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.