BURYING THE MYTH OF APPEASEMENT: ARMS CAUSE WARS NOT PREVENT THEM.

How industrial militarism got underway – the pioneers.

A world dominant political ideology grows like a river flowing. Tributaries join. but they start small. After the great Napoleonic Wars there was a lull in arms production, as nations recovered from twenty five years of horrific European War. But nothing stands still. The streams start flowing again.  Industrialisation was underway, and some manufacturers had already worked at semi-industrial weapons. Now iron began to be mass produced and some steel was made in Sheffield and elsewhere. Becoming a militarized world did not happen by accident. As industrialization took place, it was planned by those who wanted to sell manufactured weapons. The early figures like Krupp and Armstrong were pioneer entrepreneurs from the 1830s onwards who set out to forge a business. Profits came with economies of scale, and they set out to increase scale. They sold arms, initially at home, and then soon throughout the world. From Japan to Paraguay, states were persuaded by political vanity, bribery and scares to purchase arms. If one ruler bought, their neighbours could be persuaded to buy as well. Gradually, politicians were taught that force was the name of the game, force against national force. The great national rivalries of the 19^th century were weaponized. Autocratic leaders had long surrounded themselves with soldiers, and the European imperial powers were set to fight across the globe, so there were open doors, but these pressures were not allowed to melt away with more democracy. People did not normally want war; it killed them. But by pushing people towards nationalism and patriotism, the politicians could be persuaded to back militarism and the arms companies made their pitch in season and out of season. Arms were the rationale of the empires developed by the Belgians, the Dutch, the British, the French and the Russians and of national rivalry.  States built up their armed forces, went looking for countries to control as colonies like Alexander the Great or Caesar, and then probably went to war, and also did not trust their neighbours.

Weapons went to a series of wars in China in the early 19^th century. Between 1939-42 there was the first Opium War, fought by the British for their right to make the Chinese into opium addicts from supplies grown in India. The British won and took over Hong Kong and imposed reparations of 21 million dollars. The internal weakness of China led eight years later to the Taiping Rebellion, one of the most ignored wars in history. It killed perhaps 30 million Chinese and lasted from 1850-64. The rebellion was led by a fanatic with weird western and Christian ideas. It led to the Second Opium War of 1856-60 and the western powers, especially Britain and France, used cannon on land and ships, rifles, guns and swords to defeat the Chinese who then began to use western weapons. China, Egypt, South America, India, Turkey – all over the world – markets opened up for cannon, rifles, swords and guns feeding an international trade system. The Crimean War of 1853-6 bumped up weapons sales yet more and the US Civil War got arms and naval sales moving on further. Glasgow’s naval provision for the South extended the war, and Birmingham-made guns went to both sides, while the US gunmakers, already practicing on Indians, expanded further. So, one way and another industrial arms had arrived as a permanent industry involved in international trade by the mid 19^th century. Factories developed. Designs improved. Weapons strengthened. Firing speeded up. Penetration was improved. Weapons were steel. Engines powered new ships. Armour was stronger, and explosions were bigger. The question was, how much could this industry expand?

There was an ideological conflict around weapons. Christianity was fairly systematically against killing and war and strong peace movements grew after 1815 to close down weapons and war in Europe and the United States. Christian missionaries had a record of nonviolent engagement with different national cultures around the world learning local languages and working at schools and hospitals. On the other hand, the British elite learned Latin and looked to Rome in their public schools to understand how to run a similar empire with British made weapons. The arms companies fitted this model. They talked national rivalry, provided the wherewithal to fight “and win” with industrial scale arms production, and saw their profits grow. Gradually, some politicians adopted this view too. For example, there was a tension in Britain between Gladstone’s Christian anti-imperialism and the commitment to empire of Palmerston and Disraeli. The empires grew and with them the escalation of industrial arms sales, for the Maxim gun ensured that the natives could be mown down and the Empire rule. More and more weapons found their way around the world.

The Great War was about weapons, not territory.

The pace of militarization quickened. Arms companies had strong links into government. Bribery was practiced to open up markets in Japan and elsewhere. Companies like Krupp, Armstrong, Vickers, Schneider, Mauser, Skoda, BSA, Nobel, Du Pont and Remington became among the biggest industrial companies on the planet. They conversed with Prime Ministers and Emperors, and promoting arms to big and small nations. Basil Zacharoff, who became the richest man in Europe, collected contracts in armfuls for Vickers, and others, was given a knighthood and consorted with kings. Arms “races” and wars became normal, and by 1914 there were four great arms races pushing Europe to the edge. Each state was watching the others, and their military build-up, for a decade or so. The British like to see themselves as the good guy, but around this time we were seen in Europe as an unprincipled imperial aggressor; we had side-stepped the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to fight the Boer War for gold and diamonds. That War saw the first Concentration Camp with thousands of deaths. British arms companies had sold weapons to Japan, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia and many other countries priming them for conflict. We led the arms business, especially in warship production around the world. The arms companies and warship manufacturers stoked fear to up their sales; the Germans became the Huns and the popular newspapers scared the public with silly talk of invasions. The military lobby defeated and controlled politicians from Gladstone onwards to expand sales, especially in the great “Dreadnought Scare” of 1908-10. Even Churchill, the great Navy Man, acknowledged that this was a false scare. The militarists developed the first propaganda machines, pushed their agenda in newspapers, Parliament, through pressure groups, and using tame politicians. This contribution of Britain and its militarists towards the Great War has never been properly acknowledged. WW1 was about weapons, not about invasion, territory, trade or ideology. That so few acknowledge this shows how successful the arms companies have been in their business. They sell the stuff that generates wars in the name of defence and peace, and few question them, certainly far fewer than did then.

The military competition finally pushed over the edge, into the greatest war of all. The trigger was weapons-inspired. Austro-Hungary‘s Skoda had tried to sell arms to Serbia, but failed. It was miffed, but Serbia would not buy Skoda arms because Austro-Hungary was her most likely enemy. Then the so-called Pig War ensued between 1906-08, and, with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the Austrian Empire was ready to issue an ultimatum and then invade Serbia partly because it had not played game on the arms trade. This was the starting gun for all those other arms races which existed – France-Germany, Germany-Russia, England-Germany and Russia/Serbia-Austro Hungary – and these spread into the Great War. When the Kaiser decided for war, Krupp was at his side, and the French were sure their field gun was a winner. The production of arms then exploded in the greatest output of weapons the world had ever seen, many times over. Perhaps ten millions tons of shells were used. After the Great War with four years of maximum production and growth, these companies controlled the biggest industry in the world. People focus on the events of the Great War, and even on the weapons – gas, shells, rifles, bayonets, early tanks and planes but they have been taught to ignore the companies that produced them, even though they were really the only ones profiting from the War. Militarism became the world lead industry, with vast profits, and these vast companies would not disappear.

The Buried History of Disarmament.

There were many thoughtful leaders before the Great War who understood the danger of the arms industry and militarism. They included Gladstone, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, President Wilson, Pope Benedict XV, Bertha von Suttner, Frédéric Passy, Jeanette Rankin, Ramsey McDonald, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, Maude Roydon, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Fried, Jane Addams and many more, an awesome list. They had waged a widespread and articulate war against war, militarism and the arms trade. A shaped, principled understanding of Christian peace and disarmament spread through Europe and North America.

