Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE: What Happened to Us?

  INTRODUCTION: The Great Civil War of the West

  1 The End of “Splendid Isolation”

  2 Last Summer of Yesterday

  3 “A Poisonous Spirit of Revenge”

  4 “A Lot of Silly Little Cruisers”

  5 1935: Collapse of the Stresa Front

  6 1936: The Rhineland

  7 1938: Anschluss

  8 Munich

  Photo Insert

  9 Fatal Blunder

  10 April Fools

  11 “An Unnecessary War”

  12 Gruesome Harvest

  13 Hitler’s Ambitions

  14 Man of the Century

  15 America Inherits the Empire

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

  COPYRIGHT

  To Regis, William, James, and Arthur Crum

  My Mother’s Brothers

  and Veterans of World War II

  I HAVE A STRONG belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country…believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute. That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us…but there is a more serious danger, that is lest we overtax our strength. However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go. It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourself to pass beyond it.1

  —LORD SALISBURY, 1897

  The Queen’s Speech

  [A] EUROPEAN WAR can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples are more terrible than those of kings.2

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1901

  Speech to Parliament

  PREFACE

  What Happened to Us?

  AND IT CAME to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him.

  —GENESIS, 4:8

  ALL ABOUT US we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.

  In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell. All the empires that ruled the world have vanished. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth.

  Having lost the will to rule, Western man seems to be losing the will to live as a unique civilization as he feverishly indulges in La Dolce Vita, with a yawning indifference as to who might inherit the Earth he once ruled.

  What happened to us? What happened to our world?

  When the twentieth century opened, the West was everywhere supreme. For four hundred years, explorers, missionaries, conquerors, and colonizers departed Europe for the four corners of the Earth to erect empires that were to bring the blessings and benefits of Western civilization to all mankind. In Rudyard Kipling’s lines, it was the special duty of Anglo-Saxon peoples to fight “The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease.” These empires were the creations of a self-confident race of men.

  Whatever became of those men?

  Somewhere in the last century, Western man suffered a catastrophic loss of faith—in himself, in his civilization, and in the faith that gave it birth.

  That Christianity is dying in the West, being displaced by a militant secularism, seems undeniable, though the reasons remain in dispute. But there is no dispute about the physical wounds that may yet prove mortal. These were World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years’ War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West. Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misruled accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting.

  A quarter century ago, Charles L. Mee, Jr., began his End of Order: Versailles 1919 by describing the magnitude of what was first called the Great War: “World War I had been a tragedy on a dreadful scale. Sixty-five million men were mobilized—more by many millions than had ever been brought to war before—to fight a war, they had been told, of justice and honor, of national pride and of great ideals, to wage a war that would end all war, to establish an entirely new order of peace and equity in the world.”1

  Mee then detailed the butcher’s bill.

  By November 11, 1918, when the armistice that marked the end of the war was signed, eight million soldiers lay dead, twenty million more were wounded, diseased, mutilated, or spitting blood from gas attacks. Twenty-two million civilians had been killed or wounded, and the survivors were living in villages blasted to splinters and rubble, on farms churned in mud, their cattle dead.

  In Belgrade, Berlin and Petrograd, the survivors fought among themselves—fourteen wars, great or small, civil or revolutionary, flickered or raged about the world.2

  The casualty rate in the Great War was ten times what it had been in America’s Civil War, the bloodiest war of Western man in the nineteenth century. And at the end of the Great War an influenza epidemic, spread by returning soldiers, carried off fourteen million more Europeans and Americans.3 In one month of 1914—“the most terrible August in the history of the world,” said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—“French casualties…are believed to have totaled two hundred sixty thousand of whom seventy-five thousand were killed (twenty-seven thousand on August 22 alone).”4 France would fight on and in the fifty-one months the war would last would lose 1.3 million sons, with twice that number wounded, maimed, crippled. The quadrant of the country northeast of Paris resembled a moonscape.

  Equivalent losses in America today would be eight million dead, sixteen million wounded, and all the land east of the Ohio and north of the Potomac unrecognizable. Yet the death and destruction of the Great War would be dwarfed by the genocides of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and what the war of 1939–1945 would do to Italy, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic and Balkan nations, Russia, and all of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals.

