1940 And All That

Peter Hitchens writes:

This is just a warning of a great shock-wave of controversy heading our way soon. Two powerful new books, which I managed to obtain and read in the USA last week, assault the reputation of Winston Churchill and question many of our fondest beliefs about the Second World War. Both will be published in this country during May. I have to say that it was a pretty dark and dispiriting experience to spend so much time on such grim, upsetting study. All the material has been published before, but not in such concentrated form and not at such a significant moment. It is the timing, and the concentrated force of the arguments, that make this such an interesting development.

For the Iraq war was sold to us very much as a 'good war', by people who used Second World War terms - especially 'appeasement' - in their arguments. And that is why the failure of the Iraq war, now largely seen as a 'Bad War', has shone a cold light on the Second World War, still largely viewed as a 'Good War'. Was World War Two so good? Was it fought in a civilised fashion and for good reasons.

I have less trouble with one of the forthcoming books - "Human Smoke", by Nicholson Baker - than I do with the other - "Churchill, Hitler and the unnecessary war - How Britain lost its Empire and the West Lost the World", by Patrick Buchanan. I have never met Mr Baker, and I do not share his pacifism. I think war is sometimes necessary and pacifism a silly indulgence pursued by the inhabitants of countries with big navies and plenty of sea between them and the nearest enemy. Even so, his volume contains some disturbing facts, quotations and claims which many, long comforted by the story of the Good War, will wish they had not read.

Whereas I have met Pat Buchanan and respect him as a brave and original thinker whose warnings - about the decay of the West and about the Iraq war, for example - are often borne out. On this subject, he is definitely going to be in trouble, because of his long and unpopular sympathy for the 'America First' movement which tried, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, to keep the USA out of World War Two - a cause he still thinks was just.

The problem with 'America First' is that it attracted the support of those who wished to help the German Nazis, or who were sympathetic in general to Germany under Hitler - including the rabble of anti-semites. A fairly common view of it, and of its most influential figure - Charles Lindbergh - is given in Philip Roth's recent historical fantasy novel "The War against America". Many in Britain aren't really aware of this movement and its considerable power, now forgotten amid the sentiment of the alleged 'special relationship'. If they were, would they have the same rather soppy view of the Atlantic Alliance that is common here now?

But 'America First' and its long shadow will be Pat Buchanan's problem now. Will the world's justified loathing of the Nazis, which ought never to fade, mean that people simply do not want to listen to a book which suggests that America was right to keep out, and that Britain, too should have stayed out of the European conflict in 1939 and 1940 - and thereby saved its empire and its position as a world power? It is very hard for a British person to stomach this view. But what if there is much truth in it? What if our decline into a third-class power wasn't inevitable, but actually brought about by a war we all regard as a triumph? This is dangerous stuff. I hope to write about it all at far greater length in the Mail on Sunday, soon.

And I look forward to reading it. Those of us who grew up surrounded by people from mining backgrounds have of course always been ambivalent about Churchill. His conduct during the First World War also deserves rather more scrutiny than it generally receives.

There are serious flaws in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and rather worse than mere errors in his war memoirs. And it is notable that he was removed as Prime Minister by the electorate while the war against Japan was still going on.

All in all, a bit of balance to the Myth of Winston Churchill is long overdue.

But it is not news that Britain was the biggest loser at the end of the War, literally in hock to the Americans for several decades, broadly convinced that we were morally in hock to them for ever (although I'll be returning to that in another post at some point), and forced by them to dismantle our Empire.

Would that we had made peace in 1940 (and thus prevented the Holocaust, among much else)? More to the point, would that the Allies had been forced to make peace with the Central Powers by the refusal of American intervention in 1917, so that there would never have been any vindictive Treaty of Versailles, and thus there would never have been any Nazism.

And so that there would never have been any Iraq, for that matter.