Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
31 Dorothy Sheridan (ed.), Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology (London,
2000), 4–5.
32 Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working Class Atti-
tudes and Reactions to the Boer War 1899–1902 (London, 1972), 12–45.
33 Ian F. W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition (Manchester, 1991), 200.
34 Quoted in J. E. Johnson, Full Circle, (London, 1980), 179.
35 Carman Miller, Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War
1899–1902 (Montreal, 1993), 5–6; Stephen Clarke, ‘Manufacturing Spontane-
ity?’ The Role of the Commandants in the Colonial Offers of Troops to the
South African War’, in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey (eds), The Boer War: Army,
Nation and Empire (Canberra, 2000), 129–150.
36 Quoted from ‘With French to Kimberley’, in Andrew Paterson, The Works of
Banjo Paterson (Ware, 1995), 102.
37 Judd, Empire, 245.
38 Sanjoy Bhattacharaya, ‘Colonial India: Conflict, Shortage and Discontent’, in
John Bourne, Peter Liddle, and Ian Whitehead (eds), The Great World War
1914–1945 Volume 2: Who Won? Who Lost? (London, 2001), 182–183.
39 David Murphy, Ireland and the Crimean War (Dublin, 2002), 169–233.
40 Richard Doherty, Irish Men and Women in the Second World War (Dublin, 1999),
15–46; Richard Doherty and David Truesdale, Irish Winners of the Victoria Cross
(Dublin, 2000), 141–173.
41 McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 223–224.
42 Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War (London, 2000), 2–3.
43 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in
the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), 204–206.
44 Jeremy Black, The English Press 1621–1861 (Thrupp, 2001), 177–200; Macken-
zie, Propaganda and Empire, 16–37; Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History
of the Media: From Guttenberg to the Internet (London, 2002).
45 I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749 (Oxford, 1992), 27–38.
46 Pamphlet by D. M. Luckie, The Raid of the Russian Cruiser “Kaskowiski”, an Old
Story of Auckland (Wellington, 1894).
47 Christopher Pugsley, ‘New Zealand: “From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth”’,
in Bourne, Liddle and Whitehead, The Great World War 1914–1945 Volume 2:
Who Won? Who Lost?, 214.
48 V. G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies 1815–1960 (Thrupp, 1982), 158.
49 John Keegan, ‘The Ashanti Campaign 1873–74’, in Brian Bond (ed.), Victorian
Military Campaigns (London, 1994), 194; Edward M. Spiers (ed.), Sudan: The
Reconquest Reappraised (London, 1998), 5.
50 Thomas Packenham, The Boer War (London, 1979), 32; Stephen Badsey, ‘War
Correspondents in the Boer War’, in John Gooch (ed.), The Boer War: Direction,
Experience and Image (London, 2000), 187–202.
51 G. W. Steevens (ed. Vernon Blackburn), From Capetown to Ladysmith: An Unfin-
ished Record of the South African War (Edinburgh, 1900), 176.
52 A. P. Wavell, Other Men’s Flowers (London, 1944), 15.
53 Read, The Power of News, 88–89, 134.
54 Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War 1914–18,
167–207.
55 Ibid., 152.
56 Stephen Badsey, ‘The Missing Western Front: British Politics, Strategy and Pro-
paganda in 1918’, in Mark Connelly and David Welch (eds), War and the Media:
Reportage and Propaganda (London, 2004), 47–64.
57 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney,
1981), 125–126; see also John F. Williams, ANZACS, The Media and the Great War
(Sydney, 1999).
232 S. Badsey
58 Tim Cook, ‘Documenting War and Forging Reputations: Sir Max Aitken and
the Canadian War Records Office in the First World War’, War in History,
10(2003): 265–295; see also Shane B. Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire
(Westport, CT, 1997).
59 Judd, Empire, 273–286; Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 103–109.
60 Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: Volume 2: The Twen-
tieth Century (London, 1984), 657–659.
61 A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook (London, 1972), 346–349, 748; Piers Brendon, The
Life and Death of the Press Barons (London, 1982), 154–179.
62 Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (London, 1928).
63 Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 256; Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in
the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, 1999), 76–78.
64 Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 3.
65 Bhattacharya, ‘Colonial India: Conflict, Shortage and Discontent’, 184.
66 Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless 1927–1939: The History of Broadcasting in the
UK Volume II (Oxford, 1995), 342–362.
