Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Nor could Britain commit to war to defend a Bolshevik state whose very reason for existence was the destruction of Christianity and Western civilization. Why should a single British soldier die to save a Stalinist regime whose departure from the earth all decent men would celebrate? Yet, in a supreme irony of the twentieth century, Britain’s greatest champion of an alliance with Stalin turned out to be that same Churchill who had championed the Allied intervention to strangle Bolshevism in its crib and who had been England’s most ferocious and eloquent anti-Communist. In a September 1936 column, “Enemies to the Left,” written after the show trials of the Bolshevik Old Guard, Churchill wrote, “What is the meaning and effect in this oppressive scene of the Moscow executions?”9

  Churchill answered his own question. Stalin’s regime, he wrote, had taken on the same anti-Semitic and nationalistic features as Hitler’s.

  Many people unable to be shocked at the expiation of these miscreants who have blithely sent uncounted thousands of good men to their doom, were nonetheless sickened at the elaborate farce of their trial. Its technique throws a gleam of intimate light upon the mysterious nature of a Communist state…. We see the gulf between the Communist mentality and the wider world.

  The second point to notice is that these victims were nearly all Jews. Evidently the Nationalist elements represented by Stalin and the Soviet armies are developing the same prejudices against the Chosen People as are so painfully evident in Germany. Here again extremes meet, and meet on a common platform of hate and cruelty.10

  What stance should Britain take toward the twin evils of Nazism and Bolshevism and the Stalin-Trotsky split? In “The Communist Schism,” published in October 1936, Churchill gave his answer:

  We ought to arm night and day in conjunction with other friendly countries and make ourselves independent of all these monstrous and fathomless intrigues. The stronger we are, the more upright and free-spoken, the less danger will there be of the civilised and normal nations being drawn into the quarrels of cruel and wicked forces at either extreme of the political gamut.11

  Wise counsel. Would that the Western democracies had taken it.

  Yet five months before the Hitler-Stalin Pact exploded upon the world, Churchill was assuring his country that Stalin’s Russia was a mighty force for peace upon whom East Europeans could rely: “The loyal attitude of the Soviets to the cause of peace, and their obvious interest in resisting the Nazi advance to the Black Sea, impart a feeling of encouragement to all the Eastern States now menaced by the maniacal dreams of Berlin.”12

  THE COURTSHIP OF STALIN

  HITLER WON THE COMPETITION for Stalin’s hand for a reason: They were brothers under the skin, amoral political animals with blood on their hands who would unhesitatingly betray nations or crush peoples to advance state or ideological interests. In the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Hitler conceded that Stalin’s slice of Europe would include Finland, Estonia, Latvia, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and, later, Lithuania and Northern Bukovina. Stalin would sell Hitler the food and raw materials needed to crush the democracies and repatriate to Hitler all anti-Nazi Germans in his new territories or any who sought refuge there. It was a transaction between two regimes entailing what Auden had called the “conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.”13

  Hobbled by scruples, Britain and France took months to negotiate with Molotov and Voroshilov. They got nowhere. Ribbentrop and Molotov negotiated the most famous (and infamous) pact in history in twenty-four hours. One hitch came up in the negotiations: Stalin demanded two Latvian port towns. Ribbentrop requested a recess. Gene Smith describes:

  Ribbentrop agreed to everything, but when Stalin expressed an interest in the Latvian warm-weather ports of Libau and Windau, he said he would have to consult the Leader…. [Ribbentrop] put in a call to Hitler and told him of the Russian request that the Latvian ports be assigned to their sphere of interest. Hitler sent an orderly for an atlas, looked at the map of the Baltic coastline, noted that the ports were a stone’s throw from East Prussia, but told Ribbentrop to tell Stalin he was welcome to them.14

  Hitler could be magnanimous in granting Stalin custody of what Stalin would one day have torn from him.

