Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 260

'What the Papers Say' , 15th September 2013

Some of you may care to listen to this i-player version of ‘What the Papers say’ on BBC Radio 4, which I presented on Sunday night. It’s only available for a few days. Warning: Mild profanity shortly before the end.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039zdvk

 

 

A Necessary Change of Subject

 Every time I make my standard criticism of modern policing,   I get exactly the same response. And each time the response has very little to do with what I have said, is emotive and takes the same precise form. It also look as if it has been whipped up on some website somewhere, because it is so repetitive in tone and content. The fact that I have all this many times before, and replied to it many times before, doesn’t seem to have any effect at all. It is like pouring a small bottle of water on to the Sahara desert at noon. Soon afterwards, there is no trace at all of what you have done. This is the fate of all writers who do not have regular and frequent access to mainstream TV or who are not on the magic list of authors whose books are puffed by the big reviewers and promoted by the big booksellers. We can say what we like. Most people , if they hear it at all, will be hearing it for the first time. Many will never know we have said it. If we defend it against attack, they will not be aware of our defence, though they may well be aware of the attack.

On the police, I have written a book devoted to the subject (and given a copy of it personally to the current Home Secretary who, I am assured, has read it) , and more articles in print and on line than I care to recall, I have responded personally to scores of often rather rude letters (in many cases never receiving any acknowledgement or response to my carefully-marshalled arguments).  The same might be said of my attempts to discuss Britain’s entry into war in 1939 (even now I am receiving posts suggesting that I think we should not have fought in the Second World War, a view  I have never expressed and do not hold. My arguments are about the timing and purpose of our entry, and of the misrepresentation of this war as a moral crusade, so as to justify new and allegedly moral wars. But in much of the response, there is  almost  no understanding of the actual point of what I am saying, however many times I explain it. One even advances the argument that we had to go to war in September 1939 to fulfil our guarantee to Poland. Yes, we did.  But the questions are ‘Why did we give a guarantee to Poland in the first place?’. And why did we do absolutely nothing to help Poland in practice? And round we go again.

 

In both cases, this of often caused because people's most treasured illusions are being threatened. And treasured illusions, as know, are treasured all the more because those who hokld them secretly doubt them. They *hate* hearing their secret doubts expressed openly by others.

 

 

I’m going to leave aside 1939 for a bit ( it’s bound to come up again) and urging those still interested to use the index  to study what’s been said (‘Churchill Cult’ is the best entry to follow, though also ‘World War Two’). Everything that’s come up in comments is dealt with there. Instead I’m going to try to offer a definitive riposte to my police critics (who are also to be found, interestingly, in large numbers on Twitter) , taking their arguments as they are usually made.  That will be on the next post.

 

 

 

 

The Police - My Critics Speak

What follows is I think a representative sample of comments posted here by defenders of the modern police. I’ve put them here for easy reference, as it gets harder and harder to find older comments as others pile up on top of them.

Pete Danes said:

‘Oh Peter you sad deluded individual, it's very easy to write this but you really have no idea come on patrol with me for a week and see what it's really like. I mean yeah lets all be on foot and get rid of police cars all together it'll be so easy to get to all the immediate jobs within 11 minutes when they're 10 miles away then the question will be why are the police so slow to respond ? Leave the policing to those that are brave enough and stick to writing Shi te articles !’

 

Somone who is informed  said: If this man cared to study the history of policing he would see it is littered with corruption, violence, drunkeness, and a general sense of the boys club. Largely like the world he now occupies. The world of Dixon of dock green was a myth, and the golden days of policing were probably it's darkest. Nowadays police officers are more heavily scrutinised, and open to complaints and criticism than they ever have been. Fact! Accountability is higher than it ever has been. Amazingly the majority of police officers are well meaning, overworked and honest public servants who don't heir jobs despite huge obstacles placed in their way through cuts, bureaucracy, and a legal system which places the criminal and not the victim at its centre. He starts the article with "what use are the police nowadays?" then argues we should remove all of the equipment which provides us with an advantage over the criminal. If he would like to track an armed burglar through waste land at night wearing just a cape and a jolly smile without use of a helicopter, the safety of a poor quality stab resistant vest, or the means to fight back I wish him well and wonder why, like batman, he has not donned a cape and took on the fight himself. Of course I am biased, and he won't even read this. I am also arrogant, rude, corrupt and all the other charges he levels at me without meeting me. I am a police officer. I drive a fast car and, making me even more evil, I carry a Taser. I also help the old lady who has had all of her money stolen by the burglar, I have told parents the news their child has just died in the most horrible of circumstances, I have witnessed the most horrific of scenes that horror movies don't even come close to. I have seen more injuries than I care to remember. I have sustained injuries, fortunately none serious, but bear the scars on my body. I have seen my colleagues injured, and in at least two occasions near death. When the world goes uncontrollably wrong it is me you call. And me who comes running, towards the danger.

 

Mr Whitcombe said:

Mr Hutchins Clearly you live in a perfect bubble where nothing or real life happens to you. Your statement is purely on the basis of the MET Police. Police officers are arrogant and rude? Personally as an officer myself I find this offensive and damn right rude. Your ignorance to your ideas of getting rid of fast cars and helicopters and putting us out on foot patrol are... well plainly ludicrous. I was on foot patrol on my beat in the City. I was dealing with an individual who then point blank range strikes me round the face with a glass bottle. I lost brief conciousness and was on the floor bleeding on my own, 4mins later my back up arrives. Now Mr hitchens lets put you in this situation on the floor injured, dazed, bleeding...and your back up is running on foot to you??? 4 mins seemed like an eternity and they were on Blues in a vehicle coming to my aid!. You moan about the Police and our methods yet you still call us when your in need next you will be moaning about our response times!

 

Aplod said:

Another anti police article from the mail. I don't drive a flash car we have Astras and focus's all plain basic cars. I wear a stab vest because we face violence on a daily basis I've been assaulted numerous times. I don't carry a taser but I think all front line officers should have them. I got out single crewed during the day You are out of touch with your article. Please find time to come out what's its like on a response shift like mine.

 

Tom said:

In reply to your article on the Police. What an ill thought out piece of disrespectful drivel. Whilst you might take issue with the Police, it is unquestionably foolish to suggest they don't provide a much needed service to this country. In addition, your suggestion that the Police should be treated more like 18th Centruary servants is quite astonishing. I'm surprised a newspaper employs someone who writes such poorly constructed, and unsupported arguments. I expected better, but am not surprised.

Sean said:

Why are you so anti-police? What would you say, if it just so happened to be you/ a family member that was assaulted/burgled/robbed/hit by a vehicle, and the operator turned round and said sorry, the closest officer is 25 minutes away because they are all on foot!! What wod you say then?!?!?!?!?!

 

Daily Fail said:

This guy is an utter prat! Take away the police's cars? Well no point in calling then an emergency service is there! If I call 999 I certainly want the police to get there as quickly as possible, how are they going to do that without a car??!! I have heard some really stupid stuff in my time but this pretty much tops it so congratulations for that. I presume you would be exactly the same person who would call police and complain that they took ages to arrive. How about the daily mail save some money and take away your office, computer and company car and actually send you out on the streets with a pad and pencil to get some real news and SERVE the readers with something useful to read! The Daily Fail - a new low. What a complete idiot.

 

Leon said:

How pathetic Hitchens! You clearly have no insight into the work of the police and base your uneducated opinions on TV based cop shows and exaggerated news articles. And we all know journalists like to play around with the truth to get a good story, don't we?! I would simply like to refer you to the brutal murder of PC's Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone this time last year for you to reflect on how their families might feel at the thought of your comments today! When the next lunatic with a gun is on the loose lets send him your way and see how long it takes you to call the police and ask for them to come with their guns, tasers and stab vests! I wonder if they would get to you in time on foot? Bloody Idiot!

