July 3, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
MYTHS Surrounding World War II, the “Good War”: Peter Hitchens’ New
Book
Friends,
Another commissioned review essay today: this one a review
I authored of British writer and journalist Peter Hitchens’ new book, The Phoney War: The World War II Illusion
(I. B. Tauris, 2018). My review is new and has not appeared previously in any form in
the MY CORNER series. This detailed review appears in the Summer 2019 issue of
the journal, The Agonist, an online magazine begun by author Christopher De
Groot that I recommend highly. (Other writers at The Agonist you might recognize include Dr. Paul Gottfried and
Anthony Esolen.)
There has been much—probably too much—written about World
War II, its causes, its conduct, its aftermath, and the mistakes made either
during or after it. Hitchens, who writes a fine (and very English) conservative
column in The Mail on Sunday (London UK), does not seek in his relatively
short volume (288 pages) to re-invent the wheel. He does not discover new and
earth-shattering history hidden in dusty archives for seven or eight decades.
Rather, he employs the historical record already available and argues
persuasively and concisely that clearly avoidable mistakes were made by England
and its leaders during that period. Those mistakes had a profound effect not
only on the conduct of the war, but on the aftermath of it. Indeed, that
aftermath in so many ways has been and continues to be disastrous for the
survival of our Western Christian civilization. For the mechanism put into
place by the victorious Allies, including the “reconstruction” of Western
Europe and the triumph of liberal democracy, has had, argues Hitchens, near
fatal consequences for the very culture and civilization that we ostensibly
went to war to “save.” Not just that, but in fighting that war we resembled, at
least in some of our methodology, too closely those we opposed. And, of course,
we embraced as an ally a power—the Soviet Union—that was, arguably in many ways,
just as horrific in its effects as anything Nazism ever inflicted.
I have referenced citations and sources in my review. Please
take a look.
The Mythology Surrounding
World War Two
by Boyd Cathey
The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion,
Peter Hitchens; I. B. Tauris, 288 pages, 2018
Peter Hitchens, the English author and writer
for The Mail on Sunday, has written a little book that has
caused a big stir in Britain. Written with verve, and incorporating anecdotes
and vignettes that bring his arguments to life, The Phoney Victory: The
World War II Illusion does not seek to remake the historiography of
the Second World War, or the basic known outline of it to challenge what we
know about the conflict in its fundamentals. There are no new startling revelations
hidden for seventy-five years in dusty archives now excavated and held up to
public view.
Indeed, Hitchens makes that very clear from the
outset:
This book makes no claim to be primary research.
It simply takes a number of events and developments that have been separately
described by reputable historians and journalists, and connects them in a way
that has not been attempted before."
Aware that his account would be—as it has
been—attacked as “revisionist” or even in some way “philo-Nazi,” he takes pains
to declare unequivocally what he is not writing and what he
disavows. Near the beginning of his 288-page book Hitchens states that The
Phoney Victory does not suggest that Britain should
have made peace with Hitler after the fall of France in 1940. Far from it, the
country was correct to continue the conflict after the hasty evacuation of
British forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. He is not suggesting
that England should have remained aloof and out of the war. To the contrary, he
points out that the island nation was not ready for warfare in September 1939,
and thus let events dictate strategy rather than the reverse. Nor does he take
the view that war against Hitler was unnecessary. “At some point,” he writes,
“for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be
ended, probably by force, from within or without.”
What he does is argue “that the war could have
been fought differently and that [for instance] the British guarantee to
Poland, by consciously giving Warsaw control over our decision to declare war,
was one of the gravest diplomatic mistakes ever made by a major country.”
Hitchens, as he details both vividly and
lovingly, grew up in an England which had seen its empire and its glory days
disappear. That unraveling began on the slaughter grounds of World War I, which
inflicted on the island nation shattering and catastrophic losses: the
country’s governing class and the cream of its youth extinguished on the
killing fields of Ypres and the fatal escarpments of Gallipoli, its treasury
depleted, its social structures undermined. After another world war, no one,
including Winston Churchill, could halt the decline. Britain was shorn of its
material grandeur and soon, too, its colonial empire, although it clung
fiercely to the memory of its long history of accomplishment, of the valor and
glory it won both at sea and on land.
