One of the principal temptations in researching the voluminous materials available on arms-control conferences between the wars is to rely too heavily on the highly informative yet surprisingly incomplete published documents. So voluminous are these published sources that one can receive the erroneous impression that they are sufficient for a highly detailed understanding. The exclusion of emotional, personal, or embarrassing expressions creates the impression of highly rational and unemotional diplomatic exchanges. Yet this study reveals that the examination of private, unpublished correspondence and records adds vital facts, emotional emphases, and more importantly, secret negotiating motives and objectives not found in official publications. For this reason, careful reading of the unpublished personal papers and correspondence of the principal leaders and negotiators as well as the official but unpublished documents is essential to our understanding, especially of the 1927 Geneva Naval Conference.
Another temptation arising from too heavy a reliance upon published sources is to assume that because the chief spokesmen at these conferences were usually civilians, their military advisers must have played a secondary role in formulating policy goals and in conducting the negotiations. But the 1927 Geneva Conference offers a cautionary tale. The Admiralty was able to dominate the negotiations to a far greater degree than scholars have recognized. To discover the most revealing evidence of the Admiralty’s motivations and objectives in arranging the Conference and in conducting the negotiations, one must look to its highly technical unpublished Admiralty documents at the Public Records Office, Kew, London, England.
The Admiralty’s lengthy technical reports, studies, and recommendations on which its negotiating strategy was based are scattered throughout a variety of record groups. The Naval Staff’s adamant determination to use the 1927 Conference to eliminate the 8-inch gun can only be found in its numerous technical reports on cruisers. Most revealing is the Director of Gunnery’s “Investigation of the Considerations Affecting Gun Armaments and Protection of Future Cruisers,” in ADM 1/92712. The Gunnery Division’s yearly handbooks on the unsatisfactory performance of the 8-inch gun between 1925 and 1938 are in ADM 186. Essential, as well, are my numerous citations in Chapters 11 and 16 to Admiralty record groups ADM 1/8694, ADM 118 and ADM 167. Included in these numerous reports are the “minutes” by members of the Naval Staff offering their insightful reactions and recommendations. Their sense of urgency for an immediate international conference to eliminate the 8-inch gun differs markedly from the British delegation’s public economic rationale and casts an entirely different light on our understanding of hidden Admiralty motivations and objectives.
The intricate interrelationship between the perception of military realities and political and economic constraints is revealed most clearly in the prolonged 1925 Birkenhead Committee disputes over the Admiralty’s insistence upon building new 10,000-ton, 8-inch-gun cruisers. Understanding the issues and the positions taken by Churchill, formerly First Lord of the Admiralty and then currently Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by the Admiralty during these debates and the subsequent resignation crisis is crucial to understanding the Admiralty’s ability to dominate the negotiations at the Geneva Conference in 1927, as well as Churchill’s strained relationship with the Admiralty and its objectives between 1925 and 1927. Many of the documents can be found in Cab 27/273 and in the personal papers of Winston S. Churchill at Churchill College, Cambridge University. The confused discussion in the Committee of Imperial Defence on May 20, 1927 is in Cab 2/5. Cabinet discussions and decisions throughout the negotiations can be found in Cab 23/55 while the important records of the Cabinet Naval Programme Committee are in Cab 27/355. Fascinating debates in the Further Limitation of Armaments Subcommittee and the Minutes of the British Empire Delegation at the Conference are in Cab 27/350, Public Record Office, Kew, London. Copies of many of these documents are also in the Winston S. Churchill Papers.
Unpublished documents are also essential to our understanding of the personal relationships among the principal leaders. Beatty’s stormy confrontations with Churchill, his contempt for politicians, and his criticisms of individual political leaders are revealed in his letters to his wife and to a lesser extent, to Admiral Roger Keyes. This private correspondence reveals his determination to dominate the political leaders during the 1925 resignation crisis and later in setting the terms of the negotiations and in maintaining control of those terms at Geneva and London in 1927. One should also consult his correspondence with Roger Keyes in The Keyes Papers: Selections from the Private and Official Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Baron Keyes of Zeebrugge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), edited by Paul G. Halpern. Other important letters are in published collections edited by B. Mc. L. Ranft, William Scott Chalmers, Philip Williamson and Martin Gilbert. Stephen Roskill’s biography of Beatty, Earl Beatty: The Last Naval Hero: An Intimate Biography (New York: Athenaeum, 1981) adds importantly to our knowledge of this pivotal figure.
As an historian as well as the most prominent British political leader in this story, Winston S. Churchill was acutely aware of the value of preserving documentable evidence. His collection of private correspondence and important government papers is indispensable in untangling his intricate political maneuverings in London, both prior to and during the negotiations. As a former First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill’s personal relations and repeated clashes with First Sea Lord Beatty, his abiding keen interest and fulsome knowledge of naval matters, and his willingness to link strategic military thinking with economic and political realities are crucial to an understanding of the dynamic politics of British arms-control diplomacy between 1925 and 1927. It is only through his private papers that one is able to understand the evolution of the clever counter-strategy which he employed against Beatty during the 1927 Conference. Many, but by no means all, of the important Churchill letters and documents are reproduced in Companion Volume 5 of Martin Gilbert’s monumental published collection cited in the footnotes.