  The questions this book addresses are huge but simple: Were these two world wars, the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves, necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West?

  INTRODUCTION

  The Great Civil War of the West

  [W]AR IS THE creation of individuals not of nations.1

  —SIR PATRICK HASTINGS, 1948

  British barrister and writer

  OF ALL THE EMPIRES of modernity, the British was the greatest—indeed, the greatest since Rome—encompassing a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people. Out of her womb came America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, five of the finest, freest lands on Earth. Out of her came Hong Kong and Singapore, where the Chinese first came to know freedom. Were it not for Britain, India would not be the world’s largest democracy, or South Africa that continent’s most advanced nation. When the British arrived in Africa, they found primitive tribal socie
ties. When they departed, they left behind roads, railways, telephone and telegraph systems, farms, factories, fisheries, mines, trained police, and a civil service.

  No European people fondly remembers the Soviet Empire. Few Asians recall the Empire of Japan except with hatred. But all over the world, as their traditions, customs, and uniforms testify, men manifest their pride that they once belonged to the empire upon whose flag the sun never set. America owes a special debt to Britain, for our laws, language and literature, and the idea of representative government. “[T]he transplanted culture of Britain in America,” wrote Dr. Russell Kirk, “has been one of humankind’s more successful experiments.”2

  As with most empires, the sins of the British are scarlet—the opium wars in China, the cold indifference to Irish suffering in the Potato Famine. But Britain’s sins must be weighed in the balance. It was the British who were first to take up arms against slavery, who, at Trafalgar and Waterloo, were decisive in defeating the Napoleonic dictatorship and empire, who, in their finest hour, held on until Hitler was brought down.

  Like all empires, the British Empire was one day fated to fall. Once Jefferson’s idea, “All men are created equal,” was wedded to President Wilson’s idea, that all peoples are entitled to “self-determination,” the fate of the Western empires was sealed. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, saw it coming: “The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized…. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!”3

  Twenty-five years after Versailles, Walter Lippmann would denounce Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination as “barbarous and reactionary.”

  Self-determination, which has nothing to do with self-government but has become confused with it, is barbarous and reactionary: by sanctioning secession, it invites majorities and minorities to be intransigent and irreconcilable. It is stipulated in the principle of self-determination that they need not be compatriots because they will soon be aliens. There is no end to this atomization of human society. Within the minorities who have seceded there will tend to appear other minorities who in their turn will wish to secede.4

  WILSON’S DOCTRINE OF SELF-DETERMINATION destroyed the Western empires.

  But while the fall of the British Empire was inevitable, the suddenness and sweep of the collapse were not. There is a world of difference between watching a great lady grandly descend a staircase and seeing a slattern being kicked down a flight of stairs.

  Consider: When Winston Churchill entered the inner cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, every nation recognized Britain’s primacy. None could match her in the strategic weapons of the new century: the great battle fleets and dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy. Mark Twain jested that the English were the only modern race mentioned in the Bible, when the Lord said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”5

  Yet by Churchill’s death in 1965, little remained. “Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.”6 At century’s end, Labour Party elder statesman Sir Roy Denman looked back at the decline and fall of the nation and empire into which he had been born:

  At the beginning [of the twentieth century], Britain, as the centre of the biggest empire in the world, was at the zenith of her power and glory; Britain approaches the end as a minor power, bereft of her empire…. [O]n the world stage, Britain will end the century little more important than Switzerland. It will have been the biggest secular decline in power and influence since seventeenth-century Spain.7

  WHAT HAPPENED TO GREAT BRITAIN? What happened to the Empire? What happened to the West and our world—is what this book is about.

  For it was the war begun in 1914 and the Paris peace conference of 1919 that destroyed the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires and ushered onto the world stage Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. And it was the war begun in September 1939 that led to the slaughter of the Jews and tens of millions of Christians, the devastation of Europe, Stalinization of half the continent, the fall of China to Maoist madness, and half a century of Cold War.

  Every European war is a civil war, said Napoleon. Historians will look back on 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West, where the once-Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization.

