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.