THE ILLUSION OF DEFENCE
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—The advisory function officially exercised, as Major- General Lethbridge Alexander says, by the professional heads of the Navy, Army and Air Force, in the consideration of means for carrying out the Foreign Policy of the British Government, has surely keen conceived at times in very generous terms, even since the Great War.
The last volume of the memoirs of Field-Marshal Sir I lenry Wilson gives direct evidence of the strength of military influence upon British foreign policy in the years i llll nediately following the signing of the Peace Treaty.
To take one small example: Sir Henry Wilson was himself in a position to refuse to send a company of British troops to Vilna to assist other neutral troops in insuring an impartial plebiscite in the area seized from Lithuania by Poland. Because of the British defection the plebiscite was not held. and the Vilna question has remained for fifteen years an open sore on the troubled face of European polities.
Again, in the 1927 Naval Disarmament Conference and in the 1932-4 Conference the advisory function of Naval and Military leaders was so far extended that they were in a position to state British views on questions in the counsels of the Nations.
Mr. Noel Baker has told of the devastating effect of the speech made to the Disarmament Conference by Admiral Pound, in the absence of the British Foreign Secretary, in which this professional sailor stated that the proposal to abolish weapons " particularly efficacious against national defence " could not be applied to any part of the British Fleet.
With our 40,000-ton ' Hood' classed as " defensive " the aggressive weapons to be abolished proved very hard to find. As a result of Admiral Pound's lead strong pleas were.entered by other nations for the " defensive character " of 16-inch shells and tanks up to seventy tons !
The responsibility for occurrences such as these does not lie with the Naval and Military Chiefs who make use of the opportunities which fall to them, but rather with the British Government for not being master in its own house.—Yours
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