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

by Patrick J. Buchanan

If Churchill’s assessment of Hitler’s character and Munich were spot-on, his strategic alternative—bring the Red Army into Europe to stop him—appalled Chamberlain, who despised and distrusted the Bolsheviks more than the Nazis and Fascists. Forced to choose between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union controlling Eastern and Central Europe, he would have preferred the former. “Better Hitler than Stalin” was a sentiment shared by leaders of all the nations bordering on Stalin’s empire: Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Rumania. They had all heard the screams from over the border. Living next door, they had none of the romantic illusions about a “brave new world” held by British Labourites and American liberals. By Munich, when the number of Hitler’s victims still numbered in the hundreds, Stalin had murdered millions in his “prison house of nations” stretching from Ukraine to the Pacific. Chamberlain also believed any alliance with Russia meant certain war with Germany, a war from which Hitler or Stalin would emerge as master of Eastern and Central Europe. Neither result, Chamberlain thought, was worth Britain’s fighting another horrific European war.