatest sea power’, but it was followed with a ‘huge burst of naval building’ designed to deter Britain’s rivals. Britain’s ‘great surge of warship building in the second half of the 1930s was’, in many respects, ‘an opening move in a burgeoning naval arms race’.132
Nevertheless, fears of further naval limitations during the second London Naval Conference led to increased Navy League propaganda. The league warned that the ‘time has come to stop this dangerous reduction of our Navy when other navies have increased and are increasing. Unless we act now it may be too late to recover our supremacy by which alone our peace and safety can be ensured.’133 The league published widely in national newspapers, produced pamphlets and printed propaganda, and increased its lecturing campaign and public meetings.134 To fund its work, the league received £10,000 from Lady Houston, while Lloyd deemed the situation significant enough to consider accepting donations from armament firms – something which the league publicly opposed until this point.135 Lloyd emphasised that the league’s propaganda campaign should ‘not embarrass our representatives at the Conference, nor draw the Navy League into unwise controversy’, but stressed that it was necessary to increase ‘public appreciation of our need for Naval Defence’.136 Lloyd’s warning did not prevent the league from publicly criticising the conference. For example, in its New Year message in 1936, it wrote that it ‘seems certain that the Conference will end without any real advance towards the objective of disarmament’. The league lamented that through ‘years of neglect, muddled idealism, and false economy, we have hazarded by default the glory and honour of our race’. For the Navy League, the lessons were clear: Britain ‘must be free to build the ships we need’.137
Despite such concerns, Rear-Admiral Henry Thursfield, Navy League member and naval correspondent for The Times, assured the league’s Executive Committee in early 1936 that the Admiralty was ‘alive’ to the danger of further naval limitations and that ‘no such situation was likely to arise’. Lloyd also stressed that, as the government was due to issue a second white paper on defence, the league should limit its propaganda until this had been published.138 The government’s Defence White Paper in March 1936, which emphasised the ‘overwhelming importance of the Navy’ for preserving sea communications to ensure the supply of food and raw materials as well as the passage of troops and supplies, clearly allayed the league’s concerns.139 Indeed, Lloyd suggested that the league’s ‘intensive and extensive propaganda’ had ‘some effect in rousing public opinion and encouraging the Government to take this action’.140 In its annual report for 1936, the league stated that for ‘many years upon the public platform, through the Press, by Parliamentary action and in many other ways’ it had
constantly refuted the doctrine of peace by unilateral disarmament and of the virtue of weakness … These conclusions have now been accepted both by the Government and by the people at large, and it is not too much to claim that the work of the Navy League has been a principal factor in bringing about so satisfactory a change.141
While the Navy League was satisfied with the 1936 White Paper – and its own propagandistic work – it nevertheless stressed that there are ‘still vital matters connected with our sea-power to which the public are not yet alive, nor even the Government’, namely the Merchant Navy, youth and the influence of air-power propagandists as the following chapters will explore.142
An international air police force and the internationalisation of civil aviation
Calls for the creation of an IAPF and the internationalisation of civil aviation received widespread support across the political spectrum from the early 1930s. This was especially so amidst global economic crisis, uncertainty surrounding the fate of international disarmament, the growth of European nationalism and increasing anxieties concerning the ‘shadow of the bomber’. As noted, there existed an enthusiasm among liberal internationalists for the potentially transformative aspects of aviation in relation to technology, modernity and the maintenance of peace.143 Hopes for an IAPF in the British context are often explained through the enduring liberal belief in international law as a means of preventing war alongside fears of aerial bombardment.144 For Waqar Zaidi, enthusiasm among liberal internationalists for aviation – and bombing in particular – was so great that it was much closer to militarist, than pacifist, streams of thought. As he suggests, ‘technological internationalism’ incorporated a ‘liberal militarism which put its faith in modern scientific weapons, seeing them as the ultimate arbiters of power and war’. Bombers, and later atomic weapons, were both ‘widely recognized and feared as weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘welcomed as potential instruments of peace’.145
While the Air League was initially reluctant to engage with the World Disarmament Conference or questions on the internationalisation of aviation, this changed following J.A. Chamier’s appointment as secretary general in 1933. Issues surrounding the abolition of bombing, the international control of civil aviation and, in particular, the formation of an IAPF prompted extensive opposition from the Air League. While Chamier stated that the league supported the limitation of armaments, and that this was ‘desirable in the interests of peace and prosperity’, he asserted that it could not be at the expense of the security of the nation or the empire, urging ‘we should be inferior to no other power in the air’.146
