The Unnecessary War

2,323 words

Patrick J. Buchanan
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
New York: Random House, 2008

See also: “The Collapse of British Power,” “The Audit of War,” “The Lost Victory,” “The Verdict of Peace,” “The Forced War,” “America First,” “Colonel McCormick,” & “Wind Down the Empire of Nothing”

Part of the reason why the United States got involved in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, and Iraq was due to the “aggression at Munich” paradigm of international relations. This refers to the deal struck at Munich between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in September 1938. The deal allowed Germany to annex the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia that were called the Sudetenland.

Within a year, however, Britian and France would declare war on Germany over its invasion of Poland. The apocalyptic conflict which followed destroyed the great cities of Europe and claimed the lives of over 60 million people. At the end of the war, the British Empire, hitherto the world’s superpower, collapsed, and the United Kingdom itself was dependent upon American handouts merely to feed its own people.

According to the mainstream historical narrative, the agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler had been the last chance to avert the Second World War. More recent interpretations of events suggest that the British should have compromised over Poland a year later as well to avoid war.

Buchanan published Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War in 2008, during the Iraq War, which was itself launched in no small measure as a result of analogies with Munich. The war had become a demoralizing disaster for the United States by then, and Buchanan offered a book which turned the conventional narrative of the origins of the Second World War on its head. The conflict had not arisen due to Hitler’s Germany aggressing against Britain’s defenseless allies, but instead had grown out of a border dispute between Germany and Poland in which the British recklessly became involved.

Winston Churchill, a reckless genius

From 1896, when Leander Starr Jameson, an upper-class British adventurer, attempted to take over the Afrikaans-speaking South African Republic, until 1968, when Enoch Powell gave his famous “Rivers of Blood” Speech, the British upper class made a series of reckless decisions. The one member of this class who outshone the rest in terms of his genius and ability — albeit alongside recklessness — was Winston Churchill.

Fate caused Winston Churchill to be born at the right time, place, and social station in 1874. He was a member of the upper class but lacked a formal title. Churchill’s father Randoph was the son of the Duke of Marlborough, but not his oldest son. Ironically, this gave Churchill greater opportunities. Instead of going to the House of Lords, where he’d have only held symbolic power at best, Churchill went to the House of Commons, where he had real power.

Churchill as a Boer prisoner of war in 1899. He’d been captured after recklessly riding in an armored train. The tracks were blocked by the Boers and the train had come under fire from field guns.

Churchill had served in the British Army and took part in what was possibly the last British cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman, during the British reconquest of the Sudan. Churchill later went on to write an outstanding account of the conflict called The River War. Shortly thereafter, Churchill served as a war correspondent — and part-time soldier — in the Boer War.

It was in South Africa that an event occurred which is emblematic of the whole of Churchill’s career. He wanted to see some action, so he secured the opportunity to ride in an armored train that was on patrol. The train had no accompanying cavalry or mounted infantry to secure its flanks, which was a problem, as a train as a vehicle of war was the equivalent of a battleship without a rudder. At no point did Churchill grasp the tactical problem that the train embodied. Predictably, the train was ambushed, and Churchill was captured. He managed to escape and happened to knock on the door of an Englishman who was able to sneak him onto a train bound for Portuguese Mozambique. The entire affair was stupidity mixed with enormous luck.

The end of splendid isolationism & the Great War

Shortly after the Boer War, British policy quietly shifted from one of “splendid isolation” in which the British stood aloof from the conflicts on the European continent to one where Britian promised to come to the aid of France in case of trouble. This deal was struck in secret by Sir Edward Grey, who was Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the time. This secret agreement would have carried no weight when war broke out in 1914 except for the fact that the French and British later worked out a further scheme in which the Royal Navy would prevent the German fleet from controlling the Scapa Flow, and in turn the North Sea, so that the French Navy could focus on the Mediterranean.

When the First World War broke out, the British had less freedom to act than they had before making their agreements with France. Winston Churchill’s mix of astonishing stupidity and enormous fortune recurred in his service during this war. As First Lord of the Admiralty he was responsible for Britain’s disastrous Gallipoli Campaign, and resigned soon after. He then joined the British Army and went to the front lines, competently commanding a battalion without getting killed.

The war ended with a number of treaties, the worst of which was the Treaty of Versailles. It changed Germany’s borders and left German minorities in unstable, poorly-governed nations such as the newly-created Czechoslovakia.

Should the settlement of the First World War have followed the Wilsonian idea of the “self-determination” of peoples, Germany would have in fact expanded. Hypocrisy reigned, however, and instead Germans were left in foreign nations such as Czechoslovakia.

United States President Woodrow Wilson added what turned out to be a difficult problem into the post-war settlement: the “self-determination of peoples.” The concept sounded good, but was difficult to carry out in practice. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved in the face of the idea of self-determination for all its various peoples, new polities sprang up: multi-ethnic mini-empires without the legitimacy of a genuine empire. As a result, there was self-determination for some and foreign rule for others. Yugoslavia was one such entity. Furthermore, ethnic Germans who were in foreign countries were not given any chance to exercise self-determination themselves, as this would in fact have caused Germany to expand.

