Joined-up fighting: the road to a unified Ministry of Defence, part 1
The First World War exposed the gaps between the armed services, but it took nearly half a century to bring the fighting forces together under unified control
From cabinet to war cabinet
Before 1918, the UK had two branches of the armed forces, the Army and the Royal Navy, and each had its own government department and political chief: the War Office, run by the secretary of state for war, was responsible for the Army, while the Admiralty, with the first lord at its head, was in charge of the Royal Navy. Both of these ministers sat in the cabinet as a matter of course, meaning there was virtually no forum for coordinated military policy at a lower level, though Lord Salisbury had formed a cabinet defence committee in 1895, which in 1902 was transformed into the committee of imperial defence (CID), chaired by the prime minister but designed to consider long-term strategy and organise in-depth research rather than carry out the administration of the services.
During the First World War, there had been serious concerns in Whitehall that the relationship between the War Office and the Admiralty was too much one of rival fiefs than brothers-in-arms. Overall direction of the war initially remained the responsibility of the full cabinet, which numbered 23 by the end of H.H. Asquith’s premiership and was clearly unwieldy and unworkable. At the end of 1916, dissatisfaction began to grow, and an alternative structure was sought. The idea of a three-man war council, excluding the service ministers, seems to have started with Maurice Hankey, a former Royal Marines officer who had been appointed secretary of the CID in 1912. He was a bureaucrat par excellence, and applied his neat, careful mind to the cabinet system. The war council was the obvious solution.
David Lloyd George, formerly chancellor of the exchequer but now holding the key post of war secretary after his predecessor, the legendary Lord Kitchener, had been lost at sea, liked the idea of a committee, chaired by himself, to direct the war. Even at the War Office, Lloyd George lacked complete control over military policy, as the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir William Robertson, had been granted the right to give strategic advice to the cabinet on his appointment the previous year. The CIGS was a supporter of the idea of a small war council, and advised Lloyd George to “stick to it”.
Asquith was tired after eight years as prime minister and often less sober than he should have been, and perhaps still in mourning for the end of his passionate relationship with Venetia Stanley, his twenty-something confidante. It is debated whether their association was ever consummated sexually, but from 1910 to 195, Asquith wrote to her constantly, often three times a day and sometimes in cabinet meetings, and she seems to have responded. He relied on her heavily for advice, but the pressure grew too much and in 1915 she married his cabinet colleague Edwin Montagu, who had courted her for years. This was the man who was at the head of the British government as the war entered its third year and the Army went through the unimaginable savagery of the Somme.
Initially opposed to the three-man war council, which he saw would make him a figurehead, Asquith then indicated he might consent, so long as the council reported to him and he was allowed to attend whenever he wanted. But that missed the point of the whole exercise which was, in the end, to substitute Lloyd George for Asquith and lassitude with dynamism. On 3 December, he spoke to the Unionist leader, Bonar Law, and agreed that a substantial reconstruction of the government, short of his own head on a charger, would satisfy his coalition allies. Later he played bridge with Duff Cooper, a young Foreign Office official, his lost love Venetia Montagu and Lady Gwendeline Churchill, sister-in-law of Winston; Cooper recorded that Asquith was “more drunk than I have ever seen him, (...) so drunk that one felt uncomfortable”.
The Times weighed in on 4 December to support Lloyd George’s elevation to that almost-supreme position. The prime minister, enraged by the editorial in The Times, tried to outgame Lloyd George, but even such political deftness as he had had at Relugas in 1905 (which had of course ended in failure) had vanished by now. He threatened—“Unless the impression is at once corrected that I am being relegated to the position of an irresponsible spectator of the War, I cannot possibly go on”—but couldn’t see that his departure was no longer a threat but the desired outcome. Lloyd George simply argued that he could not control the newspapers.
It was effectively over, but there would be punch and counter-punch. On 5 December, Lloyd George fought back by offering his resignation, but Asquith knew he could not go on without the Welshman. The “three Cs” of the Unionist Party, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and Lord Robert Cecil, said they would not serve without Lloyd George, and Law had already made it clear that the loss of Lloyd George would mean the loss of the confidence of the Unionists. Asquith was now faced with a general collapse, later writing “When I fully realised what a position had been created, I saw that I could not go on without dishonour or impotence, or both.” He went to the Palace at 7.00 pm and tendered his resignation (and that of his government) to the king, George V, then returned to Downing Street, where he was in good cheer. His daughter-in-law, Lady Cynthia, related “I sat next to the P.M.—he was too darling—rubicund, serene, puffing a guinea cigar [a gift from Maud Cunard] and talking of going to Honolulu.”
The king was faced with a difficult choice. With the departure of Asquith, he could have attempted to find another Liberal who could command the House of Commons; instead, he followed his father’s precedent of 1905, when Balfour had resigned, and turned to the leader of the next-largest party in the House, Bonar Law. But the Unionist chief, who had grown close to Lloyd George and was realistic about his personal power, had no desire to take the reins, and refused to become prime minister. He knew he needed Liberal votes to sustain a government, and he knew that only Lloyd George could deliver them. If that inexorably led to the conclusion that Lloyd George must be prime minister, that was a sacrifice Law was willing to make. For appearances’ sake, Law enquired whether Asquith would serve under him, expecting, and receiving, a negative response.
When Lloyd George accepted the king’s commission to form a government on 7 December, most of the senior Liberals stayed loyal to Asquith, but enough supported the ministry to make it on the one hand viable but on the other Unionist-dominated. There were barely 20 Liberal ministers, plus a handful of whips, and a few Labour Members; otherwise it was a Unionist ministry, with Law as chancellor of the exchequer.
