The Impact of the Two World Wars

The First World War seems to have come as a shock to the government of Britain. In spite of the increasingly large public expenditures of the previous three decades on the Royal Navy, and in spite of the emergence of its own military-industrial complex, Britain entered the First World War almost wholly unprepared for it. This sprang largely from the inability of Britain’s military advisers to consider anything but past glories, glories, moreover, of the 18th century rather than the 19th. As French’s (1986) investigations reveal, Liberal military policies in 1914 reiterated those of the 18th century in giving primacy to the role of the Navy to keep the seas open, and to financial and banking support of continental allies whose armies would do the main land-fighting. Britain went into the war with a Navy confident of a short, sharp and successful engagement with the German fleet, and a small professional army not expecting to be called out but grooming their horses just in case. In the event, the German fleet proved equal to the British, the Army had to be massively expanded via conscription and Britain’s ability to fund and manage the finances of its allies collapsed only marginally less quickly than did theirs.