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

by Patrick J. Buchanan

In 1911, the Turks had sounded out Great Britain on an alliance, but Churchill, “with the arrogance of his class in that time, had replied that they had ideas above their station.”138 He warned the Turks “not to alienate Britain which ‘alone among European states … retains supremacy of the sea.’”139 Churchill’s insults would prove costly. On August 2, Germany and Turkey signed a secret alliance and in 1915 Turkish troops inflicted on British and Anzac troops at Gallipoli one of the greatest Allied defeats of the war. Churchill’s affront to the Turks was “an almost unbelievable act,” writes William Manchester, that tore down “a British bulwark and thereby set the stage for a disaster whose chief victim would be he himself.”