Something Better

Peter Hitchens writes:

Our behaviour in the present is (or ought to be) governed by what we believe to be our experience of the past. The recent war in Iraq is a stark illustration of the enduring power of the Munich/Finest Hour myth. What if that myth is seriously misleading? He who controls the past, controls the future. If we misunderstand the past, mightn't we mess up the future? This is the immense and lasting power of the Churchill cult, which has dominated political thinking in Britain and the USA for 70 years, and is now at last due for serious revision. It will die hard. But it will die, having been disastrously wounded in Baghdad and Basra six years ago. We had better be sure that it is replaced by something better.

I should add here that some contributors seem to have concluded that my view in some way sympathises with or removes the stain and guilt from Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany. This is simply false. I have no such opinion. Nothing that I say contains any such implication. It is however true that the British belief, that we fought Hitler because of the vileness of his regime and because of his Judophobic fury, is not justified by the facts. Hitler's extermination of the Jews began some time after we declared war. I will not here go into the suggestion that he might not have attempted it without the cover of the war, but there are those who believe this to be true. We had endured his persecution of the Jews of Germany and then of Austria for six years without major complaint until 1939, signed treaties with him, communed with him and his henchmen at the highest level and in convivial occasions, and we took part in his awful 1936 Olympic Games without protest, and did precious little to provide refuge for his victims.

Our war with Hitler never had anything to do with the internal character of his regime. This justification was invented afterwards. If we had chosen our allies on the basis of their goodness, and our enemies on the basis of their badness, then we could hardly have been allied with Stalin for four hard years. In which case, why exactly did we fight Hitler's Germany and about what? And more especially, why did we fight it when and where we did? If it was a simple balance of power question, why shouldn't we have sought to balance the USSR against Germany, rather than rush into war with one of them while he was allied to the other? Did we in fact help create the Stalin-Hitler pact, thus actually wrecking the balance of power, by our guarantee to Poland?

'Stan' [who posts comments on Peter Hitchens's blog] wrote: 'Why was our behaviour over the "Danzig" episode stupid? We had just been humiliated on the global stage by Hitler over the Munich agreement - what did you expect us to do? Roll over and play dead?' This is the language of the Sun editorial column, written as if war is, well, a football game. 'Humiliated on the global stage'. 'Roll over and play dead'. Diplomacy isn't (or shouldn't be) conducted on such foundations. The world is not, in fact, a stage, where the corpses get up after the play, and go for a drink and a laugh. It is a world of cruelty and blood, fire and war, hunger and slavery, loss and pain, where death is real, corpses rot in fly-infested heaps, the vaults of national banks are emptied of their gold by the enemy's army, wounds do not always heal and the dead stay forever dead, where great and famous cities and cultures centuries old can be dissolved and plundered to nothing in a week, where defeated millions can be marched off in chains to exhaustion and death, loving families torn apart forever in a minute of horror, happy homes reduced in seconds to blackened charnel houses full of screams, and civilised and gentle empires replaced in the twinkling of an eye by evil and rapacious successors or by chaos - a world in which the rulers of nations can by a single incautious false move, done often through bravado or wounded self-regard, lose forever the safety and peace of those whom they govern, and whose safety is their chief concern.

If mainland Britain did not share the miserable fate of France in 1940 (and never forget that the Channel Islands, in an incident we still prefer to keep rather quiet about, did share that fate, because the sea between them and the continent wasn't wide enough), it was no thanks to those who signed the guarantee to Poland. A bit of humiliation is a small price for holding on to the Empire that pays for your freedom and prosperity. Rolling over and playing dead is often not at all a bad thing to do, if you have been struck to the ground by a ruthless blow from a stronger enemy, and are hoping that enemy will turn his wrath against someone else while you recover your wits and your breath. People who write about war as an act of policy ought to see war, from time to time.

'Stan' has repeatedly failed to substantiate one claim in particular, a claim on which he heavily relies, that Hitler had always planned to invade France in 1939-40, whatever the outcome of events in Poland. He has produced precisely no proper evidence for this. The one piece of alleged evidence he has referred to is a supposed discovery by the fledgling Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in autumn 1939 (Bletchley Park only began operation on 15th August that year, so this would have a been a major triumph worthy of record) of a German plan to invade France through the Low Countries at this date. There are two things wrong with this. One is that I cannot find any evidence that it exists, 'Stan' has ignored repeated requests from me for a substantiation, and nobody else has so far confirmed its existence. It may exist. But I have no means of knowing, and if 'Stan' does, he is not sharing his means with me, or with anyone else here. Perhaps you need an Enigma machine to find this stuff.

The other is that, even if it did exist, such plans post-date by many months the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland, and Poland's consequent refusal to negotiate on Danzig and the corridor, and therefore have no bearing at all on the case. It may well be that Hitler decided to invade France in September 1939 rather than October 1939 (as records show he did). But if so he did so after Poland (which he had hoped to enrol in the anti-Comintern Pact and regarded as a possible ally until early 1939) refused any further negotiations on Danzig and the Corridor. And Poland did so after Britain and France gave their guarantees.