 

Oh and there was this one, too

'And further more I draw your attention to Robert Peels principles of policing, numbers 7 and 9 in particular; Number 7, in short that the Police are the pubic and the pubic are the police. Im sure it did not cross your mind to remonstrate with the driver jumping the red light yourself. Number 9, and this is very important that you read and understand Mr Hitchens as it will save you further embarrassment later I'm sure. 'The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, NOT the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it!!' I am sure Mr Peel knew a great deal more about policing than you do or will. It is quite clear that if you see a Police officer wandering about in the rain or twirling his truncheon making you feel all safe and cosy inside he or she is not dealing with the criminals and removing them from your streets. A good police force is never seen, they will work tirelessly and endlessly in the background to ensure that the crime and disruption is also absent.'

 

 

 

Not Bang to Rights, Nor a Fair Cop, Guv

Here, I deal with the sample criticisms of me which I have featured in the previous posting.

 First , as a contrast to the intemperate and often incoherent attacks I posted earlier, here’s a different response:

 

Lanca Lad said:

‘Peter is dead right about the clowns masquerading as policemen. I was a 'bobby' for over 25 years - not an 'Officer' or 'Community Patrolman' but a British Bobby. I was armed with a piece of Lignum Vitae and was fully prepared to use it on any thug who wanted it. Bobbies need courage, the ability to talk others out of some disastrous chosen path and above all, a sense of humour and perspective! The dependence on tasers, CS gas and Japanese batons really displays a mentality alien to me and my generation of bobbies. Our uniform was our pride and our badge of office. Then along came a cadre of social engineers pretending to be policemen and what do we have now? Trousers tucked into boots, T-shirts and those ludicrous yellow coats. Who decided that the colour 'Yellow' should EVER be worn by a British bobby? Yes, I know there are guns out on the streets. But wake up! There were in 1829 and bobbies were shot then! We choose this way of life and we know the dangers. Only a total fool doesn't or imagine they are entering a 'safe' job. As the old saying goes "If you can't take a joke, don't join". Time for a Campaign for Real Policing, Peter?’

 

I have to say that I have over the years received many similar letters from serving and retired officers. It was because I had begun to feel a deep sense of unease about my country that I embarked, in 1999, on what would be a series of books about what had happened to it. The first, ‘The Abolition of Britain’, explored the cultural revolution that had transformed education, broadcasting, the countryside, transport,  and the relations between the sexes. Very few people have actually read it,  but they have read hostile accounts of it instead, often written by others who had not read it -  as I gather frequently from the comments they make about it.

 

As I wrote it, I realised that there was something else that specifically needed explaining, What on earth had happened to the police? I had been out of the country for more or less the whole of the period 1990-95, and on my return I found that they had almost completely vanished from foot patrol. The process, as I now know, had been going on for many years. But absence from your own country is like separation from a  relative or old friend. It is when you meet them again after a long absence that you realise just how much they have changed, in ways you would have missed if you had daily contact.

 

I had, as it happened, some knowledge of what modern policing involved.  In answer to all those who screech:

 

‘Why don’t you go out on patrol and see what it’s really like?’ ,

 

I have done.

 

I have been out on what is called ‘patrol’ with police officers in West London, in Johannesburg and in Dallas, Texas. All these exercises were more or less the same, a dispiritingly futile amount of hurried, noisy driving, only to arrive at places after incidents had taken place.  I went to bed after each of them feeling that their approach was completely wrong.

 

I later found that my misgiving had been largely borne out in the ‘Broken Windows’ theory of policing, which states that once the police cease being a presence, deterring so-called ‘minor’ crime, such as broken windows, graffiti and kids riding bikes on the pavement, wrongdoers assume that the law in general is not being enforced and a general deterioration in behaviour ensues, ending with severe violence and knives, not to mention the powerful drug gangs which now operate in many of our cities. The drug gangs are helped by the certifiable policy of failing to pursue the purchasers of illegal drugs, and instead concentrating entirely on the sellers. If the product is evil (and it is) surely its possession and use are what make it evil. Yet the modern police are now one of the main advocates for letting people off for possessing illegal drugs, claiming ( baselessly ) that this will 'free up' officers to pursue the evil dealers and the 'harder drugs'', whose possession is also effectively decriminalised.

 

But of course reactive, fire brigade policing with its helicopters and go-faster stripes, its obsession with arrests as a measure of success and its pursuit of 'targets'  is useless at dealing with possessors of drugs.

 

I think this deterioration in the atmosphere on the streets has been the experience of millions of British people as the police retreated to their computer screens, their cars and their helicopters. It is precisely because they have lost their direct personal contact with the streets that the police now need their cars , their tasers and their stab vests, because when they appear, nobody knows them, and they have become so separate from the public that the public no longer sees them as friends, and they don't see the public as allies.   

 

These incidents, which we rushed by car to deal with,  were ‘minor’ in police terms, like most crime. But they were major, often tragic, in the lives of the victims.It is minor, disorganised crime and disorder, intimidation and selfishness, that most people fear, not high-glamour gangsterism.

 

 

Why don’t you do any research? You don’t know what you are talking about

 

Well, I have done, and I do. I wrote a substantial book, called ‘A Brief History of Crime’, later updated as ‘The Abolition of Liberty’. Any good library will get it for you. This involved long hours of research.

 

I found out how, when and why foot-patrolling had been abolished. I researched the history of police radios, the brutal mergers of smaller forced, the setting up Bramshill, the invention of ‘Unit Beat’ policing and the switch to cars, the history of the 999 service(even then, hopelessly overloaded) . I found that there had never been any good practical reason for abandoning Peel’s principle that the police were there to *prevent* crime and disorder. I grasped the real nature of crime figures. I looked into the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its codes of practice, the new rules of evidence, and all the other ways in which the police had their discretion removed.

 

I looked into the strange way in which it had become a serious offence for a British person to defend himself against thieves (in his own home or elsewhere) , and the modern police force's special zeal  (quite lacking in their pursuit of burglary itself) which was applied to householders who did defend themselves.

 

I examined the dilution and abolition of the principle of due punishment of responsible persons who broke the law, and its replacement by an excuse-making, relativist view which blamed crime on social conditions and cod psychology. I visited a major English prison and saw how the warehousing of criminals had become the main purpose of these places, now that punishment has been abolished.

 

I examined the curious Scarman report into the Brixton ‘riots’ (actually, like the more recent so-called ‘riots’, an outbreak of mass criminality) and its use to introduce politically correct ideas into policing. I then examined the Macpherson report, following the Stephen Lawrence case, and noted that this astonishing document was the foundation and licence for a politically-correct inquisition aimed at wholly transforming the police, and removing the remaining influence of conservative officers. I examined the real significance of the death penalty and of ‘gun control’ (these chapters are only in ‘A Brief History of Crime’). I also charted the increasing enthusiasm of police officers for pursuing offences against the speech codes of political correctness, particularly the strange case of Harry Hammond, and elderly preacher arrested and successfully prosecuted after being pelted with lumps of mud in the centre of Bournemouth by some homosexuals who disagreed with his conservative views on homosexuality. In a fascinating footnote, the two officers sent to the scene disagreed about whom to arrest . The older one wanted to act against the people throwing mud at an old man. the younger one wanted to act against the old man. Guess who won.

 

I have since examined the police’s role (in my most recent book, ‘The War We Never Fought’) in the dilution and effective abolition of laws against the possession of dangerous drugs.

 

I write often about all these subjects. Any regular reader of my column or blog would be aware of this.   I understand that the police are subject to outside forces and did not in many cases decide perosnally to behave as they do. 

 

 But I have noticed that police officers up to quite high ranks are ready to make public protests, even mass demonstrations, on matters of pay and working conditions, as they are rightly free to do.

 

And I have yet to notice any parallel protests about the imposition of ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes on the police, which make it very difficult for them to operate effectively, and often turn them into enemies of free speech.  Indeed, I noticed one complaint about my article said it was ‘hate speech’, the language of the Politically Correct thought police. When I see such demonstrations, I’ll believe the protestations I get at such times that officers are chafing angrily against the imposition of these rules upon them. My suspicion is that the older ones are just hanging on for their pensions (and who can blame them?) knowing that protest will get them into big trouble. And that many of the younger officers are themselves very politically correct.

