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THE COMING WORLD WAR

THE
COMING WORLD WAR

by
T. H. WINTRINGHAM
A

LONDON
WISHART BOOKS LIMITED
1935

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY WESTERN PRINTING SERVICES LTD., BRISTOL

IF we are to maintain our position as a first-rate power,
we must, with our Indian Empire and large colonies,
be prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other
CONTINUALLY. And the true economy will be to be
always ready.—Queen Victoria, 1879.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED =.
TO THOSE WHO ARE
READY

we ag A Fp
á. iG:

CONTENTS
PREFACE

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE
War From THE AIR
YENGHIZ KHAN’s COUNTRY
GOERING’s BOMBERS .
Br PREPARED!

THEY SPEAK PEACE .
Wars Enp—Anp How
LABOUR AND WAR
War’s Roots

GENERAL CRISIS
REVOLUTION .

APPENDIX
Maps .

135
155
179
200
216

239
256

PREFACE

Macuines make war. These machines are made by
men and women, handled by men, and directed
against men, often against women and children. The
‘usefulness’ of machines in war depends on the
direction given to them by commanders, and the
efficiency with which they are served, as well as on
their own powers. Men—working machines or hid-
ing from them, enduring their assault—win wars.
But in all modern warfare the machines do the fight-
ing and determine what sort of war it shall be: men
are their servants and their targets. This book is an
attempt to suggest the way in which the rapid
development of modern machinery—and of tech-
nique as a whole, including chemistry—will affect the
second world war that is generally recognized to be
close at hand. It is also an attempt to suggest the way
in which the men who make and handle these
machines can and will end war.

If and when this war comes, it will be different
from all other wars. Much of the difference will be
due to the development of the aeroplane. In 1914
this machine was in its infancy; only one aeroplane
existed that could lift and drop a torpedo; a wind of
moderate strength made flying almost impossible;
aeroplane armament consisted of revolvers and car-
bines and grenades with fuses that had to be lit before
the ‘bomb’ was dropped. A machine in its first

THE COMING WORLD WAR

stages of development, such as this, cannot have a
decisive influence on warfare; in the slower-moving
days of the Napoleonic wars the first steamships were
evolved, but they had no influence whatever on these
wars (the first naval vessel with an auxiliary steam-
engine was launched in 1823). The aeroplane had
not become more than a lusty infant in 1918; it was
able, as lusty infants are, to cause much trouble and
`- disturbance, but unable to alter the shape of warfare.
The aeroplane is now of full military age.

The next world war, wherever it starts, will spread
to Europe; the effect of war from the air on thickly-
populated industrial areas therefore takes first place
in any attempt to give a picture of what is likely
to happen. But it is possible and indeed likely that
the first phase of this war will include, or consist of,
a campaign in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Siberia.
The uses of machines vary with climate and geo-
graphy; here the modern developments of technique
need to be considered in relation to the nature and
size of the battlefields and of the contending forces,
very different from those of Europe.

The preparations that are being made for the new
sort of warfare, both in Europe and in many parts
of the world, show that those whose duty it is to plan
the next world war consider it close at hand. In
these preparations the technical aspects—the develop-
ment of machines, the training of men to serve them,
and the building of defences against them—are not
more important than the political aspects, the
spreading of propaganda and shaping of methods by
which the governments can get their peoples to go to
10

PREFACE

war, and can continue to rule during this new sort
of warfare. One form of propaganda is of particular
importance, because it is the essential thing, now and
here in Britain, in the preparations for a new sort of
war. It is the main thing necessary to secure the
support of those who make this sort of war possible.
This is the propaganda that expresses ideas and
feelings favourable to peace, but expresses them in
forms and moulds them into association with organi-
zations and persons that permit of these ideas and
feelings being used, when the time comes, as ammuni-
tion in another ‘war to end war.’

The two preceding paragraphs outline the sub-
jects discussed in the first half of this book. It will be
a pity if the reader who gets as far as the second
chapter, or even the fifth, then gives up under the
impression that it is mainly written, as many books
and articles seem now to be written, to show that the
second world war will be more than unpleasant and
should be prevented. The attempt in this book is to
describe a war, real, solid, and rapidly approaching
us; to describe some of the new features of this war
and of the preparations for it; but only in order that
this background can be used for a serious discussion
of the measures proposed for preventing this war
occurring, or for ending it when it has begun.

It is possible that such a discussion may be more
useful than some of the current chatter about war in
the abstract, war as part of human nature or in rela-
tion to the Christian ethic, war as an expression of
this or that psychological formula or national charac-
teristic. Out of steel and aluminium, petrol, explo-

THE COMING WORLD WAR

sives, poisons, lathes, blueprints, a real war is being
shaped. The forces shaping it are equally real:
markets, rates of profits, monopolies, competition,
poverty ‘caused by plenty,’ tariffs, class power. It
may be of some use to deal with these realities as they
seem likely to affect the inception of the next world
war, the possibility of preventing it, the continuance
of such a war, and the ending of it.

That this war is near at hand admits of no doubt.
It is not necessary to pile up opinions or facts to show
this : the reader has only to look at his daily paper and
think of what he sees there.* As specimens, one
opinion and one fact will do. The fact first: the
active squadrons of the Royal Air Force already ex-
ceed in number the active squadrons of the Royal
Flying Corps in January 1918. Each modern
squadron is of course, also, far more powerful than
its war-time counterpart. And this force is being
increased more rapidly, in relation to its present size,
than the Royal Navy was increased before 1914.

As a specimen opinion, let us take that of the most
experienced politician in Europe:

* The author of this book, on the other hand, had to stop reading
the daily press during the last few weeks of its preparation. Each
day’s news contained quotations he wanted to use, more effective
than those embodied in the book. But it has proved impossible to
escape knowledge of the German announcement of conscription, an
announcement freeing part of the new German army, already
formed and already, with its reserves, larger than the 36 divisions
announced, from the difficulties of secrecy. Or the French Premier’s
reply: ‘It is impossible to separate the moral preparation of the
nation from its military preparation. Let us take an example from
the moral preparation which has been carried out beyond the
Rhine.’ (Daily Telegraph, March 21, 1935.) Or the British govern-
ment’s greatly increased estimates for the army, navy, and air force.
12

PREFACE

‘The atmosphere of the world—East and West—
is charged with international suspicions, rivalries and
fears that have always hitherto ended in war.
Nations are arming for war. Every nation through-
out the world—almost without exception—is in-
creasing its armaments. ... There is no confidence
in any quarter that peace can be long preserved.’*

Those who see this war as close at hand, almost
certain within the next few years, sometimes speak
of it as inevitable. But at the same time they work
to prevent it. That paradox has to be disentangled
if the argument of this book is to be understood.
Otherwise all efforts to show what the war will be
like, and how near it is, will lead mainly in the end
to the purchase of a few gas-masks, the excavation of
a few dug-outs in suburban back-gardens, and a
slight increase in the liability to blind panic among
those who cannot secure these modern amenities—
and among those who realize their inefficiency.

Luckily, no miracle is involved, such as the ‘pre-
vention of the inevitable.’ The laws of political
economy, which in the long run govern questions of
war and peace, instruct us as definitely as the laws
of Louis XIV: ‘commit no miracles.’f It is not
necessary that the impossible should happen, that the

_* D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, Vol. III, London, 1934, page

viii.
t Louis XIV, according to one version of a story that has col-
lateral descendants, asked one of his bishops why and how a political
prisoner had escaped from the bishop’s dungeons. The bishop
replied : ‘It can only have been by a miracle.’ Louis ordered that he
should post on his gate this notice forbidding miracles :
De par le Roy, défense à Dieu
D’opérer miracles en ceste lieu.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

two thousand million human beings on this planet
should simultaneously change their natures. It would
indeed be a miracle on a very convincing scale if
even a majority of them began to disregard the
stresses and compulsions of ordinary existence, the
durable relationships in which they struggle to live
and to expand their lives, began to suffer a change of
heart and to follow the precepts, rather than the
examples, of such exponents of peace as John D.
Rockefeller or the founder of the Nobel peace prizes,
and of the Nobel fortune—which was made by the
sale of explosives. The honest longing of millionaires,
war profiteers among them, for a peaceful world
consisting, say, of kindly and charitable Presbyterians,
is no more hypocritical—and no less—than any
similar ache in the hearts of a Lansbury or a Gandhi.
It is as sincere as any illusion held by any of the
bewildered millions to whom events happen without
clear cause—without any reason at all except the
wickedness of the neighbours they are endeavouring
to love. But it is an illusion: this change will not
- happen. Not in this way can we hope to see resolved
the tragic strain of ‘war is inevitable—war must be
prevented.’ ,

For so long as the economic relations by which
we live are those of capitalism, we are ruled by
‘the natural laws of capitalist production . . .
working with iron necessity towards inevitable
results.’ * In the years since that phrase was written
the iron has been smelted into steel and the steel has
been given a cutting edge. This necessity’s ‘abhorred

* Karl Marx, preface to second German edition of Capital.

PREFACE

shears’ have hacked away many lives and hopes in
one world war; they now close down to tear away
more lives, and all the painfully woven insecure
beauty and comfort that remains for those in some
way privileged in life, making for those not privileged
an existence less tolerable still. How can we break
those shears, that necessity?

The aim of this book is primarily to discuss how
we can do that, basing this discussion on facts of
to-day. Among these facts are not only the technical
relations of men, the mechanical powers and instru-
ments they have at their disposal, but also their
social relations: the arrangements between indivi-
duals, groups, classes by which men get their living.
From these relations war springs. Men will change
these relations when they see that it is from them, by
war, that they get their deaths.

March 1935. T. H. W.

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CHAPTER i.

a
C ois

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

Macuines make war. This has only recently
become true; is now only true to a limited extent.
Yet it is so far true that the influence of machines
altered, during 1914—18, almost every aspect of war;
combat, tactics, strategy by 1918 had become very
different from what they were in 1914; since 1918
the changes have gone even farther.

Although this influence is a recent development,
corresponding in its growth to the past hundred
years’ mechanization of production, transport, and
travel, and only reaching full stature during the past
twenty years, machines have had some influence on
warfare for a much longer period. In the ancient
world, four hundred years before Christ, aspects of
machine development began that were of importance
in warfare.

The primitive Greek, Roman and Carthaginian
machines, made of wood, bulky and heavy, were
difficult to use with the field armies because they
could not easily be moved. But they became of first
importance in sieges, and in the defence of fortified
lines such as the Roman walls in north Britain.
` . About two hundred years before Christ, catapults
and baliste had achieved a range of eight hundred
= Dionysius, an Alexandrian, invented the poly-

THE COMING WORLD WAR

bolos, a machine throwing a number of arrows one
_ after the othér. ‘On the lines first roughly indicated
by these two developments all subsequent sia in

oe : war. machines has occurred.

= Men do not go to war for the sake of fighting, but ;
‘in order to win victory. They want as much as they
can get of the latter, as little as possible of the former.
Therefore, if they can, they constantly employ
weapons with a longer and longer range, and try to
hit their enemies with these weapons’ projectiles
—while themselves remaining so far away that their
enemies cannot hit back. At the same time a second
process goes on. Long-range weapons are hard to
aim, therefore bold troops will advance through
their fire. To prevent such an assault getting un-
pleasantly close, men devise machines capable of
rapid fire, killing as large a number as possible of the
assailants in the few minutes available. .

Wooden machinery, powered by twisted ropes in
tension, or flexible wood in torsion, is not suitable
for action over great distances or at great speeds.
The 800 yards’ range mentioned by Agesistratus was
probably exceptional—the range of some classical
‘Big Bertha.’ But smaller ‘engines,’ despite their
clumsiness, became effective weapons in the hands of
great commanders such as Alexander of Macedon,
who may have been the first to employ them as true
field artillery. And when created by the skill of
master engineers and the wealth of great cities, they
could, for a period, dominate siege warfare. Plutarch
writes of the siege of Syracuse: ‘all the rest of the
Syracusans were no more than the body in the
18

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

batteries of Archimedes, whilst he was the informing
soul. All other weapons lay idle and unemployed, his
were the only offensive and defensive arms of the city.’

Men had—for a short period—become servants
and targets of the machines, even as far back in
history as that.

Major-General J. C. F. Fuller, from whose work
on ‘the projectile cycle’ in classical warfare these
examples have been taken, comments on them: ‘the
point to note here is, and we do not see it again
clearly until after the Industrial Revolution, that
directly projectile weapons become superior to shock
weapons, more and more is the power to wage war
economically influenced by the civilian inventor, by
science and by industry, in place of by the soldier
and his professional tactics. The result of this is...
that generalship is apt to fall behind inventiveness ;
secondly, that fighting becomes more and more
dependent upon invention and industry, until to
attack these sources of military power is even more
important than attacking the enemy’s armies.’*

In this way the ‘constant tactical factor,’ as Major-
General Fuller calls it, leads through the growth of
‘technique to a change in war greater than a mere
change in the weapons used. Aspects of this change,
in modern conditions, begin to be noted soon after
the Franco-Prussian war,f but other aspects are, of

* Major-General J. F. C. ages C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., The
Dragon’s Teeth, London, 1932, p. 23
+ Engels in his ‘Anti-Dihring’ (Bory Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in
Science, London, 1935) quotes (on p. 195) a captain of the German
general staff who said in 1876 that ‘the basis of warfare is primarily
the general economic life of the peoples.’
19

THE COMING WORLD WAR

course, occurring all through the centuries after the
collapse of ancient civilization.

Changes in weapons (first mainly in weapons as
tools, then in weapons as machines), consequent
changes in warfare, have played a large part in the
shifting of power from one social class to another.
Major-General Fuller describes the effect of the
introduction of gunpowder to Europe (it was first
invented in China):

“Gunpowder . . . first restricted and then elimi-
nated the feudal order, it abolished private wars,
consolidated kingdoms, policed them, and with the
merchant led to the emergence of another order and
form of civilization—the Modern Age.’*

_ The process by which this occurred was described
more fully by Friedrich Engels in 1878:

‘At the beginning of the fourteenth century, gun-
powder came from the Arabs to Western Europe,
and, as every school-child knows, completely revo-
lutionized methods of warfare. The introduction of
gunpowder and firearms, however, was . . . a step
forward in industry, an economic advance. Industry
remains industry, whether it is applied to the produc-
tion or the destruction of things. And the introduc-
tion of firearms had a revolutionizing effect not only
on war itself, but also on the political relationships
of domination and subjection. The provision of
powder and firearms required industry and money,
and both of these were in the hands of the burghers
of the towns. From the outset, therefore, firearms
were the weapons of the towns, and of tac rising

o Major- General Fuller, The Dragon’s Teeth, p. 250.
20

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

monarchy drawing its support from the towns,
against the feudal nobility. The stone walls of the
noblemen’s castles, hitherto unapproachable, fell
before the cannon of the burghers, and the bullets
of the burghers’ arquebuses pierced the armour of
the knights. With the armour-clad cavalry of the
feudal lords, the feudal lords’ supremacy was also
broken; with the development of the bourgeoisie,
infantry and guns became more and more the
decisive types of weapons. ’*

Technique develops ; warfare changes ; class power
is shifted. This process did not end when ‘the ruins
Cromwell knocked about a bit’ became useless in
war. It is a process that can reach its full develop-
ment to-day or to-morrow—when industry rather
than ‘the soldier and his professional tactics’
becomes clearly the most important thing. in war-
fare—and ‘industry’ means more and more, with
modern technique, the skill, education, numbers of
an industrial working class.

Stages in this process of change can be seen in
every struggle of the revolutionary bourgeoisie to
establish its power against feudalism and royalty. In
the American War of Independence the flint-lock
muskets of King George’s mercenaries were opposed
to the rifled weapons of the American settlers. ‘These
settlers, being hunters of wild animals, had learnt
how to aim and hit; King George’s troops were
drilled to reserve their volleys until they could see
every detail of their opponents’ uniforms. The
Americans fought from the woods as sharpshooters ;

* Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dihring, p. 190.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

bourgeois individualism triumphed, and bourgeois
democracy.

The French Revolution met the old order of
Europe in battle first at Valmy, in 1792. It was a
critical point for the revolution, before Carnot (who
began his military career with a famous ‘Essai sur
les Machines en Général,’ 1786) had been able to
create the new revolutionary armies. Valmy was not
really a battle: it is correctly described by Hilaire
Belloc as a cannonade. The technical weapon pro-
duced by industry, artillery, here was a principal
factor in deciding the progress of a social change,
the revolution.

Later this revolution was subjugated by, and yet
summed up in, an expert gunner, Napoleon. He
began his career as a lieutenant of artillery in the
same year as Carnot published his ‘Essai.’ In his first
engagement of importance, that at Toulon, he intro-
duced new methods of attack by artillery on fortified
positions and on a fleet. And his typical method of
struggle for power, and of government in crisis, had
as its basis not the training of a special guard of any
sort (the royal method) but a ‘whiff of grapeshot.’

In his preparations for battle—as the non-military
reader may have noticed from Tolstoy’s description
of Borodino in War and Peace—Napoleon first dictated
the position of his artillery and their objectives. The
field-gun, though primitive, had become a dominant
weapon. It continued to become more and more
important until the development of modern rifles and
entrenchments (1904) to some extent countered its
power.

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

While industry was producing more and more
powerful artillery, it was improving the tools of war-
fare as well as the machines*: breech-loading rifles,
then repeating rifles, then the machine-gun. This, as
its name implies, is a tool or weapon that has
become a machine. For the ancient balista the field-
gun, for the catapult the howitzer, for the polybolos
the machine-gun. The full development of these
weapons during the first World War brought the
siege of Germany almost to the same stage as the
siege of Syracuse ; the soldier became ‘the body in the
batteries.’

The industrial technique that came to full expres-
sion in these weapons is that of coal, steel, steam,
blasting charges, the turret lathe—mid-nineteenth-
century materials and forces. During the twentieth
century a new technique (based of course on this
older one) came into being with extraordinary speed :
steel alloys, aluminium, electricity (the magneto),
and petrol began to dominate in transport. When
the petrol-engine had developed, the aeroplane, the
tank, and the cross-country lorry came into being.
These three machines had scarcely time, by 1918, to
show their full powers.

For the campaign of 1919 the plans of the British
Ministry of Munitions included 10,000 fighting tanks,
10,000 caterpillar lorries,t and special fleets of aero-

* A tool consists of few parts, is usuall abend by hand by a
single individual, and the movements of the parts are simple;
machine consists of many parts, is usually operated by power, fevers,
etc., by a number of men, and the movements of some of its parts
are complicated, often repetitive.

t Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1916-1918, Part II, p. 485.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

planes for long-distanced bombing. ‘All that hap-
pened,’ writes Winston Churchill, * ‘in the four years
of the Great War was only a prelude to what was
preparing for the fifth year. The campaign of the
year 1919 would have witnessed an immense acces-
sion to the power of destruction . . . thousands of
aeroplanes would have shattered their cities . . .
(using) poison gases of incredible Mangy But
this campaign was not fought.

. When the second world war comes, the new
technique based on petrol, aerodynamics, and
chemistry will be fully applied to warfare for the
first time.

The scale of warfare made possible by the almost
illimitable productive capacity of the modern world
has led to a position in which the fighting forces are
dependent not on a few arsenals but on all the indus-
try of a country at war. Shells alone for a modern
battle may need transport capacity equal to that of
100,000 big lorries.t That this growing dependence
of armies on industry means a very big change is
admitted by the theoreticians of war. Thus Captain
Liddell Hart, in his History of the Great War, draws a
distinction between ‘the nation in arms’ (as in past
wars) and ‘the nation at war’ (as it will be in the
future).

The distinction amounts to this: in the first case
the whole able-bodied male population is trained,
and as far as possible made available, for service in

* Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath, p. 453.

+ Naturally it is impossible and unnecessary to provide such a
number of lorries; each vehicle makes more than o one journey from
railhead to dump or battery. .

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

the army, which is the’ war-making instrument. In
the second case all the activities, social and economic,
of the population are governed by the need to make
available its military strength, which is expressed
more fully in millions of shells, in artillery, transport,
tanks, aeroplanes and machine-guns, than in mil-
lions of riflemen. __

This change makes necessary a different sort of
preparation for war. Governments need to think
first of the discipline and productive efficiency of
the working classes, not of the armies. In the
Napoleonic or Crimean wars the civilian had to be
willing to pay rather higher taxes; now he must be
willing to work directly for the war—while he is the
target for the most effective weapons used in the
war. i E

For the application of technique based on petrol
and the new metallurgy may alter land warfare out
ofrecognition, but its principal effect is to bring about
a war from theair against the enemy’s chief centres
of military strength : the factory cities. Following the
‘constant tactical factor’ to. its logical conclusion, the
ultimate weapon would be an aeroplane operated
by wireless from half across the world, capable of
bombing or gassing the factories and working-class
populations that supply the enemies’ armies. Before
this ultimate conclusion becomes their end, the work-
ing-class populations will have a part to play in the
matter. 7 3 :

In the next chapter we will suggest some of the
probable aspects of this war from the air. Before
that, it is necessary to summarize the relationship

THE COMING WORLD WAR

between technique and warfare, stated above, as part
of a wider relationship, between technique and
society.

It will, perhaps, have been noticed that quotations
from Major-General Fuller—one of the leading
theoreticians of the British Army—and from Fried-
rich Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx, coincide
remarkably on the social effect of the introduction
of gunpowder. Major-General Fuller is no Marxist ;
he is in all probability a supporter of Sir Oswald
Mosley, since in the first issue of the Fascist Quarterly
(January 1935) he contributes the necessary anti-
Semitism. But working at the facts of his profession
and studying the relation between technique and
war, he develops ideas contained in a clearer form
in Marxism, the science that explains the relations
between technique, and the productive relations in
which men get their living, and society as a whole,
including all its ‘superstructure’ of arts and sciences.

From economics, from exact descriptions of life
by every sort of witness, from factory inspectors’ re-
ports and the widest generalizations of history, Marx
built up a theory which shows productive technique,
the way men get their living, and its progress to be
the dominant factor—not the sole cause, in a one-
way street of cause and effect, but the root, the pri-
mary thing—in society, law, art, government, the
way men live. The fact that warfare demands new
weapons, machines; that these machines alter war-
fare ; that this alteration then helps in the destruction
of old ruling classes and the rise of new ones—this is
only an illustration, a sub-section, of the general pro-
26 7

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

cess of the development of society that Marx first ——7
brought to consciousness and clarity. :
There are English readers who have never been
further west than Marylebone, yet ‘come from
Missouri’ : they demand to be shown. For them, the
value of a theory of society lies not in its ability to
explain events and show their relations, but in its
ability to predict events or form the basis of predic-
tion. It is worth while giving, for their sake, some of
the more superficial ‘credentials’ of Marxism.
Marxism is a method of thought and action used
by those who understand the world in order to
change it. It is a combination of theory and prac-
tice. In Britain these two aspects of human life have
no equality in prestige : for so many years the British
people were the pioneers in changing empirically,
by ‘rule of thumb,’ the whole shape and nature of
the life of the world’s population, that they have
grown accustomed to neglecting social theory—the
rational, scientific study of the laws that govern and
link events. (Britain’s rival power, Germany, having
learnt modern industry and finance and life late and
at second hand, became for a period just the oppo-
site, a nation of theoretical bent.) It is no part of
this book’s purpose to do very much of the spade-
work needed—greatly needed—to break through |
what Lenin called the ‘English aversion to theory.’
But we can attempt to give some examples of how
Marxist theory ‘works.’ To show the practical value
of this theoretical system may help some readers to
understand that it is an essential part of the struggle
to prevent the relapse of the world into barbarism.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

We will take examples from Engels and Lenin that
touch on the main subject of this book: war. Eco-
nomics, history, political science, have seen a wide
development of controversy on Marxism. We need
not intervene here except to note that the average
man’s summing up of the economic controversy is:
Marx is always said to be out of date, but his pre-
dictions as to the breakdown of capitalism as an
economic system—from its own structure and own
forces—are being proved correct every day. ‘There
must be something more in Marx than will be
allowed by those experts in economics who. prove
him wrong yearly, but cannot prevent things going
as he said they would. .

This feeling of the ordinary man may be steenpili-
ened if we can show that Engels and Lenin knew
more about the war of 1914-18, before it happened,
than did the great soldiers and war ministers of
Europe. :

Engels wrote in- 1801: ;

‘The Socialists in all countries are for peace. If,
nevertheless, war comes, then one thing is certain.
This war, where fifteen and twenty million armed
men would slaughter one another and lay waste to
Europe as never before, this war must either bring
about the immediate victory of Socialism or so
shatter the old order of things from top to bottom,
and leave behind such a heap of ruins, that the old
capitalist society will become more impossible than
ever before, and the social revolution, though it
might be set back for ten or fifteen years, would,
however, in this case also have to conquer, and
28

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

in so much the more speedy and thorough
fashion. ’* |

In this quotation we note the accurate idea of the
scale of the future world war, the casualties, the
devastation. The general staffs on both sides,
believing in a short war, were about as wrong as
Engels was right. More important, the generals
never foresaw ‘the immediate victory of Socialism’
which will seem to history the outstanding result of
the war (immediate, and yet needing a struggle of
decades, a victory not yet fully achieved—the hardest
yard-stick of all to make is that for the fourth dimen-
sion! We can see what is happening and what will
happen soon. How soon, no one can tell accurately.)

Earlier, Engels—this civilian in the Manchester
cotton trade, whose works are never mentioned by
the military theorists—had given an almost ludi-
crously correct picture of what the war between
France and Germany would be like:

‘If things turn out as we would like it, and this is
very probable, then it will be a war of position with
varying success on the French frontier, a war of
attack leading to the capture of the Polish fortresses
on the Russian frontier, and a revolution in Peters-
burg, which will at once make the gentlemen who
are conducting the war see everything in an entirely
different light. One thing is certain: there will be
no more quick decisions and triumphal marches to
Berlin or Paris.” (Letter to W. Liebknecht, Feb-
ruary 23, 1888.) | on

* Socialism in Germany, 1891, quoted in the Labour Monthly,
August 1931.
29

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Later he predicted that the Germans would go
through Belgium, disregarding the Treaty of Neu-
trality as ‘a scrap of paper’—Engels’s words.

There are no signs in any military theory or
history that any general or soldier thought the war
in the West would become one of positions. But it
did. And the Polish fortresses fell. And the revolution
occurred as Engels had predicted.

Lord Kitchener is said to have realized the likeli-
hood of a long and devastating war. He was an
exception in this among the generals of Europe. But
Kitchener knew less than Lenin about the weapons
that would prove to be dominant in this war.

Lenin wrote in 1906, after the Moscow insurrec-
tion, to the effect that technical changes were taking
place in warfare which those organizing insurrection
should note. The Russo-Japanese war, he pointed
out, had ‘produced the hand-grenade; automatic
firearms have been placed on the market.’* In these
dozen words Lenin picks out, to illustrate his argu-
ment, two weapons most neglected by the generals
of 1914, but of decisive importance during the war.

Lloyd George, in his War Memoirs, has described
how Lord Kitchener laid it down, in 1915, that four
machine-guns per battalion would be quite enough.
He was only a few hundred per cent. wrong, by 1918.f

* ‘Lessons of Moscow Insurrection,’ Selections from Lenin, Vol. II,
_ p. 205, Martin Lawrence, London, 1927.

t Kitchener’s viewpoint on machine-guns was not worse than that
of the French general staff. In their regulations of October 28 and
December 2, 1913, the French general staff laid down, detail by
detail, the methods to be used by ‘large units’ in battle. The machine-

gun is never mentioned! See, for a concise and cruel analysis of
these regulations, Le Plan 17 by André Morizet, Paris, 1919.

TECHNIQUE AND BATTLE

Similarly the hand-grenade, that Lenin noted in
1906 as important among modern weapons, was not
supplied to the British Army until a year of warfare
had gone by. In the first trench battles the British
infantry used plum-and-apple jam tins, filled with
cordite by themselves and fitted with make-shift
fuses.

Engels and Lenin were able to see further into the
fog of war than those trained in the use of the blinkers
of generalship. This was because Marxism, as a
science, is based on a knowledge of the relations
between technique, industrial progress, and the forms
and policies of social life. Changes in technique—
mastery. of explosives in small handy containers for
use in mines and quarries, development of automatic
repetitive machinery—can be seen by Marxists to
have obvious parallels and consequences in war: the
hand-grenade, the machine-gun. Just as the larger
changes in productive technique can be seen to pro-
duce, condition, limit, govern the growth of classes
and the forms of their clash in politics.

CHAPTER II
WAR FROM THE AIR

War from the air is not to be confused with war in
the air. From 1914 to 1918 the aeroplane was used
principally as a special sort of scout, ‘spotting’ for
guns, carrying out reconnaissance behind the enemy
lines.. The machines doing this work were limited to
a few dozen miles of territory on each side of fixed
trench lines. They could be and were attacked by
fighters, and an elaborate organization of attack and
defence was built up—a war in the air.

But the aeroplane in the next war will not mainly
be a special sort of scout; it will mainly be a special
sort of artillery. .It will be a weapon capable of
partially destroying cities and depots, and hampering
ports and railways, within several hundred miles of
the fighting-line.

The German ‘Gothas’ were used against London
and Paris in this way, in the last years of the war; so
was an independent section of the Royal Air Force
which bombed Rhine towns. But these forces had
not reached full development by the Armistice.

The weight-carrying capacity and range of the
modern bomber makes it roughly a dozen times as
efficient a weapon as the average machine used in
1918. It can carry four times the load three times as
far. It can also unload its cargo far more accurately.

WAR FROM THE AIR

It is possible that in a colonial area such as Man-
churia, for several reasons, the dominance of the
air-weapon will only appear after some months of
warfare. The distances are so enormous, the targets
(towns, depots, ports) so small in size and restricted
in number that it may be possible for defending
‘fighters’ on each side to intercept a number of
bombers. In the more thickly populated and more
highly organized countries of Europe the immense
power of the air-weapon will appear at once. Here
there are many targets to choose from; it is impos-
sible to guard them all; the destruction of the
bridges, or the power-stations, or the main railway
stations, or the government centres, or the food
markets and warehouses of a modern city would
cause so much disorganization that the city would
be unable to play its full part in the war.

Another reason why this weapon may not be
dominant immediately in country such as Manchuria
and Siberia is the difficulty of operating aircraft
when snow is falling and when snow is melting.
There are weeks and months when ’planes can only
be flown from specially prepared landing-grounds. ©
And these landing-grounds will be the first targets on
each side. But even here, after a few months of war-
fare, railways, roads and ports may be more danger-
ous than front-line trenches. Railways, probably,
will only work at night. Troops on the road will
move in the dark, or move in very small parties.

In Europe, where swiftly moving mechanized „e.
forces will be prominent for the first time, the targets
for aircraft at the ‘front’ may be too elusive for the

c 33

THE COMING WORLD WAR

pilots to trouble themselves about. Why try to bomb
tanks when you can bomb the depots from which
they are supplied, and the factories that make and
repair them?

The most effective way of bombing cities will be
to gas selected areas, ‘bottle-necks’ for transport
or productive and administrative centres, and at
the same time to scatter incendiary bombs, with a
smaller proportion of high explosives, over a much
larger number of targets.

The theory has been put forward that ‘London
could be wiped out in a night’ by the use of poison
gas. This is not true. Armentières, with a civilian
population of over 10,000, was enclosed in a ‘box-
barrage’ of mustard-gas shells on July 28, 1918.
This prevented civilians, who had no masks, from
escaping. The town was soaked with mustard gas
for two days. According to the Official History of the
War (Medical Services),* the deaths numbered only
12 per cent. of the population.

It 1s quite clear that the aim of the politicians who
talk of ‘London wiped out in a night’ is to scare up

“panic support for a stronger Air Force. But apart
from their aim, these scares are baseless. Every gas
or liquid, or poisonous dust-smoke, has its own
physical laws which it must obey. It can only rise,
fall, spread outwards from the points of release in
accordance with these laws. No substance of any of
these types exists that will spread over and into houses
for a long distance from the point of release. To
damp the streets of London several thousand tons of

* London, 1924, Vol. IT, p. 294.

WAR FROM THE AIR

rain are needed. To deposit on each square inch of
London a drop of liquid so small that it is only just
visible would need over 300 tons of the liquid for
inner London, which is 115 square miles in extent.
‘Greater London’ is 700 square miles. No gas or
mixture of gases can destroy all life in such an area in
a month, even if all the air forces in the world are
spreading it.

But London will be starving, more or less rapidly,
within a month if an air force of any size operates
against it continuously. Transport will almost cease.
Bridges and railway junctions will be wrecked with
high explosive, strategic areas (such as the railway
yards and crossings between King’s Cross and Chalk
Farm, at Clapham Junction, at Willesden Junction,
and also the Canning Town bridges) will be soaked
with poison gas and unapproachable without special
clothing and masks. The aircraft factories in the
suburbs will be burnt or bombed. The failure or
destruction of gas, electricity and water services will
make the city practically uninhabitable. And in
every town from Southampton to Glasgow night or
day can bring the raiders and the terror. Suspense,
waiting, fear—then the appalling horror of the attack.

Fires, lit by incendiary bombs, will destroy large
areas. These bombs can now be made of only four
pounds weight; they generate heat enough to burn
through an inch of steel; they cannot be quenched
with water.* The ordinary fire-fighting organization

* A factory making the metallic powders that are mixed to form
thermite, and other incendiary substances, suitable for bombs, exists
near an English city. To find it, you must turn off a side road down
a lane that has, apparently, no name. The company’s own name

THE COMING WORLD WAR

will be useless against such weapons; its equipment
is insufficient; the number of trained men is so
restricted by motives of economy that the Labour
majority on the London County Council—to give an
example—cannot allow its firemen an eight-hour
day. An explosion occurred just after Christmas 1934
in a refrigerating plant near Smithfield market; the
fumes spread, as poison gas will spread, across two
or three streets; firemen with gas-masks were sum-
moned from every brigade in London, even from as
far away as Woolwich; but only eighteen men
equipped with suitable masks were found to be avail-
able. Fire equipment of this sort could not cope with
the results of a raid by a single flight of modern
bombers, carrying high explosive to break gas pipes,
etc., thermite bombs to start fires, and mustard gas
to protect these fires from ‘interference.’ Big fires,
spreading to a frontage of whole streets, and the
lingering wind-carried gas will cause casualties so
horrible that the minds of those not injured will be
strained to breaking-point. A planless rush out of
London, and out of other big cities, will begin.

The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph,

is the X Y Company, but outside their factory this name is not
posted up; instead there is a board with the words: The Z Works.
The name Z does not occur on the firm’s notepaper or in the tele-
phone directory. Inside the factory the machinery is so completely
automatic that few skilled workers are needed; the rest are young
girls who know very little about the meaning of their work. Machines
are grinding to powder metals so inflammable that the grinding
cannot be done in air; a special atmosphere, largely consisting of
nitrogen, is supplied to the working chambers. Automatic tests of
this artificial atmosphere are made continually; if it is faulty, the
testing apparatus switches off the entire factory’s electricity supply at
once.

WAR FROM THE AIR

Captain Liddell Hart, revealed in its issue of Novem-
ber 7, 1933, that since 1925 the War Office had been=™
considering the provision of bomb-proof and gas-
proof shelters, distribution of gas-masks to the civil
population, training in their use, special training for
fire brigades, measures for dealing with an interrup-
tion of supplies of water, light, heat, power. The
War Office is presumably still studying these ques-
tions: it is even possible that before the next war
their studies may get as far as the making of a few
shelters and the issue of a few masks.

Other bodies are also studying these questions.
The Women’s Legion has asked for 4,000 women
volunteers to receive training in emergency first-aid
work, in the event of gas attacks. Lady Londonderry,
wife of the Secretary of State for Air, is president of
this legion; Lady Hailsham, wife of the Secretary of
State for War, is one of her principal assistants.
These ladies are necessarily well-informed, and it is
possible, though not likely, that the training given
under their patronage will be adequate—as training.
As a practical measure to deal with the dangers
foreseen, it is at least inadequate.

The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph
is in continual touch with Government departments.
He continued his article:

"It has been suggested that in the event of severe
air attacks 40 per cent. of London’s seven million
population would leave the city in the first forty-
eight hours, and 8o per cent. within the week.

‘Such an estimate may be exaggerated, but it 1s
nevertheless essential to consider ways of controlling

THE COMING WORLD WAR

any mass evacuation and of feeding and housing the
refugees.” (Daily Telegraph, November 7, 1933.)

‘Essential to consider’: this is very official lang-
uage. Masks have been considered for ten years;
shelters have been considered for ten yeats. Do many
exist? Do any plans exist for dealing with the
refugees? And would they be of the slightest use? _

For this looks like an insoluble problem: food,
water, milk and even the provision of sufficient graves
or quicklime or the organizing of cremation for
several hundred thousand dead. An army of a
million men needs trained and organized supply ser-
vices numbering perhaps 50,000 men. How many
thousand, untrained and unorganized, would be
needed to feed the four million people who can be
expected to leave London—according to a more con-
servative estimate than that mentioned by Captain
Liddell Hart—in the first fortnight of bombing?
Even the roads would be insufficient for the purpose :
of trained men 60,000 can be moved by a single road,
at the rate of fifteen miles per day (on foot). The
roads to the north and north-west of London would
be hopeless if something over a quarter of a million
people on foot were added to a heavier motor traffic
than that which already, in ‘rush hours,’ congests
them considerably.

This, then, is the probable fate of London in a
war from the air at the present moment. And, as we
shall see in a later chapter, such a war is possible at
any time. Paris would also suffer the same destruc-
tion in a war with Germany or Britain, before
General Goering’s new air force, or Mr. Baldwin’s,
38

WAR FROM THE AIR

was destroyed. It is hard to reckon the probable
extent of the casualties, but if the process is allowed to
go to its limit, it seems possible that 25 per cent. of
the populations of London, Paris and Berlin, if all
three are involved, will be killed—say five or six
million people in all. In this estimate the most diffi-
cult figure to reckon is that for epidemic diseases
among the civilian population.

It should be remembered that this casualty list is
only a small one as compared with the number killed
throughout the world, in the last war, by wounds and
disease.

Typhus and enteric seem probable. The ‘order of
merit” among creators of casualties may well be:
disease, exposure, gas, hunger, fire, high explosive.
Apart from immediate deaths from these causes there
will be many who will die or go blind years after-
wards. Five of the cases admitted to St. Dunstan’s
during twelve months in 1933-34 were men blinded
by gas—their blindness was not complete till nearly
twenty years after the gassing. (Daily Telegraph,
August 4, 1934). In this form of warfare there may
be, for the first time in the history of the world, a
large percentage of mental casualties—men and
women who go mad. This is by no means certain,
since human beings seemed, during the last war,
capable of remaining relatively sane through almost
anything. But ‘shell-shock,’ it is clear, will be
common. The troops who suffered in the last war
to the point of mental exhaustion had periods of
rest when they were out of range of the guns. No one
will be out of range of the bombers.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Those who endure will be liable to later break-
down. The Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Society, ac-
cording to Sir R. Tyrwhitt, still cares for 6,000
mental cases due to the last war in hospital ; there are
also 32,000 cases of neurasthenia.* Many of these
only developed fully when the strain of war had
ended. |

War is hell, and always has been; but even Dante
never conceived the torments that can be let loose on
the living now, at any moment, from the sky. Dante
believed the sky to be populated with angels; a war
film taught us, some time ago, to call the sky’s more
recent inhabitants ‘Hell’s Angels.’ They will live
up to that name.

