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Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691638331 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #744 |
| Pages: | 578 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Knowing One's Enemies
Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars
By Ernest R. May
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04717-1
CHAPTER 1
CABINET, TSAR, KAISER: THREE APPROACHES TO ASSESSMENT
By Ernest R. May
The following pages describe three governments at moments when they were casting up the potential balance of forces — Britain in mid-1911 and tsarist Russia and imperial Germany in late 1912. Experts already know the stories. They are retold here partly to illustrate what is meant by "assessment," partly to compare three different types of organization, and partly to orient nonexperts to a distant but terrifyingly instructive period.
In each episode, the persons engaged are heads of government, ministers, chiefs of staff — actors, not analysts. Intelligence officers scarcely appear at all. Intelligence estimates do. But the instances illustrate the point that intelligence estimation and assessment are not the same.
The polar types of organization for assessment are collegial, with several more or less independent minds in play, and centralized, where only one judgment matters. The latter, however, include centralized organizations directed by persons who merely choose among views put before them and others directed by individuals who impose their own views. The prewar British system was collegial. The Russian and German systems were centralized, but the one passively, the other hyperactively led. The three examples suggest differing weaknesses peculiar to each type of organization.
The first episode occurred during the second Moroccan crisis. With war seeming possible, Britain's Secretary of State for War, Richard Burdon Haldane (later Viscount Haldane), prevailed on Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith to call into special session the Committee of Imperial Defence (or CID). The meeting took place on Wednesday, August 23, 1911.
The crisis dated back to July 1, when the German gunboat Panther appeared off Agadir, a tiny market town on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Half a dozen years earlier, Britain and France had come to an entente. By challenging France's claim to dominance in Morocco, the Germans tested the entente's firmness. When the British proved resolute, the Germans backed off. The appearance of the Panther at Agadir posed a new test.
Speaking at a Mansion House banquet, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George declared strong British interest. Historians disagree as to what he meant to say and to whom. The German ambassador, however, protested. Hearing "the tone of an ultimatum," Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, alerted Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, and Reginald McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty. When the warning reached Haldane, he appealed to Asquith to summon the CID.
At No. 2 Whitehall Gardens, a Georgian townhouse in a cul-de-sac between Whitehall and the Embankment, about a block from Downing Street, the Committee met in a ground-floor room looking out across the rear lawn over a high brick wall to masts and smokestacks gliding along the Thames. Murals of French peasants gamboling in hazy sunshine surrounded the conference table where the Prime Minister sat, flanked by Grey, McKenna, Haldane, Lloyd George, Churchill, four senior army officers, and three admirals, one serving as secretary.
Asquith asked what Britain could do if war came. Responding for the army, General Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations, called for promptly sending an Expeditionary Force to France. The Germans, he said, had 121 divisions. France had sixty-four. Though Russia would be France's ally, she would need three months to mobilize. Most of her armies would be pinned down by Germany's ally, Austria-Hungary. But, said Wilson, since the Germans would have to funnel their offensive through a ninety-mile gap in northeastern France, they would fight on a forty-division front. Given their need to keep some forces in reserve, the French could meet them with perhaps thirty-nine divisions. Hence, he declared it "quite likely that our six divisions might prove to be the deciding factor."
Churchill asked why the Germans would not broaden their front by sweeping through Belgium. "Much too dangerous," the general replied. The strength of Belgian forts and the menace of the Belgian army, he said, would serve as sure deterrents.
The Prime Minister turned to the Admiralty. Since the Royal Navy outmatched the German navy in almost every type of ship, and recent studies discounted the danger of invasion, Asquith went directly to the fleet's ability to move British divisions to France. McKenna minced no words. The navy, he said, "could spare no men, no officers, and no ships" for such a mission. Supporting him, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur K. Wilson, the First Sea Lord, explained that the navy expected to need army units for tasks such as seizing Wilhelmshaven or raiding the German coast.
Churchill, having fought in the Boer War and studied European military history, exclaimed that an attack on heavily fortified Wilhelmshaven was "surely out of the question." Field Marshal Sir William Nicholson, the army Chief of Staff, pointed out that a comparable operation, the Japanese siege of Port Arthur, had required 200,000 men and cost 70,000 lives.
Undeterred, the admiral continued that ships would in any case be unavailable because the Admiralty planned a close blockade of the German coast. "He would add," say the official minutes, "that the intention of the Admiralty to order this close blockade was one which it was absolutely essential to keep secret. It was not even known to the Fleet." Pressed again by Churchill, the admiral conceded that a close blockade involved risk to capital ships. To the question of how the navy could scatter warships for a close blockade and yet be prepared to concentrate for a decisive sea battle, he had no clear answer. Discussion trailed off, and Asquith adjourned the meeting.
