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But our reaction should not be as defensive as this. There is in Mrs. Foster’s volumes, in Mr. Bond’s admirable recent addition to the House of Lords calendar,” and in Professor Kenyon’s collection ample material, for those who take the trouble to look, which relates to puritanism, the gentry, ‘intellectual origins’, London, the money market, foreign trading companies, philanthropy and the poor law, office-holding, or whatever other may be the preferred preoccupations of those who find old-fashioned political or constitutional history dull.la The truth is that it is not the publication of original docu- ments, but rather the rise of ‘potted’ compendia of snippets, largely from secondary writings, which threatens to injure our whole mode of teaching; or, to be more exact, our pupils’ mode of learning. Mean- while we must be glad of what we have-and salute the early seven- teenth-century parliament-men not least for their continuing ability to stimulate historians and their readers, both ‘lay’ and ‘professional’. University of York G. E. AYLMER

F O R E I G N P O L I C Y D O C U M E N T S ’

WITH VOLUME XII of the First Series in the collection of inter-war British diplomatic documents, Mr. Bury has completed the docu- mentation of British policies towards European problems in 1920, and in some cases early 1921. Into a first chapter containing only forty-eight documents he has swept various Western European odds and ends, even the long-projected Channel tunnel. British military and naval authorities did not object to the tunnel. The Foreign Office did, in a memorandum drafted for cabinet circulation which ranks as a collector’s piece. Arguing from the pre-1815 traditional enmity, 1893 disputes over the Siam border, Fashoda, and French unfriendliness during the Boer War, while resolutely ignoring the entente cordiale and the Great War, the department concluded that Anglo-French relations ‘never have been, are not, and probably never will be, sufficiently stable and friendly to justify the construction of a Channel tunnel, and the loss of the security which our insular

H.M.C., H . of Lds., n.s. XI, Addenda, 1514-1714, ed. M. F. Bond (196r), in which pp. 69-322 cover the years 1604-42.

la Perhaps demography and the family constitute exceptions to this, but even there I am not sure1

including Russian Questions, January qa+April 1921, lxxxvii + 841 pp.. 95s., and vol. xiii, The Near and Middle East, January 19m-March 1921, lxxxiii + 747 pp., Bos., edited by Rohan Butler and J . P. T. Bury, assisted by M. E. Lambert; Series IA vol. i, The Aftermath of Locarno, 1925-1926, lxxiii + 881 pp., logs., edited by W. N. Medlicott, Douglas Dakin and M. E. Lanibert. London: H.M.S.O. 1962-66.

D o c u n f E N T s ON GERMAN FOREIGN POLICY 1918-1945: Series C, The Third Reich: First Phase, vol. iv, April, 1935-March 4, 1936, lxxvii + 1272 pp., Sos., and vol. v, March 5. 1936-October 31, 1936 lxxxi + 1208 pp., 77s. 6d.; Series D, The War Years, vol. xii, February I , 1941-June 22, 1941, lwi + 1109 pp., 6os., and vol. xiii, June z j , 1941-Decernber 11, 1941, lxxx + 1035 pp,, 60s. London: H.M.S.O. 1969-66.

’ DOCUMENTS ON BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY 191I)-1939: First Series, VOl. X i i , EUrO#h?iIn,

REVIEW ARTICLES 293 position’, despite recent ‘wonderful scientific and mechanical develop- ments. . . continues to bestow’. T h e post-war Anglo-French tensions which prompted these jaundiced views, already illustrated in previous volumes, are much in evidence in the following chapters. The next volume provides a melancholy record of ineptness and failure. Bol- shevik re-assertion of Russian power in the Caucasus and Central Asia reinforces the lesson of the earlier volumes: the inadequacy of British military, political and economic resources for the foreign policy which was adopted after the Great War. Britain’s failure under Lloyd George and Curzon to abandon attitudes formed in the days of imperial greatness and to frame policies which better accorded with the realities of her new international position, are however even more poignantly shown with the rise of Kemalist Turkey and the strained relations with Iran, the Arab rulers and the former French and Italian allies. Documentation of British policies in the Near and Middle East is necessarily incomplete. I t is not editorial practice to utilize the files of the War, India and Colonial Offices which are essential for their full understanding. Egypt, not independent until 1922, falls outside Mr. Bury’s purview. But the record is interesting and important, and it illuminates an old and thorny problem by showing that mistranslation into Arabic of McMahon’s famous offer of Syria to Hussein of the Hejaz had concealed from Hussein im- portant British war-time reservations about French rights in Syria. This makes British acceptance of France’s expelling Hussein’s son Feisal from Syria in 1910 a little less odious than it has hitherto seemed. But it leaves unresolved the contradictions on the British side between McMahon’s offer and the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the story of the implementation of the Balfour Declaration through the establishment of the Palestine Mandate remains as treacherous a Serbonian bog as ever.