But it must not be thought that this new and
efficient hell on earth is certain to lead directly to
surrender and to peace. The town of Hull suffered a
little from Zeppelin bombing early in the war, and
on clear nights many hundreds used to trek out of

- Hull to sleep—if they could sleep—ain the fields.
But there was no noticeable feeling for peace engen-
dered; the feelings roused were turned by adequate
propaganda into hate for the ‘baby-killers.’ Mr.
Bernard Shaw has said in a broadcast speech (later
reprinted as a pamphlet, ‘Are We Heading for
War?’ and published by the Labour Party) : ‘What
will London do when it finds itself approached by a
crowd of aeroplanes, capable of destroying it in half
an hour? London will surrender. White flags and:

= * Sir R. Tyrwhitt also said: “There are hospitals now in this
country which the public never see. They contain mutilated men,
their smashed faces hidden by masks. They are waiting to die!’

WAR FROM THE AIR

wireless messages: “Don’t drop your bombs: we
give in,” will fill the air. But our own air squadrons
will have already started to make the enemies’
capitals surrender. From Paris to Moscow, from
Stockholm to Rome, the white flags will go up in
every city.’ This gallant old man on the flying
trapeze of paradox forgets that there is no single city,
London, that can do such a thing. King and court,
judges and police, generals and staffs, cabinets and
civil services exist. Millionaires own the papers
through which London becomes aware of what is
happening. These rulers will ‘give in’ before a bomb
is dropped? They have not the courage. Mr. Shaw
was not educated at an English public school.

These rulers will not say, ‘We give in.’ They are
more likely to say: ‘Fight to the last man’—mean- `
while, as a matter of national necessity, removing ~
their offices to Belfast or to Inverness.

On the question of bombing civilians there is no
practical difference in policy between the Labour
party and the other parties. A pacifist Secretary of
State in the first Labour government was responsible
for the ‘pacification’ of frontier tribes from the air.
Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air in the
second Labour government, said that in the next
war ‘the way to win will be by the ruthless bombing
of localities which in many cases will be densely
populated.’ It is this ruthless bombing that will dis-
tinguish, and set apart from all other battles in world
history, the first phases at least of the second World
War. |

In a war of this sort, what part can the armies

THE COMING WORLD WAR

play? They will be the ‘moppers-up.’ Raiding far
into enemy country in mechanized brigades, they
will have the duty of occupying the wrecked cities
and enforcing dictated peace terms on their in-
habitants, if either side succeeds completely in war
from the air. It takes a lot of bombing to ‘knock a
city right out.’ Even the jerry-built suburbs of
Shanghai, bombed by the Japanese, stood a con-
siderable amount of knocking about, from machines
untroubled by any resistance. The Times stated on
February 2, 1932, that ‘the bombing of the city has
been going on since January 28. This bombing has
claimed countless victims in Chapei, which is a
human ant-hill . . . it is quite evident that the
destruction of the entire city is intended.’ But this
bombing, by machines numbering between 150 and
200, went on with short intervals for a whole month,
without the resistance of the Chinese in Chapei being
broken. Their resistance was only ended when the
Chinese government secured, by diplomatic means,
the withdrawal of its own 19th Army, which had
fought without the government’s sanction.

When London, Paris and Berlin are treated in the
same way by air forces stronger in numbers and much
better equipped (but hampered perhaps just a little
by the various forms of anti-aircraft defences) they
will also remain capable of resistance, or more
properly of defiance, for a considerable period. It
will be the armies’ duty to put an end to this defiance
—if they can beat the opposing armies.

In Manchuria and Siberia, where cities scarcely
matter, the armies may possibly provide the principal

WAR FROM THE AIR

targets for the bombers. The ordinary infantry
soldier, armed. with a rifle, will usually be unlucky
—as most infantrymen on the Western front were in
1918. The Pope has said, in an address to the
Fascist National Infantryman’s Association: ‘We
should, as you well-beloved sons are aware, be and
remain far distant from all the science of warfare,
but we cannot fail to see clearly that the infantry is
the real body of the army.’ This ‘real body’ in the
next world war will be cannon-fodder for His Holi-
ness’s canonization—not much more. To the
machine-gunners will fall the task of holding the
positions won in battle-zones perhaps thirty miles
wide. To the tanks and armoured cars will fall the
work of winning new positions. The infantry will
provide target practice for both.

There will be little likelihood, in Europe, of thé”
armies playing a primary part in the war until the
air forces are worn out and the aircraft factories
bombed to pieces on both sides. But this may happen
within a month or two. Air forces crack up at a great
rate when on active service. The British aircraft
factories had to produce 2,700 machines per month
in 1918 to keep less than 2,000 machines in active
use. If all air forces engaged crack, and revolutions
have not ended the war in its first phase, the light
tank will begin to make history, and the possibility
of a fairly long war will emerge. L

Machine-guns are so much stronger in defence
than in attack that a military solution is not to be
expected: a solution through hunger is indicated by
all modern military history. But while a military

THE COMING WORLD WAR

decision in the next world war is unlikely, it is pos-
sible. The industry of one country or group of
countries may prove—through its level of technique,
or through the class relations of those who work in
it—much stronger than the industry of the opposing
country or group of countries. The application of
petrol-engine technique to land warfare will certainly
counteract some of the strength of the machine-gun
in defence. It will do this both by making it possible
for troops and weapons to be pushed through and
past machine-gun ‘nests,’ and by such a development
of mobility that the opposing forces’ defensive posi-
tions are made untenable.

The speed of movement of self-contained forces,
battalions of infantry and batteries of artillery, has
been pushed up to extraordinary levels recently.
This makes possible outflanking movements stretched
over hundreds of miles. o

The mobility of infantry remained at a fixed level
for more than two thousand years ; only picked troops
could equal the marching power of the Roman
legions. Then came the development of railways
and later of road transport. Railways do not give
true mobility, the power to move in any direction;
nor do they give the mobility during actual battle
that is the vital factor. When they have to be built,
as in the Egypt-Palestine campaign, progress is
limited to a few miles a day. Road and cross-country
transport, on the other hand, gives true mobility.
The strategic importance of this form of transport
was underlined early in the war, when General Gal-
lieni’s taxi-cabs took troops from the Paris area to

WAR FROM THE AIR

Von Kluck’s flank, during the critical stage of the
battle of the Marne. Its tactical importance was
made clear at Cambrai and in the final battles of the
war.

This form of transport did not reach full develop-
ment during the war. It is only since then that we
have seen self-contained units of all arms swung across
the map by petrol. And during 1932 the scheduled
pace of movement for a British infantry battalion,
the slowest unit of a ‘mechanized’ brigade, was
raised at one bound from 15 m.p.h. to 20 m.p.h.

In the same way the speed of movement of field
artillery has been raised from that of the horse-drawn
battery, not much faster than Wellington’s guns, to
that of the ‘dragon’ tractor, capable of 20 m.p.h. or
more. A general increase in mobility has taken place
that makes possible a war of manceuvre so long as
the factories can continue to supply transport,
machinery, and tanks. But new methods of defence,
anti-tank guns, etc., make it unlikely that the
manoeuvre phase will last until victory is won; a
deadlock will be reached in all probability.

Speed, of course, is not everything : the fire-power
of a division has increased with its mobility. This
has occurred mainly through the development of the
machine-gun as the dominant weapon of the army. |

Figures are not available for the exact number of
machine-guns allotted to a British division now; and
progress is so rapid that they would probably be out
of date if available But it is known that in 1913 a
United States division of infantry had 24 machine-
guns, capable of firing 12,000 shots per minute

THE COMING WORLD WAR

maximum. In 1930 such a division had 947 machine-
guns, capable of over 470,000 shots per minute. The
maximum potential fire-power of the division (in-
cluding rifles but excluding artillery) had thus
increased by 200 per cent.

Most British battalions have now a machine-
gun company consisting of three machine-gun
platoons and a light mortar platoon. In addition,
there are brigade machine-guns, divisional machine-
guns and light mortars, and the machine-guns of the
armoured vehicles attached to each division.

From the time of Agincourt until the latter half of
the Great War the dominant weapon in warfare could
be handled by a single man, and that man could
carry in battle all the munitions required in a day’s
fighting. This weapon—bow, musket, rifle—was a
tool that needed little mechanical skill in making,
handling or maintenance. Modern rifles could be
produced, in 1914, by workshops without a high
level of technique; rifles were made in Persia,
Afghanistan and China.

From 1916 the machine-gun began, on the Western
Front, to replace the rifle as the dominant weapon.
(By dominant weapon is meant the principal creator
of casualties and principal instrument in imposing
the will of one force on another, which is mainly but
not entirely done by creating casualties.) The
machine-gun needs considerable mechanical skill in
making, handling and maintenance. It can only be
produced by machine-tools working to fine limits. It
also needs the co-operation of several men in a day’s
fighting, and to maintain full effective use for a day

WAR FROM THE AIR

may need four to ten times more ammunition than
its crew can themselves carry in attack.

The fighting round Chapei during 1932 has shown
that the machine-gun maintains, or even has in-
creased, its predominance. Chinese machine-gun-
ners were able to maintain themselves in the Woo-
sung forts against attack by all weapons, as the
German machine-gunners held the ground at
Paschendaele. The Japanese tanks and armoured
cars failed to defeat snipers in the city and machine-
gunners in the rice-fields.

The dependence of the machine-gun on a con-
tinual flow of ammunition, its need for skilled hand-
ling and maintenance (even if the gun gets these,
the life of a machine-gun unit in battle is usually
described as ‘all jam’), its dependence on the
micrometer-gauge and first-class metallurgy in
manufacture make this weapon typical of modern
technical advance. But it is, of course, not nearly
so complicated a piece of engineering as the aero-
plane engine, or so dependent on supplies as a tank.

An aeroplane in the air is, for a number of hours,
a self-contained military unit. But an aeroplane
squadron with its workshops and transport is a very
complex economic group dependent on the steel
and engineering industries throughout almost all
their range, needing wireless parts, delicate instru-
ments, chemicals (for special fuels, and ‘dope’ for
fabrics), benzol from coal, specially-made tyres,
light metal alloys and a dozen other things. If the
supply of any of these is held up, the squadron is
helpless.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Because of the complete dependence of all modern
weapons on the factory, these changes in the tech-
nique of warfare will not have the results in practice
that are sometimes expected from them. They will
not make it easier to fight the Soviet Union, or to
reconquer a lost colony, or to wipe out working-class
revolutionary forces within each imperialist State.

——the development of scientific machinery for warfare
makes it easier to start but not to win such wars.

To begin a war, with new and overwhelming
machines in your possession, becomes a matter of
confident (but unfounded) optimism, as at Shanghai
in 1932, when the Japanese expected to crush the
Chinese resistance in a few days; it is also easier for
governments to postpone the actual outbreak of a
nationalist revolt (as in India) by a show of over-
whelming force. But when the test comes—whether
of armoured cars in Peshawar or of tanks in Chapei
—the results are not in accord with the expectations
of the General Staffs. ©

When carried beyond a certain point each
development of military technique makes the im-
perialist State weaker as against the enemies men-
tioned. This may seem, at first sight, absurd ; surely
a new and better weapon strengthens the fighting
power of the man who holds it? Certainly it does,
we can answer; but who holds this weapon? And
does the weapon need, for its use, the obedient
service of many other men, some of them outside the
armed forces altogether? New weapons must be
judged not only by their efficiency as weapons but

_ also by two other standards: their tect on the pro-

48 i

WAR FROM THE AIR

cess of class differentiation within the armed force in
question, and their effect on the dependence of this
armed force on the products ofa skilled working class.

In the next war the decisive factor will be not the
potential killing-power but the actual will-power,
solidarity and endurance of the opposing forces.
Class differentiation, shortages of supplies due to
strikes at home, and other factors of this sort will
affect the will and endurance of the troops.

An effect of the development of modern technique
of warfare is that the competence of commanders in
relation to the weapons employed decreases. (Ap-
pointment to high command for reasons of seniority
and social influence will, of course, continue; the
officer who plays polo will still advance over the head
of the officer who ‘swots’ metallurgy.)

At one stage of a war on the Soviet Union or on
China, India, etc., this inability of the command to
handle its new weapons will be one of the biggest
revolutionizing factors at work among the troops.
It affects officers as much as men, ‘patriots’ as much
as those with a different outlook. Just as members
of the Russian nobility. and capitalist class turned
against Tsarism in March 1917, for ‘patriotic’
reasons, out of a desire to press forward with the
war, so will officers of the next Expeditionary Force
kick against cavalry generals, and Camberley staffs ©
who think they are engineers because they can tune
the engines of sports cars.

Another effect of modern technique is to create a
reserve of skilled officers and men who are, in a
period of capitalist crisis, without employment at an

D 49

—

THE COMING WORLD WAR

early age. In the Boer War period the ‘old soldier’
was usually a good soldier. But an old aeroplane is
never a good one, for fighting purposes. Therefore
a system of ‘short-service’ commissions is employed
in the Air Force; this turns young officers out into
the search for civilian jobs at ages between 28 and
35. These young men, after years of unemploy-
ment or uncongenial employment, will return to their
Force in war-time as administrators or observers with
enthusiasm. But their experiences will have left a
mark, and as the enthusiasm wanes they will be
able to realize from their own lives the emptiness of

_-Patriotic’ propaganda.

It was a grievance amongst the infantry in the war
that they were getting a shilling a day for fighting,
while a first-class air mechanic far behind the lines
got four shillings a day. This differentiation is
increased by each advance in technique, and its
effect on fighting efficiency will be seen when the
pinch comes.

The physical and mental strain imposed by the
new weapons must also be noted. The war-strain in
a tank or submarine rapidly creates crippling
neuroses or otherwise destroys health. War used to
be a slow, toilsome pursuit rather like agriculture ;
now it is a ‘speeded-up’ industry run at a killing
pace. Each individual needs reserves of physical
and mental strength to stick it. As capitalist society
divides more and more into a class rotted by leisure
and luxury and a class physically damaged by
poverty and hunger, the imperialist forces will not
find it possible to retain the morale needed.

WAR FROM THE AIR

The ‘lumpen-proletariat’ and the agricultural
- workers are no longer the main source for recruits.
A better-educated, mechanically adaptable type is
needed to handle aircraft, vehicles and machine-
guns. This type is mainly drawn from the industrial-
proletariat, and particularly from young workers in
the engineering trades. The background of the
youngsters in the forces now is no longer the farm
or the fish-and-chip trade; it is the unemployment
exchange, the Bedaux system, the parents out of
work, and the chained slavery of the moving ‘con-
veyor.”

One further effect of modern technique which
may seem trivial, but is of great importance, must be
mentioned. The ‘craftsman’ in the forces cannot be
treated for disciplinary purposes in the same way as
even the most expert rifleman. Wireless is being
developed enormously; most tanks and aircraft are
fitted with it, and even machine-gun units are often
controlled by portable wireless. The wireless opera-
tor or mechanic cannot be given ‘fatigues’ implying
any heavy manual work; these would spoil his fine-
ness of touch when handling small parts and tools
and sending-keys. Thus the ‘disciplinary’ sergeant-
major is prevented from employing his normal minor
bullyings, in the case of a few men in each unit;
which only shows up their irritating absurdity the
more when they are employed on others.

It is difficult to inflict any punishment except
stoppage of pay on a skilled mechanic whose services
are urgently needed. In an Air Force squadron a
‘rigger’ may be confined to the guardroom on a

THE COMING WORLD WAR

serious charge. A machine crashes in landing; it
must be repaired. The rigger is at once told to ‘hop
it and get on with the job.’ Each development of
specialization makes more difficult, in this way, the
maintenance of arbitrary discipline. And arbitrary
discipline is the only sort that can exist in a capitalist
force. |

These factors increasing class differentiation in
the forces will only, of course, be supplementary to
- the general effect of the capitalist crisis on the work-
ing class and petty bourgeoisie, from which the ranks
and nine-tenths of the officers are drawn. The
tendencies to disintegration among the troops will be
still further strengthened if news reaches them of
their women and their relatives suffering from
bombs at home.

But these tendencies will only come to full develop-
ment after a certain period. This development will
be considered later in a chapter dealing with the way
in which modern wars end.

These, then, are the two things that matter most
about the new technique of warfare: in the next
big war the cities will be targets, the armed forces
will be strained to breaking-point. The results will
depend on the ability and activity of those who see
how to build a world in which war will not exist.

CHAPTER III
YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

MancuuriA, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia are coun-
tries from which came the greatest conquerors of
Asia, men who invaded and ruled China, Russia,
Central Asia, Hungary, the Caucasus, Baghdad, and
Persia. Since that incursion into world history, seven
hundred years ago, these lands were of no great
Importance until the expansion of two empires,
Tsarist Russia and Meidji Japan, made of them a
battlefield thirty years ago. Now it appears prob-
able that they will become of importance again as
the first battlefield of the next world war.

There is a particular cause and a general cause for
this probability (which is not more than a proba-
bility: there is plenty of inflammable material in
other parts of the world, and plenty of sparks). The
general cause is the antagonism between the whole
capitalist world and the Soviet Union. This antagon-
ism embodies in terms of governments and guns,
trade and diplomacy and thought, the fundamental
cleavage in the world to-day, the war between the
classes. It goes deeper than all other antagonisms
between nations because it expresses the deepest con-
tradiction in capitalism, and enters right inside each
capitalist country, is a threat from within as well as
an obstacle and a possible victim beyond the borders.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

This antagonism is, of course, directly rooted in
economics. But it does not get its effect on men’s
minds from economic facts. There have been out-
cries, at times, about the competition of Soviet petrol
on the world market, and ‘Soviet dumping’ of other
goods. But the Soviet Union needs almost all its
oil for its own tractors. It needs almost all its surplus
food for its swiftly growing towns. It has so far suc-
ceeded in making itself independent of the import of
machinery that it need not worry to sell overmuch
of its products to pay for this machinery. Soviet
Russia has no surplus of capital for which a market
must be found abroad, no need to judge her own
prosperity by the amount of goods which she has
persuaded foreign countries to buy. Her exports do
not worry world capitalism; they are scarcely half
those of Tsarist Russia.

Russia as a market, as the market which could end
the crisis if it was opened up, is a factor of importance

__-in the minds of some capitalists; Russia as a source
~ of possible raw materials, oil, haunts others. But it
is not in these motives that the real urgency is to be
felt.

The antagonism between the Soviet Union and
world capitalism does not show itself principally in
the directly economic field, but in that of the class
war. The Bolsheviks’ crime is that they have made
Russia an example to the workers in the capitalist
world. They are the leaders of a force that threatens
each government in each capitalist State. They
embody the working-class revolution—and not now
a revolution in the stage of struggle, of bloodshed and

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

barricades, but a revolution in the stage of new
factories, great power stations, successful adminis-
tration of industry.

It is not in the vast tractor-plants, either, that the
main and dangerous attraction of this revolution
lies. It is in the new men and women that the Soviets
are making.

There was a hero, to the pre-war generation of
schoolboys, named Amundsen. And he still seems to
some the last, and perhaps the greatest, of the heroes
of the old world of individual courage and action.
His daring was a fire within caution and scientific
knowledge. He knew the ice lands and how to live
on them as no one else. When the Italian airship
commanded by Nobile crashed north of Spitzbergen,
Amundsen insisted on going to look for it in a hastily
purchased and not very suitable aeroplane. He
never came back. A Soviet ice-breaker rescued the

majority of the Italians.

_ But the comparison that matters is not that be-
tween Amundsen the individual hero and the work
of the Krassin’s crew. It is that between his venture
and the more recent rescue of the Chelyuskin’s men
and women. Here was a ship crushed in the ice in
a far more remote and difficult part of the Arctic.
Patiently, day after day, a nation moved every
available plane and dog and sledge to the terrible
coast south of them. Patiently they waited, who had
flown up through the snow and storm, for the
weather that would give them a chance. When the
weather came, and their orders released them, they
made journey after journey, loading their ’planes

THE COMING WORLD WAR

with three times the number of people, in one case
six times, that are normally carried as passengers.
And—gallant gesture!—they ended by bringing
back to the mainland every fit dog that remained
of the Chelyuskin’s sledge teams. Risks were taken in
plenty, there was courage and a refusal to accept
disaster. But there was this new factor: the whole
effort had been a collective one, the heroism was
almost anonymous, a nation took part in the struggle.
Who kept those aeroplane engines fit for work in
seventy degrees of frost? We have not been told,
and shall not be; it was the Soviet Union. Who
flew the transport ’planes that kept the camps sup-
plied with petrol? The Soviet Union! The men
who carried through this job are the stuff and self of
the new Socialist country. And it is the example of
these people and the different life they are creating
that stirs and wakens minds in every country.
Because of them the rulers who know what unem-
ployment and ‘depression’ are doing to their own
subjects hate the Soviets.
Unemployment, world crisis, depression, and
Japan’s economic needs shape the particular cause
r a war in and near Manchuria. Japan is the
<_weéakest, industrially and financially, of all the great
~~ Powers. Her industries make cheap goods, her
economic structure includes enormous trusts on the
one hand and feudal agriculture on the other, while
until the crisis her exports included much raw
material. Like other countries producing raw
materials, Japan has felt the pinch of falling prices,
during the crisis, extremely badly. The reasons why

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

Japanese capitalism is forced by the crisis to a
policy of expansion at all costs have been stated
fairly fully by two Englishmen, H. Hessell Tiltman
and Colonel P. T. Etherton.* These reasons have
been given dramatic expression by Mr. Lees Smith,
who was at one time Minister of Education in a
- Labour Government. Speaking on March 19, 1932,
at a time when the Japanese bombers were over
Shanghai, he said: ‘How is Japan to live? She is
desperate. If we were in her position, we should not
die quietly, but we should undoubtedly burst out
somewhere as she has done in Manchuria and
Shanghai.’

The pressure of the crisis weighs heavily on
_ Japan’s working class. The wage index compiled by
the Mitsubishi Bank shows a fall, for time rates,
from 96.2 in 1930 to 85.1 in 1933.

‘Japan is to-day in the situation of a country that
must overflow its boundaries,’ wrote an Americanf
ten years ago. ‘Only about one-sixth of her total
area of 176,000 square miles (including Formosa, but
not Korea) is under cultivation, because so much of
it to the north is cold—too cold, that is, for typical
Japanese agriculture—and a large part of the rest
is mountainous. Her poets sing the praises of Fuji-
yama, but the mountain cannot grow rice. Sixty-
_ one million people are crowded together on an area
only a little larger than that of California. The
average size of a farm is two and a half acres.’

* P. T. Etherton and H. Hessell Tiltman: Japan, Mistress of the
Pacific and Manchuria, the Cockpit of Asia.
t Isaiah Bowman, Director of the American Geographical Society,
The New World, London, 1924, p. 502.
57

THE COMING WORLD WAR

This population-pressure is not, of course, the
cause of Japan’s ‘need for expansion’ and the
aggressive policy which, since Mr. Bowman wrote,
has added Manchuria to the Japanese Empire—an
area twice as large as that of Japan itself. Nor is this
expansion and aggression a cure for the desperate -
straits of the Japanese population. It will benefit
only the Japanese bankers, munition makers, in-
vestors, and others of their class, whase total known
investments in industry, transport, banks and agri-
culture increased by over 500 per cent. between
1913 and 1928.*

How little pressure of population has to do with
the causes of poverty in any country, quite apart
from war, can be seen from the recent example of
Holland. The Dutch have recently ‘expanded,’ not
by war, but by enclosing and draining a large pro-
portion of the Zuyder Zee. The old map of Europe
we all knew ten years ago has been altered, looks
strange. Here is new land. And the Dutch got to
work to sow this land with crops that would work
the salt out of the soil. They succeeded.

Then they grew grain, mainly barley. No market
for it—so they fattened cattle on it and sold the
cattle in Germany. And now there is no market for
cattle in Germany.

While they had a market, their cattle undersold
the Danish cattle. And because of this (and because
the world’s children need less Danish cheese and
butter) the magnificent Frisian herds of Denmark are
going every week to special Government-established

8 S. Dashinsky, Japan in Manchuria, London, 1932.
5

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

incinerators, are being burnt to save the cost of their
keep. And a special machine has been invented to
crush the carcasses of other cattle into pig-food.
Which would be sensible—if there was not a dwind-
ling market for Danish bacon.

Holland, with about 500 persons to each square
mile, is more heavily populated than the British
Isles, which have about 400 persons per square mile.
But it is not the ‘pressure of population and the urge
for expansion,’ to quote Sir James Jeans’ ‘explana-
tion’ of the causes of war, that could make the
people of Holland ready for war. It is the system of
production, exchange and finance that, however
they expand their frontiers, constricts their lives,
forces on them unemployment, ‘bad trade,’ long
hours, low wages, the starving of every human
faculty, the flatness of life. That flatness of life is not
due to Holland’s geography or population: it is due
to the arrangements between men by which men
get their living.

While pressure of population is neither the cause
of Japan’s drive towards war, nor can be cured by
it, it provides the excuse, and the mass support for,
the Tokyo finance-capitalists’ policy of aggression.
The principal aims of this policy are to secure con-
trol of China, the greatest undeveloped market in
the world, and of Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern
Siberia, the greatest ‘open spaces.’ The Japanese
know that their American rivals will not let them go
much further in China, without war. They plan,
therefore, to cripple the power of the Soviet Union
in the Far East, largely in order to be safer during

THE COMING WORLD WAR

_the conquest of China and the inevitable war with
/’ America that will accompany it.

Their plan has, for reasons to be outlined later, a
wide measure of support in Britain. When, as an
essential step in this plan, the Japanese were bomb-
ing Chapei—to teach the Chinese what would
happen if they resisted seriously Japan’s winning of
Manchuria and Mongolia—British policy was to
‘hold the ring,’ to prevent any interference. The
Daily Telegraph, speaking as usual for the British
Foreign Office, stated that Sir John Simon’s aim at
Geneva was to ‘prevent the League and Great
Britain from becoming involved in unwise and un-
necessary measures of a coercive character’ (against
Japan). The British Ambassador in Tokyo assured
the Japanese Government that there was no ‘pro-
Chinese feeling in Britain.” The Morning Post, pub-
lishing a Japanese proposal for war on Soviet Russia
after the seizure of Manchuria, assured the Japanese
in a leading article of British ‘goodwill.’

More material support was given: hundreds of
tons of chemicals for explosives, many Rolls-Royce
aero-engines, machine-guns, Short flying-boats, six-
wheeled cars were sold and exported to Japan.

At this time, in 1932, French imperialism was
equally in favour of a Japanese attack on the Soviet
Union. The Jnformation SONON Financière of
Paris wrote:

‘Japan, as the soldier of civilization, is able to
defeat Bolshevism, which stands with one foot in
Asia and the other in Europe, ae is aiming at the
downfall of both continents.

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

©The Soviet power is most vulnerable in the forests
of Siberia, and if Europe understands its duty to
civilization, the boundless steppes of Siberia may in
the near future become the battlefield and the grave
of Bolshevism. ’

The operative words here are ‘if Europe under-
stands’; they mean ‘if European armies and air
forces help the Japanese.’ But this could not be
achieved—yet. Japan had to have time to prepare,
also. Then Hitler came to power in Germany,
pledged by his book Mein Kampf, and by all his
political and financial backing, to war on the Soviet |
Union.

Here was the moment, then? No, history is a web,
not a skein. Hitler’s advent frightened French
imperialism: if Germany and Japan overran the
Soviet Union, would not Germany become too
strong? Would not her strength then threaten
France? Because of these fears, Germany had to
wait; Hitler had to make peaceful speeches. A slow
process of negotiation for new pledges of ‘security’ to
France was undertaken. British policy walked a
tight-rope between French policy and German, and
now, in February 1935, by the proposed ‘air pact,’
has found a formula that seems likely to remove
French fears and wean France from her sudden
‘friendliness’ for the Soviet Union, a ‘friendliness’
assumed out of fear of Germany. These moves, and
perhaps more, were necessary preparations for and
pressures towards the war that Japan has been
planning.

What will be the strategical aims of the com-

THE COMING WORLD WAR

batants in this second Russo-Japanese war? On
what fronts will their forces meet? What military
tendencies can be foreseen in such a war? These
questions are not the main questions which will
determine the outcome of the war. The main ques-
tions are the available strength, moral and material,
of the governments and of the classes supporting
them, together with the strength of the allies or
associates on either side. But if it is possible to get
some idea of the aims, the battlefields and the
military tendencies, and the way in which these will
affect and be affected by the modern technique of
war, we shall be better able to understand the news
that will reach us when this war breaks out, better
able to work against an extension of the war to
include ourselves. In an appendix to this book,
which begins on p. 239, we give an outline of the
fronts and the forces, and an estimate of the probable
military tendencies. Here we need deal only with
the war aims, the methods of starting such a war,
and its effect on Japan.

~The principal war aim on the side of the Soviet
Government will necessarily be to secure peace
rapidly. They will desire to ‘scare off’ the govern-
ments and groups of politicians in Europe who
might be tempted to swing their States in with Japan
as allies. They may desire to get some form of buffer
state on the Siberian frontier, some government or
provisional regime in North Manchuria and Inner
Mongolia which will remove the threat, now ever
present, of an invasion cutting the trans-Siberian
railway.

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

A secondary war aim will bs to give the popula-
tions of Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, and
even of Japan itself, the opportunity to rid them-
selves of the tyrannous oppression of Japanese
imperialism. It will never be far from the minds of
the Soviet leaders that a sequel to the war may be a
proletarian revolution in Japan.

The immediate strategical aim will therefore be
to win an early and considerable victory, probably
on the main front near Manchuli, and later perhaps
to occupy temporarily the railway line (of which the
Soviet Government is or was part owner) that runs
across the northern half of Manchuria.

The principal war aims of the Japanese Govern-
ment will be to win territory as colonies, markets and
sources of raw materials, and to cripple the military
strength of the Soviet Union, so that in a future war
in the Pacific, Japan need fear nothing from the
only great Power close to her shores. To shake the
Soviet Government out of power will be the aim of
the more optimistic Japanese military leaders (and
of many military leaders and politicians far from
Japan). In pursuit of these aims the Japanese need,
and believe they can get, allies in Europe.

Their immediate strategical aim, if they have to
start this war before all their potential allies will
move, must be to win—and announce—a consider-
able success at an early stage of the war. Such a
success need not necessarily be a complete victory in
a battle or series of battles. It may be a successful
invasion and occupation of a region which the
Soviet armies cannot defend effectively during the

THE COMING WORLD WAR

first months of war (either for geographical reasons
or because of the original disposition of the Soviet
forces). It may be a manceuvre or raid that cuts the
trans-Siberian railway.

The Japanese army chiefs are working for a suc-
cess of this order, so that their potential allies in the
west may be encouraged to attempt some variant of
the route that Napoleon took in 1812.

The territories that the Japanese do not hide their
desire to occupy are:

Inner Mongolia.

Outer Mongolia (now the Mongolian Peoples’
Republic).

The Maritime Province (Vladivostock, etc.).

‘Soviet Sakhalin.

The trans-Baikal Province.

Kamschatka and the Yakutsk coast.*

Inner Mongolia is formally a Chinese province. It
is already partly under Japanese control. It is a
possible future area for colonization, and also a path-
way to richer provinces of China.

Outer Mongolia is an independent Republic allied
to the Soviet Union. It is strategically of great value
to Japan because it lies near the trans-Siberian
railway. Both sections of Mongolia contain coal and
iron in amounts not yet known but certainly con-
siderable.

The Maritime Province contains ie great Bort of
Vladivostock, immense timber resources (Japan

* See map on p. 257.
64

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

imports timber) and fisheries and farms. The town
of Khabarovsk has recently become important
industrially. This province has a long coast line
only 400 miles from Japan. If the Japanese can
seize and secure the Maritime Province they will be
fairly safe from air raids during any Pacific war
fought during the next five or ten years. This would
also mean safer sea communications between Japan
and Korea, Manchuria and Northern China in such
a war. On these sea communications Japan depends
for food and raw materials.

Sovtet Sakhalin, the northern half of this island,
contains oil. It is also ‘necessary’ to Japan in any
war with the U.S.A., together with

_ Kamschatka and the coasts to the north, because
a naval war between Japan and the U.S.A. would
be fought—to a large extent—along the coasts of
Siberia and Alaska.

Trans-Baikalia is economically, and from the point

_of view of world prestige, more valuable than any of
the other prizes. Here is a rich province, full of
minerals, gold, platinum, iron and coal, ready for
intensive development, and with far fewer climatic
and geographical drawbacks than the other pro-
vinces. It is the biggest prize, so big that Japanese
strategy may be unduly deflected towards it.

The rulers of both countries, as of others, clearly
realize that a war between them will develop at some
point or other into a world war. That is the domi-
nating factor which governs the use that they will
make of their armies and air forces during the first
campaigning season. There is one other factor of

E 65

THE COMING WORLD WAR

principal importance: the Japanese will have the
initiative in the sense that they are likely to choose
the time for the declaration of war. They will
‘kick off.’

The advantage of the initiative at the outset of a
war is small if the battlefield is restricted, and the
invaders’ route is certain. The advantage is large if
the battle front stretches, as in this case, for some
thousands of miles, and the possible objectives are
several.

The probable ‘reasons’ for the war, the excuses
with which ‘world opinion’ will be mobilized on the
Japanese side, can only be guessed. They will
probably include an accusation that the Soviet
Union has sent its army over the frontier into Mon-
golia. The Mongolian People’s Republic has
already had to withdraw troops from its frontier
because Japanese forces have pushed over the line.
In a future ‘scrap’ of this sort, the Soviet Union will
be accused of intervening. The world’s press is
willing to make much of such an accusation. The
clumsy journalists who serve Messrs. Odhams on the
Daily Herald thought in 1931 that the time had come
for this boosting: on November 14, 1931, when the
Japanese troops were fighting through Manchuria,
the Herald reported prominently that ‘the troops of
the Chinese General Ma are strengthened by a
Russian brigade.’ The Herald did not print the
denial of this story issued by the Japanese Ambassa-
dor in Washington,

Another possible excuse for the war is a fake
bombing raid. The Soviet bombers include machines
66

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

that are almost indistinguishable from the German
Junkers four-engined monoplanes. The Japanese
possess some of these *planes, bought in Germany.
An easy matter to stage a ‘bombing raid’ by Soviet
aeroplanes on some unimportant Japanese or Man-
churian town—photograph it, film it, declare war.
And who would print the Soviet denials, from The
Times to the Daily Herald?

The forces at the disposal of the Soviet Union
seem likely to be smaller in number than those
employed by Japan ; but the air force will be stronger,
and the Soviet ’planes will drop leaflets as well as
bombs. |

It is impossible to estimate the effect, on the
Japanese forces, of propaganda of this sort, increased
by the effect of modern technique on the stability of
all capitalist armies. In this connection it is neces-
sary to note the vigorous and successful anti-war
work carried out by Japanese Communists in their
army. During the fighting in Shanghai an illegal
paper, the Outpost, was reported by the Shanghai
press to be circulating among the Japanese troops.
The official telegraph agency, ‘Simbun Rengo,’ then
reported that students of the Shanghai High School,
in the Japanese Concession, had been arrested for
Communist propaganda among soldiers and sailors.

In September 1934 the Japan Advertiser reported
arrests at the Yokohama aviation school for ‘red
propaganda.’ In October 1934 the newspaper
Asachi reported the arrest of five soldiers of the 31st
regiment, for the same reason. WNishi-Nisht, one of
the more important Tokyo papers, reported 120 such

THE COMING WORLD WAR

arrests in Osaka in October 1934 and in November
an unstated number of arrests of soldiers of the
Tokyo garrison, for distributing literature.

Kayamoto, writing in International Press Correspon-
dence for December 10, 1934, quotes newspaper
reports during 1934 of the arrests of fifty seamen in
Kobe, ten workers at Osaka, five Communists in
aircraft factories, two in a Tokyo armament firm, etc.

Mutinies of troops of the 13th regiment, of a com-
pany in Mukden, and of the roth division in Man-
churia are mentioned by the same writer; in the
latter case 200 men are said to have been shot.

With strategical dilemmas ahead of them,* and
nearly half their army of poor quality (for who could
rely on Manchukuo troops, conscripted from the
conquered Chinese?) it seems amazing that the
Japanese should be going ahead, step by step,
towards this war. But needs must, when finance
drives !

All the difficulties involved in this war must
be fairly clear in the minds of the more realistic
members of the Japanese General Staff. But always,
when faced with the problem of how to beat an
enemy who seems stronger, the General Staff of an
imperialist State develops the theory that its soldiers
have a superior morale, that it can catch its opponents
off their guard, that it can succeed by ‘a furious rush
upon the foe.” This was the French theory in the
first months of 1914. The Japanese Staff have deve-
loped it in the form of a theory of ‘sudden attack.’
It is a theory that has always failed.

* See appendix, p. 239.

YENGHIZ KHAN’S COUNTRY

The dangers of attacking the Soviet Far East are
so great and so obvious that in spite of this theory
the Japanese imperialists must necessarily wait for
the time when allies are ready or very nearly ready
in the West, in Europe. They will strike when their
war is sure to spread ; otherwise they know they are
doomed at once to failure. And even with help from
the West their chances are none too good!

CHAPTER IV
GOERING’S BOMBERS

‘Ir must be admitted,’ says the writer who for three
years edited the official communiqués issued by French
Army Headquarters in the first World War, ‘that
military art is not incompatible with intelligence, nor
perhaps with reason.’*

This certainly must be admitted. On the other
hand, it is hard work finding traces of intelligence
and reason in the exploits of the political and mili-
tary leaders and heroes of the last war. It will be
harder still in the next. It will-be particularly hard
if among these heroes—and they are determined to
be first among them—are the rulers of Hitler’s
Germany.

General Goering’s adventures in lunacy are well
known. A snapshot of one of the less-famous mem-
bers of Hitler’s cabinet is worth giving:

‘In 1920 Dr. Rust, then member of the Hanover
Local Education Board, asked to be retired on pen-
sion, submitting, as evidence that he was no longer
capable of performing his duties, medical certificates
that he suffered from insanity.

‘During his trial for a sexual offence, Professor
Forster, psychologist of Greifswald University, ex-

* Jean de Pierrefeu, Plutarch Lied, English translation, London,
1924—an invaluable introduction to the true greatness of generals.

GOERING’S BOMBERS

amined him and testified that he was not responsible
for his actions.

‘In 1933, in the Third Reich, Dr. Rust became
Prussian Minister for Culture, in charge of educa-
tion throughout Prussia.

‘On September 12, 1933, the Frankfurter Zeitung
reported the “suicide” of Professor Forster.

-= ‘In 1934, Dr. Rust was promoted Reichs Minister
for Education, in charge of education throughout all
the Reich.’*

In the schools controlled by this gentleman the
children are taught ‘patriotism.’ One of the songs
they must sing is ‘Gegen Ostland wollen wir mar-
schieren’—‘ We will march against the East.’ Even
before school age the German child is under the
influence of such men as Dr. Rust. The Frankfurter
Nachrichter of October 30, 1933, boasts of it:

‘Halt! March at attention! Eyes right! A four-
year-old is in command. Two three-year olds form
the Storm Troops. ... The tiny fists obey regula-
tions and are held to the seam of the trousers. Their
backs are so bent backwards in the effort to hold
themselves straight that they can hardly keep their
balance. You can see that spectacle to-day in the
parks, the courtyards, the gardens, the pavements,
in every part of the town. ... And those who see
it are filled with joy. ... The soldier has awakened
in the German child, the soldier who is inherently
within him.’

