New Zealand As It Might Have Been 2

fulfilled.

Illustrations

HMS New Zealand arriving at Auckland, 1913. Kinnear Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, G-15253-1/2

Rufus Dewar (c. 1912–1913). Dean Parker Collection

Salute at the Cenotaph, Wellington. Men in naval uniform are from the RN Armando Diaz. A group of fascists are to the right with their arms upraised. Photograph by Edward Thomas Robson, 1934. Alexander Turnbull Library, PAColl-7081-16

Winston Churchill in Croydon, 1 January 1948. Hulton Archive, Getty Images, 102165893

President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973) and visiting New Zealand Prime Minister, Keith Jacka Holyoake (1904–1983), standing together at a White House ceremony welcoming Holyoake. Dominion Post Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, EP-NZ Obits-Holyoake-12

Autographed photograph of Katherine Mansfield. Adelphi Studio (London), 1914. Alexander Turnbull Library, F-017274-1/4

Huts on Mesopotamia at Samuel Butler's homestead, ca 1868. Watercolour painting by William Packe. Alexander Turnbull Library, A-196-015

Cover of Bill Pearson's novel, Coal Flat, 1963. Original cover artwork by Colin McCahon. Pearson Estate

Hone Heke. Portrait by Joseph Jenner Merrett. Rex Nan Kivell Collection, NK321, National Library of Australia, 893600

Sir George Grey, Governor, New Zealand. Engraving from a photograph by William Wolfe Alais, ca 1861. Schmidt Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, F-604-1/1

Maori warriors lead thousands of people down Lambton Quay en route to the grounds of Parliament, as part of the hikoi to protest the Seabed and Foreshore legislation, 5 May 2004. Photograph by Kenny Rodger. New Zealand Herald, 050504NZHKERHIKOI8

Remains of the wreck of the White Swan Steamer, June 1863. Artist unknown. Alexander Turnbull Library, A-090-011

Coat of arms, Australasia. John E. Martin Collection

How on earth did that happen? Cartoon by Peter Bromhead, 1977. Alexander Turnbull Library, A-328-036

Last meeting of the Legislative Council, Wellington. Archives New Zealand: National Publicity Studios Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, F-19120-1/2

Electoral referendum ballot paper, 1992. Electoral Referendum Panel

Women voting for the first time at the Drill Hall in Rutland Street, Auckland, in 1893. Photograph by Beattie and Sanderson. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland City Libraries, 7-A12353

Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Mount Everest at 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953. Tenzing waves his ice-axe on which are hung the flags of Britain, Nepal, the United Nations and India. Photograph by Edmund Hillary. Royal Geographical Society, S0001056

Introduction

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well …

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

We all hope to find the unexpected, hidden beneath the landscape of the ordinary and the everyday. Beneath the surface of New Zealand's history – and, in fact, part of it – are possibilities: opportunities overlooked, neglected and now forgotten. There is a fascination about them, and rediscovering them – intellectual oases, sources of refreshment offering the prospect of something else, something new, something perhaps a bit startling – provides enjoyment and even aesthetic appreciation.

Counterfactuals – a rearrangement of incidents and events, also known as alternative history – are now a worldwide phenomenon. A Google search in June 2010 found 165,000 results for ‘counterfactuals’. ‘Counterfactual history’ produced 82,000 ‘hits’; ‘counterfactual analysis’, 345,000; ‘counterfactual thinking’, 132,000; and ‘counterfactual reasoning’, 349,000. The results for ‘alternative history’ were even greater: 145 million, with nearly 16 million for the words ‘alternative history fiction’.

The Amazon book site also points towards an increasingly crowded field. In June 2010 ‘counterfactuals’ produced 799 book results; ‘counterfactual history’, 38; and ‘counterfactual thinking’, 86. Searching on ‘alternate history’ gave 671 results, with ‘alternative history fiction’ producing 178. There is, furthermore, on both Google and Amazon, evidence of an ‘alternative history community’, with thousands of people promoting large numbers of lists, guides and other products, while maintaining discussion groups of one kind or another.

This second book of New Zealand counterfactuals (New Zealand as it might have been, with 15 scenarios, was published in 2006) takes on an array of topics, each, in a sense, an enigma, a puzzle waiting to be solved. In one way or another there are two historical puzzles at issue: why did an event that could well have happened fail to do so? And what would the consequences have been – what would it have meant – had it in fact taken place?