 

Now, in the enraged and bilious response to what I wrote, I’ve seen no attempt to address the matters I actually raised. Why should a police force which was intentionally unarmed from its beginnings now be so heavily armed? Why are police uniforms swaggering, overbearing and paramilitary, with their big boots , baseball caps and prominently displayed handcuffs, clubs , sprays and tasers?  How much use is all this panoply of force against terrorism, or crime?

 

And what about the wholly wrong use of the sad deaths of police officers on duty (an event which has absolutely nothing to do with my argument at all) be used to try to suggest that I am wrong? I mourn them as anyone else does. That does not mean I ahve to abandon my critcisms of modern policing.

 

Do I have to point out here that journalists, too, sometimes die bravely in pursuit of their jobs, and note that this does not in any way counter or overcome criticisms of bad behaviour by other journalists?

 

I am told that I will complain about ‘response times’ if police officers are put back on foot(or bicycle, another excellent form of police transport neglected these days). No, I won’t. In most cases, there is very little a police officer can do after a crime has been committed, unless he or she is good at first aid (and paramedics are better at that) . I don’t want police officers *responding* to crimes. I want the crimes prevented in the first place, by preventive foot patrolling. Why foot patrolling? Because officers on individual regular foot patrol genuinely know their beat and the people on it, and their vigilance and presence encourages the good and discourages the bad. Because a person driving down a street in a car will miss a dozen things a walking officer would see or hear.  

 

What if I or a family member were attacked or burgled? Well, what if they were? My fundamental desire is to ensure that they are not. A crime number, or a ‘restorative justice’ procedure, or ‘victim support’ or any other measure will not restore the security of the burgled person. I believe that following the Peel theory of policing prevents burglaries. I believe that the reactive, fire brigade style does not. I have not, as it happened, been particularly impressed with the police response as it . I recall one occasion when my house in a respectable suburb was vandalised, and I caught up with and corralled the culprits. The police , though called, never came because they had so little local knowledge that they could not find the location. So I had to let the vandals go. I remember that by then my main concern was that I should not under any circumstances lay a finger on these rat-faced little creeps, in case the police chose to charge me with assaulting them. Most of us were aware of *that* possibility even then, 20-odd years ago.

 

A few years  afterwards the same force, at three in the morning, scrambled a helicopter from 40 miles away to circle endlessly over my suburb, shattering the sleep of thousands, and shining its searchlight into our gardens because a security guard *thought* he might have seen someone jump off the top of a 50-foot building (nobody had, and of  course anyone who *had* made such a  leap wouldn’t have been able to get far, unless it was Superman). I calculated later that it would have taken a constable on foot the same time to reach the location from the city centre police station as it took the helicopter to get ready to fly and make the trip. Give people toys, and they will use them, and think of excuses afterwards. My book , by the way, also explored the surprisingly early origins of this daft form of policing, and of CCTV cameras, which form the start have been a very poor substitute for a real police officer.  

 

 

To the person who writes : ‘'And further more I draw your attention to Robert Peel’s principles of policing, numbers 7 and 9 in particular; Number 7, in short that the Police are the pubic and the pubic are the police. I’m sure it did not cross your mind to remonstrate with the driver jumping the red light yourself.’

 

He is quite wrong. Of course it did, and I did so, and it was as I did so , and the driver, a look of alarm on his face that he had been spotted, slowed and hesitated, that I saw police officers, in their own car, nearby and appealed to them.

 

I might add that, as it happens, I (and more importantly my wife) have confronted a man with a knife. My wife and I, walking (on foot patrol, as you might say) home late one night along Adelaide Road in North London, saw a man beating up a woman and ran across the road to her aid.  I doubt that a police officer in a car would have noticed it, but it was absolutely obvious if you were walking. It is not true that bullies are all cowards. When I told him to stop, he turned and punched me hard in the face, knocking me over,  and then produced a knife. My wife, far braver than I, stood her ground while I ran to a nearby phone box to call the police . They were profoundly uninterested (and never came)  but I dashed back and claimed they were on their way. Luckily, this was still credible in those days, and the knife-wielder (who had been waving his blade in my wife's face as she tried to keep him calm)  thereupon fled. These days I am sure he would have laughed. And I am not sure I would now cross the road.

 

Finally, a special prize to ‘Tom’, who wrote : ‘In addition, your suggestion that the Police should be treated more like 18th Centruary servants is quite astonishing. I'm surprised a newspaper employs someone who writes such poorly constructed, and unsupported arguments.’

 

Since he chose to claim I had said something I hadn’t, and then said that I used poorly constructed and unsupported arguments, I have abandoned my usual merciful habit of correcting the bad spelling of my opponents (I have also declined to correct the spelling of anotehr of my assailants, who has trouble with the word 'public'). I did not say ‘that the Police should be treated more like 18th Centruary servants’. Nor did I say anything like it. We really would get on a lot faster if my critics would only read what I actually say. 

A Good Question from Mrs S

A good question from a contributor:

 

'Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why you always get the same response when you write your standard criticism of modern policing?'

 

Yes. And it is striking that the response never includes a reasoned attempt to rebut what I have actually said, but imputes to me things I have not said, and is based on an appeal to the emotions and (usually) on attacks on my own integrity, knowedge etc.

 

Because an inefficient and unresponsive nationalised industry, which has long been protected by a reputation earned when it was efficient and popular, is unused to criticism and responds with unreasoning rage rather than by any admission of fault or self-examination.

Many failing institutions choose to respond in this fashion to valid criticism (the BBC is much the same) but in the end they will have to act on it. Some things need to be said over and over again before anyone pays any attention.  If my critic would care to read 'A Brief History of Crime', which I published ten years ago, and can then tell me where it is incorrect in fact or logic, I hope she will let me know. I just wish more people would read it.

Hoping it Might be So - Truth versus Desire

I have puzzled for some time about how best to respond to Mr Meredith. I am baffled by his rather huffy response to me, as I believe there was nothing intemperate or personally rude in my reply to him, let alone ‘invective’, as alleged. I’ve checked the deep stores and magazines where my invective is stored under UN supervision, and it’s all still there.

 

 I’m also very interested by his repeated failure to admit that he is simply wrong about my reference to the failings of HM ships before 1939. My principal source was clearly the (authoritative) Times obituary of Admiral Le Bailly, one of the navy’s most distinguished engineers,  and the mention of Herman Wouk a minor footnote. Even when this has been clearly pointed out to him, he does not retreat at all, but repeats the original mistake.

 

I don’t see any point in rehearsing my argument, because Mr Meredith hasn’t so far even acknowledged its existence. He could do so in several ways, either by rebutting or even refuting it with facts and logic, or by accepting it. But maintaining *that* he disagrees with me, without in any way saying *why*, is not a response.

 

His approach to argument is summed up in these words ‘

 

‘only my opinion maybe, but I'm entitled to it’.

 

But  why is he ‘entitled to it’? He is free to hold it and to express it, surely . But if he seeks , on a public forum, voluntarily to challenge someone who has a wholly different opinion, then I think he is obliged to make out a case for his own position, or a case against mine, other than

‘only my opinion maybe, but I'm entitled to it’.

This he does not do.  And he maintains his position by simply ignoring what I say.

 

If he wants to know what my argument is, he will find it set out in my two previous contributions, and also under the heading ‘Churchill Cult’ in the Index. But I don’t get the impression he does want to know.

 

I suspect he doesn’t want to know, for the same reasons that (for many years) I also didn’t want to know. I imagine that he (as I and many others have done) finds the mythical version of events sustaining and comforting. This is mainly because it is obvious that at the end of this great war our country was sadly and permanently diminished, and it was a powerful consolation, amid the rubble, the bereavements, the many men returning gaunt and haggard from Japanese PoW camps (or worse still, not returning from them) ,  the debts and the demoralisation, the thousands of ruined marriages and broken homes,  to think that ours had been a great moral conflict in which we had stood against evil and for good.

 

The historic facts , alas, do not support these contentions. I wish they did.  I know the truth is sad and painful. But I have stopped wishing, and begun thinking. I have done so mainly because this myth is now used for a quite different purpose.  Few now even know how destitute we were in 1945. Fewer still remember what sort of country this still was in 1939 and what we lost by our rash rush into a war we were not equipped to fight. 

