I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
I have been a fan of Buchanan going back to the 90s and read most of his books, including the Unnecessary War. Like many, I held Churchill in high regard given the praise heaped upon him by most historians. Buchanan makes strong case Churchill deserves significant blame for carnage from WWII. I also learned of his abysmal treatment of the Irish, furthering my change in view.
Makes me think of the quote from one of Churchill's contemporaries about how lavishly WC was blessed with talents, but among those gifts was not included good judgment.
This is preposterous, you are pushing an unhistorical narrative from a third rate populist book (that could never be considered a history book as it does not engage with any primary sources or with interpretations of secondary sources) seriously trying to justify the obviously unethical claim that Hitler should have been left alone? If you are not a nazi then you certainly come off as one in this write up. I will unsubscribe and leave you to your political ‘history’ books. This is not chivalry at all sir, not at all!
Ok, I’ll play. The whole “Treaty of Versailles was too harsh” is horseshit. It certainly wasn’t a soft treaty like Wilson was clearly plugging for, but it was arguably far lighter than what the Germans forced the Bolsheviks to accept at Brest-Litovsk. The German economy certainly could have paid those reparations (they eventually did so…in 2010). It certainly would have involved hardship and sacrifice but there’s no way the losers of that war were getting away with zero repercussions: certainly not after ten million battle deaths. What messed it all up was French stubbornness. They were furious about the Germans occupying their most productive industrial lands during the war (not to mention losing the most people per capita, even over the Russians)and wanted their pound of flesh. So they occupied the Ruhr and it took all sorts of American promises and incentives (the Dawes Plan) to get them out in 1924 (they didn’t get out of the Saar until 1935).
In retrospect, tying the reparations payments to the health of American banks may have not been the best idea, but the Americans were flush with cash and idealism and what could go wrong? The German population was fine with that though: one important indicator was that Remarque’s pacifist All Quiet on the Western Front (published in book form in January 1929 and which Hitler later banned) sold a million copies within a year. Clearly, if they were suffering so badly and pining after Versailles they would have outright rejected the book like Hitler did.
I won’t play “who’s the better scumbag” by measuring early body counts between Hitler and Stalin (i’ll agree they were both fantastically capable at churning out corpses), but let’s consider a curious question: why did Buchanan call Hitler “barbarous?” According to Buchanan’s puerile “revisionist” take, the poor man was just trying to restore some Aryan dignity by kicking subhuman ass and getting him some lebensraum (the project that evil imperialist WC ruined)…what’s so barbarous about that?
Finally, somebody should have told the Poles, Russkies, and other Slavs in the path of Hitler’s revival tour that all he was trying to do by invading their asses was to prevent another blockade of the heroic German people. Maybe then they would not have fought so hard and happily adjusted to their new role as slaves to the enlightened Aryan world order.
This is all bullshit that contradicts every contemporary piece of evidence of the times and only matches the very flimsy ad hoc liberal narrative that also caused the war in the first place
Wow, I stand corrected after that blistering point-by-point rebuke of my flimsy liberal narrative. What makes it even more devastating, is the sneaking suspicion that Buchanan could not have done better in tearing down my bullshit than you did in that tour-de-force critique! Clearly, it’s back to the drawing board…I’ll have to completely redesign my World War One course (not to mention revisit my dissertation which was on WWII) with all that compelling “evidence” you brought forward!
everyone has deep held opinions about this but surely we can all find it ludicrous that Britain gave war guarantees to a country they had zero hope of defending which made said country brazenly defy Germany only to fold to them in a matter of hours and after the Allies won they just handed that country over to Stalin. bleak.
Please consider an edit to replace “hope” with “intent”.
Please note that Poland never surrendered to either Nazi Germany nor Communist Russia while maintaining a government in exile in London and a shadow government in Warsaw each with their respective armies.
The elements of the Polish Army that escaped Poland after the initial invasion by Germany then Russia 2-weeks later escaped and fought under the British Command (that turned the tide of the war at key moments).
