Counterfactuals

A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

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1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Recently, I read Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. It’s an excellent book, both illuminating and informative (being airminded, I found the section on the Austrian and German bombing of Italy to be especially fascinating), and I highly recommend it.¹

But there was one section which brought me up short. In a section on Britain’s entry into the war, Kramer says that the breach of Belgian neutrality by Germany was a gift to Asquith and Grey, because it meant that the war could be framed as a just war. Absolutely. Then he goes on to say:

At the time, British decision-makers could only sense intuitively what we know today — this was far more than a conservative defence of the status quo: had Germany succeeded at the Marne in September 1914, which it almost did, the defeat of France and a separate peace would have been followed by a defeat of Russia and, after a pause to build up the German navy, the invasion of Britain from a position of towering strength on the Continent.²

Which is where I went ‘Huh?’ Do we really know that? Because I didn’t know we knew that.
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1. Reading really good books is depressing when you’re in the middle of writing a thesis — Nicoletta F. Gullace’s “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) was another. Which suggests a New Year’s resolution: to read only rubbish …
2. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95.

WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names.

This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be a South Australian recruiting poster, showing how the map of Australia might be redrawn if Germany won. Australia itself becomes “New-Germany”; Perth becomes Tirpitzburg; Adelaide, Hindenburg; Brisbane, Bernhardiburg; Sydney, Nietscheburg [sic]; Tasmania (not Hobart), Kaisermania; and, most appropriately from my point of view, Melbourne would be renamed Zeppelinburg!

I don’t think much has been written on German plans for Australia in the event of victory in the First World War, probably because the Germans themselves gave very little thought to the place. However, it seems unlikely that Germany would have wanted to take over Australia lock, stock and barrel; better to turn us into some sort of client state instead. They’d probably have wanted to take a few of Britain’s colonial possessions in the area, and perhaps would have insisted upon reparations or favourable trade terms. And our battlecruiser HMAS Australia — which caused von Spee such headaches in 1914 — would no doubt have had to go. No independent foreign policy, perhaps (not that we had much of one as it was!) But we probably wouldn’t have had to go so far as to need to translate such phrases as “don’t come the raw prawn with me, mate” into German — fortunately!

This idea that we had to fight Germany in France in order to prevent the Kaiser’s victory parade down Swanston St had obvious potential as a motivational device, and was used in stories and films as well. Did people really believe it? The Daily Mail said that the poster had ‘great success’, so perhaps they did.