British Politics and Strategy, 1914-1915
Asquith, the historical verdict goes, was a man who would have made and did in fact make a perfectly respectable peace-time prime minister, but whose nerves and tendency to delegate rather than bear responsibility rendered him unfit for war-time leadership. Whatever the degree of fairness or malignancy in this judgement, it is true that Asquith failed to halt the slow implosion of the Liberal party over the "Russia issue".
The radical ministers, clustered around the persons of John Simon, John Burns, Richard Haldane, and John Morley, may have been willing under certain circumstances to participate in a European war. A nakedly aggressive policy of German eastern imperialism or a clear signal from Austria-Hungary that it intended to precipitate a European war may have convinced the radicals that Tsarist Russia was indeed a lesser evil to imperial Germany. However, the Second Balkan War and the subsequent behavior of Serbia during the Albanian crisis awoke in the radicals that traditional sense of British Liberal moralism which led to the fiasco of the Crimean War and undergirded all elite criticism of British Imperial projects and interventionism. The Romanian affair only compounded matters, nearly leding to the resignation of Burns and Morley from the government. However, the breaking point was Russia's attempt to leverage the threat of Franco-British intervention against the Central Powers to wage a localized war against the Ottomans. This stirred up the old fear of a Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean, and all of a sudden the buried ghosts of the 19th century emerged seemingly unperturbed by their half-decade slumber.
In the terms of Parliamentary power politics, the radicals were playing a losing hand. They could not on the best of days muster more than half the party to the anti-war cause; fomenting a split was sure to be viewed negatively by the institutionalist centre of the party and its power-brokers. More concretely, the only real allies the radicals had in the event of a split were in the labor party and the pro-home rule deputies from Ireland; as these were not sufficient to secure a Parliamentary majority, a radical revolt would inevitably lead to some sort of coalitional government from which they were excluded.
What, then, was the purpose of the revolt? While it is tempting to understand the revolt of the radicals as a matter of principle rather than politics, it is clear in retrospect that the true mind behind it, Sir Richard Haldane, had a lucid long-term political strategy in mind. The radicals reasoned that, given the amount of dissension which had already roiled the cabinet, Asquith was not a candidate that would lead a war-time cabinet for any length of time. He would be replaced by a figure with a clearer record of support for war; such a figure would attempt to side-line the radicals, and, if they governed in coalition with the conservatives, they would be able to do so.
The radicals' reasoned that their decision was not whether to sacrifice principle on the altar of party unity, but whether to expend their remaining political capital to support a failing government or to go unabashedly into the opposition, with all the advantages and opportunities for moral opprobrium and denunciation which that offered. By going into the opposition, the radicals' hoped to become the "conscience of the party", to seize the mantle of leadership when it inevitably presented itself, and to reforge Asquith's coalition once the mistakes of the party's right had been made manifest.
The pivotal figure in the new coalition government was David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer under Asquith. Widely considered to hail from the liberal wing of the party, his reputation for even-handedness during the July Crisis and Asquith's increasing delegation of executive responsibilities saw him take on much of the actual day-to-day business of running government. His decision to align with the pro-war wing of the Liberals enraged the radicals, who treated it as an act of supreme political opportunism, though the recollections of some of the participants in the cabinet meetings of July attest that Lloyd George felt moved by a sense of duty and honor to come to the defense of Britain's allies.
When the prospect of war grew more likely in late July, Lloyd George and a number of sympathetic ministers from the Asquith government held informal talks with Bonar Law and the conservatives. Bonar Law, in private conversation a modest and self-effacing individual, initially suggested that Lloyd George head the new government. It was worried that such a move would strike too much of a last-minute palace coup, however, and the amount of support each party could realistically provide to the new government in parliament militated in favor of a conservative prime minister. Regardless, the new government would be a truly coalitional one.
Lloyd George stayed on as the chancellor of the exchequer, providing the impression of continuity and conservative graciousness to the general public. Winston Churchill, one of the most vocal of the pro-war liberals, was permitted to remain as the First Lord of the Admiralty. Arthur Balfour, the previous conservative Prime Minister, became the new home secretary, while his colleague Bonar Law became the Prime Minister and de facto co-leader of the government along with Lloyd George.
The matters of the war secretary and secretary of foreign affairs were most contentious. H.H. Asquith had previously served as both war minister and prime minister; the desire to create the broadest government possible had led Lloyd George and Bonar Law to offer him the opportunity to stay on as the war minister. Asquith, however, deeply despondent at the time from the failure of his government, refused the position, instead recommending Herbert Kitchener, a national war hero and Consul-General of Egypt. The non-partisan nature of this recommendation struck a chord in Westminster; Lloyd George and Bonar Law set aside their skepticism of the old officer and invited him to participate in government.
The Foreign ministry presented the largest problem. Few individuals could match the knowledge and expertise of Edward Grey, and even fewer were willing to take over the foreign ministry at a time of international crisis. Nonetheless, the July crisis had seriously harmed the man's reputation by associating him with the waffling, indecisive policy of the Asquith government. Several prominent conservatives felt that, had he taken a stronger line in defense of the entente, Germany would not have begun a general mobilization against Russia with such reckless haste.
In the end, Bonar Law was able to mobilize discontent with Grey to bring on Lord Cuzson of Kendleston, an ardent conservative and expert in Central and Near Asia, as a minister without portfolio and eminence grise on British foreign policy, limiting Grey's control over the foreign policy ministry. He was also able to secure the appointment of archconservative Austen Chamberlin as the new Secretary of State for India. In return, Edward Grey remained as the Foreign Minister, and David Lloyd George was able to have Lord Milner, a close ally of his, appointed as a second minister without portfolio.