During the early years of the century the pacifists identified the escalation of arms and pointing out the stupidity of teaching mass murder as some kind of patriotic good. They warned about the destructiveness of war and the arrogance of rulers and the armaments industrialists. But these powerful arguments did not win. Jingoism, a quick stirring up of popular warlike patriotism, won the day in 1914 in Britain, Germany, France and Russia. It was the time when propaganda entered the modern world. The disarming people also faced aggressive opposition. In France Jean Jaures was shot to get rid of his stand against war in 1914. Keir Hardie, the Labour Leader, became a hate figure because he opposed the war, while everybody went off to fight in a euphoria of presumed success. When the War actually came, its horrors mounted month on month. The militarists promised it would be over by Christmas, but they were nearly four years out. The Pope said the war was a failure of civilization. He suggested a Christmas Truce which even looked like holding with the troops, who quickly worked out they preferred football in no man’s land to killing one another. But the generals broke the truce and the carnage went on and on with millions of shells, and then gas, as soldiers crossed the front to kill and be killed. It ground on in the trenches and mud in a series of battles which achieved little and were for little. Millions now understood the arguments of the pacifists that war was dumb and nationalist jingoism was false. The world saw the reality of mass murder and the common sense of disarmament. This was a vast, articulate, world-wide recognition, and it had the militarists with the bitter fruits of their labour out in the open.

The Reality of the Great War.

Let us dwell with that War. Superficially, it was about who won, and the patriotic nationalism was present on all sides. But soon no-one had won. Everyone was bogged down in the trenches with young soldiers dying at about six thousand a day. The War Poets said it in verse, but everybody knew it in doggerel. “Oh what a lovely War! Up to your waist in water, Up to your eyes in slush, Using the kind of language, That makes the sergeant blush.” And it was worse than that. Russia imploded with about three million deaths, bodies lying about everywhere. Germany eventually ran out of equipment and the people and its fighting collapsed in 1918 into internal horror; look at the paintings of Georg Grotz. The United States had moved from supplying weapons and explosives to engagement. It had it relatively easy, because it only had 117,497 deaths and 204,002 injured, a light burden compared to other countries. Overall, some twenty million died, a further twenty million were injured and another twenty million traumatized. The United States entered the War partly because Britain and France (and Russia, who defaulted) owed so much through buying weapons that the US had to make sure they would win and therefore repay their debts. In turn Germany needed to pay reparations to Britain and France in order to pay the Americans. These debts and destruction crippled the economy of the world through to the Thirties and helped create the next World War. The historic scale of the tragedy cannot be exaggerated.

Yet it was the personal reality of it which bit. People had seen for themselves state murder and being murdered. The reality of War was horrific with bodies in mud and craters across the horizon. There was gas with soldiers drowning in mucus. There were screaming men with missing limbs and throbbing open arteries. Murder destroys far more than the person who dies, and destroyed people lived on in their millions.   Really, everyone knew that this was the travesty of civilization. The sacred language of patriotic sacrifice did not cover the reality of bodies as fodder to war. This must never happen again. Yet, it was worse still. The returning soldiers carried “Spanish” flu around the world and fifty to a hundred million more people, weakened by the war, died all across the globe. Loved bodies in coffins stretched to the horizon. Cemeteries were like fields of white dot mourning. Two great tidal waves of grief traversed the globe touching all those mourning far more than a hundred million dead and injured. We now call the war pain, then called shell shock,  PTSD – full of rage, silent, sleepless, raw at the inhumanity they had seen, driving to suicide. Often, the men took it out on their women – another brutal undercurrent to the War. The scale of the trauma tragedy is summed up in the fact that Hitler was merely one of them. Then, there were frozen winters without food or resources, or strong, young people, or fuel and shelter in Russia and Eastern Europe. The suffering cannot be imagined. So, millions just tried to cope, but underneath most of them knew War must be addressed and ended. The statesmen of the era were chastened. War had no-where to go. Those who had bought into chauvinism and the arms trade knew Weapons Kill, because their beloved son was dead. As Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary in the decade before the War, the best placed authority, said afterwards, “The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.” There was widespread repentance at this false trust in militarism.

Beware the late-coming historians. They say, the phrase – “The War to End All Wars” was idealistic, not really believed. It was not. Millions, and most of the statesmen involved, were deadly serious about it. Yet, this clear understanding was defeated in a mere twenty-five years; and few grasped how it had been defeated because the militarists learned how to hide and disappear from public view. We are taught that the Second World War was caused by Hitler, and we must arm to be strong, but this involves speeding through twenty years and misrepresenting the history of the era drastically. For the Second World War to occur the international arms manufacturers had to be back in the driving seat, as they were just before Hitler came to power. They were determined that the Great War would not be the War to End All Wars and they were successful in Britain, the United States, France, the USSR, Japan and Italy, not just in Germany. Their strategy during the interwar period was crucial and is largely unexamined. It is the real reason for the Second World War.

The Inter-War Disarmament Movement. 

The arms companies faced a formidable foe. Another generation had emerged after 1918 who knew war was wrong because they were in it. In Britain they included Vera Brittain, Lord Robert Cecil, Clem Attlee, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, Lord Edward Grey, R.H.Tawney, Charles Raven, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Hobhouse,  Charles Buxton, Philip Noel-Baker, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Evelyn Underhill, Siegfried Sassoon, Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson  and even the main architect of Britain’s War effort,  Lloyd George – a formidable list. Earlier Pacifists including Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and other groups who added further weight to the cause. In the United States, Jane Addams was joined by others including the later President Hoover, Frank B. Kellogg, Dorothy Detzer, Mary Dingman, Mary Woolley, Helen Keller and a list of other women pacifists who have been ignored in much subsequent history. They gave a critical perspective on male militarism which rocked American politics. The Quaker, Mennonite, Catholic Workers and other Christian groups were resolutely for peace. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was a potent organization for peace principles.

So, this was no fringe movement. These groups had support in excess of ten million through the twenties into the thirties.  They had seen the problem of militarism in the raw and were determined to do something about it.  They were not just “for peace”, but had an articulate understanding that arms cause wars and the arms manufacturers and militarists had a vested, and stupid, interest in war. In France, Italy and elsewhere similar movements were strong. In France the ex-servicemen, the Anciens Combattants, shared pacifism with primary school children, so that children understood how militarism was wrong. They attacked the idiocy of planning to murder millions of people with new technology. World renowned figures like the explorer Nansen were up for the challenge. In Germany the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht was a setback, but peace and disarmament were strong. The No More War movement among veterans numbered 30,000.[i]  among Catholics and some Protestants and a range of radical journalists, artists and writers. Ernst Barlach, Carl von Ossietzki, Kurt Tucholski, Erich Remarque, who wrote “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1928), Bertha von Suttner, Etape Gent and Heinrich Wandt were attacked by the militarist right, because of their success in presenting pacifism. Overall, there was a massive world-wide popular movement which involved tens of millions of people, still perhaps the biggest in human history. The movement grew. Key was the Catholic Church which under Benedict XV had opposed WW1 throughout. He described it as a “useless massacre” which did not endear him to the fighting statesmen, but he was now understood, because it had proved to be so. This stand of the Catholic Church has never been honoured and was later trashed into complicity with Hitler, but it was formidable. It mobilized millions for peace; there were rallies of many thousands well before Hitler thought of mass rallies. 

The Anglican Church also woke up. People saw the problem was arms and wanted to end the power of the Merchants of Death, as they came to be known. Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from December, 1928, backed disarmament throughout the period as did the Archbishop of York, William Temple. Many other Anglicans and Nonconformists took a principled stand against the idea of arms for profit and the proliferation of arms. George V did, so this was an establishment view, not a fringe protest.  The arms traders had pushed munitions, naval confrontation and military rivalry, but millions lay dead while the arms manufacturers made their profits. Their weapons were undeniably evil and they were not popular. Statesmen and millions of ordinary people sought and worked for world disarmament to make the Great War the War to end all Wars. The arms companies were going to have to fight hard to get round disarmament, and they had lost the democratic battle.

The Communist and Socialist Critique.