  The news of the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 23, 1939, shook the world. Militarily, it was directed at Poland; strategically, at London. Hitler believed his pact, which put Russia at Germany’s side in a war on Poland, would jolt Britain awake to reality. Poland was surrounded. Poland was indefensible. Poland was lost. It made no sense for Britain to declare war to defend a doomed nation. Confident Britain would now back away from its war guarantee, Hitler assured his comrades, “Our enemies are little worms…. I saw them at Munich.”15

  To Hitler’s astonishment, Chamberlain countered his pact with Stalin with a British Mutual Assistance Pact with Beck.

  Thus, on August 25, 1939, hours before the scheduled August 26 attack, Hitler called off his invasion for a week. Not only had Britain affirmed its commitment to Poland, Mussolini had, the same day, weaseled out of his Pact of Steel pledge to go to war. Italy’s ambassador and Foreign Minister Ciano were imploring Il Duce not to let Italy be dragged into a war that threatened national ruin for Hitler, who had never consulted Mussolini on his pact with Stalin or on the steps he was taking to war. Chief of the German General Staff Halder wrote in his diary that Hitler was “considerably shaken” by the two events.16 “‘The Italians are behaving just like they did in 1914,’ fumed Hitler. He canceled the marching orders, and the invasion ground to a halt just before it reached the Polish border.”17

  LAST WEEK OF PEACE

  THUS BEGAN THE FINAL week’s countdown to the bloodiest war in all of history, with Chamberlain and Halifax searching, as the hours slipped away, for a way to accommodate Hitler’s demand for Danzig, as Hitler and Göring sought some way to avoid war with Britain. By August 30, the British were pressing the Poles to agree to Ribbentrop’s final offer: a Polish plenipotentiary sent to Berlin in twenty-four hours with full powers to negotiate the return of Danzig.

  The Poles said, “No!”

  Behind Polish defiance lay the lesson of Czechoslovakia. Six months after Prague surrendered the Sudetenland, the multiethnic country had come apart. Poland, too, was a multiethnic country, with Germans, Balts, Ukrainians, and Jews unhappy under Polish rule. If the Poles agreed to give back Danzig, would not the Germans in the Corridor and Silesia, and perhaps the Ukrainians, too, demand the right to secede? What would happen then? Even without their war guarantee, the Poles might have concluded: Better to go down fighting than suffer the fate of the Czechs. And so the Poles rejected the final German offer of August 30.

  Was this final Hitler-Ribbentrop offer—to effect the return of Danzig to Germany but let Poland retain its economic rights in the city, and to hold a plebiscite in the Corridor to decide its future—a Nazi ploy to give Britain an escape hatch from its war guarantee? Of course. But was it also a serious offer?

  Henderson believed that a Polish plenipotentiary in Berlin on August 30 could have stopped the invasion. Had Poland formally received the offer, Chamberlain would have insisted it be taken up in negotiations. Hitler would then have had his excuse for calling off the invasion. His generals, up to the hour they crossed the frontier, believed Hitler would find a way to retrieve Danzig and avoid war. But the Poles refused to send a negotiator. They had confidence in themselves as a warrior people and trusted in their British guarantee. “Colonel Beck missed the bus to Berlin and Poland paid in terms of a fourth partition.”18 As Marshal Foch predicted, the next war would break out over the Polish Corridor.19

  For that war one man bears full moral responsibility: Hitler. A self-described “barbarian” who mocked Christian concepts of morality, he was content to take responsibility before history. Crushing Poland to restore land and peoples to the Reich and to realize Germany’s manifest destiny was no more immoral to him than riding down Dervishes at Omdurman was immoral to Churchill.

  AN ALTERNATIVE TO WAR?
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  BUT THIS WAS NOT only Hitler’s war. It was Chamberlain’s war and Churchill’s war, and it is the conduct of the British statesmen that concerns us here. Was this the time, the place, and the cause for Britain to fight?

