Getting the Dinky Toys out Again

All right, let’s get the Dinky Toys out yet again. I still can’t get most of the contributors here to think. Again and again they imagine that by repeating sentimental old fancies, or fantasising on the basis of the touching old belief that in 1940, Britain was a major European power, and a major preoccupation of Hitler, they deal with the question at issue.

 

They don't.

 

The question is, why on earth did we risk (and lose) our standing, wealth and power for the indepndence of Poland?

 

Look, Hitler didn’t much care about Britain, and was surprised and puzzled by our involvement in the war.

 

And people keep dipping into the story as if it can be analysed without going back to the point of decision - for instance the speculation by ‘Ernest’ that ‘As we know, the USSR in 1941-2 was in no shape to wage war against the Wehrmacht on equal terms. Without British pressure in the west, German attrition from 1939-41, and the arrival of the first Arctic convoys, Operation Barbarossa might well have triumphed by the arrival of the first winter.’

 

The point of decision is April 1939 and the British guarantee to Poland. Can I say here once again that I think it likely, though not certain, that a rationally-governed  Britain might have wanted to intervene in a Continental struggle at some point. I have never said, and do not say, that we should have stayed out of such a conflict under any and all circumstances. I do say that the circumstances of our entry into war were more or less certifiable. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong issue. Wrong allies. Wrongly-structured armed forces. Insufficient funds.

 

Let me ust ask ‘Ernest’ to start from April 1939, and consider a plausible alternative.

 

Imagine: Britain does *not* give a guarantee to Poland ( and so neither does France).

 

Poland accepts the German offer of a renewal of the 1934 non-aggression pact.

 

It enters talks with Germany about the cession of Danzig and new German rights in the Polish corridor, and agrees these things.

 

The following things then do NOT happen. There is no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. There is no German invasion of Poland. There is no Soviet invasion of Poland. There is no direct frontier between the third Reich and the USSR. There is no war in the West. Britain does not breach Norwegian neutrality by mining her waters or by sending warships into her waters. There is no Norway campaign, no invasion of Denmark, no invasion of the Low Countries,  no invasion of France. Why should there be?

 

I doubt if Stalin would have invaded Finland without the cover of war. During all this time, Britain is rearming, and now maintains a substantial defence force on its own territory.

 

Now, perhaps ‘Ernest’ could explain to me, how, starting from here, he gets to a German attack on the British Empire. What for? On what pretext? For what rational purpose? When? Where? How?

 

That’s exercise one.

 

Then a brief response to Mr Jones and his ‘Your thesis depends on an image of Hitler as a much-misunderstood man of entirely rational aims and essentially limited ambition’. Well, and what of it?. Mine and A.J.P.Taylor’s . Hitler’s main driving force was, it is true, an unreasoning murderous hatred of Jews. But had he been wholly irrational and chaotic, he would not have manoeuvred himself into the Chancellery as he did, nor been able to rule a major country, frequently outwitting and destroying rivals and opponents . Read Kershaw’s life if you doubt it.  I dislike the phrase ‘much-misunderstood’ as it (intentionally?) suggests that I have some sort of sympathy with Hitler, which I do not. Taken literally, however, it is true that many in Britain particularly have lazily promoted or accepted the idea that Hitler was just a madman.  I don’t have much time for the ‘Teppichfresser’ (Carpet-biter’) myth about Hitler, which I think first appears in William Shirer’s Berlin Diary.  No doubt, by the final days in the Bunker he had lost all contact with reality, but most politicians of all kinds eventually do this to some extent. His ambition was undoubtedly limited by possibility, though he was (as Taylor repeatedly explains) much more of a brilliant seizer of opportunities, than a careful, long-term planner.

 

France and Britain, by their support of Poland and their declaration of war (how precisely could he or would he have declared war on us if we hadn’t declared war on him?)  allowed him to humiliate France, eliminate the only serious Western military threat to him and plunder the prosperous nations of Western Europe. But if we hadn’t given him that opportunity, there’s no reason to believe he would have done all these things. What’s more, why were we shackled to the corpse of France in the first place? We had no formal alliance, nor any reason to have one.  France is not our traditional ally, her interests weren’t and aren’t ours, her reluctance to commit herself to war from 1936 onwards was evident to anyone with eyes in his head, and there was no reason to believe she would perform well in any war.  

