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Great Contemporaries: Churchill in the Age of Lloyd George (Part 2)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | June 7, 2022
- Category: Churchill in WWI Explore Great Contemporaries
“Great Contemporaries: David Lloyd George,” continued from Part 1.
Lloyd George and the Great War
The First World War marked the end of one phase of the career of Lloyd George, and opened another that wrote him into history books. His first challenge was whether even to remain in office. His career had largely been focused on domestic issues. He did declare, during one prewar diplomatic crisis, that Britain would not stand aside if the European balance was threatened. But when the Cabinet learned of prewar staff talks with the French, Lloyd George teetered on resignation.
That unofficial military commitment could sweep Britain into a Franco-German war. What tipped him into staying in office was Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, guaranteed by Britain since 1839. Britain had long feared control of the Low Counties by a would-be continental hegemon—an unacceptable threat to its security.
Lloyd George’s skills proved far more adaptable to the demands of total war than those of Prime Minister Asquith. Initially the war was expected to be “over by Christmas.” Alas it rapidly morphed into industrialized conflict—a brutal attritional struggle. It required the mobilization of finance, industry and peoples. That in turn decreed unplanned and drastic adjustment of the relations between industry, labor and government.
Asquith had little taste or aptitude for the war’s revolution in the size and reach of government. Lloyd George, on the other hand, had flexibility and negotiating skills unique among Liberal ministers. His ability to work with opposition Conservatives would pave his way as Asquith’s eventual successor.
Money and Munitions
As Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908-15) Lloyd George oversaw the financial transition from peace to war. This included the first large-scale borrowing that would by 1918 transfer financial preeminence from London to New York. But it was his time as Minister of Munitions (1915-16) that signaled his emergence as a national war leader.
A major problem arose when the War Office failed adequately to supply the army by traditional methods. Previously the War Office (and Admiralty) had controlled munitions procurement using a network of suppliers. These longstanding, comfortable relationships had sufficed for the “little wars” of the 19th century. They were totally inadequate for the scale of war in 1914. Now for the first time, Britain was raising a mass army to fight a war of attrition. As a result, the role of artillery steadily increased. More guns were needed for preliminary bombardments preceding infantry assaults, which lengthened from hours to days, and ultimately to a week.
The crisis came in May 1915: the army simply did not have enough shells. The problem soon became political. Asquith was forced to form a coalition government to pursue a unified war effort with Bonar Law’s Conservatives. One price Asquith had to pay was to sack Churchill, under fire at the Admiralty for the faltering Gallipoli campaign. Another result was establishment of a Ministry of Munitions. Lloyd George moved from the Exchequer to become its head. The task he faced was massive.
The munitions challenge
Munitions was a brand-new department with no precedents for guidance, and the demands of war were steadily increasing. He first had to wrest munitions procurement from obstinate generals and admirals. Trade Unions had to be cajoled into setting aside hard-won, jealously guarded pay rates and job security. This involved, among many other things, overcoming their objections to “dilution”—recruiting large members of new workers, overwhelmingly women, to staff the new factories needed to produce what the Western Front required.
Company owners and managers had to be become accustomed to answering not to shareholders but to civil servants. Finally, a host of technical issues had to be confronted: mass production of complex new weapons like tanks and airplanes; raw material sourcing and supply. All this had done and done quickly. By 1918 the Ministry of Munitions was an industrial behemoth, the largest single manufacturing concern and employer in the country.
As Minister of Munitions and then as Secretary of State for War (July-December 1916), Lloyd George also developed very clear ideas about national strategy that he would carry with him into the Premiership. As the Western Front congealed in the autumn of 1914, a search began for alternatives to what Churchill aptly described as sending men “to chew barbed wire in Flanders.”
Easterners versus Westerners
Like Churchill, Lloyd George was an “Easterner,” seeking Mediterranean and Balkan attacks that would reopen connections with Russia. This would exploit the weakness of Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s Ottoman ally. The “Westerners”—the commanders in France and their supporters in London—were committed to the Western Front as the only key to victory.