 

The myth nowadays is constantly employed to justify new wars. And that is why it is necessary to challenge it - for the sake of our future. 

 

As for ‘hindsight’, what is history but hindsight? What are memory and experience but hindsight?  There is no use advising the corpses of Halifax and Chamberlain on what they should have done when they were still alive. But there is a great deal of point in analysing how they came to do what they did.  The point, as always, is about the future (not least our current political class’s costly and dangerous near-obsession with supposedly Churchillian intervention against supposedly Hitlerian  tyrants in foreign countries) .

 

Why does Mr Meredith not see this?

In a way, I think he himself answers this question in the following passage. ‘(just how the hell did Stalin manage to not notice 4,000,000 Axis soldiers, 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses massing on his borders?)'.

 

It’s a good question, and one over which historians often puzzle. It wasn’t just the massed armies he ignored. He ignored repeated despatches from his own best intelligence agent, Richard Sorge. He ignored warnings sent to him by Churchill personally.

 

The answer is simple, and not surprising to anyone who carefully observes human behaviour, and above all the extreme difficulty which most people encounter in changing their minds, even when the reasons to do so are overwhelming. I am an expert on this, as I meet it so often.

 

Stalin refused to believe the overwhelming evidence that Hitler was about to attack for a simple reason - *because he did not want to believe it*.

 

Stalin wanted to believe that his pact with Hitler was an enduring personal diplomatic triumph, which protected the USSR against the danger of war. Red Army officers who reported the early stages of the attack were actually shot for doing so, as the news they brought was considered subversive in itself.

 

Belief, as I have so often pointed out here, serves desire.  But where the facts can be shown to be different, and in the case of the 1939-45 war they certainly can be if we allow ourselves to study them,  that means we have to abandon the desire and face the truth.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

PETER HITCHENS: Get rid of the guns, cars and Tasers and we might just end up with real policemen

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday Column

What use are the police these days?
We know they have a pretty ambiguous attitude towards us, the public,
avoiding us where possible by staying indoors or racing about in cars,
and seldom going out alone in case one of  us actually approaches them.

They’re
busy doing something else, as one of them recently explained to me in
an irritable voice, when I asked him to act against a driver who’d
driven through a red light at a pedestrian crossing 20ft from his nose.

That
‘something else’ often involves hanging about scowling, with
sub-machine guns, supposedly saving us from an exaggerated terrorist
menace.

But now it turns
out that all those haughty squads of armed militia who supposedly
protect the great and the powerful don’t even know who it is they are
meant to be guarding. Prince Andrew was quite right to be angry when two
armed officers treated him like a suspect as  he strolled in broad
daylight in his mother’s garden.

How typical. First, they
failed to detect or halt an intruder into Buckingham Palace, surrounded
by high walls and fences and an obvious terror target (and nutcase
target) if ever there was one.[related]

Next,
they failed to recognise one of the best-known people in Britain, who
was also one of the very few people who had an absolute right to be
there, and whose features should be imprinted on their minds since they
are being paid to protect him.

It
is ridiculous to accuse the Duke of York of having a self-important
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ moment or of being insufferable or pompous.
The officers were paid to know who he was.

It
wasn’t as if his presence was unlikely or unexpected or out of context.
It’s his childhood home. He was right to be livid, and we should be
livid on his behalf. And there’s more.

How did news of this event reach the
media? It is now almost a year since the then Chief Whip, Andrew
Mitchell, was falsely said to have called police officers ‘plebs’.

This happened after an overzealous and inflexible officer refused to open a gate to let him ride his bike out of Downing Street.

Mr
Standfast, our warlike, missile-rattling Prime Minister, quickly dumped
Mr Mitchell from his job when he realised  it might endanger his poll
ratings. And Mr Mitchell remains sacked, despite the unravelling of the
claims made against him.

Meanwhile,
there’s still no sign of any action against those who leaked the
original falsehood, despite an investigation almost as big as the one
into the late Jimmy Savile.

Call
them all back in. Take away their guns and their Tasers and their stab
vests, sell their helicopters and their fast cars with the go-faster
stripes.

Give them proper British police uniforms, which mark them out as the people’s servants, not their masters.

And
send them out on solitary foot patrol, yes, even in the rain, where
they might once more meet those they are supposed to serve.

If London’s really so dangerous it needs armed guards, then deploy the Army.

They’re
better at it, they don’t look down on us, they’re nicer and more polite
than the police, and would be most unlikely to threaten a member of the
Royal Family or fabricate lies against a Minister.

 
Downton’s Lady Mary will NEVER be a ‘single mum’

A newspaper puff for the TV
snob opera Downton Abbey says that the character Lady Mary, whose
‘husband’ was killed off in the Christmas episode, will be ‘coming to
terms with her role as a 'single mother’ in the new series.

See how language is twisted to hide the truth?

The correct expression is ‘widow’, which you may have noticed we don’t hear so much any more.

Lady Mary, played by Michelle Dockery, did not have a child outside wedlock.

She was married. This matters.

One of the great triumphs of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was to deny the importance of marriage.

The expression ‘unmarried mother’ was abolished, and replaced by ‘single mother’.

But
a widowed or deserted wife’s position is and always will be utterly
different from that of a woman who deliberately has a child outside
marriage.

The difference is a moral one, and that’s what the revolutionaries want to abolish  – morality.

So we are to get horrible slithery plastic banknotes. I’ve used them in Australia and I can tell you, you won’t like them.

This
is to stop them wearing out so fast. I don’t mind the tatty notes. I
mind the way they lose their value so quickly. If they could find a way
to stop that, I’d be keen.

 
Generation ‘gap’ is now a mighty gulf

Britain
really is two nations now – the pre-1960s patriotic, Christian moral
conservative one, and the post-1960s omnisexual, multicultural liberal
one. The annual Social Attitudes survey does not show people changing
their minds. Very few do, as it’s rather difficult.

It
shows that younger people have completely different views from their
elders on almost every major issue of life. So at some point – and this
must be the first time this has happened in history – the older
generation stopped being able to pass on their values to their own
children. 

How was
this done? Who was responsible? Was it an accident? My own view is that
it was deliberate and sustained. Could it now be reversed? I rather
doubt it.

Oh no, we’ve done what the voters want!

Our political class
actively want to be out of step with public opinion, and are sorry they
accurately represented it the other day.

A
survey of Tory MPs revealed that many actually want to vote again on
attacking Syria, so that they can authorise this lunacy, even if it is
only an incredibly small pinprick with no discernible purpose.

And it’s not just the Tories. Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, also wants Another Chance To Bomb.

He
confided to an elite TV show: ‘Our jaws dropped when the Prime Minister
suddenly took the  idea of military action right off the table.

I wasn’t expecting that, nor was Ed Miliband. If David Cameron is going to put that back on the table, we’ll look at that.’

Well, if they so fervently want not to represent us, I’ll say it again.

We
don’t have to elect these people. I’ve reluctantly come round the view
that we should bring in compulsory voting in this country – provided
every ballot paper contains a slot at the top marked ‘None of the
below’.

And if
the numbers voting ‘None of the below’ exceed 30 per cent in any
constituency, nobody is elected for that seat. Parliament would get a
lot smaller. MPs would become a lot more interested in us and in what we
think.

Mr Meredith Replies

Mr Meredith's response to my post on 'What I am up against'

 

The title of this thread is "What I Am Up Against" Despite the implied martyrdom of the title, all you are up against is someone who disagrees with you. Nothing more. I had thought this was a place where ideas could be debated but sadly your intemperate and thoroughly personal attack on me and my supposed motives seems to prove once and for all that this is not so.

 

It's a genuine mystery to me quite why you went up in such a sheet of flame at my post, but since I know from experience that your invitation for me to reply carries with it the very real threat of further invective and ridicule if unanswered, I'll do my best to oblige whilst simultaneously disappointing Mr. Hodson.

