1917-1919: The Implications for Britain

Abstract

In I917 the Allied Powers came within an ace of military defeat; by April the German submarine campaign was eating deep into Britain's merchant shipping resources; in April, too, was launched the catastrophic French offensive on the Aisne, in November came the Italian disaster at Caporetto and the Russian retirement from the war; at the same time Haig's Third Battle of Ypres, designed to relieve the French, was petering out with little of consequence having been achieved; and it would plainly be months before the United States, who entered the war in April, would be making an effective contribution. Yet by the following October the Central Powers were asking President Wilson for peace on the basis of his Fourteen Points speech of 8 January I918. The effect of this struggle was to plant in the British mind an abiding fear of war in Europe and of involvement in rival alliance systems which were thought to have dragged the nations into the maelstrom. Hence the dominant aspiration both of British policymakers and of public opinion in the inter-war period was to prevent at all costs a return to the 1917 situation, and to do so by avoiding the division of Europe into rival blocs; by refusing specific commitments to defend the European status quo in detail, which might touch off again the bloodbaths of I914-I8; and by striving for the reduction of land forces which suffered the haemorrhages of those years and the abolition of the submarine which had all but severed Britain's vital supply lines from abroad in I9I7. At the same time, the fact that the disasters of I917 had been surprisingly reversed by the autumn of I9I8 meant that the full extent of the French defeat on the Aisne was never properly appreciated. Considering the intact condition of the German army at the end of the war and the unravaged condition of Ger-