There was another level of critique which war and militarism faced. The USSR, vastly populous, had ended the Great War early. They had declared it a capitalist-imperialist war, and identified the munitions industry and the imperial economic expansion as the cause of war in which the workers were merely treated as cannon fodder – the phrase summed up the hurt of millions of mothers whose sons had gone to the slaughter. Lenin’s argument against war spread, and the workers of the world were asked to follow Marx’s cry to unite against their oppressors. The real war said Lenin was the class war and not this imperial war. Both sides in the imperial war were out for the same thing, profits, the advance of capital and the suppression of the workers by force. Eugene Debs, who won 6% of the Presidential vote in the 1912 election, was saying the same thing in the States. Keir Hardie, Bernard Shaw and other Socialists had said it in Britain and Ramsey MacDonald and Philip Snowden continued to say it. Jaures had said it in France until he was murdered.  They repudiated capitalist war and sought to address the needs of the proletariat.

The elites of the West were scared – both the old landed aristocracies and the new capitalists. The Tsar and his family had lost their lives; now aristocratic Russians were fleeing to the rest of Europe and North America. There was a Red Scare in the States which was partly a false scare. Churchill as Minister of War after the War linked up with the White Russians and fought his own personal vendetta against the Bolsheviks to “murder the baby in the cradle” as he put it. When the Communists withdrew from the World War, Lenin hoped for an uprising of the German soldiers against fighting. When Germany was defeated, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht stood for this emphasis, but they were murdered. Suddenly the rich and the militarists woke up to the Marxist Leninist and Democratic Socialist critique of war and weapons, and were scared. In Germany they funded Hitler and others to beat up the socialists. Yet, millions of workers agreed with this analysis, especially those who were used to being ordered about in the same way in the factories and the trenches and could see the link. Many of the aristocracy feared a socialist attack. Ordinary foot-soldiers had worked out that the poor sods in the German trenches on the other side were suffering and ordered about just like them. Was there really a difference between German nationalism and British nationalism? Was one nation right and the other wrong? Or were all upholding a corrupt system? The army was class war by another name and the ordinary soldiers knew domination when they saw it. The Generals gave orders well behind the Front line, and they were often bad orders and left the plebs to carry them out and die. They felt no camaraderie with their commanders.

When this bloody war is over, no more soldiering for me,
When I get my civvy clothes on, oh how happy I shall be.
No more sergeants bawling, ‘Pick it up’ and ‘Put it down’
If I meet the ugly bastard, I’ll kick his arse all over town..   

So, militarism and war were under attack. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave all men in Britain over 21 and all women over 30 the vote, and suddenly most of the workers had arrived in the political system and fuller democracy was shaping politics. Socialism could not but grow, and with it the full critique and defeat of militarism was likely. Or perhaps not.

In 1918 the Arms Companies are rich, but out of business and popular political power.

At the end of the Great War arms companies in several countries were rich with profits from the War. In Germany, Krupp and Thyssen (who made the steel for the weapons), Mauser, Bayer (chemical weapons), Rheinmetall and others made big profits, which were hidden in the Netherlands and elsewhere, but they were forbidden producing any arms at the end of the War by the Treaty of Versailles. In France, Schneider and the other companies had been profitable as the State had backed them to rearm against Germany and had helped finance their exports to Russia. But it was not clear where they would go after the War. In Italy, Ansaldo were rich with making arms. They had used Mussolini as their propagandist and then in 1922 he came to power as leader of the first Fascist Regime, when militarism was linked with state-supported capitalism. Skoda emerged from the war quite powerful and linked up with Schneider in Austro-Hungary to pick up contracts which had previously gone to Germany. But the real weight was in the United States, which had become the industrial arms supplier of the Allies during the War, usually through American loans by J.P. Morgan the great financier of World War One. Du Pont had supplied a vast quantity of explosives. Remington, Winchester, Browning, Colt, Singer, Naval Yards and other firms had emerged producing guns and more in an exponentially expanding market, until the Armistice in November, 1918 and they were now rich and the main players in Wall Street in the 1920s. During the War these companies had had a vast, usually conscripted, workforce of men and women producing weapons allowing big profits; in Britain there were three million munitions workers and millions more elsewhere, but Lloyd George to his credit kept arms production profits under control. Overall, though, the arms companies had loads of money, absolutely no demand and a drastically cut workforce and industry. How could they recover? It was no easy task. The era of Sir Basil Zacharoff, the king of the arms trade, was over.

The arms people were suddenly personae non grata, outside much of the political system. Wilson and the Versailles Treaty people were serious about disarmament. The arms manufacturers were not popular. The era of “The Merchants of Death” had arrived, though the epithet did not appear until 1932. Yet still the fat arms traders and manufacturers were hated. A contemporary joke sees a child asking an arms’ manufacturer, “Daddy, what did you do in the War? And the answer comes, back, “My child, I did everybody.” The conventional political wisdom was that another major war was not likely for ten or more years. There would long be a massive surplus of weapons, though many were destroyed in Beaufort’s Dyke between Scotland and Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Sales were, and were likely to be for a while, stagnant. Business was nearly dead. What do you do? 

They slowly developed a strategy. First, they needed allies inside the establishment – politicians, industrialists and public figures – and they kept those links well-oiled with money. Then they bought or influenced newspapers, so that they would present a better image; the air and military links of Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook in Britain were obvious. Second, they lay low; they disappeared. This is why the theme of this study has been so unexamined. The strategy has now successfully lasted a hundred years; they hid from view. Their marketing was quiet, their contacts unseen; they operated through proxies and behind the scenes, they cultivated spokesmen who created a culture where weapons rule benignly and are good for us. We need to have arms, sell arms, buy more arms, but the sellers are invisible. When you are disliked and people want to abolish you, you evaporate, avoid publicity and dampen any moves against you. You wait for people to forget, even if it takes fifteen years. Even then, the issue really blew up in 1933-34 with the publication of “The Merchants of Death” and the Nye Commission in the States, but by that time, they had already won and were back in charge, though the masses did not know it because it was hidden. The arms companies had two other strategies. They began planning for the next war and a changed military strategy gave them new sources of demand. Warships were less strategic. Planes – bombers and fighters – were obviously coming. Submarines could develop. So, you worked on these new weapons. This had the added advantage that it made old weapons, the vast post war stock, semi-obsolete. Then, fourth, you looked for areas in the world where new tensions might erupt into war and arms races so that business would pick up. There were two big ones – China/Japan and the USSR, and arms began flowing again in a small way at first, but with increases as Fascist-sympathizing and military-dictator small powers emerged. The fourfold strategy quietly went into operation in most of the states around the world.  The arms companies competed a bit, but, really, they were on the same side. If one did well, all did. The new democratic voters did not understand the way power operated behind the scenes and the rich controlled the newspapers. So, the military arms complexes in Britain, the United States, Germany, France and the USSR went quietly about their work.

Conservative Control delayed the Disarmament Conference.

For a while we focus on Britain, still superficially the main world power. The British Conservative Party was key at this stage for the militarists. Let us look back a bit. After the Great War the Liberals fell apart between Lloyd George and Asquith, and the Tories had to work out how to stay in charge in the face of the new socialist tranche of voters who could potentially dominate elections. Labour was coming and winning votes. The Election of 1918 was easy. By using Lloyd George, the political hero of the War, they got a vast majority of MPs and split the Liberals. Churchill, still a Liberal at this stage, strongly supported the army and navy as Secretary of State for War, and there was plenty for the military to worry about with conflicts in the USSR, Ireland, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and some colonies, but they did not need any more arms.