 

 "In what way did we ‘stand up to’ Germany in 1939?" We declared war on the Nazi regime. We could have done some deal with Hitler but we'd have been fooling ourselves. The choice was to either oppose him or become his ally (unthinkable). There was no way to stay neutral, he'd have come for us anyway, only my opinion maybe, but I'm entitled to it. Stalin did a deal with Hitler, they even gave it a fancy name, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. A fat lot of good it did him. Two years later, after Operation Barbarossa (just how the hell did Stalin manage to not notice 4,000,000 Axis soldiers, 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses massing on his borders?) he was writing begging letters to Churchill, demanding that we send our own still meagre resources to him, despite the fact that we were under siege by sea and the Soviet Union was itself a massive, industrial powerhouse.

 

True the war went badly for us at the start, but exactly the same is true for Russia, despite its immense size and resources. But we held on. We did not lose the war in June 1940. We lost battles, we did not lose the war. We survived and we held on long enough to turn the tide. So did the Russians. At the time our most valuable defensive weapon was probably the English Channel. So it was with the Russians, they had their bitter cold winters to help them stall the enemy's advance.

 

"What is this word ‘combination’ supposed to mean or suggest? My view of British policy in 1939 is not in any way ‘combined’ with my view of modern Germany. I have these views, one about the past, and one about the present. They are separate and have no linking thread, except for the fact that I hold them, and that Germany is involved in both. One is about the half-witted conduct of my own country’s government. The other is about learning, especially about economics, transport and education, from a country comparable to our own which has done rather better with these things than we have. My admiration for much (though not all) of modern Germany is entirely to do with its present state, especially in contrast to its past. Does Mr Meredith want to impugn my patriotism? If so, let him do so openly and we shall see what happens." I hadn't imagined I would have to explain what is a very simple point, that the Germany you admire (a feeling which I share, by the way) would simply not exist if Nazism had gone unopposed in 1939. Nothing more than that, you can always disagree with me of course but you seem to have decided to take it as some sort of personal insult. That's unfortunate, I wish you hadn't but it's your decision, not mine. As for impugning your patriotism, of course I'm not. Besides, I wouldn't know how to. I'm not sure I even still know what the word means in this multicultural open border society we find ourselves in.

 

 "But if Mr Meredith is against this country having to submit to foreign ways of doing things, how about this? It seems to me that the permanent imposition of EU law on this country, done slice by slice by peaceful means and with the consent of our own Parliament, and with no hope whatsoever of it being thrown off in future, is the most serious capitulation to foreign power since Charles II signed the Secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, under which the British monarch became an employee of the French Crown." A bit off topic this but while we've landed here and I'm being coerced into justifying myself, I'll just recall that I agree with your view on the capitulation of power to an undemocratic European bureaucracy, which is why I voted against Britain remaining in the European Union in the 1975 referendum. But what has this to do with the second world war?

 

 "It also seems to me that had we not rushed rashly into two Continental conflicts, in 1914 and 1939, but behaved in an adult manner, we would not now be governed from Brussels, but would still be a global naval, economic and diplomatic power, sovereign over its territory and laws." That's legitimate conjecture but no more than that and it's a big "if". Yes I agree we have paid a heavy price for the second world war, which the abject luxury of sixty years of hindsight has enabled us to fully quantify.

 

 "Who is this ‘we’?" The Allies of course. All of them. Who else?

 

"Many Germans were not Nazis, just people who were caught between the upper and nether millstones of power." I know this. Are you suggesting that I don't distinguish between Nazis and Germans? If so it is precisely the sort of below the belt slur of which you endlessly complain. I don't think that my view that the end of the war defeated Nazism but liberated the German people from Nazism could be a clearer statement that I do not conflate the two.

 

"As for basing what I said about the Navy ‘on a passage in work of fiction’, that claim is actually a breach of the laws of civilised debate, for which Mr Meredith really ought to apologise." This is just bluster and itself comes close to a breach of the laws of civilised debate. In fact the only source you quoted in this context was a popular novel, which you quoted for the fag-ends on the deck of HMS Prince Of Wales story. *** SEE BELOW

 I referenced this in my post. It's very simple and not even controversial. 'The Winds of War' is a work of fiction, in fact you used the very word yourself. What is there to apologise for?

 

 "Mr Meredith is of course welcome to reply at length." Well that's it from me, length isn't everything of course. No doubt you will reply to this and reinforce your own position. Go ahead, it's your blog and you make (up) the rules. I shan't be replying further. You can make whatever you like of that. I have enjoyed reading your column for several years but I'm disappointed to discover that when crossed you are a tiresome bully. I enjoy debate, but I don't need this heavy handed petulance intruding into my life. I'd just like to take a second to thank all those correspondents with whom I have exchanged ideas over the last few years. Goodbye and good luck.

*************

 **I shall respond to this at length when I have time (and Mr Meredith can respond too, until we have exhausted the argument), but I must deal with his statement here about the Wouk reference being the 'only source' for what I said about the Navy's poor state in 1939. The following extract from my original post shows that Mr Meredith is, quite simply, wholly mistaken and should acknowledge his error.  Here is the passage:

 

''I have also recently learned more details about how badly we were prepared for war in 1939. HMS Hood, one of the most beautiful warships ever built, was of course sunk by the Bismarck in 1941, being blown to pieces with the loss of almost everyone aboard. This was a huge national shock because ‘the Mighty Hood’ had for two decades been the shining symbol of British naval power.

 

I recently read an obituary of Vice-Admiral Sir Louis le Bailly in ‘The Times’, in which the two following notes appeared. They are deeply shocking to me, coming as I do from a naval family, aware of the deficiencies of naval spending and building between the wars but still convinced of the basic soundness of the fleet in 1939.

 

‘As a midshipman Le Bailly served in great ships such as the battlecruiser Hood, which sunned itself in Mediterranean ports under dazzling white awnings, while the bearings of her gun mountings were so corroded that one attempt to train the 15-inch "Y" turret through 90 degrees ended in disaster which was retrieved only by the brute force of tackle, capstan and the ship's tug-of-war team.

 

‘Such a navy was to be revealed as being an inadequate partner to the US Navy when war came, and with it the stern test of operations in the wide Pacific Ocean. Even the First World War four-stacker destroyers given to the Royal Navy by America in the wake of disastrous sinkings at the time of Dunkirk were found, by the astonished RN engineers who made them ready for sea, to be superior in such basic matters as boiler and steam pipe technology to the latest British construction of the time.’

 

I knew that the RN simply couldn’t keep up with the US Navy in the Pacific towards the end of the war, but had not known that things were so bad at the start.  On the same lines, there’s a striking scene in Herman Wouk’s fascinating World War Two fiction ‘The Winds of War’ (one of the great Good Bad Books of our age, in my view) , in which his hero notes that the decks and scuppers of HMS Prince of Wales, carrying Winston Churchill to the Placentia Bay conference with Roosevelt (which resulted in the unsatisfactory (to Britain)  ‘Atlantic Charter’) , are littered with discarded cigarette butts and other garbage.  Wouk served in the US Navy, and I have always assumed that he either saw this himself, or was told it by a fellow-officer who had done so. And this was a new ship, in a way the pride of the Fleet (with a tragically brief future before her) . "

As is clear, the Wouk reference was a minor part of a much re extensive discussion of the problem, based upon (as I said in my rebuttal) the obituary in The Times of one of the RN's most distinguished engineering officers. I think we have here evidence of the real problem. Mr Meredith isn't actually reading what I write. I'll return to that in my response.