Churchill was politically marginalized by Gallipoli, but Lloyd George pursued the Eastern strategy until 1918. His distrust of the Westerners, including successive BEF (British Expeditionary Force) commanders, Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, deepened when he moved from the Ministry of Munitions to the War Office. Haig was backed by the Chief of Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Sir William Robertson, the Conservatives and King George V. And he was committed to achieving a “break-through” in the West.
As Lloyd George moved to the War Office, Haig launched the Somme offensive, one the greatest British military catastrophes. Lloyd George was a largely impotent bystander, but his distrust of Haig and Robertson soared. Even in small matters, like his desire to see Welsh units grouped in a Welsh division, he was frustrated by the obstinate obstructionism of Robertson and the War Office. This was the background to his arrival at the top of the British war effort.
Mobilizing for total war, at which Lloyd George excelled, offended what Asquith believed his party stood for. Personal grief—his oldest son died on the Somme—reduced his ability to cope. In December 1916 a complex political crisis brought him down. With Tory support Lloyd George succeeded him—not with altogether sunny prospects. By now, many in government had become pessimistic that the war could be fought to a successful conclusion.
Lloyd George’s war
The first thing to note about Lloyd George’s arrival at the top of what a previous prime minister had described as the “greasy pole” of British politics is that it destroyed his party. When Asquith left, the Liberals fractured. One group followed Lloyd George into coalition with Bonar Law. A larger group remained loyal to Asquith and joined him in opposition. The party would never coalesce again. This opened the door for the Labour Party (which joined the Coalition). A few years later, moving from minor third-party status, Labour would form a government.
The Liberal debacle was only the first of many earthquakes Lloyd George precipitated. A second quickly followed. Despite the advent of temporary wartime ministries like Munitions, the structure of government remained essentially prewar. Cabinet meetings were often not recorded properly, leading to confusion about what had been decided. Indeed, the best records we have of many early Cabinet meetings are Asquith’s letters to his lady friend Venetia Stanley. The married Prime Minister was besotted with Stanley, confiding more deeply with her than anyone.
Lloyd George used the immense bureaucratic talents of Maurice Hankey, a Royal Marine officer, to establish a cabinet secretariat. Cabinet decisions were now recorded, disseminated and followed up. It was a crucial step, not only in the wartime effectiveness of the British government, but in its modernization. Hankey would remain Cabinet Secretary until 1938, building the Cabinet Office into a key institution. He became the most influential civil servant in British history.
The PM and the military
Another revolution was in the relationship of the Prime Minster to the high command.
“Easterner” Lloyd George had long distrusted the Haig-Robertson nexus that sustained the primacy of the Western Front. But Haig seemed immoveable. Supported by only a rump of the Liberal party, Lloyd George was dependent on Tory votes to stay in office. And Bonar Law’s party was committed to the belief that generals knew best. So were the King and the press barons like Lord Northcliffe. A frontal assault on Haig was out of the question. But Lloyd George, unlike Haig, was skillful at maneuver.
His first attempt at bypassing Haig and Robertson was to embrace the plans of the French commander-in-chief, General Robert Nivelle. An artilleryman and veteran of the brutal 1916 Verdun battle, Nivelle was polished, plausible and spoke excellent English. (His mother was English.) He claimed that his tactics would produce a decisive victory within 48 hours. Lloyd George, desperate to forestall another of Haig’s bloodbaths, agreed to subordinate Haig to Nivelle.
Haig and Robertson pushed back vigorously and managed to reduce subordination to cooperation. Nivelle’s offensive failed with nearly 200,000 causalities, and triggered widespread mutinies.6 The worn-out French army was, temporarily, incapable of further offensive action. That cleared Haig to launch his next offensive. Lloyd George tried to limit Haig by stressing the need to lower casualties, but to little avail.
Launched in July, Haig’s drive, the Battle of Passchendaele, soon bogged down. The terrain was low lying, the weather wet. Drainage systems were shattered by the preliminary artillery bombardment. It soon became another attritional struggle, this time in a quagmire. When it ended four months later, Haig had lost another quarter million men for no appreciable gain.