67 Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against Ameri-
can ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (Oxford, 1995), 45–46.
68 David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Techno-
logical Nation (London, 1991), 18–22, 31–32.
69 Michael Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and
Popular Cinema (Manchester, 1995), 77 and 102.
70 James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–1945
(London, 1998), 144–148.
71 Read, The Power of News, 181–185.
72 George MacDonald Fraser, quoted in Stephen Badsey and Philip M. Taylor, ‘The
Experience of Manipulation: Propaganda in Press and Radio’, in Bourne, Liddle,
and Whitehead (eds), The Great World War 1914–45: Volume 2: Who Won, Who
Lost?, 47.
73 Richard Collier, The Warcos: The War Correspondents of World War II (London,
1989), 206.
74 Cull, Selling War, 4–32.
75 Ibid., 47.
76 Asa Briggs, The War of Words: The History of Broadcasting in the UK Volume III
(Oxford, 1970), 177, 494–497.
77 Briggs, The War of Words, 508–510.
78 Bhattacharya, ‘Colonial India: Conflict, Shortage and Discontent’, 192 and
footnote 62.
79 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 256–257.
80 Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977
(Thrupp, 1998), 84–93; Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British
Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London,
1995), 217–259.
81 Tony Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion
During the Suez Crisis (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 189–196; Michael Nichol-
son, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the
Cold War (London, 1997), 88–90.
Propaganda and the defence of empire 233
12 The colonial empire and
imperial defence
Ashley Jackson
The term ‘colonial empire’ refers to the fifty or so colonies that were ruled
through the Colonial Office, as opposed to the ‘white’ Dominions and
India, both separate branches of the imperial tree. This straightforward
definition is blurred around the edges, however, because the Colonial
Office had a major role in some territories that were not officially colonies,
such as the Mandates established in the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific
following the First World War, as well as the Southern African High Com-
mission Territories which in 1925 were transferred from the Colonial
Office to the new Dominions Office. In this chapter, there will not be a
religious devotion to a fixed definition, because it is important to include
some of the empire’s constitutional oddities in an examination of the colo-
nial empire and imperial defence, such as the joint-ruled ‘condominiums’
of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Anglo-French New Hebrides, the pri-
vately ruled Sarawak, and areas of ‘informal empire’ such as Shanghai.
Traditionally, the colonial empire has played second fiddle to the
Dominions and India in studies of imperial defence.
1
To an extent this is
understandable, for it was the Dominions and India that provided
the empire with its main non-British defence assets. The omission of the
colonies also reflects the fact that they were voiceless compared with the
other constituent parts of the empire; the Dominions were self-governing
and, as the twentieth century progressed, increasingly involved in imper-
ial defence decision-making (even sending representatives to the Ver-
sailles Peace Conference as part of the British Empire Delegation). India,
while ruled autocratically at the highest levels by British authorities, had
always been represented in imperial defence counsels by the Viceroy, the
Secretary of State for India, and the Commander-in-Chief India, and the
Raj itself had gathered to itself a huge network of influence, as well as
defence responsibilities, throughout the Indian Ocean.
2
It was, in effect,
a sub-empire within the British Empire. In contrast, the colonies were
ruled directly from London through the Colonial Office and did what
they were bid.
The colonies poor billing in studies of imperial defence also stems from
the fact that they were considered consumers of imperial defence rather
The colonial empire and imperial defence 235
than contributors, though the amount that the colonial empire was to give
in the empire’s major wars (and the little that the Dominions were pre-
pared to commit in peacetime) makes this a questionable assumption.
This chapter suggests that the colonies were at the heart of imperial
defence for a number of reasons. First, imperial defence was all about
defending colonies (as well as Dominions, sea routes, and the Northwest
Frontier), and many colonies had been gained precisely because of their
imperial defence utility. Second, the colonies contributed a huge amount
to imperial defence, in terms of military and civilian manpower and indus-
trial and primary resources, and the colonies supplied more troops to the
imperial cause during the Second World War than all of the Dominions
combined. Third, the colonial contribution to imperial defence grew in
importance during the twentieth century, moving from the peripheries of
imperial defence thinking to the very core as Britain came to rely more
heavily on colonial bases and manpower resources. Fourth, colonies were
essential bases for the armed forces that gave meaning to the term ‘imper-
ial defence’ and acted as regional power centres from which imperial
power could be projected.