Dr. Ley, leader of the Nazi ‘Labour Front’
organization, says, ‘We start our work when the

* Heil, a Picture Book, London, 1934.

t Quoted in Hitler Re-arms, London, 1934.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

child is three. As soon as he begins to think, a little
flag is there to be put in his hand.’

These certificated educators work in this way on
the cannon-fodder for the third or fourth World War;
it can be imagined with what vigour they train
young men for the second! On January 1, 1934,
compulsory ‘labour service’ was to have been insti-
tuted throughout Germany. This ‘labour service’
includes practice in entrenching, throwing hand-
grenades, marching with packs; the men are organ-
ized into troops of sixteen; four troops make a
platoon; three platoons a detachment; nine detach-
ments a ‘group.’ According to the Deutscher Führer
(September 21, 1933) about 250,000 men had then
been organized ‘voluntarily’ into 4,500 camps.: The
military training given at these camps is kept secret, .
for fear of foreign protests. But English students who
went to an International Students’ welfare-work
conference in Rendsburg, Holstein, in April 1934,
saw some of the procedure.

During the conference, states one of these students, *
visits were paid to ‘labour camps.’ ‘A band of
trainees from the Leaders’ School was seen marching
out into the woods near Rendsburg late one night.
A Nazi delegate was asked where they were going, `
and after a moment’s hesitation said: “For a drink.”

‘Next morning the delegates witnessed a drill dis-
play in which some of these lads took part, and one
of them was noticed to have a badly bleeding knee.
On being asked how it happened, he replied: “On
the barbed wire during drilling last night.”

* In International Press Correspondence, No. 26, of 1934.

GOERING’S BOMBERS

‘In the barracks, 44 miles from the place of work,
notices were found, giving instructions for travel.
“If anyone in the train tries to talk to you about the
camps, politely change the conversation. It is not
your job to talk, and you will thus avoid spreading
false impressions about the camps through inex-
perience.” ’

The number of youths in these camps will reach
a million, the Nazis plan, in 1935. And when they
are described as ‘voluntary, this word means that
you lose your job or your unemployment relief if you
refuse to go. ‘Compulsory? would mean—as in
Britain now under the new Unemployment Act—
that you could be sent to prison if you did not go. In
Germany an opponent of the Nazi plans is sent to
.prison or concentration camp for other reasons.
But the aim is to make this service compulsory : this
has been postponed only owing to the international
protests made.

The drug-maniacs and sex-maniacs who control
these forces are certainly likely to ‘march to the
East.’ That is the whole trend of their policy. The
Berlin correspondent of the Tokyo paper, Nishi-
Nishi, wrote in January 1935 that:

‘The assurance of Japan’s aid for Germany would
not be a bad stroke of policy, it seems to me, since
the possibilities of resistance by the U.S.S.R. in the
East would thus be weakened.

‘Such a policy would also strengthen the chances of
a war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany, on the
one hand, and between the U.S.S.R. and Japan on
the other.’

THE COMING WORLD WAR

The correspondent of the Neshi-Nishi is closely in
touch with the Nazi Foreign Office. The message 1s
virtually an official bid for an immediate alliance
between these two Powers and an immediate war
on the U.S.S.R.

In a later part of this message the correspondent
remarks that ‘Germany is tightening her connec-
tions with Yugoslavia, extending her influence to
Esthonia and Latvia, thence threatening the
U.S.S.R?

While this message was being printed in Tokyo,
Sir Oswald Mosley was allowed the vast circulation
of Lord Rothermere’s Sunday Dispatch to advocate
that the people of Britain should support a war drive
to the east by Germany. ‘The future of Germany,’
he wrote, ‘must lie on her eastern frontiers in an
empire to which the future sets no limit.’ (January
13, 1935-)

The British Foreign Office, it is openly admitted,
is working to get German rearmament ‘legalized’ ;
while at the same time Mr. Baldwin’s declaration
that ‘our frontier is now on the Rhine,’ the agree-
ments reached by the French and Italian Govern-
ments at Rome, and the ‘air pact’ now (February
1935) in process of negotiation, bar all employment
to these new armaments in a western or southern
direction. Only the road to the East remains.

And Germany, like Japan, ‘must burst out.’

The defeat of the ‘united front’ of Socialists,
Communists, and Catholics in the Saar is Hitler’s
first victory in foreign affairs since he seized power,
and will encourage every force in Germany that

GOERING’S BOMBERS

works for immediate war. It is a victory won by the
most brutal intimidation (not restrained in any way
by the League of Nations officials in power during
the plebiscite or by the troops used as ‘an inter-
national police force’), a victory won by the expendi-
ture of a good deal of money, and by reckless
demagogy. Saarlanders were given holidays in parts
of Germany where everything seemed pleasant—to
the casual visitor. The radio, the press, the count-
less paid speakers and organizers worked not only by
rousing hopes but also by stirring up all the resent-
ment of the people against the French rulers and
exploiters, the men who brought Negro troops to the
Saar at the end of the war. The Nazi formula—t1o
per cent. of pretty promises, 20 per cent. of nationalist
hatred, 70 per cent. of crude force, from eviction and
victimization up to and including murder—has suc-
ceeded in the Saar as it succeeded in Berlin.

On January 15, 1935, immediately the Saar
plebiscite figures were announced, a Paris paper, the
Liberté, wrote that this was ‘the first great inter-
national success of Germany since Hitler’s advent,
and it will give back to Hitlerism all its virulence
and sharpen its appetite.’

But there are not only appetites and needs that
must be considered : there is also fear. In particular,
one fear. It is impossible to explain the reckless
violence of Germany’s rulers—whether we try to use
the ordinary terms of intelligence and reason, or the
less usual terms of morbid psychology—except by the
overmastering desire to end, to escape from, a fear.

Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and the financiers who

THE COMING WORLD WAR

equipped them for power and control them, are
afraid of the Communist revolution.

The most experienced capitalist politician in
Europe has warned his countrymen not to tread too
heavily on the new Germany’s toes. Lloyd George
has said, according to a press report:

‘He knew that there had been horrible atrocities
in Germany, and they all deplored and condemned
them, but a country passing through a revolution
was always liable to ghastly episodes owing to the
administration of justice being seized there and then
by infuriated rebels.

‘He was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist nor a Com-
munist. If the powers succeeded in overthrowing
Nazism in Germany, what might follow? Not a
Conservative, Socialist, or Liberal regime, but ex-
treme Communism. Surely that could not be their
objective.

‘A Communist Germany would be infinitely more
formidable than a Communist Russia. The Ger-
mans would know how to run Communism effec-
tively.’ (Speech at Barmouth, September 9, 1933.)

- A representative of the most responsible capitalist
newspaper in Europe has printed the following:

‘Those who take a long view of history may ponder
the fact that the Communist Party, as an organiza-
tion, alone survives of all the parties that National
Socialism has destroyed. The Conservatives, the
Socialists, the Catholics, the Democrats, the Liberals,
all have been swept into the dustbin of time.

‘The Communist Party, which it was the primary
purpose of National Socialism to destroy, remains—

GOERING’S BOMBERS

a skeleton force, working underground, its members
still apparently in organized relationship with each
other, its activities pursued in spite of obstacle—
waiting for its opportunity, waiting for National
Socialism to collapse in the stress of a new war or
some such thing. ... The Communist Party stripped
like a tree by autumnal frosts but still there rooted,
ready to bud.’ (The Burning of the Reichstag, by
Douglas Reid, special correspondent of The Times at
the Leipzig trial.)

Ready to bud! The Nazis themselves have given
us plenty of evidence of that readiness. In the sum-
mer of 1934, months after they had decreed the
complete and final eradication of Marxism from
German life, their own papers reported with glee the
arrest of a Communist organizer who had come back
to Hamburg from abroad. And they reported also
that this man had been responsible, in nine or ten
weeks’ work before his arrest, for the enrolment in
the Communist Party of twelve thousand members!

Fear of this force, the undefeated and incorruptible
force of the working class, the men who make the
guns and ’*planes—this is not something extraneous
to Fascism or some phase of purely German Fascist
development; it is the essence and root of Fascism
itself. Fascism is capitalism in panic, ‘when fear of
insurrection drives ministers and judges from their
propriety’—to use the old-fashioned phrases of a
philosopher so old-fashioned as to believe in liberty.
It is not, as it is sometimes represented, a movement
of the middle-classes—it uses the ideas of these
classes, builds mass-movements under their impul-

THE COMING WORLD WAR

sion ; but it uses these ideas and movements to serve
finance-capital, the master of the modern State.
The Provisional Supreme Economic Council ‘set up
by the Nazi Government’ (more really, which set up
the Nazi Government) contains six members who
directly control or represent firms with an aggregate
capital of £674,000,000.* The three other members
of this council are private bankers whose millions
cannot be estimated. This money, this overwhelming
claim on the lives and production of the German
people, Fascism maintains and protects. The
pressure of this finance-capital, and the desire to
uproot the stronghold of their fear, forces the Nazi
leaders towards alliance with Japan and war on
Soviet Russia. But fear is two-edged; the Soviets
are strong; there is another side to the picture.
The direct and indirect economic interests of this
German finance-capital conflict with the interests of
finance-capital in other countries, particularly in
France and England. Because of this conflict and
because of the fear that masters them, the rulers of
Germany hesitate to take yet the path eastward, wish
for a few more easy victories, a few more concessions
wrung from France and Britain. Such victories—
union with Austria, recognition of the German right
to arm, and to arm the frontiers, recognition of Ger-
many as ‘civilization’s barrier against Bolshevism ’—
they want to win without a war, certainly. They
need these things not so much for their actual value
as for the prestige ensuing : for ‘home consumption’ :

* R. Palme Dutt, Fascism, London, 1934, p. 82. See the whole of
this chapter from p. 72 for the class-nature of Fascism.

GOERING’S BOMBERS

for weapons in the war within minds, the struggle
against the thing they fear. They are forced to make,
continually, new demands on Britain and France and
Italy, forced to bluff. They foster every disruptive
force in the States surrounding them, that might, by
upsetting the uneasy balance of Europe, give them
the chance to snatch some new victory, some rein-
forcement in prestige that will strengthen them for
the test of war on the Soviet Union. The gunmen
who assassinated King Alexander of Yugo-Slavia,
and M. Barthou, in Marseilles, came from Nazi
Germany. The gunmen who murdered Dolfuss, the
Austrian Chancellor, were armed and financed by
Nazi Germany. The gunman who shot Kirov, the
Bolshevik leader, was one of a group financed and
fostered by the Esthonian consul in Leningrad; con-
trolling Esthonia stand Britain and Nazi Germany.
To these desperate expedients Hitler’s government
is driven by its need for successes somewhere, any-
where, before it tackles the Soviet Union.

While the slow, difficult negotiations between
Britain and France, and Italy, that centre round the
proposed ‘Air Pact,’ drag on, with the aim of detach-
ing France from her ‘friendliness’ with the Soviet
Union, some new bluff or coup by the Nazi leaders °
may possibly precipitate war in the West. There is
all the material for it ready.

The industrial and mining areas of Lorraine, the
Rhineland, the Saar, the Ruhr, Briey, Belgium,
Northern France, are inextricably one area, inter-
dependent, locked together. The frontiers divide this
area, the world economic crisis throttles it. This, the

THE COMING WORLD WAR

greatest productive group in Europe, generates enor-
mous financial forces—but they are antagonistic
forces, always struggling for a new division of sources
of wealth that each owns in part. There is French
money in the German firms, German money in the
French. This does not make for co-operation, but
for conflict, a struggle for control, hegemony.

And the new technique of war means that neither
side can possibly be safe from the other.

It may be thought that, because of this, neither
side dare loose the conflict. True, in a way. But
when tensions and pressures of this sort accumulate,
neither side means to force on war. Each endeavours
by bluff or threat to gain some potential advantage,
some greater safety—till a move is made that is in
fact war and is treated as such. And also the capital-
ists of France and Germany, more than most, know
how to leave untouched the property of their friends,
even in a destructive war. The story of how the
French left intact the Briey mines, 1914-18, is well
known ;* there was French money in these mines.
Less well known is the fact that ‘after four years of war
(1914-18) there was still, between the Hamburg-
America Company and the French Compagnie
Générale Transatlantique, a tacit agreement of such
a nature that on no occasion was a Transatlantique

boat torpedoed. ’T
`- Agreements of this sort make war more tolerable
—for the finance-capitalists.

* See ‘Briey: a Moral for Patriots,’ appendix to Patriotism, Ltd.,
Union of Democratic Control.
t Paul Allard, ‘Les Secrets de l’Arriére,’ in Vu, No. 288, Paris.

GOERING’S BOMBERS

While there is every possibility of a war in the
West, because of these factors, the more likely thing
is a war in the East—first. But how can this war in
the East, the war against the Soviet Union, fail to
spread to the West? If, in its first stages, the Soviet
armies have to retreat, if Leningrad is taken, and
German-Polish armies go far into the Ukraine, will
French capitalism see with equanimity such a
strengthening of its age-old rival? Will the Nazi
leaders and German finance-capitalists, on the other
hand, with their armies mobilized and successful and
their air force ‘blooded,’ fail to feel that this is the
moment, enthusiasm and victory hot in the people’s
veins, to settle accounts with France?

Or, take the other road: if Poland crumples up
like a cocked hat trodden upon, and the new German
ersatz armies fail, there will be revolution in Ger-
many. Will France or Britain permit a Soviet
republic with the Rhine as its frontier?

Win or lose, the campaign against the Soviet
Union opens a world war in which Britain is sure to
be involved.

It is for the most likely thing, the war close to us,
the first phase, that the preparations are being made
now. The Daily Mails Warsaw correspondent
reported during February 1935 that:

‘According to what is believed to be authentic
information, plans are being discussed for a meeting
between Herr Hitler and Marshal Pilsudski, the
Dictator of Poland, at which they would discuss the
possibility of a Polish-German military alliance, the
provisions of which would include the separation of

F 81

THE COMING WORLD WAR

the Ukraine from Russia should war break out in
the Far East.’

General Goering has already met Pilsudski with
this aim. Nor is Poland the only power involved
along with Germany. Von Papen was in Sweden
‘for an elk hunt’ in October 1934. Mr. Anthony
Eden arrived in Stockholm at the same time. A
commentator wrote :

‘Neither Mr. Eden nor Herr von Papen were sur-
prised at the fact that for some time Sweden and
Denmark have been discussing a pact on the subject
of armed neutrality.

‘In the very centre of this pact stands the proposal
to fortify the two banks of the Sound, which divides
Denmark from Sweden and dominates the entrance
to the Baltic.

‘This second Dardanelles, which played an impor-
tant role in the naval operations of 1914718, is to
be protected by guns with a range. of twenty kilo-

z metres. o o

‘The barricading of the Baltic means, in the event
of a war under the present European political con-
strictions, that Germany and Poland could attack
Russia without French naval forces and munitions
being able to go to the assistance of their ally, the
Soviet Union.

‘ While, on the other hand, Germany would be in
no way inconvenienced, since the Kiel Canal pro-
vides her with a short and protected access to the
Baltic.

‘In brief, this proposed pact between Sweden and
Denmark to neutralize the Sound would in the event
of war isolate Russia, while making Germany master
82

GOERING’S BOMBERS

of the Baltic. More: it would automatically drive
the Baltic States into the German front.

‘This was the real game that Herr von Papen was
hunting in Sweden—a game much dirtier in its
habits than the elk.

‘In view of the presence of Mr. Eden, one cannot
avoid the suspicion that Britain is also on safan.’*

A writer in semi-Fascist Finland, named Johannes
Rautakoura, has published a book called The
Struggle for World Hegemony, 1935-1950 in which he
describes the conquest of Siberia by Japan and the
formation of an alliance between Germany and
Poland as the proper factors for the realization of a
Greater Finland. This book met with an enthusi-
astic reception among the Finnish public. Declara-
tion of war by Japan against the Soviet Union will
be takerf by the Finnish Fascists and militarists as the
signal for their invasion of Soviet Karelia, a province
that thesé gentlemen claim should be part of
‘Greater Finland.’

While these preparations are being made, the
German government refuses to enter into an
‘Eastern Locarno,’ guaranteeing the frontiers of
Poland and Germany and the Soviet Union, and of
the smaller States in Eastern Europe. British policy,
as expressed by The Times, views this refusal with
equanimity, and even states not without some evi-
dence of satisfaction that ‘a consequence of the
London Agreement may be that as a breach is being
closed in the West, so a breach in the East is being
widened.’

* ‘Atergo,’ in the Sunday Referee, October 28, 1934. 5

THE COMING WORLD WAR

These diplomatic preparations for war are backed
up by technical preparations.

‘Germany is preparing to re-arm—and is re-arming
—with a concentrated purpose never before known
in a European country in time of peace. ... While
all other industries are languishing there is a boom
in those concerned with the material of war.’ (An
English resident recently returned from Germany,
Daily Telegraph, July 13, 1933.)

‘That the German factories produce fighting and
bombing machines complete to the point of fitting in
machine-guns and bombing apparatus is admitted
by the German air authorities themselves. That
they construct on a large scale types of fighters and
scouting planes is equally evident. It is pointed out
that the H.D.38, H.D.41, and H.D.43 of the Heinkel
firm are classed as such in British works of reference.
The military qualities of the Junkers giant aeroplane,
type G.38, as a bombing ’plane have been justly
vaunted by the German constructors, and no illusions
are entertained in France as to its being a bona-fide
transport plane.’ (The Times, December 10, 1932.)

‘It is officially estimated that Germany could at
short notice put into the field an army of 1,000,000
men, equipped with rifles and machine-guns, but
without heavy guns, tanks or aeroplanes. And even
where heavy artillery, aeroplanes and tanks are con-
cerned, the Germans themselves frankly admit that
they have not kept to either the spirit or the letter of
the Peace Treaty.’ (The Times, December 10, 1932.)

If the German army available in December 1932
was a million strong, how strong will it be in 1935,
after two years’ intensive development?

GOERING’S BOMBERS

Since 1933 the policy of British imperialism has
been to permit and even encourage this re-armament
of Germany; therefore we find no more of these
references to German strength in the London press.
But from technical journals we can get a good pic-
ture of the importation of war materials by the
Nazis. Imports of food and clothes to Germany are
cut down to the barest minimum, for lack of cash.
There is no such restriction on war stuffs, as this

table shows: g

Imports to Germany 1932 1933
tons tons
Iron ans .. 171,000 431,000
Scrap-iron .. 99,000 348,000
Nickel ore .. 17,000 34,000

That this is happening is admitted by the British
Government; a representative of the Government
answering a question in the House of Commons, stated :

‘The total quantity of scrap and old iron . . . im-
ported for consumption into Germany during the
first four months of 1933 amounted to 176,732 tons
compared with 16,216 tons during the corresponding
period of 1932.’ (Hansard, July 26, 1933).

The figures for American aircraft exports to Ger-
many and Holland (whence many go to Germany),
increased even more rapidly:

Germany. Holland.

dollars. dollars.
19390 ž .. ae 51,000 99,000
1931 .. én: 2,000 210,000
1932 .. gs 6,000 130,000

1933 .. oi 272,000 234,000
1934 (Jan.-Aug.) 1,445,000 138,000
85

THE COMING WORLD WAR

In May 1934, eighty Armstrong-Siddeley engines
were ordered in Britain. The British Government
_ gave a permit for their export.

While war material is thus being imported,
German heavy industry is also speeded up. The
increase in heavy industrial production during 1934
(iron by 66 per cent., crude steel by 50 per cent.,
rolling-mill products by 40 per cent., compared with
the previous year), can only be explained by a
feverish increase in the production of artillery,
machine-guns, tanks, steel reinforcements for
concrete ‘pill-boxes’ and emplacements, steel
hangars, lorries, all the equipment of armies and .
air forces.

According to official figures, German industrial
production in 1934 reached a level 50 per cent. or so
higher than in 1932. But retail trade was only about
10 per cent. in value (less in quantity) above the 1932
level. Where has the rest gone? Into the re-equip-
ment of factories, say the German economists. Into
war material, say the French newspapers.

In 1932 the motor industry sold about 40,000
vehicles. In 1934 the sale was roughly 80,000. But
the consumption of fuel for motor vehicles decreased.
The extra vehicles are stored in the army and air
force depots.

In Hitler Rearms,* Miss Dorothy Woodman and
her colleagues of the Union of Democratic Control
show, from secret documents and from indiscreet
passages in the German press, that the whole of the
nation’s life is being forced into the straight-jacket

* John Lane, London, 1934.

GOERING’S BOMBERS

of war preparation. She estimates that the trained
and organized forces of the new mass army were, by
the middle of 1934, 2,400,000 men. About 2,000,000
reserves stand behind these.* At the same time an
enormous increase in aviation is indicated.

A secret ‘provisional programme’ for the manu-
facture of military aircraft, which was to have been
completed by May 1934, is reproduced photo-
graphically in Hitler Rearms. This comprised 294
machines, and 660 engines. This was the addition
being made to an air fleet which already, in the
spring of 1934, is estimated to have included the
following :

‘Civilian’ ’planes, adaptable for war.. 1,000
Experimental constructions at factories 50
Military *planes at factories in Italy,
Sweden, Holland, owned by Germans 300
Military ‘planes | built sega in Ger-
many . 400

Total .. 1,750

In quoting these estimates we have taken in each
case the lower figures given. Similar figures have
been quoted by Seymour Cocks, M.P., in Parliament,
on February 6, 1934, by the Sunday Referee, and by
the Sunday Express Berlin correspondent, who ‘re-
vealed that the German Air Armament programme
was between 1,700 and 2,100° (machines).

* Since the above was written, the German government has
announced its plans for an army of 500,000 men. This only means
that it has released from the restrictions of secrecy this spear-head of

the mass army already in being.
87

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Since that time this air force has probably been
increased at the rate of over 300 machines a month.
(It is probable that the ‘provisional programme’
reproduced in Hitler Rearms is a programme for a
month’s deliveries, though this is not stated on the
document. The rate of delivery would be speeded-up
as the factories got into their swing.) Normal
wastage and obsolescence would by May 1935 have
subtracted from this total perhaps a third of those
machines available in the spring of 1934. By May 1,
1935, therefore, the air fleet at the disposal of
General Goering should be as follows:

Total of previous table T .. 1,750
Less wastage
1,150
Added by May 1, 1934 250
Added between May I, 1934 2 and May
I, 1935 : 3,600
Total .. 5,

This is a very rough estimate, and may be much
too low. The productive capacity of the German
aeroplane industry in 1918 was about 2,500 machines
a monih. It may, by the end of 1935, have got back
nearer to that level.

These machines are hidden in forest aerodromes
and in underground hangars. The ‘unemploy-
ment relief works’ on which millions of marks are
spent yearly are almost all listed as ‘underground
works.’

GOERING’S BOMBERS

The money for this enormous programme of re-
armament comes from lowered wages, and increased
prices. The consequent misery of the population can
be guessed from an Exchange Telegraph message
printed in the London press during February 1935.
This states that the Hamburg municipal gas works
is spending £230,000 in an attempt to reduce the
enormous number of people who use gas for the
purpose of killing themselves.

The part of the gas that kills is the carbon mon-
oxide. At present there is 16 per cent. of carbon
monoxide in the Hamburg municipal gas. Now they
are to erect a plant to reduce the amount to one-half
percent. ‘The charge to consumers,’ they announce,
‘will be the same as at present.’

Unemployment, low wages, helplessness, suicides
—Germany must ‘burst out.’ |

As we have already shown, the edge of the new
weapon is turned eastwards—at present. But
inevitably, from success or stalemate or failure in an
Eastern war, or possibly from the manceuvres pre-
liminary to it, will arise a war in the West. It is by
no means certain that in such a war British imperial-
ism will be on the side of French imperialism, as
against Fascist Germany. France has colonies that
could change hands, Germany has none. ... What-
ever the alignment, this war will begin with the use
of air forces against the cities. The British plan of
‘defence’ is to counter-attack from the air, and also
to use a new mechanized expeditionary force for
raiding or forcing back the enemies’ aerodromes, thus
making their bombing more difficult.

THE COMING WORLD WAR

The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph
stated on October 22, 1934:

‘An important decision, and re-orientation of aim,
is indicated by instructions that have, I understand,
been conveyed from the General Staff.

‘For several years past the training of the Army at
home has been based on Colonial warfare, in the
form of major and minor expeditions. In the
brigade and divisional exercises the “enemy” has
commonly been represented as savage tribesmen or
as the forces of an Asiatic State with a comparatively
low standard of equipment.

“Next year the training will be based primarily on
the ues of hypothetical operations in
Europe. .

The same correspondent, Captain Liddell Hart,
reported on November 15, 1934:

‘Far-reaching plans for the re-organization of the
Army and the creation of an up-to-date Expedition-
ary Force were unfolded by Col. G. N. Macready,
who is on the staff duties side of the War Office, at
a lecture at the Royal United Services Institute
yesterday. .

‘One important development is the creation of a
mobile division in place of the old cavalry division.
Sometimes the division may be used as a whole,
sometimes as a mobile protective base from which
the Tank Brigade can be shot out independently.

‘As forecast in the Daily Telegraph of November 3,
the mechanized cavalry regiments will be similar to
the French dragons portés, the men being mounted in
low-built vehicles carrying a driver, an N.C.O., and
six men.

GOERING’S BOMBERS

‘The infantry division, too (as also forecast), is to
be reorganized on modern lines. It will have all its
vehicles mechanized, and its proportion of weapons
to men improved.

‘The Light Artillery Brigades (using pack or
draught horses) will be converted into mechanized
field artillery, and the role of close support to the
infantry will be taken over by mechanized mortars.

‘A considerable number of men will be saved in the
infantry brigade, but this reduction will be offset by
an increase of 52 light machine-guns per brigade.
The saving of men will be partly utilized to create
one Army Tank Battalion for each infantry division.

‘Adaptability, based on interchangeability of roles,
is a key-note of the new organization. Thus, the
mobile division may operate with or without a tank
brigade. The increased number of army field
brigades, adopted instead of an increase in the
divisional artillery, will allow a greater concentra-
tion of fire on the decisive sector of attack, and more
possibilities of varying the point of main effort.’

By these means the War Office hopes to develop
a striking force that can land in Northern France,
Belgium, or Holland, and rush the bases of any hos-
tile air force within range, while our own air force
bombs the factories that supply it and the cities that
control it. | 3
The outcome of such a war—or series of wars—is
impossible to foresee. We have already indicated a
possible death-rate of twenty-five per cent., if the
bombing of cities goes to its technical limits. Mr.
Wickham Steed, in the Nineteenth Century, July 1934,
described German preparations for bacteriological
gI

THE COMING WORLD WAR

warfare.* If this form of war is successful, perhaps in
some areas the population will be reduced to such an
extent that a complete breakdown of modern eco-
nomic life—in which food is provided by the inter-
dependent co-operation of millions of workers—will
occur, or will only be prevented by intervention from
areas less injured. It happened once before, at least,
in history, that the centres of a world civilization
collapsed from war; the edges of the world, as it was
then, had to supply the material for rebuilding
human life.

But there is no need to envisage that possibility,
yet, as even likely. For from the first World War, and
its shattering effect on the brittle tyranny of Tsar-
ism, came the first working-class revolution. From
the second World War, what is more probable than
a Soviet Germany?

Ernst Thaelmann, leader of the Communist Party
of Germany, is in prison. But the Hamburg insur-
rection, that Thaelmann led in 1923, is alive in the
minds of thousands of German workers. They
remember how, on the night of October 23 the
fighters gathered at the previously appointed places.
The total number who gathered was not more than

*“Mr. Wickham Steed quotes from secret documents which have
come into his possession, from which it appears that the experiments
were made with a harmless germ easily identified. ... The results at
specified places in Paris and in London (at Leicester Square, Totten-
ham Court Road, and especially Piccadilly Circus and Liverpool
Street) show effects which would greatly assist gas attacks by airmen.

‘These experiments, according to the documents quoted, have been
compared with similar ones made secretly in Germany. Of particular
interest is the interpretation of a German cypher report on tests made
in Paris last August when the Place de la Concorde and other spots
were sprayed with germs.’ (Daily Telegraph, June 28, 1934.)

GOERING’S BOMBERS

goo. They were divided into twenty shock groups,
of which each received a task of capturing one police
station. Each of these groups received two revolvers
or one rifle and one revolver.

Exactly at the appointed time, at 5 o’clock in the
morning, an attack was made on twenty police sta-
tions in the northern proletarian districts of Ham-
burg. The result of the first blow was that in half an
hour seventeen police stations were occupied by the
fighters. They proved to be masters of the situation
in Barmbeck, Eimsbuttel and Schiffbeck.

Workers remember how those men fought and held
their positions, and only gave up their fight when it
was clear that there would be no movement in the
rest of Germany. This was an ‘Easter week,’ a small-
scale 1905. It was the testing, the proving, of the
men who—a few in prison, a few in exile, the majority
working secretly in Germany—will lead a people’s
revolution to power.

That revolution was impossible while the Social-
Democratic leaders of Germany held the majority of
the working class behind them, kept them from
action, led them to ‘vote for Hindenburg to keep
Hitler out.” Now Hitler, put in power by Hinden-
burg, has broken the German Social-Democratic
party to pieces. He has therefore released the
majority of the German working class from a force
that shackled them.

A Communist Germany, ‘infinitely formidable,’ in
Lloyd George’s words, would face aggressive capital-
ist Powers determined to crush it. But even if cities
were ruined, factories destroyed, armies and air

THE COMING WORLD WAR

forces split and disorganized, such a Germany could
resist all attacks. Because it could speak to the
peoples of France and Britain irresistibly; because
it would have as allies everything alive, conscious, in
the working classes of these countries.

That also will be part of the indestructible power of
the Soviet Union, if Nazi Germany, backed by Britain,
marches east. It is for this war within minds, as well
as for the war by bombs and shells, that preparations
are being made.

CHAPTER V
BE PREPARED!

Ir this is the sort of war that is likely, how shall we
prepare for it?

That is the question that governments and those
who control governments are asking. It even
troubles the peaceful routine of Whitehall, and
forces the War Office to spend ten years considering
whether gas-masks can be given to civilians.* It
leads the French government (according to a Times
report, August 1, 1934) to study the ‘dispersion’ of
the population of Paris and other cities. And the
French have also invested in a brand-new steel and
concrete frontier, defences dug deep into the hills and
equipped for a whole army’s occupation. Where
this question has led the German government we
have already seen, in part.

The most important war preparations for the
readers of this book, and possibly the more important
for the world as a whole, are those being made by
the British capitalist class. We will note some aspects
of these preparations, technical and ‘moral.’ But
before doing so, we return for a page to our previous
thesis : that the new Serajevo is likely to be found in

* Has the argument been raised, during these discussions, that if
workers are given gas-masks they cannot effectively be gassed in the
interests of ‘law and order’?

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Manchuria or Mongolia, and the World War will
start there. The preparations that have been made
by the Japanese, for this eventuality, are very con-
siderable.

To give an example we quote from the Daily
Telegraph, whose Manchurian correspondent writes:

‘An investigation which I have made into Man-
chukuo’s strategic railway construction reveals aston-
ishing achievements under enormously difficult
conditions.

‘The programme has brought Japan into a
strikingly favourable position to meet any military
developments which might in the future be under-
taken by Soviet Russia.

‘Before 1931 the total mileage of railways in Man-
chukuo—then Manchuria—was 3,715. This in-
cluded: South Manchuria system, 693 miles; the
Chinese Eastern, 1,075; Chinese lines, 1,660; and
light railways, 287.

‘The present admitted mileage is 4,644, an increase
of 929. I am reliably informed, however, that rail-
ways which are listed as “‘under construction” are in
reality almost completed, and add 1,031—or a
revealed total of 5,665 miles.

‘This means that Manchukuo has constructed
within two years about 2,000 miles of railway. The
building commenced in the spring of 1932.

‘The new lines will enable Japan to place troops
rapidly in any part of Manchukuo or Mongolia.
Eleven distinct railway systems are admitted, but I
learn that an additional line is nearing completion
in East Manchukuo. .

‘It is only fair to state ‘that these railways also dove-
96.

BE PREPARED

tail with the Manchukuo Government’s economic
development, which is generally stressed.’ (Daily
Telegraph, December 21, 1934.)

At the same time, and presumably for the same
reasons of ‘economic development,’ an increase in
air lines and aerodromes is reported. The Aeroplane
states that early in 1934 there were over 2,400 miles
of air line in operation, with thirty-nine aerodromes,
nine of which were near Mukden. Many of the air
lines were ‘for government use, and ordinary travel-
lers have to get special permits to use them.’ Eco-
nomic, perhaps.

Equally open preparations for war are taking
place in many other parts of the world. But no-
where so rapidly, or on so large a scale as compared
with the nation’s resources. Japan has reached the
stage of spending almost half the total state budget
on her war forces.

According to a Reuter message printed in the
London press on December 23, 1934, the draft
Budget for 1935 totals £ 128,860,000 at present rates
of exchange. Of this the Navy takes nearly
£31,130,000, and the Army £28,840,000. Nearly
£60 million out of less than £130 million goes on
war preparations. Reuter’s Tokyo correspondent
comments :

‘Comparison of the 1935-36 Budget figures with
those of the current and preceding financial years
reveals that military expenses have increased for the
fifth successive year. Whereas the total Budget out-
lay has increased since the 1930-31 Budget by about

G 97

THE COMING WORLD WAR

37 per cent., the portion devoted to military ex-
penses has grown by 1930 per cent. From being 27
per cent. of the total, the military portion has become
46.6 per cent.’

No other Power can rival these percentages,
though several Powers, Britain included, spend more
than the Japanese. They have far more to spend.
The crushing weight of these war expenditures on
Japan’s rickety economy is one of the reasons why
the Japanese must fight soon; they cannot afford to
wait. l
It is not necessary to survey here the official
figures for the world’s expenditure on armaments,
an expenditure that has increased steadily since the
Disarmament Conference began to sit. The figures
are available in a dozen pamphlets, are repeated
continually in newspaper articles, are the theme of
speeches that always, in all countries, amount to
this: we had begun to disarm, had almost disarmed,
had pushed disarmament to the limit of risk, are
willing to disarm, have proved our willingness—
but . .. And the ‘but’ is directed against the
foreigner, the dangerous and aggressive foreigner
who spoils our plans for disarmament. So Britain,
so America, so—with variations about ‘security’ or
‘equality’—France and Germany and Japan. Some
of these speeches go on to pacifist conclusions ; others
lead towards ‘we must rearm to be safe.’

The figures for expenditure on armaments mean
much and yet mean little. There is money spent on
giant battleships (particularly now in the U.S.A.)
that is fairly clearly just graft on the grand scale,

BE PREPARED

robbery by the steel trusts. For these machines were
conclusively proved obsolete when U.S. aeroplanes
dropped four 2,000 lb. bombs alongside the ex-
German dreadnought Ostfriesland. By the time the
fourth bomb had been dropped the stern was under
water; in g minutes she sank.* When a direct hit
with a 1,100 lb. bomb was scored on the obsolete
U.S. battleship Virginia, it was a total wreck in a few
seconds. The New Jersey, treated to a similar bomb,
promptly turned bottom up.f It is clear that the
proposal to build more vessels such as these can only
come from ‘Noahs’ and from steel firms.

While there is much waste of this and other sorts
to be counted off the figures for effective war
expenditure, there are many expenses that never find
their right places in the Budgets. Subsidies to civil
aviation, subsidies for beet and meat and wheat,
hordes of employees and millions of money employed
to organize food reserves, or to train pilots, or to
produce petrol from coal. Special tariffs protect war
industries: dyes, artificial silks, nitrogenous manures
are no good for war, in themselves—but the factories
that make them can make poison gases or explosives.
These should all be reckoned among the expenses on
war preparations.

* See Rear-Admiral Murray F. Sueter, Airmen or Noahs, London,
1928, p. 74 and subsequent pages; especially the convincing photo-
graphs opposite p. 75. aa

t Since this page was written the rebellion in Greece has occurred.
Aeroplanes were used to bomb a navy in revolt, and did little
damage. There are those who argue from this that the air weapon
is not effective. But the Greek government did not want to sink its
only warships; the weapon was effective enough to bring the rebel
fleet to surrender in a

THE COMING WORLD WAR

War preparations are territorial as well as tech-
nical. Since one of the great prizes of the next World
War will—according to the hopes of bankers and
traders—be control of the Chinese market, British
and Americans and Japanese widen their footholds
there by trade, education, religion, and adventure.

‘The educational work done by foreigners in
China looks like charity, but is in reality a form of
colonization,’ stated a manifesto of the national asso-
ciation of Provincial Educational Associations of
China in 1924. ‘Most foreigners who are doing
educational work in China usually have as their
purpose either religious propaganda or political
aggression. Education is simply a supplementary
matter to them.’ The English and Americans use
education to the full. And religion: there are less
than 130,000 Protestants in China, but missionaries
distribute—according to a League of Nations jour-
nalist—ten million Bibles every year.* As in Africa,
the Bible breaks ground for the trader, and behind
the trader is the gunboat. The Japanese are ham-
pered by their not being Christians, but they are
‘very well informed about all the doings of the
bandits, because they pay for them. They are even
able at times to publish the news (of a bandit raid)
in advance.’ f

Mongolia is full of Japanese expeditions, Japanese
advisers to the local chiefs. Round half the circum-
ference of China, which contains a fifth of the

* Wiliam Martin, sometime foreign editor of the Journal de
Geneve, in ‘Understand the Chinese,’ London, 1934.
d.

BE PREPARED

population of the globe, and far inland, a struggle
goes on between the imperialisms for influence, for
the ownership of railways and war-lords, of mines
and politicians. It is difficult tó estimate which .
fo. m of investment is more profitable. < Ft 1$ impas-:"
sible often to say who or what has-been: bought, or. -

blackmailed into acquiescence, by ‘each Powet.: “But ~>.

it is easy to see that all these moves are war moves.
Typical of a dozen adventure stories is this quota-
tion from the Daily Telegraph of August 4, 1934:

Collapse of Londoner’s ‘Kingdom.’
Dr. Sheldrake in Flight.

‘Mystery surrounds the whereabouts of Dr. Khalid
Sheldrake, the London-born Moslem, who was
elected “King of Islamistan” to rule over 15,000,000
Moslems in Sinkiang, on the borders of China and
Afghanistan.

‘According to reports from Tihua, states the
B.U.P., Sinkiang Government troops have routed his
forces and overthrown the insurgent government, set
up at Khotien, in Southern Sinkiang, which had
offered him the throne.

‘One report states that Dr. Sheldrake, who is
president of the Islamic Society, has gone to India.

“Recently his wife, Mrs. Ghazie Sybil Sheldrake,
was living in Gaynesford Road, Forest Hill, London,
with her two sons. The latter were to have been
princes in the new State.’