The key was keeping Labour out of power. They learned to prevaricate on disarmament until December 1923, when they lost to Labour, who formed their first Government though with no overall majority. The Tories did not easily relinquish control. They were used to being default Government, the establishment and intended to stay that way. When the October, 1924 election came, they fixed it with an astonishing piece of dishonesty – the fake Zinoviev telegram. A fake telegram, purporting to come from the USSR Minister, Zinoviev, was “acquired” by the Conservative Party and published in the Daily Mail four days before the election telling Socialists to “rise up and have a revolution”. The Mail’s headlines were: CIVIL WAR PLOT BY SOCIALISTS’ MASTERS. MOSCOW ORDERS TO OUR REDS. GREAT PLOT DISCLOSED YESTERDAY. “PARALYSE THE ARMY AND NAVY” AND MR. MACDONALD WOULD LEND RUSSIA OUR MONEY! DOCUMENT ISSUED BY FOREIGN OFFICE. Actually, it was not from Zinoviev. He was on holiday at the time and out of communication. It got several official labels on the letter wrong. It would have been mad to send it. It was barking absurd that a Labour Government already in power democratically a week before an election would receive or welcome a letter plotting “Civil War”, or that Zinoviev would remotely think of sending it. It was a forgery and the Foreign Office and Secret Service people, and of course the Daily Mail were in cahoots with the Tories to fix the election. Labour was actually resolutely democratic, and distrusted the Soviets, but the mud stuck, and they lost enough seats to face a new Conservative Government who resolutely denied it was a fake knowing they were lying. That kept them in control for five crucial years until 1929, really against the democratic weight of the electorate. During those years they stalled on disarmament and pushed the Great Disarmament Conference down the road into the future.

In the election on the 30^th May, 1929 Labour came to power again, though in a minority government. It geared up the disarmament process, but within a few months faced the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. This massive failure of capitalism and the subsequent unemployment then dominated much of politics in the next two years. Nevertheless, The Great Geneva Disarmament Conference was set up for the end of January, 1932 and tens of millions of people looked for its success.

Meanwhile, the Tory establishment struck again in 1931. This was even more extraordinary. MacDonald, old and quite weary faced a problem. Labour, who obviously had not caused the Wall Street Crash, were told by the establishment, against the advice of the world’s best economist – John Maynard Keynes – that they could neither devalue or provide benefit support to keep the economy from depression. MacDonald who had been courted by Conservative ladies like Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry of Park Lane, had drifted away from his earlier principles. He was persuaded by the King to be a figurehead Prime Minister for a “National” Government and desert his own party. It was the same trick as the Party had used in 1919 with Lloyd-George as figurehead. MacDonald drifted from fifty years of socialist politics, and really the Conservatives led by Baldwin were in charge. This was brutally true after the election when the number of Labour MPs was cut by over two hundred and the Conservatives gained over two hundred under the National Government banner. Suddenly, the political support in Government for Geneva was gone. Lord Cecil had resigned from the Conservative Government in 1926 and was not going to get much backing now. Though no politician could oppose disarmament because it was so popular, behind the scenes the militarists were back in control of the Government. The timing was excruciating. The election was on the 27^th October, 1931, less than ten weeks before the Geneva Disarmament Conference was due to start. When the new Cabinet was formed, the Marquess of Londonderry, the husband of Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart of Park Lane who befriended MacDonald, was in the Cabinet as Minister for Air. Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell was First Lord of the Admiralty.  The Viscount Hailsham was Secretary of State for War and Sir Phillip Cunliffe-Lister was Colonial Secretary. They were hostile to disarmament and well able to stall its progress. So, the Cabinet was a coalition consisting of a few Labour people, in uninfluential jobs, some Liberals, including Sir John Simon as Foreign Secretary and the quietly dominant Conservative group.    

The Arms Companies Get Back to Business in the late 20s.

The arms companies did not have it all their own way but they had been rebuilding their businesses. The Germans had been forbidden arms’ manufacture. Much has been made of their cheating, setting up factories in Russia and elsewhere through undercover agreements. They allowed research and technical development, but not too much actual output and their whole wartime production system was destroyed which was a fundamental blow to the industry. Krupp and other firms’ arms production was closed down quite fully throughout the 1920s, although they were ready to expand given the opportunity. The Skoda factory took a lot of the German business in central Europe after an agreement with Schneider-Le Creusot and began to expand; it would be crucial to Hitler after Munich when he moved into Czechoslovakia allowing him ready made arms, expanding his munitions production and technical expertise. In Britain the warship business was in the doldrums; WW1 battleships would last and seemed less strategic after the Great War than before. Lots of aircraft manufacturers sprung up, but it was not clear how civilian and military aircraft might develop; they also developed nearer London and moved the main arms manufacturing emphasis away from the Northern shipyards. Many people wanted the bomber banned. Some treaties put a firm ceiling on warship and other military building, and an understanding of the “ten-year rule” that no major war could be expected for ten years after 1918 kept military spending down, a principle extended by Churchill in 1928 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Expenditure was quite constrained. Nobody was expecting new wars to arrive.

Yet, the arms companies were working behind the scenes. Tensions between China and Japan opened up some contracts to supply both sides. Britain, France and the US still dominated the arms market, and the US was relatively unrestricted. Later it began to sell not just arms, but arms factories and technologies to both the USSR and Germany. In the 1920s, apart from a range of colonial revolts and small conflicts, there were no major wars. The Chinese Civil War began in 1927 and started another source of demand met initially on the Nationalist side by American arms. But slowly overall the arms companies were getting back to business.

The level of strategic organization grew among them. In 1927 three arms companies paid William Shearer $20,000 for six weeks work to disrupt the Coolidge Naval Conference on reducing warships. He and others were successful both in creating national rivalries, especially between the US and Britain, and using them to prize open new contracts. Lord Cecil, the leader of the disarmers, resigned from the Government over its failure to agree naval reductions at this conference; for parity Britain should have reduced its warships from seventy to forty, but the Conservative Government refused. Churchill and others wanted Britain to retain the biggest navy, and to be bigger especially that the United States. They focused on rivalry with the United States and the naval lobby was now well organized and backed them up, and the Conference collapsed. Armstrong and Vickers had merged, with big warship yards at Barrow in Furness and on the Tyne, but even now orders were still slow. When Cecil resigned, he received a lot of public support among the many voters who were looking for substantial disarmament. The conflict between the arms companies and the world disarmament groups moved up a notch. At the same time the post-war surplus of weapons began to come to an end and demand for military kit was beginning to pick up.  The arms companies were also more in control behind the scenes in several states. Yet, in Britain, the public was strongly for the League of Nations and against the Conservatives. Some historians downplay the public commitment and concern for disarmament, but it was the biggest issue in British politics.

The Peace People Carry on to Geneva.

So, again, in 1929 the momentum for the Disarmament Conference speeded up. Arthur Henderson was the Foreign Secretary and he meant business. Planning for the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference was underway and gathered momentum. The British Geneva team of Henderson, Lord Cecil and Philip Noel-Baker had massive popular support. The peace people were determined. They did petitions, rallies, worked through popular League of Nations Societies and a whole range of other initiatives. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom had grown from WW1 and in 1932 presented 9 million signatures at Geneva. They quite reasonably insisted that they were not rearing children to shoot and be shot by other children as cannon fodder, and of course they were irrefutably right. Other organisations mobilised for disarmament and peace with big petitions of several millions. There was a strong Catholic reconciliation movement between France and Germany. In Britain Baptists, Pentecostals, Anglicans and other denominations were against militarism and for peace and reconciliation. Socialists understood that wars were capitalist wars – for the merchants of death, for imperial conquest and for controlling power. There was a two-tier dynamic. Lower class women and men were exercising the vote and participating in politics as never before, but the old guard patriarchal establishments were still running governments; there was a gulf between the two. The Labour Party in Britain partly represented this new political force, but it was also a wider democratic one with Liberal and Conservative voters too opposed to the old guard, male, political establishment de-populated of talent by World War One. Cecil and others had deep and wide popular support for disarmament. The old guard were for the democratic chop, as they were to discover in 1945, but not yet.