Given the constitutional and political realities of imperial rule, British
subjects in the colonies had no representation at anything above the local
level. They could therefore justifiably claim to depend upon British pro-
tection against external aggression, for, unlike the Dominions, they had
no political autonomy, and so the ‘self government begets self defence’
aphorism did not apply.
3
Thus, a fundamental feature of the nexus
between Britain and its colonial subjects was the provision of security from
external aggression as well as the maintenance of internal law and order.
Imperial defence meant protecting colonial subjects from the arbitrary
attentions of foreign powers. It was the breach of this unspoken contract
that did so much damage to Britain’s reputation, and the legitimacy of
Britain’s presence, when millions of colonial subjects found themselves at
the mercy of the Imperial Japanese Army in December 1941.
The colonial empire had always been central to imperial defence,
because it required defending and because it was, in turn, responsible for
helping defend and police the empire. Until 1854, the war and colonial
offices were combined beneath a single Secretary of State for war and the
colonies. It was as a platform for force projection that the colonies con-
tributed most consistently to imperial defence. Colonies provided bar-
racks for the army and ports for the navy. They were watering holes, repair
yards, recreational retreats, ammunition dumps, fuel reservoirs, sheltered
harbours, administrative centres, internment centres, cable and wireless
links, and, from the First World War, airbases.
4
Colonies were also central to imperial defence because they were
responsible for their own internal security and that of their borders,
saving the regular army a job and allowing it to retain its small peacetime
size. Colonial military and paramilitary formations were formed primarily
236 A. Jackson
to defend the borders and prevent internal unrest, though a tradition
soon developed of expanding these forces in times of general war for
service elsewhere in the empire. The success of this system depended
upon the contumely attached to calling in help from above. A young dis-
trict officer facing unrest in a hinterland province would suffer a severe
bout of career blight should he feel it necessary to telegraph for the dis-
patch of a platoon of native levies and their white officer and NCO from
the coastal capital (better to sort it out Sanders of the River style); similarly,
a governor, worrying in Government House about reports of disturbances
up country, would be in for some unpleasant scrutiny from his Whitehall
masters if he should think it necessary to call in imperial troops from
Britain.
5
The colonies were always pivotal in imperial defence because they pro-
vided strategically located bases in an age where power projection relied
upon local concentrations of troops, ports of call for warships, and
airstrips. The extension of Britain’s protective shield to distant Dominions
depended upon colonial bases. While Australia, for example, might have
army, militia, and naval forces at its disposal, these were never sufficient to
withstand the determined attentions of a first-class enemy. So the conti-
nent’s security depended upon the British Army and, in particular, the
Royal Navy (and later the ability to reinforce the region by air, reliant
upon a string of colonial air bases). In order to get to Australia should an
attack ever come, those military instruments of British power depended
upon domination of the sea routes and secure air routes, and regional
power points that could provide safe harbours, infrastructure, airstrips,
and transit camps as forces journeyed east. Colonial bases performed this
vital function, without which the Australasian Dominions would have been
utterly marooned.
Colonies were an integral part of the British Army’s development in the
nineteenth century as an imperial force. Colonies were important in fur-
nishing the army with regional strongholds from which to operate. In
1842, for example, British regiments, excluding those in Britain, the
Dominions, and India, were stationed in Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda,
Ceylon, Gibraltar, Jamaica, Malta, Mauritius, St Helena, Sierra Leone, and
Trinidad.
6
In 1881, British troops, excluding those in Britain, the Domin-
ions, and India, were stationed in Barbados (813 troops), Bermuda
(2,200), Bahamas (101), British Guiana (246), British Honduras (247),
Ceylon (1,224), Cyprus (420), Gibraltar (4,158), the Gold Coast (191),
Hong Kong (1,167), Jamaica (778), Malta (5,626), Mauritius (355), St
Helena (210), Sierra Leone (441), the Straits Settlements (1,028), and
Trinidad (121).
7
In extending its writ around the world, to enhance British presence in a
region as well as to contribute to the defence of vulnerable colonies, the
British Army always made extensive and effective use of locally recruited
formations. In the British Empire, locally recruited forces performed two
The colonial empire and imperial defence 237
functions: they contributed towards internal security and helped the
British Army in defending the colony, by forming coastal artillery units or
infantry companies detailed to defend strategic points should the colony
ever be attacked. The growth of colonial military forces went hand in
hand with British expansion, and the formation of a regiment was at the
top of the list when the British arrived on a distant shore, along with the
creation of a school, a racecourse, a club, and a church. Thus, when
British sovereignty alighted in Fiji in 1874, it was not long before the Fiji
Armed Constabulary was formed, and in 1898, its commander, Colonel
Claude Francis, organised the Fiji Volunteer Corps. This force, dedicated
to internal security, soon proved its value when the empire needed man-
power overseas. In the First World War, Fiji sent labourers to France, and
in the Second World War, the Fiji Military Forces played an important role
in defending their homeland and operating with American and New
Zealand forces in the Pacific war.