The idea of an IAPF had widespread support from leading internationalists including Angell, Davies and Noel-Baker.147 One of the most influential proposals for an IAPF was that advanced by Noel-Baker in his contribution to the series of anti-war essays Challenge to Death (1934). He proposed the creation of ‘one single homogenous corps, recruited, organised, equipped, armed and paid by an international authority, the League of Nations, and owing allegiance to the League alone’.148 Not only would an IAPF act as a deterrent to potential aggressors, but Noel-Baker argued that internationally controlled planes could, if an aggressor persisted in bombing civilians, ‘bombard his cities until he stopped’.149 Although Noel-Baker emphasised that it would be a ‘desperate measure, undertaken in the last resort’, this reflected an apparent inconsistency in the notion of an IAPF – that aggression could ultimately be halted in the form of reprisal bombings.150 More broadly, proponents of an IAPF did not necessarily share the same vision: for some, such a force should be purely defensive in nature, while for others, the use of an IAPF might entail reprisals through the ‘terrible power of the bomber to be effective’.151 While some deprecated the use of force, liberal internationalist calls for an IAPF did not eschew militarism but instead often represented a ‘pacificist’ interpretation of military aviation, if not a form of ‘militarised internationalism’.152
Beyond liberal internationalist proposals, schemes for an IAPF were introduced to parliament on several occasions, while leading figures from all the major parties supported the internationalisation of aviation at certain points. Clement Attlee, Labour Party leader from 1935, published on the subject of an IAPF, while Labour supported the abolition of all national air forces and the creation of an IAPF in its 1935 manifesto.153 Stanley Baldwin, meanwhile, spoke favourably of ‘the abolition of the air forces of the world and the international control of civil aviation’. Although the concept of an IAPF may well have been a panacea for many on the political left, it clearly transcended political boundaries.154 Indeed, an IAPF was even supported by former Air League figures with links to the far right such as Moore-Brabazon and Thwaites.155
Proposals for an IAPF were welcomed by a series of associational bodies and organisations throughout the 1930s. In 1932, David Davies founded the New Commonwealth Society (NCS) to advance such a cause. Among those later dismissed by E.H. Carr as a ‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’, Davies was a founding member of the LNU and one of the most persistent advocates of an IAPF.156 Davies set out his views on the IAPF in The Problem of the Twentieth Century (1930), arguing that although ‘in the course of time the chariots of air will play a decisive part in the service of the international authority’, they were not yet in a position to do so.157 However, as Brett Holman notes, the NCS published nearly exclusively on the concept of an IAPF.158 The society suggested that an IAPF could apply military sanctions ‘which can be exerted upon states for the purpose of maintaining peace’.159 The NCS was not a mass-membership organisation, having reached only 1,772 members by 1936, yet its council contained a number of influential figures.160 Most notably, Winston Churchill became president of the NCS in 1936. However, as Michael Pugh observes, there is little evidence to suggest he viewed his presidency as anything other than a ‘rostrum on which to espouse war preparations’.161 Alongside the NCS, the Liberal-dominated, centrist Next Five Years Group similarly called for the government to ‘consider without prejudice’ the formation of ‘an international air force with the limited function of preventing misuse of civil aircraft’.162 Its founder, Clifford Allen, pacifist and leading ILP member, believed that ‘aviation will either destroy or save our civilization’.163 By 1935, the LNU also supported the idea of an IAPF after years of internal debate.164
Being anti-war did not entail being consistently pacifist, anti-armament or anti-militarist. Indeed, in the late 1930s – albeit at a time when calls for collective security and disarmament no longer held much sway – the ‘liberal conscience was militant rather than appeasing’ and, by 1939, ‘the liberal conscience endorsed a national struggle as a just war’.165 For all the LNU’s association with pacifism, British liberal internationalists ‘were not pacifists, but willing upholders, with force if necessary, of a liberal international order’.166 Militarism was able to cut across conventional dividing lines of party politics in the interwar years, much as it had done prior to the First World War.167 As Edgerton argues, Britain developed a ‘strategy of liberal militarism alongside its liberal internationalism’.168 The IAPF concept, which for some ‘savoured too much of militarism’, provides a case in point.169