At any moment every event in the life of a nation, or a person, has a range of possible paths that can be taken. Counterfactual speculation, responding to that reality, considers what actually happened by looking at what could have happened, the inquiry akin to the movements of a kaleidoscope, each turn opening up new patterns, new relationships, among its interconnected pieces.

This book of counterfactual chapters does not provide a continuous narrative, a single thread of altered New Zealand history in which each restructured event leads inexorably on to the next. Quite the contrary: each chapter stands on its own. Indeed, some events, such as the opening chapter's vision of a New Zealand transformed by German occupation as a result of an altered outcome of the First World War, would preclude some of the other circumstances conceived of in this book – including, for instance, Gallipoli (in chapter 2) and the Second World War (chapters 3 and 4) – from ever taking place.

So this is a book to be read as a series of surprises, each encounter with a new New Zealand altogether separate from the one preceding and the next one just up ahead. And this is also a book about possibilities: some realised, some not. In that respect, through a mingling of the real and the imagined – of what was and what might have been – it resembles life as it is, full of plans, some fulfilled, some not: as in the Jewish proverb, ‘People plan, God laughs’ (‘mentsch tract, Gott lacht’).

Just as the bright colours of a painting can fade with the passage of time – made dull by dust, and grit, and too many layers of varnish – so too events can lose their glow, becoming lost to memory. Any work of history, counterfactual or otherwise, strives to rescue from neglect forgotten incidents, personalities obscured by indifference and inattention. In this sense historical writing can be likened to art restoration, bringing life and lustre back to a canvas filled with possibility and promise.

What the contributors to this book do is restore, at least for a little while, a New Zealand – or, really, a succession of New Zealands – in which events that eventually occurred have yet to do so. All is put back to as it once was. Now the possibility is there once again that matters may unfold along a different path – as, indeed, was the case before incident and decision, chance and intention, combined to produce the ‘time line’ of events as it actually is.

As noted, this is the second of two books to take this more open-ended approach to New Zealand affairs, searching for the overlooked opportunities, the ‘near misses’ of New Zealand history, politics and possibility. The two volumes – New Zealand as it might have been, 1 and 2 – re-enact entirely different events. No situation examined in the first book is given a ‘second look’, but there are, even so, some continuities of style and subject between them, with certain themes in common. One is a preoccupation with war: with New Zealand's vulnerability, and with New Zealanders’ involvement in armed conflict. The attempt to rewrite the way in which these wars unfold reflects, at times, dissatisfaction with what occurred – with New Zealand's involvement in the First World War, for instance – and the wish that matters had been handled differently (see chapter 2). This is true as well of conflicts involving the Crown (and/or European settlers) and the Maori people. Indeed, a second theme, found in both volumes, is a preoccupation with the way in which interactions between Maori and the state, or between Maori and non-Maori, were managed, particularly during the 19th-century colonial period. This is not nostalgia, more the opposite. A perceived falling short by the nation's founders, leading to a discrepancy between the way they behaved and how many would perhaps prefer them to have conducted themselves, animates much of the counterfactual re-examination of scenes and events associated with European-Maori relations. No doubt this sense of national regret has contributed much to contemporary measures seeking to resolve historical grievances and to atone (where possible) for the misdeeds of the past. A re-imagining of the way things could have been plays a part – and perhaps not a small one – in that process.

What makes New Zealand as it might have been 2 particularly distinctive – different from its predecessor and from ‘what if’ books written about other societies – is its broader cultural perspective. In this second volume, the focus is not solely on the rediscovery of forgotten alternatives relating to New Zealand's political, military and economic decisions and choices. Instead, the ‘what if’ horizon has been opened up, with contributors speculating about literary figures whose lives and works might have been altered had they but made different personal and creative choices. If Katherine Mansfield – perhaps New Zealand's most famous author – had been compelled, by one means or another, to return to this country, how might her life have been changed? What would this have meant for her – and for her work? If Samuel Butler, an English writer who sojourned for a time in New Zealand – subsequently to become a renowned author, influenced by his stay here – had never left the country, had never gone back to England, what might this have meant for him, and for us, and for the works that he left behind him? And what of the less well known but nevertheless influential New Zealand essayist, Bill Pearson? This counterfactual is rather different, the focus being on Pearson's private life, and a choice he might have made as a writer, one that would have altered the direction and meaning of his sole novel, Coal Flat, with consequences for his life and career.