  Kissinger contends that Britain was swept into war on a wave of righteous revulsion: “After Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, British public opinion would tolerate no further concessions; from then on, the outbreak of the Second World War was only a matter of time.”20

  But no war is inevitable until it has begun. What made a European war “only a matter of time” was not Hitler’s occupation of Prague but Britain’s guarantee to Poland. Had there been no war guarantee, Poland, isolated and friendless, might have done a deal over Danzig and been spared six million dead. Had there been no war guarantee of March 31, there would have been no British declaration of war on September 3, and there might have been no German invasion of France in May 1940, or ever. For there was nothing inevitable about Hitler’s war in the west.

  The fear that after Poland Hitler would have attacked Britain was an illusion. As he had made clear in Mein Kampf, Hitler would have marched against Russia. As it was, Britain was dragged into an unnecessary war, which cost her nearly 400,000 dead, bankruptcy and the dissolution of the British empire.21

  When deterrence failed and Britain was faced with an obligation to declare a war it could not win, to honor a war guarantee it should not have given, on behalf of a nation it could not save, what should Britain have done? Barnett addresses that question:

  [T]he British guarantee to Poland had entirely failed of its deterrent purpose. Was it therefore still in England’s interest to fulfill it? Poland herself could not be saved…. [N]o general discussion even took place in the Cabinet as to whether it would be expedient to fulfill the British guarantee to Poland. There were no prolonged and anguished debates such as had taken place during the Czechoslovakian crisis.22

  Barnett suggests that, given the costs of a European war and the impossibility of saving Poland, the Cabinet should have considered not declaring war, even after Hitler invaded Poland. That would have been seen as a betrayal of Poland and Chamberlain’s government may have fallen. But if Chamberlain believed, as he told U.S. Ambassador Joe Kennedy, that Poland’s cause was lost and war an act of suicidal revenge in which millions must die, ought he not to have resigned rather than lead his country into such a war?

  In the last days of August, Britain seemed fatalistic, resigned to war. An anti-Hitler German diplomat, Ulrich von Hassel, wrote in his diary, “The government in London, whose ambassador did everything to keep the peace, gave up the race in the very last days and adopted a kind of devil-may-care attitude.”23

  But Hitler and Ribbentrop were desperately seeking a way to avoid war with Britain. Here is Hitler’s interpreter describing the scene when the Leader was told Britain had sent an ultimatum and would declare war in two hours:

  There was complete silence. Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him. He was not at a loss, as was afterwards stated, nor did he rage as others allege. He sat completely silent and unmoving. After an interval…he turned to Ribbentrop: “…What now?” asked Hitler with a savage look, as though implying that his Foreign Minister had misled him about England’s probable reaction. Ribbentrop answered quietly: “I assume that the French will hand in a similar ultimatum within the hour.”24

  Interpreter Schmidt withdrew to the anteroom and informed the others of the British ultimatum: “Göring turned to me and said: ‘If we lose this war, then God have mercy on us.’ Goebbels stood in a corner, downcast and self-absorbed. Everywhere in the room I saw looks of grave concern.”25

  Hitler and his high command believed war with Britain represented their own failure, which underscores the point Albert Speer made: “From [my] observations I deduced that this initiation of real war was not what Hitler had projected.”26

  That Hitler wanted no war with Britain is evident from his final directive of August 31, in which he ordered the attack on Poland the following morning, September 1:

  The responsibility for the opening of hostilities in the West should rest unequivocally with England and France…. The German land frontier in the West is not to be crossed at any point without my express consent. The same applies to warlike actions at sea or any which may be interpreted as such…. Defensive measures on the part of the Air Force should at first be exclusively confined to the warding-off of enemy air attacks on the frontier of the Reich.27

  Writes Hillgruber, “[T]he European war that came on September 3 was as incomprehensible as it was contrary to his [Hitler’s] aims.”28

  Germans reacted as their leaders did. Shirer was in the Wilhelmsplatz when news of Britain’s declaration of war blared out on the loudspeakers. “Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished there was not a murmur. They just stood as they were before. Stunned.”29

  By the second day of war, however, September 2, the Germans had broken through the Polish defenses. The Poles were publicly calling on their British allies to declare war and attack Germany from the west. But to the astonishment of many, no action came. For Neville Chamberlain yet hoped that Hitler might agree to a conference to avert a European war. On the evening of September 2, at 7:30 P.M., Chamberlain rose in the House and spoke hopefully of such a conference. He sat down—to a stunned silence. The House had expected an announcement that an ultimatum was being sent to Berlin. As Labour leader Arthur Greenwood rose to reply to the prime minister, Tory backbencher Leo Amery shouted across to Greenwood, “Speak for England!”