Despite widespread support, calls for an IAPF and the internationalisation of aviation more generally were criticised by the Air Ministry, leading aviation periodicals and the Air League. The Air Ministry’s position, advanced in the lawyer and air-power advocate J.M. Spaight’s An International Air Police (1932), maintained that rather than ensuring peace through an IAPF and the internationalisation of aviation, a strong national air force consisting of heavy bombers would be the best guarantee of peace through deterrence.170 The Aeroplane spoke more forcefully, stating that an IAPF was one of the ‘most persistent heresies of the present day’ and represented the ‘folly of internationalism’.171 Such sentiments were echoed by the Air League, who regarded calls for the abolition of military aviation and an IAPF with ‘grave concern’. The league declared that, if adopted, such measures ‘would prejudice the country’s safety without contributing anything to the progress of air disarmament’.172 For the Air League, an IAPF constituted little more than a ‘fallacy’ and ‘would not be a police force at all, but a plain military force armed with weapons of immense power’. Furthermore, it suggested that, as the League of Nations could already employ military sanctions (under Article 16 of the Covenant which permitted the use of collective armed force against an aggressor in certain scenarios), an IAPF was also unnecessary.173 David Davies responded to such statements directly, arguing that league failures – notably its inability to intervene in the Manchuria Crisis of 1931 – only served to highlight the weakness of the threat of military sanctions, hence the need of deterrence through an IAPF.174 The Air League remained unconvinced:
The League of Nations has a great role to play in the world but its paths must be the paths of peace. It is designed to be the conciliator, the arbitrator, the tactful friend, the originator of useful social international legislation … It is not right to set it up as a super State, armed against all comers: nor is it practical to do so.175
In practical terms, the Air League stressed that even if an IAPF might act as a deterrent, it could not prevent a frontier from invasion, nor was such a force a weapon of defence or measure of security. Moreover, in using an IAPF as a tool of international arbitration, the Air League emphasised that any action taken against a potential aggressor could ‘result in the ruin of a whole people’.176 An IAPF, and its capacity for aerial bombardment, meant putting the ‘most feared and hated means of warfare in the name of peace and the League of Nations’ and, as the Air League observed, it was ‘not for such bloody tasks that the League of Nations was formed’.177 As Figure 2.2, produced in Air Review, indicates, an IAPF – and the militarised form of internationalism this entailed – was both impractical and incongruous with the purpose of the League of Nations.
In response, the Air League was again accused of being a ‘reactionary and militaristic organisation’. ‘Nothing’, Air Review stressed, ‘could be further from the truth’.178 However, if the league wished to distance itself from such associations, the shift in tone towards an IAPF in late 1934 did little to assuage such criticism. As Chamier declared in November that year:
Recently a school of thought has arisen that seeks to persuade our people that the only answer is to take all potent weapons, and particularly the air weapon, away from the nations, and entrust the maintenance of the world’s security to a League of Nations Air Force, so strong as to be unchallengeable … Descriptions of this kind are misrepresentations based on misconception. When nations go to war the policeman is impotent: the resort must be to force, brutal and undisguised.179
Figure 2.2 ‘Join the International Air Force and bomb the world’
Alongside references to ‘brutal’ and ‘undisguised’ force, the Air League claimed that air control (the use of bombing aeroplanes on frontiers) was both ‘humane and effective’.180 Unsurprisingly, this stance was questioned by figures such as Noel-Baker, who noted that the ‘bombing plane, which is “humane and effective” in the hands of a national State … becomes the “most feared and hated means of war”, when it is a question of enabling the League of Nations to check aggressive use of civil aircraft’.181 Accordingly, the league’s statements were dismissed by Noel-Baker as ‘not a serious contribution to the discussion of any problem of Disarmament, or even of national defence’.182
Conclusion
The presence and popularity of internationalism, pacifism and anti-war sentiment in the interwar years – alongside calls for collective security and disarmament – posed myriad challenges for both the Navy and Air Leagues. In attempting to respond to such issues, the policies adopted by each organisation were, if only briefly, radically different from what had gone before. This reflected an endeavour to find a place in a society that certainly appeared inhospitable to certain elements of organised militarism. Fears of being labelled alarmists, scaremongers, jingoists and militarists were understandable concerns for both leagues. Yet, in gravitating towards more moderate policies, the character and ideological stance of each organisation appeared compromised. Ultimately, support for disarmament and shifts towards seemingly more pacific programmes were not long-standing features of either league’s work. After reverting to back to policies that advocated military strength, each league increasingly came into conflict with pacifist, anti-war and liberal internationalist streams of thought. Key LNU figures – despite their pacificist stance – all directly challenged Navy and Air League propaganda, as did many other anti-war and pacifist organisations. While it may have been the case that public confidence could not be gained by talking of ‘bombs and battleships’ alone, the apparent failures of collective security and disarmament as the 1930s progressed meant that both the Navy and Air Leagues once again focused on the promotion of military strength.