'Stan' behaves like this because he simply does not understand the case he is rejecting. He is, in my view, made incapable of doing so by dogma. He has it in his head, so firmly that I cannot dislodge it however many times I try to do so, that I am saying that the Anglo-French guarantees to Poland directly influenced Hitler's actions. On the contrary, Hitler regarded Britain and France as 'small worms' (the phrase he used to his intimates when discussing Chamberlain at Munich). It was his confidence that this was the case that enabled him to get what he wanted at Munich.

He thought the guarantees worthless. Poland, on the other hand, took them seriously, people and government alike. There is a pathetic photograph in existence of the people of Warsaw gathered outside the British Embassy after our declaration of war in 1939, cheering and waving approving banners. It took a few weeks before it dawned on them that no help was coming, and that they hadn't just lost Danzig and the Corridor, but their homes, their country and their happy lives. I'd be interested in any information anyone has from documents of the time about what Poland's political leadership really thought. The British and French guarantees to Poland were among the gravest diplomatic mistakes (and among the most dishonourable false promises) ever made by either country. Not only did they give Poland a false assurance of help, and encourage its government and people in what turned out to be a blood-soaked national suicide.

They also gave the Polish government the absolute right to determine when Britain and France entered the war against Germany. Even if you believe, as 'Stan' apparently does, that an Anglo-German war in 1939-40 was predestined and unavoidable, you must surely concede that the country which can choose precisely when and under what circumstances it goes to war is in a better position than the country which has ceded that decision to a despotic, erratic state on the far side of Europe.

Napoleon III's idiotic tumble into the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, thanks to cunning German propaganda provocations, seems to me to be the only modern episode in the same class of vainglorious dimwittedness. I think Patrick Buchanan's 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War' (which I suspect 'Stan' has not read, and urge him to obtain) shows beyond doubt that the conventional narrative of World War Two is simply unsustainable in the light of modern knowledge. Its poor reception arose partly out of the fact that, like all courageous history, it upset so many academic and political vested interests. One of this book's most profound effects on me had nothing to do with the Polish guarantee. It was the realisation that my long-held view - that Britain and France should have acted against Hitler when he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 - was hopelessly unrealistic. I notice some other readers still cling to this idea. I warn them against this. Alas, it is a rotten branch, and will snap beneath their weight.

No significant political force at the time supported such action. Even Winston Churchill, who seems otherwise to have said and done nothing about the Rhineland, wrote in a newspaper column of 13th March 1936 that France had taken 'the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations'. No fighting on the beaches there, eh? Another great anti-appeaser of a later period, Duff Cooper, told the German ambassador at the time that the British public 'did not care two hoots about the Germans reoccupying their own territory'. I don't doubt these were true reflections of British (and French) public opinion. Leaving aside growing dislike of Hitler's regime (which at that time was foul and cruel, lawless, tyrannous and murderous, but not systematically genocidal), Britain and its people had long thought that the Versailles Treaty had been unfair to Germany and were sympathetic to attempts to revise its harsher provisions.

Stanley Baldwin told the French that Britain was in no state to go to war, and told his own MPs he hoped to see Germany going to war with 'the Bolshies'. Lloyd-George, the great war leader of 1914-18, was against action and full of praise for Hitler.

Oh, and who said this?

'One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.'

Yes, it was 'the 'Last Lion', Winston Spencer Churchill, in 1937.

Thus the standard escape route, for those of us who wish it had happened otherwise, doesn't really work. You might as well wish that Britain (and Britain alone) had possessed the H-Bomb in 1914. Useful, but impossible. The collapse of the Stresa Front, thanks to the early exposure of the Hoare-Laval Pact in the French press, had ended all hopes of keeping Mussolini out of an alliance with Hitler. That led, ineluctably, to Hitler's takeover of Austria - Mussolini had been Austria's principal protector. Once he withdrew his protection, Anschluss was inevitable.

Next came the Czech issue. Whatever possessed Britain to think that she had any power or ability to intervene in this matter? It can certainly be argued that it was a better place to stand than over Poland in 1939. Czechoslovakia, for all its many faults, was a civilised law-governed democracy, which pre-war Poland wasn't. It had a large and reasonably well-trained army and modern border defences. It had inherited the great Skoda armaments works of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But the defences were in the wrong place, as any traveller in Europe who has travelled from Prague to Vienna can easily see to this day. With Austria now a province of the Reich, German land forces could simply bypass the mountain fortifications in the Erzgebirge, and planes based outside Vienna could be over Prague in an hour (and over Bratislava in minutes).

So if we had gone to war for Czechoslovakia, with our tiny broomstick army and our biplane air force in September 1938, we would probably have gone to the rescue of a defeated, occupied ruin. I have been visiting the Czech lands since 1978, I am moved by the Czech story and have much sympathy for that noble experiment, though I suspect all attempts to 'contain' Germany then or since were bound to fail, once Bismarck had achieved unification. But I still cannot for the life of me see what good it did the Czechs, or us, for us to take the Czech side in 1938. Still, at least we didn't 'save' them, the way we 'saved' Poland in 1939.