 

 

What I am Up Against

As if to demonstrate what I am up against when I try to discuss the 1939-45 war rationally, Mr Brian Meredith writes:

‘Our host seems to combine the view that we should not have stood up to Germany in 1939 together with an admiration for the Germany of today. Well if we had capitulated to Hitler, I'm certain that by now we would be very familiar here in Britain with the German way of doing things, but life for us here would not resemble that currently lived by Germans. In Britain it is quite common to hear people look at Germany's post war success and wonder despairingly just who did win the war. Understandable perhaps given the way Britain has discarded so much of itself, but I think we need to think about this differently. In 1945 we did not defeat Germany. We defeated the Nazis. We liberated Germany. The end of the war freed them from a tyranny which had dreamt of lasting a thousand years. The shiny Germany for which our host has so much admiration was made possible only because we fought Hitler and his criminal regime. Germany has rebuilt itself entirely by its own skill and hard work which should earn our admiration rather than our envy, but we made it possible and we should be proud of our role in saving Germany from itself. It was Churchill's resolve, with the support of the men and women of this country together with tens of thousands from the British Empire which held firm long enough for us and our eventual Allies, (both of whom let us recall, entered the war only after they had themselves been attacked on their own soil) to be able to overcome the Third Reich. Yes, we were ill-prepared for war, maybe some of our ships were less than the best (although I'd personally be very wary of basing my judgement on a passage in a work of fiction, written by an ex US navy man. Hardly a primary source, I'd have thought). The fact that despite these myriad shortcomings we managed to pull through ought to make us more proud, not less of the achievements of our fathers and mothers.’

 

I’ll take this bit by bit

 

‘..we should not have stood up to Germany in 1939’.

 

***What does this mean? In what way did we ‘stand up to’ Germany in 1939? We had no political, military or diplomatic interests in Eastern Europe at all. Most British opinion favoured revision of the Versailles Treaty, and we had no special interest in defending its remaining provisions.  Germany had no designs on us or on our Empire. Yet in April (in what appears to be have been a fit of pique by Lord Halifax)  we suddenly gave a guarantee to Poland which we (and the Germans, and the French) knew to be militarily worthless, as we didn’t have an army of any size or power. This is not ‘standing up’ to Germany, but diplomatic incompetence mixed with vainglorious bravado. As a result, Poland, previously an ally of Germany, developed the deluded view that it was an independent great power,  and refused to make a compromise with Germany over Danzig and the corridor.  No doubt it was wicked of Germany to invade Poland (though if A.J.P.Taylor is right, and he usually is,  Berlin tried quite hard to get a compromise with Warsaw before doing so) . But it wouldn’t have been any concern of ours unless we had started behaving like the great European power we weren’t.

 

If a man stands up to a bully and beats or halts him, most people will admire him. If a man stands up to a bully and, after a noble fight, is beaten by that bully, most people will admire him for his pluck. But if a man noisily says he *will* stand up to a bully (even though he is by comparison to that bully a weakling) , but doesn’t mean it and then does nothing when that bully does the very thing the boaster has warned him against, what do we think of him?  We think he is an empty vessel.

 

Remember, there was no serious contact between British land forces and German land forces during the entire invasion of Poland, whose existence was snuffed out by Hitler (and his then ally, our future ally Stalin) in the autumn of 1939. When our armies did (briefly) meet, in the late Spring of 1940, Poland had long ceased to exist, and we were not attacking Germany in her defence, or in revenge for her treatment, but defending ourselves against a German attack – a German attack quite in accord with the laws of war since we had declared war on Germany. When we returned to the Continent four years later, we did not liberate Poland, because it was beyond our power to do so, as it had been beyond our power to save her in 1939.

 

‘Our host seems to combine the view that we should not have stood up to Germany in 1939 together with an admiration for the Germany of today.’

 

*** What is this word ‘combination’ supposed to mean or suggest?  My view of British policy in 1939 is not in any way ‘combined’ with my view of modern Germany.  I have these views, one about the past, and one about the present. They are separate and have no linking thread, except for the fact that I hold them, and that Germany is involved in both.  One is about the half-witted conduct of my own country’s government. The other is about learning, especially about economics, transport and education, from a country comparable to our own which has done rather better with these things than we have.   My admiration for much (though not all) of modern Germany is entirely to do with its present state, especially in contrast to its past. Does Mr Meredith want to impugn my patriotism? If so, let him do so openly and we shall see what happens.  

 
Mr Meredith ‘Well if we had capitulated to Hitler,( I'm certain that by now we would be very familiar here in Britain with the German way of doing things).’

 

***Who is suggesting ‘capitulating to Hitler’? You capitulate when you are militarily defeated and (usually) occupied by an enemy with whom you have been at war. This country only ever faced such a possibility as a result of declaring war on the most modern and well-armed military power in Europe, when it had no substantial army with which to fight that power.  Had we not taken that step, there was no reason why we should have faced such a risk.

 

Fortunately for us, and thanks to the great courage of our own rearguard, the French rearguard,  the Royal Navy and many civilian seamen, Hitler was not able to take our entire army hostage at Dunkirk, though all agree it was a very close-run thing. Had he done so, we might very well have been forced to capitulate. Had that happened, it would have been the fault of the fantasists who talked of ‘standing up to Hitler’ when they didn’t have the strength to do so.

 

The English Channel, as it has done so many times before, saved us from occupation and subjugation. However, it is true to say that by June of 1940 we (and the French) had lost the war which we declared on 3rd September 1939, and lost the cause for which we had fought it, namely, our ability to intervene in Germany’s eastward expansion, and to enforce the remaining clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Our independence, territorial integrity, wealth, command of the sea, had never been threatened by Hitler until we chose to engage in this conflict for things that didn’t particularly matter to us, with an army we didn’t have.

 

France, having no Channel, and having failed to complete the Maginot line when it could still have done so, was defeated, disarmed, robbed of manpower and wealth, and (to begin with partly) occupied, as were Belgium and the Netherlands who were crushed in what might be called ‘collateral damage’ . We were just defeated, and, as it happened, bankrupted and compelled to become pensioners of the USA.

 

From then on, we could only prosecute the war as a subordinate ally of the USSR (after she changed sides in June 1941) and the USA. Both these powers (in the case of the USA long before she became an active belligerent)  defined the war’s aims and dictated its outcome, reducing us to a pathetic marginal role after the Teheran conference.  

 

I might add that our defeat in Europe (and the crushing of France and the Netherlands in the same war) also encouraged the Japanese to believe that they could defeat us in Asia. Our decision to engage in a European war in 1939 meant that we were unable to devote the necessary forces to the defence of Malaya in 1941-2. So our *capitulation* (I use the word deliberately)  to the Japanese at Singapore in 1942, the greatest disaster ever to befall British arms,  could also be said to be a consequence of our ‘standing up to Hitler’ in 1939.

 

 

Mr Meredith writes ; ‘(Well if we had capitulated to Hitler,) I'm certain that by now we would be very familiar here in Britain with the German way of doing things, but life for us here would not resemble that currently lived by Germans.’

 

****I’ve dealt with ‘capitulation’ above. But if Mr Meredith is against this country having to submit to foreign ways of doing things, how about this? It seems to me that the permanent imposition of EU law on this country, done slice by slice by peaceful means and with the consent of our own Parliament, and with no hope whatsoever of it being thrown off in future, is the most serious capitulation to foreign power since Charles II signed the Secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, under which the British monarch became an employee of the French Crown. It also seems to me that had we not rushed rashly into two Continental conflicts, in 1914 and 1939, but behaved in an adult manner, we would not now be governed from Brussels, but would still be a global naval, economic and diplomatic power , sovereign over its territory and laws.

 

Nobody impugns the virtues of the USA, which wisely kept out of the European conflict until it was necessary to join it, and which emerged from the 1914 and 1939 wars stronger and richer than before. Why should it be so terrible to consider that Britain might have done the same? The Hitler regime was just as evil while the USA was neutral as it was while the USA was in the war.

 

Mr Meredith says ‘In 1945 we did not defeat Germany. We defeated the Nazis. We liberated Germany.’

 

Who is this ‘we’? And why this distinction between ‘Germany’ and ‘the Nazis’? The ‘we’ who defeated the German Reich were , above all others, Stalin’s Red Army, which broke the power of Hitler’s Armies at Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. This is an unwelcome fact, as Stalin was as monstrous as Hitler, his soldiers were driven into battle ill-armed and ill-trained, with NKVD death-squads behind them to make sure they fought. The country they fought for was a vast prison, governed by force and lies, and maintained with an archipelago of lawless camps in which men were killed by malign neglect, worked to death or simply killed. Their victory helped to maintain that tyranny for many years afterwards, and indeed legitimised its continued rule until 1990.