Notes
1. Parliamentary Archives, London, Papers of Sir Patrick Joseph Henry Hannon (Hannon Papers), HNN 3/2, Letter from Patrick Hannon to Colonel Walter Faber, 28 October 1921, 1.
2. NMM, White Papers, WHI/136, Letter from Arnold White to the Duke of Somerset, 9 January 1922, 1.
3. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 14 April 1931, 2.
4. P.R.C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1934), 273.
5. Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), Chapter 5.
6. Carolyn J. Kitching, Britain and the Geneva Disarmament Conference: A Study in International History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1.
7. Brett Holman, ‘World Police for World Peace: British Internationalism and the Threat of a Knock-out Blow from the Air, 1919–1945’, War in History, 17 (2010): 313.
8. Cited in David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18.
9. Kitching, Geneva Disarmament Conference, 7. Emphasis in original.
10. Edgerton, Warfare State, 58.
11. McCarthy, The British People, 134–5.
12. Andrew Webster, ‘The League of Nations, Disarmament and Internationalism’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 145–6; Michael Pugh, Liberal Internationalism: The Interwar Movement for Peace in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2.
13. McCarthy, The British People, 133; Edgerton, Warfare State.
14. See Duncan Redford, ‘Collective Security and Internal Dissent: The Navy League’s Attempts to Develop a New Policy towards British Naval Power Between 1919 and the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty’, History, 96 (2011): 48–67 on the Navy League’s response to the Washington Naval Conference as the exception.
15. Webster, ‘The League of Nations’, 146.
16. N.C. Fleming, ‘The Imperial Maritime League: British Navalism, Conflict, and the Radical Right, c.1907–1920’, War in History, 23 (2016): 300.
17. Joseph A. Maiolo, ‘Did the Royal Navy Decline Between the Two World Wars?’, The RUSI Journal, 159 (2014): 19; Redford, ‘Collective Security’, 48.
18. Cited in Redford, ‘Collective Security’, 49.
19. Cited in Redford, ‘Collective Security’, 60; 54.
20. The Times, 4 March 1921, 6.
21. Redford, ‘Collective Security’, 49.
22. N.H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy Volume 1: Rearmament Policy (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1976), 22.
23. Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, Volume 1: The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy, 1900–51 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 101; 87.
24. The Naval & Military Record and Royal Dockyards Gazette, 13 February 1924, 100.
25. The Navy, June 1924, 157.
26. Duncan Redford, ‘The Royal Navy, Sea Blindness and British National Identity’, in Maritime History and Identity: The Sea and Culture in the Modern World, ed. Duncan Redford (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 73.
27. NMM, MSY/6/2/6, NLAR 1924, 1–2; The Navy, May 1924, 132–9.
28. Joseph Maiolo, ‘Naval Armaments Competition Between the Two World Wars’, in Arms Races in International Politics: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Thomas Mahnken, Joseph Maiolo and David Stephenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 99; Kitching, Geneva Disarmament Conference, 22. Cf. Dick Richardson, The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy in the 1920s (London: Pinter, 1989), Chapter 9.