It is not often that a paper so sage as the Daily
Telegraph pretends to be so stupid. ‘Gone to India’!
Where else could the poor man run? That is where
he came from, And he did not raise the money for

IOI

THE COMING WORLD WAR

his venture by the subscriptions of his neighbours in
a lower middle-class little side-street in Forest Hill,
S.E. 23. But perhaps even Mr. Sheldrake does not
p know the.source of the finances behind him.

: While- the great Powers chip pieces off China—

ae treading. firmly .on each other’s toes whenever pos-
“.: siblé-—theré afe some other smaller ‘open spaces’ in

the world, as tempting prospective properties as any
village common in the days of enclosures. There is
Abyssinia, the one bit of Africa not swallowed by the
European empires and their agents. Here, Italian
troops are said to be a hundred miles within the
borders. Little battles are reported. The Japanese
make a surprise appearance in the news, building
aerodromes in Abyssinia. ... In what Budget can
we find the expenditures involved?

All these preparations for war cost a deal of cash,
which does not often have any reflection in pub-
lished accounts. Even Chinese bandits need some
pay; English ones need quite high wages. For good
historical reasons the British capitalist class are better
equipped than most others for many of these forms —
of not quite official war preparations. As a class, it
has held power and gathered riches for a relatively
long time, and since England was the only ‘workshop
of the world’ for a large part of this time, it ‘did
things on its own’ without the need for government
control or initiation. The habit remains. When
Greenland becomes interesting, strategically, because
of its value to navies and air forces moving from
Britain ‘to protect Canada,’ a university sends an
expedition, or a group of young men from a uni-
102

BE PREPARED

versity form one. When the Soviet areas of China
have to be reckoned with, The Times can be relied on
to send a very able correspondent, who will be the
first European to make his way round them.* Be-
sides the rich newspapers, geographical associations,
museums, universities, etc., that can pay for investiga-
tions, there are millionaires of a very useful sort.
The British ruling class has a firm but adaptable
science of government, and knows how to assimilate
almost all the rich men and women who rise into it
from industry or trade. These men and women
seldom found peace prizes or leave their money to
libraries; they have been helped to shed any petty-
bourgeois ideas belonging to their past. Lord Wake-
field or Lady Houston can be relied on not to waste
their resources, but to finance flights that “blaze a
trail,’ or help the aircraft industry in some other way.

In technical matters slightly different processes go
on. British technique has fallen behind American
and German during the past thirty years. America
led in the petrol-engine technique, Germany in the
electrical and chemical. But in quality of product
great efforts have been made in Britain to keep
ahead. The laboratory equipment of British indus-
try is far behind that of Germany or the U.S.A., but
the skilled workmanship that results from genera-
tions of industrial civilization makes possible the
Rolls-Royce type of product. This, considered in-
dustrially, is an unimportant luxury class of goods.
Considered technically, it is of much greater impor-
tance: it leads to the Rolls-Royce aero-engine, for

* Peter Fleming, One’s Company, London, 1934.
103

THE COMING WORLD WAR

several years the most efficient engine in the world
for high-speed aeroplanes.

Similarly the productive technique of Sheffield is
less progressive than that of Essen or of Bethlehem,
U.S.A. But the concentrated work done at Sheffield
to produce steels, for various purposes, of the highest
possible qualities, has had great results. Sir Robert
Hadfield, mainly responsible for these special steels,
made modern war possible as much as any other
single man.

This aspect of British war preparations—the drive
for quality—is the reason why the decision to increase
the size of the Royal Air Force very rapidly, taken
in 1934, is the most important measure of technical
preparation for war that can be observed in the
world to-day. It is more important than the parallel
German effort because it means the organisation of
larger productive forces.

Ever since the first World War, the British capitalist
class was content with an air force relatively tiny in
size compared with the rival forces (even though,
before its present expansion, it was more powerful
than the Flying Corps of January 1918). But this air
_ force was kept at a fairly high level of performance
and quality.

Performance is of outstanding importance in air
war. Two slow machine-guns, on the ground, can
more than counter in effect one that fires more
rapidly. But two slow aeroplanes are no use at all
against one fast one.

Aeroplanes last a very short time when on active
service; many aeroplane engines during 1915-18
104

BE PREPARED

were only of use for about six weeks. Modern
machines are of stronger material, but have to
endure greater stresses; they will crack up almost as
quickly. |

Because of these two technical factors in this new
force in warfare, the capacity to produce aeroplanes
and the quality of the “planes produced are of
primary importance. Because of the rapidity with
which aeroplane technique advances, machines are
obsolescent within a few years.

The decision to increase the air force rapidly
means first of all that the British capactty to make
*planes is being greatly increased during 1935 and
1936. |

Britain’s eventual capacity to produce vast quan-
tities of these machines is higher than that of any
other capitalist country, except that of the United
States. Almost every factory in Britain which in
1918 was producing aeroplanes and aero-engines
still exists. Many of these factories have been turned
over to other purposes. But these could be rapidly
re-equipped and reorganized for air work; the plans
for such a change-over are ready, and the Air
Ministry continually inspects all factories on its lists
to note what changes have been made and therefore
what alterations in these plans are needed.

Many of the factories which in 1918 were small
concerns, and old-fashioned, are to-day big modern
plants. For instance, the Wolseley motor works
made ‘Raf’ engines during the war, by methods
that would now be considered primitive. To-day
these motor works are part of the Morris combine ;

105

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Sir William Morris (now Lord Nuffield) has re-
organized them for ‘flow’ production, and made it
possible for them to turn out perhaps ten times as
much in aero-engine horse-power as could be done
during the war. In 1919 this firm ceased to make
aero-engines ; in 1934 it began to do so again.

An aeroplane is a complex mechanism of many
parts. The metal portions contain not only steel and
aluminium, but wolfram, tungsten, vanadium, chro-
mium, nickel, manganese, copper, zinc, tin and anti-
mony. For wings and framework cotton and linen
of fine quality are needed, and also cellulose acetate
and nitrate, acetones, ketones, glue, casein products,
cement and rubber. The industries supplying and
shaping these things will all be stimulated and if
necessary extended to deal with the orders for new
aircraft. These industries will be made ready to
meet the strain of war.

That is the position in regard to productive
capacity. What of quality? Here a technical
peculiarity of this type of work comes in.

The first experimental models of a new type of
aeroplane are ‘tool-room jobs.” Which means that
each individual part of the framework is drilled or
cut or rolled or pressed or welded by hand, or by
machines on which hours (sometimes days) have to
be spent in ‘setting up’ the working tools to make
exactly the right shapes and sizes. When erecting the
first models of a new type of aeroplane, the fitters and
riggers have to work slowly, adjusting and filing,
getting each angle, each point of contact between
parts, correct according to the blue-prints.

106

BE PREPARED

Continually the erecting-shop will be referring.
back to the drawing-office for further explanations
and calculations. The process of working out a new
type and taking it through all its tests is a slow
and costly one. Sometimes it lasts, up to the first
production order, as long as eighteen to thirty
months.

But when at last a new type goes into production
there is a great change. ‘Jigs’ of wood or metal are
set up to give the position and correlation of parts:
all the erector has to do is to see that the parts fit into
their right positions in the jigs; blue-prints no longer
worry him. Gauges cut exactly to size from solid
metal replace the adjustable micrometer gauges, and
save hours each day in the continual checking of
sizes (which have to be correct to a thousandth part
of an inch, or even in some parts of the engines to a
matter of some ten-thousandths). Moulds for the
forgings, fixed settings for the automatic lathes and
boring machines, are standardized. Production can
then get ahead as fast as the workers employed are
prepared to go.

The decision to increase the air force rapidly will
mean that practically every aircraft factory in the
British Isles will be fully equipped with the gauges,
the jigs, the whole equipment for making aeroplanes
wholesale. And modern aeroplanes are much more
capable of mass production than those of 1918. Steel
has replaced spruce, complicated frames have
become simple structures of metal tubes, no more
difficult to make quickly than bicycles.

Trained men are available to use these flow-pro-

107

asiy

THE COMING WORLD WAR

duced machines. The editor of the Aeroplane wrote
in 1934:

‘The short service system, plus the newer system of
bringing men into the Reserve of Air Force Officers
direct without putting them through a short-service
commission, has built up a very big reserve of well-
trained officers who . . . would provide us in a few
weeks with a fighting force which would probably
entirely alter our place in the scale of Air Power.

‘The number of officer-pilots and N.C.O.-pilots on
the Reserve has never been published. Possibly the
powers-that-be do not wish it to be known... .
We have also an enormous reserve of mechanics
because of the number who retire year by year.

‘Naturally such quantities of pilots and mechanics
would be of no use without aeroplanes and arma-
ment. Here again we are not so badly off, because
. .. the various heads of technical departments have
held fairly consistently to a policy of only accepting
designs which can be put into mass-production on
the outbreak of war.

‘Some designs which are terribly expensive when
made in dozens are such that similar aeroplanes
could be turned out like sausages by chopping up
and sticking together steel strips.’ (Aeroplane, Feb-

ruary 14, 1934.)
That is, then, a main point of policy; ability to
turn out aeroplanes ‘like sausages,’ and to man them.

: A minor point is to have a large and increasing stock
` of engines on hand, because engines take longer to

make than aeroplanes. In the increased Air Esti-
mates of 1934 the largest proportionate increase of
all was that in the vote for engines and engine spares.
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BE PREPARED

The Aeroplane commented on this disproportion:
‘this is odd, because the R.A.F. has masses of com-
paratively modern motors in store’ (March 7, 1934).
It is not ‘odd’ at all, if there is to be production of
*planes, soon, ‘like sausages.’

If machines ‘can be put into mass-production at
the outbreak of war,’ why build up a stronger force
now, a stock of machines that will soon be obsolete?
The only reason possible is that these machines are
likely to be needed before obsolescence.

A fighter or bomber that is ten miles an kont too
slow has a ten to one chance against it. At Hendon
in June 1931, the ‘star’ exhibit was a ‘Fury’ fighter.
At Hendon in 1933, a ‘Super-Fury’ appeared. At
Hendon in June 1934, a ‘modified Fury,’ with a new
type of engine, was shown which because of its added
speed, climb and power of manceuvre made the
older machine obsolete. In 1931 the original ‘Fury’
was still experimental; in 1932 and 1933 squadrons
were equipped with it, in 1934 it was easily surpassed
not only by its faster namesake, but also by at least
two of the new ‘day-and-night fighters’ also on view:
the Supermarine (developed from the Schneider
Trophy winners) and the Hawker ‘P.V.’ (‘private
venture’).

In 1932 three experimental night-bombers were
seen at Hendon. One, the Handley-Page machine
(then unnamed), was put into production and
squadrons were equipped with it in 1933-34. At
Hendon in 1934 a ‘second edition’ of this machine
appeared, the Handley-Page ‘Heyford’ Mark II.
‘The speed of this latest version has been consider-

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

ably increased by certain improvements.’ (Aeroplane,
June 27, 1934.)

This inescapable process of rapid change makes it
sheer folly to build a large number of machines, that
will be technically out of date soon after their pilots
know them—unless war 1s expected within a few months
or years.

If war is really near, at most a matter of eighteen
months off, the new machines that were ordered in
the autumn of 1934, and are being produced now
(February 1935), may be of some use, though obso-
lescent towards the latter part of this period. But an
important technical point is that the majority of the
jigs and gauges, moulds, press matrices, etc., which
allow of machines being turned out ‘like sausages,’
hold good for the life of the type and not for the life
of the model. The majority are as good for the
Handley-Page ‘Heyford’ Mark III, that is doubtless
under test now, as for the Mark I that is already
obsolescent. Therefore the decision to increase the
air force rapidly, which will give the factories orders
for perhaps three to four times the number of ’planes
normally supplied, does not mean that the British
capitalist class is risking its money on war within
twelve or eighteen months; it means that it expects
this war within the lifetime of the types that are now
standard, including developments of these types—
perhaps another three years in all. Meanwhile the
normal process of designing and testing newer types
will be continued and speeded-up.

The decision to make this increase, therefore,
means that war from the air, on a scale never before
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BE PREPARED

contemplated, is being planned, and thought prob-
able, by the British ruling class within the years
1935-38.

War from the air is not only a question of aero-
planes : there is also necessary a rapid reorganization
and improvement in the supply of explosives for use
in such war. In October 1934 the British railway
companies circulated their usual list of additions to
their ‘standard classification of goods list, on which
their charges are based. It contained fifteen addi-
tions: eight were the following, all added to the
‘Dangerous Goods classification’ :

Butane.

Giant Dix Amorces.

Nobel Nitrocellulose Powder No. 1.
Nobel Superim Powder.

Nobel’s Explosive No. 695a.

Nobel’s Explosive No. 704a.

Polar Saxonite No. 2.

Smokeless Diamond Powder No. 2.
Tracers (third and fourth definitions).

Fuel for the war from the air, petrol from coal, is
also being produced under government supervision
and with government help.

The decision to make these preparations for war
from the air in the near future was ‘put over’
by a press campaign almost on a level with the cam-
paigns of the war period, and certainly stronger
than the agitation for more battleships (‘We want
eight and we won’t wait’) that helped the Liberal
Government of 1906-14 to get ready for the crush-

III

THE COMING WORLD WAR

ing of Britain’s commercial rival, the German
Empire.

Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, the
London Evening News, and many provincial papers,
clamoured for 5,000 more aeroplanes. He was sup-
ported by Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily
Express and the Evening Standard.

Lord Astor’s paper, the Sunday Observer, which
aims at convincing the ‘professional classes,’ income-
tax payers, etc., said: ‘We require not another
hundred machines, but a thousand. We need a
hundred squadrons—something more than double
our existing strength.’ This was from the pen of
J. L. Garvin, ex-supporter of the League of Nations
(which he has more recently termed a ‘derelict
institution’).

The exponents of a stronger air force, from the
millionaire coal-owner (Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s
personal friend) who is head of the Air Ministry to
the millionaire newspaper-owners who make ‘public
opinion’ (both for the masses and for the ‘intelligent’
middle class) all say that their only aim is to provide
secure defence for Britain.

That is a lie. An air force cannot defend.
And the British Air Force is not designed for
defence.

To prove that an air force cannot defend London,
or any other great city, from modern air attacks, we
need only quote from The Times and from the
Aeroplane.

The Times aeronautical correspondent wrote on
November 14, 1931:

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BE PREPARED

“The intention that these fighters (defending Lon-
don) some 30 miles an hour faster than the best
bombers in the world, should intercept raiders
between the coast and London was not fulfilled
during the Exercises.’ (The exercises referred to are
the full-scale air manœuvres of July 1931, the last
real test of London’s defences.)

During these exercises, according to the official
report (The Times, July 24, 1931) the number of
daylight raids that ‘penetrated the defences’ was
twenty-four; in the dark sixty-eight bombers got
through. ‘It has never been held,’ wrote The Times
correspondent, ‘that London could be made secure
against air attack at a reasonable cost’ (July 24,
1931). ‘The odds must always be against the
fighters (defending London) so long as they are
denied a heavy numerical superiority’ (July 18,
1931).

During the 1930 Air Exercises, states the Aeroplane
(July 22, 1931), ‘the very slowest of our long-range
bombers succeeded by good navigation and by guile
in outwitting the fastest and best of our fighters on
more than one occasion.’

In reference to the 1931 Air Exercises the Aeroplane
wrote:

‘In considering the problems of the defence of Lon-
don one has to realize that aircraft are characteristically
stronger in attack than in defence, and the defenders
have to protect a vertical front of about five miles
in addition -to the horizontal front. An enemy must be
destroyed or disabled before he leaves his base if his efforts

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

are to be averted with any reasonable hopes of suc-
cess.’ (July 29, 1931.)

That is the technical and strategical nature of this
weapon; it cannot defend; it can only be an expe-
ditionary force. That is why Mr. Baldwin made his
famous remark that ‘our frontiers are now on the
Rhine,’ and why Major-General Sir C. W. Gwynn
wrote :

‘Our strategic frontier for Home Defence owing to
the air threat lies not on the coast, but in the hinter-
land of Western Europe. For that frontier we must
be prepared to fight.’ (Morning Post, July 12, 1934.)

This is the crowning absurdity of the ‘Home De-
fence’ camouflage: the ‘strategic frontier’ for Lon-
don’s defence is now in the Ruhr; the ‘strategic
frontier’ for the defence of the Ruhr runs through
Windsor and Versailles! But the ludicrous nature
of the plea must not obscure for us the nature of
Major-General Gwynn’s order to us all; we must be
prepared to fight for the strategic frontier—because
otherwise, in Mr. Baldwin’s words, ‘no power on
earth can protect us...’

Major-General Gwynn is not the usual type of
Morning Post ‘dug-out.’ He has been Commandant
of the Staff College, Camberley ; a position once held
by Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General
Staff in 1918. His ‘we must be prepared’ is a state-
ment not of desire but of fact; British imperialism
is preparing to use its new expeditionary air and
ground forces to win and hold a frontier ‘in the
hinterland of Western Europe.’ |

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BE PREPARED

The enemy against whom this frontier must be
held is, perhaps, Nazi Germany—or Soviet Germany.
These words, and the air force behind them, and
the international agreements now being negotiated,
the ‘Air Pact,’ are intended to form a wall on

Germany’s western frontier, forcing her to look and
move eastward.

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CHAPTER VI
THEY SPEAK PEACE

Tue moral is to the physical as three to one, in
warfare. This is still as true as when Napoleon said
it. But the scale grows with the change in war. The
morale of the fighting troops used to matter most ; now
the whole population is included in the ‘nation at
war.’ Therefore for this new sort of war new
methods of propaganda have to be evolved, and old
ones strengthened.

In one of the early editions of a London evening
paper—an edition that is two-thirds racing—an
incautious paragraph is printed about the strength- ©
ening of defences at Hong Kong, Britain’s advanced
base in the Pacific. It disappears from the later
editions. Why? In a private and confidential
memorandum to news editors the Director of Naval
Intelligence at the Admiralty requests . . . etcetera.
There is no censorship in Britain, but there are
official secrets. And there is alertness ; action is taken
quickly. Particularly quickly if a newspaper refers to
the defences of Hong Kong, because Article 19 of
the Washington Naval Treaty (still in force; it does
not expire till 1936) says ‘the status quo at the time of
the signing of the present Treaty, with regard to
fortifications and naval bases, shall be maintained
in... (2) Hong Kong and the insular possessions
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THEY SPEAK PEACE

which the British Empire now holds or may here-
after acquire in the Pacific Ocean...’

The British censorship is officially non-existent.
But its power is enormous. How can a newspaper
hope to compete with its rivals, if it cannot get news
from government departments? A ‘juicy’ murder
case, an even more luscious Royal Wedding or
Jubilee, is without savour if you have no ‘inside
information’ to give. Therefore newspapers behave.
To hesitate a doubt about the honesty of a ruling
politician, to hint at the financial corruption that
goes hand-in-hand with war business, is to risk
prosecution for criminal libel. Worse, it might offend
advertisers, by whose bounty newspapers live. The
laws of ordinary libel can be pressed to limits almost
incomprehensible, when the holier instruments of
propaganda are concerned. A singer employed by
the British Broadcasting Corporation was criticized,
during 1934, on purely esthetic criteria; it was
suggested that this singer allowed undue aspiration
to occur at the beginning of certain words, ‘an
intrusive h.’ Heavy damages were given for this
libellous suggestion.

In these and other ways judicious silence is
enforced on the newspapers, in regard to certain
topics, including those that could even indirectly
affect the prestige of our institutions. And the native
populations of the war bases in the colonies are pro-
tected from ‘dangerous thoughts’ by laws passed to
stop the importation of ‘obscene literature,’ or by
police powers that the Tsar’s agents might have
envied. Law matters little, in this matter; the

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

police twist the law to their purpose. In Australia a
law exists that visitors who cannot read can be
refused entry. A Czecho-Slovakian journalist who
can read most European languages lands in Aus-
tralia to take part in an Anti-War conference. He is
tested under this law by police officials, who ask him
to take down dictation—in Gaelic! He has to appeal
to a High Court to get this set aside—and is then
jailed for something else.

In Britain the laws against the expression of
political opinion have been made far more drastic
than they were under the infamous ‘Six Acts’ of
Castlereagh.

But all this is only one side of the medal; because
this side is carefully kept in the dark the other side
shines with added glory. The volume of war propa-
ganda now poured out, almost all in indirect forms,
has never been equalled. ‘Nation shall speak peace
unto nation’ is the motto of the British Broadcasting
Corporation, the latest marvel of technique applied to
propaganda; but when by mistake an honest scientist,
Professor J. B. S. Haldane, is asked to contribute
to the talks on ‘the causes of war,’ he is prevented
from doing so. Mr. Churchill was not prevented.

It is one of the more considerable tragedies of our
present civilization that teachers who really believe
in elementary education, and printers and engineers
who have given their lives to the intricate efficiency
of rotary presses, have by their work made it possible
for the millionaires who own the press to infect us
with a continual slow poisoning of war propaganda
that soaks right inside the skin.

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The film helps: ‘Cavalcade’ is an ‘epic of our
national life,’ according to the advertisements. In
‘The Private Life of Henry VIII’ this congenial king
explains how hard he is working to keep the peace
in Europe. Jack Hulbert performs prodigies in naval
submarines or war-time aeroplanes; Cicely Court-
neidge puts across ‘There’s Something About a
Soldier.’

Sections of the intelligentsia play their part,
writing war novels full of hopelessness, but most
hopeless of all about any way of resisting war, writing
political books and articles ‘against war’ that help,
as we shall see later, those who are preparing war.

The controllers of the armed forces themselves
know the value of propaganda: tattoos, air dis-
plays, navy weeks—there is no end to it. These few
paragraphs on war propaganda could be expanded
to a book.

What is the content, the argument in this propa-
ganda? It has two aspects: the nationalist and the
pacifist. The nationalist aspect is a variant of the
line well stated by the writers of the Psalms, who
asked ‘Why do the heathen so furiously rage to-
gether?’ and answered, ‘The kings of the earth
stand up and the rulers take counsel together against
the Lord and against His Anointed.’ This question
and answer is still the basis of the attitude of half-
educated clergymen, of part of the popular press,
the moderately literate majority of members of Par-
liament, the ‘officer class,’ and the millions deluded
into following these people in their beliefs.

Note first the shape of the question: ‘Why do the

IIQ

THE COMING WORLD WAR

heathen . . .?’ We are not heathen. It is not a
question about ourselves as well as other people. It
is a question about other people, strangers, foreigners,
those who do not worship our God. (We do not
rage; we are not war-like; we are never the aggres-
sors.) Note next the shape of the answer: ‘The kings
of the earth...’ It is usually difficult to persuade
the ordinary man that the whole enemy population
is vile and abhorrent. It is much easier to persuade
him that a foreign leader, a type, a representative,
Kaiser or Dictator or General, is a monster of
inhumanity. The worst crime of this enemy leader
is that he stands up ‘against the Lord and against
His Anointed.’ He does not accept our God, our
King, our Government.

This simple theory is the theme of ninety per cent.
of all effective propaganda during a war. Robbed of
the power given it by continual repetition on an
immense scale, the hypnotic pressure of press, pulpit,
platform, this theory can be seen to be ludicrous and
a lie. But when a war has broken out this first great
lie about war grows to mountainous solidity: ‘my
dear, my cousin in Belgium saw with her own eyes the
babies that a German General...’ It affects not
only the credulous ; those who have opposed our own
imperialism and seen through the patriotic myth that
Britain is always right, those who have, in Mr.
Chesterton’s words, divided hearts ‘torn apart by
mother earth and fatherland’*—they also fall vic-

* See ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers.’ In this poem Mr. Chesterton
states that before the first World War he realized that Britain was not
always right:

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THEY SPEAK PEACE

tims to this poison. And the victims become almost
immune to argument. They are able to believe that
lurking in the minds of several foreign peoples,
secret and hidden until a war breaks out, lie uncon-
trollable desires to rape, to destroy, to murder
babies, to mangle corpses—while the inextricable
mixture of peoples who inhabit these islands or
happen to be our allies have no such desires, and
would control them if they had.

This becomes, when a war situation has been fully
reached, the dominant note in the propaganda of
the governments and their supporters (as in Nazi
Germany to-day). But before war, other notes are
needed. Before war, it is necessary to convince the
whole population that no one in Britain, not a single
politician or capitalist even, desires or makes any but
the most reluctant preparations for war. Mr.
Churchill, in his wireless speech on November 16,
1934, claimed that no one in Britain ‘outside a mad-
house’ wished to attack or invade any other country.

Churchill’s claim is severe comment on his own
past. According to his own account, in his World
Crisis, his tenure of office as Secretary of State for
War in Mr. Lloyd George’s Government was
largely occupied in urging that the Soviet Govern-

A blacker thing than blood’s own dye,

Weighed down great Hawkins on the sea;

And Nelson turned his blindest eye

On Naples and on liberty.
But when war breaks out he thanks the Germans, the throne and
‘frozen folk . . . who have no faith a man could mourn’ because they
‘bring my English heart to me,’ i.e., restore his faith in British
imperialism’s righteousness. It will be seen that war propaganda

produces the type of faith that can move mountains.
I2I

THE COMING WORLD WAR

ment should be destroyed by military action.* He
might reply that the military action contemplated
would not in the main have been carried out by
British troops. But that is a traditional form of
British aggression : to hire, bully, persuade or permit
some other army to do our fighting for us—as in the
case of the Greek advance into Turkey after the war,
which ended so disastrously for the Greeks.

The view that wars are only caused by foreigners
is not the monopoly of Churchills or of Psalmists.
Mr. Gibson, presenting to the 1934 Trades Union
Congress the General Council’s report on peace and
war, said:

‘Peace in our view does not mean the negative if
highly desirable policy of seeing that this country
abstains from war. ... There is little likelihood that
this country would be an aggressor.’

And this claim that British policy is peaceful is
voiced as continually by the present Labour Party
leadership as it used to be by Mr. MacDonald when
he was their leader. It is here that the propaganda
that prepares war under the guise of peace has its
most important expression, because the Labour
Party is the most powerful organization for influen-
cing working-class opinion in Britain. The millions
who are members or constant supporters of the
Labour Party are the men and women who, at the
lathes or the machine-guns, will matter most in the

* Mr. Churcnill wrote on March 24, 1920: ‘Since the Armistice
my policy would have been ‘‘Peace with the German people, war on
the Bolshevik tyranny.” ’ (World Crisis: The Aftermath, p. 377.)

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THEY SPEAK PEACE

second World War. They can only be persuaded to
fight in this war if they are made to believe that |
their country, peaceful, partly disarmed, working
only for agreement among the ‘foreigners,’ is
attacked or threatened by foreign war-makers.

But before we examine the attitude of the Labour
Party leaders on this question, let us look first at the
real nature of the policy of British imperialism. Is it
really peaceful?

The history of the latter half of the nineteenth
century is largely a history of the grabbing of Africa,
and of other colonial countries. It was a period of
wars against colonial peoples for the seizure of
‘unoccupied territory’ (that is, territory not occu-
pied by strong Powers equipped with modern arma-
ments, or by local rulers willing to serve such Powers
as agents). In this period the British ruling class
grabbed more successfully and on a larger scale than
any other. Later, when the division of the world
into colonies and ‘spheres of influence’ was nearing
completion, came wars for the re-division of part of
the world, for a ‘new deal.’ The U.S.A. and Spain
fought over the colonies of Cuba and the Philippines,
Japan and Tsarist Russia fought over Korea and
Manchuria. These were reshufflings at the edges of
the world. Meanwhile at the world’s centre pres-
sures grew volcanic. Across innumerable threads of
policy and interest, trade and greed and fear,
appeared the vast pattern of two world-schemes at
grips. One, the less ambitious, was Berlin—Baghdad.
The other had for its main shape Cape Town—Cairo-—
Calcutta.

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

These schemes were mutually exclusive. The
German scheme met with obstacles among the
Balkan States that blocked the way from Berlin to
Constantinople. A Balkan State in the way, Serbia,
was under Russian protection; Russia was France’s
ally; there was an entente between France and
Britain; so the web was woven. The sequence of
Serajevo, the Austrian ultimatum, the World War,
was the inevitable outcome of this.

The position now occupied by the Labour leaders,
as the principal advocates of a popular democracy,
aspiring to a gradual change in capitalism, was occu-
pied in 1914 by Lloyd George. Swinging his fol-
lowers into support for the war in 1914, he swore ‘as
the Lord liveth’ that the British Government had no
desire for a single inch of additional colonial terri-
tory; they were defending Belgium, and their own
country, and the sanctity of treaties.

Mr. Lloyd George, having made so many speeches,
cannot be expected to remember them all. But one
of his murmuration of secretaries ought to have
reminded him of that speech before letting him print,
in the third volume of his War Memoirs, the frank and
illuminating phrases on war aims written by General
Smuts. Smuts, when he wrote these, in May 1917, was
a member of the Imperial War Cabinet. In a docu-
ment on the military situation he wrote that ‘apart
from the subsidiary recommendations of those
committees’ (two committees of the War Cabinet)
‘our war aims are now limited to the following four:

‘(a) Destruction of the German colonial system
with a-view to the future security of all communica-
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THEY SPEAK PEACE

tions vital to the British Empire. This has already
been done—an achievement of enormous value
which ought not to be endangered at the peace
negotiations.

‘(b) Tearing off from the Turkish Empire all parts
that may afford Germany opportunity of expansion
to the Far East and of endangering our position as
an Asiatic Power. This has essentially been achieved,
although the additional conquest of Palestine may be
necessary to complete this task. ’*

The two subsequent clauses deal with Europe.

These were not admitted war aims. Passchen-
daele would not have been fought through to its
sticky finish if this document had been given to the
world and to the armies as the reasons for their
sacrifices. It is a private statement of the thoughts
of the Imperial War Cabinet, written for circulation
to members of that Cabinet.

It puts first the security of the Empire’s communi-
cations and the retention of colonies seized. Second
comes ‘our position as an Asiatic Power.’ Gallant
little Belgium is a bad third.

The minds of present Cabinets are made in the
same moulds. The safety of the Empire, our position
as the rulers of India, are mainsprings of British
policy still. The Soviet Union, Japan, America—
against the ‘threats’ of these Powers, against their
propaganda, against the navies, commercial and
financial penetration of the latter two, the rulers of
the Empire carry on a policy of ‘defence,’ which
means a policy of war during peace.

* D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, Vol. III, London, 1994, p. 1531.

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

In the interests of this ‘defence,’ a Japanese
gentleman dies inexplicably in a Singapore police-
station, or an American missionary is murdered by a
war-lord near Tibet. If Japan or America proceeded
to act in these matters, they would of course be
aggressors; the British are not warlike; but is this
‘defence’ different in essentials from aggression?*
In the interests of peace and the ‘defence’ of peace-
ful citizens, Britain sent a large army to China in
1927. It was Philip Snowden, Labour Chancellor
of the Exchequer, who expressed most openly the
larger issues of the struggle for China, the aims of
the contending Powers. A hush fell on the House of
Commons as he told it that if every Chinaman would
only wear his shirt a foot longer, all Lancashire’s
export problems would be solved. This is the high
and humane hope behind the struggle of Japan,
Britain and America to secure undisputed control of
these four hundred million people.

In the markets of the other three-quarters of the
world British capital and American fight desperately.
British money fights American on a world scale,
pound and dollar, gold and silver, bank rates and
insurances—immense sums are used, such as the
British Government’s £ 300,000,000 exchange equaliz-

* Britain and France are considered ‘peaceful,’ because ‘satiated,’
by German Social-Democrats, and the idea has been brought to
England by a Social-Democrat who has persuaded some English
people that he is a Marxist. (See Why War? published by the
National Council of Labour Colleges.) The idea was originally
Bismarck’s and the phrase ‘satiated’ was first applied to Britain and
France by him. It may correctly describe a temporary position but
noe a permanent one: imperialist appetites are increased by in-

igestion.

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THEY SPEAK PEACE

ation fund, to make these monies weapons in the
fight for sales, for profitable and safe investments, for
the control of raw materials. ‘We fight for oil,’
wrote Ludwell Denny, and showed in a brilliant
book the savage scramble of the U.S.A., led by
Standard Oil, to beat the British firms, of which the
greatest is the Royal Dutch-Shell combine.

Wherever there is a smell of oil, a seepage staining
the earth (even in California or the Middle West,
America’s home fields) British companies carry on
the war. Bribery, arson, murder, and several South
American revolutions come into the picture. The
governments help all they can.

In South American markets British capital at one
time held predominance. Now in the majority of
these republics the U.S. dollar is in power. Some
of the markets are shared amicably, as when the
Electric Boat Co. of New York sells submarines to
Peru, and passes over orders by Peru’s neighbours
and ‘enemies’ to Vickers (who pay a share of the
profits to the Electric Boat Co.)* But in other cases
agreements cannot be reached or are broken; one
result is that for four years, in fever-ridden jungles
of the Chaco, the patient half-Indian peoples of
Bolivia and Paraguay have been carrying on a war
that is modern in most of its details—the hospital
services being an exception. Death claims over
twenty per cent. of the combatants. The League of
Nations inquires into this war, twice a year; but big
capital is involved, tin and oil and shipping, Britain
and the U.S.A. ; so the League gets nowhere.

* See the reports of the American Senate’s armaments inquiry.
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THE COMING WORLD WAR

There are other issues dividing these two world
empires besides markets, colonies, semi-colonies. It
has sometimes seemed as if the ‘scrap of paper’ for
the second World War would be a war loan bond of
the first. Britain borrowed money in 1917 and 1918
not only for herself but for her allies. The payments
made have scarcely scratched the surface of the
debt. Now real payments arë no longer made;
‘token’ amounts cross the Atlantic instead. The
Americans will stand this ‘token’ trick for as long as
it pleases the big Trusts, the millionaires, the oil ring,
steel kings, and Roosevelt. But when they choose not
to put up with it any longer, Britain is a defaulter, a
country that will not pay its debts. Britain has
fought wars for such reasons in the past; might not
America?

And the clash between Britain and America comes
also right inside the British Empire, tending to split
up that unwieldy conglomeration. Canada is largely
controlled by American capital, and increasingly.
Mr. de Valera’s government in Ireland has behind
it an alliance of Irish bourgeois and petty bourgeois
forces with U.S. capitalism. It maintains, as an
enemy outpost at the gates of Britain, an army and
air force not too inclined to think of England as a
friend. It allows another army to exist, the I.R.A.,
which is well supplied with Thompson sub-machine-
guns. In Chicago, this is the gangsters’ gun; in all
other parts of the world it is the weapon of armies to
which the U.S.A. is benevolent. When the roth
Chinese Army fought and held the Japanese, north
of Shanghai, the ‘Tommy gun’ was their main
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THEY SPEAK PEACE

weapon. When a new government, American-
financed, appeared in the Chinese province of
Fukien, there again was this brisk little weapon. It
turns up in Mexico and in South America. An
interesting arm!

Because of this deep-rooted antagonism between
Britain and America, and because of the class hatred
among British rulers directed against the Soviet
Union, Japan’s adventurous policy in the past three
years, her seizure of Manchuria and her attack on
Shanghai, has had cautious support or (even more
useful) calm and formal criticism from Britain. The
head of Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., visited
Tokyo at the most critical point in these imperialist
adventures. One of the heads of the Mitsubishi com-
bine, the Vickers of Japan (and connected with
Vickers by share-holdings in subsidiary companies)
lives permanently in a London suburb. The Federa-
tion of British Industries recently sent a large
delegation of leading members to Manchuria, to study
on the spot—naturally with the help of the Japanese
rulers of ‘independent’ Manchukuo—the possibili-
ties of trade. This was particularly galling to the
Americans, who find their business men in practice
shut out of all territories controlled by Japan.* The

* An American bishop was recently refused permission to land
on an island for which Japan has a ‘Mandate’ from the League. The
Japanese must know of the habits of the American clergy, one at
least of whom was revealed at the Senate inquiry as a missionary on
Sundays and a dealer in chemical poison gases on weekdays. And
perhaps the American bishop also knew something about the
Japanese: that these islands—which Japan ought to hand back to
the League shortly, but will not—are being fortified, contrary to the
terms of the Mandate under which they are held, and the terms of

. the Washington Treaty.

I 129

THE COMING WORLD WAR

head of the mission, Lord Barnby, was indiscreet
enough to say (and the Morning Post was foolish
enough to print) : ‘I think we should see Manchukuo
through Japanese eyes, for they understand it best.
. .. It is our desire to connect Great Britain, Japan
and Manchukuo with the chains of friendship.’ In
the capital, Kirin, Lord Barnby found time to call
on the Japanese Chief of Staff. The delegation later
met the Japanese Commander-in-Chief and dis-
cussed the ‘traditional friendship’ between Britain
and Japan.

But after all Lord Barnby is not a member of the
government, just a business man, a civilian? Yes.
He is also a director of Lloyd’s Bank and a director
of Dawnay, Day & Co., merchant bankers. Another
director of the latter firm is Major-General G. P.
Dawnay, who is also a director of Vickers-Armstrong
and chairman of Armstrong-Whitworths. Another
Dawnay helps to keep the B.B.C. on the side of the
angels. The firm was represented among the heads
of the buying departments at the War Office until
recently. Lord Barnby, in other words, is one of our
rulers; when he speaks it is as the voice of the British
capitalist class.

In reply, the U.S.A. builds warships up to the
limits allowed by treaty, builds the biggest air force
in the world, and fortifies Dutch Harbour, a naval
base in the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, that can
only be of use in a war with Japan. Alaska itself,
with a population of less than 60,000, has been
equipped with seventy-two aerodromes and six sea-
plane bases, 470 miles of railway and thirty-five cable
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THEY SPEAK PEACE

and telegraph stations. The cable system, built by the
U.S. Army Signal Corps, works at a loss. The rail-
way, built and owned by the U.S. government, works
at aloss. The air lines are ridiculously uneconomic.
War demands sacrifices.

In the struggle against Britain, time is on America’s
side, and the crisis. Keeping the dollar usually a
shade below the pound, destroying the world eco-
nomic conferences that Britain hoped so much from,
American capitalism concentrates on being ready at
the appropriate moment to deal with Britain’s tradi-
tional friend, Japan. Even sometimes a clumsy
effort is made (as recently on the question of the
‘freedom of the seas’ and naval armaments) to
neutralize Britain for a while in order to be the freer
to oppose Japan.

America is considered a very peaceful country, in
foreign affairs at any rate. But great firms like
Messrs. E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co., a combine
with some 50 million dollars of capital, are not likely
to forget that during the first World War they made
profits at a rate ten times higher than the normal
pre-war level. The ‘direct economic motive’ is not
the sole cause of war, often not the main cause; but
it does help a bit sometimes, in a depression, to think
of those four years in which it was possible to pay out
as dividends sums amounting to over 450 per cent.
of the capital.*

* These were not exceptional profits. On December 13, 1934, the
Senate Arms Inquiry went into the question of war profiteering. The
following facts emerged:

United Steel: average annual profits i in 191 2, 1913, 1914, were 89
million dollars; average annual profits in 1916, 1917, 1918, were

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

This vast struggle between the U.S.A. and Britain,
the two largest world-empires ever existing, only
reaches the stage of open warfare occasionally, in
out-of-the-way places like County Clare or the Chaco
frontier. But war, said Clausewitz, its greatest
student, ‘is a political instrument, a continuation of
political commerce, a carrying out of this commerce
by other means.’ t The ‘political commerce’ of
British imperialism consists very largely of a struggle
for supremacy in shipping, oil, aeroplanes, trade,
finance, world position, against the United States.
It also consists of a patient effort to organise capi-
talist unity in Europe against the Soviet Union.
Who is the ‘aggressor’ in this struggle? What sense
is there in claiming that Britain is peaceful, while
this ‘political commerce’ drives ahead every day?

