9 The execution of Edith Cavell: 12 October 2015

The execution of Edith Cavell: 12 October 2015

Posted: 12 October 2015

In the early hours of Tuesday, 12 October 1915, Edith Cavell, a British nurse who had been working in Belgium, was executed by the Germans after being found guilty of helping over 200 Allied servicemen escape to England. At her trial she confessed freely to doing this. Many others, mostly Belgian, had been arrested with her, of whom 26 were found guilty and 5 condemned to death, though in only two cases was the sentence carried out. Cavell’s hasty execution, before anyone had time to appeal on her behalf,

Edith Cavell (National Portrait Gallery) caused international outrage. She became, literally, a poster girl for both sides in the First World War. The Germans publicised her fate to discourage resistance and espionage; the Allies publicised it to encourage recruitment and stiffen public resolve against German barbarity. A Foreign Office official, however, suggested that her death, while ‘part and parcel’ of a German ‘policy of frightfulness’, might also be a sign of weakness. 1 Cavell’s execution needs to be set in its wartime context to understand its particular resonance.

1915: a year of transition

By the autumn of 1915 it was clear to all warring parties that the war initially expected to last six months was going to go on for a long time. It had become, as historian Sir Michael Howard has written, less a traditional struggle for power than a conflict of ideologies. 2 Overall, the advantage in 1915 seemed to lie with the Central Powers, principally Germany and Austria, though a divided approach to the campaign against Russia weakened their initiative and Austria was close to collapse. For Britain, the disastrous Dardanelles campaign in the spring had served to emphasise the fact that the Balkans were lost to the Allies, despite Italy’s joining the Allied cause in April. By the autumn, both sides were committed to renewed campaigns on the Western Front: the Allies, led by Britain and France, to help their Russian ally, the Central Powers to encourage Russian weakness and strengthen the call for a separate peace. During 1915 the Allies had discovered they did not have enough of the right kind of guns, ammunition or men to fight the war they were faced with, and their communications were poor. The Central Powers discovered that success would require new defensive tactics, while on the Eastern Front infantry attacks behind a curtain of prolonged artillery fire worked better.

On the Western Front the difficulty for both sides of attack and defence meant that attrition—exhausting the opponent—became an objective. In 1915 the extension of hostilities fostered innovation on both sides, in armaments, in communications, in tactics and in staff work. It also increased the importance of propaganda.

Edith Cavell and the propaganda war

Public perception was important to the prosecution of the war on both sides, to boost recruitment and ensure the continuing support of the belligerent peoples for a conflict with no early end in sight. Each side disseminated or encouraged the publication of material exposing the barbarity of the other. In Britain, popular opinion was whipped up by the press with stories of atrocities, especially after the Germans began to use chlorine gas as a weapon during the spring of 1915. Anti-German sentiment led the Royal Family to change their Germanic surname to Mountbatten, German Shepherd dogs were rebranded as Alsatians and Wagner’s music outlawed from the concert halls. The Central Powers also put out stories of barbarity, accusing the Allies of colonial aggression and underhand tactics. In particular, the Germans wanted to discourage espionage and resistance in the countries they had overrun, such as Belgium. The case of Edith Cavell played into both sides’ propaganda effort. In Britain, she was portrayed as an angel of mercy, persecuted for her efforts to nurse wounded and dying servicemen and for helping them get home. For the Germans, she was a symbol of underground resistance who must be made an example of, to discourage others. Another Englishwoman nursing in Belgium wrote that after Cavell’s arrest posters appeared in the area, warning that ‘Whoever knowingly aids in any manner whatsoever an enemy of Germany in concealing his presence whether by giving him lodging, by clothing him or by giving him food is liable to the same punishment—Death or penal servitude’. 3

Cavell’s execution also provided propaganda material in the Allied nations. She featured on the front page of the New York Times, and her image was used widely on recruitment posters and propaganda literature. Regular army and territorial enlistment rose substantially in late October and November 1915. Certainly there was widespread public revulsion at her fate, particularly at the idea of executing a woman. The speed with which the Germans had acted in carrying out the sentence suggests they expected such reactions; it also shows how important they estimated the deterrent effect of her execution to be.

An unlikely spy?

There have been suggestions that Cavell was involved in espionage, for which her activities on behalf of servicemen were a useful screen. There is no evidence to suggest she was working for any formal intelligence organisation, and she was not charged with espionage by the Germans. But her activities in coordinating the shelter and onward passage of Allied servicemen through Belgium were undoubtedly part of an organised resistance network. Such networks were an important feature of the intelligence landscape of the First World War.