This book also explores the New Zealand idea – a source of considerable satisfaction – of being ‘first in the world’, with two authors, Caroline Daley (chapter 16) and Hugh Logan (chapter 17), wondering what it might have meant for this country, and its view of itself, had New Zealand not been world leaders on two highly celebrated occasions. One – becoming the first country in the world to introduce women's suffrage – is a deeply embedded source of pride for New Zealanders. Disrupting this idea, as indeed she does with her reworking of some of the historical context, could not help but alter aspects of the New Zealand identity and outlook. As for the other, the inspiration achieved by Edmund Hillary's feat in climbing to the peak of the planet – the conquest of Mount Everest – is in every sense irreplaceable. Impossible, now, to recover the excitement of that achievement. Impossible, too, to underestimate the pride – a permanent sense of satisfaction – that the man who made this ascent had the personality and demeanour that he did. Hillary's life was a great peak of its own – a symbol of strength and purpose – and Hugh Logan's imagining of a world in which Edmund Hillary does not climb that mountain, Everest, before anyone else, is itself an exercise in exploration and discovery.

There are, as this book shows, various ways in which counterfactuals can be written. Accounts of historical events, developing differently from the way they actually occurred, in ways both large and small, can be made to unfold through an analytical study exploring alternative possibilities and their consequences. How probable an event might have been can be determined, more or less, by investigating, and thinking about, the factors responsible for it failing to occur. Of course, such an exercise invites a renewed appreciation, and a deeper understanding, for what actually did take place.

A second approach, also resting upon a good grasp of events and their causes, is to write a narrative – a story – in which the counterfactual history simply unfolds. With this style, an altered course of events is presented as though it had actually been so.

In this book, as in its predecessor, both styles of counterfactual discussion are present. The ‘stories’ are told in chapters 1–4 (about the two world wars and their aftermath), in chapter 11 (an account of a subtly different handling of the contemporary foreshore-and-seabed dispute), in chapter 12 (narrating the demise, at sea, of both the colonial Governor and the New Zealand government), in chapter 15 (on MMP), and in chapter 17 (in part, with the account of exploits on Mount Everest).

The analytical approach par excellence is provided in chapter 10 by Giselle Byrnes, who, at the same time, as she did in volume 1, explores the rationale and usefulness of counterfactual reasoning for historical purposes. Paul Moon's consideration of Hone Heke's career (in chapter 9) likewise affirms the usefulness of counterfactual discussion while analysing ways in which matters might have turned out differently for Maori, the British authorities, and the country's precarious European settlements. Donald Anderson (in chapter 5) provides an analysis of factors that could have led to a different 1960s–1970s for New Zealand, one in which the country's armed forces never need to be extricated from South Vietnam because they have never been sent there in the first place.

Caroline Daley's chapter (16) on women's suffrage provides a meticulously argued analysis, thoughtful and thought-provoking, emphasising not one but multiple opportunities for the question of voting rights for women to have played out differently. Hers is a counterfactual chapter in which, realistically, there is more than one alternative path to be rediscovered and explored. The same can be said of Anderson's scrupulous view of New Zealand's engagement with the Vietnam conflict.

Some chapters, of course, combine a bit of each counterfactual style, the analytical and the story-telling. Hugh Eldred-Grigg's look (in chapter 13) at the life and political career of former Labour Cabinet minister Colin Moyle – inventing (not implausibly) a Moyle government, overshadowing the once sensational ‘Moyle affair’ for which he is largely remembered – involves analysis as well as a brief glimpse of Prime Minister Moyle gracing the national stage. Harshan Kumarasingham's depiction (in chapter 14) of a revived parliamentary second chamber – a New Zealand Senate – begins by enacting a plausible Senate scene, before moving on to an analysis of the context in which Prime Minister Jim Bolger's preference for a second chamber, and the National Party's pre-election 1990 manifesto commitment to consider one, actually come to fruition (as one would normally expect it ought to have done, given the party's election victory).

