"He Simply Wasn't Interested In Us Until We Declared War On Him"

As Peter Hitchens explains:

Once again I'm criticised in another, left-wing, blog. Michael White of the Guardian (Google Michael White, Guardian and 'honourable road to ruin'). And, oddly, Mr White makes the same mistaken criticism of my alternative history as did several people who posted comments on the article or here. He seems to think I am advocating a peace with Hitler *after* Dunkirk. Anything but. By then we had to fight, as any terms would have been intolerable. I am saying we should not have entered the war in the first place.

He says what fun it used to be having a good row with the Tory MP and mischief-maker Alan Clark, adding: ’It is less fun having one with Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, whose version of this thesis (“If we hadn't fought, would we still have a British Empire?”) was published at the weekend. It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez...The list goes on, and it is foolish. If we had done a deal with Hitler from a position of weakness he would have come back for more. Had he gone east to finish the Russians first, who knows what might have happened, but he could not have held on to his conquests for long. Empires rarely do and, Hitler or no, the curtain was already falling on ours.’

Well, I've no idea what would have happened if we'd let Hitler fight Stalin, though I find it hard to believe it would have been any worse than the hell that actually did take place. But what I principally remember about Alan Clark was taking him to lunch, and being told by his secretary that he was a vegetarian. After scouring London in vain for a suitably grand vegetarian venue, I rang her up and explained the problem. ‘Oh’, she said, naming a stately Covent Garden eatery famous for its game, ‘Rules will be fine. When he says “vegetarian” he means he won't eat anything that's been killed in a slaughterhouse. He doesn't mind if it's been shot in the open air’. When I teased him about this over his well-shot pheasant (I think), he muttered something about how Hitler, too, couldn't abide slaughterhouse meat. He loved to do this sort of thing. He told someone else I know that he was a bit of a 'national socialist', just to shock. Of course, he was nothing of the kind. Silly stuff, in the end. He was a reasonably entertaining diarist, but not much of a politician.

But back to Mr White, whose glum and increasingly policemanly demeanour has obviously prevented me from realising that he is, in fact, in search of fun. Mr White, whom I meet from time to time in radio and TV studios for adversarial conflict, always looks as if he wants to arrest me for showing insufficient respect for David Cameron, the Guardian's new best mate. Nor is he terrifically forthcoming with the jokes.

I was not in any way suggesting that we 'did a deal' with Hitler. In fact, I was suggesting that we avoided putting ourselves into a position where we very nearly had to. Declaring war, inadequately armed and prepared, in 1939 meant that we had either to win the war, or do a deal. Few could then have guessed the third possibility, of handing over conduct of the war to Roosevelt and Stalin, while going slowly bankrupt.

Had Hitler wanted to force us into a deal after Dunkirk (which I don't believe he did), he could have massed his forces in France rather than on the Soviet border in the spring of 1941, and launched an invasion of this country. I think, given our state at the time, that we would have been at least in serious danger of being overwhelmed. Nothing in Hitler's behaviour in June 1940, after we had been driven off the continent, suggests that he was particularly interested in doing any such thing. We were left in a sort of belligerent limbo in 1940, from which we were eventually rescued by the USSR and the USA, who then conducted the war according to their goals.

Let me make this point again. There is no evidence, in word or deed, that Hitler had any special interest in the British Empire, or in destroying it. Sad as it is to acknowledge it, Britain did not figure greatly in his calculations or seem to be much of an obstacle to his plans. If we had 'given' him Poland (which we actually had no power either to give or withhold) as we had 'given' him the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia (which we also had no power to give or withhold) what was the 'more' he would have come back for? Would our willingness to let him seize chunks of Central Europe, where we had no interest or possessions, have somehow fuelled a German desire for Burma, Malaya or Nyasaland? Hitler wanted a German Land Empire stretching into the east, into Ukraine for the wheat, and the Caucasus for the oil - probably something like the territory seized by the Kaiser at the 1917 Brest-Litovsk Treaty. I don't follow the logic that leaving Hitler to fight his twin, Stalin, would have fuelled in him a desire to seize Delhi or Nairobi. The threat to the British Empire came from the USA, which wanted it broken up, and from Japan, which wanted to steal large chunks of it. Though Japan was powerless as long as we and France were militarily strong in the Far East.

