What I think about World War Two

I notice that my old friend John Rentoul and others are speculating (not always accurately) on my remarks about D-Day, and why we should revere those who took part, but not the foolish politicians whose irresponsible decisions ( especially the Polish guarantee of April 1939)  made it necessary for us to send young men on to those terrible beaches, to reconquer territory we need never (in my view) have lost in the first place.

This response to a comment by Mr O' Vinny may help them:

 

Mr O’ Vinny has written (in a  comment on another thread): ‘Having corresponded with PH direct about his view of WW11, I know what he hasn't said in today's article. I understand he believes we should not have intervened (not the same as appeasement). 

 

It is a pity that, despite the correspondence, he still doesn’t understand my perfectly simple and easily grasped position.

 

It is this. I do not believe we should not have intervened. I believe that we should not have intervened when we did.

As the whole course of events in Europe and Asia was violently skewed by our more or less clinically insane 1939  foreign policy, it is difficult to speculate now on when an intervention might have been justified. All I can say with certainty is that the 1939 intervention very nearly cost us our existence, and did cost us our life savings, our national sovereignty, our unique culture and laws and our empire. In all but one respect (our presence on the winning side, as a useful appendage to the USA) we resembled a defeated country in 1945 and have behaved like one ever since.

 

What we did next would and should have depended on what Hitler and Stalin did. The fundamental conflict in Europe (and therefore the hinge of the balance of power) was then as it is now the conflict between Germany and Russia over who dominates Eastern and Central Europe. The Franco-German conflict, now neutralised by the EU, was a subsidiary of the Russo-German one, thanks to France’s alliances or attempted alliances with Moscow, and Germany’s wish to fight a war on one front at a time.

 

 

Britain’s guarantee to Poland in April 1939 was mistaken (in that Britain had no interest in preventing the cession of Danzig to Germany, a demand a good deal more reasonable and justified than Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland) ), and in that our action’s main effect was to encourage intransigence on the part of Colonel Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, so preventing  a negotiated compromise between Poland and Germany, who were in fact allies bound by a treaty at that stage.

 

That Britain’s guarantee to Poland in April 1939 was dishonest, in that we knew when we made it that we had no intention of taking any material action to enforce it, and that we couldn’t have done if we had wanted to, as our armed forces (on the modernisation of which we had nearly bankrupted ourselves by 1938) were designed to defend the Empire overseas, and our home islands - but not equipped or configured for a continental land war. We also knew that the Germans were fully aware of our military weakness, in continental land forces,  and likewise did not take our guarantee seriously.

 

Similar criticisms apply to France which, though it maintained a large land army, was also configured, prepared, equipped and trained  for a defensive rather than an offensive war (and, as it happened, not very well-prepared even for that, as it had neglected to complete the Maginot line in the most crucial sector, along the Belgian frontier - a route of attack which would hardly have been a surprise to any French general or politician).

 

Whatever view either country might have taken in April 1939, by the way, it was utterly transformed by the Stalin-Hitler Pact, which (by giving Germany free land-based access to raw materials and fuel from the USSR), instantly negated one of Britain’s most powerful weapons, which had effectively won the war for us in 1914,  the threat of naval blockade.

 

All I ask is that people think. Silly misrepesentation is the reflex of the person who does not wish to think, and so seeks to pretend that I am saying something quite different from what I am actually saying.