Inside of occupied Poland the Home Army harassed the Germans valiantly beginning in Sept 1939 eventually capturing a V2 rocket that was evaluated by Polish engineers then disassemble to be smuggled out of Poland to Britain, broke the Enigma Code & provided the code to Britain, infiltrated one of the first concentration reporting the conditions to the British.
To be certain, the British (Churchill) placed little value on the contributions of Poland to the war effort as they were content sitting on their hands and fingering themselves to eventually betray Poland at Yalta.
It has been written that Poland fights for the security of the world but their fighters died for Poland. Several centuries prior to WW2, a Polish Army devastatingly defeated the Islamic Army laying siege of Vienna because the Polish Army overcame obstacles that the Islamic Command thought impossible to overcome on their flank. Today Poland is probably the best ally that the USA has in Europe.
Pardon my pontification as my Polish family fought with the Allies, for the Allies and within the Home Army throughout WW2.
Well, it's hard to say exactly what would have happened if Britain had stood back and allowed Hitler free rein, of course. What we can say is what Hitler would have wanted in that case. His Stufenplan called for alliances with Britain and Italy; the joint conquest of France and eastern Europe; then the destruction of Russia and the wholesale replacement of its population with the Volk. On the way he would have destroyed the Jewish and Slavic population of Europe. So much was clear already from Mein Kampf. It is, I suggest, incumbent on Buchanan, and his reviewers, to say whether they think this is indeed what would have happened, and if so, why if would have been preferable to the way history actually panned out.
Absolutely would have been preferable. The West is a dying civilization, slowly being conquered by the third world. We are weak and pathetic and the same forces Hitler fought in WW2 now control the West today whom are sacrificing our civilization and culture, which took millennia to create, on the alter of idealism, progressivism, and communism. I reject all of it. Ethnic conflicts are once again on the horizon and people need to realize that and not put the generations after us in danger.
If you really think that the triumph of Nazism across Europe would be preferable to where we are today, then there is so little in common between us that further discussion is a waste of time.
That isn't what would have happened and your pov is basically coloured by propaganda.
Fascism was a reactionary response to Bolshevism. It didn't emerge from the ether. Prior to any hostilities in WW2, the Bolsheviks had killed upwards of 10 million of their own people. Marxism was taking over the world. If the NSDAP hadn't taken Germany the Marxists likely would have. Stalin was an aggressor. He was fighting Japan in August of 1939. He invaded 14 countries which Churchill, Lebrun and Roosevelt didn't seem to be bothered by. Which suggests this fear of totalitarianism was not the reason for the Allies to go to war. (America entered the war late for a reason and the new deal was a political revolution that changed America just as Fascism and Communism were revolutions).
Hitler understood that the age of super powers was beginning and for Europe to survive they had to become a Super power - he said so in speeches. They were a bulwark against communism which would have taken all of Europe. The Wehrmacht and SS were made up of Europeans from every European Nation including 50,000 Jews. Erhard Milch was a Field Marshall but you never hear about that or about Rudolph Hess because it changes the whole narrative. You seem to care greatly for the Slavs and Jews but not the outcome with regards to Europe. Look at Germany at the end of the war - how were they treated by the Soviets? Look at Europe today, are they in a good place? Are they Sovereign? The ideology that won the war is the same that is consigning Europe to ruin today. And the same that is killing Ukraine today.
As I said, it's impossible to say what would have happened. What I described was what Hitler explicitly said he wanted, and what he had already started in 1940. As to whether the outcome of WW2 as it actually happened, well, it was about as good as anyone good have hoped for at the time. We didn't have a nuclear war, for example. Saying that Europe isn't in great shape now does not mean that the alternatives would have been better: I think it's pretty likely they would have been a lot worse.