Yet that claim is echoed from the platforms of the
Labour Party and the pulpits of the churches every
day. And almost all those who echo it, together with

484 million dollars. The profits in the best year, 1917, were 35 per
cent. on the capital invested.

Armour, Cudahy, Morris and Swift (all meat-packing firms) : average
annual profits in 1912, 1913 and 1914, were 19 million dollars for
these four. In 1915, 1916, 1917, their average annual profits were
46 million dollars. The Armour firm increased its capital from
20 million dollars to 100 million in 1916, no new money being sub-
scribed; the increase was by share bonus.

Bethlehem Steel: 61,800,000 dollars profit in 1917—43 per cent.

Calumet and Hecla Copper Mining: 800 per cent. in 1917, 300 per.
cent. in 1918.

Colts’ Firearms: 5,797,000 dollars profit in 1917—6o0 per cent.;
5,693,000 in 1918.

Many other firms made similar amounts. Comparable figures for
Britain are not available, because the Excess Profits Duty forced
firms to camouflage their ‘earnings.’ But profits were probably
almost as high.

¢ Clausewitz, On War, I, i,

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THEY SPEAK PEACE

exposure of the horrors of war, believe honestly and
earnestly that they are thereby furthering the cause
. Of peace.

Except for the few, now very few, leaders of the
‘Labour Party who remain pure pacifists, almost all
of them believe in one or other of the schemes for
preventing war described as ‘collective security’ or
as ‘an international police force.’ With these schemes
we shall deal later, in chapters on the way to end
war. But here it is necessary to note that each of
these schemes, each of the existent or proposed
organizations embodying them, must in fact and
action help the war-makers if—it is this ‘if’ we shall
discuss later—they draw working-class attention
away from a real way to prevent war, and concen-
trate it on an unreal way. And each of these schemes
is doubly dangerous if it can be adopted, in part or
whole, by a capitalist government, and twisted into a
cover and excuse for a capitalist war.
= We have seen, in a previous chapter, that the plan
for a war on the Soviet Union, by Japan, Germany,
and Poland, is well advanced; we can see that
British policy supports this plan and shields it. To
clamour about the beastliness of war, and at the same
time to praise our own statesmen’s peaceful policy,
can only help this plan to fruition. It hides the real
nature of British policy from those who need to see
and struggle against this policy, those who can check
it, hamper it, hold it up. Yet the people who thus
help to hide the war plans, leaders and spokesmen of
the Labour movement and of the churches, almost all
hate war and believe that they are working for peace.

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

They are, these honest speakers of peace, victims
of the delusions of idealism; they believe that the
kindly characters of British politicians, the amiable
nature of their intentions, the virtuous rectitude of
their professions, really mean something. They
cannot see that this so conscious rectitude weighs
featherweight in the scales against the inescapable
pressure of economic facts, and the need of a profit-
seeking class to secure its profits and its power—at
the expense of competitors or of another and a
threatening class.

Pure pacifism exists also, the denial that any
forcible means should ever be employed, by govern-
ments or by classes, in pursuit of their economic and
political ends. It is often worthy of respect, as an
emotion embodied in strong characters. It has no
pretention to logic or reality, since it resolutely
refuses to see that the adoption of pacifism by those
who look forward to a new order of society, those who
refuse to tolerate economic anarchy any longer,
would leave the bankers and the armament manu-
facturers free to do exactly what they like to the
world and its population. Pacifism is preached to
rich and poor alike, rulers and ruled. But do
Kreugers and Staviskys, and their lesser or greater
allies, Zaharoffs, J. P. Morgans—do these people
listen?

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CHAPTER VII
WARS END—AND HOW

WE have described a war that is likely, and some
aspects of this war that are almost certain. And the
technical preparations for this war, in which, we
believe, those of the British capitalist class are the
most important. And the diplomatic preparations,
in which the British Government’s hand can be seen.
And the political preparations, the propaganda, in
which the line of the Labour Party seems of key
importance. The rest of this book is devoted to ways
to end this war, or—if we can—to prevent it hap-
pening.

We take first the question : how can such a World
War be ended? For, after all, the probability is that
we shall not be able to prevent it happening. That
does not mean that we should concentrate now on
this question of the future; we should concentrate
now on our efforts to prevent war, efforts of the
present. To wait, to delay, to accept the war as
inevitable, means neglecting the present struggle, the
fact, for the future struggle, the phrase. Yet it will
be useful to deal shortly with that future, since when
war is actually upon us there will be little chance to
discuss openly the way to end it.

A war, engineered in secret, put across swiftly,
covered up with an impenetrable smoke-screen of

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

lies and censorship, will sweep masses of the working
class off their feet. Their patriotic fever, since it is
produced by ignorance that is their rulers’ fault, and
by a very human belief in the honesty of the words
they hear, will not be so horrible a phenomenon as
the war fever of the ‘educated,’ who have every
chance to find out the facts, and every reason to
suspect, from the beginning, the honesty of all
capitalist propaganda. And the working class will
recover more quickly. From the very beginning
there will exist, as outlaws, groups of men and
women, a party that no suppression can defeat, who
will work, in the interests of the working class, for
the ending of the war.,

The older forms of warfare, in which the armies
alone mattered, ended with the defeat of the army
of the weaker side. The new form of war, in which
the working populations are, in Major-General
Fuller’s words, the main ‘sources of military power,’
is ended—naturally and inevitably—by the effect
of war on these working populations. The Franco-
Prussian War, which might have continued longer
than it did had not the threat and then the reality
of the Commune driven the French ruling class into
Bismarck’s arms, belonged to the old form of war but
foreshadowed the new. The Russo-Japanese War,
ending in an abortive revolution in Russia—abortive,
yet a necessary ‘rehearsal’—was right on the thres-
hold of the present day. The first World War opened
fully the period in which wars are ended in a new way.

No war has ever, in any period, been ended by the
refusal of a number of non-combatant individuals to
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WARS END-—AND HOW

take part in it.* That is fact, history, reality. We ;
cannot alter it by our wishes or by the purity of our '
intentions. Perhaps if we strain our imaginations we
can construct some hope that the future will be
different from the past in this matter. But does it
seem likely that the future World War will ‘yield to
treatment’ by such individuals? It seems very
unlikely. The essence of individual ‘war-resistance’
during a war amounts to this: as the eyes of a certain
number of men and women are opened, as they begin
to be spurred towards action by grim facts, they
must each, as individuals, withdraw from their work,
from the human relationships they possess, the people
they can persuade or influence—and go to prison.
That may be, for each individual, a noble choice, if
he knows no more effective way of helping to end the
massacre of his fellow-men. Or it may be a selfish
choice, a callous attempt to save one’s own soul, no
matter what the effect on many neighbours’ bodies.
But in any case it does not stop the war.

Indeed it may sometimes help the war govern-
ment. It isolates in prison, in sterility, the individuals
whose realization of facts and anger against war
could be blended with the resentment and longing
for peace in thousands of other minds, as necessary
parts of a movement of revolt.

It is by movements of revolt, affecting thousands of
people armed and unarmed, that wars end to-day,
or to-morrow.

* A civil war in a minor Balkan State is said to have been ended
by the female population refusing their usual aid and comfort to
the male. The story is historically doubtful, and psychologically
incredible.

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

Capitalist propaganda has made many people
believe that such movements are contrary to the
outlook and nature of the English people. The re-
verse is true, and has been since Froissart, the
Maurois of the Middle Ages, described the English as
a nation very perilous to rule. In some ways the most
useful example and precedent, in considering such
movements, is the Ulster revolt not a generation ago.

A Liberal government passed laws to which the
Tory Party had some objection. The Government
had—for what it is worth—a mandate for their
action from elections fought on this issue (which a
government that declares war never has). But the
Tories succeeded, by armed revolt, in forcing the
Government to retreat.

The arms used to equip the 100,000 Ulster Volun-
teers were illegally and forcibly brought into the
country from abroad. That may or may not be a
precedent of value: a movement including a large
proportion of the industrial workers who make arms
has sometimes other opportunities for securing the
weapons it needs. No single method can be relied
upon ; every possible method is—possible.

Other precedents apply more closely. A govern-
ment that declares war for the sake of ‘a gallant
little Austria’ (or Paraguay, or Manchukuo) might
well be reminded of Sir Edward Carson’s words:
‘the Government has treated us with fraud ; if necess-
ary we will treat the Government with force’ (April
9, 1912, at Belfast). That has always been the posi-
tion of the English people when roused to take a real
interest in politics.

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WARS END-—AND HOW

Other statements made at the same period can be
taken as useful precedents by anti-war propagandists
endeavouring to avert a threatened war, or to end one
that has become a fact. These statements are par-
ticularly useful because the authors of them were
later given the highest offices in the administration
of the law, and we can therefore be certain that such
statements will not lead to trouble with the authori-
ties. The reader will doubtless pardon a short diver-
sion from the main argument, for the sake of such
words as these:

‘We will shortly challenge the Government. ...
They may tell us if they like that that is treason.
We are prepared to take the consequences, and in
the struggle we will not be alone, because we will
have all the best of England with us.’ (Sir Edward
Carson, at Blenheim, July 27, 1912.)

‘We regard the Government as having . . . seized
by fraud upon despotic power. We shall use any
means to deprive them of the power they have
usurped.’ (Bonar Law, Blenheim, July 27, 1912.)

‘We will set up a government. I am told it will be
illegal. Of course it will.’ (Carson, May 16, 1913.)

‘Nothing was left but the unconstitutional resist-
ance of men who in the last resort were prepared to
take up arms against the Bill.’ (F. E. Smith, June 15,

1914.)

Two or three years later Sir Edward Carson was
given the Attorney-Generalship, one of the highest
legal positions in England, and one always filled by
a lawyer whose past has been beyond reproach—
even if his present is beyond anticipation. Bonar

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

Law became a member of the Cabinet. A few years
later F. E. Smith was Lord Chancellor, head of the
Law in England. While we cannot guarantee that
leaders of the struggle against war who model their
eloquence on such examples will necessarily follow
these gentlemen to their high places, we feel that it
is certain that the peculiar law of England on the
freedom of speech and of the press will, in such a
case, be interpreted with restraint and wisdom. This
law, John Stuart Mill pointed out long ago, ‘is as
servile to this day as it was in the time of the Tudors,’
but, he said, ‘there is little danger of its being actually
put into force against political discussion, except
during some temporary panic, when fear of insur-
rection drives ministers and judges from their
propriety’ (On Liberty, 1859). No fear ever drives a
modern minister or judge from his propriety.

One further aspect of the Ulster movement can be
noted (before we return to the main argument of
this chapter) : its dealings with the army. Bonar Law
said in November 1913:

‘In order to carry out his despotic intention King
James had the largest paid army which had ever
been seen in England. What happened? There was
a revolution and the King disappeared. Why?
Because his own army refused to fight for him.’

Four months later Bonar Law said that the
Government had no right to ask the army to under-
take ‘to coerce Ulster. ... Any officer who refuses is
only doing his duty’ (March 23, 1914). And in fact
officers did refuse. It is impossible to believe that the
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WARS END-—AND HOW

duty of an officer in such matters is different from the
duty of any soldier.

The argument may be used that in these satisfying
quotations we have relied too much on Tory sources.
Let us, therefore, quote a politician who has, during
his life, proclaimed several creeds, but never has
had anything to do with Toryism. ‘There come
times when the unjust action of a kept Parliamentary
majority should be resisted.’ That was written by
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald in Forward, October 29,
192I.

In our subsequent discussion, therefore, of the way
in which those who oppose war should resist the
actions of the Government, should arm their fol-
lowers, should set up a government, should ‘treat’
the war-making authorities with force, we hope it will
be clear that we are not using these words or these
ideas in a sense dissimilar to the way in which they
were used by Carson, Bonar Law, Smith, and
MacDonald.

We will begin with the question of the relation
between a movement of revolt against war and the
armed forces. It is argued, by opponents of any
action except such as may be allowed by the ruling
class, that it is impossible for a movement of revolt to
succeed because the troops are certain to crush it at
once.

But is this true?

If one looks through English history carefully one
finds that the danger in any revolutionary situation,
from the revolutionaries’ point of view, is not so often
that their movement will come up against resistance

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

of troops and other forces used by the government,
as that the mutinies of these forces will break out
before the revolutionary movement is strong enough
and ready enough to work with them to a useful issue.
Under the influence of the French Revolution one
hundred and thirty years ago there were mutinies at
the Nore, Spithead, etc., which led to the passing of
the Incitement to Mutiny Act (under which Com-
munists are still occasionally jailed). During the
highest point reached by this wave of mutinies the
whole of the Home Fleet was in the hands of the
rebels, who began to blockade London and only
failed to carry the movement further because they
received no support whatever worth mentioning from
working-class or radical sections of the population.
A few years later, during the struggle with the
machine-breakers who followed ‘Ned Ludd,’ a
soldier refused to fire on the ‘mob.’ He was sen-
tenced to 300 lashes—practically death by torture.
But within the next thirty years such methods of
repression became too dangerous, owing to the
effective propaganda of the Chartists. General
Napier, commander of the forces in the industrial
north during this period, wrote on May 9, 1839, soon
after assuming his command, that the first attempts
to tamper with the troops were being made. ‘I am
indeed very anxious for hiring barracks at any cost,
from what I hear of the attempts to seduce the
soldiers.’ He grows anxious for the comfort of his
men, their quarters and food, because ‘every effort
is being made to corrupt them.’
A soldier of the Rifles, an educated man, avows

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WARS END—AND HOW

himself a Chartist, and Napier tries to win him over
by sweet words. The cat-of-nine-tails has become too
dangerous.

‘There are many Chartists among the Rifles,’
Napier writes to his brother in July 1839. The same
month he writes again that ‘At Hull, soldiers and
mob joined to thrash the police.’ The soldiers
started the attack, crying ‘Damn your eyes, we are
all Chartists.’

Our police force was formed at this period by the
Tory mill-owner, Peel, because the capitalists no
longer felt that the troops could be relied on to
massacre the workers (police were armed with
swords and carbines then), and because their own
yeomanry were afraid. Even Napier writes, ‘the
police are odious to the people.’

The best account we have of the Chartists’ attitude
to the soldiers is in Harney’s paper, The London
Democrat, in a letter from the Leeds revolutionary
journalist, William Rider.

Rider writes, under the heading, ‘What will the
Soldiers Do?’ as follows:

‘The army, as a body, will not serve corruption’s
cause—they know that when the strength of their
manhood has passed away, when their constitutions
are broken up, and they are no longer deemed fit for
the service, the toil-worn, emaciated soldier must
then repair to some infernal bastille (Rider means a
work-house), there to experience the curses of the
damnable system we are now labouring to destroy.

‘Yes, sir, and destroy it we shall.... But what
will the soldiers do during the struggle? ... The

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

poor simple things who preach up procrastination
and moral force, and talk about the rashness of us
pike, dagger and tuck-up-the-sleeve men, . . . will
say, “we fear the soldiers will oppose the people.”

‘Now, sir, I have no such fears; on the contrary, I
believe the soldiers will be our supporters in the
coming struggle. ... I do fear the moral force men
will be traitors in the cause (if we are to consider
them as being at all connected with us), but I have
an idea that the soldiers will supply the places of
the moral force men in our ranks.’

Rider then goes on to tell how eagerly the soldiers
read the revolutionary Chartist Press, the Northern
Star and London Democrat. Rider ends by quoting from
‘a friend’s’ letter telling of a meeting between
Chartists and soldiers in a tavern, a sergeant in the
chair and seventy or eighty soldiers present, who
listened for an hour and a half to an address on
Chartism. The soldiers elected a delegation to the
local Chartist organization to arrange further meet-
ings. The Chartists actually penetrated into the
barracks and regular meetings with the soldiers’
delegates were arranged. In this way, concludes
Rider, must work be carried on in the army to win
the soldiers over to our side and to persuade them to
‘unsheath the sword in behalf of the people.’

The language is old-fashioned, but the thought is
that of those English workers of the Chartist days
who worked out in practice the theory of the class
struggle. From them Marx and Engels learned.*

* I am indebted to Ralph Fox, author of The Class Struggle in
Britain, London, 1933, for the whole of this material on the Chartist
period, which appeared in an article written by him in 1990.

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WARS END-—AND HOW

The Russian Revolution of 1905 seems to have had
a remarkable effect in the British Navy. (The effect
was probably increased by the tragic incompetence
of the Russian naval officers in the war with Japan.)
There was the famous incident in 1906 of the British
officer who became so rattled by the continual quiet
antagonism of his crew that he brought matters to
explosion point by yelling at one of the seamen ‘on
the knee, dog!’ In October 1906 naval barracks in
Malta were destroyed in rioting.

By 1909, when a wave of industrial ‘unrest’ was
beginning to move in Britain, the number of cases of
‘breach of discipline’ in the Navy reached the highest
level ever known. There were 116,000 such cases
during that year. The strength of the Navy, including
petty officers, was roughly 100,000 at the time.

During the summer of 1918 ships’ committees
began to be elected in the British Navy, and dele-
gates from these ships’ committees began to form
port committees at each port where there was a
moderately stable naval population. The police
strike in the summer of 1918 seems to have given the
lead for this movement, in which the main demand
at first was for a fully organized trade union affiliated
to the T.U.C. and recognized by the Admiralty. At
Portsmouth, in July 1918, an Admiralty agent named
Yexley found that a general strike was being dis-
cussed hotly by the port delegates. The very high
level of political intelligence reached by the British
Navy at this time is shown by the fact that the
delegates were discussing, in connection with their
plans for a general strike, the need to get in touch

K 145

THE COMING WORLD WAR

with German sailors and organize jointly with them
action against both governments to end the war.
Only very skilful handling by the Admiralty pre-
vented these plans maturing. The ships were
replaced, and scattered. Pay and conditions were
improved and no punishments were attempted until
the sky was clearer.*

In 1925 the Admiralty reported that it was con-
cerned about the ‘spread of Bolshevism’ in the
Navy. Practically all the crews at that time con-
sisted of new entrants since the war. In 1926 during
the General Strike naval ratings were drafted ashore
for strike-breaking work at Pembroke Dock. They
were driven to such a pitch of anger and disgust
by the discipline imposed that they nearly killed
one of their petty officers, hanging him from a beam
in a hut. He was cut down just in time by an officer.

During the year before Invergordon there were six
cases of minor mutinies, the ships involved being the
Revenge, the Royal Oak, Vindictive, Repulse, Ramillies
and Lucia. The mutiny on the last-named of these
was considerably larger than the others and found
its way into the press. Forty-two men were arrested.

Invergordon, therefore, which need not be de-
scribed here since it is well known to everyone, was
not an isolated incident; nor is the Navy the only
force in which such incidents have occurred. Major-
Generals are said to have died of apoplexy between
Aldershot and Salisbury Plain when hearing whole
battalions whistling the tune of the ‘Red Flag,’
and being told after their first outbursts that this

* Lionel Yexley, in the Fleet, 1930 and 1931.
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WARS END-—AND HOW

was a hymn tune of which the men were very
fond.

The number of men in the Army sentenced for
acts of sedition and mutiny during the war were:

1916 ve ʻi a 60
1917 is i pi 221
1918 én — Ms 676

It is necessary to underline the enormous extent
and importance of such movements during the last
years of the War and immediately after it. Winston
Churchill states that in one week early in 1919 there
were thirty cases of deliberate insubordination in the
British Army. In January 1919 there was a revolt
at Calais which Churchill says involved about 4,000
men. Other accounts put the number involved at
nearer 10,000. Two whole Divisions were moved to
Calais to crush this movement, the men being told
that the Calais mutineers were obstructing the
demobilization of the Army. In order to prevent
these two Divisions from finding out the truth and
fraternising with the mutineers they had to be con-
fined to camp as if they were prisoners. Next month
the War Office in London was surrounded by 3,000
men refusing to go back to France.

The war on Russia was strangled during 1919 by
the refusal of British troops to take part in it. In
December 1918 whole units from the Army Service
Corps at Park Royal marched in a disciplined parade
to Downing Street protesting against being sent to
Russia. In January 1919 the storm broke, in France
at Calais, in Britain at Folkestone.

‘

147

THE COMING WORLD WAR

The careful reader will note that in all these
descriptions of the mutinies no references to news-
papers are given. That is because they have not been
and cannot be gathered from newspapers. The
account of the developments at Portsmouth are
taken from a source I can acknowledge: Mr. Yexley,
to prove his importance, boasted of these mutinies,
and how he persuaded the Admiralty to deal with
them sagaciously, in the columns of his paper, the
Fleet. For an account of the Folkestone mutiny, in
fairly full detail, the reader is invited to look at the
issue of the Herald (then a weekly paper, edited Py
George Lansbury) for January 11, 1919.

The first point about this mutiny is that it was
actually fifteen mutinies. The Herald lists fourteen
places where some form of action was taken by sol-
diers, in breach of ordinary discipline, in support of
the ‘strike’ at Folkestone or along the same lines.
The mutinies were at Folkestone, Dover, Osterley
Park, Shortlands, Sydenham, Grove Park, Shore-
ham, Kempton Park, Park Royal, Aldershot, Maid-
stone, Chatham, Briston, Fairlop, and at a London
railway station. Of these fifteen only four are men-
tioned in the daily press.*

The second point about Folkestone is that it was
primarily a ‘strike’ against the despatch of troops
abroad, particularly against the regulations enforcing
a return to France on men who had been on leave or
in hospital. Its main object, therefore, was to speed-

* So far as I can find. This, with other indications, makes me
think it possible that the list of such actions given in these pages is
penay between a third and a half of the number that actually
occurr

148

WARS END—AND How!
up demobilization. But it was to some extent
directed against the war on the Soviet Republic, and
had in fact a big effect in preventing reinforcements
being sent there.

: The men ‘picketed’ the quays, and forcibly pre-
vented both men and officers from getting on to the
boats leaving for France.

Complete political uncertainty prevailed, and
Horatio Bottomley, editor of John Bull, was asked by
representatives of the men to take up their case. But
even he found it difficult to get them to promise to
accept a ‘settlement,’ and a real speeding-up of
demobilization had to take place.
` At Blackpool and in the Isle of Wight similar
movements occurred later in the month. Some
police stations were attacked. In March there was a
riot at Kinmel Camp, Liverpool. (Manchester
Guardian, March 6 and April 17, 1919.)

The opposition to the war on Russia did not
happen only in England. At Libau in the Baltic a
light cruiser crew mutinied. A ship had to be sent
home from Archangel. Four destroyers, which
arrived at Murmansk before their crews knew where
they were going, had to be sent home. There were
refusals by sailors to weigh for Russia during 1919 at
Invergordon, Portsmouth, Rosyth, Devonport, and
the Fort Edgar destroyer base.

A typical incident in this grim struggle was the
case of a cruiser at Rosyth. The ship was refitting
when ordered to Russia. The destination leaked out
because of the equipment that was being taken
aboard. Sailors consulted with dockers, who appar-
149

THE COMING WORLD WAR

ently belonged to the Socialist Labour Party. The
dockers got a leaflet printed in Glasgow. The crew
eventually refused to move the ship from the dock.
‘Loyal’ elements were gathered and the ship was
moved out to sea, isolating the crew from shore
influences. There the ship anchored and the officers
by means of special propaganda material and lec-
tures endeavoured to induce a more suitable frame
of mind among the sailors. After three weeks at
anchor, no success having been achieved, the vessel
was sent to Portsmouth and the crew was dis-
charged.

An amusing example of the attitude of some of
the British soldiers in Russia was reported from
Baku. There a battalion refused to carry on its
duties unless it could have permission to hire an
interpreter for two evenings a week, who would read
to members of the battalion Pravda and other Bol-
shevik newspapers. After a fortnight of these read-
ings the War Office decided to bring the battalion
home.

These movements had no effective support among
civilians. The Councils of Workers and Soldiers
formed in 1917 had been ‘taken care of’ by politicians
such as Ramsay MacDonald, who attended their
first conference. There was no revolutionary political
party of experience and strength. Therefore move-
ments of this sort—which might have ended the war
on our side in 1919 if similar movements had not
ended it in 1918 on the German side—had only a
negative effect, hampering the war but not ending it.
It will be possible for those who oppose the next
150

WARS END-AND HOW

World War to see that such movements have a
positive effect.

But, it may be argued, the armed forces will
matter little in the next war. The ‘centre of gravity’
will be the aeroplane and poison gas factories.
Probably true; and it is more difficult for those who
insist on continuance of the war to coerce civilians
in industry than soldiers in the army—particularly
difficult if troops are not available for such a purpose.

The revolutions in Germany and Austria that did
in fact end the first World War, and gave practical
examples of how modern wars can be ended, were
built up out of widening strike movements in which
the working class learnt the brutality of the forces
opposed to it, but also learnt its own power. In these
strikes new leaders for the workers emerged. The
anti-war demonstration led by Karl Liebknecht on
May Day, 1916—1in spite of all repression—set the
note for the political side of these movements ; but it
was of course the example of the Russian workers and
peasants in 1917 that had the decisive effect.

In the first part of a war it is difficult to get strike
action, even for grievances of an extremely serious
nature. There is a feeling among the workers, care-
fully fostered by capitalist propaganda, that to strike
would be to let down the men in the trenches (or,
in modern war, the men, women and children in the
bigger cities where the bombs are falling). Slowly
the realization grows that the factory workers and
miners have to help rescue these men from the
trenches, these people from the target cities, by
ending the war.

151

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Strikes are made illegal, or are met with the
bitterest hatred. The capitalists hate ‘their’ workers
who go on strike far more than they hate the
‘enemy’ people. They are open about this: Owen
Seaman wrote in Punch in 1915:

When memory of Prussian foulness fails
One thing will keep its fame

Of tyranny and shame—

The strike in Wales.

In spite of this, strikes are possible, indeed inevit-
able, during a war; they will occur even if the plans
for industrial conscription treasured by the War
Office are put into operation. Indeed, there may
even occur strikes against the operation of these
plans; carried out with the usual efficiency of the
military leaders, this form of conscription may prove
almost unworkable from any point of view. Any
plan for such conscription, though it is supported
with all the forces of the official trade union leader-
ship, will meet serious opposition from the branch
officials and members of the trade unions.

A furious opposition will at once be roused against
the war-making government and the War Office if
—as seems likely—arrangements are made for the
Whitehall staffs, the ‘essential war services’, to
operate from bomb-proof and gas-proof shelters
before these are provided for the civil population,
particularly the factory workers. An opposition
equally bitter, more of disgust than of anger, will be
roused if the ‘Brass Hats’ and the government leave
London for some safer centre.

. 152

WARS END--AND HOW

To meet the needs of refugees from the bombed
cities some form of compulsory civilian billeting or
rationing of house space will be needed. This, if
applied on capitalist lines, the houses of the rich
exempted, will be a fruitful source of discontent. So
will the food regulations. So will half a dozen other
consequences of the war. From some of these causes
spontaneous demonstrations and movements will
arise ; but as spontaneous movements they will get no
further. It requires great courage to throw part of
the tiny forces of a revolutionary party into open
organized demonstrations and actions on such ques-
tions: the issue is always raised ‘would we not do
better to start the fight on bigger questions?’ or
‘when the masses are more thoroughly fed up,’ or
‘can we risk the imprisonment of our active workers
before we get more members?’ But when there
really begin to be spontaneous movements of any
size those who want to end war must be part of these
movements, must organize them, and will find that
the risks taken are well repaid.

In the factories, questions of safety are often the
key to the first actions of the workers. Much war
work is very dangerous: in hastily erected factories,
at unfenced machinery, men and women are
speeded-up to the limits of physical endurance. Work
in the chemical factories, producing explosives and
poison gases, is particularly dangerous. In Edge-

A ai a

wood poison-gas arsenal, U.S.A., during the last |

seven months of 1918, there were 925 casualties— `

deaths or injuries requiring hospital treatment. In
British poison-gas factories the ‘accidentally burned
153

THE COMING WORLD WAR

and blistered exceeded 100 per cent. of the staff
every three months,’ according to Winston Churchill.*
‘Patriots’ exasperated by the wastage implied in this,
and trade unionists refused any say in improving
such conditions, will help the organizers of strikes
on such issues.

From the pressure of such movements, or from
military defeat, or failure of the food supplies, will
come a time when it is possible, if all available forces
are gathered, to end the power of the war govern-
ment—which has ceased entirely to represent any
large section of the people—and to establish a
workers’ government. ‘Peace without annexations
or indemnities, the land and factories for those who
work them, bread . . .’—we do not know what
development or addition to these slogans of 1917
will be the programme of this government. (But the
programme is likely to be more progressive than that
of the government which the leaders of the Con-
servative Party fostered in Belfast in 1914.) This
government and the forces putting it into power will
then have the choice between the path through
struggle to Socialism, or that through compromise
with the ruling class to a parliamentary republic and
its natural sequels, Fascism and further wars. They
will remember the way in which the Russian and
the German revolutions—the movements that ended
the war—developed in different directions.

* The World Crisis, 1916-1918, p. 482.

154

CHAPTER VIII
LABOUR AND WAR

Ir has been one of the essential things in Socialism
during the whole of its existence as a modern system
of ideas, believed by almost all its sects and parties,
that the solidarity of those who suffer from capital-
ism ought to be international, and that no support
should be given to any war carried on by a capitalist
government.

This is not a ‘foreign’ doctrine; it was developed
by Chartists and given full expression in the Inter-
national Working Men’s Association formed:‘in 1864
by London trade union leaders, old Chartists and
followers of Robert Owen—with some French and
German representatives and Karl Marx. The
General Council of this, the First International,
seems to have contained a majority of British mem-
bers throughout its effective life. Later a great
Socialist who was also an Englishman of the English
wrote that the duty of a Socialist was:

‘To further the spread of international feeling
between the workers by all means possible; to point
out to our own workmen that foreign competition
and rivalry, or commercial war, culminating at last
in open war, are necessities of the plundering classes ;
and that the race and commercial quarrels of these
classes only concern us so far as we can use them as

155

THE COMING WORLD WAR

opportunities for fostering discontent and revolu-
tion ; that the interests of the workmen are the same
in all countries, and they can never be really enemies
of each other.’

These were the words of William Morris, in his
paper, The Commonweal (January 1, 1887). They
were echoed by almost every section of the move-
ment—until August 7, 1914. Into the change that
then took place we need not enter. The Labour
Party, the movement as a whole with a few indi-
vidual exceptions, ‘rallied to the support of the cause
of the Allies with practical unanimity.’"* Imme-
diately after the war it was seen that this was, to say
the least, a mistake, if not a betrayal; the line of the
Labour Party was laid down in its resolution of 1922:

‘That this Conference is of opinion that the Social-
ists and Labour Parties of all nations should agree to
oppose any war entered into by any Government,
whatever the ostensible object of the war, and ask
the Labour Party Delegates to bring forward this
policy at the next International Socialist Congress.’

At the founding of the Labour and Socialist Inter-
national at Hamburg in May 1923 a resolution was
passed declaring:

‘This struggle of the international working class
against imperialist policy will be most effective if
Labour everywhere fights against the imperialism
and capitalism of its own country, with all Parlia-
mentary and a e means at its dis-
posal for the class struggle. . .. The first requirement

* Max Beer, History of British Socialism, London, 1920, Vol. i,

P- 383.
156

LABOUR AND WAR

of this struggle is that the Labour and Socialist
Parties of all countries refuse all support to an
imperialist war, and that their Parliamentary repre-
sentatives in accordance with this attitude, withhold
their consent to military or war credits having
imperialist objects.’

This remained the official attitude and 4 policy of
the Labour leaders until 1934. These may have had
no more solid basis than the similar resolutions
passed before 1914; they may have been illogical or
ill-phrased in parts; but the resolutions and speeches
up till 1933 were a definite recognition of a thing
that matters: the trade unionists and Socialists of
this country are against any support for a capitalist
war, ‘whatever the ostensible object of the war.’

In 1933 the Labour Party again ‘pledged itself to
take no part in war and to resist it with the whole
force of the Labour movement.’ At the Trades
Union Congress, in that year, a resolution was
passed demanding :

(1) An uncompromising attitude against war pre-
parations.

(2) A determined boycott of war if and when it
should be declared.

(3) An organized refusal to assist in any shape or
form in measures calculated to help in the prosecution
of the war.

W. Monslow, A.S.L.E. and F., the mover of the
resolution, said :

' ‘One had to remember that in all wars “in defence
of one’s country,” both sides said the same thing.

157

THE COMING WORLD WAR

That had been the popular cry in relation to war up
to the present moment. He believed that the last
war had proved the unreality of that romantic

appeal.’
Supporting the resolution, G. M. Hann, Shop
Assistants, said:

‘The last portion of the resolution was the all-
important portion. It committed Congress to
organized refusal to assist, in any shape or form,
measures calculated to help in the prosecution of the
war.”

While this was the policy officially stated from
1922 to 1933, the two Labour governments of 1924
and 1929-31 made no attempt to carry out this
policy or to go further with disarmament. Nor did
they try to arm (as an alternative to disarmament)
the mass of the people, and abolish the gap that
separates the standing army, completely controlled
by officers soaked in capitalist ideas, from the
working class. The idea that such a separation
should not exist was voiced by many of the Whigs
during the latter part of the eighteenth century ;* it
was too radical for the Labour Party in 1929. Pro-
gress in political thinking is relative.

On disarmament the myth was proclaimed, by
these Labour governments, that Britain alone had

* Blackstone, the Whig theoretician who is recognized as the
greatest exponent of the fundamental constitutional laws of this
country, wrote that a standing army is unconstitutional (Commen-
taries, 1, pp. 413, 414). War armies were ‘to be looked upon only as
temporary excrescences bred out of the distemper of the State, and

not as any part of the permanent and perpetual laws of the King-
dom’ (Commentaries, I, p. 412).

158

ae m ee Md

ap Sie. ates

LABOUR AND WAR

disarmed, ‘unilaterally... Tom Shaw, Secretary for
War in the second Labour Government (and ex-
secretary of the Second International) said:

‘It is impossible, in the circumstances, for me to
recommend any further unilateral disarmament.
The figures are against it. Experience is against it.
And in my opinion the chances of peace and disarma-
ment are against it.” (House of Commons debate on
Army Estimates, March 10, 1931.)

On March 17, 1931, the Tory ex-Minister for Air,
Sir Samuel Hoare, ‘congratulated the (Labour)
Under-Secretary upon continuing, without any
breach of continuity, the programme of air develop-
ment, military and civil, which he found in existence
when he went to the Air Ministry.’

In Labour’s policy up to 1933, then, there were
these two elements: working-class pressure and '
official resolutions for disarmament, for action
against war—and capitalist pressure, official action
as governments, against disarmament, for ‘con-
tinulty’ in war preparations.

In 1934 the bubble burst. The Labour Party
leaders, conscious of the nearness of war and con-
scious also that widespread antagonism to the
National Government might soon make possible a
third Labour Government, forced through the
Labour Party Conference at Southport a resolution
pledging Labour to support war against a ‘peace-
breaker’ !

In this resolution, ‘Socialism and Peace,’ three
main points are laid down: by a proposed ‘Peace

159

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Act’: (i) Great Britain would be bound not to resort
to force as an instrument of national policy; (ii) she
must comply with instructions from the League of
Nations, ‘in case of having to use force in self-
defence’ ; (iii) the Labour Party ‘must unflinchingly
support our Government in all the risks and conse-
quences of fulfilling its duty to take part in collective
action against a peace-breaker’; this means being
prepared militarily and financially to join in such
‘collective action”!

This policy is stated as a necessary part of a settle-
ment of the world by ‘collective security.’ A Labour
government, says the Southport decision, would pro-
pose to all nations at Geneva a bold plan for dis-
armament and for international organization of
security, based upon (i) abolition of all arms for-
bidden to Germany under the Versailles Treaty, of
air forces, etc. ; (ii) a non-aggression treaty; (ili) the
settlement of disputes by pacific means.

This ‘collective peace system,’ it is explained in a
memorandum accompanying the resolution (Report
to Southport Conference, p. 101) means the League of
Nations plus any other States which agree to co-
operate with it. ‘Labour’s policy is directed to
developing the collective system in such a way as to
make it a sure guarantee of peace.’ That is to say,
a sure guarantee of peace could come out of co-opera-
tion between the fifty or sixty capitalist and imperial-
ist States in the world, plus the one State where the
workers are the ruling class—the U.S.S.R.—plus
Britain under a Labour government (where Lords
Melchett and Londonderry, the bankers and the
160

LABOUR AND WAR

ship-owners, would still be the ruling class, but
which would not be imperialist because Herbert
Morrison, instead of Ramsay MacDonald, had
kissed the King’s hands).

And under this system, the memorandum states
(p. 103), it would be possible to distinguish between
a war of an aggressive character and one undertaken
in defence of the collective peace system:

‘Labour is emphatically opposed to any form of
aggressive war, but we recognize that there might be
circumstances under which the Government of Great
Britain might have to use its military and naval
forces in support of the League in restraining an
aggressor nation which declined to submit to the
authority of the League and which flagrantly used
military measures in defiance of its pledged word.’

What is the League? Fifty-nine capitalist govern-
ments and one Soviet government. The League’s
‘action or inaction at any given moment is the resul-
tant of the policies of the Government members of
the League, especially the most influential Govern-
ments. And no Government has more influence at
Geneva than the British,’ says this Labour Party
memorandum. Action ‘in support of the League’
therefore means actilon—war—1in support of a body
representing in the main capitalist governments,
first among them our own.

Contrast these quotations with a speech by John
McGovern, M.P., a member of the Independent
Labour Party, made in the House of Commons in
opposition to the Sedition Bill, and reflecting the

L 161

THE COMING WORLD WAR

feeling of millions opposed to this Bill, which was
one among the many measures preparatory to war
passed in 1934:

‘The Government, which is composed of ship-
owners, coal-owners, royalty owners, railway direc-
tors and bond-holders, every single capitalist interest,
uses these troops to defend their ill-gotten gains, and
we are not to be allowed to appeal to these working
classes and say, “Do not allow the ruling class to
use your bodies to defend their selfish interests.” On
every occasion I appeal to the working classes to
take no part in your vile wars, but to defend the
interests of the working classes against those of the
ruling class. |

‘I make no apology for it. This is a struggle of the
working classes against the ruling classes.

‘Your Army and Navy and your Air Force are not
to defend the interests of the common people, but to
defend your selfish class interests, your right to plun-
der, exploit and rob them, to defend bond-holders,
your armament rings, and the interests of “‘Society.”’
And I am told that I must not appeal to the working
classes not to be used in this matter.’

