Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

I HAVE A STRONG belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country … believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute. That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us … but there is a more serious danger, that is lest we overtax our strength. However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go. It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourself to pass beyond it.

These were World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years’ War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West. Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misruled accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting.

The questions this book addresses are huge but simple: Were these two world wars, the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves, necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West?

WHAT HAPPENED TO GREAT BRITAIN? What happened to the Empire? What happened to the West and our world—is what this book is about.

Every European war is a civil war, said Napoleon. Historians will look back on 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West, where the once-Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization.

And it was Britain that turned both European wars into world wars. Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.

Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.

Why did Britain declare war on Germany, twice? As we shall see, neither the Kaiser nor Hitler sought to destroy Britain or her empire. Both admired what Britain had built. Both sought an alliance with England. The Kaiser was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Thus the crucial question: Were these two d...

Critics will instantly respond that Britain fought the First World War to bring down a Prussian militarism that threatened to dominate Europe and the world, that Britain declared war in 1939 to stop a fanatic Nazi dictator who would otherwise have conquered Europe and the world, enslaved mankind, massacred minorities on a mammoth scale, and brought on a new Dark Age. And...

Thus the question this book addresses is not whether the British were heroic. That is settled for all time. But were their statesmen wise?

There has arisen among America’s elite a Churchill cult. Its acolytes hold that Churchill was not only a peerless war leader but a statesman of unparalleled vision whose life and legend should be the model for every statesman. To this cult, defiance anywhere of U.S. hegemony, resistance anywhere to U.S. power becomes another 1938. Every adversary is “a new Hitler,” every proposal to avert war “another Munich.” Slobodan Milosevic, a party apparatchik who had presided over the disintegration of Yugoslavia—losing Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia—becomes “the Hitler of the Balkans” for holding Serbia’s cradle province of Kosovo. Saddam Hussein, whose army was routed in one hundred hours in 1991 and who had not shot down a U.S. plane in forty thousand sorties, becomes “an Arab Hitler” about to roll up the Persian Gulf and threaten mankind with weapons of mass destruction. This mind-set led us to launch a seventy-eight-day bombing campaign on Serbia, a nation that never attacked us, never threatened us, never wanted war with us, whose people had always befriended us. After 9/11, the Churchill cult helped to persuade an untutored president that the liberation of Iraq from Saddam would be like the liberation of Europe from Hitler. We would be greeted in Baghdad as our fathers and grandfathers had been in Paris. In the triumphant aftermath of a “cake-walk” war, democracy would put down roots in the Middle East as it had in Europe after the fall of Hitler, and George W. Bush...

For it was Winston S. Churchill who was the most bellicose champion of British entry into the European war of 1914 and the German-Polish war of 1939. There are two great myths about these wars. The first is that World War I was fought “to make the world safe for democracy.” The second is that World War II was the “Good War,” a glorious crusade to rid the world of Fascism that turned out wonderfully well.

For their crimes, Hitler and his collaborators, today’s metaphors for absolute evil, received the ruthless justice they deserved. But we cannot ignore the costs of Churchill’s wars, or the question: Was it truly necessary that fifty million die to bring Hitler down? For World War II was the worst evil ever to befall Christians and Jews and may prove the mortal blow that brings down our common civilization. Was it “The Unnecessary War”?

THE KAISER WAS CORRECT. As long as Germany remained the greatest power in Europe, Britain would line up against her. Britain’s balance-of-power policy commanded it. Britain thus left a powerful Germany that had sought an alliance or entente, or even British neutrality, forever frustrated.

TWICE THIS POLICY would bring Britain into war with Germany until, by 1945, Britain was too weak to play the role any longer. She would lose her empire because of what Lord Salisbury had said in 1877 was “the commonest error in politics … sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”

Yet, as the summer of 1914 began, no one expected war. The naval arms race had ended in 1913 when Tirpitz conceded British superiority by telling the Reichstag Budget Committee he was ready to accept a 60 percent rule, a sixteen-to-ten ratio in favor of the Royal Navy. Germany could not sustain a buildup of both her army and the Kaiser’s fleet. In the end, the High Seas Fleet had nothing to do with Britain’s decision to go to war, but everything to do with converting Britain from a friendly power aloof from the alliances of Europe into a probable enemy should war come.

That day, the Kaiser’s yacht regatta began. British and German naval officers visited one another’s warships and attended parties together. Tensions between the two nations had eased. On June 28, the Kaiser was aboard his racing yacht Meteor when an urgent telegram was brought out. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne of the octogenarian Emperor Franz Josef, whose only son had committed suicide, and his wife Sophie had been assassinated in Sarajevo.