 

This army did not ‘liberate’ anything. It substituted one tyranny for another and behaved with great barbarism towards many of the civilians that fell under its power. It imposed an iron-bound despotism upon the whole of the eastern part of Europe (including Poland , for whose independence we had supposedly gone to war). That bloody empire would last nearly four times as long as Hitler’s Reich, and in subsequent years would deploy tanks against 'its own people' in 1953(Berlin) 1956 (Hungary) and 1968 (Prague) without a squeak of opposition from the 'West' .   

 

Yet without the aid of this flawed (to put it mildly) colossus, it is hard to see how, even with the aid of Canada and the USA, we could have loosened Germany’s grip on the Continent, which we had helped bring about by our rash decision to go to war without a proper army in 1939.

 

Many Germans were not Nazis, just people who were caught between the upper and nether millstones of power.  Yet they suffered and died, from bombing of their homes, from invasion and rape and the rest. The Butterfly upon the Road preaches Contentment to the Toad, as we know. But I wonder how many of those who now lightly sneer at the Germans for failing to stand up to the Nazis would have been as brave as many Germans actually were, even after the Brown terror had begun.   

 

Mr Meredith kindly concedes that ‘Yes, we were ill-prepared for war, maybe some of our ships were less than the best (although I'd personally be very wary of basing my judgement on a passage in a work of fiction‘.

 

**Ill prepared???!! That is, as they say, putting it mildly. We were all but wholly unprepared for the war we actually decided to fight, when we fought it.  As for basing what I said about the Navy ‘on a passage in work of fiction’, that claim is actually a breach of the laws of civilised debate, for which Mr Meredith really ought to apologise.   Most of what I said was based on the recollections (recorded in a ‘Times’ obituary), of one of the Royal Navy’s most distinguished engineering officers.  The Wouk reference was additional, and qualified by me.

As for ‘managing to pull through’, that is the point.  What was it that actually pulled through? The country that emerged from the war, bankrupt, weak enough to be stripped of its empire, heavily socialised by war economy measures, its culture permanently overshadowed by that of the USA, was not the country that those people fought for, but a different one. By the time Churchill died 20 years later, this was even more obvious. By our own times, it was painfully so.  This is usual in wars. The politicians yell at you to go out and die to save your way of life.

 

And when (or rather if) you come home, the things you fought to save have vanished. Or, in our case, they will vanish in the years ahead. No wonder we like to  think that this national tragedy, still in progress and leading inevitably to our disappearance from the front rank of nations,  served a noble purpose. We like to think that we went to war because we didn’t like the Hitler regime (quietly abjuring the corollary, which would be that we fought alongside Stalin because we  liked his regime, which of course isn’t so).   What we like to think, and what is so, are two different things.

 

Mr Meredith is of course welcome to reply at length.

Wars and Rumours of Wars

 

Wars seem to start rather often at this time of year.  Why are we so willing to consider new wars, knowing what we do about the horrors of conflict?  One reason must be the enduring power of the idea of  a ‘Good War’. The power of the World War Two cult is still immense, and plainly working even in the minds of millions as we stand on the brink of an attack on Syria, though less on the brink than we were.  Some of you may have noticed, during my recent appearance on the Jeremy Vine show, Mr Vine’s response when I said it was a bit much for Britain to try to be a global policeman, when we couldn’t even police Manchester.

 

He said :  ‘On that basis you wouldn’t get involved in the Second World War until you had eliminated all crime in the UK’ .

 

The assumption of this question (an assumption made semi-consciously, I believe, by almost every grown person in the USA and Britain) is that the Second World War was fought as a moral combat (the title of a recent history attempting to make this case, I thought rather lamely) to stop Hitler, because ‘we’ ( and who ‘we’ were, then and later, is an interesting question) regarded his government as an evil regime, and above all because he was engaged in genocide. It is also assumed that the more unlovely methods of war were generally confined to the German side.

 

There is only one antidote to this belief, which is a study of history. But history, in this case, is surrounded by a bodyguard of myth.  The myth is a series of potent cameos, each of which forms a powerful picture in the minds of anyone of my generation, and many of which instantly summons an actual photograph to memory:

 

Here is the rough chain of events   :  ‘Reichstag Fire’,  ‘Jewish shops boycotted in Berlin’ ‘Occupation of Rhineland’, ‘Anschluss’ ‘Munich’,  ‘German tanks Roll into Prague’ ‘Invasion of Poland’ , ‘Resignation of Chamberlain – in God’s name, Go, ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ ’ ‘ Dunkirk’ , Battle of Britain’, ‘Finest Hour’,  ‘Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat’ (one of the very few political promises ever delivered in full), ‘The Blitz’,  ‘El Alamein’ , ‘D-Day and then ‘Victory’, followed by another victory after ‘Hiroshima’ , the creation of the NHS and the Permissive Society.  And we all lived happily ever after. The more prosaic and complex truth is to be found in the gaps between these events, and also in a cooler evaluation of the events themselves. But few care to pursue this, reasonably fearing that they will get themselves into difficulties. Most firm opinions are sustained by this faint sense of not wanting to investigate one’s beliefs too closely, combined with a bilious fury at anyone else who asks us to do so.

 

 

 

I don’t blame people for preferring not to look. It’s unsettling.  I have been unsettled ever since I looked into it, and the turmoil into which I was then plunged has never ceased.  I now know roughly how a Victorian might have felt when he first began to question his Christian beliefs.  But if your beliefs lead on to action, especially violent action, taken for moral reasons then I think you are obliged to examine your views.

 

I saw this week pictures of ‘Battle of Britain’ stained glass windows in an old RAF headquarters, recently restored. They are very striking, and one of them can be seen here

 

http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/war-and-conflict/world-war-two/art79432

 

I know stained glass can be used for any purpose, but its associations are generally religious, and the sight of these windows, in one of which the Spitfire (viewed from above) resembles a Cross, reminded me of my view that the story of Britain’s heroic lone stand in war has become a sort of scripture, the story on which many people’s moral opinions are based. That,  I think, is why the idea of moral bombing, of war as rescue, is so powerful in our culture.

 

 

 

Here it is necessary to state that nothing that I write here is a criticism of, or a repudiation of, the huge numbers of brave men and women who suffered dreadful loss and made appalling sacrifices to ensure that we were not defeated in that war. When shall their glory fade?  My father and mother were among their number, both serving in His Majesty’s forces and enduring grave danger at home and (in my father’s case) at sea in hostile waters. I have to make this declaration to forestall the stupid slanders of one kind or another that are almost invariably levelled against anyone who examines this conflict with cool reason and factual knowledge. People will make them anyway, but one has to do what one can.

 

BUT this country did not go to war in 1939 because it disapproved of the Hitler regime. The British government had maintained cordial diplomatic and trading relations with the German state, and negotiated treaties with it (notably the Anglo-German Naval Agreement), long after the Weimar Republic had given way to the Third Reich.   It maintained such relations even after the Kristallnacht events which showed even to the most complacent that Hitler was a Judophobic monomaniac, and that lawless persecution of Jews was undeniably German state policy.

 

The systematic mass murder of Jews, first by special squads of troops and then in extermination camps, a later and separate development,  did not take place on German soil and followed the outbreak of war. These facts do not quite fit the ‘Good War’ theory and are often unknown to quite well-educated people,  But when the anti-Hitler allies learned of this deliberate murder, thanks to the almost unbelievably courageous actions of those who obtained and smuggled out the truth,  they consciously did nothing to stop it.  

 

Many British people, especially of the liberal and enlightened sort, were highly sympathetic to Germany’s consistent view, before and after the arrival of Hitler in power, that the Versailles Treaty had been unfair.  In fact, as A.J.P.Taylor points out, it is odd that we went to war over the control of Danzig, a German city to which Germany had a far stronger claim, under natural justice, than she ever had to the Sudetenland, over which we did not go to war.

 

The moralising left of the time, far from being keen on war with Germany, were opposed to rearmament and conscription until a few months before war came, and wanted an alliance with the savage regime then installed in Moscow , which would have had to have been based on appeasement of the USSR, especially in the three Baltic Republics, and probably in Poland and Finland too, not to mention Romania.