In Hitchens’ youth the words of Churchill echoed
in every schoolboy’s ear, as they still do eight decades after the British
retreat from France in late May 1940. His immortal words, “This was their
finest hour,” had resounded in Parliament on June 18, just two days after the
defeated French sued for peace. World War II had been “the good war,” as we
continue to call it, in which freedom, truth, and morality had triumphed over
evil, darkness, and barbarism.
Hitchens cites Prince Charles, heir to the
British throne, in the BBC broadcast “Thought for the Day” (December 22, 2016),
in summarizing the generally held view of why the Allies went to war in 1939
and in 1941: to defeat “intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt
to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.” And yet this view is
contradicted by the facts and by the history of period, which Hitchens sets out
to document. How the war and its aims were initially framed and presented
reflects a rather different situation than what people typically learn from
their schoolbooks. As Hitchens details, the drive to moralize the war, turning
it into a uniformly and unambiguously “good war,” leaves out too much that
should cause succeeding generations to examine more carefully both the motives
and decisions of those responsible for conducting the war and ensuring the
subsequent peace, especially Sir Winston Churchill and the pivotal role he
played.
Hitchens examines several major questions
surrounding both Britain’s entry into the Second World War and how it was
conducted. In particular, he takes a hard and thorough look at the Polish
guarantee of March 31, 1939. As he indicates, this guarantee by Britain and
France to provide military aid to Poland was a result of the occupation of the
rump Czech Republic by Germany two weeks earlier, and of the effective voiding
of the Munich Agreement of September 1938. But the terms of the Polish
guarantee were almost certain to lead to war with Germany, and British leaders
knew it. Hitchens cites historian Simon Newman (March 1939: The British
Guarantee to Poland; 1976) to the effect that the fate of England, and
then Europe, depended on a military junta in Warsaw whose decision to begin or
respond to conflict would ineluctably trigger Britain’s involvement. What is
more, a secret protocol basically exempted any British response should an
attack come from the USSR. Therefore, when Stalin’s legions invaded the eastern
half of Poland in mid-September, Britain’s reaction was essentially to do
nothing.
Quoting Newman, and citing both Lord Halifax and
Churchill, Hitchens asserts that this was clearly designed to keep open the
possibility of a future alliance with Stalin, something British and French
diplomats had contemplated as early as summer 1939. Indeed, Sir Winston had, on
October 1, 1939, declared:
We could have wished that the Russian armies
should be standing on their present lines as friends and allies in Poland instead
of as invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on this line
was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace [the
italics are Hitchens’].
Eventually, Britain (and the United States) did
ally with Stalin against Hitler. But, Hitchens asks, how does an alliance with
a power arguably just as bad as Nazi Germany support the lily-white “good war”
narrative? And, more pointedly, when the Americans and English leaders
understood what Stalin and the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
legions had done and were doing, not just in 1945, but much earlier?
Certainly the arguments in favor of a Soviet
alliance in 1941 are strong, in a purely strategic way. Britain, and then the
US, were engaged in a total war against the German dictator who had, also,
taken direct aim at Russia, reaching the suburbs of Moscow in December 1941.
Thus, the refrain “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” took shape and made
sense. And there followed the massive material support, mostly from America, to
bolster the Russian war effort which proved vital in defeating the Wehrmacht.
More troubling was the choice by the allied leaders, late in the war at
Yalta and then at Potsdam, to turn a very noticeable blind eye to exactly what
Stalin and his Communist minions were doing in Eastern Europe. By the time of
Sir Winston’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946 at Westminster
College in Fulton, Missouri, recognition of this came too late.
Along with the concessions made to Stalin at
Yalta, it is the Potsdam Agreement (August 1945) that Hitchens reserves for
especially critical scrutiny. One of its central protocols—on which Stalin had
insisted and to which the Western Allies acceded—directed the forcible
population transfers to Germany of some thirteen or fourteen million German
civilians living in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, and in other Eastern European
countries, countries in which they had lived peaceably for centuries. These
population expulsions were to be made, according to the wording at Potsdam, in
an “orderly and humane” fashion. Yet, most of those transfers were accomplished
under brutal conditions during the frigid 1945-1946 winter, with civilians
taking almost nothing with them, save for the clothes on their backs. During
the painful transit, often by foot or wagon cart, thousands were massacred by
Communist guards and partisans; hundreds of thousands of others died of cold or
starvation, as many as 1.5 million by some estimates.