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
As a follow-up, by the way, I wonder what followers of Buchanan’s preferred alternative make of the probability that Germany would have had the atom bomb (Uranverein) within a few years in the event of peace with Britain. Curiously, so would Britain (Tube Alloys). We might have had a cold war style standoff in Europe: or more likely prolific use of nuclear weapons by Germany in Russia. I expect Buchanan would have blamed Churchill for that too …
Poland's position was far from "unenviable", they made their bed quite deliberately during the WWI peace talks and were quite pleased to have England back their unending arrogance rather than humble themselves to their Versailles mistakes
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
One of the foundational tenets of National Socialism was total autarky. The Nazis were truly anti-trade and anti-capitalist -- the German nation was to be entirely self-sufficient. Thus, military expansion was a necessity, for agricultural land, minerals, and fossil fuels. The idea of "letting the Russians and Germans fight it out" assumes that both entities would have been worn out at the end, but that was not a given.
I suppose if the purpose of a book is to blame Churchill for everything, that the author has to make it appear that Churchill was actually primarily responsible for those things. It's pretty clear that Buchanan goes beyond the bounds of historical discourse in his attempts to do that. A few examples that spring to mind: the conduct of the First World War was not dictated by Churchill. Although as First Lord of the Admiralty for the first 16 months he was certainly responsible for the Royal Navy's enforcement of the economic blockade, it was not his decision. And his statement to the House in 1919 was made more than three years after he was removed from the Admiralty: he had just returned as Secretary for War. The Versailles Treaty was largely determined by Lloyd George, and Churchill was in fact arguing for less stringent terms. The treaty with Poland was unwise at best, in that it offered guarantees that Britain could not and did not actually deliver, but it was nothing to do with Churchill. Coming on to Churchill's taking over as PM in May 1940, by which time the economic blockade had already been put in place by Chamberlain, it is indeed the case that Churchill refused a peace treaty, at a time when Germany had apparently conquered much of Europe and was starting its own bombing ("the Blitz") of Britain, which of course included non-combatants: like it or not, it was a conventional mode of warfare in the 20th century on all sides. The concessions made by the Western allies to the Soviet Union were probably as good as anyone could have got negotiating from a position of social and economic exhaustion.
> Churchill made allies with a more wicked and more ambitious man and conceded him far more territory than Hitler had been eyeing.
Maybe to Stalin; no to the concession. When Churchill came to office in 1940, Germany and its allies occupied almost all of Europe and was eying up Russia to the Urals. When he left office, more than half of Europe was liberated: and the rest was not.
Your point about the Blitz is telling. You don't understand the facts around 1941 and who started bombing who and to what degree.
The Germans lacked strategic bombing capability throughout the whole war. That is a fact. The British civilians killed during the Blitz was a response to civilian deaths in Berlin not an initiative of the Germans. (Just like the fact the Germans didn't kill 400,000 British soldiers at Dunkirk). The deaths of British civilians by German dive bombers during the Blitz was muted (40,000 in 1941) compared to the bombing deaths of German civilians throughout the war (150,000 at Dresden alone).
Britain had lost the war and Churchill decided to surrender their empire to the Americans in a deal with the communists to fight Germany. Those are the facts. Europe was divided at the end of the war. Britain never recovered from the War. Today the ideological forces that drove the communists and Americans to victory has basically subsumed Britain to the point that it is turning into a third world country.
Churchill was driven by the Focus Group and was basically isolated in the conservative party initially in his desire for War. Men like Rudolph Hess sought peace while Churchill consigned millions of men and women and children to death and basically handed half of Europe over to Communism. He isn't a hero and if you read about his actual character he wasn't this magnanimous man, that was largely propaganda. He was an indebted drunkard obsessed with sending men to war like toy soldiers (he was frequently caught playing with toy soldiers as an adult). When groups like Antifa attack statues of Churchill today they don't realize that Churchill was Anti-Fa. That is who he was historically speaking.