The appearance of the volume on The Aftermath of Locarno marks considerable editorial changes for the British collection. T o expedite publication, the First Series has been subdivided at 16 Oct- ober 1925 when the Locarno Agreements were initialled ne vurietur. Miss Lambert assumes special responsibility for the present volume and future volumes in the new Series IA. Professor Medlicott inherits from Mr. Butler both senior editorship and special responsibility for the Second Series, after the ‘fifty-year rule’ barring the archives to independent researchers for the last fifty years has been replaced by the ‘thirty-year rule’. Implementing the new rule in the manner rather nai’vely expected by some historians when it was announced would have seriously devalued before publication all future volumes in Series I and IA (a fate possible for most of them under the fifty-year rule also if fairly administered) and in the Second Series. However, the official historians will complete their labours before the Foreign Office archives are fully opened outside the thirty-year ban.

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This bureaucratic paternalism by the Foreign Office accords ill with the manner in which it has discharged its duties as custodian of the diplomatic archives for the period between the mid-1920’s and mid-1930’s. Obviously the proliferation of modern archive material necessitates extensive weeding out of documents unlikely to possess permanent departmental or historical importance, but Miss Lambert reveals that much of that process for this period was performed by junior officials without adequate recognition of the historical interest of the documents destroyed. Stricter control will prevent future de- predations of the kind which eliminated about a third of the 1926 papers on German affairs. Deficiencies in the file on the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ of September 1924 ‘may or may not be due to the same cause’. Much of the missing German material was unimportant or is still available elsewhere (e.g. in Treasury files). The forgery of the ‘Zino- viev Letter’ and Ramsay MacDonalds well-founded suspicions on that score are now conclusively established; nevertheless the absence of the original draft of the British protest is disquieting. Some future suspicions might be avoided if archive material were microfilmed before destruction. The cost in money and shelf space would be supportable.

The volume opens with a Foreign Office memorandum of 10 Jan- uary 1926 on the Locarno Treaties, which it hopes will turn the sometimes ‘precarious armistice’ of the dangerous post-war years into a real peace. Britain’s price for this was merely to assume obligations in the Rhineland which were restricted to circumstances in which her vital interests had in any case made intervention almost certain. Britain remained ‘the judge whether the casus foederis has arisen’; mutual confidence had been restored between the former allies as well as between them and Germany; and all disputes arising from the execution of Versailles were ‘virtually at an end’. In November 1925 Chamberlain prophetically observed that even if Germany accepted some new French demands for further security against the German General Staff’s revival: ‘couldn’t a corporal drive a coach and four through them?’ But he could not have foreseen that within ten years a British government would argue that remilitarization of the Rhine- land did not constitute a threat to Belgium and Francc under Locarno, since there was obviously no intention to proceed from that step to invading their territories-still less that its French counterpart would shrink from using France’s undoubted military superiority to maintain one of the greatest guarantees of her security.

But the volume documenting the third year of German foreign policy under the corporal begins with British acceptance of the re- construction of Germany’s navy. Ribbentrop secured his first diplomatic triumph by making the Anglo-German naval treaty, which was widely regarded as condoning Hitler’s destruction of the Ver- sailles disarmament provisions in return for limiting the Nazi fleet

REVIEW ARTICLES 3 95 to 35% of British strength, with an escape clause allowing submarine parity-if danger from Russia made that necessary. By then Britain was well on the road which led to Munich. The ‘Stresa front’ of Britain, France and Italy against Germany was already a mere pre- tence before Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia had been publicly prepared in the spring. In these documents, as at the time, the Abyssinian crisis dominates the scene, and Hitler tried to exploit Mussolini’s difficulties to force him to abandon Austria, and to denounce Locarno, to open the way for German remilitarization of the Rhineland. Mussolini sought to instigate German denunciation of Locarno so that the west would be too busy to proceed with sanctions against Italy. Britain was preoccupied with sanctions over Italy and had far less interest in the Rhineland; France reversed this order of priority. The theoretically obvious danger that remilitarization would provoke a hostile coalition could hardly become a reality. Britain was as un- likely as Italy to move against remilitarization. The Franco-Soviet treaty, concluded with strong reservations on both sides, was played down by Laval in conversations with both the Italians and the Germans. Litvinov at the revolutionary celebration banquet on 7 November drank a toast to the rebirth of Russo-German friendship, and often abused Laval to the Germans. I t is not surprising, therefore, that Hitler decided in February 1936 that though military Germany was still too weak for the move, ‘Political developments . . . made one wonder whether the psychological moment had not arrived now’, and he curiously added that the relative military strengths of other states, especially Russia, were increasing. This volume makes clear how widespread by that time were expectations of the coup, and how justified was his belief that it would not be forcibly opposed despite German military inferiority.