Africa was home to numerous locally recruited forces, which came to
form the bedrock of internal and border security. Private enterprises such
as the British South Africa Company and the Imperial British East Africa
Company formed their own security forces, and the British South Africa
Police being created to accompany Cecil Rhodes’ Pioneer Column into
Mashonaland in 1890. It then took part in the Matabele War of 1893, the
suppression of the Ndebele and Shona rebellions of 1896, and the Anglo-
Boer War. During the First World War, it served with distinction in the
East African campaign and, in 1914, captured Schuckmansberg in
German South-West Africa. Most African colonial forces were raised in the
name of the Crown, most famously the King’s African Rifles (KAR) and
the Royal West African Frontier Force. The Central Africa Rifles was estab-
lished in 1891 around a nucleus of Sikhs and renamed the Central African
Rifles in 1898 and the KAR four years later.
8
In the First World War, the
unit’s strength rose to twenty-two battalions, falling back in the 1930s to
about 3,000 men. The Second World War brought further expansion for
the KAR, climbing to forty-three battalions (there was also an all-white
Kenya Regiment). The West African Frontier Force (it became ‘Royal’ in
1925 and the King became its Colonel-in-Chief) was formed at the behest
of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in 1897 to provide Britain with
a more assertive presence in the light of aggressive French expansion in
the region.
British Africa provides many other examples of locally raised defence
forces that were used beyond colonial borders during world wars and colo-
nial emergencies. The Sudan Defence Force (SDF) was established in
1924, and by the outbreak of the Second World War, numbered over
4,000 men. Its role was to defend the condominium’s extensive borders,
particularly against Italian incursions. During the Second World War, the
SDF took part in operations against Italian forces in Libya and Abyssinia,
and the territory was also an important centre of air power in the region,
238 A. Jackson
being home to an RAF group. Other long-standing African units were the
Somaliland Camel Corps, raised in 1912 to check inter-tribal fighting, and
the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. Colonies could also provide specialist
military expertise during imperial campaigns, as when members of the
Bakgatla tribe, split by the colonial border between South Africa and
Bechuanaland, acted as scouts during the Anglo-Boer War and when
Dyaks from Borneo were employed as trackers during the Malayan Emer-
gency.
9
Other parts of the colonial empire followed the same pattern. The West
Indies had contributed infantry regiments to the British Army for scores
of years before African units were first raised, and West Indian formations
served in both world wars.
10
The Mauritius Territorial Force was formed in
the 1930s to supplement the British garrison on the island, manning
coastal defence artillery and forming an infantry unit to repel an enemy
raid. During the Second World War, it became The Mauritius Regiment,
and one of its battalions was part of the garrison established in Madagas-
car after the British invasion.
11
If the men of the Colonial Administrative
Service were the steel frame around which the British colonial empire was
built, these locally recruited military units were the cold steel that but-
tressed that frame.
As well as their locally recruited or imperial army units, most colonies
had other forms of military and paramilitary organisations on the books,
and colonies could present a surprisingly militarised environment. The
Gold Coast in the mid-1920s, for example, had a range of forces at its dis-
posal in addition to the Gold Coast Regiment (part of the Royal West
African Frontier Force).
12
There was a military reserve of ex-servicemen
who could be mobilised quickly, and a territorial defence force with a
European and an African section, the former including machine gun
companies. In addition to the general police, there was a paramilitary
Northern Territories Constabulary, recruited mainly from military veter-
ans; an Escort Police; separate mine, railway, and marine police branches;
and an armed Preventive Force serving on the frontiers as part of the
customs service. Many of the Europeans in the colony possessed firearms
and practiced in rifle clubs supported by government funds.
