British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars

Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. Blue hard cover with gilt titles on spine. Boards are bright and clean. Contents tight and clean. No inscriptions or markings. Dust jacket is price clipped with just minor edge-wear.
This study seeks to fill a gap in the bibliography concerning the making of Britain's strategy and its relationship with foreign policy in the inter-war period. The author focuses on the role of the Army, starved of new equipment, and relegated to the duties of imperial policing. He contends that a major lesson of the First World War - t hat an Expeditionary Force was essential to uphold Britain's vital strategic interests in Western Europe - went unheeded until it was too late. Instead the army was allowed to run down to a deplorable extent in the 1920s and it was specifically instructed not to prepare for continental war. With Hitler's rise to power its possible role in Europe was exhaustively debated but a definite decision was repeatedly deferred, and the Government adopted a policy of `limited liability' which virtually denied the Army a continental role. This policy was only abandoned, under the pressure of events, in February 1939. The author argues that it was this policy, rather than the alleged conservatism and incompetence of its professional leaders which was responsible for the Army's unprepared state in 1939-1940. It also emerges, however, that the General Staff held ambivalent attitudes to the continental commitment, and that the Chiefs of Staff were badly handicapped in confronting politicians by bitter inter-services rivalries. One the continental role had been belatedly accepted, the War Minister and his military advisers made heroic efforts to make up for lost time in the final months before the outbreak of war. The author goes on to discuss the character and ethos of the Army, and the vital issue of mechanization which, it is argued, was fatally affected by the uncertainty over the Army's role and by its poor production base...

This study seeks to fill a gap in the bibliography concerning the making of Britain's strategy and its relationship with foreign policy in the inter-war period. The author focuses on the role of the Army, starved of new equipment, and relegated to the duties of imperial policing. He contends that a major lesson of the First World War - t hat an Expeditionary Force was essential to uphold Britain's vital strategic interests in Western Europe - went unheeded until it was too late. Instead the army was allowed to run down to a deplorable extent in the 1920s and it was specifically instructed not to prepare for continental war. With Hitler's rise to power its possible role in Europe was exhaustively debated but a definite decision was repeatedly deferred, and the Government adopted a policy of `limited liability' which virtually denied the Army a continental role. This policy was only abandoned, under the pressure of events, in February 1939. The author argues that it was this policy, rather than the alleged conservatism and incompetence of its professional leaders which was responsible for the Army's unprepared state in 1939-1940. It also emerges, however, that the General Staff held ambivalent attitudes to the continental commitment, and that the Chiefs of Staff were badly handicapped in confronting politicians by bitter inter-services rivalries. One the continental role had been belatedly accepted, the War Minister and his military advisers made heroic efforts to make up for lost time in the final months before the outbreak of war. The author goes on to discuss the character and ethos of the Army, and the vital issue of mechanization which, it is argued, was fatally affected by the uncertainty over the Army's role and by its poor production base...