 

Clive Govier (who needs to grasp that contributions here are not posted till the moderators get round to them, so multiple postings of the same comment don’t help anyone) argues that by saying we lost the war we had started in 1939, at Dunkirk, I am contradicting myself when I say that the rescue of 300,000 soldiers saved us from capitulation.

 

You can lose a war, and yet not surrender to your opponent. In fact, 1940 is the best example of this in history. We went to war in September 1939, with France as our ally, to protect the independence of Poland. By July 1940, Poland had ceased to exist, the whole of Western Europe with the exception of Sweden and Switzerland had been occupied by German forces, and our own army, stripped of billions of pounds worth of equipment, had left the field of conflict and had no obvious way of returning. Meanwhile we were, literally, bankrupt.

 

I repeat. We lost the war we entered in September 1939. Our principal war aim was not merely unfulfilled but now entirely beyond hope. Our principal ally was a prostrate corpse and , where possible, our enemy ( see Mersel-Kebir, and Syria) . We had no troops on the European continent, nor any effective means of attacking the military power of our principal enemy. We were dependent on the USA for our funds, and could in future not act against their wishes. We had lost the power of independent action.

 

It is true that had Hitler captured the entire BEF at Dunkirk we should probably have had to make terms. With that many hostages in enemy hands, it would have been politically very difficult to abandon them to what would probably have been rather brutal enslavement, far away,  for an indefinite period,. That's to leave aside the fact that we would have lacked the nucleus round which we could build a new army. Thus, the success of the Dunkirk evacuation, and the courage of the rearguard probably did save us from having to move the final step from defeat to surrender. I am glad of it, but it can hardky be called a great national triumph to have escaped subjugation, by so narrow a margin. It was certainly a great deliverance. But if we won;t recognsie just how serious matters were,  and how close our delusional, vainglorious folly of April 1939 had taken us to catastrophe, we won't learn from events.

 

No doubt we had ‘fight left in us’. So did the French (whose soldiers’ courage helped save us at Dunkirk). Part of their Maginot garrison refused to surrender until the Defence Minister went in person to order them to cease fire. But once you are defeated, having ‘fight left in us’, does not save you from the consequences of defeat.

 

By the way, I do wish people would stop saying, as they do here so often, that Hitler had any serious plans to invade this country in 1940. He did not. Sea Lion was a sketchy thing, a going-through-the-motions paper exercise, laid aside with relief after a few days. The German Navy (rightly)  did not believe it would be possible. And there was no political will behind it. The whole myth of the Finest Hour has depended for years on the belief that the Wehrmacht were poised to storm through Kent, Sussex  and Surrey, and march down Whitehall. By believing this, we flatter ourselves immoderately.  Hitler wasn’t interested in any such thing. Had it mattered to him, he would have invaded Britain, not Russia, in 1941.

 

It is because Britain returned to the war later, in a wholly different guise and with wholly different aims, that people don’t recognise the decisive moment in 1940.   In June 1944, when we finally re-entered to the main theatre of war (yes, I know about North Africa, the Far East and Italy) , we were not fighting under our own command, but under an American general and in an unwilling alliance with Stalin, who frequently spoke to Winston Churchill as brutally as Hitler had spoken to Neville Chamberlain – and Churchill, despite the public bulldog image,  had to take it humbly. We had perforce abandoned the aim of protecting Polish independence. And we now fought to cede Poland to Stalin (along with the whole of eastern Europe).

 

To ‘Paul P’ I say with confidence that Oswald Mosley and the BUF never had any political importance in this country their importance is exaggerated by the far left, which engaged in street battles with the Mosleyites and like to think this led to the BUF's defeat. But the BUF never had any serious following or influence, especially after the violence at their Olympia rally, and not much before it. Had Mosley been allowed to roam the country, rather than being locked up during the war it would have made no difference .

 

It was the Communist Party, which spread defeatist propaganda during the Blitz and which sympathised with strike action in war production factories, which posed more of a threat to the war effort, though of course this ended abruptly after the German invasion of the USSR.

Returning to Mr Jones, who says ‘'Delusions of great power status' and asserting we were secondary players in the 'real' war contradicts your lament that joining that war lost us the Empire.’. No, it doesn’t,. we were, by 1939, a second-rate power, but with an empire. By 1956 we were a second rate power without an empire. I’m not sure what the power-rating equivalent of Standard and Poors may be, but I’d guess we’re now rapidly approaching the status of third-rate power.