In 1915 both MI1(c), the British overseas intelligence organisation (later called SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service), and British military intelligence were very active in Belgium and France, supported by a large number of civilian networks. For example, the Dame Blanche network of train-watchers in Belgium numbered about 800 people of all ages supplying intelligence on German troop and equipment movements to the Allied military authorities. 4

The image of a young, innocent nurse (though Cavell was 49 when she died), bravely working in secret to protect Allied servicemen was a potent one that was useful to the intelligence authorities as well as the military and political ones.

Patriotism is not enough

There are many memorials in Britain to Edith Cavell, some inscribed with her words: ‘I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’ German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann, commenting on Cavell’s fate, added a rider to this: ‘In war one must be prepared to seal one’s patriotism with blood, whether one faces the enemy in battle or otherwise in the interest of one’s cause.’5

Notes

1. Minute of 14 October 1915, FO 383/15. 2. Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction (London: 2007). 3. Tammy Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (London: 2003). On Cavell’s activities see also Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell: Nurse, Martyr, Heroine (London: 2010, memorial edn 2015); and Herbert Leeds, Edith Cavell, her Life Story (1915, reissued by Classic Reprints 2012). 4. See Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 (London: 2010), pp. 78-82. 5. www.firstworldwar.com/source/cavell_zimmermann.htm

Frank Roberts’ ‘Long Telegram’: 21 March 1946

Posted on: 21 March 2016

No one who has served in Moscow can ever be quite the same person again . . . Those who have had this experience may be pardoned if they think that, among themselves, they can speak a language and carry thoughts which no one who has not shared that experience can fully understand. 1

At the beginning of 1946 Frank Roberts2 Sir Frank Roberts (National Portrait Gallery) was British Minister in Moscow, acting as Chargé after the departure of the Ambassador. His American counterpart was George Kennan, who famously sent an 8000-word telegram to the State Department on 22 February 1946, analysing Soviet policy and recommending a strategy of containment to frustrate its aggressive expansionism.3 Three weeks later Roberts sent an equally long and penetrating analysis to the Foreign Office in a set of reports including three telegrams on 21 March 1946.4 The quotations below are taken from these documents unless otherwise stated. The two men agreed on many points: but aspects of Roberts’ reporting shed interesting light on the global context and on differences between the British and American approach to the USSR. Roberts, representing a weakened and exhausted power, sought to understand the Soviet Union in order to work with it; Kennan, representing a world superpower, sought to understand it in order to counter its ambitions. This is an over-simplification, but holds some truth.

The world in March 1946

No one thought in March 1946 ‘this is the beginning of a long Cold War’, though it already seemed the postwar world was dividing on ideological lines, reinforced by military might. Less than a year since the end of the war in Europe, seven months since the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, the victorious Allied powers were mired in fractious negotiations on peace-making and institution-building. Europe was devastated physically and economically, with millions of people displaced; nationalist uprisings, civil wars and competition for scarce resources disturbed the peace on a global scale. The new world organisation, the United Nations, already seemed unlikely to fulfil the aspirations of its Charter. The wartime Allies—Britain, the US and the USSR—had lost their common purpose and with it the imperative to work together harmoniously.

Bring back the ‘Big Three’

In 1945 the UK, US and USSR all thought they had won the war, individually as well as jointly, yet with the euphoria of hard-won victory came disappointment. American money and military might had transformed the struggle against the Axis powers after the US entered the war in December 1941, but when peace came the rest of the world seemed chaotic, unstable and needy, reluctant to pick itself up and let the US alone to mind its own business. Britain felt its monumental efforts since 1939 had been rewarded by bankruptcy and crippling global responsibilities, rather than the chance for domestic reconstruction.

For the Soviet Union, invaded by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the hard-fought battles that secured victory on the Eastern Front and thereby ensured success in the West had been won at immense human and economic cost. The reward, in Stalin’s eyes, was to be marginalised by the Anglo-American special relationship, excluded from the atomic club and pressurised by a capitalist expansion alien not just to Soviet Marxist ideology but to economic recovery. The result was resentment, suspicion and, in Roberts’ words, ‘high-handedness’. Roberts understood that the Soviet Union wanted to resurrect the Big Three, for reasons rooted in geography, history and ideology, as well as prestige.

Geography: ‘the constant striving for security of a state with no natural frontiers’

In October 1945 the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had described Russia’s geographical situation as ‘strategically relatively invulnerable’.5 But the view from Moscow was quite different. Russia felt both vulnerable and insecure, seeking to establish a protective belt of Soviet republics, with acquiescent or subservient nearneighbours, the scope to exert influence further afield (for example in the Middle East) and control over strategic waterways like the Dardanelles. Security meant keeping Soviet troops in Persia while resisting a continued Western military presence in Greece. It meant making sure that it could never again be threatened by a resurgent Germany, and that postwar Germany should look east, not west. Where Russian interests were not threatened, Western interests and objectives could be accommodated; but any perceived encroachment would be resisted, with force if necessary. Security was, as Roberts said, Russia’s first priority. ‘The frontiers of Russia have never been fixed and have gone backwards and forwards with defeats or victories in war. But even after her greatest victories in the past, Russia has somehow found herself deprived of many of the fruits of those victories.’