With the three ‘cultural’ chapters (6–8), the first, by Patrick Evans, is presented as a story, with Katherine Mansfield living in New Zealand, growing old, her relationships evolving. What is portrayed is not an analysis of possibilities, but rather a ‘what if’ narrative in which the basic premise – Katherine Mansfield, ‘home’ in New Zealand rather than an exile in France – is presented as though it had been so. Roger Robinson's chapter is very nearly that as well, his depiction of Samuel Butler's altered life, had he but remained in New Zealand, carried out so vividly, and so effectively, that it seems as though it should have happened exactly that way. Paul Millar's chapter, unique in its approach, offers a re-creation of Bill Pearson that is poignantly persuasive, as Millar subtly rewrites segments of Pearson's only novel, showing how, through this work of fiction, slightly rearranged, Pearson the author might have set free Pearson the man.

In a counterfactual world, authors themselves may enter and leave the scene. One author, Bob Gregory, has a ‘Hitchcock moment’ (the celebrated film director, Alfred Hitchcock, a superb self-publicist, used to put in a brief cameo appearance in his films) though he may be more difficult to spot than the great (and somewhat rotund) director had been once he became famous. Other authors – Nigel Roberts and myself, along with a contributor to the previous ‘what if’ book, Jon Johansson – are more conspicuously present (see chapter 15), acting out our accustomed roles, answering questions about why New Zealand politicians behave the way they do and what it means for the rest of us.

The tone and mood of the chapters varies, one from the other, just as the style does. For instance, the first chapter, Ian McGibbon's altered First World War narrative, is good-humoured, while the second, dealing with that same conflict, is bleak and intense. These variations in mood and outlook continue from one chapter to the next. Some are mischievous; others sombre, even grim.

The book is organised into several sections. Each identifies important, and complementary, features of New Zealand's politics, culture and national identity. The country's participation in the great wars of the 20th century – the First and Second World Wars, and the Vietnam War – is reflected in the five chapters focusing on those events. Another section of the book looks back at 19th-century conflicts, arising out of European settlement, with colonists and Maori intermittently locked in struggle over land, resources, sovereignty and power. That these struggles continue to the present is emphasised, of course, in Janine Hayward's chapter (11) on the foreshore-and-seabed issue.

The colonial experience also forms an introductory backdrop in the section dealing with New Zealand government and politics. It is worth emphasising that the basis for the counterfactual set forth in chapter 12 actually happened. The counterfactual – the imagined scenario – is not, as some might suppose, the loss of a ship carrying virtually the entire colonial government, but rather the circumstances that follow it, as conceived by the author. Following on from the colonial period this section of the book moves to several 20th-century events: the abandonment by Parliament of its second chamber; a dramatic late-night dispute with Prime Minister Robert Muldoon at the centre of it; and the idea of a referendum in 2011 on New Zealand's electoral system, arrived at by a somewhat restructured sequence of events.

This book also has a focus on individual decisions: those of artists and adventurers, choices that had social or cultural significance, with importance not only for those who made them, the artists (Mansfield, Butler, Pearson) and adventurers (Hillary), but for New Zealand's wider national identity. This element of the book, focusing in particular on authors – and in two cases on the consequences of coming to New Zealand and of leaving it – adds a different dimension to counterfactual inquiry.

The final section, examining the New Zealand claim to be ‘leading the world’ – and what the loss of that distinction might have meant for the country's view of itself – provides a framework for its two very different chapters. It would not be difficult to find many other instances, right up to the present, of New Zealand political and cultural debate being influenced by the idea of the country ‘again’ leading the world – a role seen almost inevitably in warmly positive terms, as an opportunity for a small and remote country, seldom a focus for international attention, to lead by example.

What actually happened – ‘New Zealand as it really was’ – is also, inescapably and explicitly, a significant feature of this book. For each chapter, the real story – the essential facts, at least – is also given. These accounts are grouped together at the back of the book, in an Appendix: ‘17 scenarios – what really happened’. These materials, for the most part concise and largely dispassionate, are vital not only so that readers will not be misled, about matters both great and small, but because knowing what actually happened is part of appreciating alternative possibilities.