“The character of Kiel Week changed,” writes Massie. “Flags were lowered to half-mast, and receptions, dinners and a ball at the Royal Castle were canceled. Early the next morning, the Kaiser departed, intending to go to Vienna and the Archduke’s funeral.”78 As the British warships sailed out of Kiel, the masts of the German warships flew the signal “Pleasant Journey.” King George V responded with a wireless message, Friends Today Friends in Future Friends Forever79

THE AUSTRIANS DID NOT want a European war. Vienna wanted a short, sharp war to punish Serbia for murdering the heir to the throne and to put an end to Serb plotting to pull apart their empire.

The Austrian ultimatum had been drafted in anticipation of certain rejection, to justify an Austrian declaration of war. But on July 26, Serbia accepted nine of Austria’s ten demands, balking only at Vienna’s demand to send a delegation to Belgrade to oversee the investigation and prosecution of the conspirators who had murdered the archduke. Yet, even on this point, the Serbs agreed to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice. The Kaiser was relieved and elated. Austria had scored a brilliant diplomatic coup and he could not see what more she wanted.

But when the Austrian ambassador in Belgrade received the Serb reply, he picked up his packed bags, boarded the first train out, and, once over the frontier, telephoned Vienna. When news hit that Serbia had failed to submit to all ten Austrian demands, crowds were in the streets clamoring for war. On July 27, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war.

The Schlieffen Plan, laid down in virtual tablets of stone, called for the German army, no matter where war erupted, to strike first and hardest to crush Germany’s strongest enemy, France, then to shift her armies by rail to meet the Russian steamroller before it rumbled into East Prussia.

Had the Austrians not sought to exploit the assassination of Ferdinand to crush Serbia, they would have taken Serbia’s acceptance of nine of their ten demands as vindication. Had Czar Nicholas II been more forceful in rescinding his order for full mobilization, Germany would not have mobilized, and the Schlieffen Plan would not have begun automatically to unfold. Had the Kaiser and Bethmann realized the gravity of the crisis, just days earlier, they might have seized on Grey’s proposal to reconvene the six-power conference that resolved the 1913 Balkan crisis. The same six ambassadors were all in London, including Germany’s Prince Lichnowsky, an Anglophile desperate to avoid war with Britain. Had Grey himself conveyed to Lichnowsky, more forcefully and “just a few days earlier,” that Britain would likely be drawn into a European war, writes one historian, “Berlin almost certainly would have changed its position more quickly and firmly. Austria might then have deferred its declaration of war, and Russia would have had little reason to mobilize.”70 The Great War might have been averted.

And it is in Britain’s decisions and actions that we are most interested. For it was the British decision to send an army across the Channel to fight in Western Europe, for the first time

in exactly one hundred years, that led to the defeat of the Schlieffen Plan, four years of trench warfare, America’s entry, Germany’s collapse in the autumn of 1918, the abdication of the Kaiser, the dismemberment of Germany at Versailles, and the rise to power of a veteran of the Western Front who, four years after the war’s end, was unreconciled to his nation’s defeat. “It cannot be that two million Ger...

For Britain, World War I was not a war of necessity but a war of choice. The Germans did not want war with Britain, nor did they seek to destroy the British Empire. They feared a two-front war against a rising Russian Empire and a France resolute upon revenge for 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Berlin would have paid a high price for British neutrality.

“Austria had simply wanted to punish Serbia (though it had lacked the courage to act alone). Germany had wanted a diplomatic success that would leave its Austrian ally stronger in European eyes; it had not wanted war.”94

The Kaiser wrote George V to accept his proposal that Germany not attack France if she remained neutral in a war with Russia. But when he called in Moltke and ordered him to halt the army’s advance to the frontier, a “crushed” Moltke said, “Your Majesty, it cannot be done.”

None of the monarchs—Nicholas II, Wilhelm II, George V, or Franz Josef—wanted war. All sensed that the great war, when it came, would imperil the institution of monarchy and prepare the

ground for revolution. In the final hours, all four weighed in on the side of peace. But more resolute and harder men had taken charge of affairs.

To those who say the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet was a provocation to Great Britain, were not the Royal Navy’s dreadnoughts a provocation? And if France, with a population of 39 million, was maintaining an army the size of Germany’s, which had seventy ...

If Britain would have been judged dishonorable by not coming to the aid of France, it was only because Grey and Churchill, without the approval of Parliament, had committed her to go to war for France. Grey’s reason for tying Britain’s destiny to France was fear that a German victory would make Belgium, Holland, and Denmark vassals, give the High Seas Fleet a berth on the Channel coast, and make the Kaiser “supreme over all the Continent of Europe and Asia Minor.”104 “[But] was that really the German objective? Was the Kaiser really Napoleon?” asks Ferguson.

