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By Root 846 0

his opinion since and buoyed by his self-perceived value, and with his Canadian counterpart Vincent Massey to support him, he now angrily urged that Germany should be given one more 'chance of saving face'.30 Perhaps as a result of this verbal assault delivered to the unfortunate Inskip, te Water and the other high commissioners were given some degree of advance warning at the end of March that a security guarantee was to be offered to Poland. They were also told about British thinking on the future of Danzig. None of this helped mollify them.31 When the news was made public, no formal comments came from the Dominion capitals but privately there was deep unhappiness. Jan Smuts, in his role as South Africa's deputy prime minister, was 'staggered' and felt that the decision was 'mere surrender to panic' and made war 'inevitable'. William Mackenzie King, the Canadian leader, also thought the decision amounted to 'a conditional declaration of war' but seemed more upset that it had been reached without prior consultation with Canada or any of the Dominions.32

At this point efforts to finalize the memorandum were once again renewed and with the Admiralty's concerns appearing to have been resolved, towards the end of April a final draft document was at last ready to be issued to the principal Whitehall departments involved.33 Forty pages long, it still made little reference to New Zealand and Australia, the focus remained the likely reactions of Canada and the Union of South Africa but the earlier conclusions had changed.34 Telegrams sent from mid-February onwards by the British high commissioners in Ottawa and Cape Town were said to have become progressively more optimistic in tone. 'Force of circumstances' would now dictate the Dominions response; in the Canadian case this meant almost certain participation, South Africa would 'probably' offer its support. In arriving at this new assessment any of the high commissioners' comments which could have been seen to offer cause for concern were overlooked. The clearest example of this were those warnings from Sir William Clark about almost inevitable 'delays' and 'confusion' in the Union that would follow any British declaration of war.35 The report also chose to ignore the advice being offered by the Dominions' high commissioners in London that their respective prime ministers still held some significant anxieties. The news that a possible alliance was being considered with the Soviet Union did little to improve their mood.36

With the Dominion governments showing little enthusiasm to make any public declaration of support for London's increasingly aggressive stance and the high commissioners still insisting on the need for further diplomacy, at the end of May the memorandum was finally published.37 So sensitive were its contents that distribution was restricted to those ministers who would be most concerned with the war's conduct.38 At the same time, in the various Dominion capitals, the British representatives were also warned to make no mention of the document's existence until such time as it was necessary. Inskip appears to have had only the faintest awareness that it was being prepared; Harding sent him a copy but attached a much more optimistic view about its conclusions than he had done before. There was certainly a visible and most genuine desire amongst the senior DO staff to avoid war hence, perhaps, his hope that there would 'never be occasion' to test the findings and, if there was, those difficulties that were anticipated would 'not, in practice, prove unduly serious'.39 The Secretary of State, by way of response to this new information, did little more than commend the quality of the work.40

Some of the final conclusions that were put forward made a good deal of sense. There was little reason to doubt that the governments in Canberra and Wellington would offer their support. Considerable emotional ties still existed between the two countries and Britain, which helped to guarantee that there was significant public support for British policy. Their security—there had