Was World War Two Pointless

Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq, asks Peter Hitchens

By PETER HITCHENS
Last updated at 21:01 19 April 2008

It almost makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for lost of my life.

Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British, had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable.

Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it, as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in both cases.

Heroism: Tommies commandeer a German machine gun during battle for Caen in 1944

With my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my bedroom floor.

I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible bravery by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours.

I read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now.

After this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency, quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the essence of Britishness. To this day I can't watch them without a catch in the throat.

This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything else must be set.

So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I didn't really want to know if it wasn't exactly like that. But it has rather forced itself on me.

When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did.

I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB.

They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars.

And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were.

They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein.

Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America."

And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country.

When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.

Now here comes another. On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry.

I read them, unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster, in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness.

Same story? British soldiers at Basra Palace during the Iraq War - a conflict justified on the precedent of the Second World War

They are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War.

We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.

Well, I didn't feel much like Neville Chamberlain when I argued against the Iraq War. And I still don't.

Some of those who opposed the Iraq War ask a very disturbing question.

The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were dead wrong.

In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war?

What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?

Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here.

The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-dominated European Union?"

The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"

Don't read on if these questions rock your universe.

The two books, out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke.

I know Pat Buchanan and respect him, but I have never liked his sympathy for "America First", the movement that tried to keep the USA out of the Second World War.

As for Nicholson Baker, he has become famous only because his novel, Vox, featuring phone sex, was given as a present to Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky.

Human Smoke is not a novel but a series of brief factual items deliberately arranged to undermine the accepted story of the war, and it has received generous treatment from the American mainstream, especially the New York Times.

Baker leans towards being a pacifist, a silly position open only to citizens of free countries with large navies.

Many of the facts here, especially about Winston Churchill and Britain's early enthusiasm for bombing civilian targets, badly upset the standard view.

In his element: Churchill preferred war to peace claims US author Buchanan.

Here is Churchill, in a 1920 newspaper article, railing against the "sinister confederacy" of international Jewry.

I say I am reluctant to believe it, as I am reluctant to believe another Baker piece of information presented, that Franklin Roosevelt was involved in a scheme to limit the number of Jews at Harvard University. Roosevelt apparently believed that the small Jewish community of the U.S. were attempting to control the economy, media, cultural and intellectual life of America as part of a plan by their intelligentsia.

Such things today would end a political career in an instant.

Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief.

If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident.

We ignored reports from Auschwitz once the war started and refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it.

Baker is also keen to show that Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised mass murder.

The implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause of it, is specially disturbing.

A lot of people will have trouble, also, with the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his regime was well known: "A highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism."

Three years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane.

Buchanan is, in a way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own sake, and preferred it to peace believing war strengthened nations, building their character, especially of their men. Churchill is also a firm believer in racialism barely considering peoples in many parts of the Empire as full human beings. In fairness they should have noted that this notion of war or race was not an unpopular one, especially among the British upper class, even in the wake of the First World War.

As the First World War began in 1914, observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as "radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a really happy man".

Churchill also, rightly, gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British armed forces between the wars.

It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing against.

Well, every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing spectacularly right, as Churchill did.

Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

Surveying Buchanan's chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions.

The First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict.

We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA.

We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war.

This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable.

Worse still is Buchanan's analysis of how we went to war.

I had always thought the moment we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the time. Nobody? Yes.

That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13: "Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations."

He then even more wetly urged "Herr Hitler" to do the decent thing and withdraw.

Buchanan doesn't think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, and I suspect he is right.

But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to ensure the post war borders of Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it. He wanted a return of the lost German territory, especially cities such as Leipzig and a guaranteed border with Russia and the Slavic nations. The perceived threat and natural alliance of Poland with Russia today may seem difficult to fathom but much of Eastern Europe at the time was under the thrall of Pan-Slavism and the Soviet's had not shown their desire for hegemony behind brotherly affection. The question for Britain however was one of its European preeminence, not the national integrity of Poland.

We then embarked on a war which cost us our world Empire, many of our best export markets, sources of natural resources, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies. Our Empire became theirs.

As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.

Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting, evening strategically aiding as Hitler and Stalin ripped out each other's bowels?

Was Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the global British Empire?

The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never built a surface navy capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he left it for far too late to build enough submarines to starve us out.

He was narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, partly because Hitler never actually invaded but how would we have fared if, a year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead?

But he didn't. His "plan" to invade Britain, the famous Operation Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned.

Can it be true that he wasn't very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would drone for hours.

Of course he was an ruthless dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our Press and politicians, including Churchill himself.

We almost declared war on Stalin in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain.

And, in alliance with Hitler, Stalin who was no fool, was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London. Stalin knew that eventually there were too many nations aspiring to be dominant. No alliances or treaties could solve too many players on an crowded field. The Americans while delivering war assistance were also trying to overthrow their authoritarian ally in Russia.

Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense.

No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved.

But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

• Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, is published on May 6 by Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, is published on May 13 by Crown Publishing.

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CHURCHILL has always been a bundle of contradictions: petty, self loathing alcoholic and egotistical statesman; nationalist and imperialist; racist elitist and leftist; philo-Semite and anti-Semite. Here are some quotes that seldom make the monuments.

"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes" - Writing as commandant of the RAF's predecessor command council, the British Army Military Air Council.

"I do not admit...that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia...by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race...has come in and taken its place" - Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937.

"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate...I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed" - Churchill to Asquith, 1910.

"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievements. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations" - From 'Great Contemporaries', 1937.

"This movement among the Jews is not new...this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire" - Writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, 1920.

A good biography of Churchill is by Clive Ponting, Sinclair Stevenson 1994