It is perfectly true that an Anglo-French stand against Hitler when he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 might have brought him down. But this is much more fantastical than my essay. By 1936, we had already trashed our good relations with Italy and nobody in democratic Europe, nobody - not even Churchill - actually favoured the military action which would have thrown the then-tiny German army back over the Rhine bridges.

After that, you have to ask, what exactly would Britain have done had we 'fought' over the takeover of Austria in 1937, another genuine turning point. With what army? With what air force? Come to that, how would we have saved Czechoslovakia?

Look at a map. Central Europe is more interesting and complex than you think. Prague is not some remote Slavic outpost, but a long way west of Vienna. In September 1938, Prague was perhaps an hour's flight from the Luftwaffe airfields near Dresden. Bratislava, then the second city of Czechoslovakia, is practically in the suburbs of Vienna, where Hitler was free to station enormous forces. The territory of Hitler's Reich embraced the Czech lands from North, and Southern flanks. However gallantly the Czechs might have fought in their mini-Maginot line in the Sudetenland, what would have become of them, while we gallantly dropped propaganda leaflets on Mannheim and Stuttgart from our bi-planes, and the French polished their belt-buckles in the Maginot Line, as they did while Poland perished in September 1939? They'd have gone the way of the Poles. We didn't fight in 1937, 1938 and 1939 because we couldn't. The silly part of Munich was not our realistic failure to stand up for people we couldn't actually help except with words, but our misleading and dishonourable pretence that we could help the Czechs, the pretence that we were their 'friends' at Munich and the pretence that the inevitable climbdown was 'Peace with Honour’.

It was this deluded, idealistic piffle that was exposed when Hitler grabbed Prague in March 1939, and we then gave our inexplicable - and wholly worthless - guarantee to Poland. What good did it do? It took away from us any freedom to decide when or whether to go to war. It didn't save an ounce of Polish sovereignty, or a square inch of Polish territory, let alone a single life or building. Having been useless and idealistic over Prague, we were then to be useless and militant over Warsaw. It has been said many times how much worse it was to be a 'saved' Pole than it was to be a 'betrayed' Czech. Who can deny it?

No, the question is not what sort of a deal we'd have had to make with Hitler. My reading of 1940 tells me how very, very close we came to making such a deal after Dunkirk left us bankrupt and without an army, a state we were in entirely thanks to the beliefs that 'something must be done to stop Hitler' and 'you have to stand up to bullies', neither backed by any considered thought. Well, if you do stand up to a bully, experience suggests that you knock him down with the first blow, or he'll still be a bully. You certainly don't let him knock you down.

My reading of 1945 tells me that we ended up making a shameful deal with Stalin, under pressure from Roosevelt to do so, giving the Soviet tyrant the very 'free hand' in central Europe that we had impotently sought to deny Hitler. The difference was that by then we had sacrificed huge numbers of lives, all our wealth and our Empire. For what? If we had stayed out of power struggles in which we had no power, there'd have been no need to make a deal with Hitler, or Stalin either.

The USA, which stayed out of the conflict until December 1941, acted much as Britain used to behave in European conflicts, supplying and paying others to fight on its behalf until it had to intervene directly. This sensible policy, which made us rich and powerful in the 18th Century, did the same for the USA in the 20th.

In his jocular mockery, Mr White derides me for listing some of the things we would have escaped if we had stayed out in 1939. ‘It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez.’ Well, let Mr White tell us, which of these avoidable developments does he think were good things?

It was the people who wanted war in 1939 who exposed us to the terrible danger of having to make a deal with Hitler as a beaten nation. Had we stayed out, why would we have had to negotiate with him at all? He simply wasn't interested in us until we declared war on him.