Installed as prime minister, Lloyd George, no longer needing to sideline his former chief, did not create a three-man war council but set up a war cabinet of five, of whom only one, Law, had a departmental brief. The others were the Unionist peer Lord Curzon, lord president of the Council and leader of the House of Lords; the Labour leader Arthur Henderson as minister without portfolio; and the German-born colonial administrator and Balliol classicist Viscount Milner, also minister without portfolio. This was a radically different way of directing policy. Not only did it create a decision-making body which was entirely dedicated to the conduct of the war; when necessary the service ministers, by now Sir Edward Carson (Admiralty) and the Earl of Derby (War Office), attended but they were not full members and concentrated on the administration of the Royal Navy and Army. Just as importantly, for the first time Lloyd George established a War Cabinet Secretariat to take care of the administrative affairs of the body and—hard to believe this was an innovation—to keep minutes.
The secretary to the new war cabinet was Major Maurice Hankey, secretary of the CID (see above). His assistant secretary at the Committee of Imperial Defence, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Dally Jones, joined him in the new secretariat. Hankey was believed to have devised the new structure and persuaded Lloyd George to adopt it; certainly it was a long-standing concern. When he had been interviewed by Lord Haldane, then war secretary, for the post of CID secretary in 1912, Hankey had explained his ambition to see “the eventual extension to Cabinet government as a whole, of the system of coordination which he had now seen so effectively developing in the region of both military and civil defensive preparations”. In its first year, 248 people other than the formal members and secretariat attended meetings of the war cabinet, which showed its reach and comprehensiveness. Being one of those five members was a full-time job: the war cabinet met at least once a day, an inevitable corollary of taking charge of all aspects of the conduct of naval, military and eventially air operations as well as diplomacy and other areas of policy.
It was Hankey who, by preparation, learning, experience and ambition, was the true father of coordinated command during the First World War. His background as a Royal Marine and an intelligence officer had drawn him to contemplate both combined operations and strategy on its grandest scale, while his service with the CID—he served as naval assistant secretary from 1908 to 1912 before taking on the post of secretary—steeped him in bureaucracy and how to master it. And he had a prodigious appetite for work. When he retired from the civil service in 1938, having served for more than two decades as cabinet secretary, he held the positions not only at the Cabinet Office and secretary of the CID but also clerk of the Privy Council, and had to be replaced by three separate individuals. No-one else was equal to the concatenation of tasks.
The war cabinet survived as an organisation only slightly beyond the end of hostilities. Although November 1918 was only an armistice, and the peace negotiations in Paris went on until the conclusion of the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, no-one really expected a return to hostilities. In the UK, there was a general election in December 1918, the so-called “Khaki Election”, which had been delayed for the duration of the war, and the coalition was resoundingly endorsed. In October 1919, the war cabinet met for the last time, and a conventional body of 21 ministers took its place.
Despite the slimmed-down efficiency of the war cabinet, two more subordinate bodies, both intended to bring more ruthless focus yet, were created during the second half of the First World War. In June 1917, at the suggestion of Lord Milner, the prime minister created the war policy committee, to consider overall strategy for the conflict. It consisted of Lloyd George, Lord Milner (minister without portfolio), Sir Edward Carson (first lord of the Admiralty then minister without portfolio), Lord Curzon (lord president of the Council) and the Boer soldier and politician Lieutenant General Jan Smuts (minister without portfolio). Its first agenda items were the revolution in Russia and the impending entry of the United States into the war, but it came to consider every major military enterprise undertaken by the Allies until November 1918.
The second body was the X committee, established in April 1918 when Milner moved to the War Office, thereby leaving the war cabinet, so that he could continue to consult closely with the prime minister. In operation, it was hardly a committee at all, being much nearer to a bipartite meeting with advice: it consisted of Lloyd George and Milner, and Lieutenant General Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, with Hankey as secretary (although he delegated much of the work to Leo Amery, who improbably combined the positions of assistant secretary to the cabinet and Unionist MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook). The committee existed essentially to brief the prime minister before meetings of the war cabinet, and also to take high-level strategic decisions about the war. Amery later wrote that it “really ran the war during the critical spring and summer months” of 1918, meeting for the first time on 15 May and concluding its business a fortnight after the armistice on 25 November. Two-thirds of its meetings took place between May, when the Germans launched Operation Blücher-Yorck (the Third Battle of the Aisne) which threatened both Paris and the Channel Ports, and July, when Allied forces contained and reversed the German advance.
All of these bodies followed the same direction of travel: concentration of focus on military affairs to the exclusion of all else, small numbers of interlocutors, and a robust staff organisation to keep records and transmit and pursue the implementation of decisions. There was no chiefs of staff committee until 1923, when it was formed as a sub-committee of the CID, and no official post of chairman of the committee until 1955. Indeed, what it striking about Lloyd George’s (and Hankey’s) arrangements is how far they were dominated by civilian leaders, with only the CIGS and occasional field commanders having access, let alone contributing to decision-making. This flies in the face of the stereotype of war as a situation in which too much power is ceded to the military.
The other notable feature of the First World War experiments is that they contained lessons for civilian government too. Most obviously, the War Cabinet Secretariat was the progenitor of the modern Cabinet Office which still serves some of the same functions today, and it is difficult to imagine central government existing without that administrative support. But one can also see the beginnings of the cabinet committee system that now deals with a lot of routine government business, and the concept of ad hoc committees to deal with particularly serious or perilous circumstances, such as the two Covid-19 committees dealing with strategy and operations during the pandemic.
For now we shall stop there, as the First World War ends, peacetime norms of government practice return and the three armed services (the Royal Air Force had been established as a stand-alone service in April 1918) adapted to their new environment. But lessons of the Great War would soon be revived, well before the UK was launched into another global conflagration. And the government would again agonise over how to respond.