Guest Post: Secretary of War Kitchener Resigns from the Cabinet

This post first appeared on Today in Alternate History.


June 3, 1916 -

On this fateful day in alternate history, Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, resigned from his Cabinet position as Secretary of War.

The mistaken choice of Britain's ageing, last military hero was a panic measure taken to assuage public fear when the Liberal Government's ultimatum to Germany was ignored. Considered unsuitable for Chief of General Staff and too old for BEF Commander, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith offered him a political role that ill-suited him for exactly the same reasons Asquith had refused to appoint him Viceroy of India three years earlier. As a precondition for accepting the position, he insisted on being an apolitical figure that would not be expected to publicly defend the Government's record. Ultimately, circumstances would make this impossible because the stakes were too high for him to take isolated decisions from inside in the War Office; to maintain morale they would have to be vigorously defended in the public arena.

At issue was his accountability in a modern democracy to the voting population rather than his orders from a chain of command or, more accurately, the mission parameters. A Victorian-era dinosaur, he wrongly considered his foremost loyalty was to the King, and indeed it was to the King that he had lobbied for the position of Viceroy. When this was firmly declined by Secretary of State for India John Morley, Kitchener obtained permission to refuse the consolidation prize of the commander of Malta. By this stage, the monarch was only a ceremonial figure, and Kitchener was caught out of step with the modern democracy, having spent his career overseas serving as a senior British Army officer and colonial administrator in the British Empire, a long way from the liberal politics of Westminster. Disconnected, the other problems were he held the War Office in open contempt and, being an introspective figure, had a major flaw in communicating critical pieces of information.

A bad early omen was the death of his former boss, Lord Roberts of Kabul and Kandahar. "Bobs" died of pneumonia while visiting Indian troops at the BEF base in St Omer, France, on 14 November 1914. Meanwhile, BEF Commander Sir John French had been particularly angry that Kitchener had arrived wearing his field marshal's uniform. By the end of the year, French thought that Kitchener had "gone mad" and his hostility had become common knowledge at HQ.

Regardless of whether Asquith also intended for him to be a ceremonial figure, Kitchener used his considerable ability to set about organizing the British Army with great vigor. Key staffing decisions such as holding back officers for training were inspired, but his man-management skills were overwhelmed with the larger problems of scaling up munition supply. Within twelve months the war effort, which he himself admitted was a "grand experiment," hit a brick wall during the Shells Crisis. The leak to media was made by Sir John French, who bore a grudge against Kitchener for insisting the BEF fight in the First Battle of the Marne. This crisis resulted in the appointment of David Lloyd-George, a "peppery fellow" who had been sharply critical of his grand-standing ever since the Second Boer War. DLG became Minister of Munitions as well as Chancellor of the Exchequer, while Kitchener was stripped of his role as owner of the war-time strategy. This reshuffle was a reversion to the military reforms of 1904, which safeguarded civilian control of military matters, demonstrating that the bygone era of Marlborough and Wellington had long since passed. His reputation was further damaged by his mishandling of the Gallipoli Landings even though Winston Churchill at the Admiralty oddly took the majority of the blame.

The famous finger-pointing at the British public was now pointed straight back at him. Whereas Kitchener had failed to understand popular liberal opinion over his inhuman mistreatment of the Dervishes or Boers, public anger over British casualties was impossible to ignore especially after the disastrous Battle of the Somme, the grimmest moment in the history of the British Army. A failed vote of censure in the House of Commons over his running of the War Department was the beginning of the end. Most damagingly, Kitchener had ordered two million rifles from various US arms manufacturers, but only 480 of these rifles had arrived. The number of shells supplied was no less paltry despite the determined efforts he had made to secure alternative supplies.

Kitchener correctly foresaw a three-million-man volunteer army because conscription was considered politically unacceptable by the British cabinet. The tragedy was that he alone had foreseen a long conflict of up to five years, but even he had not anticipated the horrors of trench warfare. Adherence to the strict timings of seven-day bombardments by artillery and attacks on the half-hour removed the element of surprise, and the German machine guns cut down waves of attacking British soldiers. The final nail in the coffin was when conscription finally began when the British government passed the Military Service Act in January 1916. The act specified that single men aged eighteen to forty years old were liable to be called up for military service unless they were widowed with children or were ministers of religion. Despite unrealistic high hopes, Kitchener had lost the public's confidence in military control of the conflict and the ruthless culture of blood-letting in high command finally reached all the way to the very top.

Always more popular overseas than at home, the Canadian city of Berlin, Ontario, named in respect to a large German immigrant settler population, was renamed Kitchener following a referendum only two weeks earlier. With the public perception of "lions led by donkeys," the ever-ambitious Welsh firebrand Lloyd-George replaced him as the new Secretary of State for War and was already eyeing Downing Street. The wider problem was public trust because Kitchener's resignation triggered a wave of defeatism. This ultimately would lead to the signing of the Treaty of Potsdam with the Central Powers. Meanwhile, Kitchener would live the rest of his life on Hinson's Island, which was owned by his nephew, Major H.H. Hap Kitchener, who had married a Bermudian. Like the masses of young men he had sent to their death, he would be buried overseas in "a corner of a foreign field that is forever England."

Author's Note:

In reality, Kitchener was among 737 who drowned when the HMS Hampshire struck a German mine 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Orkney, Scotland, and sank. His great fame, the suddenness of his death, and its apparently convenient timing for a number of parties gave almost immediate rise to a number of conspiracy theories about his death.

Provine's Addendum:

With the end of the World War in 1917, a second American president won a Nobel Peace Prize for mediation with Woodrow Wilson following after Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 in efforts of bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Wilson's presence in truth was largely ceremonial and allowed the honor of all parties to be maintained, despite Wilson's bold initiatives and outlining Fourteen Points that he hoped would establish lasting peace. Kaiser Wilhelm II was arguably the greatest winner of a no-win situation, but German confidence in royalty had declined along with the rest of Europe's, shifting Wilhelm's authority more toward ornament than practical governmental action. Germany found itself in a difficult new position rebuilding along with the rest of central Europe while the Russian Empire faced bitter revolts in the east and a Great Flu pandemic swept across the world. Through the decades, Germany became the leader of continental Europe propping up Russia during its long overdue reforms while Britain and France turned toward their attentions to maintaining their empires overseas. Japan's rapid industrialization and expansion into eastern continental Asia and Southeast Asia, challenging British, French, Dutch, and American colonial authorities already present along with Russian territory beyond Siberia. Military advisers across the world agreed, "the next great war will be in the Pacific."