The exchanges cannot have improved the maps in the minds of those who attended. No one can have departed comprehending better apparent contingencies or the current or prospective balance of forces. In retrospect, this CID session seems a model of how not to conduct assessment.
The poor performance was not due to lack of talent. Asquith could be lazy and slow to stopper the brandy, but no one questioned his preciseness of mind. He himself thought Grey and McKenna the intellectual superiors of Churchill and Lloyd George. None of the professionals was a nonentity. Admiral Arthur Wilson held a Victoria Cross for bravery, had patented inventions, and had been recommended for First Sea Lord by his predecessor, Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, on ground that "he thinks a lot." The participants failed to develop any coherent collective assessment in part because none of them went to the meeting with such an outcome in view. Each person had some other goal.
Shepherding a fractious parliamentary majority, Asquith wanted above all to escape a Cabinet row. He took care not to invite some ministers who ordinarily attended CID sessions, for they would have insisted on questioning whether Britain should aid France at all. The meeting convinced him to put Churchill in McKenna's place as First Lord of the Admiralty and have Churchill name a new First Sea Lord to replace Admiral Wilson. "Sir A. Wilson's 'plan'" for a coastal blockade, he wrote Haldane, "can only be described as puerile." But Asquith managed the change, as he had managed the meeting, with an eye to minimizing potentially divisive debate.
The War Office contingent wanted to sell the Expeditionary Force concept. Privately, General Henry Wilson doubted that six divisions would do. "Fifty too few," he commented to a friend. Hoping that the government, in for a penny, would stay for a pound, he and the other generals dreamed of conscript armies comparable to those on the Continent.
McKenna and the admirals wanted simply to hold their own. Not long before the CID meeting, Admiral Fisher wrote to McKenna of the Expeditionary Force notion, "The whole single object is compulsory service and an increase of the Army estimates and military influence. "7 The naval contingent went to No. 2 Whitehall Gardens intent on giving not an inch to further a War Office plot.
While the ostensible purpose of the meeting was to assess the balance and consider alternative strategies, the key participants had other matters on their minds, and the collegial structure of the CID enabled them to pursue separate ends without having fully to confront their differences. Since the CID made no decisions and existed solely so that the services and the Foreign Office could question one another, with everyone exposed to interrogation by the Prime Minister and informed outsiders such as Churchill, it might have seemed an ideal forum for discovering and correcting discrepancies in mental maps.
In practice, however, collegiality inhibited dialogue. Men deferred to one another's presumed expertise. While one might dispute another's logic, he hesitated to question his facts. At the meeting of August 23, General Wilson's facts made a forceful case for a six-division Expeditionary Force. Asquith's later telling Haldane that four divisions would do suggests that he called upon facts of his own. Neither he nor anyone else, however, pressed the general directly to justify his intelligence appraisal.
In truth, Wilson had a shaky case. The Germans did not then have 121 divisions. They had eighty-five, and twenty-two were reserve units regarded by Wilson's friends in the French General Staff as unfit for front-line service. Instead of a maximum of sixty-four divisions, the French had sixty-eight, only eighteen composed of reservists. Moreover, the very use of the division metric exaggerated the German numbers. On average, a German infantry division had 12,000 to 13,000 riflemen, while a French division had 15,000. Though Wilson may have been right that Russia would need three months to mobilize, Russian generals were telling the French they could go on the offensive in two to three weeks. As for Wilson's assertion that the Austrians could handle the Russians almost by themselves, that was emphatically not the view in Vienna. And Wilson himself actually possessed intelligence that a sweep through Belgium figured in German war plans. He had just been warning the French to prepare for such a contingency.
That others at the meeting did not challenge Wilson was not because the army held and concealed the relevant facts. Detailed figures for German ground forces had been published, for example, in the April 1911 issue of the Revue militaire des armées étrangères, available to any subscriber from the firm of R. Chapelot of the Rue Christine in Paris. Possibly, McKenna and other opponents of the Expeditionary Force did not read about armies. Possibly they feared that someone might question their numbers. More likely, they anticipated that a challenge would produce no effect. General Wilson could insist on the validity of his numbers. No one would be able to make him accept others. The Prime Minister had no resources for making a conclusive ruling or, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, to insist on an independent review. Collegiality almost necessitated mutual deference.
