ARMISTICE DAY is promoted as a celebration of national unity, “the day the guns fell silent,” and when the wounds of first world war began to heal.

But the reality is that November 11 1918 marked the start of a new phase of war: the escalation of the class war.

The night before the German high command formally surrendered, Britain’s war cabinet met in Downing Street. The minutes of that meeting reveal that the armistice was not the government’s most important issue.

Prime minister Lloyd George told his ministers he was receiving telegrams about the situation in Berlin. “It would seem that events were taking a similar course in Germany to that which had taken place in Russia” in 1917, he said.

Henry Wilson, the chief of the British Imperial General Staff, agreed and suggested the British army in Europe should not advance further than the Rhine in case they got “involved in Bolshevik outbreaks in Germany.”

Winston Churchill, the minister of munitions, even suggested that Britain “might have to build up the German army, as it was important to get Germany on her legs again for fear of the spread of Bolshevism.”

Lloyd George ended the discussion by describing Germany as a “cholera area” infected with the “virus” of Bolshevism, and argued, “It would be most undesirable to march British miners to Westphalia if Westphalia was controlled by a Bolshevist organisation.”

Armistice Day marked the end of Britain’s war with Germany, but as the war cabinet made clear, it was also the start of the escalation of the government’s war against Bolshevism abroad and the workers’ movement at home.

Germany’s surrender was the direct result of German workers, soldiers and sailors mutinying against the war. On November 3 sailors at the Kiel naval base in northern Germany overthrew their officers and set up a workers’ and sailors’ council.

Five days later, the Kaiser was told that workers’ councils had taken control of Cologne, Frankfurt-am-Main, Dusseldorf, Halle, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Stuttgart and many other smaller towns. “All red,” laconically noted the British War Ministry’s intelligence report on the situation.

The following day, Berlin itself was brought to a halt by a general strike. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, the cabinet resigned, and a Council of Peoples’ Deputies took charge. First Russia, now Germany. Workers had shaken off their chains, and the ruling classes of Europe were trembling.

In Britain, the Cabinet was already grappling with widespread worker unrest. During the war, strikes in Britain had been more frequent than in Germany. In 1916 and 1917 significantly more British workers went on strike than did their German counterparts.

While there were no British military mutinies to compare with those in Germany or France, the September 1917 mutiny by troops at Etaples in northern France shook the usually implacable self-confidence of the British High Command.

In autumn 1917, Chinese and Egyptian workers in British army labour battalions went on strike at military bases near Calais. These were bloodily suppressed, with 36 men shot dead and dozens more wounded.

By 1918, patriotic war-fever no longer deterred workers in Britain from standing up for their rights. That year saw the second-highest number of strikes since records began, and union membership rose to 6.5 million members. Calls to end the war became common among trade unionists.

The 1918 Labour Party conference was even addressed by Maxim Litvinov, representing the new Bolshevik government. “For the first time,” he told delegates, “the working class has attained supreme power in one of the largest states in the world … They had revolted not against the unsuccessful conduct of the war, but against the war itself.”

Three days after Armistice Day, Lloyd George seized the initiative and called a general election for December 14 1918. To no-one’s surprise, his coalition of the Conservative Party and personal retinue of Liberals won an overwhelming majority.

But the tide was turning. The Labour Party took 20 per cent of the vote. In Ireland, Sinn Fein won 73 seats, leading it to establish the Dail Eireann and declare Irish independence on January 21 1919.

In Italy, two battalions of black troops in the British West Indies Regiment stationed in Taranto mutinied against their racist treatment by officers. On January 3 1919 2,000 soldiers based at Folkestone refused to go back to France and demanded to return home. The next day 10,000 men marched through Folkestone calling for immediate demobilisation.

Two days later, 1,500 Army Service Corps troops at Osterley Park in west London commandeered the base’s lorries and drove them to Whitehall to press their call to return to civvy street.

Within a few days, strikes and demonstrations had broken out at military bases across southern England. “Everywhere the feeling is the same,” reported the Daily Herald, “The war is over, we won’t have to fight in Russia, and we mean to go home.”

When the war cabinet discussed using troops against strikers at the end of January, the volatility of the situation was highlighted by General Wyndham Childs, who acidly commented that in the past: “We had a disciplined and ignorant army, whereas now we had an army educated and ill-disciplined.” The fear of a workers’ revolution was uppermost in the minds of the ruling class.

The year 1919 would become the most traumatic in modern British history, as strikes, mutinies and rebellions gripped Britain and its empire. It took determined action by the state, aided by its friends in the labour movement, to extinguish the threat.

Armistice Day became the symbol of that restoration of order, a reassertion of national patriotic unity. But for socialists, there is another tradition.

It is the men and women who fought to put an end to imperialist war and the tyranny of capitalism who we should celebrate. Their struggle, not Armistice Day, is our inspiration.

Tony Collins’ book, Raising the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921, is out now from Haymarket.