  When he departed the Commons that night, Neville Chamberlain

  was told that Tory backbenchers would rise in revolt if the government did not immediately carry out its threat to declare war. Twelve Cabinet members met in caucus in the chambers of Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon. They agreed to warn Chamberlain that his government could not survive another day of delay, regardless of what France did. Shortly before midnight, Chamberlain gathered his Cabinet and accepted a vote for war.30

  On September 3, the day Britain declared war, Neville Chamberlain, “looking crumpled, despondent and old,” broadcast to his nation in words that echoed Sir Edward Grey, twenty-five years before: “Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins.”31

  “It seemed,” said Eden, “rather the lament of a man deploring his own failure than the call of a nation to arms.”32 Yet one U.S. historian writes: “This note of melancholy was distinctly appropriate to the occasion. British and French statesmanship had been outmaneuvered by Soviet. What could easily have been a German thrust against the Soviet Union had been deflected against the West.”33

  The threat of a mutiny in conservative ranks that night of September 2 had forced Chamberlain, at 11:30 P.M., to assemble his Cabinet and direct Henderson to see Ribbentrop at 9 A.M.—to give Germany two hours to declare it was withdrawing from Poland or face war. His own House had forced on Chamberlain the war he never wanted. Seven weeks into that war, Chamberlain wrote his sister, “I was never meant to be a war leader.”34 He was right. As biographer Ian Macleod wrote, “He should have resigned on the outbreak of war.”35

  As of September 1939, “Britain had only four or five divisions ready for action, which was minuscule compared to the French and German armies, which each numbered about 100 divisions.”36 Looking back on the British decision to declare a war it had neither the ability to wage nor an idea of how to win calls to mind Lord Kitchener’s remark in 1914: “No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world.”37

  POLAND ABANDONED

  WHEN GERMANY INVADED POLAND on September 1, six months after Warsaw received its war guarantee, not one British bomb or bullet had been sent to Poland. No British credit had been extended. Britain still l
acked the power to come to Poland’s aid. And Britain had made no plans to come to Poland’s aid. The Poles, however, facing the first blitzkrieg, or lightning war, awaited the promised Allied offensive.

  General Ironside had told the Poles that German bombing raids on Poland would be answered by British bombing raids on Germany.38 Within hours of the declaration of war, British bombers were in the air—dropping leaflets over Germany. Warsaw was bombed by the Luftwaffe while Bomber Command ineffectually struck at German naval targets in the North Sea.

  General Gamelin had assured the Poles that within fifteen days of a German attack, forty divisions, the “bulk of the French Army,” would be hurled against the Reich.39 “[T]he French general staff concluded a military agreement with its Polish counterpart on May 19,” writes Hillgruber, “that called for a French offensive with approximately 40 divisions against the German western border on the fifteenth day of a European war.”40

  No French offensive ever came. As the German armies rampaged across Poland, the French army entered a few German towns, withdrew, and burrowed into the Maginot Line. The Poles learned that they had been chips sacrificed in an attempt to bluff Hitler. The bluff had been called. There was nothing to back it up. Poland had been deceived. Poland had been abandoned. When an offensive did come in the west, it would be five years later and led by Americans who would halt at the Elbe. And the Poles, who had endured five years of Nazi occupation, would endure forty-five years of Soviet tyranny.

  Chamberlain had known all along his guarantee was worthless. He had confided as much to Joe Kennedy, who wrote in his diary, “[Chamberlain] says the futility of it all is the thing that is frightful; after all they cannot save the Poles; they can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of the whole of Europe.”41