So, this now-ignored disarmament movement came to a head in the great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932. As it began Noel-Baker describes the support. “The speakers were impressive personalities, and together their organisations had a total of more than a thousand million regularly subscribing members – a constituency in 1932 of almost half the individuals who then made up the human race, and a good deal more than half the adults.” It had been planned since 1925 and was a long time coming, but come it did, backed in Britain by the King, archbishops, church leaders, prime ministers, military leaders and most of the population and similarly in the States, Latin America and around the world. The wave had gathered strength and was breaking. The Conference gathered in January, 1932. Sadly, before it started Nansen, the explorer and humanitarian, died and Stresemann, the key German politician, was also dead of a stroke – two great disarmament people. It faced every difficulty. 

The Geneva Disarmament Conference – How to do nothing.

When it came, Geneva was one of the most peculiar political events ever. It began with these millions of petition signatures, urgent speeches, support from around the world and then, mainly because of the British, the main Conference stalled into pointless, detailed, private discussions. As we have noted MacDonald, the British Prime Minister was the figurehead of a coalition dominated by the Old Tories and they were really in control just before the Conference. You have to read a year’s Hansard to really get the flavour. The public and MPs were constantly asking for information about how the Disarmament Conference was going, and the Government said almost nothing time after time in a prolonged blah de blah cover-up of what was happening. It did not want disarmament. Behind the scenes ministers were agreeing to selling weapons to both Japan and China at the same time; so they were really backing the arms trade. The key Civil Servants, Hankey and Vansittart, worked hard to prevent agreement. The armed forces and Churchill did the same, and the Cabinet papers show they were looking to drift though without being blamed for the failure they were causing. Sadly, MacDonald as Prime Minister was an isolated man, dependent on Conservatives and in failing health. Even worse, Sir John Simon, previously Liberal, was indecisive and wanting to please his new Conservative colleagues and therefore did nothing, even though he saw this policy was opening the way for Hitler. He was preoccupied by the Manchuria crisis and approached Geneva like the games of chess he so enjoyed playing. The British Government prevaricated, and Sir John Simon stalled on the next move. As time went on agreement became more difficult.  It was a lamentable tragedy. Then most energy was expended on moving the blame for failure around to the French, the Germans and other states. The British were morally in charge, but the Government froze progress.

Then President Hoover stepped in with a bold and decisive move in June, proposing cutting all arms by a third and getting rid of ALL aggressive weapons – all bombers, submarines, heavy guns and big tanks. Suddenly, there was action, from the President of the new world superpower. There was enthusiastic acceptance around the world of his proposals. Is that overstating it? You judge. Russia welcomed the plan and said the Conference needed to speed up, Germany did, “with special satisfaction” Italy accepted the Hoover plan “entirely”, as did Spain. There was a gap of fifteen days and then on July 7^th and 8^th, Canada, Belgium, Brazil, Turkey, Cuba, Austria, Norway, the Dominican Republic, Finland, Hungary, Denmark, Mexico, China, Sweden, Estonia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Roumania, Persia, Venezuela, Argentine, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Afghanistan, Colombia, Latvia, Portugal, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia gave it a warm welcome. Much of the rest of the world was still colonies. The main absentee was Japan. This was overwhelming support. But Sir John Simon, though he favoured disarmament, prevaricated. The 500 Tories in the House of Commons were on the whole hostile to the League and Disarmament and he wanted to keep on their side. Baldwin made a statement in the Commons with reservations to hold the line. Superficially, the British Government “accepted” the Hoover Plan to avoid losing face with the British public, but said they would put counter proposals. Actually, the Cabinet spent their time discussing how they could stall them without taking the blame. They were obviously jealous of the United States emerging as the dominant world power and wanted to protect the Navy at its present strength to police the Empire. Notice the timing. The German elections were on the 31^st July, three weeks later. Hitler was fulminating about Germany being treated unfairly. A breakthrough a couple of weeks earlier would have seen his support plummet. His support dropped in the November election anyway. The Nazis became the largest party in July mainly because Britain, France and the other countries had not also disarmed as the Treaty of Versailles required them to do. It gave him the ammunition which the Hoover Plan would have eradicated. All Britain needed to do was to say, “Yes”. But the Hoover Plan for substantial world disarmament was stymied by Britain, and Hitler made his biggest electoral advance.

The Disarmament Conference meandered through the rest of the year in a long drawn out charade of buck-passing. In January 1933 Hitler came to power. After a year of meeting, the Disarmament Conference was effectively dead. Although the public around the world still did not realize it, the move to world disarmament had been defeated by British Tory and military opposition and the arms companies were off the leash.

Airbrushing Disarmament out of History.

Hardly anybody now knows about the Geneva World Disarmament Conference, because it has largely been expunged from our history. It was covered up by the Conservative Government to mask their failure. They had killed it by sitting on their hands. They were decisively indecisive. In November 1932 after ten months of dithering Baldwin made his “The bomber will always get through” speech which was part despair at failing to implement world disarmament, part asking for a new big initiative and partly trying to hand over responsibility to the next generation so that he could avoid it himself. But, in reality, the old generation had stayed in charge and opened the door again to the arms manufacturers. They believed Britain needed the biggest Navy so that we could control the Empire when the natives revolted. It was that pathetic. The whole world was waiting on the acceptance of President Hoover’s plan, and we Brits were jealous of the United States usurping our dominant role and so killed world peace. The Tories put the negotiations into treacle; they kicked it into the long grass so that no-one would find the ball. When President Hoover found the ball, they kicked it back into the long grass again while looking the other way.  They endlessly discussed delaying in Cabinet. Sir John Simon funked it and did not know what to do. Lloyd George said that “Sir John Simon sat on the fence so long that the iron entered his soul” Eden expressed his contempt for him, and Harold Nicholson, an ally of Churchill, just called him “a toad and a worm”. It was an appalling event in British history which opened the way to the Second World War before Hitler came to power. The Tories just pretended it did not happen and blamed the French..

Then, later, militarists wanted World Disarmament forgotten as an idea which could work, because it was the complete danger to their business. Behind the scenes they had undermined it. They say that disarmament failed but omit the fact that it “failed” because their guys made sure it failed. In reality, Disarmament did not fail; it was not tried. It was the failure to disarm which opened the way to the Second World War, as to the First. The Government was patronizing; Parliament, the nation and the rest of the world were treated as not capable of understanding these complex issues. Actually, most people understood that the world had to escape from nationalist arms races, war and false patriotism, but the Tories succumbed to it yet again. Because the electorate backed disarmament so fully, the Conservatives talked peace and disarmament right through to 1938, but dishonestly. The weight of public support is shown by the Peace Ballot of 1934-5, mounted by Lord Cecil and others. It was a full national referendum with over 11 million voting. Over 90%, over 10 million, more than actually voted Conservative in the 1935 election, said they “were in favour of an all-round reduction of armaments by international agreement” and a similar number were in favour of “prohibiting by international agreement the manufacture and sale of armament for private profit”. It was a massive popular vote for disarmament and curbing the arms trade. The Tories just pretended they were for peace and disarmament in November 1935 election to keep their vote up. Even then though Hitler was in power, he did not really have military might until after Munich in 1938. But by now the arms business people were expanding trade, selling in Spain, Italy, Japan, China, Germany and the Soviet Union The military people in Japan, Germany, France and Britain had won the day, when we could have opened the way to disarmament and peace. So, disarmament was trashed by the arms people.

