“Grudgingly” (1) is how David G. Williamson describes the manner in which the British carried out their obligations as one of the four occupiers of the Rhineland after 1918, but also, at the apex of the British government's commitments in the early 1920s, through temporary assignments in Danzig and the plebiscite regions of Schlewsig, Alleinstein, Marienwerder, and Upper Silesia, and membership of the various inter-Allied control commissions, especially the Berlin-based Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IAMCC), set up to inspect German armaments factories, military installations, and ports. Whereas during World War II, Britain had actively planned to be part of the total defeat, demilitarization, and occupation of the Third Reich, in World War I, its agreement to send troops and civilian administrators into Germany came only at the very end of the conflict, in October–November 1918; was not based on any forward-thinking plans for re-education; was instinctively opposed by senior military leaders, including Sir Douglas Haig; and, according to Williamson, was at best seen as an awkward necessity at a time when social discontent at home and nationalist disorder in the empire, particularly in Ireland, India, and Egypt, were haunting the corridors of Whitehall.

For the French, occupation after World War I was a means of enforcing reparations payments (even before the 1923 Ruhr crisis) and of safeguarding the nation against future German invasion. For the UK government, too, disarming Germany was important. On the other hand, Britain saw France as the power whose ambitions in Europe needed to be restrained, at least until 1924. Furthermore, French plans to seize reparations by force and to encourage Rhineland separatism, for instance by imposing (semi-)permanent tariff barriers between occupied and unoccupied parts of Germany, soon clashed with London's interest in German economic recovery. All of this was reinforced by the rather pro-German views of the troops sent to garrison the British occupation zone around the Rhineland city of Cologne, who do not seem to have shared the same antipathy toward the erstwhile enemy as the population at home or the Royal Navy experts charged with enforcing the armistice conditions in Germany's ports.

Only with the improvement in Anglo-French and Anglo-German relations in the mid-1920s did the occupation come to be seen by the Foreign Office as having more positive outcomes—although the relocation of British troops from Cologne to Wiesbaden in 1926 was not accompanied by the establishment of similarly friendly relations with the local inhabitants. Even before the newly elected minority Labour government set in motion preparations for a comprehensive withdrawal of the British Army of the Rhine in July 1929, the War Office had itself concluded that the garrison there was obsolete and a waste of resources. Evacuation was completed by December 1929, and the last French troops also left in June 1930, alongside the remaining civilian members of the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission.

This is the second edition of a book first published in 1991. Quite how it differs from, or improves upon, the first edition is not clear from the introduction. Certainly, the author is correct to argue that no serious alternative academic study of the subject has been written since then, but this may be because there is little more to add, at least as far as international, administrative, and military aspects are concerned. Britain's role was “essentially reactive” (246) and depended on how much power it could assert over the French at particular moments in time. The first crisis point in the divergent way in which the two countries understood and sought to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Versailles on a bitterly resentful Germany was already reached over Upper Silesia in 1921, but the “decisive stage” (178) clearly came during the thirteen months from January 1923 to February 1924. British policy was to disentangle itself as far as possible from further military commitments on the continent, and it is no surprise that Britain saw the Franco-Belgian invasion of the Ruhr as a mark of its failure to establish this agenda in the early postwar period.

In subsequent years, Britain was able to play a more proactive role in the gradual dismantling of the occupation, first and foremost through its agreement, alongside Italy, to guarantee the post-1918 borders in western Europe under the 1925 Treaty of Locarno. Even then, the pace of withdrawal was largely determined by forces beyond Britain's control. Its own assent to the early removal of Allied troops from the Rhineland and the winding up of the IAMCC could be taken for granted, and what really mattered was the development of a new relationship between Paris and Berlin, and America's input through the Dawes and Young Plans.

The British army's general unwillingness to embrace its role as occupier was also signaled by its curious decision not to follow France and the United States in agreeing to supply food to hungry German children in the Cologne zone from its own military stores. The official assumption in London that French generosity with aid was part of a devious plot to encourage Rhineland separatism illuminates British attitudes at this time. Britain was there to defend its own (supposedly nonpolitical) interests, not to provide humanitarian assistance. Berlin had to be handed back responsibility for feeding its own citizens in the Rhineland, and ought not to be hindered from doing so by further economic or military sanctions.

The book could say more about whether and to what extent British public opinion was gradually pushed in a more pro-German/anti-Versailles direction by the appeals made by the Quaker-led Friends Emergency and War Victims Relief Committee and other bodies seeking private donations to enable aid distribution, and more generally by knowledge of the dire conditions in postwar Germany brought back home by the occupation troops. Williamson does not offer enough evidence to be conclusive either way. More convincing is his suggestion that Britain's involvement in the Allied occupation of Germany after 1918 helped in a positive sense to block certain unwelcome eventualities, for instance the spread of Bolshevism in 1919 or the use of Cologne as the capital of a pro-French Rhenish state after 1920. Even then, “[t]he great majority of the [British] troops wanted to return home as quickly as possible” (18). Finding anything more positive to say about the occupation, whether as a learning process for Britain or a defining moment in Anglo-German relations, would be a difficult task indeed.