There was a considerable amount of discussion of aerial warfare in the 1930s. It was popularly held that "the bomber will always get through" -- the general assumption of all sides was that bombing would be an integral part of warfare. The theory of Blitzkrieg (shock and awe is its modern version) included bombing, although the Luftwaffe operated strategically as much as tactically. So the invasion of Poland, for example, was accompnaied by bombing of Polish infrastructure. From 18-27 September 1939 Warsaw came under heavy bombing with numerous civilian casualties. The point here is that heavy bombing of enemy cities was a part of the prevailing doctrine of warfare: it wasn't something tha Churchill invented, and the notion that German use of bombing in Blitzkrieg was a response to Brtish bombing is nonsense.
> What were Britain’s alternatives to an unnecessary war with Germany? Buchanan suggests a tantalizingly straightforward one: just leave Hitler to fight Stalin!
Britain tried to leave Hitler alone ultimately leading to the Munich treaty, which Hitler immediately broke. And than proceeded to apply with Stalin.
I am not certain that WW2 was unnecessary given the historic militancy of Germany and the traditional paranoia of Mother Russia with the lands between the two borders considered by each to a mere buffer zone.
The main issue in Europe today, which is drawing them inexorably towards the war they so obviously want, is the same issue it has been for 1000 years - where lies the border between Russia and Germany?
Torgau is too far West. Stalingrad is too far East. The rest is up for grabs.
The not-so-hidden subtext is not whether WW2 was unnecessary — on some views it had already started in 1937 with the Sino-Japanese War — but whether Britain and the USA has been on the right side. My reading of this review is that Buchanan hated Churchill and so blamed him for everything that went wrong about the war; and that one of those things Buchanan thought was wrong was not looking favourably on Hitler. It’s a little surprising how many people still agree with that second point.
Hitler would not have only fought RUSSIA ONLY, mainland Europe would have been under the Nazi boot. There would be no France as we know it. It would be the Third Reich from the North African Desert, to the Arctic Circle. The Atlantic all the way to Rostov, and Saint Petersburg..
France wasn't under the Nazi boot. The Petain government was extremely popular. This idea of a reviled Vichy France is extremely overblown as propaganda. The French were the first to fight the Anglo Americans in Africa in Operation Torch and the last Waffen SS unit to fight the Soviets in Berlin was French. What does that tell you about French attitudes to the Nazis?
More Allied bombs were dropped on France than Japan.
A majority of the Waffen SS was non German. The National Socialist movement was European. The last defense of Europe against the Communists. And they were betrayed by their Anglo American brothers. Which resulted in a divided Europe that has never recovered and is now being destroyed by the American-Zionist political occupation to this day
> More Allied bombs were dropped on France than Japan.
Something to do with the fact that the Allies invaded German-occupied France and fought their way across it, but Japan surrendered after the two atomic bombs?
a) France being closer to Allied Air Bases than Japan
b) The Allies engaging in mass saturation bombing with not much precaution in preventing civilian death. Sarkozy spoke about French civilian deaths by the Allies on the anniversary of DDay.
C) the idea the Vichy government was unpopular is propaganda. Petain was highly popular. French forces fought the Anglo Americans in Africa first in Operation Torch. The French Waffen SS was the last unit to fight the Soviets at the fall of Berlin.
A. True of course. The Allies were gearing up for the invasion in 1945 but fortunately it never had to happen.
B. That's what bombing looked like at that time.
C. Irrelevant (to this specific point). The southern part of France was not on the allied invasion route: and in 1942 Germany had already put the whole of it under military occupation anyway.
You skate on thin ice when you try to design alternative scenarios to what unfolded. The new situation has innumerable alternatives, not a predictable sequential path. It is human nature to speculate on the “ if only I had….” The theory of a German Russian conflict that exhausted and weakened both beyond recovery is a scenario that would create a thousand new roads untaken depending on the outcome one might hope for.