A quarter of a century later, in Great Contemporaries, Churchill would exonerate the Kaiser of plotting a war for European or world hegemony: “[H]istory should incline to the more charitable view and acquit William II of having planned and plotted the World War.”

From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records.

Germany had not gone to war in forty-three years, and the Kaiser had never gone to war in his twenty-five years on the throne, how can one call Germany—as British statesmen did and British historians still do—the “butcher-bird of Europe”?

The German army had never fought the English and indeed had not fought a battle in nearly half a century. Churchill, however, was already a veteran of wars. He had seen action with Sir Bindon Blood on the Northwest Frontier. He had ridden with Kitchener’s cavalry in the massacre of the Dervishes at Omdurman in the Sudan. He

had been captured riding in an armored train in the first days of the Boer War, been held as a POW, escaped, and then marched with the British army to the relief of Ladysmith. Britain had engaged in many more wars than Germany in the century before Sarajevo, and Churchill had himself seen more war than almost any soldier in the German army.

In the hours before war, Bethmann secretly suggested to Grey that, in return for British neutrality, Germany would agree not to annex any French territory and respect Holland’s neutrality. Grey, secretly committed to fight for France, dismissed the proposal as “impossible & disgraceful,” so great an act of dishonor “the good name of this country would never recover.”119 Yet Britain had stood aside in 1870 as Prussia invaded France.

What would have happened if Britain had declared neutrality and stayed out? The Germans would have triumphed in France as in 1870 or there would have been a stalemate and armistice. The United States would not have come in. No American or British soldiers and many fewer French and Germans would have died. A victorious Kaiser would have taken some French colonies in Africa, which would have replaced one British colonial rival with another. The Germans

would have gone home victorious, as they did in 1871. Russia would still have been defeated, but the dismantling of Russia’s empire was in Britain’s national interest. Let the Germans pay the cost, take the casualties, and accept the eternal enmity for breaking it up. A triumphant Germany would have faced resentful enemies in both France and Russia and rebellious Slavs to the south. This would have presented no problem for the British Empire. The Germans would have become the dominant power in Europe, with the British dominant on the oceans, America dominant in the Western Hemisphere, and Britain’s ally, Japan, dominant in Asia.

Before August 1914, Lenin had been living in a garret in Geneva. In 1917, as the Romanov dynasty was falling and Russia seemed on the verge of chaos, the German General Staff transported Lenin in a sealed train across Germany. Their hope was for revolutionary chaos in Russia that might force St. Petersburg to sue for peace. Had Britain not declared war, the war would not have lasted until 1917—and Lenin would likely have died unmourned in Geneva. And had th...

Germany, as the most powerful nation in Europe, aligned with a f...

its existence to Germany, would have been the western bulwark against any Russian drive into Europe. There would have been no Hitler and no Stalin. Other evils would have arisen, but how could the first half of t...

Had Sir Edward revealed to the Cabinet his secret discussions with France and the moral commitments they implied—that Britain must go to war if France were invaded—his policy would have been r...

Churchill concedes that he and Grey were morally committed to a war they knew the Cabinet and Parliament opposed. “In other words,” concludes historian Jim Powell, “Churchill believed that if Grey had operated openly, Britain might not have been able to get into the war!”

By secretly committing Britain to war for France, Grey, Churchill, and Asquith left the Kaiser and German Chancellor in the dark, unaware a war with France meant war with the British Empire. Had he known, the Kaiser would have made his belated effort to abort a war far sooner and more successfully.

Churchill was unafraid to break the rules of war. As he had been prepared to blockade Antwerp before the Germans invaded, so he brushed aside international law, mined the North Sea, and imposed upon Germany a starvation blockade that violated all previous norms of civilized warfare. In the war’s first week, Churchill had wanted to occupy Ameland, one of the Dutch Frisian Islands, though Holland was neutral. To Churchill, writes Martin Gilbert, “Dutch neutrality need be no obstacle.”148 Churchill urged a blockade of the Dardanelles while Turkey was still neutral. In December 1914, he recommended that the Royal Navy seize the Danish island of Bornholm, though Denmark, too, was neutral. Yet it had been Berlin’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality that Churchill invoked as a moral outrage to convince Lloyd George to support war on Germany and that had brought the British people around to support war. When the Germans accommodated Britain’s war party by regarding the 1839 treaty as a “scrap of paper,” the relief of Grey and Churchill must have been immense. The declaration of war was their triumph. And when British divisions crossed the Channel, the troops were sent, as the secret war plans dictated, not to brave little Belgium but straight to France.

On March 3, 1919, four months after Germany accepted an armistice and laid down her arms, Churchill rose exultant in

the Commons to declare, “We are enforcing the blockade with rigour, and Germany is very near starvation.”

Put in charge of all relief efforts, Hoover wanted to feed the starving Germans. Congress refused.