Wresting control
In the aftermath, Lloyd George finally broke the Haig-Robertson roadblock. As Passchendaele squelched to its muddy, futile finale, a German and Austro-Hungarian offensive against Italy achieved stunning success. The Italians lost over 600,000 men and 3000 pieces of artillery. The need to rescue Italy allowed Lloyd George to persuade his French and American allies (the U.S. had entered the war in April 1917) to create a Supreme War Council to improve inter-allied coordination. Then he appointed Lt. Gen. Henry Wilson as its British military representative. Wilson was a highly intelligent staff officer (Lloyd George thought him the smartest solider he knew). He was also an experienced intriguer. Lloyd George allowed Wilson to become the government’s principal strategic advisor, bypassing Robertson. Several months of tussling later, Wilson became CIGS, giving Lloyd George the control over strategy that he needed to curb Haig.
Triumph in the Mideast
Despite Haig and Robertson, Lloyd George managed to follow his “Eastern” instincts in one area. Briefing General Sir Edmund Allenby, a newly appointed commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, the prime minster told him he wanted Jerusalem taken as a “Christmas present” for the war-weary British people. Allenby had not shone brightly as an army commander under Haig. But once released from the constraints of the Western Front, he developed into one of Britain’s best field commanders.
Given resources by Lloyd George, Allenby defeated Ottoman forces in Palestine and delivered Jerusalem by Christmas. That was not only a fillip for the morale of the increasingly tired British public. By its dramatic contrast with Haig’s failures, it was a useful lever for Lloyd George to break the grip of the “Westerners” on British strategy.7 It had taken Lloyd George longer to out-maneuver Robertson and Haig than it had to outflank the House Lords. But the same skills were at work, as they were in 1910-11.
Winston is back—again
Lloyd George was more straightforward in his major personnel move of 1917. Since being forced out of the Admiralty in 1915, Churchill had been marginalized politically. Lloyd George understood however that his abilities could not be allowed to run to waste: “I admire his dazzling mind, his brilliant mind, often so brilliant as to dazzle his judgment,” Lloyd George declared. “In fact, one of his troubles is that his headlamps are rather blinding, and he finds it difficult to keep a very straight course on the road, and to avoid smashing into traffic.”8 Erratic though he might be, Winston was back in government. In July 1917 he became Minister of Munitions, despite a great deal of Conservative grousing. It was the first step in rebuilding Churchill’s career.
Lloyd George had established control of the national war effort in time to face the climax of the war in spring 1918. With the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin took Russia out of the conflict. This allowed the Germans to shift the bulk of their victorious eastern army west. Now or never! Germany bid to win before American strength could affect the battlefield balance. But five German offensives between March and July failed to break the Anglo-French front. They cost the Germans some 670,000 casualties, exhausted their reserves, and left them vulnerable to devastating counteroffensives. These began with the British Army’s great victory at Amiens on 8 August 1918.
Throughout the terrible years 1916-17 the British army had slowly learned how to attack effectively. Amiens was the climax of that learning curve. The German front finally broke, and the German retreat was continuous until 11 November. The war was over. David Lloyd George, and the enduring British infantry, had carried the nation through the greatest challenge it had ever faced. But greater challenges lay ahead.
Continued in Part 3.
Endnotes and further reading
6 See “General Nivelle’s Experiment,” in Richard M. Langworth, “Literary Flourishes: ‘Take the Enemy into Consideration,’” 2020.
7 The arguments over the proper strategy for Britain to follow can be followed in two works by David French: British Strategy and War Aims 1914-1916 (London, 1986) and The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition 1916-1918 (Oxford, 1995). David R. Woodward’s Lloyd George and the Generals (Newark, 1983) is more tightly focused on Lloyd George.
8 Lloyd George on Churchill, 1917, in Henry Anatole Grunwald, Churchill: The Life Triumphant (New York: American Heritage, 1965), 67.
The author
Dr. Callahan is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware and a leading scholar of the Indian Army in the two World Wars. He taught at the University for 38 years and was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, where an annual student prize bears his name. Among his books are Churchill and His Generals (2007) and Churchill: Retreat from Empire (1997).