What’s this all about?

The gist of the matter is as follows.

When Hore-Belisha was appointed war minister in 1937, he invited two ‘advisers’ to help him: Lord Gort, who was made chief of the imperial general staff, and Liddell-Hart. The triumvirate directed the war office for about a year, and much useful work was done. In particular, progress was made in the mechanization and democratization of the army (NCOs were admitted to the officer corps, soldiers were permitted to eat in the same canteens as officers, etc.). The generals were also rejuvenated (men aged 65–75 were removed).

However, as Liddell-Hart told me back in 1938, Hore-Belisha did not dare go all the way with his reforms and stopped at half-measures. Of particular significance was the fact that, having removed the ‘old men’, Belisha [sic] failed to take the ‘middle-aged’ generals (55–65) down from their commanding heights and replace them with ‘youth’ (40–55), as Liddell-Hart had insisted. ‘Teasing the geese’ too much, Belisha feared, would damage his career.

Belisha’s indecisiveness would come to haunt him. First, it set him against Liddell-Hart, who resigned his post as adviser right before the Munich Conference. As a result, Belisha was left alone in the ministry with Gort. Second, it spoiled Gort. The latter arrived in the ministry as a ‘radical’ and reformer, and initially he was true to his colours. But once he sensed his position to be fairly secure, and the influence of the conservative ‘middle-aged’ generals to be fairly stable, he began to change his bearings. He made common cause with the generals, who were particularly unhappy with the democratization of the army and the rejuvenation of the top brass, against Belisha. In the meantime, having learnt about the discord between Belisha and Liddell-Hart, Gort began to scheme against the latter and hastened his resignation. A struggle between Belisha and Gort continued on and off until the beginning of the war. In September, Belisha managed to shake off Gort by sending him to France as commander-in-chief. Gort was peeved with Belisha and waited for a convenient moment to take his revenge. An opportunity soon presented itself. At the end of last year, a group of dominion ministers, headed by Eden, visited the front in France. Some of the ministers, who remembered how fortifications were prepared in the last war, found the present fortifications in the British section of the front to be insufficiently solid. Their impression was quite mistaken: the current fortifications are state of the art, but they look rather different from those of 1914–18 because of the changes in armaments. It was Gort’s duty to enlighten the ministers, but he did not do so. Quite the opposite: he did his utmost to cast a shadow on the war minister. The dominion ministers returned to London and started complaining at every opportunity about imaginary faults in the front-line fortifications and about Hore-Belisha himself. The latter wrote a sharp letter to Gort. Soon afterwards, Chamberlain visited the front line, and Gort told him bluntly that the army command could not work with Belisha. The PM reported the matter to the king, who dislikes Belisha for being a parvenu and a Jew. As a result, the war minister was forced to resign.

It’s a pity. Belisha is a clever man and, most importantly, he is against a break with the Soviet Union.

Although the press is up in arms, I don’t think that the storm will last very long or have any dangerous consequences for the government. The ‘cream’ of the ruling elite is entirely against Belisha – a plebeian and a Jew – while Belisha is a careerist and he won’t want to ruin his future for good. They’ll come to an arrangement somehow.