Hitchens cites the comprehensive study by Ray M.
Douglas (Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second
World War; 2012) for its unsettling historical details. But Douglas’
account was not by any means the first. A few years after the war, the English
jurist F. J. P. Veale wrote Advance to Barbarism (1953),
denouncing the implicit criminality of having such a “cruel peace” serve as the
consummation of a “good war.” More recently, authors and historians as diverse
as Nikolai Tolstoy (The Secret Betrayal, 1944-1947; 1977), Alfred
de Zayas (Nemesis at Potsdam, 1941-1945: The Anglo-Americans and the
Expulsion of the Germans; 1979), Canadian James Bacque (Other
Losses; 1989), and Joachim Hoffmann (Stalin’s War of Extermination,
1941-1945; 1999) have documented the horrors suffered by millions of
civilians during that period.
The response to such accounts has been, of
course, to point to the barbarities and crimes committed by the Nazis, by
the Schutzstaffel and Einsatzgruppen, especially
during Operation Barbarossa. In a sense, that argument goes, the “Germans
deserved what they got” for supporting, evenly if only tacitly, Hitler’s
aggression and criminality. It is maintained, moreover, that the expulsions
were necessary to achieve national harmony in postwar Europe and to placate our
ally Stalin.
As Hitchens rightly points out, however, two
wrongs do not produce a right. War dictates brutal actions that have inhuman
consequences. The mass uprooting at the point of a bayonet of thirteen million
civilians, almost entirely made up of women, children, and older men, meant
exposing them to violence and cruelty, and the Western Allies knew that. Under
the Nuremburg Laws, it would have been a war crime itself.
Indeed, as Hitchens discusses in his critical
appraisal of the Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and the English strategy of
indiscriminate night bombing aimed at civilians, it is one thing to argue that
the Allies sometimes engaged in tactics and actions that crossed the line, but
a close consideration reveals that both the English and Soviets practiced direct
assaults on civilians as part of their overall strategy. Hitchens carefully
examines the firebombing of Hamburg, “Operation Gomorrah,” which practically
devastated the entire population center of that city. He follows with a list of
major German cities which suffered similar levels of death and destruction and
misery, including Dresden in February 1945, an act of barbarism committed long
after the result of the war was settled. It was a strategy that failed to
shorten the war by undermining the German will to fight, while inflicting
appalling suffering on the most helpless and defenseless segment of the German
civilian population.
It is now pretty much beyond debate that Harris’
air campaign did not slow down German arms production (which was dispersed into
rural areas), and did not put much of a dent in German morale. Only the actual
capture of German territory in late 1944 and 1945 did that.
In defense of such tactics, the German bombing
of Coventry and the Blitz are cited, as if those attacks somehow justified the
later massive incineration of dozens of German cities. To the response that
such action was needed to fend off a potential German invasion, Hitchens points
out that most of the attacks came after such an invasion was a
moot point; that is, after the German failure at Stalingrad made German defeat
more or less inevitable:
Even if you believe that Hitler seriously
intended to invade this country in 1940 or later, which the evidence shows he
did not, the choice was out of Hitler’s hands before the main bombing campaign
began in 1942….The final outcome of the German-Soviet war was not altered by
the British bombing of Germany, which was relatively minor before the 1942 raid
on Cologne and did not become intense until well into 1943. By the time significant
and sustained bombing had begun, Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at
Stalingrad, and the USA was in the war.
A major question that Hitchens addresses is
British military preparation during the 1930s. In assessing what the country
might have done differently, he is critical of Churchill’s consistent failure
as an armchair strategist, a record that began during the First World War (the
Battle of Gallipoli) and continued with Churchill’s fascination with “the soft
underbelly of Europe,” with Crete and Greece, then Italy, and with his neglect
of British defense in Malaya and Southeast Asia. Hitchens is aware of Andrew
Robert’s newly-published defense of the English lion, Churchill:
Walking with Destiny (2018), and he does not discount the vital role
the British leader played (as he makes clear in his retort in The Mail
on Sunday to Daniel Johnson’s review). Rather, it is the nearly impenetrable
mythology that has developed around Churchill that troubles Hitchens, this
group-think having cemented the unquestioning, rosy view of “the good war.”