The biggest reason why we do not know about this event is the gloss which has been put on this interwar history by the militarists. Their version is: there was World War One caused by the Kaiser and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Then Hitler came along when the Allies had not properly rearmed, and so World War Two happened. Actually, both wars were not caused by Germany alone, but by the militarism and pressure of the arms companies in Britain, the US and throughout Europe. So, the conclusion, always stay armed so that another Hitler can’t do the same, is the opposite of the conclusion that should follow. It is disarmament that ends wars, promotes trust, opens economic opportunities, creates Budget surpluses, keeps the young alive and opens up world trade.  Later, we will see how multilateral world disarmament was transmuted into “appeasement” to discredit the obvious clear direction that world politics should have taken. This fake history has dominated western political ideology, with a few further twists, up to the present. It ignores the facts of history – Hitler was armed, mainly through American money and arms AFTER disarmament had been defeated, when disarmament would have prevented him coming to power and Germany or anyone else rearming. Instead, the arms trade resumed dominance supplying the Japan-Chinese War from 1932, the Chaco War of 1932-5, the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 as well as Germany’s growing militarism after 1933. Arms cause wars, and the growth of the arms trade transitioned into the Second World War as it gave Germany the capacity to fulfil Hitler’s ambitions. Even then, he needed considerable help to have viable armed forces from western banks and arms companies. The Appeasers then gave him even more help.   Hitler, as we shall see in more detail was funded to re-arm, provided with arms factories, technologies and vast stocks of actual weapons by the powers who would be fighting him in the Second World War. It was wider western militarism and arms which empowered Hitler. Proper disarmament ends wars, but it remained untried and again arms won through into the worst war of all. Soon the arms companies got their Second World War in a bonanza of arms deals.

The Conference was also weakened by other factors. The Japanese military-dominated regime had invaded Manchuria, breaking the basic rule of the League of Nations.  Yet, Britain was selling arms to both the Japanese and Chinese and so hypocritically voicing their concern at the war and moderating criticism of the Japanese. Another factor was that the Arms Companies had agents and allies to prevent agreements, and the various military people at the Conference worked against disarmament. Hankey and Vansittart, the main Civil Servants involved, did all they could to undermine it. But mainly it was the Cabinet members linked to the armed forces and arms companies. If Sir John Simon had worked with Hoover and the United States, disarmament would have happened. All aggressive weapons – bombers, howitzers, tanks and submarines – would have been prohibited, and the rest cut by a third immediately. Hitler storming about the unfairness of the Versailles outcome, would have had nothing to rant about and would have to show his armpits to the doctor. Even without disarmament his support was down by two and a quarter million votes and thirty four seats in the November election. The German delegation at the Conference were gleeful that a successful outcome would see Hitler off. But it did not happen. When in January 1933 the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that “This House would not fight for King and Country” it was voting its contempt at the handling of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Ordinary people in the world did not understand what had happened, because the Conference just stalled. They continued to believe disarmament must take place, when it was being blocked in secret by politicians committed to doing nothing. The arms companies had won and soon they would be quietly back in business. When World War Two came, disarmament was off the agenda, as it turned out more or less permanently, but nobody understood how it had happened.

Hitler, the product of the Arms Traders.

Also ignored is the fact that Hitler moved to a position of strength through the arms industry. The key early figure was Fritz Thyssen, head of the United Steel Works, the biggest company in Germany. It was responsible for much of the steel production of World War One and had links into various arms manufacturing businesses. He and they wanted German military production opened up again, against the disarmament requirements of the Versailles Treaty. He linked with Hitler in 1923 when Thyssen had opposed the French invasion of the Ruhr and Hitler mounted the Kapp Putsch in Munich. Thyssen fed Hitler funds which kept the Nazi Movement going through the lean years of the twenties. After 1929 when the Nazis were growing, he backed them further and persuaded other business/armaments people, now including Krupp, to support the Nazis through into power. He probably gave them somewhere between 650,000 and a million marks. A key meeting was in November 1932, when the Geneva Disarmament Conference was failing, when he, as a senior businessman, and Hjalmar Schacht, the banker, and other businessmen wrote to the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, asking him to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, which in due time he did. Thyssen regretted his support of the Nazis and broke with them later to his cost, for he spent time in a concentration camp but the damage created by his donations was done. Hitler looked the best way forward for the suppressed German arms industry and they backed him. Arms made the man into the Fuhrer. 

The Arms Traders are back in Business.

People do not seem to ask the obvious question of how Hitler in seven short years was able to move from the position where Germany was in acute depression with millions of unemployed and relatively little arms production to overrunning Europe. It was not that he was brilliant. The case is even more difficult to make when the scale of the problem is addressed. So, if the British/French share of the worldwide tank market between 1930-9 was 54% and the German under 5%, you would not expect the Nazis to blitz through France in 1939. The Germans had clandestine production systems and the Reichswehr was planning on expansion, but its military spending was very low. As Churchill notes, “Up till 1934 at least German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life.”[ii]

The answer is one we do not like. After the failure of Geneva and after Hitler came to power in January 1933 when military spending was very low, the Nazis  were able to import arms from the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, France, the US and even Britain. More than this, the funding for these arms was supplied mainly by the United States through the Harriman Bank and also with help from the Governor of the Bank of England, Montague Norman. A French firm sold 400 tanks to Hitler even when the French Government was contesting the German right to rearm; they were shipped through Holland to avoid suspicion. British Armstrong-Siddeley aero engines were exported to Germany in April 1934, giving the Germans fifteen years of British Government air research.[iii] Often arms trading was disguised or undeclared so that the industry became a law unto itself, despite attempts to contain it. American companies flocked to Berlin to sell Hitler arms and factories; there were more than a hundred US companies prepared to manufacture and sell military hardware, even on the terms that they did not repatriate profits but reinvested in Germany. Ford, who had funded Hitler in the 1920s, now provided factories for military vehicles. Others, like Du Pont, were investing in arms related businesses which would allow profitable expansion while the US was in recession and they were sidelined by Roosevelt’s New Deal. German preparedness for war depended on this investment, arms imports and American factories – three levels of military support. People focus on the fact that Ford, Harriman, the Dulles brothers and Prescott Bush were linked with Hitler, but ignore why they were linked. The banking/arms industry in Germany at this time seemed lucrative and worth big investment and, as a consequence, German military power surged through US funds seeking profits. While arms factories in Germany were forbidden, Germany had also set up factories in the USSR and Sweden linked to Krupp and other German companies; the arms business was a stronger link than ideology. Then the invasion of Czechoslovakia in October, 1938 also gave them the Skoda works and its large munitions output to complete the military package. The military expansion based on American loans gave the domestic economy the boost to take it out of recession. We look at it more thoroughly shortly.

 No, Appeasement is Different.

You are now entering a historical black hole. The history of disarmament has been covered up and papered over by those who want it to disappear. Mainly, one word has done it – “Appeasement”. Churchill was against Appeasement and Disarmament is Appeasement – End of Discussion. This is a travesty of history and of Churchill, who had to fight appeasement in his own party and even his own family. “Appeasement” was right-wing British leaders running the Conservative Government in 1938-9 who were pro-Nazi and soft on the military in Germany even when war was likely, because they were worried about socialism. Britain was rearming fast at the time, so it was not really the arming issue but about shared right wing sympathies and going along with the expansion of the arms trade, including to Germany.