Nearly every chapter also has ‘endnotes’, likewise bracketed together at the back of the book. Some of these provide background commentary, while others give citations to sources. These latter, though genuine, may in some cases be deployed in ways not originally anticipated, documenting events that did not actually occur – or, at least, not in the manner suggested. Other notes add nuance, extending the counterfactual, contributing further verisimilitude – credibility and coherence – to the narrative.

Each chapter also includes a photograph (or cartoon), illustrating the scenario with visuals showing the events (the foreshore and seabed protests, for instance), protagonists (such as Governor George Grey and Hone Heke), and other thematic elements (such as the cover of Bill Pearson's only novel).

Together these 17 counterfactuals, with their interplay of stylistic elements, seek to orchestrate a more expansive view of personal and political experience. While it is not true that ‘everything’ is possible, the range of possibilities – of plausible outcomes, influenced by chance and misadventure, by accident and the unforeseen – is far wider than is often realised. Perhaps the attitude and outlook we adopt towards the past should be more consistent with that taken towards the future, seeing in each something of an undiscovered country, with unexplored terrain that still beckons. In the end, through a creative consideration of what might have been as well as what was, it should be possible to arrive enjoyably at a worthwhile destination: a more authentic understanding of the events that influenced and shaped us, bringing us to the world that we now inhabit, both for ill and for good.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And to know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

IAN MCGIBBON 1

What if Germany had destroyed the British navy at the Battle of Jutland in 1916?

HMS New Zealand, 1913

Defeat at sea

In all his sixty years William Massey had never had a bigger shock. The words in the telegram he held in his shaking hand were brutally short but their impact could not have been greater: ‘NORTH SEA ENGAGEMENT GRAND FLEET DECISIVELY DEFEATED’. The British Empire's worst nightmare had become awful reality. The British battlefleet – the lynchpin of British power, New Zealand's shield from a hostile world – had been annihilated.

The battle that shocked the Prime Minister had begun while his countrymen slept the previous night. After learning that its adversary, the German High Seas Fleet (under the command of Admiral Reinhard Scheer), had put to sea on 31 May, the Grand Fleet had hastily steamed out of its base at Scapa Flow. Flying his flag in the battleship HMS Iron Duke, its commander, Sir John Jellicoe, was acutely conscious of the burden of responsibility on his shoulders. Recognition that he could lose the war in an afternoon bolstered his innate caution. So he was in no mood for risk-taking when, late in the afternoon, it became obvious that a clash was in the offing off the coast of Denmark.

No one could fault Jellicoe's tactical competence. But, unknown to him, there was a hidden menace within his fleet – a design fault that allowed shell flash to penetrate to the magazines. This became apparent when the battlecruiser fleets opened the fight. Two British battlecruisers quickly blew up, and shortly afterwards another exploded and sank. At first this did not seem a fatal development. Jellicoe crossed Scheer's line, forcing his German counterpart to turn away in the gathering gloom, sheltered behind a shield of smaller craft which unleashed a cloud of torpedoes towards the British fleet. The wise course for Jellicoe at this point was clearly to turn away and to seek to get between the enemy fleet and its base. But the British admiral, suddenly blinded by visions of another Trafalgar, uncharacteristically ordered his fleet to close with the disappearing German battleships. It was a move that would baffle historians for half a century, not least because Jellicoe did not survive the night.

In a matter of minutes the Grand Fleet suffered a shattering blow. The torpedo strikes, combined with an inspirational decision by Scheer to reverse his line and to re-engage the British fleet in the fading light, precipitated a disaster unprecedented for British seapower. The Battle of Jutland (or the Skagerak, to Germans) would indeed rival Trafalgar in its strategic consequences – though not in the way Jellicoe had hoped. Among the victims was the battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, which New Zealand had gifted to the Royal Navy with a view to helping to prevent such a situation occurring. As she entered the battle, her captain was wearing a tiki [greenstone figurine] and there was a Maori piu piu [flax skirt] hanging in the conning tower. Her crew had insisted on this, having been convinced that these gifts, received during the ship's New Zealand visit three years before, represented a talisman, evidenced by her good fortune in coming through the earlier clashes at Heligoland and Dogger Bank unscathed. But this time they failed to ward off danger. New Zealand suffered the same fate as several of her sister ships, blowing up when a shell flash penetrated to her magazine. All but two of her crew, most of whom were British seamen, went down with her.