Here are two different conceptions of war and of
society. In one conception there is a united, ‘col-
lective’ world—the Labour leaders even write of it
as a ‘World Commonwealth of Nations,’ consisting
of capitalist States!—bound together to resist a
‘peace-breaker.” In the other there is a world
divided by class war, in which ‘defence’ means
primarily defence of ruling class property. These
two views clash within the whole Labour movement.
162

LABOUR AND WAR

But this movement is only democratic in appear-
ance: it is controlled in fact by methods well
known—block vote, expulsion of militants, refusal to
accept amendments to official resolutions—by a
closed group of leaders.* These leaders have used
their normal methods to change the Labour Party’s
avowed policy from one of opposition to all war to
one of support for war ‘against a peace-breaker.’
_ The importance of this change in policy cannot be
overstressed. It means that war is near—since
otherwise the Labour leaders would not take the
risk of widening the gap between themselves and
the bulk of their followers—and it means that in this
war the official machinery of the Labour movement
will be at the disposal of whatever government
(National, Labour, or Coalition) wages that war.
For it is always easy to make this war appear a war
against the foreign ‘peace-breaker,’ a war for ‘col-
lective security,’ a war for peace.

To this end develop all the trends of pacifism and
of reformist opposition to war that are not bound up
into a positive movement, fighting, in spite of the
Labour leaders’ bans, against all war preparations
now.

The policy of a general strike against war is
officially abandoned. This policy was at all times
something of a myth, a promise of future action
unsupported by any real preparations for this action.
But it was a myth that embodied the very solid

* ‘In practice, the Parliamentary Labour Party controls the party
organization.’—Egon Wertheimer, London correspondent of Vor-
warts, in Portrait of the Labour Party, London, 1929.

163

THE COMING WORLD WAR

feeling of the trade unionists who are the best forces
of the British working class: that their unions must
be able to stop war. The policy was abandoned,
according to the official statement, because:

‘It was recognized that the lack of an independent
Trade Union Movement in such countries as Ger-
many, Italy, Austria and others, made the calling of
a General Strike against their Governments an
impossibility ; and in other countries, such as Japan,
the weakness of the Trade Union organization made
it unable to restrain its Government.

‘Recognizing that aggressive action might come
from some of these countries, the statement declared
that the General Strike in such circumstances could
not possibly be made effective by the trade unions in
these countries; the responsibility for stopping war,
moreover, ought not to be placed on the Trade
Union Movement.’

In Germany, Italy and Austria the forces of trade
unionism have been led to defeat, and a position in
which they can only work illegally, by reformist
leaders. ‘Therefore, say the colleagues of these
leaders here, pursuing the same policies as in Ger-
many, let us accept defeat beforehand ; let us take no
responsibility for stopping war.

If, then, much of the propaganda for peace actually
helps the war-makers, how can we distinguish
between this propaganda and the ideas and actions
that can really stop the war-makers, or hamper
them? |

‘The friends of peace in bourgeois circles’ (wrote
Rosa Luxemburg a generation ago) ‘believe that
164

LABOUR AND WAR

world peace and disarmament can be realized within
the framework of the present social order, whereas
we, who base ourselves on the materialistic concep-
tion of history and on scientific socialism, are con-
vinced that militarism can only be abolished from
the world with the destruction of the capitalist class
state. . . . The bourgeois friends of peace are
endeavouring—and from their point of view this is
perfectly logical and explicable—to invent all sorts
of ‘practical’ projects for gradually restraining
militarism, and are naturally inclined to consider
every outward apparent sign of a tendency towards
peace as the genuine article, to take every expression
of the ruling diplomacy in this vein at its word, to
exaggerate it into a basis for earnest activity. The
Social-Democrats,* on the other hand, must con-
sider it their duty in this matter just as in all matters
of social criticism, to expose the bourgeois attempts
to restrain militarism as pitiful half measures and
the expressions of such sentiments on the part of
governing circles as diplomatic make-believe, and to
oppose the bourgeois claims and pretences with the
ruthless analysis of capitalist reality.’ t

The kernel of the Social-Democratic (i.e. revolu-
tionary) idea about war, continued Rosa Luxem-
burg, was that:

‘Militarism in both its forrns—as war and as armed
peace—is a legitimate child, a logical result of

* By ‘Social-Democrats’ was meant revolutionary socialist. In
1911 no Communist Parties existed. Words change their meaning
when people change their faiths.

t Rosa Luxemburg, articles in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, May 6
and 8, 1911; English translation, abridged, in Labour Monthly,
July 1926.

165

THE COMING WORLD WAR

capitalism, which can only be overcome with the
destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever
honestly desires world peace and liberation from the
tremendous burden of armaments must also desire
Socialism. Only in this way can real Social-Demo-
cratic enlightenment and recruiting be carried on in
connection with the armaments debate.

‘This work, however, will be rendered somewhat
difficult and the attitude of the Social-Democrats
will become obscure and vacillating if, by some
strange exchange of rôles, our Party tries on the con-
trary to convince the bourgeois state that it can quite
well limit armaments and bring about peace, and
that it can do this from its own standpoint, from that
of a capitalist class state.’ |

The essential thing about most of the work of our
friends the pacifists, and those of the Labour Party
who really want peace, is that it consists of an
endeavour ‘to convince the bourgeois State’* The

* This is the main effort of those pacifists who are really concerned
about war. But there are other pacifists who seem mainly concerned
about revolution. One of them, Mr. C. E. M. Joad, has written in
á pamphlet published by the ‘No More War’ Movement stating that
he did not believe ‘that, even if a revolution were able to achieve an
economic millennium and did in fact achieve it, the result would be
worth the price in human misery and suffering that it would involve.
Thus, I have learned to curb my expectations and to modify m
demands in respect of the future of our society. Socialism I sti
think good, but I am less certain that it is realizable than I used
to be. In many moods I am inclined to think that the Marxians are
right in holding that the difficulties involved in the supersession of
capitalism are too great to be overcome without a violent struggle,
and this violent struggle it seems to me essential at all costs to avoid.
If its avoidance means that Socialism must be regarded as imprac-
ticable, then we must get on without it as best as we can.’ (What
Fighting Means, p. 20.)

Capitalism means war, growing more and more murderous and
destructive. Socialism, which is a state of society without classes or

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LABOUR AND WAR

essential thing about the work of those who want
peace must be the attempt to convince the working
class of their power to end the bourgeois State,
thereby ending war.

All the suggestions, even when they have behind
them a real and vigorous hatred of war, for a rebirth
of the League of Nations, for an international police
force, for new pacts of security and disarmament
between the great Powers, come in the former
category; they are attempts to get each bourgeois
government, organizers of bourgeois States, to act
against the needs of each bourgeois class, and main-
tain peace in the world when the antagonistic classes
they represent are out for war.

The most interesting arguments against Marxism
put forward in this country come—directly or
indirectly—from the Fabians, the more open expo-
nents of the policy of ‘convincing the bourgeois

exploitation, without any of the causes of war, is seen to imply a
revolution—which only means killing and destruction to the extent
that the capitalists have the strength left to fight it. And these
pacifists choose—capitalism and war. These pacifists are not only
against revolution; they are against the wars of subject peoples for
their freedom from imperialist domination. They are against the
determination of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union to
guard the Socialist State now building

To the British workers they say: ‘Curb your expectations; give up
the struggle for Socialism.’

To the Indian and Chinese peoples they say: ‘Curb your expecta-
tions; give up the struggle for democracy and freedom.’

To the workers and peasants of Russia they say: ‘Surrender your
Socialist cities to the first Imperialist Power that cares to invade you.’

They say these things ades a careful cover of morality, earnest-
ness, piety, regard for ‘the sanctity of human life,’ appeals to the
hatred of war that is rooted in the hearts of millions of workers. But
what they are saying helps imperialism, and therefore helps the war-
makers, even more than the usual pacifist talk of Britain as a peaceful

country.
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THE COMING WORLD WAR

state.” Their policy, applied with assiduity and
great skill for some generations, has been a factor in
producing the present state and present government
of Britain, and has led directly to the existence of a
Labour Party which has twice formed governments.
These governments have proclaimed ‘continuity of
policy’; in the colonies and in the struggle for new
colonies they have done just what their Tory pre-
decessors did; the first Labour government started
an important phase in the present armaments race
(the competition in cruisers) and the second Labour
government carried on a ‘police war’ against the
Indian people, jailing almost as large a number of
its political opponents there as any other tyranny
in world history has done (roughly as many as
Hitler seems to have imprisoned). If we view the
question simply as ‘practical men,’ therefore, Marx-
ism in practice has more to say for it than Fabianism,
since Marxism has to its credit a Soviet government
that even Fabians must admit pursues a real policy
of peace.

The Fabians, however, are very active at present
with a new—or refurbished—plan for securing world
peace, an international police force.

‘The international organ required’ (says one of the
Fabian pamphlets*) ‘is one that has not to consider
the immediate advantages of individual govern-
ments, and will not be bound by the permutations
and combinations of day to day national policy.
There must be a judicial approach. The finding

* H. R. J. Greaves, The Prevention of War, New Fabian Research
Bureau and Victor Gollancz, London, 1934. `

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LABOUR AND WAR

should be based not on a compromise between
opposing interests, but on the conscious building up
of a super-national technique. It is a disinterested
body akin to the Permanent Mandates Commission
that we want. Membership of it should, as far as
possible, be independent of governments. Its per-
sonnel must be authoritative. To assure this they
ought to be chosen by the Council (under Article V
and with the ad hoc membership of participant non-
League Powers), to be irremovable during a seven-
year term of office (except with the approval of the
Council and Assembly), to be paid officials, to be
forbidden any employment by governments or out-
side bodies, and perhaps to be by majority nationals
of other than great Powers. The lesson of the Man-
dates Commission is that a Board composed on these
lines develops an esprit de corps, a reputation for just
and wise judgment, an authority generally recog-
nized, and a valuable technique of international
administration. Nor is it difficult to secure the ser-
vices on such a body of eminent public men. The
personnel of the Mandates Commission is evidence
of that, and, taking into account the much greater
importance of its work, it ought to be easy to find
prominent international statesmen to serve on this
board whose reputations would enhance its prestige.

‘The task of the board—one might call it the Inter-
national Police Board—would be in normal times to
think out and prepare the methods of applying
sanctions. It would maintain contact with the
necessary national departments. It would organize,
if that were decided, an international Air Force,
deciding in view of its general plans where sections
should be stationed, how they should be officered,
and appointing the air chiefs. It would develop a

169

THE COMING WORLD WAR

system of co-operation between the navies of the
League Powers, and might have conferred upon it
the control of certain naval bases. Above all, its
functions must be so divided that they can grow as
the Board proves its value and shows that it has
reached years of discretion. It would have its plans
ready for the application of sanctions whether
diplomatic, economic, financial or military. It
would consider each country and each type of
sanction separately, and devise the exact technique
required in each case.’

In addition, it is suggested that all military and
naval aircraft in the hands of governments should
be abolished, civil aviation should be international-
ized, and an air police force set up armed with the
latest and most powerful fighting machines.* One
of the most active exponents of this policy, Mr.
Philip Noel Baker, was at one time Parliamentary
Private Secretary to Arthur Henderson, leader of the
Labour Party. He was later one of the Labour
government’s representatives on the Assembly of the
League of Nations, and later still secretary to Mr.
Henderson when he was President of the Disarma-
ment Conference. A practical man with experience:
he has been a professor and member of parliament as
well. But how ludicrous his main argument looks
when you strip it to essentials: that a police force is
possible without a government; that a police force
thus miraculously produced—parthenogenesis is the
technical term, I believe—would necessarily be an

* Philip Noel Baker, ‘International Air Police Force,’ a chapter in
Challenge to Death, London, 1934.

170

LABOUR AND WAR

instrument of peace and order, not of aggression and
tyranny: that the ‘civil servants’ appointed by
various governments to control this police force
would, in the best ‘old school tie’ manner, work for
the good of the community and ignore the needs and
policies of the governments appointing them.
Stripped to these bare bones, the plan can be seen
for what it is, the utopia of an idealist.

We find the basis for it in the same book in which
Mr. Baker writes. In a chapter entitled ‘No Peace
Without Economic Security, Mrs. Mary Agnes
Hamilton expresses exactly the view of police forces
that is at the root of this scheme. She writes:

‘Britain and every other settled country have
established peace at home, safety for the ordinary
citizen, and justice as between citizens, by the self-
same method. That method is the handing over of
responsibility for common safety and common order
and justice—what we call “the peace of the realm ””—
to officers and institutions representing a common
law. This law has come into being by consent.’*

It is 170 years since Rousseau wrote his Social
Contract. It might have been difficult for him to
know that the process he described, by which a
‘common order and justice’ came into being ‘by
consent,’ never took place, was historically untrue.
But it is far more difficult, surely, for this lady who
was educated in Germany and at Newnham to
believe that what she describes ever happened, or
anything like it. She must know that police forces

* Challenge to Death, London, 1934, p. 267.
171

THE COMING WORLD WAR

were instituted, as a fact, for the protection of
property and of the power of a ruling and exploiting
class.

This lady continues with a charming story of an
attempt to sell her a burglar-proof lock for her front
door: ‘I inspected it, and admired: as I was doing
so, a policeman happened to pass by on his beat.
Suddenly, then, it occurred to me that actually it
was he who kept my house safe. ... What enables
the policeman to do this for us is that we all rely
upon him. We consent to his being there, as our
guardian: he has our goodwill; he is our servant and
representative.’ Idyllic picture! How many impli-
cations it carries with it: the home counties, a
smooth hedge, the familiar, friendly blue uniform. ...

There was once a similar and equally charming
picture drawn by the same author. It was the por-
trait of a gentleman. I remember the beautiful
phrase in it: ‘It is a face that has weathered storms
and has kept straight on.’ The gentleman was praised
especially for the fact that, by years of patient
struggle, he had saved the British Labour Movement
from Communism. The gentleman was J. Ramsay
MacDonald.* Perhaps it was from this gentleman—
and a few years ago he had no more loyal supporter
than Mary Agnes Hamilton—that the lady acquired
an apparent inability to remember that the majority
of the population are workers, their wives, and
children. Workers, who meet the police at Labour
Exchanges and evictions, as protectors of the P.A.C.

* Mary Agnes Hamilton, writing as ‘Iconoclast,’ in James Ramsay
MacDonald, London, 1923.

172

LABOUR AND WAR’:

or of the bailiff. Workers, who when they demon-
strate peacefully in this city can see the whole police
force of London, and reinforcements from the Home
Counties, doing their primary duty—keeping the
militant working class ‘quiet’—while a curious
menagerie of ‘specials’ mix the traffic and look
round, uncomfortably, for burglars.

We do not wish to suggest that the desire for peace
of these who advocate an international police force
is fraudulent. We do suggest that their view of the
nature of police forces is wrong in fact and history,
contrary to all scientific socialism—and springs from
a slightly ludicrous suburbanism. It is a view of the
police natural to Hampstead Garden Suburb. But
the world is not quite like that.

In this utopia of the biographers of MacDonald
and the secretaries of Henderson there are two
dangers. One is that the efforts of many otherwise
useful people may go in this direction, instead of in
a direction that can lead to the ending of imperialism
and of war. The second is that it may not be a
utopia at all; a shift of policy in Britain could, at this
moment, lead towards the establishment of an inter-
national police board and of an international air
police. But the organizations called by these names
would be organizations set up to serve, to represent,
to consolidate the power of the dominant capitalist
Powers in Europe to-day. It would be a general
staff for air warfare, and an air force established by
the Great Powers. The law that it would administer
would be the international law of capitalist imperial-
ism, a law well described by a Chinese nationalist in

173

THE COMING WORLD WAR

the days before the Chinese Nationalist Movement
sold out. ‘What is International Law?’ wrote this
representative of a semi-colony. ‘It is an instrument
for securing the privileges obtained from the weak
by the powerful nations. The powerful nation has
already used force or blackmail to obtain the privi-
leges. It uses international law to secure them. A
wolf and a lamb talking justice.’* This is what the
‘common safety and common order and justice’
enforced by this police force would look like to the
majority of the population of the world, the Indians
and Chinese and Africans who are subject to imperial-
ism. And even apart from these, the establishment
of a body pledged to keep things as they are, unless
alterations occur by consent, would be a threat of
war against all those millions who cannot endure
things as they are, from Belfast to Buda-Pesth, from
Barcelona to Berlin. It would be, like the ordinary
policeman, a servant of ‘the man in possession’ and
no friend of the dispossessed, whether a race or a
class. Its formation and assumption of aerial
superiority would be resisted by every nationalist
movement that is not a mere decoration to cover
partnership with imperialism, and by every Power
that is driven by capitalist needs to a policy of
expansion or of ‘revision’ (i.e. forcing a change of
frontiers). It might easily turn into the sort of inter-
national police force that fought the Chinese people
(practically unarmed) in 1900, sacked Pekin, and
had the title of ‘Huns’ bestowed on it by the German
Emperor. Or it might provide the camouflage for a
* Wong Ching Wai, China and the Nations, London, 1927.
174

LABOUR AND WAR

new ‘war to end war’ against Germany or the
U.S.A. This is not our road!

Another plan, on which much energy is concen-
trated by those who feel a burning hatred of war, is
that of the nationalization of armament manufacture.
There is something peculiarly horrible about the
armament trade, and an extremely useful literature
of exposure has grown up recently around it.* The
use of prostitutes and lavish bribes to get orders, the
creation of war scares, and the arming of potential
‘enemies’ have been fully shown up at the recent
inquiry by the American Senate.

A summary of some of the evidence given before
this Inquiry has been made by the New Republic of
New York (September 19, 1934). It shows:

That representatives of American airplane firms in
China planned to sell ’planes to the Hankow Govern-
ment through bribery of officials.

That the Electric Boat Company (of New York)
has long been associated with Vickers, Limited, and

* This literature is so thorough and so popular that I have not
thought it necessary to include much material from it in this book.
Interested readers should see particularly Merchants of Death by
Engelbrecht and Hanighen, and the cheaper pamphlets issued by
the Union of Democratic Control, The Secret International and
Patriotism Limited.

t Bribes, is the form of secret commissions and secret rebates, are
common practice in many modern industries. Where combines and
cartels are formed fierce competition continues within these trades
by means of secret discounts, exaggerated payments for advertising,
or alternatively the provision of free services, etc. When a deal is
near completion, the innocent phrase is usually some variant of ‘that
sounds somewhere near possible: how does the price split up?’ The
salesman then ‘does his stuff.’ Municipal officials, when approach-
able, I was taught by an efficient sales manager, need tact and a
bigger ‘slice,’ because the risks are greater. A sidelight on what is
sometimes called Municipal Socialism!

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

that a stockholder and dominating factor in both
firms has been Sir Basil Zaharoff, greatest munitions
profiteer in history. Between 1919 and 1930, Sir
Basil received in commissions $1,360,000 from the
Electric Boat Company.

. That until the World War, a third partner of these
two companies was the Whitehead Company Limited,
a British-owned Austro-Hungarian concern from
which the German Navy obtained American sub-
marine secrets, and used them against American
merchant vessels.

That Vickers, over the protests of the Electric Boat
Company and apparently without the knowledge of
the British Admiralty, has recently sold American
and British submarine secrets to Japan.

That during the Tacna-Arica dispute between
Chile and Peru, it was understood that the Electric
Boat Company would sell only to Peru, Vickers only
to Chile, each company splitting its profits with the
other. Thus the Electric Boat Company’s salesman
at Lima could talk piously of the British intrigues in
Chile, and Vickers salesman at Santiago of the
American manceuvres in Peru. L. V. Spear, retired
United States naval officer and vice-president of
Electric Boat, writes Commander Sir Charles
Craven, managing director of Vickers, on how to do
business in Chile: ‘Graft is the real foundation of all
South American business,’ adding that ‘at the last
minute something extra is always needed to grease
the way.’

That the Electric Boat Company and the Beth-
lehem interests maintained a common bribe-dis-
tributor for South America, Captain Luis Aubry of
Peru. Captain Aubry volunteered to have himself
sent as Peruvian delegate to the 1924 disarmament
176

LABOUR AND WAR-

conference at Geneva to fight any move for the out-
lawing of submarine warfare.

That Germany, since 1925, has maintained sub-
marine-manufacturing plants, certainly in Holland,
perhaps in other European countries, and that it has
manufactured and sold small arms to all of Europe.

That Soley and Company, of London, sells vast
amounts of munitions in all parts of the world,
substantial portions of their supplies coming from the
British Government. The amounts are so large that,
as the head of the firm wrote, they could ‘alter the
balance of political power in any small State.’

_ It is good to use the almost incredible facts of this
trade to persuade those otherwise indifferent to take
notice, and to generate the decision and will-power
needed for struggle. But the suggestion that nationali-
zation of these trades would alter matters, essentially,,
is nonsense. Sir Herbert Lawrence, now head of
Vickers, Ltd., was before the war engaged in ‘high
finance’ ;* he became Chief of Staff to Sir Douglas
Haig during the War, then went to Vickers. Would
he find his powers and position altered by his
appointment as Under-Secretary for Armaments?
Would His Majesty be any less willing to honour a
government official than he was to honour Sir
Charles Craven? (Commander Craven received his
knighthood just at the time when those despicable
Americans were preparing to publish his letters, in
which as managing director of Vickers he was a little
less than discreet about ‘commissions.’) Perhaps if

* See speech by Lord Hutchinson of Montrose, House of Lords
December 8, 1932.

M 177

THE COMING WORLD WAR

the trade was nationalized ‘commissions’ would be
less prominent—and ‘concessions’ would take their
place. But nothing essential would be altered. The
capitalist class would control their arms through
governments (not always immune, I believe, from
_“jobbery’) instead of through firms that, like Vickers,
are in a different way, ‘national institutions.’

But it would take the profit out of war, say some.
Nonsense! There is scarcely a big industry in exist-
ence that does not ‘profit’ from war. There has
never, in the whole history of the world, been
profiteering on a bigger scale than in the British
shipping industry during the last World War.
Banking, coal, steel, shipping, food—these make
profit out of war. To nationalize armaments alone
would perhaps take excess profits out of war for a
tiny proportion of the capitalist class, but would
spread these profits over the whole class. It might
even be a step towards war; Roosevelt is obviously
contemplating some form of armament nationaliza-
tion, with the aim of preparing his country for
‘defence’ more efficiently than private capital can do.

A score of other ‘plans’ exist of the same character.
The same or similar arguments apply to them. All
of them fail to deal with the facts of the modern
world: with what war is, and its connection with
modern technique and the way men get their living.

178

CHAPTER IX
WAR’S ROOTS

‘On the threshold of human history,’ wrote Friedrich
Engels, ‘stands the discovery that mechanical motion
can be transformed into heat: the production of fire
by friction; at the close of the development so far
gone through’—Engels wrote in 1878—‘stands the
discovery that heat can be transformed into mechani-
cal motion: the steam-engine...

‘The generation of fire by friction gave man for
the first time control over one of the forces of Nature,
and thereby separated him for ever from the animal
kingdom. The steam-engine . . . (represents) all
those immense productive forces dependent on it—
forces which alone make possible a state of society in
which there are no longer class distinction or anxiety
over the means of subsistence of the individual, and
in which for the first time there can be talk of real
human freedom and of an existence in harmony with
the established laws of Nature. .. .

- ‘All past history can be characterized as the history
of the epoch from the practical discovery of the trans-
formation of mechanical motion into heat up to that
of the transformation of heat into mechanical
motion.’* :

Against this background we look at the modern

+ Anti-Dihring, London, 1935, p. 131.

179

THE COMING WORLD WAR

relations between technique, productive forces, pro-
ductive relations of men, and society, systems of ideas
and of government; here we can find the roots and
realities of modern war.

The steam-engine and the technique based on it
raised man from the level of a creature that lives
mainly by using tools and animal power, and employs
natural forces (fire, wind-pressure, water-pressure)
directly and on a small scale, thereby altering only
slightly the environment surrounding him, to the
level of a creature that lives mainly by using
machinery and mechanical power, and by the use
of these can, eventually, control to a large extent all
the physical conditions of his life.

On the basis of the old technique, of sailing-ship
and horse-drawn vehicle and hand-forged metal, a
class of traders had grown up before the steam-engine
existed ; they had taken power from the kings and
nobles, first in one country and then throughout half
Europe, developed machinery driven by water-power,
and remoulded society on a basis of free competition
and the exploitation of wage-labour. Capitalism
came into being. The capitalists owned the engines
and the machinery that steam made possible, and
conquered the whole planet with them, partly by the
power they gave for warfare, partly by the wealth
they gave, partly by the cheapness of the goods they
produced.

In the competition governing production, trade
and transport, within or between the separate
capitalist nations, the owners of great masses of
capital and machinery were always able to squeeze
180

WAR’S ROOTS

out their lesser rivals: from this grew up monopolies.
‘Normal’ capitalism grew into imperialism, which
Lenin defined as

‘Capitalism in that phase of its Adopen in
which the domination of monopolies and finance
capital has established itself; in which the export of
capital has acquired very great importance ; in which
the division of the world among the big international
trusts has begun; in which the partition of all
territories of the earth amongst the great capitalist
Powers has been completed.’

In the pamphlet, Imperialism, from whieh we take
this quotation, Lenin gives figures of ‘the enormous
development of industry and the extremely rapid
concentration of production in ever larger enter-
prises.” Lenin’s examples of this are all pre-war; he
wrote in 1916. He knew nothing of Imperial
Chemical Industries, of the concentration of British
railways into a few big groups, of the merging of
British shipping lines. But every tendency he
pointed out has grown to extraordinary proportions
in the years since he wrote. This applies also to his
second chapter, which describes how the banks
become

. . transformed, and instead of being modest go-
betweens they become powerful monopolies dealing
with almost all capital, and with almost all capital-
ists (and small proprietors); and similarly dealing
with the biggest part of the means of production and
of the sources of raw materials of a country or of
several countries. ;

‘Then the domination of capitalist monopolies
181

THE COMING WORLD WAR

inevitably becomes, in conditions of commodity
production and private property, the domination of
a financial oligarchy.’

Lenin notes among the essential features of this
oligarchy’s rule the use of falsified balance sheets,
and a juggling of accounts among subsidiary com-
panies. Kreuger was not a well-known name when
he wrote, nor had the cases occurred that led to the
‘Hatry Crash’ and the prosecution of Lord Kylsant,
but facts have not failed to confirm his thesis.

He notes that Britain, France, Germany and the
U.S.A. own nearly eighty per cent. of the world’s
finance-capital :

‘Thus by this means or otherwise the whole world
is more or less the debtor and vassal of these four
international banker-countries, on which world
finance-capital rests.’

Lenin then describes the part played by the export
of capital in the creation of an international net-
work of dependence and connections of finance-
capital.

‘In the old type of capitalism, that of free com-
petition, the export of goods was the most typical
feature. In the modern kind, the capitalism of
monopolies, the export of capital becomes a typical
feature. .

‘The necessity to export capital comes from the

‘‘over-development”’ of capitalism in certain coun-
tries where (with agriculture backward and the
masses impoverished) profitable investments are
becoming scarce.

‘F inance-capital has created the period of monopo-
lies and monopolies bring with them everywhere
182

WAR’S ROOTS

their own methods; the utilization of business ‘‘con-
nections” for profitable transactions takes the place
of open competition on the market. Nothing is more
usual than to stipulate before making a loan, that
some of it will be spent on purchases in the country
of issue, particularly in orders for war material or for
ships.’

That this is still the normal method of business is
shown by the recent inquiry into the work of arma-
ment firms, held by the U.S. Senate. And this
inquiry also gave startling evidence of the division
of the world between capitalist groups, which Lenin
described as follows:

‘The capitalist monopoly groups—cartels, syndi-
cates, trusts—divide among themselves first of all the
whole internal trade of a country, grasping the whole
of industry more and more firmly. But in capitalist
society, internal trade is connected with foreign
trade. Capitalism has long ago created a world
market.’

Each government backs its own monopolists,
taking colonies to secure for them markets, cheap
labour, and raw materials. Lenin writes:

‘Colonial possession alone gives complete guarantee
of success to the monopolies against all the risks of
struggle against competitors, including the possi-
bility of the latter defending themselves by means of
a law establishing a State monopoly.’

The tariff wars and ‘quota’ restrictions of the past
few years have carried these processes to their
logical conclusions: a series of empires walled off
against competitors.

| 183

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Every process traced by Lenin continues, domi-
nates more and more all economic life. Each of us
living ordinary lives, buying the goods produced by
huge monopolies because of the insistent pressure of
advertising, or because other goods can only be
obtained with difficulty, contribute to these pro-
cesses. We eat the meat provided by Lord Vestey’s
Anglo-Argentine combine, but when saying grace
we seldom thank God for the fact that British
imperialism has not yet lost control of the Argentine
to its American rivals. We read the newspapers of
millionaire combines, smoke their cigarettes, watch
their films. We ride in or dodge from under motor
buses owned by rapidly-growing semi-monopolies,
and these are built by other semi-monopolies,
and fuelled by Shell, the firm that carries on
ceaseless war with the Standard Oil, throughout
almost the whole world, for control of the world’s
oil.

Tastes and fashions are steered and spurred into
the service of finance-capital. When the home
market for textiles mattered most, our foremothers
judged respectability by the number of flannel petti-
coats endured. Later, when the export trade was
developing, they subsidized missionaries to preach
decency to the unclad. Now that industries must be
fostered for their war value rather than for their
economic effect, artificial silks (produced and dyed
in factories adapted for—or from—the manufacture
of explosives and poison gas) become the fashionable
covering. In this and a score of other ways we take
part in the processes of imperialism. We have to: .
184

WAR’S ROOTS

these processes are the very texture of the life
around us.

In other chapters we have noted Japanese, Ameri-
can, British and German aimsand efforts to secure for
their own monopolists control of China, their desire
for a market in Soviet Russia, their struggle for
control of the industries of Central and Western
Europe, their scramble for oil and other raw
materials. All these realities of to-day confirm
Lenin’s statement that modern war is the direct and
inevitable outcome of imperialism, which is to-day
the shape and nature of capitalism.

Although this explanation of the cause of modern
war has never been controverted seriously, there are
many, even among those who are earnestly and pas-
sionately opposed to war, who know something of the
Marxist view and reject it. In a book by various
authors, that is a persuasive and forceful attack on
war and the war-makers,* an analysis of ‘the roots
of war’ is made by G. E. G. Catlin, a professor who
is a member of the executive of the Fabian Society.
His summary of the Marxist view is that in war ‘the
generous emotions of men are exploited by pecuniary
interests, which derive profit from men’s mutual
slaughter.’ This first sentence is only, of course, a
summary which he expands and improves. But
compare it with Lenin’s theory and see how dis-
torting a summary it is!

Mr. Catlin goes on to describe ‘economic imperial-
ism’ by means of a ten-line reference to past wars
and colonial exploitation. But at once: ‘to treat,

* Challenge to Death, Constable, London, 1934.
185

THE COMING WORLD WAR

however, all colonial enterprise, all imperial rule and
all wars as merely economic is not to tell the whole
tale...’ i

Marxists, we can reply at once, do not treat any
social development as ‘purely economic’; they see
economic factors conditioning or determining these
developments.

‘The chief objection to the Marxist explanation ’—
continues Mr. Catlin—“‘is that it is not true. It is
true as far as it goes—which is not the same thing—
but it does not go far enough. . . . The economic
interpretation of history . . . breaks down, as a work-
ing explanation, when we are concerned with the
causes and cures of war, because it fails to fit all the
facts. It only fits those—certainly not unimportant
—facts that idealistic histories have dishonestly
ignored.”

Mr. Catlin proceeds to argue that since wars are
not economically useful even to the victor nations
(not the ruling classes, but the nations), therefore the
root cause of war cannot be economic! ‘Even Mr.
Brailsford,’ he says, ‘who ably argues the Marxist
case, in his brilliantly written book Property and
Peace, has to admit that the capitalist assumption
that military dominance through war issues in
economic gain may be a cherished belief, an illusion.
How shall we explain this economic illusion? The
explanation, it would seem, must be in non-economic
terms.’ :

The explanation is certainly in terms that do not
enter into the orthodox economics of Fabianism.
Monopoly, finance-capital, class struggle—these are
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WAR’S ROOTS

categories a Fabian must ignore. Mr. Catlin cheer-
fully concludes that the explanation of modern war
‘must be sought in the psychology, not of acquisition,
but of the “will to power” .. .* How then are we
to abate this contest for power?’ he asks.

After which Mr. Catlin demolishes the theory that
war is ‘inevitably an inherent part of human nature’
—and begins his next section; ‘the grounds of war
are psychological.’ How foolish of us to think that
psychology had to do with human nature! Obviously
Fabian psychology has no more to do with human
nature than Fabian economics have to do with the
relations between men in which they get their living.

‘The remedy lies in placing this pride (pride of
race) in perspective . . . we have to “think our-
selves into” membership, not only of a world-wide
British Commonwealth, but of a world-embracing
organization . . . the unity of the world.’

* An interesting correspondence and contrast exists between the
Fabian view as very roughly outlined above and the Fascist. Musso-
lini writes in his Political and Social Doctrines of Fascism about ‘Marxian
Socialism, the materialist conception of history; according to which
the history of human civilization can be explained simply through the
conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the
change and development in the means and instruments of produc-
tion. That the changes in the economic field—new discoveries of
raw materials, new methods of working them, and the inventions of
science—have their importance no one can deny; but that these
factors are sufficient to explain the history of humanity excluding all
others is an absurd delusion. Fascism, now and always, believes in
holiness and heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no
economic motive, direct or indirect.’ The correspondence is in the
‘non-economic terms’; the contrast is in the fact that Mussolini,
having been in some contact with Marxism, dare not misrepresent it
so wholeheartedly as to make it a theory by which all actions are due
to direct economic motives. There is a further contrast: ‘holiness
and heroism’ and ‘the will to power’ are different views—approving
and disapproving—of the same thing.

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

And who is the ‘we’ who must thus ‘think our-
selves’ out of war? The rulers? The oligarchy of
finance-capital, from the Rothschilds to the directors
of Vickers? These rulers know what they are, and
not even the Fabians can make them think them-
selves something different.

. Perhaps such a reply to Mr. Catlin may seem too
brusque. But Mr. Catlin, and the others who answer
Marxism without studying the basic Marxist books,
have only themselves to blame if we give their answers
less than the due attention.

The ‘will-to-power’ and the psychology of the
ruling class—have Marxists dealt with such things?
Of course they have, and in a way that directly
exposes Mr. Catlin’s outline of their views as a dis-
tortion of Marxism. Bukharin in his Historical
Materialism writes that ‘class psychology is deter-
mined by the totality of the conditions of the class
life, based on the general economic situation.’ We
should not ‘ascribe the class psychology to selfish
interest, which is a very frequent error. No doubt
class interest is the main sinew of the class struggle,
but class psychology includes many other elements.’*
He shows by examples from ancient Rome and
Tsarist Russia that ‘class psychology is . . . not
capable of direct interpretation as interest only, but

* Nicolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism, London, 1926, p. 213.

Mr. Catlin’s statement that the explanation of modern war
‘must be sought in the psychology of the will to power’ means that
there are no reasons discoverable for the development of this will,
its fluctuations, its satisfaction during long periods with a policy of

l progress,’ its insistence at other periods on a policy of war.

Reasons for these changes exist and can be shown; there are causes
for men’s psychological trends—even for Fabians’.

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WAR’S ROOTS

always to be explained by the concrete environment in which
the specific class has been placed’ (Bukharin’s italics) ;
or again Bukharin deals with the whole attempt to
explain society and such social events as wars psycho-
logically by pointing out that the psychological inter-
actions in societies of one sort are different for those
in societies of other sorts. ‘For instance in the reign
of Nicholas I, there was a “‘spirit”’ of police violence,
of subjection under the Tsar’s might, love of the
traditional, while Soviet Russia presents something
quite different, i.e., the psychical inter-relations have
become altogether different. Psychological theories
of society cannot explain this difference; here again
the only scientific conception is that of materialism’
(p. 93).

What is the ‘concrete environment’ in which our
ruling class is placed? It is one in which capitalist
relations seem not only ‘natural’ but beneficial, and
beneficial not only to themselves but to the com-
munity—which means for them the people of their
own class, the professions, and the workers (they
know the parasitic services and pleasure-industry
workers better than the producers) who depend on
trade and industry. Since Rhodes and Chamberlain
and the collapse of Free Trade, a few years ago, the
insulation of ‘their markets’ from foreign competitors
has seemed to a growing number of the rulers of
Britain of vital importance for this ‘community.’
This number has become a majority. They are con-
cerned about India, about the colonies, about oil and
rubber and markets for steel, and their concern is not
necessarily ‘selfish,’ though profit-seeking reinforces

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THE COMING WORLD WAR

it, gives power to it. They hate Bolshevism and are
as resistant to any argument in favour of it as the
Fabians. They have let their friends and relatives
the landlords (and their minor allies of the market
rings) ruin agriculture, and they fear the threat not
to their own food-supply but to the nation’s that is im-
plicit in French submarines and German aeroplanes.

War is an evil; they know it, and fear it. Their
spokesmen speak honestly when they proclaim the
next war the end of civilization. Their philosophers,
proclaiming the ‘Decline of the West,’ and their
poets who see future and present as a ‘ Waste Land,’
reflect their minds. But their psychology is moulded,
conditioned, determined by the basis of the civiliza-
tion in which they live. They are a class: they must
retain their class power or ‘go under.’ When crisis
and deficits, repudiation of debt and unmanageable
priceemovements shake down into ruin the plans
they make for bigger, more rational, more powerful
productive organizations, these men use parliament
and press, the governments that they can break and
the arms that they can buy, to safeguard at all costs
their power.

But the explanation of their action does not lie in
‘the psychology of the will-to-power.’ It lies in the
facts of class society and its development. And in
these facts lie the roots of modern war.

These facts are summarized in the resolution of the
Sixth World Congress of the Communist Inter-
national on ‘The Struggle Against War’:

‘War is inseparable from capitalism.... As `
against the reactionary excuse that war is a natural

190

WAR’S ROOTS

phenomenon, and the no less reactionary utopian
schemes for its abolition by means of phrases or
pacts, the revolutionary proletariat advances the
rational theory of Marxism-Leninism, as the only
scientific basis for a real struggle against war.

‘The cause of war as a historic phenomenon is not
the “evil nature” of mankind, not the “bad” policies
of governments, but the division of society into
classes, into exploiters and exploited. Capitalism is
the cause of the wars in modern history. These wars
are not exceptional phenomena; they do not con-
tradict the principles of capitalism, of private owner-
ship in the means of production, of competition and
exploitation, but are rather their direct consequence.

‘Imperialism, the monopolist stage of capitalism,
sharpens all the contradictions of capitalism to such
an extent that peace becomes but a breathing spell
' for new wars. The surface of the earth and its
economic wealth (with the exception of that part
that is ruled by the proletarian dictatorship) is
almost completely monopolized by a few big Powers.
The uneven economic and political development of
the various countries, however, again and again
creates the necessity for a new division of the world.
In the last analysis, this cannot take place except
through wars waged by the decisive imperialist
countries against one another. At the same time,
however, the exploitation of the hundreds of millions
of proletarians and colonial slaves can be maintained
only by bloody wars of oppression.’

Compare the scope and completeness of this as a
scientific summary with the theories of official bour-
geois ‘science,’ the theories for example, of the
British Ass—as scientists who care for their profession

19!

THE COMING WORLD WAR

sometimes call the British Association for the
Advancement of Science. According to the President,
Sir James Jeans, speaking at the 1934 meeting,
science believes that ‘the pressure of population and
the urge for expansion’ are ‘likely to drive the people
of a nation to war.’