Mauritius provides a good example of how a colony was affected by the
ebb and flow of imperial defence requirements. The island, of great stra-
tegic importance during the era of Anglo-French rivalry in the east and an
important mid-ocean port of call in the pre-Suez Canal era, was home to a
permanent British garrison. During the Indian Mutiny, the garrison was
reduced, and the men sent to India, a depletion repeated during the Zulu
War of 1879–1880. The garrison was mobilised at the time of the Fashoda
incident in 1898, and the Anglo-Boer War saw the British elements
reduced and units of the Central African Rifles arrive to take their place.
The garrison was mobilised during the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War as the
Baltic Fleet steamed across the Indian Ocean towards its Tsushima doom
The colonial empire and imperial defence 239
[Port Louis was defended at the time by No. 57 Company Royal Garrison
Artillery (RGA), No. 1 Company Ceylon-Mauritius Battalion RGA, and the
Hong Kong and Singapore Battalion RGA].
During the First World War, the island did all that it could to support
the war effort.
13
It was a classic colonial role in a world war; on the one
hand, the island contributed to the war effort overseas, and on the other
hand, measures were taken to reduce its vulnerability to enemy attack. A
special tax was levied on the sugar crop and contributed to war funds,
efforts were made to reduce dependence upon imported food, money was
raised to buy the British Army and Royal Navy thirty aircraft, a naval wire-
less facility was constructed, and electric searchlights were installed. The
thousand-strong garrison was again drawn down, and a Volunteer Defence
Force established as partial compensation as well as the Mauritius Volun-
teer Artillery and Engineers. Over 1,700 local men were sent to
Mesopotamia as military labourers to work on the inland waterways during
the imperial campaign against the Turks, and over 520 white Mauritians
served on the Western Front. In the Second World War, over 6,000 Mauri-
tians joined the British Army’s Royal Pioneer Corps serving in the Middle
East, thousands more joined the Mauritius Regiment and the home guard
unit, the Mauritius Defence Force, and drafts of Mauritian women served
in the Middle East as Auxiliary Territorial Service clerks and secretaries.
Other Mauritians were employed by the RAF in its Marine Crafts Section,
working at the new seaplane anchorage, and over 8,000 were recruited into
a civil labour corps to ensure that extensive defence works on the island,
including the construction of a Royal Naval Air Station, were completed. A
battalion of the KAR arrived to bolster the island’s defences given the
threat of a Japanese invasion, a commitment that remained until 1960.
14
As providers of military labour, the colonies were a godsend for the
British government and deserve as much recognition for this as the
Anzacs or the Indian Army for their feats of arms at Gallipoli and in
Burma. As well as furnishing the empire with fighting units (over 80,000
Africans fought in Burma, and the East African campaign was dominated
by African infantrymen), the colonies provided the men of the logistical
tail upon which famous fighting units, such as the Eighth Army,
depended.
15
The colonies and other regions of empire became particu-
larly prized as a source of military labour during imperial wars. Britain’s
presence in China secured the transit of thousands of Chinese people to
work in South Africa at the time of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902.
During the First World War, the British Empire really showed its capacity
to move people; over 150,000 Chinese people were taken to the Western
Front as labourers, and hundreds of thousands of Arabs, recruited mainly
from Egypt, were employed as labourers in the Sinai campaign.
16
Still in
an era of human porterage, the East African campaign employed hun-
dreds of thousands of African labourers, and over 30,000 Southern
Africans joined the South African Native Labour Contingent for service in
240 A. Jackson
France. At Gallipoli, the 29th British Division was supported by a military
labourer battalion comprising Palestinian Jews.
As well as being garrison centres for the British Army and its local sup-
plementary forces, colonies provided the Royal Navy with the bases upon
which its global reach and ubiquity depended. They were the infrastruc-
ture without which the navy could not have sustained its presence around
the world, be it performing anti-slaving patrols off the east and west coasts
of Africa, hunting pirates in the Indonesian archipelago, or searching for
German U-boats in the central Mediterranean. By 1914, shore bases over-
seas included HMS Cormorant at Gibraltar, headquarters of the East
Atlantic Station, as well as the submarine base HMS Rapid. HMS St Angelo
and Egmont were shore bases in Malta. HMS Alert was the depot ship in the
Persian Gulf, and HMS Tamar, the naval headquarters of the China
Station in Hong Kong (as she was until British withdrawal in 1997). The
North America and West Indies Station was served by HMS Terror on
Bermuda along with bases in Canada and Newfoundland, and HMS Pur-
suivant in the Falklands served the South East Coast Station.
