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Britain, America, and the Far East, 1937-1940: a Failure in Cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Nicholas R. Clifford
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Extract

Most of the scholarly works on British policy in the years preceding World War II have neglected events in the Far East in favor of those in Europe. Any study of recent British diplomacy is, of course, seriously hampered by the lack of Foreign Office documents and by the generally uninformative nature of British memoirs. Nevertheless, the sources which do exist give a picture which, while still incomplete, is interesting for its own sake in showing how the Chamberlain Government met the problems of the Pacific, and also for the light which it sheds on Anglo-American relations in this period. Perhaps nowhere else was there as much consistent misunderstanding and disappointment between London and Washington as over the questions raised by the Sino-Japanese War. The Manchurian episode had left a legacy of distrust between the two countries; just enough was known about the approaches made by the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, so that many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that Britain had rejected American offers for joint action against Japan in 1932, and that as a result nothing had prevented the Japanese advance. When Stimson's The Far Eastern Crisis appeared in 1936, it was read by many with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and seemed to confirm these views. In Britain it provided ammunition for the critics of the Government, while in the United States it increased the suspicions of those unwilling to trust Britain, and strengthened the trend to isolation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , November 1963 , pp. 137 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1963

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References

1. See SirAngell, Norman, The Defence of the Empire (New York, 1937), pp. 93–123Google Scholar, for one of the clearest statements of this view.

2. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1937 (Washington, 1954), III, 158–59Google Scholar. (Cited hereafter as FRUS.)

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9. Ibid., (1937), III, 455-56, 464-65.

10. Times, 26 Aug. 1937; FRUS (1937), III, 480.

11. On 20 July 1937 Bingham, on his own initiative, had suggested to Eden a British approach to Washington for sanctions; Chamberlain, however, opposed the idea. Eden, Anthony [Earl of Avon], The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon: Facing the Dictators, 1923-1938 (Boston, 1962), pp. 603–04Google Scholar.

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13. The best treatment of American opinion in this period is in Dorothy Borg, “The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1933-1938,” [MS. in preparation for publication] ch. xiii. I am indebted to Dr. Borg for permission to use her MS.

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49. For an official expression of this view, see the Tokyo Gazette, No. 15, Sep. 19, 1938, pp. 10-11.

50. As Sir Norman Angell and Lord Cecil (among others) did. Times, 8 Oct. 1937, 13 Oct. 1937.

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