 

Indeed, it was our failure to agree any such appeasement of Stalin in 1939 which doomed the talks we held with the Russians in Moscow in the final months before the war.  We would appease Stalin later, at Teheran and Yalta. It is certainly an interesting question as to whether we should have appeased him more actively in 1939. But would it then have been called appeasement? Most of our military experts thought at the time that the Red Army (most of whose best officers had recently been murdered by Stalin) wouldn’t have been much use as an ally anyway. Huge numbers of people believed that an alliance with Stalin’s secret-police state was morally intolerable. But in those days almost everyone in Britain regarded the deliberate bombing of civilians to be unacceptable. Interesting how morals change so quickly and so deeply.

 

‘Plucky little Poland’ , for whose independence we went to war, was not some sort of Scandinavian democracy. Nor was it, like 1914 Belgium, a blameless neutral. It had, for much of the inter-war period,  been an openly repressive and anti-Semitic state, especially under the so-called Sanacja (Sanation or ‘cleansing’) regime. Poland aggressively grabbed territory from Czechoslovakia in 1938, as did Hungary, as part of the Munich carve-up. And it maintained good relations with Germany from 1934 to 1938, in a non-aggression treaty which Germany offered to renew, until the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland persuaded Warsaw that no such renewal was needed.

 

What is more we very nearly went to war with the USSR in 1939-40, when Moscow attacked Finland. Only some clever drafting by the Foreign Office ensured that our hurried and militarily worthless guarantee to Poland did *not* oblige us to declare war on Stalin when his troops marched into Poland from the East in late September 1939. Joint Nazi-Soviet victory parades (victory over Poland) were held in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno and Pinsk, parades of which pictures still exist, thus showing that Hitler and Stalin were in fact active allies, not just bound together by a non-aggression pact . German warships were also allowed to use Soviet naval ports which were later employed to receive British supplies. Soviet oil was essential to fuel the Blitzkrieg of May 1940 and the Blitz on London.

 

I make these points to underline the fact that we made a conscious alliance with an evil regime when we accepted that Stalin was on our side. Whatever the war may have been before this point, it cannot possibly be described as a principled campaign after we joined forces with Stalin. 

 

It may be said that the Polish guarantee was a line in the sand (in which case it was one drawn in a very silly place, because it allowed Poland to decide when and if we entered the war) and we recognised some ‘need’ to go to war with Germany to contest with her the mastery of Europe. I see Sir Max Hastings, going by extracts from his new book, is making a similar argument about our supposed ‘need’ to go to war with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in 1914.

 

I am by no means sure about these ‘needs’. Our past (pre-1914) engagements against dominant powers in Europe had been fought largely on the oceans of the world, or  in India or America, while we subsidised continental allies to do most of the land-fighting on our own continent.  Marlborough and Wellington were great generals, and the British army of the time was distinguished by courage and resolve, but neither Blenheim nor Waterloo could have been won by British soldiers alone.

 

Prince Eugene of Savoy (it has always amused me to note) was Marlborough’s key ally at Blenheim. But things shift about on the Continent and it is interesting to see in how many cultures (and under how many different names) Prince Eugene came to be honoured later.

 

The Royal Navy named a ship after him (the Monitor,  HMS ‘Prince Eugene’) which served in World War One, bombarding the Germans from the waters off Ostend. But the Austro-Hungarian Imperial  Navy also named a battleship ‘Prinz Eugen’ after him (the two warships never met) , as did Mussolini’s Navy (a light cruiser, the ‘Eugenio di Savoia’).  Hitler’s Kriegsmarine, too, honoured him. Their ‘Prinz Eugen’  was escort to the notorious battleship Bismarck, and ended up (after being captured)  being used to see what would happen to a heavy cruiser in an atomic explosion, in the test at Bikini Atoll (she survived,  more or less).

 

Then of course there is the role of Marshal Blucher and his Prussians at Waterloo, decisive in the defeat of Bonaparte. A cruiser named after him, crammed with SS men and Gestapo, was sunk by courageous battery fire in 1940 as it tried to force the Oslo Fjord (the majestic 64-year-old Colonel Birger Eriksen, in command of Norway’s Oscarsborg Fortress, gave the crucial order to fire, and sank the modern ‘Blucher with his museum-piece equipment).  This unexpected reverse (the Germans expected no serious reistance)  greatly slowed the German seizure of Norway and allowed the escape of the Norwegian King to London.

 

But I digress. My main point here is that Britain’s interests on the Continent vary quite a lot, and tend not be governed by any eternal friendships or sentimentality.  Before 1914 they never involved the creation of a ruinously expensive land army on the continental scale.  In 1914, and again in 1940, they did.

 

As for the ‘balance of power’, history seems to me  to show that, while British intervention may put the occasional thumb or fist on the scales, such a balance exerts itself whatever we do. Bonaparte would not have been beaten at Waterloo if he hadn’t first been destroyed on the retreat from Moscow and then crushed at Leipzig. Hitler, I suspect,  would not have been beaten in Normandy or on the Rhine had he not also been beaten first at Stalingrad.

 

And if Russia had been better-prepared for war in 1914 (particularly in the matter of guns and ammunition, which you would have thought were obvious needs in war) then Germany would have lost the First World War in the first few weeks . As it was, Russia’s total collapse in 1917 nearly led to *our* defeat in early 1918. That came far closer than most people realise, and had it done so, the feeble arguments for getting involved in 1914 , often couched in terms of the wickedness of the Kaiser’s ‘regime’ , would look even feebler than they already do.

 

I have also recently learned more details about how badly we were prepared for war in 1939. HMS Hood, one of the most beautiful warships ever built, was of course sunk by the Bismarck in 1941, being blown to pieces with the loss of almost everyone aboard. This was a huge national shock because ‘the Mighty Hood’ had for two decades been the shining symbol of British naval power.

 

I recently read an obituary of Vice-Admiral Sir Louis le Bailly in ‘The Times’, in which the two following notes appeared. They are deeply shocking to me, coming as I do from a naval family, aware of the deficiencies of naval spending and building between the wars but still convinced of the basic soundness of the fleet in 1939.

 

‘As a midshipman Le Bailly served in great ships such as the battlecruiser Hood, which sunned itself in Mediterranean ports under dazzling white awnings, while the bearings of her gun mountings were so corroded that one attempt to train the 15-inch "Y" turret through 90 degrees ended in disaster which was retrieved only by the brute force of tackle, capstan and the ship's tug-of-war team.

 

‘Such a navy was to be revealed as being an inadequate partner to the US Navy when war came, and with it the stern test of operations in the wide Pacific Ocean. Even the First World War four-stacker destroyers given to the Royal Navy by America in the wake of disastrous sinkings at the time of Dunkirk were found, by the astonished RN engineers who made them ready for sea, to be superior in such basic matters as boiler and steam pipe technology to the latest British construction of the time.’

 

I knew that the RN simply couldn’t keep up with the US Navy in the Pacific towards the end of the war, but had not known that things were so bad at the start.  On the same lines, there’s a striking scene in Herman Wouk’s fascinating World War Two fiction ‘The Winds of War’ (one of the great Good Bad Books of our age, in my view) , in which his hero notes that the decks and scuppers of HMS Prince of Wales, carrying Winston Churchill to the Placentia Bay conference with Roosevelt (which resulted in the unsatisfactory (to Britain)  ‘Atlantic Charter’) , are littered with discarded cigarette butts and other garbage.  Wouk served in the US Navy, and I have always assumed that he either saw this himself, or was told it by a fellow-officer who had done so. And this was a new ship, in a way the pride of the Fleet (with a tragically brief future before her) .

 

Piece by piece, the old myth crumbles away. As A.J.P. Taylor points out in 'The Orgins of the Second World War'  , much of what took place in Europe in the 1930s was caused by British and French illusions about their status as great powers, a status that (after 1914) they could no longer afford to keep up.   France had her own interests in 1914, quite different from ours,  I still believe (contrary to Sir Max Hastings) that we could have preserved much more of what made us great had we stayed out of the 1914 war.