Think! Read! Don't just Regurgitate!

I have to go and defend the Almighty (or rather attack His detractors, since He is quite able to defend Himself), at the Cambridge Union this evening, and so have to struggle into my ancient dinner jacket.

 

So rather than begin my planned revisiting of the wonderful Flashman books of George Macdonald Fraser, I’ll restrict myself to a bit of knockabout.

 

Thanks , by the way, to ‘Harry S’ for those details of the Labour Party’s appalling record on defence and rearmament in the 1930s, and for that biographical detail of A.V.Alexander. I’d love to know more, and to know where to look for more. 

The fashionable view of the Tories as weak ‘appeasers’, and the generally patriotic role of the top echelon of the Labour Party during the war itself,  have long obscured this very important truth – and also the fact that it persisted long after the character of the Hitler government became clear. The idea that the Left longed for and wished to prepare for a war with Hitler because he was uniquely wicked simply is not true. The history of the period was rewritten afterwards to leave out all this stuff, and ‘Guilty Men’, a denunciation of the Tories,  became the standard text. The fact that the Left were just as guilty, and indeed more so because of their supposedly extra hatred of the Hitler regime, implelled by their leftist virtue, needs constantly to be reiterated.

 

An Italian medical man states the standard cliché of foreign policy ‘British foreign policy, and English before it, has always focussed on being what is known in the trade as an "offshore balancer" and its main goal being to stop one power from dominating the Continent. Nazi expansion may well have ended in Poland and other Eastern European destinations, but then again, it may not have. It could easily have moved westwards into France (as of course it later did), and the British would then be facing a single power consolidating itself over the Channel. This is not in British interests, so London moved to act against the Germans.’

 

But any intelligent reading of the state of affairs on the Continent in 1936 onwards would have shown that the balance of power in Europe lay between Germany and the USSR. If our concern had been to ensure no single-power dominance, then that objective had more or less been achieved by German military and economic resurgence.  Adjustments between Germany and the USSR, over Poland, the remnants of Austria-Hungary,  Romania, the Balkans in general did not threaten that balance. Indeed, the encouragement of Poland to break its pact with Germany, which we engaged in, tended to upset that balance quite seriously. By the mid-1930s, neither Britain nor France was a major continental power to compare with either Germany or Russia (this remains the case in 2013, though the harsh truth of it was long obscured by American intervention via NATO, and is still obscured by the camouflage of German power in the shrouds of the EU) . Britain was never a major continental power. France ceased to be one in 1918, at the very latest. The claim had been questionable since 1870.

 

 

Our Italian friend also makes the classic error of characterising German expansion as ‘Nazi’ expansion, when in fact Hitler pursued classic German foreign policy, which has since Bismarck been interested in eastward developments, regarding France only as a nuisance to be eliminated if it made trouble, or formed alliances with Moscow.  If people wish to politicise foreign policy they would be much better to do so in the case of the USSR, whose foreign policy was for many years not purely national, but ideological.  Oddly enough the 'New Cold War' merchants cannot seem to grasp that modern Russian policy is transformed, thanks to the end of the Soviet Communist Party.

 

Also, ‘London’ did not ‘move to act’ against the Germans. Britain took no action against Germany until she was attacked. She lacked the means to do so. All her moves were on paper, and involved the threatened deployment of forces which Britain (and Germany) knew to be imaginary. There is a rude word for this sort of thing.  I do wish my critics would address the simple point: How can you assert your will on the Continent, without an army large enough to do so? 

 

But they never do, scurrying instead  for the shrubbery of sentiment and propaganda, in which they hide their nakedness.

 

The trouble is, a lot of people died because politicians of the time resorted to the same folly. And more will die in silly idealistic wars until this myth is punctured.

 

‘Paul P’ contributes this explanation of our behaviour: ‘The realisation that expansion westward would soon follow, and in fact that happened once German and Soviet forces had mopped up Poland. Our declaration of war over Poland rather forced Hitler's hand in the west, militarily and perhaps too early. It certainly galvanized our war preparation politics and industry into action, none too early. Had we made it clear that we would declare war over Czechoslovakia and had convincingly rattled our own sabres, such as they were, perhaps there would have been no Second World War. The thought must then be entertained that Nazism might have enjoyed such peacetime success in Germany that its spread by black-shirted osmosis throughout the rest of Europe might have enjoyed similar success. The mind shudders.’

 

Why won’t these people *think* instead of reiterating things they have read somewhere long ago? Talk about being the unconscious slaves of some defunct thinker. Strip away the barrier of sentiment, and interrogate each decision in the series of decisions that led (amongst other things) to war in 1939, the bloody erasure of Poland from the map, the humiliation of France and the destruction of Britain as a world empire. Were these decisions necessary? Were they right?

 

What is his evidence that Germany in 1939 or 1940 had any serious material, military, diplomatic or economic interest in westward expansion? If Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September 1939, why would Hitler have attacked in the West in May 1940? 

