See also
- British re-armament
- Prime Minister's Review: Reduction in Armaments, House of Commons Debate, 18 August 1919 (rtrvd Oct 22)
The Ten Year Rule was a British government guideline, first adopted in August 1919, that the armed forces should draft their estimates "on the assumption that the British Empire would not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years". [1]
The suggestion for the rule came from Winston Churchill, who in 1919 was Secretary of State for War and Air. In a Commons debate in August 1919, Prime Minister David Lloyd George referenced recommendations made by the Duke of Wellington following the end of the Napoleonic Wars: "There is not likely to be great eagerness for war in this generation." [2]
Former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour rejected the proposal but unsuccessfully argued to the Committee of Imperial Defence, which adopted the rule, that "nobody could say that from any one moment war was an impossibility for the next ten years ... we could not rest in a state of unpreparedness on such an assumption by anybody. To suggest that we could be nine and a half years away from preparedness would be a most dangerous suggestion." [3]
In 1928 Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, successfully urged the Cabinet to make the rule self-perpetuating, and hence it was in force unless specifically countermanded. In 1931 the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wanted to abolish the Ten Year Rule because he thought it unjustified based on the international situation. This was bitterly opposed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson who succeeded in keeping the rule. [4]
There were very large cuts in defence spending as a result of this rule, with defence spending going down from £766 million in 1919–20, to £189 million in 1921–22, to £102 million in 1932. [5] In April 1931 the First Sea Lord, Sir Frederick Field, claimed in a report to the Committee of Imperial Defence that the Royal Navy had declined not only in relative strength compared to other Great Powers but "owing to the operation of the 'ten-year-decision' and the clamant need for economy, our absolute strength also has ... been so diminished as to render the fleet incapable, in the event of war, of efficiently affording protection to our trade". Field also claimed that the navy was below the standard required for keeping open Britain's sea communications during wartime and that if the navy moved to the East to protect the Empire there would not be enough ships to protect the British Isles and its trade from attack and that no port in the entire British Empire was "adequately defended". [6]
The Ten Year Rule was abandoned by the Cabinet on 23 March 1932, but this decision was countered with: "this must not be taken to justify an expanding expenditure by the Defence Services without regard to the very serious financial and economic situation" which the country was in due to the Great Depression. [7] [8]
In 2010, the Royal Navy decided to retire HMS Ark Royal, Britain's only aircraft carrier, in 2011. This was five years earlier than previously planned and up to ten years before the planned entry into service of the new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. A group of retired admirals criticized the decision, calling it a new "10-year rule". [9]
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, was a British statesman and Labour Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was Deputy Prime Minister during the wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill, and served twice as Leader of the Opposition from 1935 to 1940 and from 1951 to 1955. Attlee remains the longest serving Labour leader and is widely considered by historians and members of the public through various polls to be one of the greatest Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom.
The Imperial German Navy or the Kaiserliche Marine was the navy of the German Empire, which existed between 1871 and 1919. It grew out of the small Prussian Navy, which was mainly for coast defence. Kaiser Wilhelm II greatly expanded the navy. The key leader was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who greatly expanded the size and quality of the navy, while adopting the sea power theories of American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The result was a naval arms race with Britain, as the German navy grew to become one of the greatest maritime forces in the world, second only to the Royal Navy.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, was a British statesman and Conservative politician who dominated the government of the United Kingdom between the world wars, serving as prime minister on three occasions, from May 1923 to January 1924, from November 1924 to June 1929, and from June 1935 to May 1937.
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, was a British statesman and Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. Nicknamed "Supermac", he was known for his pragmatism, wit, and unflappability.
Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.
The Tiger class were a class of three British warships of the 20th century and the last all-gun cruisers of the Royal Navy. Construction of three Minotaur-class cruisers began during World War II but, due to post-war austerity, the Korean War and focus on the Royal Air Force over the surface fleet, the hulls remained unfinished. Against a background of changing priorities and financial constraints, approval to complete them to a modified design was given in November 1954 and the three ships – Tiger, Lion and Blake – entered service from March 1959.
HMS Tiger was a conventional cruiser of the British Royal Navy, one of a three-ship class known as the Tiger class. Ordered during World War II, she was completed after its end.