But what were his intentions if it were opposed? A brief editorial note refers the reader to the Nuremberg documents for the crucial military orders by Bloinberg on 2 March 1936 to prepare for entry into the zone, and to microfilms for Fritsch’s 3 March operational orders and Blomberg’s 5 March executive orders fixing 7 March for the entry. These should have been printed in full, together with the relevant previous directives, of which only one has appeared in full in this collection in the shape of Reichenau’s letter of 30 March 1935 to the three commanders-in-chief (Series C, iii, no. 568) though Blomberg’s important directive of 25 October 1933 is briefly sum- marized in an editorial note (Series C, ii, p. 42). This asserted that if withdrawal from the League and Disarmament Conference brought invasion of Germany, the government was determined ‘to offer armed resistance locally regardless of prospects of military success,’ and that the line Roer-Rhine and the Black Forest would be held against Franco-Belgian attack, the paramilitary police acting as shield until the army could move into the demilitarized zone. On 3 May 1934

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Blomberg ordered preparation of resistance and concentration zones for fighting retreat in the event of invasion. A ‘General order for concentration and battle’ of 10 July 1935 which has since disappeared, was almost certainly similar in tenor to the 1934 and March 1936 orders.a

Yet in March 1936 rumours were current that the occupying forces would retreat if the French marched, and both Hitler himself and some of his generals later asserted that the March 1936 orders would have been so interpreted. This view was propounded at Nuremberg and is still widely held. Nothing in volume v disproves it, and Blom- berg and Fritsch may have taken it at the time. But if Hitler was ready to fight in October 1933 regardless of prospects of military success, he is unlikely to have adopted a weaker attitude in March 1936. Keitel’s posthumously published memoirs record that the ‘acute danger’ of military sanctions by France, and the Western Powers’ sharp protests led Blomberg to suggest withdrawing the three bat- talions which had crossed the Rhine (but apparently not the other sixteen in the zone), but Hitler insisted that ‘if the enemy attacked they were to fight, and not give way an inch. Orders to that effect were then issued’, and these were maintained against Blomberg’s and Fritsch’s protest^.^

The Germans were apparently unaware of the early dissensions within the French cabinet, and of the French service chiefs’ advice against a counter-move into the zone, advice which became practically impossible to override later as appeasement gained increasing sway in Britain and among the French politicians. Eden immediately saw that the initial French decision to repeat the performances of March 1935 over German rearmament, by bringing the coup before the League Council, implied that France was not treating it as a ‘flagrant violation’ of Locarno, calling for immediate counter-action. When Flandin later got his cabinet’s and Belgium’s approval to resort to military sanctions it was too late. Eden denounced the breach of Locarno, but affirmed that Britain would support Belgium and France only if they were actually invaded. The Germans were soon confident enough to protest arrogantly against the resumption of Anglo-Belgian-French General Staff talks. By July Hitler was con- temptuously ignoring British pleas that he should implement the proposals with which he had accompanied the coup: return to the League, a new Locarno on terms of ‘full equality’, new attempts at disarmament with the same specious proviso, and non-aggression pacts with all his eastern and south-eastern neighbours, including Austria and Czechoslovakia, on the model of the January 1934 Ger- man-Polish pact.

* D. C. Watt, ‘German Plans lor the Reoccupation of the Rhincland: A Note’, Journal of Contemporary H i s t o y : vol., I , no. 4, 1966, p . 193-99. Mr. Watt was a member of the British team engage in cditing the German 8plomatic documents. ’ The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel, ed. W. Gorlitz, London, 1965. p. 325.