  In deciphering what happened to the West, George F. Kennan, the geostrategist of the Cold War, wrote, “All lines of inquiry lead back to World War I.”8 Kennan’s belief that World War I was “the original catastrophe” was seconded by historian Jacques Barzun, who called the war begun in August 1914 “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction.”9

  These two world wars were fratricidal, self-inflicted wounds of a civilization seemingly hell-bent on suicide. Eight million soldiers perished in World War I, “twenty million more were wounded, diseased, mutilated, or spitting blood from gas attacks. Twenty-two million civilians had been killed or wounded….”10 That war would give birth to the fanatic and murderous ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, and usher in the Second World War that would bring death to tens of millions more.

  And it was Britain that turned both European wars into world wars. Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.

  Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.

  Why did Britain declare war on Germany, twice? As we shall see, neither the Kaiser nor Hitler sought to destroy Britain or her empire. Both admired what Britain had built. Both sought an alliance with England. The Kaiser was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Thus the crucial question: Were these two devastating wars Britain declared on Germany wars of necessity, or wars of choice?

  Critics will instantly respond that Britain fought the First World War to bring down a Prussian militarism that threatened to dominate Europe and the world, that Britain declared war in 1939 to stop a fanatic Nazi dictator who would otherwise have conquered Europe and the world, enslaved mankind, massacred minorities on a mammoth scale, and brought on a new Dark Age. And thank God Britain did declare war. Were it not for Britain, we would all be speaking German now.

  Yet, in his memoir, David Lloyd George, who led Britain to victory in World War I, wrote, “We all blundered into the war.”11 In his memoirs, Churchill, who led Britain to victory in World War II, wrote:

  One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, “The Unnecessary War.” There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.12

  WAS LLOYD GEORGE RIGHT? Was World War I the result of blunders by British statesmen? Was Churchill right? Was the Second World War that “wrecked what was left of the world” an “unnecessary war”? If so, who blundered? For these were the costliest and bloodiest wars in the history of mankind and they may have brought on the end of Western civilization.

  About the justice of the causes for which Britain fought, few quarrel. And those years from 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945 produced days of glory that will forever inspire men and reflect greatly upon the British people. Generations may pass away, but men will yet talk of Passchendaele and the Somme
, of Dunkirk and El Alamein. Two-thirds of a century later, men’s eyes yet mist over at the words “Fighter Command,” the men and boys in their Hurricanes and Spitfires who rose day after day as the knights of old in the Battle of Britain to defend their “island home.” And in their “finest hour” the British had as the king’s first minister a statesman who personified the bulldog defiance of his people and who was privileged by history to give the British lion its roar. In the victory over Nazi Germany, the place of moral honor goes to Britain and Churchill. He “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle,” said President Kennedy, when Churchill, like Lafayette, was made an honorary citizen of the United States.

  Thus the question this book addresses is not whether the British were heroic. That is settled for all time. But were their statesmen wise? For if they were wise, how did Britain pass in one generation from being mistress of the most awesome of empires into a nation whose only hope for avoiding defeat and ruin was an America that bore no love for the empire? By 1942, Britain relied on the United States for all the necessities of national survival: the munitions to keep fighting, the ships to bring her supplies, the troops to rescue a continent from which Britain had been expelled in three weeks by the Panzers of Rommel and Guderian. Who blundered? Who failed Britain? Who lost the empire? Was it only the appeasers, the Guilty Men?

  There is another reason I have written this book.

  There has arisen among America’s elite a Churchill cult. Its acolytes hold that Churchill was not only a peerless war leader but a statesman of unparalleled vision whose life and legend should be the model for every statesman. To this cult, defiance anywhere of U.S. hegemony, resistance anywhere to U.S. power becomes another 1938. Every adversary is “a new Hitler,” every proposal to avert war “another Munich.” Slobodan Milosevic, a party apparatchik who had presided over the disintegration of Yugoslavia—losing Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia—becomes “the Hitler of the Balkans” for holding Serbia’s cradle province of Kosovo. Saddam Hussein, whose army was routed in one hundred hours in 1991 and who had not shot down a U.S. plane in forty thousand sorties, becomes “an Arab Hitler” about to roll up the Persian Gulf and threaten mankind with weapons of mass destruction.