 

But in European continental terms, we were only a major power between 1916 and 1918, when to the great loss and grief of many homes and families, we fielded the most important army of the Allied powers. It helped to bankrupt and weaken us in many ways later and showed (to my entire satisfaction) that the costs, in human and money terms, of such a status, are too high for this country to pay. Our previous interventions were as members of coalitions, in which most of the fighting was done by others. Waterloo was a great battle, but ‘our’ side was far from being purely British, and in any case it would never have happened without the ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig the year before, which most British people have never even heard of  , nor without the Retreat from Moscow, a linear defeat of France by Russia, in which the Grande Armee was destroyed by ten thousand cuts and slashes.

 

I don’t know ‘Mein Kampf’ and I am happy to accept that Hitler rages against France in the pages of that volume. Well, what of it? Britain stayed aloof from the Prussian defeat of France in 1870. Why should we not have done so again if such a conflict had broken out (see above for reasons why it might not have done without the crazy Polish guarantee). What British *interest* was ever served by an alliance with France?

 

When I beg my readers to *think* my main request is this. *Examine the events of 1939-40 afresh. Do not assume that because something happened in a certain way, it had to happen that way.*

 

I’ll brush aside the silly stuff about Hitler having a ‘song in his heart’. What is this supposed to suggest? For about the ten thousandth time, this war had no moral content.  Wars seldom do. They are about ruthless violence, inflicted in scenes of desperation, when all other recourse has failed. Millions of innoents die or are maimed in them. The survivors are left scarred, inside and out, bereaved and msierable for years aftrwards. The costs are appalling. There is nothing romantic about this fiklthy busienss at all, any more than a sewage outfall is romantic. Necessary sometimes, but good, never.  Had it been a moral war for freedom, democracy, law, justice, tolerance etc, we could not have ended it as the subordinate allies of that obscene mass-murderer Stalin . But we did.

 

Mr Jones asks ‘do you honestly think a Germany that dominated Europe would have left us the Empire for long?’

 

Yes, I honestly do. Germany has never been seriously interested in a global empire. It has always wanted to imperialise in the Balkans and the great grain lands that lie between the Carpathians and the Black Sea. And if Mr Jones is going to quote Hitler to justify his belief that Hitler was bound to attack France, all Hitler’s writings suggest that he was happy to leave Britain to get on with being a global empire. I wouldn’t rely totally on that myself. I just can’t see any good, self-interested, cynical reason why he would have wanted to attack us.

 

He further asks : ‘wouldn't Russia still have undermined it by fostering or supporting independence movements?’

 

Quite possibly, But had we stayed out of the war in 1939, we would have been better able to counter this. I don’t think Stalin was especially interested in that, as it happened, and have never seen any evidence that he was.

 

‘ Or America?’

 

Undoubtedly, and the USA used the weakness and bankruptcy of post-1939 Britain to force us to weaken our grip on our empire. My point precisely. Howcan he not have noticed this?

Had we stayed out in 1939, this would certainly have been postponed, perhaps avoided altogether.

 

‘Would the Indian nationalists have gone away, or should we have put them down?’

The moment when the Indian nationalists became certain of victory was our defeat at Singapore in 1942, which defeat, as I have often said here,  was a direct consequence of our going to war in Europe in 1939.  All of Asia, from that moment, realised that we were not invincible, and our departure was only a matter of time . Without that, we might still rule India. Churchill knew that Singapore in 1942 was the worst moment of his premiership. Imagine a world without it. Had we not made the Polish guarantee in April 1939, there might well have been no Singapore defeat.   

 

‘ Would we have had the moral right to hold onto an Empire into the modern age?’

 

Did we ever have a ‘moral’ right?  Our 'right' to empire , like all major powers’ 'rights' to empire depended ultimately on our material power and on our ability to persuade the subject nations that we would effectively defend our rule with force or substitutes for force, if challenged. Thus the Soviet empire collapsed after Gorbachev, but the Chinese, American and EU empires still maintain their integrity.

 

I must go and prepare for my next debate,  on drugs, at the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday evening.  http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature/whats-on/2013/cheltenham-decides-prohibition-is-the-right-policy-on-drugs/

Have a  thoughtful weekend.