17
In the same
way that the British Army received assistance from locally raised forces, so
too did the navy.
Colonies such as Ceylon, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Trinidad had their
own naval forces for operations in territorial waters, and during the
Second World War, they were able to take over local convoy escort work as
well as mine clearance from the Royal Navy, allowing it to concentrate
stretched resources in other areas. Locally recruited naval forces also
helped man coastal batteries and the Port War Signals Stations that super-
vised the security of imperial ports and ensured the peaceful intent of vis-
iting vessels. Colonies also operated as key links on the global sea routes
that ensured imperial trade and security. During the Second World War,
colonies such as Ceylon, Gibraltar, and Sierra Leone formed vital points in
the empire’s convoy network alongside ports such as Cape Town, Halifax,
Liverpool, and Sydney.
One of the main roles of colonies in the imperial defence structure was
to serve as bases for the warships of the Royal Navy. Some colonies served as
the headquarters of important naval fleets and standing commitments.
Thus, Bermuda was home to the North America and West Indies Station
and Malta to the Mediterranean Fleet. Ceylon was home to the East Indies
Station, responsible for policing the vast Indian Ocean as far afield as the
Swahili coast, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. Until the
closure of the East Indies Station in 1958, British warships continued, much
as before, to mount East African and Persian Gulf cruises, showing the flag
on land, playing the locals at cricket and rugby, putting the band ashore to
impress or the Marines to quell disturbances, performing gunnery demon-
strations, and holding ‘harbour lights’ events and hosting the ubiquitous
cocktail parties. Naval visits were also used by colonial garrisons as an
opportunity for exercises, the garrison, for example, attempting to defend
The colonial empire and imperial defence 241
the capital from a party of Royal Marines put ashore by a visiting cruiser.
The Royal Navy was the cornerstone of the grand ‘illusion’ of Pax Britannica,
and this is how it was maintained. In their turn, the colonies were the stage
upon which the navy performed.
Another colony that served as headquarters to one of the navy’s major
overseas fleets was Hong Kong. The China Station had its home in Hong
Kong and Singapore (with a gunboat base at Hankow) and was respons-
ible for maritime security in the South China Sea and on China’s great
rivers, particularly the Yangtze and the West River. The China Station was
also intended to check Russian naval power in northern East Asia. The
station’s strength usually comprised a number of destroyers and sloops,
perhaps a squadron of elderly cruisers, and a more modern cruiser as flag-
ship. It also comprised the quaint but proven shallow draft river gunboats
(with splendid names such as HMS Aphis, Bee, Dragonfly, Glowworm, Lady-
bird, Moorhen, Peterel, and Widgeon). Weighing up to 645 tons, river gun-
boats looked more like Mississippi steamers but packed an array of
weapons – twelve-pounders, three-inch anti-aircraft guns, Lewis guns, and
even six-inch guns.
18
Some of the earlier gunboats had originally been
built for service with Kitchener on the Nile, and others for action on the
Danube during the First World War. The job of these gunboats in eastern
waters, from the end of the nineteenth century until the very day of
Japan’s assault on British colonies in December 1941, was to patrol the
inland waterways protecting British interests and providing the general
security needed for the continuance of trading activities. The China
Station also provided important force projection ashore, for example con-
tributing significantly to the relief of the European legations in Peking
during the Boxer Rebellion.
19
As war with Japan loomed in the 1930s, the
China Station was tasked with the far more daunting role of providing a
tripwire should a day of reckoning ever come.
20
The colonial empire also provided bases for the projection of air power
and the development of rapid imperial communications (pioneered by
Imperial Airways). In the 1920s and 1930s, numerous colonies became
staging posts on the air route that was developed to connect Britain to the
Far East and Australasia via the Mediterranean. Air bases were built in
Gibraltar, Malta, Iraq, Oman, India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the
Sudan. Another air route that relied on colonial bases was the Takoradi Air
Route running from the Gold Coast to Egypt. It was pioneered as a civil air
route by Imperial Airways in 1936. Its strategic potential was noted at the
time, and when Italy entered the war in 1940 and made the Mediterranean
supply route hazardous, it was decided to use the trans-Africa route to rein-
force the Western Desert Air Force, delivering over 10,000 valuable aircraft
to the region.
In the Persian Gulf and Arabian regions, the RAF became the senior
armed service in the post-First World War period, and much of its work in
the region was conducted from colonial bases, particularly RAF Khormaksar