29. The Times, 2 July 1927, 8; 5 July 1927, 17.
30. The Navy, June 1927, 168; 165.
31. Pugh, Liberal Internationalism, 53.
32. Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 260.
33. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/26, NL Minute Book 1923–30, MEC, 24 September 1928, 2.
34. The Navy, October 1928, 275.
35. John H. Maurer and Christopher M. Bell, ‘Introduction’, in At the Crossroads Between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930, ed. John H. Maurer and Christopher M. Bell (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014), 1–2.
36. Daily Herald, 16 January 1930, 2.
37. NMM, MSY/6/2/6, NLAR 1930, 1–2.
38. The Navy, April 1930, 101–4; CAC, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill Papers (Churchill Papers), CHAR 9/91A-B, Speeches, Non House of Commons, 1930, Navy League Speech, 26 February 1930, 221–9.
39. The Times, 27 February 1930, 16.
40. BLPES, LNU 2/10, League of Nations Union Executive Committee Minutes, 1930–1, MEC, 6 March 1930, 5.
41. BLPES, LNU 1/2, Minutes of the Meetings of the General Council of the League of Nations Union, 1927–34, General Council Meeting, 26–27 June 1930, 60.
42. National Records of Scotland (NRS), Edinburgh, Papers of the Balfour Family of Whittingehame, East Lothian, Earls of Balfour, A.J. Balfour Papers (Balfour Papers), GD433/2/19/98, Letter from Winston Churchill to A.J. Balfour, 22 February 1930, 2.
43. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 6 November 1930, 4.
44. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 2 June 1927, 3.
45. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 6 February 1928, 1.
46. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 8 March 1928, 1–2. Emphasis in original.
47. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 7 October 1929, 2.
48. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 15 January 1930, 2.
49. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 7 October 1929, 2.
50. Air and Airways, May 1931, xix.
51. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 18 June 1930, 2.
52. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 18 June 1930, 2.
53. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 16 June 1931, 1.
54. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 16 June 1931, 5.
55. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen, 277.
56. McCarthy, The British People, 1.
57. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, All the Way (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1949), 170.
58. Ball State University, Archives and Special Collections (BSUASC), Muncie, Indiana, Sir Norman Angell Papers (Angell Papers), Box 56, Headway, June 1932, 105.
59. McCarthy, The British People, 141.
60. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/26, NL Minute Book, MEC, 3 November 1927, 1; The Navy, June 1932, 179.
61. CAC, Lloyd Papers, GBR/0014/GLLD 22/11, Lloyd Lecture to the Junior Carlton Club, 14 May 1931, 6.
62. CAC, Lloyd Papers, GBR/0014/GLLD 22/12, Magazine Cutting: The Listener, 2 November 1932, 625; 636.
63. The Times, 24 February 1928, 10.
64. British Library (BL), London, Cecil of Chelwood Papers (Cecil Papers), Correspondence and Papers, 1893–1953, Add MS 51165, Letter from P.R.C. Groves to Lord Robert Cecil, 21 December 1927, 1.
65. BL, Cecil Papers, Add MS 51165, Letter from Cecil to Groves, 23 December 1927, 1. Cf. BLPES, LNU 2/8, Revised Draft of a Reply from the LNU to the Air League, 30 January 1928, 1.
66. The Times, 17 July 1928, 12.
67. The Times, 19 July 1928, 12.
68. The Navy, June 1931, 172.
69. A charge again dismissed by Cecil. BL, Cecil Papers, Add MS 51172, Letter from Lily Yorke-Triscott to Cecil, 19 February 1936, 1; Letter from Cecil to Yorke-Triscott, 6 March 1936, 1.
70. See, for example, NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 4 June 1931, 3–4.
71. The Times, 27 January 1930, 8.
72. Headway, June 1931, 103.
73. Headway, July 1931, 123. Emphasis in original.
74. BSUASC, Angell Papers, Box 18, ‘All at Sea’; Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Archive of Gilbert Murray, MS. Gilbert Murray 211, f. 194, Letter from Gilbert Murray to the Editor of The Times, 28 January 1932.
75. Hansard, HC, 5th series, vol. 239, c. 1837 (2 June 1930); HC, 5th series, vol. 226, c. 1366 (14 March 1929).
76. Hansard, HC, 5th series, vol. 239, c. 1837 (2 June 1930).
77. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 5 May 1930, 1–2.