REVIEW ARTICLES 497 After his riskiest gamble so far had succeeded, transforming the

European political and strategic scene overnight, Hitler’s power over German people and High Command alike was indisputable, and in August he ordered that Germany should be ready for war by 1940. Despite Mussolini’s ambiguities the course of the Austrian problem and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War completed the work of the Abyssinian crisis in putting Italy at Germany’s side. On 23 Octo- ber the basis of the future Rome-Berlin Axis was laid, and next day Ribbentrop scored his second triumph (the Axis was really Hitler’s) with the initialling of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. Neurath and the Weimar diplomats still ran the Wilhelmstrasse but its func- tions were increasingly becoming merely executive. The fluidity in international relations which had characterized even 1935 had yielded to the emerging pattern of rigidity which would explode into the Second World War. But that war was certainly still not inevitable even after the Rhineland coup.

Volumes xii-xiii of Series D in the German documents show Hitler first preparing the way for his attack on Russia in 1941 while con- cealing his intention as far as possible; and next involuntarily, though not reluctantly, being involved by Japan in her war against America, instead of making Japan a partner against Russia. No significant new evidence appears, and indeed some important material known from other sources is omitted, notably his decision on 14 July 1941 to reduce the size of the German army and navy on the assumption that Russian collapse was imminent. Naval manning and equipment would be limited to what was needed against Britain, ‘and, should the occasion arise, against America’. But there is much interesting new detail. German relations with the Balkan states, before and after the attacks on Yugoslavia and Greece, are especially well handled. On 28 April Thomsen, the Washington chargd, reported from ‘an absolutely reliable source’ America’s breaking of the Japanese dip- lomatic radio codes. There is no evidence that Ribbentrop informed Tokyo, and the well-known decision to give Japan no inkling of ‘Barbarossa’ had been made in March. Ribbentrop’s dislike of ‘Barbarossa’, hinted at here, has recently been confirmed by Soviet sources. His and Hitler’s contemptuous attitude towards America contrast with their care to avoid bringing her into the European war, both before and after the attack on Russia, but they were sincere in urging that attacking Singapore would both make Japan absolutely dominant in East Asia and force America to remain neutral. They were clearly misleading in discussing with Matsuoka possibilities of German-Soviet hostilities in terms of Soviet instead of German aggression. Mussolini, treated with notable shabbiness, was put on the same level as Horthy before the Balkan campaign, and told of ‘Barbarossa’ only on 2 1 June. These essential points of the Tripartite Pact Powers’ relationships have long been known, but the manner

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in which German policy combined diplomatic preparations for ‘Barbarossa’ with schemes to encompass Britain’s downfall and establish the European ‘new order’ is thoroughly documented for the first time. Vichy France, with her African and Middle Eastern lands, looms large, and little is left of the myth of PCtain’s ‘double game’. Stalin, like PCtain, approved Nazi moves in the Middle East which ultimately threatened Russian and French as well as British interests. Finally, an interesting intelligence problem is posed by the Harbin consulate‘s provision of decoded Soviet circular dispatches.

Germany was adequately informed of Japanese southern objectives and of the probability of Japanese-American hostilities, though not by the Japanese government. On 21 November a report from the Tokyo military attach6 listed the objectives and added: ‘In the event of a threatening American attitude, about which there can hardly be any doubt, a surprise attack on the Philippines’. O n 3 December Japan demanded immediate revision of the Tripartite Pact. There was a slight delay, as Hitler was on the eastern front, but virtually no bargaining before Japan got her way: Germany and Italy would join her against America, but Japan would not declare war against Russia or allow the Axis to share the spoils of Japan’s ‘new order’. Hitler’s concern was to give his navy time to begin the Atlantic retaliations against America before Roosevelt could humiliate Ger- many by forestalling her. But Thomsen rightly reported on 8 Decem- ber that it was uncertain whether Roosevelt would ask Congress to declare war on the Axis as well as on Japan. No plans had been made for war on America, and the directive of 8 December, the day after Pearl Harbour, merely ordered a defensive on the Russian front, allegedly because of the ‘surprisingly early arrival of severe winter weather’. This massive and uniquely scholarly documentation of a former defeated enemy’s foreign policy reaches its appropriate chrono- logical tcrm with an account of the theatrical procedures to be adopted for the Axis public statemcnts on 1 1 December, about the declaration of war and the new Tripartite Pact. Characteristically, the Germans were deterrnincd not to allow Mussolini in Rome to steal the show-but then they necded a propaganda stroke to offset their failure before Moscow.

When on 23 March 1942 Hitler issued his next military directive it would be on the theme of defending Europe against invasion. The invaders envisaged were British. The unspoken premises were that 1942 would see final victory in Russia and America fully occupied in the Pacific. University of Hull FRANK SPENCER