In the years preceding Hitler’s election, the Weimar Republic attempted to reach compromises with the French and British, but achieved nothing. The Austrians and Germans also attempted to create a common customs union, but this was also stopped again due to pressure from the former Allies

The rise and fall of the Stresa Front

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The Germans were contained to the west by the Stresa Front, which was an alliance between France, Britain, and Italy. This alliance broke up in 1935, however, when the British sanctioned the Italians for invading Ethiopia. (This had technically been within Italy’s rights, however, since they’d been given the region at the 1885 Berlin Conference.) The British sanctions were enough to enrage Italian public opinion, but not enough to stop the Italians from ultimately triumphing in Ethiopia. The British continued to allow — or were unable to stop — oil shipments to Italy, as well as Italian use of the Suez Canal. The Rome-Berlin Axis was then signed in 1936 as a result of the British decision to take a moral stand for a nation — Ethiopia — that was not a formal British ally, and which had no ability to aid Britian in any way.

With Italy out of the Stresa Front, Hitler arranged for the annexation of Austria. Austria had been a buffer zone between Germany and Italy, but with good relations between the two nations, its role in this regard became unnecessary.

Japan and the US

One of the reasons why the British were able to deploy Australian and New Zealand troops in Europe during the Great War was that the Japanese were a British ally at the time, and had been so since 1902.

The British signed the Four-Power Treaty in 1921, which reduced the size of the navies of the United States, Britain, Japan, and France. It brought about the end of the 1902 British-Japanese alliance, and inadvertently made Britain and Japan enemies in the Pacific. The British could have substituted the Americans for the Japanese as an ally, but the American representatives were reluctant to enter what they saw as an entangling alliance. The British should have maintained their agreement with Japan, but the British elite was enamored of the idea of a pan-Anglo global order, and didn’t recognize that the Americans were hostile to the British Empire as well.

The Four-Power Treaty was followed up by later agreements that outlawed the fortification of various points in the Pacific, which is why the British colony of Singapore had guns that only faced the sea and was defenseless along its landward border. When Britain went to war in 1939, the Pacific colonies were nearly helpless in the face of Japan’s Pacific naval superiority.

Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942. Its fate had been sealed two decades earlier, when the British abandoned their alliance with Japan.

The nations surrounding Germany

The end of the World War created a situation in which Germany was surrounded by nations that were hostile to it, but that were unable to resist it militarily. There was little trouble along Germany’s western borders, however. The case of Schleswig-Holstein was resolved by dividing the duchy between the Germans and the Danes. There were no tensions with Belgium over the Germans living there, nor in France or Italy. All the problems were in the east.

The most pressing problems were in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Czechoslovakia had been cobbled together out of the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its polity was a collection of mutually hostile groups, and its Czech-dominated government was utterly hostile to the German and other minorities.The crisis between Czechoslovakia and Germany began when its foolish President, Edvard Beneš, claimed that Germany was about to invade in May 1938. Beneš put his army on alert and otherwise made a big fuss. The Germans had to bring neutral observers to the German-Czech border to prove that they were not planning to invade. Beneš afterwards claimed that he’d made Hitler “back down,” but in fact the affair was an ill-advised provocation.

The phony crisis was the beginning of the end for Czechoslovakia. The nation began to collapse internally, leading Hitler to call for a diplomatic meeting in Munich involving Italy, France, and Britain in September 1938. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, allowed Hitler to absorb the German-speaking Sudetenland into Germany. After Munich, the polity became Czecho-Slovakia, and by the end of September, it had collapsed along ethnic lines. Germany then invaded, turning the Czech-speaking area, known as Bohemia, into a protectorate. The Hungarian- and Polish-speaking areas were ceded to Hungary and Poland.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG/Shutterstock (2541725a)
Ethnic Germans in Sudetenland greet German forces as they enter Czechoslovakia in 1938.
History

Bohemia had never truly been an independent country, and from Hitler’s point of view he most likely saw nothing wrong with his decision. But the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia so shortly after the Munich Agreement destroyed Chamberlain’s credibility. The British were painted into a corner, and their response was to overreact.

The other problem was Poland. German aims initially seem to have been limited to annexing Danzig, which was an independent city-state effectively under Poland’s control; obtaining an extraterritorial highway and rail line to East Prussia; and entering into an agreement with Poland to deter the Soviets. By this time, however, the British Parliament was in an uproar, and as a result the British gave a guarantee to Poland that said in effect that they would go to war against Germany should Poland be attacked. The Poles then stopped compromising.

At this point the Poles should have reconsidered their situation, but they genuinely believed that the British and French would attack Germany from the west if they were invaded. They thought wrong. The British were in no way prepared to go to war and had issued an empty threat. The French were prepared, but their army was utterly hostile to the idea of fighting Germany for the sake of Poland. It was in a state of semi-mutiny even before the fighting started.

What happened next is well-known: The Germans attacked and the Poles had little chance against their superior armed forces, while the Soviets invaded from the east. The conflict quickly grew to encompass all of Europe, and eventually the United States as well — and most of Europe was ruined, and has never been the same since.

The lesson

Buchanan is not sympathetic to the Third Reich in any way throughout this book. He also doesn’t diminish the very real security concerns that the British and French had as the Germans rearmed. But he has a message for the United States.

President Truman stopped the US military at the Elbe River in April 1945. Then the Americans successfully contained the Communists during the Cold War, but they never issued any war guarantees that they could not follow through on. When Hungary and Czechoslovakia revolted against Soviet domination, the US stood by while Soviet tanks crushed them. American military policy can only successfully go as far as American national interests.

Since the Cold War, however, the United States has allowed NATO to expand into areas that were formerly part of the Russian sphere of influence. Additionally, NATO has admitted members — such as Greece and Turkey — that are mutually hostile. American foreign policy needs to be reconsidered. Alliances that have hitherto been sacrosanct should be reevaluated and ended, if necessary. The drumbeat for more and more war by the next “Churchill” should be ignored.

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