Just three of the Grand Fleet's battleships and two battlecruisers managed to escape the carnage, which continued through the night. These survivors arrived at Scapa Flow mid-morning, but they wasted little time in moving south to Portsmouth. No one in London was under any illusions. This was a catastrophe from which there could, and would, be no recovery. The war was lost for certain – and the fate of Britain's empire hung in the balance.

The outcome of the battle shattered the assumption on which Britain had committed the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium. Logistically the BEF depended on command of the sea in the English Channel. This was now gone. German squadrons, it was clear, would soon be marauding the area. Once this happened, any British troopships or merchantmen foolish enough to put to sea would be at great risk. For several weeks fast merchantmen made dashes across the Channel at night, but on 19 June disaster struck, eight merchantmen falling victim to German warships. Fifteen hundred reinforcements drowned. In this dire situation the British government cancelled the mighty offensive that the BEF had planned to launch, in conjunction with the French Army, on the Somme on 1 July. The vast new army raised by Lord Kitchener would instead stand on the defensive. With Germany adopting a similar stance after the bloodletting at Verdun in the first half of the year, a lull developed on the Western Front.

Within weeks of arriving on the Western Front, in April 1916, New Zealand troops found the whole war context had changed fundamentally. However, since the New Zealanders had not been included in the forces earmarked for the Somme offensive, the naval disaster did not immediately affect them. They continued to man the line at Armentières, where they had to endure the taunts of exultant Germans in the trenches opposite about the naval disaster.

The Jutland defeat put at risk all New Zealand troops at sea. The 12th Reinforcements, in three troopships, had left New Zealand in the first week of May, but they were well out of immediate harm's way in the Indian Ocean, heading for Colombo, at the time of the battle. They subsequently reached Suez safely. For the time being reinforcements could proceed to the front by way of Marseilles, but this route would soon be threatened by the arrival of a powerful German squadron at the Ottoman port of Smyrna.

In London a furious debate developed within the British government as to how to respond to the new situation. A peace party quickly emerged in the House of Commons, and it wasted little time in securing a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. Upon his resignation, David Lloyd George formed a new ministry. Faced with only unpalatable options, the Cabinet concluded that to delay seeking terms was to risk a further weakening of the Allied position as the telling effect of German command of the sea became apparent. Quite apart from the problem of sustaining the BEF, there was a danger that Germany would use its newly gained naval predominance to invade the British Isles. With most of Britain's trained men now on the Continent, mounting a defence against such an attack would be difficult, if not impossible. The danger was highlighted when a German squadron successively stood off Aberdeen and Whitby and bombarded them mercilessly, wreaking heavy damage. But even without Germans landing on British soil, Britain faced a daunting crisis. It depended upon a steady flow of imports to feed its population. The Jutland defeat halted this flow for the foreseeable future. With the British Empire threatened with strangulation, Britain's own survival depended upon an armistice. The French, for their part, soon concluded that without the BEF to take responsibility for a substantial part of the front their own continuing resistance would be futile, given the battering their army had taken at Verdun.

Peace at last …

Peace feelers were soon being put out to Berlin. These culminated in agreement to an armistice. Representatives of the two sides met in a railway carriage at Valenciennes on 11 November 1916. Kaiser Wilhelm II was seen to do a small jig of satisfaction when he arrived for the signing of the document. One of the terms of the armistice agreement called for the remnants of the British fleet to sail to Kiel for internment pending the peace settlement. (The British crews would eventually scuttle their ships in the port.)

Deserted by their allies, the Russians also sought an armistice, which came into effect on 1 December 1916. Several historians have argued cogently that this sudden end to the fighting on the Eastern Front gave an eleventh hour reprieve to the Tsar; in their view – but one whose soundness can never be ascertained, being little more than an entirely speculative perspective, known among historians as a ‘counterfactual’ – had the war continued even a few more months, Russia would probably have fallen into revolutionary chaos. As it was, the Russian government faced some sticky moments as it dealt with unrest in the year ahead. The Italians also concluded an armistice with their main adversary, Austria–Hungary, and would lose a substantial slice of northeastern Italy in the eventual settlement.