British frustrations during the negotiations are most clearly revealed in the private letters and diary of First Lord of the Admiralty William C. Bridgeman. These letters are essential to understanding his role in the 1925 resignation crisis, his distrust of Churchill, his confusion over parity, his relations with Gibson and Jones, his efforts at compromise, and his growing displeasure with Beatty’s dominance. These important documents are located in the Shropshire County Record Office, Shrewsbury, England. The Churchill College Archives also has a much smaller collection of Bridgeman’s letters and an unpublished biography apparently written by his son. Much less complete but occasionally useful is The Modernisation of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William Bridgeman, 1904–1935 (London: The Historian’s Press, 1988), edited by Philip Williamson.
The collection of private letters of Lord Robert Cecil of Chelwood at the British Library, London, is yet another example of the crucial importance of private personal communications. Like Bridgeman, Cecil was candid in expressing his views, especially about the Admiralty’s dominance over arms-control negotiations, both before and during the Geneva Conference. His complaints to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and to Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain are especially helpful in untangling the confusion which bedeviled the relations between the delegates at Geneva and the Cabinet in London. The voluminous papers detailing his resignation following the Conference, and his charges before the House of Lords, must be interpreted cautiously. Yet, despite refutations of his reasons for resigning by Sir Maurice Hankey and Lord Balfour, these private and public complaints and subsequent correspondence with Bridgeman are highly revealing.
The correspondence of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin at Cambridge University Library and of Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain and his brother Neville at the University of Birmingham Library fill in important parts of the story. Much of the correspondence to Austen Chamberlain is from Cecil, but Chamberlain reveals his own frustrations with the Americans, with Baldwin, and with Cabinet resignation threats during the last days of the negotiations. Neville Chamberlain confirms the tumultuous nature of the Cabinet debates in early August.
The voluminous unpublished records of the United States Department of the Navy are located in four separate locations: at the National Archives and at the Washington Naval Yard in Washington, DC, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. These four repositories contain essential data pertaining to the arms-control conferences of the 1920s and 1930s. The National Archives in Washington, DC, is the repository for the General Board’s Disarmament Conference Series, which contains the voluminous records of the 1927 Geneva Naval Conference in Record Group 43. These records include correspondence, reports, charts, and memoranda prepared for the Secretary of the Navy and are an invaluable source for American naval thinking. But a more complete understanding emerges from research into the General Records of the Department of the Navy (Record Group 80), Records of the Office of Chief of Naval Operations (Record Group 38), Records of the Bureau of Ordnance (Record Group 74), and Records of the Office of Naval Intelligence (Record Group 39), all of which are housed in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Collectively, these sources provide one with the overwhelming sense of inferiority felt by United States naval leaders relative to Great Britain, the inadequacy of their resources for protecting American interests throughout the world, especially in the Pacific, their strenuous efforts to convince civilian leaders to strengthen naval forces, and the motives underlying the publicity war which the American naval delegates surreptitiously waged throughout the Geneva Conference. These resources are helpful also in understanding why Coolidge and Kellogg came to accept the General Board’s assessment of naval weakness and its insistence on parity.
Valuable, too, are the highly informative Minutes of the General Board, its equally valuable Hearings, and the correspondence with the Secretary of the Navy, which are located at the Naval Historical Center, Washington Naval Yard, Washington, DC. These Minutes and Hearings and the various collections at the Naval War College in Newport Rhode Island are especially important to an understanding of the development of the American 10,000-ton, 8-inch-gun cruiser, the enthusiasm expressed over the success of the new American 8-inch gun, and the inability to penetrate the veil of secrecy which had descended upon the British 10,000-ton, 8-inch-gun cruiser.
The records of the Department of State at the National Archives in Washington, DC, contain unpublished correspondence and memoranda of conversations in the Decimal File of Record Group 59. Fortunately, the Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1927 reproduces most of the essential communications passing between Geneva and Washington both during the Preparatory Commission talks and the Geneva Conference. Nonetheless, as complete and as valuable as this published source appears to be, it must be supplemented by equally important unpublished correspondence and memoranda in the Frank B. Kellogg and Calvin Coolidge papers. The Calvin Coolidge Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, and the Frank B. Kellogg Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota, are available on microfilm and, although neither collection is extensive, each contains documents essential to this study.
Much more informative and voluminous are the unpublished materials in the Hilary P. Jones Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. His letters and memoranda to members of the General Board and to the Secretary of the Navy enable us to comprehend an entirely new and more meaningful dimension to the negotiations, especially the importance of his combat equivalency compromise plan, which has been overlooked. In his letters we discover his strong Anglophile sentiments coupled with an equally strong determination for naval equality. As President of the General Board prior to the Conference, Jones gives valuable insights into the thinking of the top echelon of the United States Navy and his own brand of open diplomacy. His appointment of Rear Admiral Frank H. Schofield to the American delegation, his private meetings with Beatty, his Fourth of July Speech, and his growing disillusionment over Beatty’s evasive tactics are all essential to this story and are not found in other sources.