History: the revolutionary legacy

Before the wartime alliance, both Britain and the US had spent the years since the 1917 revolution opposing the Bolshevik system and hoping it would not last. Just as it was impossible for the Soviets to forget Allied intervention in the Russian civil war after 1917, it was impossible for Britain and America to forget that Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nor could the British Government forget unremitting Soviet efforts to inspire revolt and revolution in the Empire, especially in the context of postwar revelations of ongoing espionage activities. Difficult memories suppressed during the 1941-45 Alliance returned thereafter on both sides to poison the wells of cooperation. History, as Roberts pointed out, showed that Britain and Russia could be brought together by a shared ‘deadly menace’, as they had been in 1812, 1914 and 1941. But it

was also a powerful barrier to working with a regime underpinned by the ideology of world revolution.

Ideology: ‘present aggressive methods conform to long-term strategy indicated in ideological campaign revived since the war’

Roberts emphasised the importance of ideology in Soviet policy, together with Russian national tradition. Stalin supported this approach for domestic political reasons as well as ideological ones. It was useful to give the impression that the Soviet peoples were ‘surrounded by a hostile world composed largely of reactionary capitalists and their willing tolls in the social democratic movement’. A ‘foreign bogey’ justified the maintenance of a strong Russian army, a rigidly controlled political system, isolation from the outside world and pressure on the populace to fulfil the five-year plan for economic recovery. It increased confidence in the regime and gave it space to consolidate power. Yet though Soviet policy was fundamentally hostile to Western liberal, democratic capitalist and imperialist conceptions, Roberts thought it ‘possible, though difficult’ to reconcile British and Soviet aims, ‘granted the right mixture of strength and patience and the avoidance of sabre-rattling or the raising of prestige issues’. It was a constant theme of his advice from Moscow, and undoubtedly influenced the way Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, approached policy towards the Soviet Union. Bevin and Attlee took a much less rigid ideological approach than the US Government (which, indeed, mistrusted Britain’s ‘socialist administration’). (There were to be deep Anglo-American divisions over Communist China.) Stalin, however, disliked Britain’s ‘bourgeois liberalism’ much more than naked American capitalism: Roberts reported that Bevin was regarded like Trotsky−as a ‘very important but dangerous and hostile personality’.

Are we in for a permanent gale or a short squall?

Bevin asked Roberts this question on 12 March 1946, in response to a JIC report concluding that ‘although Soviet intentions may be defensive, tactics will be offensive’. Roberts’ telegrams of 21 March 1946 formed part of his answer. He was clear that ‘all Soviet tactics are short-term, but their strategy, although flexible, is definitely long-term’. The timing of short-term Soviet moves was usually informed by an assessment of the state of Anglo-American relations. The Soviet regime was dynamic and it was still expanding. But it did not want to achieve that expansion by armed conflict unless forced to it, or if it occurred through miscalculation. In fact, there were signs in March 1946 that the Soviets wanted to reduce international tension, evacuating Bornholm, withdrawing forces from Manchuria, establishing diplomatic relations with Switzerland. Roberts thought these moves designed partly to deflect Security Council criticism, and partly because ‘Soviet policy has overreached itself recently’. In Roberts’ view, in dealing with the Soviets there would clearly be a long-term requirement for navigating stormy seas. Sometimes oil might be poured on troubled waters; sometimes the storm must be ridden out. In all cases, it would be AngloAmerican solidarity that kept the ship on an even keel. It was a course that would be followed skilfully by Bevin in the next three years.

Notes

1. William (Lord) Strang, Home and Abroad (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956), p. 61 2. F.K. (later Sir Frank) Roberts, 1907-1997, had a long and distinguished diplomatic career, including as HM Ambassador in Moscow 1960-62. He served as Minister in Moscow from January 1945, acting as Chargé on a number of occasions until early 1948 when he returned to become Bevin’s Principal Private Secretary. 3. Kennan’s telegram is printed in Foreign Relations of the United States 1946, vol. vi, pp. 696-709. See also www.history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/kennan 4. Roberts’ despatches and the 21 March 1946 telegrams are printed in Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Volume VI (London: HMSO, 1991), Nos. 79-87. 5. Ibid, No. 41.