There have been earlier attempts to dissect and critique the Churchill legacy,
including by historians Maurice Cowling (The Impact of Hitler: British
Politics and British Policy, 1933-1940; 1975) and John Charmley (Churchill:
The End of Glory; 1993), but the established view of Churchill as a
heroic statesman continues, and in England even minor criticism is often deemed
“unpatriotic” or “revisionist.”
Hitchens interestingly defends Neville
Chamberlain against the charge that he was an appeaser. Like Charmley in his
defense of the unfortunate English leader, Chamberlain and the Lost
Peace (1989), Hitchens notes that between 1934-1935 and 1939-1940
Chamberlain more than tripled British military spending, including a whopping
jump in budget from 17,617,000 pounds to 248,561,000 pounds for the Royal Air
Force: “The truth is…Britain under [Stanley] Baldwin and Chamberlain most
certainly did rearm, though for imperial and national defence, not for a
continental land war….”
Which, then, raises the question: At any time
prior to the American entry into the war in December 1941, could England, even in
alliance with France, have actually stopped Hitler?
Although not addressed by Hitchens, historians
Richard Lamb (in his Mussolini as Diplomat: Il Duce’s Italy on the
World Stage; 1999) and Roy Denman (in Missed Chances: Britain and
Europe in the Twentieth Century; 1997) believe England missed perhaps its
best opportunity to halt German expansion westward with the Stresa Front formed
in April 1935. That accord had brought together the United Kingdom, France, and
Italy in an alliance directed specifically at preventing German expansion of
the very kind that would occur in 1938 through its annexation of Austria. In
1934, when Austrian Nazis attempted a coup in that country, Mussolini rushed
Italian troops to the Austrian border at the Brenner Pass and threatened
Germany if it should attempt to seize the country.
Yet, the British torpedoed Stresa. Mussolini was
infuriated by the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (June 1935), completed secretly
with the Germans without the knowledge of (or input from) France or Italy, and
by the bungled attempt by the British and French to end the war between Italy
and Abyssinia in the Italian leader’s favor, via the abortive Hoare-Laval Pact
of December 1935. The agreement would have granted Italy some territory in
Abyssinia, but preserved that mountainous empire’s independence with access to
the sea given by Britain. The pact was shipwrecked by a wave of popular moral
indignation in Britain and France by citizens who were enraged at what they saw
as a violation of the elementary principles of the League of Nations. Despite
Mussolini’s disdain for the German Führer and his revulsion at
Nazism (his ally, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, had been assassinated
by Austrian Nazis in 1934), such backroom dealings, which could be reversed by
manifestations of popular outrage, convinced Il Duce that he could not trust
Britain. And so it thrust him into the arms of Germany.
In Lamb’s words, “Mussolini was on the brink of
accepting the Hoare-Laval proposals; indeed he had already told Laval that they
satisfied his aspirations. His acceptance would have meant the end of the
Abyssinian war, and Italy would have happily rejoined the Stresa Front, leaving
Hitler isolated.”
In the event, Italy left the Stresa Front. And
after May 1940, Britain was increasingly dependent, financially and materially,
on the Americans for survival, a condition that, as Hitchens recounts, led to a
continuing transfer of British gold reserves and wealth to the United States.
The final outcome of the war saw America emerge
as the world’s leading power (though it was challenged by the USSR), while
Britain’s precipitous decline continued, and within a decade or so, it was
forced to give up its great colonial empire.
Peter Hitchens intersperses his account of the
Second World War with illustrative references from contemporary novels about
the war, along with reminiscences by individuals who lived through the period.
In so doing, he provides an exceptionally rich version of the events. Though it
is no academic tome, and though it breaks no new ground, Hitchens’ little book
shows in broad strokes how the Second World War was managed—and at
times—bungled; then, ironically, despite the military victory of the Allies,
how its winners turned it into a phony victory, for which Britain—and the rest
of the West—are still paying the price.
Dr. Boyd Cathey holds an MA in history from the University of Virginia and
a PhD in history from the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Retired State
Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives, he is the author of The Land
We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018) and
writes the blog, MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey.
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