The Collective Naval Defence of the Empire, 1900-1940

This collection of papers charts the development of a collective system of naval defence for the British Empire from the dying days of the nineteenth century up to its greatest test following the outbreak of the Second World War. It is the story of attempts to reconcile two mutually exclusive imperatives, the one the perceived strategic need for unity of control and freedom of movement of naval assets, the other the political reality of a growing willingness of the constituent members of the Empire to assert their constitutional autonomy and to require recognition of their physical and financial contribution to its defence. That conflict of interest was already apparent in the years before the First World War as the need to counter growing German naval strength required increased concentration of naval forces in home waters and hence their withdrawal from areas to which they were at least nominally dedicated and from which they were in part financed. While the formation of the various Dominions’ and territories’ own services – the Royal Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, South African and Indian Navies - appeared to resolve some of these issues, the question of operational control, particularly in wartime, remained unresolved as were the differing perceptions of strategic requirements. In the 1920s and 30s Australia’s and New Zealand’s increasing anxiety at the growing power of Japan and Canada’s uneasy relationship with the United States as well as its own internal differences affected their views on foreign relations and influenced their willingness to devote financial resources to a common purpose they imperfectly controlled. The development of the Dominions’ own naval forces, paid for out of their own national budgets and controlled locally, necessitated the creation of a common defence structure which would enable the several navies to train and fight together. Eventually the Admiralty, previously wedded to the concept of centralised control, recognised that it was more important to foster political support for naval effort than to try to maintain unfettered centralised command, and that only national navies were likely to receive whole hearted public support across the Empire. While the resultant compromise of a co-operative naval defence was imperfect and, arguably, insufficiently strong to deter a potential aggressor, it retained sufficient political support, despite real concerns in the 1930s that not all its constituent parts would act together, to keep the Empire intact through the crises of 1940 and 1941 to the end of the Second World War. Where it clearly failed was in its inability to sustain an effective defence against Japan at the same time as fighting a European war, a failure which led to the fall of Singapore and, arguably, the eventual dissolution of the Empire itself. On the plus side, however, it could be argued that the lessons learnt in the development of an effective system of Imperial defence co-operation formed the basis for the formation of NATO, Britain’s main system of collective post war defence.