Churchill saw Hitler coming, but so, too, did everyone at the Disarmament Conference. Even Sir John Simon knew disarmament would sideline the Nazis for ever, but he did not do it. Churchill was, of course, against disarmament and was one of the British politicians undermining the Conference, though he was outside the Cabinet.  In his view we needed a strong Navy and Air Force to police the Empire and disarmament was unthinkable. Churchill was a militarist. He had bombed the Kurds in 1919 and was the most imperialist of the Tories. This pro military and navy view also held within the Cabinet. So, the Empire won in 1932. But this was not against appeasement. In 1932 the problem was not German aggression and armament; in fact, Lord Londonderry argued in Cabinet in July 1932 that the danger was the French could attack with superior air-power.  Five years later, Germany had come through, was aggressive, bullying and arming. Yet the “Big Four” running the Conservative Government – Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Hoare and Halifax, as well as Londonderry and, of course, Moseley, thought we should still ally with Hitler, and so Chamberlain returned from Munich waving the piece of paper and looking an idiot.  That was appeasement, and Appeasement was not Disarmament. In fact, the events descended into farce. “Appeasement” was worse than that; Chamberlain opened the door to Hitler’s military success. The arms Hitler gained from Czechoslovakia, especially from the Skoda works, were sufficient to arm half the Wehrmacht. They included 2000 field guns and cannon, 469 tanks, 500 anti0aircraft guns, 43,000 machine guns, 1,090,000 military rifles, 114,000 pistols, about a billion rounds of small-arms ammunition, and 3 million rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition. Appeasement armed Hitler magnificently And disarmed nobody. Those weapons made the Nazis a military machine, and now they could make more. Arms trade militarism had won again and the Second World War was arriving. Of course, Churchill was right in the late 30s, but by then proliferating arms in the hands of Fascists in Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere made conflicts inevitable. Appeasement grew out of the cameraderie of the capitalist, militarist, pro-Fascist classes across Europe. It was topped by the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. He was friendly with Hitler’s banker, Hjalmar Schacht, and in March 1939 when Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia against the Munich agreement, he transferred £5.6 million (at 1939 prices) from the Czech to the German account, and tried to move over more in June. The same kinds of links were also present in the States.   

An American Political Slant – Corporatist Capitalism.

If Britain was an unsuccessful home for peaceful democracy, what of the States? Let us go back and look at its history through the period. Really, it had emerged as the dominant world power. By 1918 the American economy was several times bigger than Britain’s and the fastest growing economy in the world as immigrants poured in at about a million a year. Resources were opening up, oil became abundant, and the Midwest prairies produced their vast crops. But American capitalism had been turned by the Great War in two respects. First, the arms companies had grown faster than the others and were quite dominant among the New York Capitalist elite. They were used to running the show and running Washington politics. In the twenties they controlled both political parties, dominated the world economy and knew only expansion, even while Europe still struggled. They knew their companies could rule the world and Wall Street ran Washington.

The States withdrew from the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations when President Wilson had been its chief author. Wilson was very ill, and Cabot Lodge mounted a strong attack on him. Overall, the US seems to have withdrawn so that it would not have constraints on its national policies. The Republican opposition to Wilson, however, represented a group of East Coast business leaders and bankers, many of whom had made a lot of money from the War. They wanted nothing to do with Wilson’s emphasis on Disarmament and were shaping policy in their terms. The two biggest companies were J P Morgan, the banker of the First World War and Du Pont who provided 40% of the total wartime explosives. In 1919 the Du Ponts bought up General Motors. There was a “Red Scare” confrontation with the unions to try to see off the threat of the workers organizing against employers. The bosses would demonize Communism for a lifetime. The big arms companies like Du Pont and Remington now had lots of profits, but for the next fifteen years little demand for weapons. Remington were also annoyed that the new USSR did not pay for all the weapons the Tsar had bought. The USA wanted the vast debts for the arms it had supplied paying back; J.P. Morgan insisted on it. The German money had to go from Germany to Britain and France to be passed on to the US bankers to receive their repaid debts. As a result, they had more funds than they knew what to do with and lent it back to Germany, especially around the Dawes Plan. Really J P Morgan and Wall Street were running the European economic agenda in the 1920s..

Then in 1929 American capitalism faced the crisis of the Wall Street Crash. Often the big capitalists like Du Pont had got out in time and had vast amounts of capital. They bought up other businesses, but much of their capital could not easily be used in the domestic US economy in recession and they looked abroad again. They were already deeply engaged in financing the German economy and had Fascist sympathies, so money flowed to Germany and its rearmament, and also interestingly to the USSR; politics was no barrier to business and Stalin paid in gold.. They were still running the show internationally Meanwhile, the money flowed again into Germany.

 

Pro-Nazi American Business.

Being linked with Hitler is normally presented in conspiracy terms; because by 1945 he was so toxic, the links were buried fast and the charges obscured, but it was not really like that. Through the 1920s American investment poured into Germany though the Dawes Plan, and banks and industrial links, so that the big American companies like Morgan, Du Pont, Rockefeller and Ford, and as a result German industry in 1929 had bounced back from the great recession after World War One including the collapse of the Mark partly through American help, and of course the US companies and banks received their profits. The 1929 Wall Street Crash froze things for a while, and as the conspiracists rightly point out, Fritz Thyssen and Vereinigte Stahlwerke funded Hitler and the Nazis having received big loans from the Harriman Bank, and helped Hitler to power in late 1932. So, the US capitalist elite were “naturally” linked with the German business community and their business was making money and they would support right wing politics which would keep socialism suppressed.

The Dulles brothers, Avril Harriman and Prescott Bush were part of this pattern. Moreover, in January 1933, as Hitler came to power, so too did Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was implementing a business-hostile New Deal. As he noted in his inauguration speech, Jesus chased the money changers out of the Temple, and he implied that he would follow Jesus’ example, and so the business people looked to Germany, as Hitler came to power. They had no constraints on their international business and they were already heavily invested in Germany. When Hitler asked for financial support, especially through Hjalmar Schacht, who had links to American bankers (and Montague Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England) the bankers moved to support Hitler with further loans. Through these links some $3 billion was transferred to the Nazi Government. Meanwhile the big American firms looked to expand their investment in Germany and that included a whole load of military applications in chemicals, military vehicles, weapons and fuels. They were American soft Fascists, the leaders of the large companies who were against socialism, communism and labour power.

For them 1933 was just carrying on their investments worldwide. The US-German population provided links, and there were explicit Nazi supporters, like the German-American Bund, but they were not important. The Business people were used to running the show and thought they could control Hitler. They found Mussolini interesting and provided the financial links for those who were investing in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Hitler, initially, would seem benign to them, a pro-business right-wing politician who would do what business told him to. In one of the most suppressed bits of American history, they actually tried a US Fascist coup attempt in 1934, sometimes called “the business plot”, against the “Socialist” Roosevelt, but it failed thanks to the whistle blowing of General Smedley Butler. So Fascism was part of the US business culture and the links with Germany natural.

As Hitler’s political agenda unfolded, they had a problem. They were already in, though banks, companies, The Harriman Bank was the main channel to Germany. It had long been lending funds to Thyssen, Hitler’s patron, and as Hitler moved to power, it became the conduit for heavy US loans funding Nazi economic development. The German economy, now heavily geared to militarism was given a massive impetus by this American money, especially through the Harriman Bank. Its key representative was Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the later Presidents. His dealings have been erased from the archives. Hitler knew he would rely on loans, and he dd not care about repaying them. Indeed, the Nazis stipulated that profits would not be withdrawn from Germany, tying the Americans in. So American, and British, capitalists heavily funded the Nazi push towards the Second World War. They “merely” continued the agenda they had set up in the 1920s of tapping into the well advanced German industrial development and co-operating with their own kind in Germany.