78. The Navy, December 1934, 354.
79. Air Review, September 1935, 87.
80. Waqar H. Zaidi, Technological Internationalism and World Order: Aviation, Atomic Energy, and the Search for International Peace, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 64.
81. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2013 ed.), 64–5.
82. On this issue, see Brett Holman, ‘The Shadow of the Airliner: Commercial Bombers and the Rhetorical Destruction of Britain, 1917–35’, Twentieth Century British History, 4 (2013): 495–517.
83. The Navy, March 1933, 77.
84. Martin Ceadel, ‘The “King and Country” Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators’, The Historical Journal, 22 (1979): 398; 408.
85. Air Review, August 1934, 75; The Navy, September 1933, 256.
86. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 1 February 1934, 3; BLPES, Records of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI), 5FWI/A/1/1/12, Box 11, NFWI Minute Book, MEC, 8 November 1933, 1–2.
87. BLPES, 5FWI/A/1/1/12, Box 11, NFWI Minute Book, MEC, 8 November 1933, 1.
88. Gervas Huxley, Lady Denman, C.B.E. 1884–1954 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 84; BLPES, 5FWI/A/1/1/12, Box 11, NFWI Minute Book, MEC, 13 June 1934, 2–3.
89. Huxley, Lady Denman, 85.
90. BLPES, 5FWI/A/1/1/12, Box 11, NFWI Minute Book, MEC, 13 June 1934, 3.
91. Daily Herald, 13 April 1934, 14.
92. Motherwell Times, 24 January 1930, 6.
93. The Derby Daily Telegraph, 6 February 1928, 5.
94. The Derby Daily Telegraph, 22 February 1928, 7.
95. Daily Herald, 13 March 1924, 4; CAC, Noel-Baker Papers, GBR/0014/NBKR 7/35/1, ‘Arms and Industry’, 1934, Newspaper Cutting: Daily Herald, 21 October 1933.
96. Daily Herald, 6 February 1930, 3.
97. Talbot C. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 187.
98. Bodleian Libraries, MS. Gilbert Murray 209, f. 37, Letter from Murray to Cecil, 21 October 1930; Daily Herald, 17 June 1933, 10.
99. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen, vii; Philip Noel-Baker, The Private Manufacture of Armaments: Volume I (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1936), 333.
100. Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 755.
101. Kitching, Geneva Disarmament Conference, 1.
102. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 14 July 1931, 4.
103. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 15 September 1931, 2.
104. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 8 December 1931, 2.
105. AL, AL Minute Book, MEC, 13 April 1932, 2.
106. AL, AL Minute Book, AGM, 13 July 1932, 1; 3.
107. Hansard, HC, 5th series, vol. 269, c. 1782 (2 November 1932).
108. RAF Museum, AC1998/23/43, ‘Air Disarmament’, 8 November 1932, 1–2.
109. N.C. Fleming, ‘Cabinet Government, British Imperial Security, and the World Disarmament Conference, 1932–1934’, War in History, 18 (2011): 63.
110. Fleming, ‘Cabinet Government’, 62–84.
111. RAF Museum, AC1998/23/43, ‘Air Disarmament’, 8 November 1932, 2.
112. Fleming, ‘Cabinet Government’, 67.
113. Noel-Baker, Private Manufacture of Armaments, 333–41.
114. Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms, Minutes of Evidence (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1935–6), 263.
115. Royal Commission, Minutes, 261.
116. Patrick Kyba, Covenants Without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931–1935 (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 33.
117. The Daily Telegraph, 15 May 1930, 8.
118. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 18 March 1930, 1.
119. The Navy, June 1933, 179.
120. Philip Noel-Baker, The First World Disarmament Conference 1932–1933 and Why it Failed (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979), 60–61.
121. The Navy, January 1933, 1.
122. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 4 February 1932, 1.
123. The Navy, November 1932, 317.
124. Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 129.
125. Edgerton, Warfare State, 15; TLA, LCC/PC/CHA/04/039, NLAR 1934, 1.
126. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 2 May 1935, 3.