A war cabinet is a committee formed by a government in a time of war to efficiently and effectively conduct that war. It is usually a subset of the full executive cabinet of ministers, although it is quite common for a war cabinet to have senior military officers and opposition politicians as members.
In the politics of the United Kingdom, a National Government is a coalition of some or all of the major political parties. In a historical sense, it refers primarily to the governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain which held office from 1931 until 1940.
Correlli Douglas Barnett was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war deindustrialization.
HMS Erin was a dreadnought battleship of the Royal Navy, originally ordered by the Ottoman government from the British Vickers Company. The ship was to have been named Reşadiye when she entered service with the Ottoman Navy. The Reşadiye class was designed to be at least the equal of any other ship afloat or under construction. When the First World War began in August 1914, Reşadiye was nearly complete and was seized at the orders of Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, to keep her in British hands and prevent her from being used by Germany or German allies. There is no evidence that the seizure played any part in the Ottoman government declaring war on Britain and the Triple Entente.
British re-armament was a period in British history, between 1934 and 1939, when a substantial programme of re-arming the United Kingdom was undertaken. Re-armament was deemed necessary, because defence spending had gone down from £766 million in 1919–20, to £189 million in 1921–22, to £102 million in 1932.
Rear Admiral Leonard Warren Murray, CB, CBE was an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy who played a central role in the Battle of the Atlantic, and was the only Canadian to command an Allied theatre of operations during World War II.
When the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 at the start of World War II, it controlled to varying degrees numerous crown colonies, protectorates, and India. It also maintained unique political ties to four of the five independent Dominions—Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand—as co-members of the then "British Commonwealth". In 1939 the British Empire and the Commonwealth together comprised a global power, with direct or de facto political and economic control of 25% of the world's population, and of 30% of its land mass.
The arms race between Great Britain and Germany that occurred from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the advent of World War I in 1914 was one of the intertwined causes of that conflict. While based in a bilateral relationship that had worsened over many decades, the arms race began with a plan by German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in 1897 to create a fleet in being to force Britain to make diplomatic concessions; Tirpitz did not expect the Imperial German Navy to defeat the Royal Navy.
The Singapore strategy was a naval defence policy of the United Kingdom that evolved in a series of war plans from 1919 to 1941. It aimed to deter aggression by Japan by providing a base for a fleet of the Royal Navy in the Far East, able to intercept and defeat a Japanese force heading south towards India or Australia. To be effective it required a well-equipped base. Singapore, at the eastern end of the Strait of Malacca, was chosen in 1919 as the location of this base; work continued on this naval base and its defences over the next two decades.
This timeline covers the main points of British foreign policy from 1485 to the early 21st century.
The Admiralty War Staff was the former senior naval staff operational planning organisation within the British Admiralty that existed from 1912 to 1917. It was instituted on 8 January 1912 by Winston Churchill in his capacity as First Lord of the Admiralty and was in effect a war council whose head reported directly to the First Sea Lord. After the First World War ended, the War Staff was replaced by the Admiralty Naval Staff department.
The United Kingdom entered World War I on 4 August 1914, when King George V declared war after the expiry of an ultimatum to the German Empire. The official explanation focused on protecting Belgium as a neutral country; the main reason, however, was to prevent a French defeat that would have left Germany in control of Western Europe. The Liberal Party was in power with prime minister H. H. Asquith and foreign minister Edward Grey leading the way. The Liberal cabinet made the decision, although the party had been strongly anti-war until the last minute. The Conservative Party was pro-war. The Liberals knew that if they split on the war issue, they would lose control of the government to the Conservatives.
Throughout his life British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made numerous controversial statements on race, which some writers have described as racist. It is furthermore suggested that his personal views influenced important decisions he made throughout his political career, particularly relating to the British Empire, of which he was a staunch advocate and defender. In the 21st century, his views on race and empire became among the most discussed aspects of his legacy. Some academics, such as Kehinde Andrews, go so far as to suggest Churchill was "the perfect embodiment of white supremacy", while others like historian Andrew Roberts, say that Churchill could certainly be accused of paternalism, but not race-hatred.