Sadly, their own kind were Hitler, Thyssen, Schacht, I.G. Farben and the corrupt Nazi military system and rearmament right up to and into the Second World War. Since this part of American history is so covered up, it is worth quoting a letter from the American Ambassador, William Dodd in Berlin to Roosevelt, describing the problem in October, 1936 when Hitler was rearming fast, attacking the Jews, holding the Nuremburg rallies, occupying the Rhineland, fighting the Spanish Civil War in support of another Fascist and had an election when 99% of the people voted Nazi. You could hardly mistake what was going on. Dodd said, “At the present moment more than a hundred American corporations have subsidiaries here or cooperative understandings. The DuPonts have three allies in Germany that are aiding in the armament business. Their chief ally is the I. G . Farben Company, a part of the Government which gives 200,000 marks a year to one propaganda organization operating on American opinion. Standard Oil Company (New York subcompany) sent $2m here in December 1933 and has made $500,000 a year helping Germans make Ersatz gas for war purposes; but Standard Oil cannot take any of its earnings out of the company, except in good. They do little of this, report their earnings at home, and do not explain the facts. The International Harvester Company President told me their business here rose 33% a year (arms manufacture, I believe), but they could take nothing out. Even our airplanes people have secret arrangements with Krupps. General Motor Company and Ford do enormous businesses here through their subsidiaries and take no profits out…” The scale on which US capitalists funded and armed Hitler in his preparations for war is obvious, but now hidden by those who want to push more arms at us. The obvious conclusion is that US was the main facilitator of Hitler and the Nazis in constructing their military infrastructure and fighting the Second World War.

We even have to go a stage further. Though Roosevelt sympathized with Churchill and Britain, those he was surrounded by and the powerful American capitalists of Wall Street were so closely tied to Germany by loans and business links that America not only did not enter the War on the side of Britain and France, but probably would not have entered without Pearl Harbour. The gloss on this period is that the United States was “isolationist”, but it was probably more true that the German links made siding in the War impossible. Roosevelt did not have the power or the mandate to act against Germany as he and Churchill knew. Pearl Harbour and the German declaration of War against the US allowed Roosevelt to enter the War, otherwise the US would have stayed out for a lot longer and certainly did not see itself as Britain’s ally. The German industrial and banking links to Wall Street were powerful pressures the other way and the Harriman conduit continued lending money to the Nazis and contributing to the Nazi War effort through 1939, 1940 and right up to, and even beyond, Pearl Harbour in December 1941.

The Full Picture – Fascism was a world problem.

There were other bits to the picture of Militarism and Fascism we have not painted. In Italy Mussolini was employed by and worked for the arms company Alsaldo who supported him in his rise to power and he stayed linked to the arms business, especially in the Abyssinia War. In Japan arms production and militarism were linked in to the Zaibatsu, the dominant capitalist companies, after Britain and others had armed Japan before WW1 and this link defeated democracy and dominated Japanese policy in its invasion of China through to Pearl Harbour. In France Le Croix de Feu, formed by WW1 veterans which had a million members in the mid-30s, and L’Action Française, together with a load of anti-democratic leagues had a riot on the 6^th February, 1934, which at least seemed intent on overthrowing the Government. The Vichy regime in France after the invasion was partly Hitler’s recognition of this Fascist tradition. In Spain after the Civil War, in which General Franco was backed by European arms companies and right-wing regimes, his Fascist control stayed for decades more, backed by the army. Obviously, these groups were in sympathy with the arms industries. In Britain Moseley’s Fascists, whom we have not yet mentioned, were a strong presence and had sympathizers among Conservative politicians and the aristocracy. Moseley was Lord Curzon’s son in law and committed adultery with his mother-in-law – a nice guy. Churchill had deep problems with Tory Fascists right through to Hess’s intercepted flight to the Duke of Hamilton. There were Fascist Movements in power, or attempting to be, in Argentina, Austria, Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Hungary, Peru, Portugal, Poland and many more.

All of these movements partly had their origins with the fighting people of World War One, often soldiers with PTSD and perhaps no jobs. Millions had learned to fight and it did not suddenly stop with the armistice. But they were also often funded and encourage by the arms industry and fuelled by exaggerating distrust of the workers, often with vigilante groups to stir up trouble. Alongside the long struggle of the big arms companies to reassert their business against the possibility of disarmament, this widespread remilitarization in the 1930s shaped the formation of the Second World War. Chamberlain and the other appeasers at the end of September 1938 thought that he could do a deal with Hitler because they were held together with right wing sympathies. Fascism was not just a problem in Germany, but world-wide. All of these groups were militarists and allowed the arms companies to be dominant by 1939 as they were 1914. The cause of both World Wars was the same – militarism and Fascist regimes which trusted in militarism. In 1939 Hitler was an especially vicious version of this militarism.

CONCLUSION: ARMS, NOT APPEASEMENT, GENERATED WORLD WAR TWO.

We are therefore required to conclude that the banking, industrial and military companies of the West and their political representatives colluded in the build-up to the Second World War by pushing the industry of war. They were the Merchants of Death, and gradually they were allowed back in business. More than this, we see the full tragedy of the events leading up to World War Two. The Tories postponed the Geneva Disarmament Conference between 1924 and 1929 when the arms companies were weak. The Conference occurred when the Tories were dominant in the National Government and could undermine the Hoover Plan. A Disarmament Agreement would have prevented Hitler coming to power. The heavy US support for the Nazi militarization through loans and armaments, including factories for arms further generated the coming Holocaust. The effects of these loans and exports were world-changing. We ask how Germany moved from an economy on its knees in 1932/3 to one able to defeat and subdue Europe in 1939, the answer is mainly that the Nazis were enabled by finance and munitions from the United States. The help of banks and munition companies, often with Fascist sympathies, made the Nazis able to fight the Second World War. The munitions companies also encouraged and funded Fascism in many other countries, helping create the chaos that supposedly required arms to sort them out. Thus, the process of funding and promoting arms sales defeated the great peace and disarmament movement of the early 1930s in Britain and the US, as well as Japan, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

Both World Wars had the same main cause – those who pushed munitions and made money out of them and profited from war. The Second World War was formed against large populations in most major countries avid for peace and disarmament. Few people actually understood how capital and the arms companies had undermined disarmament and opened the door to World War Two. American funding of the Nazis carried on right up to Pearl Harbour. The Fascist sympathizers including the Dulles brothers became part of the US wartime Government and gradually eased out Henry Wallace, the Vice President, and ran the US government at the end of the War after FDR died. Truman was a suitable small-town sympathizer brought in to close down Roosevelt’s attack on American capitalism and the power of the military-industrial complex and people were taught to forget the arms traders and Fascist sympathizers and focus on the Communist threat. Even though the Second World war was against Fascism, the Western pro-Fascist, capitalist, pro-military power bloc stayed in charge in the United States.  

The World’s Biggest Ever Industrial Complex.

            The War was an awesome confrontation.  The Allies eventually won the Second World War in the greatest military drama in human history. The West conveniently forgets that the USSR undertook the bulk of the fight against the Nazis on the eastern front, but “we” won the War. The actual victory over Hitler and Fascism was such a dominant story that we ignore another reality as the normal consequence of war. Munitions became the biggest industry in the world, winning the War, and dominating more than a decade of industrial development, really from 1933 to the end of 1945. At the end of this period the munitions industry was vast in all major states. The military machine amounted to perhaps more than a quarter of the entire world economy, the biggest industrial complex the world had ever seen. The Second World War created a militarized world with mega arms companies, enormous armies, bases throughout the world and a generation whose business was fighting. Of course, it was going to shrink, but it is the elephant in the room of modern history and we ignore it.  A massive organizational change took place in the ten years of the War and its preparation. During this period arms companies, defence departments, scientific research, technological direction, the military establishments, transport, information gathering and many other areas of life were all integrated into the military machine. Such a vast establishment was not going to disappear, especially in the victorious nations, without serious planning to oppose its power. It was to drive for its place in the continuing post-war world, and it won. But that is another story.

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B Zieman German Pacifism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries [Neue Politisch Literature: 2015 415-37] http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/112987/1/Pazifismus_NPL.pdf p16

[ii]              Churchill Winston The Second World War Vol 1 (London: Cassell, 1948) 40

[iii]             Noel-Baker Philip The Private Manufacture of Armaments (London:Gollancz, 1936) 195

There are other points not footnoted here, but they are covered in my book Alan Storkey War or Peace? (Cambridge: Christian Studies Press, 2015) £12