Parson Malthus has been dead these many years.
But official science, anxious to clear itself of the
charge that it serves war and the war-makers,
returns to the long-derided Malthusianism of the
first period of the Industrial Revolution.

There are about 2,000,000,000 people in the world.
They increase in number by about one per cent. per
year—perhaps twenty million new mouths. But for
these new mouths there is—or easily can be—new
food. The harvests of all cereals increased every
year, on the average, during the first quarter of this
century, by four per cent. in Australia, nearly seven
per cent. in the Argentine, and over thirteen per
cent. in Canada. |

To this the standard reply of the economist is: as
the harvests increase, poorer land has to be brought
into cultivation. Therefore more effort is needed to
produce an equivalent crop, the cultivator’s hard life
gets harder; there is, in effect, less to eat. Having
‘said this, the economist feels that he has called a
spade a spade. He has; he has also forgotten that
what was done with spades a few years back can
now be done by tractors.

‘Wheat cut with a sickle and threshed with a flail
needs thirty-five to fifty hours of work per acre; we
can take the yield as fifteen bushels. With the binder
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WAR’S ROOTS

and threshing machine, the work per acre is five
hours. With the tractor and ‘combine’ one hour’s
work per acre is needed. And the yield is normally
higher than fifteen bushels per acre.

If by over-population, therefore, is meant a
growth of population greater than the growth in the
Capacity to produce foodstuffs, the theory of over-
population is sheer nonsense.

The late Lord Leverhulme estimated (during the
war) that an hour’s work a week by each individual
would be enough to support the population of the
world in comfort, if the technique already practised
in the most advanced factories and farms, transport,
mines, etc., was practised universally.* There is no
over-population noticeable in a world capable of
such unendurable laziness.

Any estimate of the population that the world
could comfortably support needs revision every
twenty years, so rapidly can modern technique
advance. There are engineers in Soviet Russia now
who spend evenings—as a relaxation after days spent
not in looking for work but in developing half a
continent as ‘an engineering job’—working on plans
for draining the Mediterranean Sea and irrigating
the Sahara desert. More immediate plans include
development for wheat growing of parts of Siberia
equal in area to all the wheat provinces of Canada.
Perhaps even more promising, more worth effort and

* The Marchese Marconi, a practical business man as well as an
engineer, has predicted that by 1943 each of us will only need to
work two hours a day. (The People, October 11, 1993.) It is clear

that his practical understanding of the profit system exceeds con-
siderably his theoretical grasp of it.

N 193

THE COMING WORLD WAR

sacrifice, are the proposals of scientists at a Soviet
institute for plant genetics; these proposals aim at
intensive ‘market-gardener’ cultivation of cereal
crops. The method proposed, and under test on
several hundred acres, is roughly this: seed-grain
(sorted for quality) is sown mechanically, each grain
alone, in specially prepared seed-beds. The young
corn is transplanted into the fields as soon as it has
got a good start. Naturally, transplantation by hand
would be an impossible job. But a machine has been
invented for this purpose and is being perfected.
Each seed has the best possible conditions for early
development; it does not have to struggle against
several other seeds fallen on the same square inch of
ground, it does not have to starve them to death,
half-starving itself. It has moisture, chemical fertiliz-
ers, even sometimes warmth supplied. The result
is a heavier crop per acre, sometimes four times
heavier than the normal.

The adoption not of these new miracles but of
normal modern methods of agriculture throughout
the world, the supply of fertilizers from the nitrate
factories now idle (or working on war explosives),
the supply of tractors to India, China, England, and
other countries where agriculture is primitive—these
measures with a few years’ education of those who
cultivate thesoil could doubletheworld’s food supplies.

How strange it is that science—refusing to recog-
nize that its own handiwork has changed, and can
change more swiftly still, the conditions under which
men live—science returns now to the drab infertile
coverts of Malthus. They talk of population-

194

WAR’S ROOTS

pressure when coffee and wheat are burnt every
year, fish thrown into the sea, cotton ploughed under,
ships scrapped, Lancashire spindles destroyed, fruit
left to rot on the trees, and all the hopes and policies
of those who rule are based on restriction of output,
quotas, less food, less clothing, less machinery. There
can, of course, be very real over-population in almost
every country if these plans for artificial scarcity are
operated long enough. But the surplus of people is
not relative to the number who could easily feed,
clothe and house themselves in comfort in these
countries. The surplus is relative to the number of
‘hands’ that a society of profit-seekers finds it
profitable to feed.

There are other theories of the cause of war;
almost all of them are variants either of ‘over-
population’ or of ‘wickedness’—which is often
modernized into behaviourist or Freudian terms.
Mr. Baldwin believes, as an English gentleman
should, that breeding and instinct govern men’s
actions ; he calls the cause of war a ‘fighting instinct’
which makes ‘for the preservation of the race’; Mr.
Aldous Huxley, slightly more modern, traces it to a
group of neuroses.

Men that we can recognize as men undoubtedly
existed on the earth more than 50,000 years ago.*
War that we can recognize as war began somewhere
in the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze
Ages, about 5,000 years ago. An ‘instinct,’ there-

* For this period there is plenty of direct evidence. According to
evidence less direct, the age of man may be between half a million

and a million years. Sir Arthur Keith thinks the latter figure
probable. (See Daily Telegraph, January 16, 1935.)
195

THE COMING WORLD WAR

fore (or a neurosis), that is taken as a part of man’s

make-up, has only had the opportunity to flower

into reality and action during the last tenth of man’s

history? And there is no connection between the

appearance of war 5,000 years ago, and the appear-
ance of propertied groups?

Havelock Ellis has written on this:

‘There is not the slightest ground for supposing
that the earliest men waged war. It is not done by
any of the possibly related animals among which
man arose, and very seldom indeed among any
animals except ants and bees. And under the diffi-
cult conditions of primitive life for a creature like
man with so prolonged a period of infancy, warfare
would render existence hazardous and perhaps have
led to extermination. What early man needed, and,
as we know, made, were tools. Weapons came later,
and even then in the first place it would seem for
hunting.

‘If we turn to those still existing savages or uncivil-
ized peoples who, though not truly primitive are
doubtless nearer to early man than we ourselves are,
it is the same story continued. Many have developed
warfare, some of them, like the Caribs—and this is
a significant fact—only in recent times, while to
others it is unknown. But even among those who
practise war, while among some it is already as
ferocious as it has become between modern nations,
among others a battle may not be a bloodthirsty
event, and the death of a single warrior brings the
war to an end, while, if the question of “reparation ”
comes in, it is sometimes, very properly, the losing
side to which they are paid.’*

* Labour Monthly, October 1934, p. 627.

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WAR’S ROOTS

The argument that war is due to ‘human nature’
is only a generalized form of many abandoned
theories. It seemed natural and eternal to a Greek
historian that Athens and the other city states of
ancient Greece should be often at war. It seemed
natural, inevitable, to the Roman historians that
there should always be barbarians on the empire’s
frontiers who must be fought. To the ballad-maker,
it was clear that there would always be raiding on
the Scottish border, because of the nature of the
reivers. To the present-day observer it is part of
Chinese ‘human nature’ to wage endemic civil war
(although Chinese human nature managed to put up
with peace during several dynasties in the period
before our era began, and even during quite a large
part of the Christian centuries).

Human nature, naturally, is a factor in every
action taken by man. So is the presence of oxygen in
human lungs. If a specific answer is desired to the
question: ‘Why was the Reichstag burnt?’ it is
possible to give the answer: ‘because of oxygen.’
There was undoubtedly oxygen in the lungs of those
who burnt it. There was oxygen in the Reichstag
atmosphere; without it no burning can take place.
Obviously it is safe to blame oxygen—if you desire
only to confuse the issue, to refuse an answer to the
question. To answer the questions: ‘Why did the
first World War occur?’ and ‘Why is the second
World War near?’ by a reference to human nature
is—as Professor J. B. S. Haldane has pointed out—
like answering a question as to why a building was
burnt down by a reference to oxygen.

197

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Man is, of all animals, the one that alters its
environment to the greatest extent. Indeed, men
have created a large part of the environment in
which they live. But the reaction between living
matter and its environment (including other living
matter of the same species or of other species) is
never a ‘one-way street.” Environment, including
those parts of it created by men, reacts on men,
alters their natures. Therefore there is no fixed,
eternal part of ‘human nature’ that we can call the
cause of war.

But, says the neo-Freudian, the present environ-
ment of the civilized man—aindustrialism—creates
neuroses, mental formations or malformations that
predispose large sections of the population towards
the emotional states that make war possible. And
this is partly true. A war’s beginning is not a ques-
tion of millionaire propaganda sheets infecting mil-
lions of controlled, clear-sighted, rational human
beings with the war fever. It is a question of this
propaganda working upon populations largely dis-
barred from all real education, stupefied by the
opiates of religion and sub-literature and the glib lies
of the film, scarred in mind as well as body by the
crippling restrictions of their lives. This is so; what
of it? We are no nearer to the root cause of war.
Here is a part of the mechanism of the process, not
of the force that produces it. ‘Industrialism,’
modern technique, modern productive forces as
embodied in capitalism, tend to produce ruling
classes that need war, ruled classes that—for a
period—can be infected with war fever. In these

198

WAR’S ROOTS

processes the psychologies and ideologies of these
classes are necessary parts. But they are not domi-
nant factors; they are only links in the chain.

That chain of mingled and interacting causes and
effects runs from the relations between men in
machine production to the relations between men in
machine war. Because it is ignored by the theorists
of the Labour parties and of pacifism, the plans and
proposals that they suggest for combating war have
no solid link with reality, can achieve nothing useful
in the world as it is—however powerful the desire
for peace behind them. And theories or proposals
that mislead millions help, in fact and practice, the
war-makers who need smoke-screens for their work.

199

CHAPTER X
GENERAL CRISIS

THE general argument, capitalism means war, can
be made more actual: the present phase of capitalist
decay shapes and causes the almost-present second
World War.

With the first World War and the Soviet revolu-
tion the capitalist world entered on a general crisis,
a phase of decay.

Capitalism has known crises before: in fact the
economic history of capitalism is a history of cycles of
boom and slump with crises of varying magnitudes
at the end of each cycle. This general crisis is a dif-
ferent thing: at this point the essential characteristics
of imperialism reach full development and begin to
change, in some cases, into their opposites ; capital-
ism used to foster production and technique, now
throttles them; used to live by the export of capital,
now can find no safe place for these exports; used to
bind the world more and more closely together—and
now the world is split into two worlds, the capitalist
countries, the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union exists. Its existence is a factor
in the present crisis of a different sort, order, quality,
to the factors in ordinary slumps. While production
stagnates elsewhere, production here increases faster
than ever it increased in America. While men rot in
200 i

GENERAL CRISIS

idleness throughout the capitalist world, here there
is lack of labour, a flow of peasants to the towns. It
is no earthly paradise, this new land; it is an arena of
immense struggles, birth-pains of a new civilization ;
but it is a place of hope, of rapid advance towards
fuller life, towards complete control by men over
the forces and riches of nature. And it is the citadel
of the new power, the class that can end crises, the
workers who even in Britain begin to see—partly
through Russia’s example—that it is absolute folly to
restrict production, to keep men and machines idle
for the sake of some idlers’ profits, when so much is
needed and so many want work. That is a new
feature not present in the pre-war crises. There
has been a proletarian revolution; it grows in
strength.

Another new feature is that there is colonial revolt
in every empire, but particularly in the British
empire. Ireland has been waging economic war with
Britain since 1930—war to the knife, and to the
plate and fork. India looms over British politics ;
every scheme of terrorism that terror can devise
(called in the English way ‘constitutional reform
with adequate safeguards’) is being discussed by
Parliament; the need for a ‘gesture’ on the one
hand, and of repression on the other, to meet the
menace of this elephantine power, is in every politi-
cian’s mind. Give concessions, or you lose India, says
Baldwin ; give concessions and you lose India, replies
Churchill: the old debate between sections of a
ruling class facing the revolution. In Burma famine
and fighting, in Africa ‘sedition,’ in China Soviets—

201

THE COMING WORLD WAR

these are new factors to complicate the ‘economic
blizzard.’

What are these factors? They are aspects of this
general crisis of capitalism, a change in the whole of
the relations between the economic system of the
world and the population of the world, a change that
found expression in and at the same time arose from
the first World War. This change we can sum-
marize: ‘capitalism is breaking down.’

If the reader is willing to attempt an economic
analysis of an aspect of this ‘general’ crisis he will see
why from the nature of the facts there is no exit from
it save by world war or revolution. .

In the present economic system capital is used by
those who own it in two forms, which Marx called
‘constant’ and ‘variable.’*

The fixed capital consists of money invested in
machinery, factories, docks, railways, ships, etc. The
variable capital is mainly money paid out as wages’

Capital reproduces itself continually, and on an
increasing scale, in ‘normal’ times. The machinery
must be reproduced and replaced (by better
machinery) in some years’ time. The wages must
also be reproduced—next week. Out of the proceeds
of the sale of ‘his’ goods, the capitalist must set
aside an amount for replacement of his machinery,
and must also be able to pay wages till the next batch
of goods finds a buyer. Also he must have a profit,
over and above these, and from his profit and from

* The whole process of the accumulation of capital and its neces-
sary outcome in a ‘relative surplus-population’ is described in
Capital, Vol. I, Part vi.

202

GENERAL CRISIS

the profits of other capitalists, from credit expansion
and from rent and various forms of interest, comes
new capital for investment. ‘The additional capitals
formed in the course of normal accumulation,’ says
Marx,* ‘serve mainly as vehicles for the exploitation
of new inventions and discoveries, or of industrial
improvements in general. However, the old capital
likewise arrives in due time at the moment when it
must renew its head and limbs,’ (Marx means that
the sums put aside for renewal of machinery or
rebuilding of factories must be spent for these pur-
poses) ‘when it casts off its old skin and is likewise
born again in its perfected industrial form, in which
a smaller quantity of labour suffices to set in motion
a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials. ...

‘The additional capital formed in the course of
accumulation’ (i.e., mainly out of profits) ‘attracts
fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its
magnitude’ (because as the years pass and technique
grows more complex more, proportionately, of this
new capital must be invested in machinery and
buildings, less in wages). ‘On the other hand, the
old capital periodically reproduced with change of
composition, repels more and more of the labourers
formerly employed’ (because the new machinery by
which the old machinery is replaced, is more efficient
and needs fewer workers).

*,... With the growth of total capital, its variable
constituent, or the labour incorporated in it, also
does increase, but in a constantly diminishing pro-
portion.’

* Capital, Vol. I, Chicago, p. 689.

203

THE COMING WORLD WAR

Marx thus described ‘normal’ capitalism. But the
process described could only go on for ever if there
was a fixed relation between the speed of accumula-
tion of new, extra, additional capital for industry
(the investment of which does employ some addi-
tional labour) and the speed of the development of
technique, which tends to contract the demand for
labour as it replaces inefficient machines by efficient.
' There is no such fixed relation.

The electrical power stations of England are being
‘born again’ at the moment. To replace the local
power stations, scattered all over the country, each
employing on the average a dozen men, vast new
stations have been set up in which every process 1s
automatic. At Barking current can be produced for
a quarter of the country. And Barking is worked by
fourteen men. No hand or shovel touches the fuel,
raised automatically from barges in the river, fed
automatically to the furnaces. The ash is dealt with
automatically. There is scarcely need even to watch
dials and to make adjustments, for temperature or
power. The fluctuating load, that changes so sharply
as the factories start or stop morning or evening, is
automatically provided for; and if some change
seems likely to go beyond the power of the apparatus,
lights speak insistently to the engineers asking for
their attention.

It is almost impossible to comprehend how rapidly
modern industrial technique has been advancing.
The machines are taking over not only rough and
heavy work but also the most delicate and subtle
measurements. The grinding of curved gear-wheels
204

GENERAL CRISIS

to correspond with complicated mathematical for-
mule used to be a matter for very highly skilled
labour: the workman would finish the last ten-
thousandth of an inch on each tooth of the gear-
wheel slowly and carefully, checking pitch and angle
with micrometer gauges, or precision gauges that
were kept at constant temperature, lest heat or cold
should change their shapes. Now for a tenth the
cost a machine will reproduce these gears with
scarcely any attention, after it has been made ready.
The cutting edges or grinding wheels of this machine,
as of all others, wear down as it works; but the
machine is equipped with fingers carrying electrical
contacts more accurate than any gauge As the tool
works it heats; when it is so hot it ‘needs a rest,’ it is
withdrawn ; the electrical fingers feel how much wear
has taken place, and adjusts the tool’s bearing for this
wear. |

Machines have grown hands. So our factories have
the notice at their door: ‘no hands wanted.’

With the centralization of capital into the hands
of vast monopolies, with rationalization, the closing
of inefficient factories wholesale and the change from
the simple machine (that must be guided, watched,
controlled in all its actions) to the new machine that
is fully automatic, technique has outstripped the
investment of new capital. So that even in periods of
‘prosperity, with rising production, the number of workers
employed by the most advanced modern industry ts stationary
or decreasing.

In the U.S.A. before the present world crisis,
production was increasing. The value of the total

205

THE COMING WORLD WAR

annual production rose from nearly 25 thousand
million dollars in 1919 to nearly 35 thousand million
in 1929. As prices went down during this period, the
production can be taken as somewhere near doubled.
But the number of workers employed decreased! In
1919, it is estimated, the average number of workers
employed was over nine million; in 1929 it was less
than 8,900,000 (United States Statistical Abstract,
1932).

There is the clear sign of the process we have
described.

Wages rose during this period, and the total wage
bill increased. But it increased much less rapidly
than the total value of production. In 1919 the
American workers, if they had spent all their wages
on industrial goods, could have bought 42 per cent.
of the goods they made. In 1929 they could only buy
36 per cent. of these goods.

The same process went on in Britain, much more
slowly. Between 1923 and 1928 production rose 7.6
per cent., employment fell 5.6 per cent.*

Naturally, this means that less of the goods pro-
duced by industry can be bought normally by those
who are employed by industry. Hire-purchase and
other forms of increased indebtedness, mortgages,
etc., fill for a time some of the gap in the market.
But when depression comes these debt arrangements
increase its effects.

As a result of these changes in the structure of

* R. Palme Dutt, Fascism, London, 1934, p. 18. The first chapters
of this book give the clearest statement yet published of the nature
of the general crisis of capitalism.

206

GENERAL CRISIS

capitalism, and particularly in what Marx calls the
organic composition of capital itself (the relative
proportion of constant and variable capital), capital-
ism has ceased to be an expanding system of produc-
tion, and is on the watershed that divides expansion
from contraction. World industrial production
ceases to expand normally. If the ‘usual’ rate of
expansion (such as occurred between 1860 and 1913,
during which period production was multiplied six
times) had continued from 1913 to 1932, the indus-
trial production of 1932 would have been more than
twice as great as it actually was. ‘Independent esti-
mates agree that in 1932 the level of industrial pro-
duction in the world as a whole fell below that of
1913. Meanwhile populations grow.

It is an effect of this change in the relation between
capitalism and mankind as a whole that the economic
system becomes increasingly a fetter on technical
advance, which could go ahead far faster than it is
now going. And while the gap widens between pro-
duction and man’s needs, the gap between the actual
production and the productive capacity grows wider
still, and more rapidly.

The breakdown of the present social system does
not proceed evenly everywhere. Some parts of the
system have greater strength, some greater elasticity
than others. Tsarist Russia had neither strength nor
elasticity, and here imperialism broke at its weakest
link. Since then in other parts of the world the social
system has been remoulded into forms as inelastic, as

* League of Nations’ World Economic Survey, 1932-33, p. 32. The
relevant passages are quoted fully in Dutt’s Fascism.
207

THE COMING WORLD WAR

irrational and as fettering to every human desire
as Tsarism ever was. Fascism arises, as a direct
result of the breakdown of the system. A new atti-
tude towards the unemployed, which is an essential
part of Fascism, comes with it.

Some years ago J. Ramsay MacDonald wrote:
‘the order of society in which we are now living—
the Capitalist order . . . cannot help classifying the
wage-earner among its machines and its raw
material and treating him as such.’* It was Mr.
MacDonald’s achievement, recently, to carry this
classification further ; he classified two million unem-
ployed as ‘superfluous scrap’ (House of Commons,
November 22, 1932). Not even machines or raw
material now, but used, broken machines, waste,
unusable material. That is what men have become
in this last stage of capitalism—men six times as
numerous, in Britain alone, as the inhabitants of
Athens in its great days, days of Plato and Pericles,
and immeasurably more able than these Greeks
were to produce the things that are the material
basis for a good life.

From this attitude there is a straight road to con-
centration camps for the workless and the other
measures taught by Mussolini and Hitler and copied
by MacDonald here.

That is the first step in the ‘treatment’ of the
crisis that capitalism is taking everywhere. The
workers cannot be usefully employed in industry, so
their labour-power is being sterilized, turned on to

* J. Ramsay MacDonald, The Social Unrest: Its Cause and Solution,
ae and 1924; see p. 100 in latter edition.

GENERAL CRISIS

practically useless work or on to war work for a bare
minimum of subsistence.

What other steps are proposed?

The sequence of boom and slump is sometimes
compared, by supporters of the present economic
system, to vibration in a machine. (No machine ever
made by man could function if the vibration was
such as to cause, at times, loss of half the effective
output; but we will tolerate for the moment the
comparison.) This vibration, say these economists,
could be ‘damped out’ if parts of the machine were
re-designed. Their plans for ‘ironing out the trade
cycle’ have been in existence for many years, but
have not been applied fully (and are not likely to be.
used except as camouflage for the ‘corporate state,’
Fascism). This vast ‘vibration’ of boom and slump
has reached the point where the machine jams and
the metal it is made of melts. But the British Govern-
ment has openly proclaimed that it will do nothing
towards operating the principal item in all ‘respon-
sible’ plans for re-designing the machine and ironing
out the cycle. This principal item is expenditure,
during ‘depression,’ on ‘public works.’ Mr. Runci-
man stated at the World Economic Conference that
‘We have terminated our scheme for dealing with
the unemployed by capital expenditure works, and
we shall not reopen these schemes, no matter what
may be done elsewhere. . .. We are abandoning
this policy once and for all’ (The Times, July 14,
1933). |

That, for a member of the National government,
is an unusually clear statement. It is not contra-

o 209

THE COMING WORLD WAR

dicted by the government’s subsequent decision
(November 1934) to give money for public works in
the ‘derelict areas,’* since the small amount of
money given (£2,000,000) makes it clear that this
expenditure is only for propaganda purposes, and is
not expected to effect any real economic change.

Those who view this anarchy of capitalist produc-
tion as a vibration to be damped out therefore tackle
the problem at the other end. The policy of increas-
ing economic demand belongs to the period of
expanding capitalism and is now tabooed ; therefore
the policy of decreasing production is relied upon.
‘To allow production to go on unchecked and
unregulated,’ says Neville Chamberlain, ‘when it
could almost at a moment’s notice be increased to
an almost indefinite extent was absolute folly’ (The
Times, June 3, 1933). The goods men need could be
produced ‘almost at a moment’s notice,’ but it would
be folly to produce them—because, as things are,
their production would cause prices to fall, profits to
fall, worse economic crisis.

Chamberlain’s admission that everyone could have
everything they need ‘almost at a moment’s notice’
is worth treasuring for itself. But the point here is
that the steps taken to end the present crisis are those
which naturally fit it with a general process of
checked, ingrowing, declining capitalism, not those
that fit in with an expanding system.

Another aspect of this process is the increased
facilities for, and advocacy of, birth control. It is an

* Recently the official term for these areas has been changed first
to ‘depressed areas,’ then to ‘special areas.’ They remain derelict.
210

GENERAL CRISIS

excellent thing that birth control should be possible
for everyone who wants it; a terrible thing that
childlessness should be forced upon millions of people
by poverty. Those who advocate and work for birth
control are usually trying to do the best they can for
people here and now. But to advocate this method
alone, or as the principal way out of the present
poverty of the world, is to ask people to accom-
modate their lives (at sacrifice of that which is of
value to many) to the decay of a dying system of
society.

When capitalism was on the upgrade birth-control
information was always difficult to get, except for
members of the ruling class. Now that it is on the
down-grade it is, in some countries, made easier. But
the shadow of a new war, the need for cannon-fodder,
makes progress this way slow. And in any case it
cannot affect the crisis for very many years. By then
what new madness and misery will capitalism have
achieved ?

Another aspect is that ‘birth control’ is applied to
industrial inventions also; we are invited to go back
to the ‘hand-made.’ But even if this ‘economic
Malthusianism’ was applied on a far wider scale than
it is at present, it would only speed the process of
decay. Capitalism has entered on a spiral of increas-
ing poverty, therefore narrowing markets, therefore
again more poverty, therefore again less markets.

It is natural that it should reach this stage when
machinery gets to such a level that it can ‘almost at
a moment’s notice’ increase the production of things
needed ‘to an almost indefinite extent.’ It is also

211

THE COMING WORLD WAR

natural that this stage should come about at a time
when the great imperialist Powers have a al
their conquest of the world.

This division of the world into empires was an
integral part of the great expansion of capitalist
industry and finance in the period of capitalist pro-
gress. After the division of the world into empires
comes a world war for re-division. The next stage
is that the empires are armour-plated with tariffs to
keep out rival imperialists’ goods. That stage, with
its quotas and its customs barriers, is now nearly
completed. The propagandists of ‘splendid. isola-
tion’ wish to carry it further. But as its main result
has been to cut down. world trade, it offers no ‘way
out.’ Indeed, it makes the world crisis worse.

It is easy enough for any ordinary person to see
that, superficially at least, each wage-reduction also
makes matters worse during an economic crisis,
since purchasing power is reduced. But wage-cuts
are enforced wherever it is possible ; the cuts imposed
in 1931 are still partly in force; only the stubborn
resistance of the working class has made it hard for
this ‘way out’ to be followed. And economists,
bankers, industrialists, claim wage-cuts as one of the
necessary factors in ‘recovery.’ In its simplest form
this idea was put before his fellow-Christians by
Lord Hugh Cecil, speaking to the Church Assembly
on February 7, 1935:

‘It would be a remedy if you could reduce all
wages by, say, 25 per cent., because then new indus-
tries would become profitable and would soon
absorb the unemployed.’

212

GENERAL CRISIS

It would be a remedy—for a class, for its profits,
not for the people as a whole.

Let us sum up the wisdom of our rulers: the way
out of the crisis is that millions of men should work
uselessly, that millions of those who work should get
less for their labour, that the production of the
machines should be cut down, that fewer babies
should be born, that new inventions should be
strangled quietly, that each great Power should be
‘self-sufficient’ and fenced off from all others. These
official ‘ways out’ are only paths sloping down slowly
to barbarism, to the destruction of the machines and
the rotting of the ships. But there is a quicker way:
world war. And irresistible as gravity to a vehicle
out of control, this pulls the capitalist world to-day.

For millions of men to work—away from their
own folk, away from their women—at useless,
irritating, unending ‘fatigues’ goes against the grain,
runs contrary to human nature. ‘You take a barrow
full of sand,’ writes a man who is being ‘trained’ as
a bricklayer at a colony maintained by the London
County Council (which has a Labour majority),
‘then the instructor lays a brick, and then he tells
you to get on with it. After making a brick wall, it
is knocked down again. Might learn in five years.’
(Report of deputation to Belmont, published by the
March and Congress Council.)

For each capitalist, or managing director, to cut
down his production or find it throttled in a web of
government regulations goes very much against the
grain, baffles and infuriates those who have hitherto
been taught by capitalism to ‘get on or get out,’ have

213

THE COMING WORLD WAR

been made callous and overbearing by capitalism’s
approval. |
To put off having children year after year—or to
have them in utter poverty—cuts across what some
feel to be the most powerful thing in human nature,
the feeling of many adults for the young of the species.
To live restricted lives, for lack of money, is hard;
to have wages cut, lives still more restricted, is hell.
For the most highly skilled section of the popula-
tion, engineers, scientists, inventors, to see their plans
‘ and discoveries throttled quietly—to see endless
waste in the name of ‘economy’ and endless obstacles
in the way of any advance—causes opposition, dis-
trust, and fear to spread among the technicians. All
this human opposition, this refusal of mankind to be
dragooned into clipping their lives to suit capitalist
decline, holds up these plans, makes them ineffective,
forces our rulers to turn their minds (guardedly,
under disguises, hiding the brutal reality sometimes
even for themselves) towards war, towards ‘their’
country’s expansion at the cost of other countries.
The pressure of discontent in each nation, of every
ordinary man’s fear for his job in a jobless world, of
every ordinary woman’s disgust with the childless
house or the house into which children ought never
to have been born, comes up as a threat to the
minds of the rulers of each nation. And these rulers
see and feel the threat vividly. Even a governor of
the Bank of Engiand talks of the ending of capitalism.
Even a Lloyd George or a Churchill sees that there
is ‘something wrong’ when poverty spreads because
of plenty. To counter this threat, to get a breathing

214

GENERAL CRISIS

space, an outlet, a chance to plan and organize the
world, without the interference of these damned
foreigners—a bold policy, a strong hand, a refusal
to be afraid is their plan.

Courage and strength born of panic, and of a real
despair as to the problems of the crisis, meet panic
courage and hysteria-strength in other ruling classes.
Kreugers and J. P. Morgans and the armament
firms foster and feed each side with money and
propaganda. From some new Serajevo—war. It is
the certain outcome of all this. Except that one
outcome is more certain still: men will not endure
this much longer. All these factors that lead to war
also lead, without war or through war, to make
revolution possible.

215

CHAPTER XI
REVOLUTION

To restate the argument of this book: machines
make war; machines, in industry and in war,
develop; this development brings about a change in
the nature of war; in the new form of war, power to
make war and to end war is mainly in the hands of
the industrial working class. In this chapter we
complete the argument: power to make war and to
end war is the essential thing in government. Govern-
ment is now in the hands of a class that lives by
exploiting the labour of others, by competition and
monopoly ; it must and will pass to the hands of a
class that lives by association in work, by the shared
effort and the common aim. That is the revolution.

The new way in warfare, we suggested in our
first chapters, will be mainly war from the air; the
new war approaching us will probably begin in the
Far East, where war from the air may not at first be
dominant, but it will stride to Europe and shatter
cities there. In preparation for this war the rulers
of this country are building an air force of excep-
tional destructive power. And they are preparing, by
their propaganda, to make war in the name of peace.

In the seventh chapter we described the way such
a war can be ended. But if we can, we must prevent
it happening. The Labour and Fabian proposals for
216

REVOLUTION

preventing war will not work; they are likely even to
help the war-makers. War is inseparable from
capitalism and cannot be ended by agreements among
capitalists. The coming World War is being shaped
and hastened by the general crisis of capitalism. This
crisis also, at the same time, is a factor in the process
that can prevent or end the war: the revolution.

The proletarian revolution cannot be treated
simply as a specific for war, a way to prevent or end
a catastrophe that is near to us. It is the outcome of
the whole of the development of class society, not of
this aspect only. Marx summarized this develop-
ment as arising from ‘the action of the immanent laws
of capitalist production itself, by the centralization
of capital . . . the conscious technical application of
science . . . the transformation of the instruments of
labour into instruments of labour only usable in
common... the entanglement of all peoples in the
net of the world market.

‘Along with the constantly diminishing number of
the magnates of capital,’ wrote Marx,* ‘who usurp
and monopolize all advantages of this process of
transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression,
slavery, degradation, exploitation ; but with this too
grows the revolt of the working class, a class always
increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united,
organized by the very mechanism of the process of
capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital
becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which
has sprung up and flourished along with, and under
it. Centralization of the means of production and

* Capital, Chicago, Vol. I, p. 836.

217

THE COMING WORLD WAR

socialization of labour at last reach a point where
they become incompatible with their capitalist
integument. This integument is burst asunder. The
knell of capitalist private property sounds. The
expropriators are expropriated.’

Within this massive generalization, that covers the
whole of our epoch, there are smaller generalizations.
One is that the ‘mass of misery, oppression, slavery,
degradation, exploitation’ in the world mainly
increases, during the middle period of capitalism and
the beginnings of imperialism, by colonial wars and
their effects: throughout three-quarters of the world,
by gin and Bible, trade and gunboat, hut-tax and
poll-tax and salt-tax, and the economic power of
machine industry, the old almost self-sufficing
economy of India, Africa, China, is destroyed ; ruined
peasants or hunters are forced into mines and fac-
tories; the landlord and the money-lender and the
mill-owner grow rich from the ruin of primitive
agriculture and village industry. On the basis of this
exploitation of the colonies it was possible, in this
period, for the conditions of a few million workers in
Western Europe to improve slightly. But when
imperialism has reached the stage of dividing up and
“opening up’ almost the whole world, the world’s
‘mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation,
exploitation’ increases not only in the colonies but
also in the favoured areas, in Western Europe and
North America. And this increase comes through
war, economic crisis, war again.

The revolt of the working class against this
increase in misery does not grow automatically or
218

REVOLUTION

unconsciously, but through the development of
scientific socialist theory, the growth of working-class
parties, argument, meetings, discussion, the efforts
to get reforms, to resist wage-cuts or the worsening of
working conditions. This revolt expresses itselfmainly,
before or during a war, in a feeling, not necessarily
clearly shaped or politically directed, for peace.

‘A mass sentiment for peace,’ wrote Lenin in
1915,” ‘often expresses the beginning of a protest, an
indignation and a consciousness of the reactionary
nature of the war. It is the duty of all Social-Demo-
crats to take advantage of this sentiment. They will
take the most ardent part in every movement and in
every demonstration made on this basis, but they will
not deceive the people by assuming that, in the
absence of a revolutionary movement, it is possible
to have peace without annexations, without the
oppression of nations, without robbery, without
planting the seed of new wars among the present
governments and the ruling classes. Such deception
would only play into the hands of the secret diplo-
macy of the belligerent countries and their counter-
revolutionary plans. Whoever wishes a durable and
democratic peace must be for civil war against the
governments and the bourgeoisie.’

Along these lines the first successful working-class
revolution broke out. It is with revolution from this
aspect, as a way to end war, that we have to deal.

The revolution is the use of the power of the
working class, and of all allies it can gather with it,
to establish a government based on ‘a special sort of

* Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, p. 235.
219

THE COMING WORLD WAR

class alliance between the proletariat (the vanguard
of the workers) and the numerous non-proletarian
strata of those who labour (petty-bourgeoisie, small
employers, intelligentsia, and so forth) or the
majority of these.’* That is the dictatorship of the
proletariat, which Lenin translates ‘from the Latin
scientific historical and philosophical setting into our
own simpler tongue’ to mean that ‘a certain class—
that of the urban workers, and in general the indus-
trial workers—is competent to guide the masses of
those who labour and are exploited to throw off the
yoke of capitalism . . . to create a new social order.’

‘It is an alliance,’ writes Lenin, ‘between classes
which differ economically, politically, socially, and
ideologically.’ t

This alliance sets up, secures, and works through ‘a
State that embodies a new kind of democracy, for
the proletarians and the dispossessed ; and a new kind
of dictatorship, against the bourgeoisie.’

These quotations, not without value as authori-
ties, are given at length because revolutionaries are
considered, by the ignorant or the deluded, to desire
a state of affairs without democracy or freedom. As
these quotations show, the dictatorship which they
desire is not dictatorship by individuals, by a party,
or by a single class, but by an alliance of classes
embracing all that vast majority of the population
oppressed by capitalism. The relation of individual

* Lenin, quoted by Stalin in Leninism, Vol. I, London, 1928,

4 Salin, Leninism, Vol. I, p. 25.

t Stalin, Leninism, Vol. I, p. 115.
220

REVOLUTION .

revolutionaries, their Party, the working class, and
the other classes, within this alliance, are summed
up tersely by Lenin:

‘Among the masses of the people, we Communists
are but drops in the ocean, and we cannot rule
unless we give accurate expression to the folk con-
sciousness. Otherwise the Communist Party will not
be able to lead the proletariat, the proletariat will
not be able to lead the masses, and the whole
machine will fall to pieces. ’*

For these perfectly realistic reasons Lenin and the
party he led insisted on the widest possible demo-
cracy, the fullest freedom of comment, criticism,
suggestion and action within the alliance, by the
nine-tenths of the population who elect and control
the Soviets. Stalin speaks of the Soviets as ‘the most
democratic and therefore the most influential mass
organizations’ (Leninism, p. 119). He speaks of them
as ‘admitting the mass organizations of the workers,
and the exploited generally, to direct and uncondit-
ional participation in the management of public
affairs’ (p. 121).

And these phrases can be confirmed as facts by
any unprejudiced visitor to the Soviet Union.

Therefore those opponents of war who argue
calmly: ‘dictatorships produce wars, therefore we
are against all dictatorships, left or right; we are for
“democracy” ’—are wise to refuse to argue further.
Their line means in fact that they are for Ramsay
MacDonald’s democracy, which is real for those

* Stalin, Leninism, Vol. I, p. 51.

221

THE COMING WORLD WAR

with money or ‘a family,’ unreal for those without;
they are against Lenin’s dictatorship, which is
democracy for the mass of the population.

There are many supporters of socialism and peace
who feel, as Storm Jameson writes, ‘a certain creep-
ing doubt’ whether the leaders of the British Labour
Movement ‘really regard war as an unmitigated
disaster... . Will they, in a war crisis, reveal them-
selves less susceptible to mass emotion, better
Socialists, than in 1914?’* But to some at least,
probably to many who have these doubts, the revo-
lutionary alternative seems as bad or worse. They
are still under the influence of the fight put up by
Ramsay MacDonald, before and during his leader-
ship of the Labour Movement; they think of revolu-
tionaries as dogmatic, sectarian and foreign. They
think of revolution as unnecessary bloodshed.

- It is time this was altered. It cannot be altered by
blinking facts. Revolutionaries work now to estab-
lish, before the clash of class force, the ‘peculiar form
of class alliance,’ that is needed when the clash
comes: they work for a united front of the working
class and a common front with all other classes and
sections of classes prepared to struggle against capital-
ism. But the unity they seek and need is not to be
established by hiding or glossing over policies or facts.

A working-class revolution is the employment of
class power to change the class that has govern-
mental power. Because of temporary despair and
division among the capitalists, it may occur without
bloodshed, as in Buda-Pesth in 1919, when Count

* In the Left Review, November 1934.

222

REVOLUTION

Karolyi ‘handed over’ to the representatives of the
working class. It may occur with less bloodshed than
is caused by motor-cars, every year, in our British
streets, as in Petrograd in 1917. But the class to be
put out of power will fight when it can.

The question raised by our consideration of
Labour and Fabian plans for securing peace—can
the Socialist Movement win peace by ‘convincing
the bourgeois State’?—is really only part of the
question: can the Socialist Movement win power
by ‘convincing the bourgeois State’? The reasons
why Marxists be:ieve this to be impossible were fully
set out by Lenin in his booklet State and Revolution.
In this Lenin traced the development of the theory
of revolution in the writings of Marx, as the latter
lived through and studied and played a leading part
in the movements of 1848 and of the Paris Commune.

After the Commune, Marx formulated the need
of the revolution as ‘not merely to hand over from
one set of hands to another, the bureaucratic and
military machine—as has occurred hitherto—but to
shatter it.’

But, argue some of those who now desire to be
Marxists, when Marx was writing in the ’seventies of
last century he suggested it might be possible for the
revolution to occur peacefully in Britain and
America. Kautsky and others have used these
statements by Marx to ‘prove’ their point.