Even more voluminous are the papers of Hugh Gibson. Located at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, this collection preserves the correspondence, diary, memoranda of conversations, reports, telegrams, extensive newspaper clippings, and official documents which Gibson retained throughout his long career. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this collection. His diary entries, for example, detail his extensive consultations with Secretary of State Kellogg and President Coolidge prior to the Conference and his growing admiration for their studious concentration and understanding of American naval weakness. This judgment was confirmed in the diary of William R. Castle, the Assistant Secretary of State, who recorded Frank Schofield’s pointed comparison that Kellogg was “one of the best secretaries of the Navy this country has ever had.” Despite Coolidge’s hasty calling of the Conference, Gibson enables us to understand that before the delegates left for Geneva, both Coolidge and Kellogg had made a decided effort to balance political and military considerations in approving the Jones combat equivalency plan as a negotiating alternative to the General Board’s insistence on numerical parity.
A number of smaller private collections should also be consulted. The papers of William R. Castle located at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, give a somewhat jaundiced insider view of Kellogg, Gibson, Coolidge and the progress of the negotiations at Geneva. The papers of the Senator William E. Borah and of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at the Library of Congress offer important domestic political details. Especially interesting is Roosevelt’s conviction that Beatty would have to be recalled to London in order for the Washington Conference to succeed. The William B. Shearer papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library are an invaluable source for the publicity war which raged throughout the Geneva Conference. The diary of Rear Admiral Frank H. Schofield at the National Archives in Washington, DC, records the intensive behind-the-scenes publicity activities of the American naval delegates and the reactions of these naval delegates to British and Japanese proposals. His article, “Incidents and Present Day Aspects of Naval Strategy,” in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute and his unpublished lecture, “Some Effects of the Washington Conference on American Naval Strategy,” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island reveal his convictions about the naïveté of American negotiators, his admiration of the British and Japanese diplomats, who, acting on the advice of their naval delegates, thereby protected their vital strategic interests at the Washington Conference, and his abiding determination not to allow another arms-control conference to further weaken American naval forces.
I am deeply indebted to the large number of historians whose excellent scholarship on arms-control diplomacy was essential to my understanding of this complex subject. Several scholars have analyzed more than one conference in a single volume. They were confronted with an overwhelming mass of documents, private collections, and shifting contexts. Despite the disadvantage of such an approach, their willingness to tackle this formidable task and the clarity of their writing places all historians in their debt. Robert Gordon Kaufman, Arms Control During the Pre-Nuclear Era: The United States and Naval Limitation Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) is a thoughtful analysis of arms-control conferences between 1921–1936. Richard W. Fanning, Peace and Disarmament: Naval Rivalry and Arms Control, 1922–1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) adds significantly to our understanding, especially of the influence of peace lobbies on arms-control diplomacy in the 1920s and 1930s. Another useful one-volume study is Christopher Hall, Britain, America, and Arms Control 1921–1937 (New York: St. Martin, 1987). While largely passing over the 1927 Conference, Emily O. Goldman’s, Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control Between the Wars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1994) blends historical content and context with arms-control theories in an intellectual analysis of the possibilities and pitfalls for present-day arms-control diplomacy. The three volumes by Stephen Roskill cited in the footnotes and his collection of naval documents at the Churchill Archives are especially useful. John Robert Ferris, The Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919–1926 (London: Macmillan, 1989) provides both background and context. British arms-control efforts are discussed in R. C. Richardson, The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy in the 1920s (London: Leicester University Press, 1989). Richardson’s excellent study highlights the confusion within the British Cabinet during the 1927 Conference. William F. Trimble, “The United States and the Geneva Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armament, 1927,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1974) is a careful narrative limited only by the resources available to him at the time, but with a very useful summary of various historical interpretations of the 1927 Conference. Finally, Roger Dingman, Power in the Pacific: The Origin of Naval Arms Limitation, 1914–1922 (Chicago and London: University Press of Chicago, 1976) is an excellent study emphasizing the primacy of domestic politics in arms-control diplomacy.
I wish also to acknowledge the contribution of Tadashi Kuramatsu, “The Geneva Naval Conference of 1927: The British Preparation for the Conference, December 1926 to June 1927,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, No.1, 19 (March 1996), pp. 104–121. Although we differ significantly on Admiralty and American motives and objectives, I am indebted to him for the knowledge that Japan’s Naval Vice Minister was dictating negotiating strategy at Geneva without conferring with the civilian cabinet.
Scholars interested in pursuing this subject will also benefit from consulting the histories, cited in the footnotes, of the following historians: Ernest Andrade, Sadao Asada, Richard Burns and Donald Urquidi, Thomas H. Buckley, Raymond Leslie Buell, Rolland A. Chaput, Betty Glad, B.J.C. McKercher, Philip Payson O’Brien, and Ron Swerczek.