The peace conference between Germany and the western allies was held at Potsdam in mid-1917. For shocked Allied statesmen the full impact of defeat finally became apparent. The terms demanded by the Germans were notable for their harshness. Heavy indemnities were just the tip of the punitive iceberg. To ensure that France would never again be in a position to threaten it, Germany demanded the cession of those parts of France already occupied by its forces. As for Belgium, it was to become essentially a vassal state of the Reich. But it was the German demands on the British Empire that most got New Zealand's attention: all British territories in Africa, including South Africa but excluding Egypt and Sudan, were to be ceded to Germany. Egypt and Sudan would be returned to Ottoman control – and, with Egypt, the all-important imperial link, the Suez Canal; the Ottoman recovery of Libya from Italy followed.

For New Zealanders, finally, all this paled in significance beside Article VIII of the treaty. This provided for all territories of the British Empire within the lines 160° E, 145° W and the Equator to be ceded to the German Reich on the coming into effect of the treaty. Self-governing though it might be, New Zealand was still a British territory in terms of international law, a status that had been demonstrated when it became involved in the war as a result of King George V's declaration of war on behalf of the whole empire on 4 August 1914. In its aftermath New Zealand's fate had been decided around a conference table. As part of the peace settlement it would become part of the German Empire – an outcome that Australia had avoided. Prolonged efforts by the British Empire Delegation to prevent the transfer of New Zealand's sovereignty were unavailing. Germany wanted a base for its Pacific empire and New Zealand fitted the bill perfectly. With just over a million inhabitants, moreover, it remained small enough for Germany to dominate with little effort (in contrast to Australia).

This was a harsh peace. But, with German hands round its throat, what alternative did the British government have to accepting it? Without the flow of commerce Britain's economy would be shattered – as the events before the armistice had brutally demonstrated. It now lay at the mercy of a Kaiser whose megalomania had been swelled tenfold by the Jutland triumph. Past slights and resentments could now be repaid in double measure, and Wilhelm II's limited vision and intelligence ensured that magnanimity would not be conspicuous at Potsdam.¹

In New Zealand the first reaction to the treaty's terms was denial. A public clamour to ignore the terms erupted. New Zealand was a very long way from Germany, many claimed. Minister of Defence James Allen sympathised. Yet what options did New Zealand have? At a meeting in London in 1913 he had heard First Sea Lord Winston Churchill warn that if the power of Britain were shattered on the sea Australia and New Zealand would have no alternative but to look to the United States. Many New Zealanders remembered the demonstration of US power in the South Pacific just eight years before the Jutland disaster when the US battlefleet, the Great White Fleet, had visited Auckland. But it soon became apparent that the United States offered no hope of avoiding a German takeover. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, the US had remained steadfastly neutral in the European war. New Zealanders quickly realised that Washington was unlikely to upset the victor in Europe by resisting the terms of the Potsdam settlement. President Woodrow Wilson's declaration while the peace conference was in session that the United States would not tolerate any change of sovereignty in the western hemisphere had ensured that Canada remained a British dominion. But there was no disposition to take under American protection a small, relatively unimportant community in the South Pacific. Wilson reasserted America's isolationist policy – he was reelected to a second term in November 1916 under the slogan ‘he kept us out of war’, a popular policy from which he never deviated – while at the same time initiating a large naval building programme to meet the threat to American security posed by the now burgeoning German fleet.

What of Japan, the British Empire's ally? It had a powerful navy in the Pacific. But its response to the Jutland disaster did not offer much comfort. Quite the contrary: immediately after the armistice on the Western Front, it had set about sweeping up British and French interests in China. Japanese forces quickly moved south to occupy Malaya and Singapore, Tokyo claiming that it was doing this to protect its British ally's interests from the Germans. Conspicuously absent from the Potsdam peace treaty's terms was any reference to these territories. Few were under any illusions that Japan was not there to stay. Tokyo would eventually sign an agreement with Germany that confirmed Japan's protectorate in these territories as a quid pro quo for returning Germany's colonies in China and the North Pacific, seized by Japan in 1914. The United States, worried about the security of its position in the Philippines, disliked this settlement and the dominance achieved by Japan in China, but it was in no position to challenge the arrangement given its inability to match Japanese naval power in the western Pacific. Few New Zealanders favoured looking to Japan for succour; the goodwill engendered by Japan's naval assistance in escorting the main body of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) in 1914 had by now dissipated. Before the war