Secondly, collegiality encouraged reticence. Although the abstract interests of the government might have been served had everyone come away from the meeting understanding reality a little better, the particular interests of particular individuals did not obviously benefit from giving away information. Maurice Hankey, then a marine officer on the CID staff, wrote to Admiral Fisher after the August 23 meeting expressing surprise that Admiral Wilson had said so much about "naval intentions." General Henry Wilson seemed forthcoming at the August 23 meeting because it suited his momentary purposes. Ordinarily, as Paul Kennedy's chapter amply demonstrates, members of the CID disclosed relatively little to one another. Though the August 23 session was an extreme case, since Asquith had deliberately not invited the ministers likely to be most contentious, the collegial form of organization encouraged deference and reticence. Every participant could cherish the intelligence appraisal that matched his purposes or preconceptions. The outcome was muddle. In 1911 it did not seem to matter, for the Germans again backed down. But the collegial system continued to yield muddle up to and beyond 1914.
The second tale concerns tsarist Russia in autumn of 1912, during the First Balkan War. In the previous spring a group of nations led by Serbia had attacked the Ottoman Empire. Surprisingly successful, these allies reduced Turkey-in-Europe to a strip of beach beside the Bosphorus. Serbia came out with a reputation for having a powerful and efficient army. Also, Serbia took over the valleys through which trade caravans traveled from the middle Danube basin to Salonika on the Aegean. Fearing Serbia's added magnetism for discriminated-against Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, officials in Vienna felt that they had somehow to rein in the Serbs — and be seen to have done so. A sense of crisis existed because Serbian defiance could set off a chain of explosions ending in a general European war.
In St. Petersburg, Pan-Slavs advocated backing the Serbs to the limit. Others, mindful of Russia's recent reverses, were appalled by the possible consequences. When mid-November brought reports that Austria-Hungary was building up forces on both the Serbian and the Russian frontiers and that Germany was alerting reservists in East Prussia for a call-up, foreigners forecast that Russia would put some of its army on a war footing. On November 21, a London Times correspondent telegraphed that Russian officials flatly denied any such intention. No one, he said, believed them.
On that very night, the chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers, Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsov, received a telephone call from the Minister of War, General Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov. The general said that the Tsar wished to see the two of them and Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov at ten the following morning. He professed not to know the reason.
Kokovtsov did not have easy relations with Sukhomlinov. Remaining Finance Minister after becoming Prime Minister the year before, he had complete responsibility for putting together the state budget, reconciling the competing claims of spending departments, defending the results before the legislative Duma, and raising the money to pay the bills. The army always vexed him, for it had almost unlimited credit with the Tsar. Earlier in the autumn of 1912, thinking that he had an understanding with Sukhomlinov on the military budget, he had presented figures to the Duma, only to learn afterward that the War Minister had been authorized additional millions after a private interview with Nicholas II. Little wonder, then, that Kokovtsov reacted suspiciously to Sukhomlinov's call and telephoned Sazonov to ask what might be up. But the Foreign Minister seemed to know no more than he. Indeed, Sazonov said that he had seen the Tsar that very day and not even been told there was to be another meeting.
On the following morning, at the railroad station in St. Petersburg, Kokovtsov found not only Sukhomlinov and Sazonov but also the army Chief of Staff, General Yakov Grigorevich Zhilinskii, and Sergei Vasilevich Rukhlov, the Minister of Transport and Communications. The fifteen-mile ride southeast to Tsarskoe Selo took about thirty minutes. Trains carrying officials and members of the imperial household traveled on a special second set of tracks recently laid alongside the original 1837 line. At the station and during the trip, according to Kokovtsov, Sukhomlinov continued to say that he did not know what the Tsar intended.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Knowing One's Enemies by Ernest R. May. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. v
- LIST OF MAPS AND CHART, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- ABBREVIATIONS USED IN FOOTNOTES, pg. xi
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- 1. Cabinet, Tsar, Kaiser: Three Approaches to Assessment, pg. 11
- 2. Austria-Hungary, pg. 37
- 3. Imperial Germany, pg. 62
- 4. The Russian Empire, pg. 98
- 5. France and the German Menace, pg. 127
- 6. French Estimates of Germany's Operational War Plans, pg. 150
- 7. Great Britain before 1914, pg. 172
- 8. Italy before 1915: The Quandary of the Vulnerable, pg. 205
- 9. British Intelligence and the Coming of the Second World War in Europe, pg. 237
- 10. French Military Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1938- 1939, pg. 271
- 11. National Socialist Germany: The Politics of Information, pg. 310
- 12. Fascist Italy Assesses Its Enemies, 1935-1940, pg. 347
- 13. Threat Identification and Strategic Appraisal by the Soviet Union, 1930-1941, pg. 375
- 14. Japanese Intelligence before the Second World War: "Best Case" Analysis, pg. 424
- 15. Great Britain's Assessment of Japan before the Outbreak of the Pacific War, pg. 456
- 16. United States Views of Germany and Japan in 1941, pg. 476
- Conclusions: Capabilities and Proclivities, pg. 503
- CONTRIBUTORS, pg. 543
- INDEX, pg. 547