127. The Navy, July 1935, 199; Joseph A. Maiolo, The Royal Navy and Nazi Germany, 1933–39: A Study in Appeasement and the Origins of the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 35–6.
128. The Times, 27 June 1935, 8.
129. Maiolo, The Royal Navy, 2; Maiolo, ‘Did the Royal Navy Decline’, 22.
130. Maiolo, ‘Naval Armaments’, 106.
131. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 329. Italy declined to sign the treaty until sanctions over its invasion of Ethiopia ended.
132. Maiolo, ‘Naval Armaments’, 106.
133. The Times, 30 October 1935, 7. Emphasis in original.
134. See, for example, NMM, MSY/6/6/1/3, ‘Watch the Naval Conference’, Pamphlet, 1935.
135. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 10 October 1935, 3.
136. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 4 December 1935, 4.
137. The Navy, January 1936, 2.
138. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 5 February 1936, 7.
139. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 337.
140. NMM, MSY/6/3/3/27, NL Minute Book, MEC, 26 March 1936, 2.
141. TLA, LCC/PC/CHA/04/039, NLAR 1936, 1.
142. TLA, LCC/PC/CHA/04/039, NLAR 1936, 1.
143. See Zaidi, Technological Internationalism; Holman, ‘World Police’; Pugh, Liberal Internationalism, 69–89 and, for an earlier account, Roger Beaumont, Right Backed by Might: The International Air Force Concept (Westport, CT; London: Praeger Publishers, 2001).
144. Holman, ‘World Police’, 313.
145. Zaidi, Technological Internationalism, 7.
146. Air and Airways, June 1933, [110]; July 1933, xxx.
147. Norman Angell, The Menace to Our National Defence (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934); David Davies, The Problem of the Twentieth Century (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1930) and Philip Noel-Baker, ‘The International Air Police Force’, in Challenge to Death, ed. Storm Jameson (London: Constable & Co. Ltd, 1934), 206–39.
148. Noel-Baker, ‘The International Air Police Force’, 214.
149. Noel-Baker, ‘The International Air Police Force’, 231. Emphasis in original.
150. Noel-Baker, ‘The International Air Police Force’, 231.
151. Holman, ‘World Police’, 332.
152. Pugh, Liberal Internationalism, 88.
153. Clement R. Attlee, An International Police Force (London: The Labour Party, 1934); Holman, ‘World Police’, 321.
154. Holman, ‘World Police’, 314; 320–21.
155. The New Commonwealth, January 1934, 40; Norman G. Thwaites, The Menace of Aerial Gas Bombardment (London: The New Commonwealth Society, 1934), 19; 21.
156. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1939); Holman, ‘World Police’, 319.
157. Cited in Holman, ‘World Police’, 319.
158. Holman, ‘World Police’, 319.
159. New Commonwealth, The Aims and Objects of the New Commonwealth (London: The New Commonwealth Society, 1932), 7.
160. Pugh, Liberal Internationalism, 84.
161. Pugh, Liberal Internationalism, 87.
162. Cited in Holman, ‘World Police’, 320–21.
163. Zaidi, Technological Internationalism, 83–4.
164. Zaidi, Technological Internationalism, 78–9; BLPES, LNU 1/3, Minutes of the Meetings of the General Council of the LNU, 1935–8, General Council Meeting, 3–5 July 1935, 61.
165. Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978), 106; 108.
166. Edgerton, Warfare State, 284.
167. Matthew Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
168. Edgerton, Warfare State, 56.
169. Michael Pugh, ‘Policing the World: Lord Davies and the Quest for Order in the 1930s’, International Relations, 16 (2002): 97.
170. Pugh, ‘Policing the World’, 90.
171. The Aeroplane, 22 August 1934, 213.
172. AL, AL Minute Book, AGM, 5 July 1933, 1–2.
173. Air Review, March 1934, 17–18.
174. Air Review, June 1934, 82–5.
175. Air Review, June 1934, 87.
176. The Times, 21 June 1934, 10.
177. Air Review, November 1934, 15.
178. Air Review, October 1934, 14.
179. Air Review, November 1934, 14.
180. Air Review, April 1934, 11–12.
181. Noel-Baker, Private Manufacture of Armaments, 338.
182. Noel-Baker, Private Manufacture of Armaments, 339.