The actual business of coalition government was complicated by the archaic practices of British cabinet government. A great deal of Lloyd George's power as chancellor of the exchequer had derived from the tight monetary constraints placed on the budget of different cabinet heads and the chancellor's role in enforcing those constraints; with the rush of money coming into the British government through credit and the disorder of the first months of coalition government, effective control of the country soon flowed outward from the principal figures associated with the new government to the lesser known heads of different departments.
This was not helped by the traditional practice of cabinet meetings, which called for the attendance of the entirety of the cabinet in a single room. A great deal of the time of such early meetings were taken up with interdepartmental rivalries, bureaucratic matters, and bookkeeping. To correct this, Lloyd George and Bonar Law started informally convening a "war council" composed of themselves, Herbert Kitchener, Lord Curzon, and Lord Milner, with the irregular participation of Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, and Lord Balfour. The practice of the war council was finalized later in 1915 with a distinction drawn between "permanent", "invited", and "standing" members, with only a three quarters majority of the first required for the council to be considered in session.
The primary questions confronting the war council at the beginning of 1915 concerned the allocation of British national resources and the distribution of British military power. Along the first axis, the ministers were divided between the traditionalists, who wished to see Britain play a primarily financial role, funding its allies, coordinating their strategy, and depriving the Central Powers of trade, and the continentalists, who were committed to an expansion of the British Army into an offensive fighting-force. The continentalist position would require more radical changes to British domestic policy: a thorough-going army expansion would likely require a draft, and if Britain was to continue providing significant funds to its allies along with equipping its enlarged army, an increase in the income tax and a broadening in its fairly narrow base (before the war, around 2% of the population) would be required.
The second axis was divided by the easterners and westerners. The former advocated for operations against the Ottoman Empire. They were composed of a motley crew of Central Asian experts from the high days of Russophobia who worried that the Ottoman Sultan might incite a revolt among the Muslim population of British India, Russophilic conservatives who hoped that seizing the Dardenelle straits would allow Britain to more easily route supplies to the eastern front, and liberals skeptical of sending more men to die in the western meatgrinder. The westerners believed that the Ottoman theatre was a distraction, and advocated instead for a defensive strategy of reinforcing the lines in the west until Britain could complete an expansion of its army to allow for renewed offensives in 1916.
The war council spun off a number of "committees", typically co-chaired by a single member of the war council in concert with a minister from outside the council. These committees attempted to address pressing issues of policy that the war council felt it did not have sufficient information to resolve, and in large part determined British war strategy in 1915. An eastern and continentalist strategy was decided upon, perhaps the worst nightmare of the fragile Ottoman Empire, which was already reeling from the Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia. With the consensus still not present for a full conscription of single males, Parliament passed a bill heavily incentivizing young, single men to join the army by raising the pay of soldiers and offering anyone who enlisted in the next year "Early buyer" benefits that would allow them to serve significantly less time in the event of a future draft.
The "Dardanelles Committee", eventually renamed the "Turkish Committee", originally pushed for an attack on the straits of Dardanelles to open up another supply route to Russia. Despite the insistence of Winston Churchill on the viability of an assault on the Gallipoli peninsula, Bonar Law, a cautious man, repeatedly rejected the plans for a Dardanelle campaign. Instead, after much internal diplomacy and negotiation, a more modest plan was drafted, calling for the landing of British troops behind the 150,000 man strong Yildirim Army Group in the Sinai Peninsula. As a sop to the charismatic but intemperate Churchill, he was given control over the details of the operation in return for consenting to drop the matter of the Gallipoli Campaign for the remainder of the year.
The new offensive would see 85,000 British troops land in Gaza over the first two weeks of August and advance on Ottoman positions in the Sinai peninsula. The Ottoman soldiers were almost immediately trapped between the freshly landed troops and the advancing soldiers in the south of Britain's Egypt expeditionary force. With no means of re-supply, a breakout attempt was made on August 19th, only to see 8,000 Turkish troops slaughtered by British machine guns in the mostly flat, desert terrain. Around 25,000 did manage to make it through the British lines, which were not sufficient to cover the entire area, but around 70,000 Turkish troops were captured, with the Yildirim Army broken as an effective fighting force. Over the next month and a half, the British Army advanced up the Levant without much effective opposition, only pausing once they reached Aleppo, which had been reinforced by a hastily raised Turkish army.
This was a truly spectacular victory, one of the first of its kind in the British Army. It quickly vaulted Churchill into the position of national hero, despite the fact that the operation itself was far from his first choice, with its basic strategic logic designed more by the British Army than Churchill himself. It also had the effect of discrediting Kitchener, who had remained indecisive about the notion of an attack further south; the success of an operation so close to "Kitchener's domain" without the officer's actual participation led some in the British government to doubt the man's indispensability, despite his populararity amongst the general public.
The arrival of Ottoman reinforcements in Aleppo and the blows to Russia in the east prompted the British government to reassess its policy. While there was a broad consensus that a formal draft had to be implemented, Churchill and a number of other easterners wished to aid Russia through opening the supply corridor in the black sea region with a renewal of the Dardanelles plan, now greatly bolstered by the aura of invincibility surrounding Churchill himself. Unfortunately for the young sea admiral, the basic contours of the war had changed; despite the catastrophic battle-field losses, Russia's munitions industries were beginning to come alive, rendering the need to open a second avenue of supply less urgent. In the wake of the Polish campaign, the Russian government believed that its most pressing need was time to recruit the man-power and create the defensive works needed to prevent future German offensives; the only sure means of buying such time was a Franco-British offensive that would force the Germans to transfer troops to the west. With the strategic rationale for the Dardanelles campaign thus undercut, Churchill found himself slowly being iced out decisions right after the moment of his greatest triumph, a slight that he would not soon forget...
