Mentioning The War

Last night’s Sunday Supplement was about Stanley Baldwin. What had Nick Robinson to say? Quite a bit, as it turned out.

But sadly including the suggestion that Baldwin failed to identify some sort of existential threat to the United Kingdom and the British Empire. This cannot have been a reference to the Soviet Union, since Baldwin did in fact identify that threat very clearly. So it must have been a reference to Nazi Germany.

Now it must be said that once the Germans had started dropping bombs on our towns and cities, sinking our ships, and shooting our planes out of the sky, then they had to be defeated. But how we ever found ourselves into that situation is altogether another matter.

Baldwin’s successor, Chamberlain, made a fateful error. He promised to defend Poland when he knew perfectly well that we neither would nor could. Thus, he involved us needlessly in what he must have known would go on to be, as it had been before, the dispute between Hitler and Stalin.

We therefore became allied to Stalin, as monstrous a Hitler; and indeed allied to Mao, the worst mass murderer of all time. Stalin, of course, was given overall control of Poland, and indeed of Czechoslovakia, at the end of the War. Bully for the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, I’m sure we can all agree. Can’t we?

Also at the end of the War, it was in fact the Americans who forced us to dismantle the Empire. And during the War, moral standards collapsed. We laugh now about the women from whose bedrooms the Normandy Landings had been launched. But it was, and is, no laughing matter.

Hitler always said that he had no plan to invade Britain, and if he had been lying then there would have been such an invasion when it would undoubtedly have succeeded, in the summer of 1943. As I said, by then we had to defeat him. But for other reasons, which could have been avoided. And the manner of our bombing of what were in any case the urban and industrial strongholds of his Social Democratic opponents does us no credit, to say the very least.

Dad’s Army sentimentality about the War didn’t kick in until a generation after it had ended, and Churchill’s popular cult didn’t start until after his death, which came shortly after his constituency association had deselected him as a parliamentary candidate.

A generation before that, he had been removed as Prime Minister while the War had still been going on. His own seat had been cut in half, and Labour had spinelessly declined to contest the half that he was contesting. But an anti-Churchill Independent took a third of the vote, and the other half of the former constituency did in fact fall to Labour.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini. In 1941, he had reissued his own Great Contemporaries complete with its paean of praise to Hitler. It had been left to Alex Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s old PPS, and to other allies of Chamberlain’s, to abstain rather than vote in favour of Churchill’s carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin.

And so on, and on, and on. The miners who refused to listen to his funeral on the radio were, and are, in excellent company. (Those about to leap into life from London, have you go that? – the miners, so that what I am writing is very far from vote-losing stuff in these parts.) Baldwin also had trouble with the miners. But the communities that they created will not, nor should they, revile his name to end of time.