 

Much more to the point, take the story  back to the actual point of choice. This was the moment when Britain chose the path which led inevitably to war for Poland, on Poland’s terms, at a time chosen by Poland, (even though in fact we couldn’t help Poland at all). Had Britain and France not guaranteed Poland in April 1939, and had Poland instead renewed its non-aggression pact with Germany(first made in 1934)and conceded Danzig and the Corridor, what harm would that have done to Britain and France? I can’t identify any harm at all from Britain as a result of Danzig (after all, a city full of Germans) becoming German again. But even if there was some harm of some kind, how does it compare with the lasting, profound harm we did to ourselves by joining that war, when we did?

 

Then let’s take this passage piece by piece. It’s as if the writer has never read any of the arguments I have posted on this subject, so many times:

 

‘Had we made it clear that we would declare war over Czechoslovakia and had convincingly rattled our own sabres, such as they were, perhaps there would have been no Second World War. The thought must then be entertained that Nazism might have enjoyed such peacetime success in Germany that its spread by black-shirted osmosis throughout the rest of Europe might have enjoyed similar success. The mind shudders.’

Think!

 

We could not ‘convincingly rattle our sabres’ over Czechoslovakia because we had no sabres to rattle. The British Army in 1938 was an even poorer and smaller thing than it was in 1939. The RAF was mainly composed of biplanes. the Royal Navy, as usual, lacked wheels by which its ships could reach central Europe.  France, as I have said, had no aggressive capacity, let alone the desire to use it.
Do these people own atlases? Do they know where Czechoslovakia was? Do they know that Prague is *west* of Vienna. And do they grasp that the German Reich surrounded Bohemia and Moravia on three sides by September 1939? German troops based in what had been Austria could have been in Brno in a few days, with no significant natural obstacles to cross. The whole of Bohemia and Moravia was within range of German airfields. The Czech defences in the Erzgebirge were certainly excellent protection against an attack from Saxony, but the Anschluss had rendered them obsolete. And while Germany invaded Moravia and bombed every Czech city with impunity, what would France and Britain have been able to do about it? Nothing.  There wouldn’t have been a ‘Second World War’, perhaps, just a smaller, quicker rout of Britain and France than eventually happened in 1940. The Second World War was a separate conflict in which the major powers were the USSR, the USA and Germany, with Britain, Japan and Italy playing secondary roles. Whether and how it would have happened as it did after 1941 is impossible to say.

 

This is the point A.J.P.Taylor makes when he muses that it was much better to have been a betrayed Czech than a saved Pole. A war over Czechoslovakia would merely have subjected Prague to the horrors that were unleashed on Warsaw, and prevented the escape of many Jews who managed to leave the Reich in the year between Munich and the outbreak of War.

 Further:

I simply have no idea what 'black-shirted osmosis’ is. German National Socialism was by definition nationalist and German. It found few active sympathisers in any other countries, or in the countries it conquered. It found collaborators, as the powerful always do, sometimes among people who would have been among the noisiest patriots beforehand, or often among those who just hoped to be left alone as much as possible. Wait and see what you do when you’re invaded before being too hoity-toity about that. Hitler, unlike Stalin, was not an ideological invader. He was following the interests of Germany.
There is no doubt that, by picking a fight with Hitler and losing it, Britain and France placed Western Europe under German domination for five horrible years. Had they not done so, but instead maintained a strongly-armed neutrality, there is no reason to believe that Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands or Belgium would have fallen under German sway. Those  Jews and others who had fled Hitler to these countries , and to France, would quite probably have survived unmolested. As it is, they were murdered in their hundreds of  thousands, thanks to our posturing and bluster.
 

         Italy, too, might have been detached from German influence.

Clive Govier writes: ‘“Had Britain lost to Hitler, his totalitarian style would have brought about in this country the same medical experiments on the weak and defenceless as he inflicted in German concentration camps etc. Sooner or later, it would have been Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, writ larger.” This belief provides the clue as to why we declared war on Germany, and enables us to determine whether the decision was good or bad. The fact is, it was a decision born of fear (stoked by Churchill's repeated warnings) that the day was soon coming when Hitler would force Britain to become either an ally in the Nazi cause (with all that that implied, as to supposed Aryan superiority), or become his enemy, thus to fight an evil regime.’

 

Where do I begin? We did lose to Hitler, at Dunkirk. He just did not invade this country (which he surely would have done, had he been as interested in us as the myth-makers like to claim) . We risked the imposition of Nazi demands on this country *precisely by joining the war*. Non-belligerents do not risk defeat by declaring war, and do not risk being forced to make terms with their conquerors, who can be expected to give a hard time to those who declare war on them and are then beaten by them. Since we were not on the German route of march into France, had substantial air and naval defences (thanks to our wise decision not to build a continental army)  and could not be reached without a very hazardous seaborne invasion, we were unlikely to share the fates of the Netherlands and Belgium, nor those of Denmark and Norway, even if Hitler had decided on a westward war in 1940, without our declaring war on him. Our decision to go to war had nothing to do with Churchill’s ‘repeated warnings’,  but was driven by Lord Halifax’s personal vanity and  by general delusions of great power status, which, as we see, still persist. 

 

 

Think!

 

Read!

 

Stop regurgitating something you once read somewhere. 

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