Lenin in his pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution
and Kautsky the Renegade, dealt with this (pages 20-22,
1929 English edition). ‘The revolutionary dictator-
ship of the proletariat is violence in respect of the

223

THE COMING WORLD WAR

bourgeoisie, and the need for such violence is caused
especially, as repeatedly explained by Marx and
Engels in detail (particularly in the Civil War in
France and the preface to it) by the fact that there
exists an army and a bureaucracy. But just these
institutions in the ’seventies of last century, when Marx
was making his observations, did not exist in England
or America (though now they do exist). .

‘Kautsky “the historian” is so shamelessly adul-
terating history that he forgets the fundamental fact
that capitalism of the pre-monopolist era, of which the
*seventies of last century were just the highest point,
was in virtue of its fundamental economic traits (which
were most typical of England and America) dis-
tinguished by, comparatively speaking, the greatest
attachment to peace and freedom. As against this,
imperialism (that is, capitalism of the monopolist
era, which has finally matured in the twentieth cen-
tury) is, in virtue of its fundamental economic traits,
distinguished by least attachment to peace and
freedom, and by the greatest development of
militarism everywhere.’

Must. our revolution then be a ‘violent’ one?
This question agitates the minds of many socialists
and pacifists. And many of them feel that while a
‘violent’ revolution might—if a choice must be made
—be preferable to a world war, it is physically
Impossible. A member of the Independent Labour
Party, scoffing at ‘the people who talk of insurrec-
tion’ has suggested that ‘those who take the bow and
arrow will perish by the tank.’ Mr. C. E. M. Joad,
at the I.L.P. Summer School in 1932, said that:
224

REVOLUTION

‘Should a revolutionary situation arise to-day the
wealthy classes would fight . . . and they would cer-
tainly win.

‘Modern science, applied to military technique,
concentrates effective power in fewer and fewer
hands. At the moment power rests with the Air
Force.

‘The Air Force could bomb a camp of unemployed,
a concentration of strikers, or marching revolu-
tionaries, out of existence in ten minutes.’

As we have already seen in previous dhapieis the
effect of modern science applied to military technique
is not in accordance with Mr. Joad’s fears (or
hopes?). Its main effect has been to cause an in-
creased dependence of the weapon on the factory,
since armies and air forces need a continual flow of
weapons and munitions.

But before this question of modern weapons and |

insurrection is dealt with, questions of policy, .
decision, will, desire may be mentioned—not because :‘

they are necessarily more important, but because our |

opponents usually treat them as more important. :

The anšwer to this question: is forcible revolution ‘
possible? is: yes—when the will exists there is cer- °
tainly a way. And the will does exist, but not yet
the leaders, the organizers of this will, the men and ;

women able to express it fully in action. A
Will is needed, and not mild scepticism, for such
work. We can see signs of its existence, in vague,
unshaped form, wherever the British peoples have
not been ruined in body and spirit by capitalist
decay: there is still an echo, in part of our chapter
P 225

1 r

THE COMING WORLD WAR

on the way wars end, of the words of Oliver Crom-
well: ‘Vote it as you please. There is a company of
poor men who will shed their last drop of blood
before they see it settled so!’

The will, the intention to make a clean sweep of
capitalism, grows under the pressure of hunger, of
capitalist breakdown, but only as the understanding
of the world grows, the understanding of necessity,
of inevitable results from known causes. This under-
standing does not grow mainly or most swiftly
among those sections of the population who have the
leisure and the money for books and study. It grows
mainly among the workers. Just as the members of
the working class have conditioned into them, by
the basic facts and processes of their lives, the need
to co-operate, to share, to act in masses (which is the
subjective foundation for socialism) so in the work-
ing class also there is conditioned, by all life as they
meet it, a recognition of iron necessity, of inescapable
results (which is the subjective foundation for the
socialist revolution). It is the privilege of other
classes to escape bare necessity, as reduced to its
lowest denominator, hunger. Other classes, or
rather the individuals in them, have the privileges
of neurosis and hysteria: can escape brutal choice
or ‘impossible’ environment by a ‘nervous break-
down’ (a disease not recognized for panel patients).
A member of the middle class, who will make a
considerable fuss over a headache, cannot feel it
possible that a chauffeur or charwoman ever has
headaches. As for the mere factory worker—he is
not thought of at all. It is therefore difficult for the
226

REVOLUTION

middle class to realize with what stark certainty—
from which no payment, or influence, or excuse is
available to hide him—the difficult decisions of life,
somewhat more insistent than headaches, press upon
a worker. When it is clear to an industrial worker
that the decision before him is war or revolution, he
will not hesitate to choose. He will not insist, against
all the facts, that ‘there must be some other way.’

The decision to end capitalism brings with it
other necessary decisions. One is that no possi-
bility can exist for even partial, or qualified, support
for any form of capitalist war. The worker who
takes this decision (or the individual from another
class ready and able to become part of the working-
class movement) will not agree with the Labour
Party spokesman* who said he ‘could conceive of
circumstances when it would be to the interests
of British trade unionism willingly to help our
country in the case of war.’

A further necessary decision is, obviously, to
become a member of a political party representing
his class and organized to carry through the mobili-
zation of that class, with all allies it can gain, for
revolution. The need for this is a great deal easier
to see now that it is clear the ruling class will not
hesitate to use the utmost brutality, Fascist terrorism,
to forestall any attempt at peaceful transition to
Socialism.

But when the understanding has spread among,
and the decision been taken by a sufficient number
of workers, is there then in fact, the physical possi-

* Mr. John Bromley.

227

THE COMING WORLD WAR

bility of successful revolution? Yes, every develop-
ment of imperialist military technique makes it
clearer that it is possible, in a revolutionary crisis, for
the workers to take power.

Such a crisis is produced by the refusal of the
working class ‘to live in the old way,’ to adapt itself,
shear off portions of its life, for the needs of declining
capitalism. It brings with it an inability of the ruling
class ‘to rule in the old way’; they must attempt
some mixture of sham revolution and open, forcible
repression, a mixture now plain for all to see in
Fascism. In such a crisis the question is: Will the
workers fight or surrender? If they are led by
pacifists they will surrender, since a working class
must necessarily group its forces round, and express
them through, leaders.

But even if the workers fight, could not aeroplanes
‘bomb their forces out of existence in ten minutes’?
We can put this question another way: could the
Bolsheviks have seized power and held it for any
length of time if modern weapons had been in the
hands of their principal opponents, led by Kerensky
or General Korniloff?

Our answer is: yes—because these weapons are
never actually in the hands of the imperialists ; they
are always, in action, controlled by members of the
working class and the petty-bourgeoisie.

Members of the working class and of the petty-
bourgeoisie are, in a revolutionary crisis, on both
sides of the barricades. On which side would be the
bulk of those who control the modern machinery of
high speed warfare ? :

228

REVOLUTION

Contrast the most effective fighting forces on either
side in 1917. The sailors (necessarily the most
advanced technically of all the Russian rank and
file, since a battleship is a complicated machine)
were the leaders of the Bolshevik armed insurrection.
With them were the Putilov (and other) factory
workers, the most technically competent in Russia,
and some machine-gun and armoured-car units.
On the other side Korniloff relied on a ‘Savage
Division’ of cavalry, and Kerensky’ on ‘Junkers’
(officer cadets) and cossack troops. The contrast is
striking ! |

Even the most insistent pacifist can scarcely argue,
after Kronstadt, Kiel, and Invergordon, that the
Navy is sure to act against a revolutionary govern-
ment in Britain. In all navies the conditions of ser-
vice are such as to breed vigorous opponents of the .
capitalist class—trained to a general level of intelli-
gence and initiative in technical matters that is
remarkably high. Therefore in considering the
Russian Revolution and civil war, and the future
British revolution, we can take the Navy as providing
more arguments for the. Marxist view than for that
of the pacifists. And the Navy means also the food
supply in Britain. As Mr. Ramsay MacDonald
gracefully says: ‘the Navy is us.’

There remain the questions of the Army and the
Air Force. What are the effects of the development
of modern military technique on the Army? Its fire-
power has greatly increased—at the cost of depend-
ence on accurate machinery and skilled repair for
its principal weapon (the machine-gun), and de-

229

THE COMING WORLD WAR

pendence on the whole of heavy industry for its
munitions.

Its mobility has increased—at the cost of depend-
ence on petrol, a commodity hard to guard effect-
ively. (Its mobility, however, 1s little, if any, higher
than that of revolutionary forces controlling the bulk
of the civilian means of transport.)

It possesses armoured vehicles capable of advan-
cing against fire, and surmounting barricades (which
is not the same thing as destroying barricades).
These vehicles need considerable skill in handling
and repair, depend on petrol, are somewhat ‘blind’
(particularly among houses) and can do little against
snipers in a town.

It possesses a new weapon, poison gas, the use of
which against an insurrection would rouse into
action every section of the population. With this
weapon it is impossible even to pretend to differen-
tiate between the revolutionaries and the rest of the
population. The use of gas by a capitalist force, in a
few working-class streets, would be the most rapid
way of disintegrating such a force that could be
devised by the stupidity of our great generals.

Modern technique of warfare has also caused,
within the Army, acute class differentiation, much
technical specialization (i.e., dependence on irre-
placeable ‘key’ men), close connection in personnel
with the industrial working class, difficulties of
arbitrary discipline, etc.

All the above considerations apply to the Air Force
as much asto the Army. But there are technical limi-
tations of this weapon which may also be mentioned.
230

REVOLUTION

In Ireland during the ‘Black and Tan’ fighting
aircraft were found quite useless in dealing with
snipers, with roof fighting, and all the other guer-
rilla methods by which an insurrectionary advance
guard would harry and hold up any attempt
by a capitalist force to enter and control a revolu-
tionary city.

The modern high-speed aeroplanes would be of
even less use in a city than the slower machines of
war time, because the pilots would have less time to
‘spot’ snipers, etc.

Bombing is as indiscriminate as gas, and as local
in its effects. An air force does not consist of a
number of aeroplanes flying about with bombs on,
ready to go into action at a moment’s notice. It is a
complicated economic unit, of which the parts are
so inter-dependent that the withdrawal of a number
of individuals, and the unwillingness of another
larger number to do their work properly (such as
would occur in a revolutionary crisis when the bombs
were falling on East-End Tories and Communists
alike), would immediately cripple its ability to get
machines into the air at all.

The usual resources of a reactionary government
In a crisis are students (university, ‘public’ school
and hospital), cadets, and Fascist petty-bourgeois
types. ‘Forces’ of this sort may possibly be of some
fighting value under some conditions of warfare.
That such ‘forces’ could handle tanks, aeroplanes, or
even machine-guns successfully is an idea which
could only occur to pacifists in a panic.

The development of modern military technique is

231

THE COMING WORLD WAR

necessary to each capitalist Power in its efforts to
outstrip its rivals. But look at these new weapons
through the eyes of men who know how they are
made and serviced and supplied and handled, and
you will see that every advance in the technique of
warfare is a new danger to capitalism.

A revolution is possible. The weapons of capital-
ism, that seem—and are—so terrible, need not
frighten the class that they make powerful, because
it makes them. But does this mean that revolu-
tionaries desire, or that their policy is one of, ‘vio-
lence’? Our answer to this question was made clear
—so clear that no opponent of Communism has
attempted to answer the argument—by R. Palme
Dutt in 1925. He was writing six months before the
‘General Strike, the first approach to a revolutionary
crisis in modern Britain, and the General Strike
justified every sentence. In the Labour Monthly, which
he edits, Dutt wrote:

‘It is a lie to say that the revolutionaries advocate
violence and civil war. What the revolutionaries say
is that the issue of bourgeois violence confronts the
working class and has got to be faced, and that the
workers cannot afford to put their trust in the
capitalist law and the capitalist State machine for
their protection. And events daily are proving the
truth of this.

‘Imagine a parallel. Suppose a scientist to declare,
as a result of his investigations, that an earthquake
will take place in England within ten years, and that
all houses, unless reinforced in a certain way, will be
shattered. It is reasonable to doubt his conclusion,
232

REVOLUTION

to discuss his evidence, to examine the facts and see
how far they bear him out. But the MacDonald
method is different. Mr. MacDonald would say:
Infamous scientist! He is in favour of earthquakes.
He wants to shatter all our houses. Out with him!
Earthquakes are all very well for countries like
Japan: but we do not want them here. We like to
live at peace. We have always lived at peace.
Expel this scientist! Vote for me and no earth-
quakes! And amid general applause, by an over-
whelming majority, a resolution would be carried
denouncing the scientist and denouncing all earth-
quakes.

‘Is the parallel monstrous? Yet this is precisely
what happened at Liverpool (Labour Party Con-
ference) with regard to Lenin’s prophecy of heavy
civil war in England. For a civil war may happen,
even though we do not wish it, if the bourgeoisie
are determined upon it.

‘Neither the Communists, nor any other section of
the working-class movement, desire or advocate
violence or civil war in any form. Communism
stands for the abolition of every form of coercion and
every form of violence. The abolition of violence and
coercion is only possible under Gommunism : because
Communism alone removes the conditions of human
exploitation which inevitably give rise to, and can
only exist by, daily violence and coercion. Com-
pared with Communism, the Quaker opposition to
violence is half-hearted and insincere: for the
Quakers rest on capitalism and the capitalist appara-
tus, draw their wealth from it, are mixed up with
their financial investments and shares in the whole
of imperialism and its daily violent subjection and
coercion of the majority of the human race. Com-

233

THE COMING WORLD WAR

munism alone proceeds along the correct method to
remove coercion by removing the causes of coercion.
But this process involves struggle in the existing
world of struggle: and Communism teaches that, so
long as the working class submits to bourgeois
violence, so long they not only do not escape struggle,
but by the continuance and expansion of capitalism
and imperialism the sum-total of violence in the
world is increased.

‘Lenin spoke of heavy civil war in England. But
when that quotation is given, it is never given in full.
Lenin did not say: “Let us make civil war in Eng-
land.” Lenin did not say: “‘ Hurrah for civil war in
England.” Indeed, on another occasion, Lenin
declared, as Marx had declared before him, that if
the revolution could be carried through peacefully
in England, then speed the work. But what Lenin
did say was that he was convinced that the revolution
could not be carried through peacefully in England.
And for this statement he gave sober matter-of-fact
evidence and reasons, which have to be gainsaid
before the conclusion can be gainsaid. What Lenin
did say was that the English workers must “‘ prepare
for’’—prepare for, not seek for, aim at, hope for—
prepare for the necessity of winning their freedom,
not through “easy parliamentary victories,” but
through “‘heavy civil war.” That was a sober esti-
mate of the future by the greatest working-class
strategist in history. It was a scientific statement,
backed by evidence, representing the outcome of his
life’s work, study, thinking and experience of the
working of social forces. .. .

‘To-day the plain facts of the situation are already
in the first stage of justifying Lenin’s words. Behind
all the pacifism and democracy of his language,

234

REVOLUTION

Baldwin in every speech is proclaiming his intention
to use the full machine of power against the working
class. At the same time as the parliamentary demo-
crats are dreaming of a future moment when they
will be able to use the machine of State on behalf of
the working class, they are failing to see that at the
present moment every support they are giving to the
trickery of parliamentary democracy is strengthening
the position of Baldwin against the working class.
It is not for nothing that Baldwin stresses on every
occasion his “democratic”? claim to represent ‘‘the
majority”? (and every argument of the Labour
leaders in favour of parliamentary democracy is a
support of that claim)—and in the name of that
claim his right and power to employ every weapon of
coercion against “the minority,” i.e., the workers.
The bourgeoisie are not so foolish as to lose their
strategic advantage of representing the State as
“the people.” It is their policy, while they are still
possessed of that strategic advantage, to strike at the
working-class movement so soon as it has become
menacing to capitalist interests and is passing out of
“safe” leadership. That is the whole meaning of the
present period of the concentrated attack on the
miners and the Communists, the organization of
Fascism and the preparations for a great conflict. ...

‘ What is the revolutionary answer to this situation?
There is no “democratic” answer. What, then, does
the revolutionary programme put forward at this
stage of the working-class movement? Does the
revolutionary programme say: “‘ Let us make a con-
spiracy.”’ “Let us blow up Buckingham Palace.”
“Let us abandon parliamentary and trade union
action?” Nothing of the kind. The revolutionary
programme says very simply: first, that the action of

235

THE COMING WORLD WAR

the bourgeoisie against the workers, both legal,
semi-legal and illegal, is to be expected at the present
stage and is inevitable: second, that the working
class cannot trust in the capitalist law and machine
for their defence, but must trust in their own
strength ; and third, that therefore the workers’ ranks
must be united and organized to meet the capitalist
attack. To realize this the workers need a common
leadership and a common movement. The workers
all over the country must be awakened to the
struggle in front and to the issues to be faced. . . .

‘The urgent need is the consolidation of a leader-
ship . . . the consolidation of a Left Wing which will
combine every honest element in the movement on a
common programme of workers’ unity and defence
against the capitalist attack.’

Our aim, if we really want to end capitalism and
war, must be to establish such a unity and such a
leadership—a fighting alliance of millions of people
against the governments and forces of the capitalists.
We must defeat, by whatever forms of mass action
are most effective, the continual efforts of those
forces to degrade and dragoon still further the living
bodies and minds of the people of this country and
of the Empire. When capitalism has been checked
and split by the blows of such an alliance, can find
no way out, cannot ‘rule in the old way,’ it will be
possible for this united front to turn to the attack, to
begin the great change. But we must work far more
swiftly towards this than we are doing, if we are to
succeed before the second World War breaks out.

236

APPENDIX

ON A CAMPAIGN IN MANCHURIA AND SIBERIA

APPENDIX

The probability has already been mentioned
that the first phase of the next World War will
consist of, or include, a campaign in Manchuria,
Mongolia, and Siberia. It may therefore be useful
to outline the strategical problems involved here.
We begin with a survey of the fronts. (See maps,
pages 256-7.)

Trans-Batkalia and Mongolia. This is difficult cam-
paigning country, being almost all roadless uplands
or desert. But it is not much worse than the Chinese
province of Jehol which the Japanese overran in
March 1933. The frontier over which operations
may take place is here about 500 miles long. Only
two roads of importance cross it: the motor road
from Kalgan to Chita, and the caravan track north
from Ulan-Bator, the capital of the Mongolian
Peoples’ Republic. These 500 miles of frontier are on
the average only 150 miles away from the trans-
Siberian railway. At two points the railway is
within 100 miles of the frontier.

River Argun Front. This is the main battlefield near
Manchuli on each side of the main railway. It is a
front of about 350 miles. The railway crosses it at
an angle to the front so that on each side the principal
towns, Chita and Khailar, which will be the bases of
the opposing forces, are closer to the front than would
be the case if the railway went across at right angles.

It is natural to expect, since the Japanese already
occupy much of Inner Mongolia, that they will
move a detachment through Outer Mongolia to the
west of the main battle front ; the nature of the ground
suggests that if there is to be a Soviet advance it will

239

APPENDIX

take place on the other flank, on the Japanese right,
north-east of the railway. Here the frontier is close
to the Great Khingan range of mountains. This is
the furthest part of Manchuria from the centres of
Japanese power, and local ‘red’ forces, known to the
Japanese as bandits, seem to be in effective occupa-
tion of more of this ground than are the Japanese.

Such a flanking movement, threatening the
Japanese base at Khailar, and the communications
between their front and Japan, would have to travel
light as there are few roads, if any, in this mountain
country. It could probably only be undertaken by
a cavalry force.

The Amur frontier. Where the river Argun runs
into the river Amur is the most northerly point in
Manchuria. The Amur frontier is the northern and
north-eastern border of Manchuria and is 800 miles
in length—twice the Western Front of 1918.

The campaigning ground here, in its central and
eastern part, is relatively open country. In dry
weather it is suitable for motor transport through
almost all its extent. The Japanese began in 1932 to
build railways northwards from the main line, one of
which reaches the Amur frontier roughly in the
centre of its 800 miles.

Japanese detachments moving along this line from
the main railway, by Mergen and Sahalian, will be,
at the beginning of the war, only separated from the
Soviet town of Blagoveschensk by the width of the
river. If such detachments can pass across the river
here or on either flank, they will be within artillery
range of the branch railway which is the Soviet line
240

APPENDIX

of communications with Vladivostock. This railway
runs right round Manchuria roughly in a semi-circle,
keeping fifty miles or less away from the river frontier.

The area around Vladivostock, at the eastern end
of the Manchurian border, forms the second main
front of the coming war.

This is in sum a frontier two thousand miles ines
five times as long as the Western Front during the
first World War. It is physically impossible for
either combatant to mass along this frontier, in the
first months of the war, more than about one-fifth of
the number of troops deployed on either side of the
Western Front.

It is impossible for these reasons, and because of
the development of tanks, lorries and aeroplanes, for
this war to develop into a trench deadlock similar to
that in France between October 1914 and March
1918. Such a deadlock, and the familiar methods of
trench warfare, could only develop on the main
fronts mentioned. Even there it is likely that modern
military tendencies will modify this form of warfare
almost out of all recognition.

It is now necessary to discuss the strategy and the
forces employed, and the effect of modern technique
on the war.

To deal with the probable strategic problems, we
will take the main Manchuli or River Argun front
first. The frontier on each side of the railway at
Manchuli, and particularly to the north-east, is
known to have been strongly fortified on the Soviet
side. The railways behind the Japanese lines here
are said to be better than those behind the Soviet

Q 241

APPENDIX

lines. But these railways, 800 to 1,000 miles long,
can scarcely be expected to carry to Khailar, the
Japanese base, the vast supplies needed for an
artillery barrage on the 1917-18 scale. One battle
of three months’ duration, on the Western Front at
the end of 1917, required 465,000 tons of shells for
the British Army alone. That is thousands of full
train-loads. ‘And the Japanese may at first need the
major part of their heavy artillery a thousand miles
and more away, outside Vladivostock.

The Japanese are not likely to be such fools as to
attack strongly entrenched positions, defended by
machine-guns, without powerful artillery support.
They know the limitations of their tanks against
trenches, from their experiences between Chapei
and the Woosung forts near Shanghai. But the area
in Manchuria is so vast and the flanks so open that
the Japanese may hope to stretch the Soviet forces
to breaking-point.

They will certainly try to make the railway behind
the Russians unusable by air bombing (a difficult
thing: it is easy to hamper a railway severely, hard
to kill it). As already indicated, a detachment is
likely to move through Mongolia and—with 500
miles of front to choose from—will try to cut the
railway. Except at harvest-time, and soon after, a
large detachment would find it difficult to exist here.
Whatever its size, it can scarcely escape air observa-
tion. But if it is lucky in its ‘hide-and-seek’ it may
possibly get well over the Mongolian—Siberian
frontier. The chances against its getting to the
railway and staying there are enormous: it is far
242

APPENDIX

more likely that it will be held up between the
frontier and the railway, and will then have to run
for safety, since larger forces can be concentrated all
round it. But if news does suddenly reach us, in the
evening papers of next September or next May, of a
Japanese column nearing the railway close to Chita
or Verkhne-Udinsk, those who ring the church bells
will be premature. National prayers of thanksgiving
should be postponed for more solid achievements.

A mechanized raiding force, of the sort probable
on this flank, depends on continuous supplies. The
only bases for supplies in or near Inner Mongolia
are the rail-heads at Solun and Paiyintala in Man-
churia, Dolon-Nor in Jehol Province and Suiyan
(Sui-Yen-Ting or Kuku Khoto), in the Shansi
Province of China on the Mongolian border. There
is a railway from Suiyan through Peiping (Pekin) to
Tsientsin. The use of this railway for supplies would
be useful to the Japanese. The Chinese Government
of Nanking (unless temporarily sold to a higher
bidder) will not seriously attempt to stop Japan using
this route. (But the Chinese working class will
attempt to do so.) Japanese troops are already in
control of this railway for some fifty miles between
Kalgan and Suiyan. The first clash between the
U.S.A. and Japan, arising directly out of a Japanese
war on the Soviet Union, may come in this area if
the Japanese need this route for supplies and use it,
disregarding American protests.

The Soviet resistance to invasion from Mongolia
is likely to take three forms: cavalry on or over the
Mongolian frontier, an armed population in the

2Q 243

APPENDIX

Trans-Baikal province, and detachments of machine-
gunners and other arms working from the railway
line.

The Soviet cavalry is strong in number and well
equipped with machine-guns. Its peculiar feature,
as compared with the cavalry of other nations, is that
it is trained as the principal arm which works with
tanks. Other cavalries have mechanized artillery
and supply services, and are brigaded with armoured
cars and tanks to some extent. But in the Red Army
mounted machine-gunners and tanks comprise the
main hitting power of one or more separate cavalry
corps (three cavalry divisions form a corps). Whether
the ground on the Mongolian frontier and in the |
Khingan mountains is passable for tanks except in
favourable climatic conditions, is doubtful. If it is,
the Red cavalry divisions will be very formidable
forces on the flanks of the main River Argun (Man-
chuli) front.

On the Amur River front the ground is certainly
suitable for tanks working with cavalry. It can be
crossed at a high speed by wheeled motors.*

On the whole of the Amur front the Japanese will
start the war with an easy objective in front of them:
the railway. It is unlikely that, working from
Mongolia into the Trans-Baikal, they can reach the
railway; on the Amur front they certainly can. But
here again the success is likely to be impermanent.
With 800 miles of border to choose from, the Japanese
can start from an unexpected spot. But their com-
munications will be difficult and the Soviet railway

* Cf. Colonel Sutton’s book, One-Arm Sutton.

244

APPENDIX

on either side of their advance will be used to con-
centrate troops against them.

The Japanese dream of an empire up to Lake
Baikal, and their desire for an early ‘showy’ success,
may lead them into unwisdom; if they overweight
their ‘side-shows’ hundreds of miles from secure
communications or try to ‘butt through’ the Argun
trenches early in the war, they are asking for severe
trouble. The Red Army has plenty of recent experi-
ence of fighting at various seasons in country far
worse than Mongolia or the Amur. Its operations
against ‘White’ bandits in the Yakut Autonomous
Republic (northern Siberian forests) only ended in
1928 and were carried on in anything up to fifty
degrees of frost.

The trouble about the Vladivostock front, from
the Japanese point of view, is that it seems likely to
be a slow business. The frontier lies 40 to 100 miles
from Vladivostock. Down the coast, only 150 miles
away, Close to the frontier, the Japanese have built a
port, Seishin or Seishun, capable of handling a big
army’s supplies. They have built railways running
inland from this port. There is only one low moun-
tain range (2,000 feet or so), passable in many
places, between them and the River Sui-Fun and
Amur Bay, on the far side of which is Vladivostock.
The Japanese have the shipping lying idle to con-
centrate five divisions against Vladivostock within
the first month of war. (In 1904 it took them 34
months to get five divisions into the war area, the
Kuan-Tung peninsula.) They can at the same time
move ‘Manchukuo troops’ (Chinese conscripts) to

245

APPENDIX

the front by rail direct from Kirin and from Harbin.
And then? Then they must try to take several
‘Hindenburg lines’ in succession.

The Red Army will not expect to defend for long
the last five or ten miles of the present frontier
towards the sea, where its positions could be shelled
in reverse by Japanese battleships. If the front is
straightened here so as to reach the sea at right-
angles north of Gamoy point, it will consist of 120
miles of entrenchments, from the sea to Lake
Maiyan, which have been reinforced with concrete,
and have had consistent attention for three years
from a considerable number of the troops that will
occupy them. These entrenchments form a ‘battle
zone’ averaging thirty miles in depth. If the
Japanese have discovered some new weapon, or
developed tanks and artillery to a level not sus-
pected and not shown in the Shanghai fighting, they
can hope to work fairly rapidly through this defen-
sive zone. If not, they can pile Passchendaele on the
Somme, yet only progress at the rate of two miles a
month—if that.

They can more easily break over the frontier
beyond Lake Maiyan, between Khabarovsk and
Vladivostock, and seize the railway. Either in this
way, or by landing a force on the rather difficult
coast north-east of Vladivostock, they may be able
to surround the city. They would then try to starve
it out, as they did Port Arthur in 1904.

- But in 1904 they needed only two divisions to
contain the Russian troops in Port Arthur. They
would need a far stronger force to form a wide ring

246

APPENDIX

round Vladivostock, and would find the country
north of that city very difficult. We have no means
of knowing what Soviet forces are allocated to this
part of the front, but they are not likely to be less
than two divisions. These, with the assistance of an
armed population (say, 25,000 rifles) could hold up
an armv of four times their strength, on lines twenty
to thirty miles away from the city, for a considerable
period, perhaps for as long as supplies lasted. (It is
probable that the factor limiting the Soviet force
here is the question of storing sufficient supplies for
it, and ammunition, with due regard to enemy air
action. A cold storage depot capable of storing
12,500 tons of meat has recently been erected in
Vladivostock.)

The Japanese would find an attempt to rush the
entrenched frontier even more costly than their
failure to storm Port Arthur in the spring of 1904.

The Japanese dilemma, put shortly, is this:

(a) Rush Vladivostock—casualties and failure.

(b) Mask Vladivostock and concentrate elsewhere
—this leaves behind them a fortified aerodrome 450
miles from the Japanese home ports and factories,
150 miles from important Korean ports (Seishun,
etc.) on their direct route to Manchuria; a centre
for submarines; a centre for cavalry or light tank
raids at the communications of Japanese forces in the
north.

(c) Invest Vladivostock in force. That means a lot
of troops, some of them sunk deep in roadless forests,
facing towards the city. And also another, perhaps

247

APPENDIX

larger,. covering force, strung out along the lower
Amur, to keep Soviet cavalry from raiding these
investing divisions.

A difficult dilemma. And made worse by the
development of a factor not mentioned yet: the air
forces.

Before the war from the air is discussed we must
look at the numbers and equipment of the opposing
forces.

General Hayashi, then the Japanese Minister for
War, stated in January 1934, that the Red Army
had five divisions (100,000 men) on the Manchurian
frontier. Other Japanese estimates have been seven
and eight divisions. These forces have recently been
strengthened considerably and could be increased
in the first month of the war by the addition of
a cavalry corps and several infantry divisions,
moving from central Siberia (the capacity of
the railway being one limiting factor in the move-
ment, the international situation in the West being
another). Indications received by the Soviet com-
mand of their opponents’ disposition and intentions,
interruption of the railway by air bombing, and
many other influences will affect the Soviet troop
movements. The total Soviet strength (after rein-
forcement both by formed divisions and by the
mobilization of the population, who are trained in
the use of rifles) cannot much exceed, and may be
less than, one hundred and fifty men per mile of the
total front.

During the first World War the concentration of
248

APPENDIX

troops averaged about 4,000 per mile on the Western
Front and was nowhere much ‘thinner’ than 2,000
per mile. In the Russo-Japanese war the concentra-
tion averaged over 2,000 men per mile of occupied
frontage (both armies had ‘open’ flanks). Mechani-
zation and the development of the machine-gun may
make it possible for modern armies to stretch their
deployment as widely as 500 men per mile; but
neither army is likely to enter the war in such
extended formation. One thousand men per mile
(not of course in the front line, but including the
forces in reserve and along railways) is likely to be
the ‘thinnest’ concentration. On the main fronts
the figure is likely to be between 2,000 and 5,000
men per mile, at first.

The point of these figures is that the Soviet forces,
even if doubled by reinforcements, cannot be spread
thinly over the whole 2,000 miles of frontier. They
can occupy in strength only about one-fifteenth
part of the frontier!

It is inevitable that there should be two main
groupings, one near Manchuli and one covering
Vladivostock. It is also inevitable that the forces at
such points as Blagovyeshchensk (half-way between
these two concentrations) should be weak in relation
to the forces that the Japanese—if they can risk
sparing them—can concentrate against these fron-
tiers. That is why Japanese ‘successes’ at points of
minor importance are certain.

The Japanese forces in Manchuria in 1932 and
most of 1933 consisted of three divisions and three
independent brigades, with a very small proportion

249

APPENDIX

of cavalry—say 65,000 men in all. The Manchukuo
conscripts were about 110,000 men. General
Bluecher, commanding the Red Army in the Far
East, has estimated the Japanese infantry in 1934 at
130,000 men.

The Japanese are in a position to increase these
forces further before the outbreak of war, and can
land four to five divisions during the first four or five
weeks of war. If their main concentration is to be
against Vladivostock, their troops can be concen-
trated for action almost at once.

At the battle of Mukden in the autumn of 1904
the Japanese had 300,000 infantry available. That
was the climax of their effort, and double the strength
with which they had effected their first strategical
concentration at Liao-Yang. They are likely to
start this war with a larger army than that which
ended the war of 1904: say 200,000 Japanese, and
175,000 Chinese conscripts and levies. Their field
army is likely to be larger than the Soviet forces, but
the quality of the Chinese troops (fighting for a
puppet Manchu ‘emperor’) will be worse than
doubtful.

The Japanese problem is: can they ‘mount’ two
full-scale offensives—one on each main front? If
they cannot, which should they postpone?

It may be thought that they can deal first with
Vladivostock, then proceed to transfer the bulk of
their artillery and their best troops to the Manchuli
front. But this would allow the Red Army at Man-
chuli and along the River Argun the initiative for
some months. If this is done, the Japanese cannot
250

APPENDIX

hope to hold the northern group of the Greater
Khingan mountains, and if Soviet cavalry pene-
trates along and into these mountains it will then be
impossible for the Japanese to mount an offensive at
or near Manchuli, since the railway from Khailar
eastwards towards the ports will be in danger. The
loss of these mountains (described by a Soviet
writer, O. Dashinsky, as ‘the most important strategic
position in Manchuria’) would also threaten any
subsidiary Japanese action on the Amur frontier.

The Japanese Army chiefs have been developing
the theory of ‘a sudden attack.’ At a conference
called under the auspices of the magazine Hinode
in August 1932, the Japanese Minister for Foreign
Affairs summarized his position by saying that ‘a
sudden attack is always accompanied by success
even in a war on land.’ Captain Taketomi suggested
that the air weapon should be made the main
factor in this ‘sudden attack.’ Captain Katokam
said that in a war with the Soviet Union, Vladivos-
tock must be destroyed or occupied ‘before anything
else.’

The words that we have italicized are an interest-
ing reminder of 1904—a war that Japan began by
a ‘sudden attack’ which destroyed several Tsarist
warships before the crews of these vessels knew that
war had begun. These tactics, according to current
Japanese military opinion, can be equally effective
in the air and on land—‘even on land.’

This theory rests, however, on the assumption that
the victims of the ‘sudden attack’ are not prepared
for it. A spokesman of the Soviets, Kaganovitch,

251

APPENDIX

replied to this theory on January 21, 1934, by
stating that ‘we are not a government of Tsarist
fools, such as that of 1904.’ He referred pointedly to
Port Arthur in 1904 and Vladivostock to-day.

Hirota’s theory of a sudden attack ‘even on land’
presents its own problems. An attack on the trench
lines near Vladivostock would seem suicidal. For
any other attack on that city they must land on
narrow beaches up the coast to the north.

In 1904 the Japanese effected two such landings,
at Pi-Tzu-Wo and at Takushan. The former, near
Port Arthur, was a landing of three divisions and an
artillery brigade. It was unopposed. It took eight
days, from May 5, 1904. Disembarkation was carried
on day and night. ‘Yet with all this, Oku’s army
had to fight at Nan Shan, thirteen days after his
divisions were landed, with an incomplete ammuni-
tion supply.’*

A ‘sudden attack’ carried out on lines such as
these would not get very far, even if speeded up
considerably. If on the other hand the air forces
are relied upon for ‘a sudden attack,’ the fact
that these forces cannot quickly destroy the re-
sistance of entrenched troops must be remembered.
And the even more important fact that the Soviet
air force is larger and better equipped than the
Japanese. |

Here is a key-point in the ‘grand strategy’ of the
Soviet Union. It is impossible to fight a great war,
with armies on the 1916 scale, at the far end of

* Major-General E. A. Altham, The Principles of War, London,

1914.
252

APPENDIX

3,000 miles of railway. It would be strategically
suicidal for the Soviet Union to keep in the Far East
portions of its army that may be needed in the West,
against a German-Polish invasion. But it is made
possible for them, by the development of the aero-
plane, to keep in eastern Siberia a striking force more
powerful than that of the Japanese. While this force
needs supplies, they are not of such a weight or bulk
as to overload the railway. And portions of this
force could be brought, in an emergency, to a
western front in three days. A division of troops
moved by rail, under war conditions, might need
three weeks or more.

The new form of warfare, therefore, will enable
the Soviet Union to do what has never previously
been done: maintain at the end of 3,000 miles of
railway a force capable of opposing effectively a
modern ‘nation at war.’ And while the Soviet
airmen will undoubtedly bomb—and scatter leaflets
over—Japanese factories and ports (since they must.
use all available weapons to defend the only socialist
country in the world) they are likely to concentrate
on making the lives of the Japanese armies unen-
durable by day and night bombing over the whole
area of Manchuria. The vast length of frontier will
make it impossible to place fighting squadrons to
intercept them. This form of warfare may not do
very serious physical damage to the Japanese forces,
or their railways and bases. But it will, almost
certainly, within a few months, bring these forces
either to breakdown or to revolt. No courage can
endure the constant threat of war from the air, the

253

APPENDIX

sleepless nights, the feeling of desperate helplessness
during an attack that cannot be answered.

While this is likely to be the main and over-ruling
process at work behind the scenes, or rather from
above them, in the whole war, there will at the same
time be going on a struggle, the effects of which
cannot be so clearly summed up, between the armies.

The modern technique of land warfare, as applied
to the Manchurian front, will probably lead to a
mixture of trench and open warfare, raids by
mechanized forces (or cavalry forces of which the
main hitting power is the tank) occurring on each
side of battle-zones which will not consist of trench
lines such as those of 1915-17, but will be deep
defensive lines held mainly by concrete strong-
points full of machine-guns. Because of distances,
railway difficulties, and the danger of tank raids
getting through to the batteries, it is probable that
artillery will play a relatively smaller part in battle
than was the case in the first World War.

There may be only one relatively fixed front, that
near Vladivostock, or there may be several. On such
fronts artillery, protected by anti-tank guns on the
ground and fighting squadrons in the air, will have
much to do. But where the flanks are fluid, where
mechanized forces can be moved to a flank or into
enemy territory at the rate of a hundred miles a day
or so, artillery will always be in danger of being
‘rushed.’ The war, apart from the influence of the
air forces, will therefore largely depend on the
efficiency and mobility of infantry armed with
machine-guns.

254

APPENDIX

Captain Liddell Hart, in his British Way in War-
fare, has stated that the Soviet infantry have a
greater number of machine-guns per battalion than
any other army. With the first Five-Year Plan,
the Soviet command claim, their forces were so far
mechanized that seven horse-power in mechanical
form was available for every Red Army man. That
is an even higher power-man factor than in the
British Army. But the real strength of the Soviet
forces will depend, of course, on: their success in
building a new type of man who knows what he is
fighting for. And the power of the Soviet air squad-
rons will partly be that they can drop pamphlets
more destructive than most bombs.

How soon, and to what extent this propaganda
and the normal effects of war will tell on the stability
of the Japanese empire, we cannot estimate. But
here, as in any other aspect of the coming World
War that may be studied, a revolutionary outcome
seems more probable than any other.

255

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