Abstract
Field-Marshal Montgomery had no doubt that the British army was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe in September 1939, and that successive governments in the inter-war period were to blame. He pointed to their belief in the 1930s that Britain’s contribution to a future war with Germany should be made mainly through air and sea power, and remarked: ‘how any politician could imagine that, in a world war, Britain could avoid sending her army to fight alongside the French passes all understanding.r1 No politician did more to delay the commitment to send a British expeditionary force to the continent than Neville Chamberlain, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937 and Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940.2 There was no Ministry of Defence in the 1930s, and policy was laid down by the Cabinet after discussions by ministers in Cabinet committees or in the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), which brought together ministers and the professional heads of the armed forces (the Chiefs of Staff) and senior civil servants. It was Chamberlain who persuaded the Cabinet in 1934 to give a lower priority to the army than to the Royal Air Force (RAF). It was he who initiated a review of the defence departments’ programmes that resulted in a Cabinet decision at the end of 1937 that the army’s first priority should be the air defence of Great Britain, and that the expeditionary force, or field force, as it was then known, should be equipped on a scale sufficient only for operations in defence of British territories and interests outside Europe.
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Notes
Viscount Montgomery, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (London: Collins, 1958), pp. 49–50.
B.J.C. McKercher, ‘Deterrence and the European Balance of Power: The Field Force and British Grand Strategy, 1934–1938’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), pp. 98–131. McKercher is primarily concerned to challenge the arguments of Greg Kennedy and Keith Neilson that historians have focused too much on the threat to British power from Germany rather than Japan — see
G.C. Kennedy, Anglo-American Strategic Relations and the Far East, 1933–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2002) and
K. Neilson, ‘The Defence Requirements SubCommittee, British Strategic Foreign Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 651–84. Lack of space precludes me from engaging in that debate.
Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 114.
Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain, a Biography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 238–9.
David Dilks, ‘We Must Hope for the Best and Prepare for the Worst: The Prime Minister, the Cabinet and Hitler’s Germany, 1937–1939’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 73 (1987), pp. 309–52.
N.H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy (London: HMSO, 1976), pp. 610–13, 620–2, 625, 653–7.
Brian Bond (ed.), Chief of Sta fff The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, vol. I (London: Leo Cooper, 1972), 18 December 1933, p. 29.
Andrew Boyle, Trenchard, Man of Vision (London: Collins, 1962), p. 681.
Self, Neville Chamberlain, p. 238, cf. G.C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–1939 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), p. 123.
Robert Self (ed.), The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, vol. 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 77.
Brian Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 246;
Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought (London: Cassell, 1977), pp. 91–4.
Cabinet conclusions, 29 September 1937, CAB 23/89; Sir John Kennedy, The Business of War (London: Hutchinson, 1957), p. 43.
R.J. Minney, The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha (London: Collins, 1960), p. 54.
Basil Liddell Hart, Europe in Arms (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), pp. 78–9.
Memoranda by Inskip and Hankey, 23 Nov. 1937, T 161/855/S.48431. For rising cost of aircraft see G.C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 117.
Jean Delmas, ‘La perception de la puissance militaire française’, in René Girault and Robert Frank (eds.), La Puissance en Europe 1938–1940 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1984), pp. 129, 133.
Peter Dennis, Decision by Default: Peacetime Conscription and British Defence 1919–39 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 206–7, 212–21.
Manfred Messerschmidt, ‘German Military Effectiveness between 1919 and 1939’, in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray (eds), Military Effectiveness, vol. II (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 227.
J. P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 260–5, 274–9, 282–90, 297–307.
David French, Raising Churchill’s Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 156–66, 174–8.
Richard Overy, Air Power, Armies and the War in the West, 1940 (Colorado: US Air Force Academy, 1989);
Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, vol. I (London: HMSO, 1961), pp. 125, 129, 178–9, 309–11.
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Peden, G.C. (2014). Chamberlain, the British Army and the ‘Continental Commitment’. In: Murfett, M.H. (eds) Shaping British Foreign and Defence Policy in the Twentieth Century. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431493_6
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