The fact remains that some very nasty characters were able to rally their nations to fight each other with unspeakable ferocity, tenacity and brutality. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt and an entire cast of secondary actors did what they thought was necessary for a host of good, bad or horrible reasons. Bad guys, better guys, good guys and some that history will judge and rejudge over time.
There is some truth to some of the facts about British war crimes etc. But what is left out is that Hitler repeatedly broke his promises over and over, and over. But we should trust him!
There is nothing said about Czechoslovakia, how Nazi party members living in Czechoslovakia began terroristic attacks, coordinated from the Nazi party in Germany. How Germany promised to only take the Sudetenland, based on falsified claims of massacres of Germans by the Czechs, and after Chamberlain’s blessing “oops! actually, even though we signed an agreement to take only the Sudetenland, we’re just going to take all of Czechoslovakia!”
So of course Poland should trust Hitler to take just Danzig and become allies with Poland! Who cares what he had written years earlier in Mein Kampf! And Hitler of course was a man of his word!
"who the Nazis were and why they did what they did"
"What Hitler did want was to build a Versailles-proof Reich, which required reclaiming the lands and peoples they had lost in the treaty as well as expanding to the east."
Yes, "expanding to the east" means the genocide, forced enslavement, and sterilization of the entire population of "the east," which includes Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia. You can read what Hitler thought about the Slavs in Mein Kampf, and what we know of the Nazi's Generalplan Ost. It meant hundreds of millions murdered directly, or sent on death marches from Europe to Siberia, and the remainder of the population forced into slave labor and sterilized so that these lands could be repopulated with a 100% German population.
Stalin managed to actually kill more than Hitler, but Hitler intended to kill more than Stalin (around 75% of the population of Poland and the Soviet Union) and would have done so had he not been stopped.
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
This is the narrative our guys and our side needs to keep pounding
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
I have been a fan of Buchanan going back to the 90s and read most of his books, including the Unnecessary War. Like many, I held Churchill in high regard given the praise heaped upon him by most historians. Buchanan makes strong case Churchill deserves significant blame for carnage from WWII. I also learned of his abysmal treatment of the Irish, furthering my change in view.
Makes me think of the quote from one of Churchill's contemporaries about how lavishly WC was blessed with talents, but among those gifts was not included good judgment.
This is preposterous, you are pushing an unhistorical narrative from a third rate populist book (that could never be considered a history book as it does not engage with any primary sources or with interpretations of secondary sources) seriously trying to justify the obviously unethical claim that Hitler should have been left alone? If you are not a nazi then you certainly come off as one in this write up. I will unsubscribe and leave you to your political ‘history’ books. This is not chivalry at all sir, not at all!
Which part of what he said is wrong?
Nearly everything.
When you dont have any specific points it makes you seem like you dont have any points at all
Ok, I’ll play. The whole “Treaty of Versailles was too harsh” is horseshit. It certainly wasn’t a soft treaty like Wilson was clearly plugging for, but it was arguably far lighter than what the Germans forced the Bolsheviks to accept at Brest-Litovsk. The German economy certainly could have paid those reparations (they eventually did so…in 2010). It certainly would have involved hardship and sacrifice but there’s no way the losers of that war were getting away with zero repercussions: certainly not after ten million battle deaths. What messed it all up was French stubbornness. They were furious about the Germans occupying their most productive industrial lands during the war (not to mention losing the most people per capita, even over the Russians)and wanted their pound of flesh. So they occupied the Ruhr and it took all sorts of American promises and incentives (the Dawes Plan) to get them out in 1924 (they didn’t get out of the Saar until 1935).
In retrospect, tying the reparations payments to the health of American banks may have not been the best idea, but the Americans were flush with cash and idealism and what could go wrong? The German population was fine with that though: one important indicator was that Remarque’s pacifist All Quiet on the Western Front (published in book form in January 1929 and which Hitler later banned) sold a million copies within a year. Clearly, if they were suffering so badly and pining after Versailles they would have outright rejected the book like Hitler did.
I won’t play “who’s the better scumbag” by measuring early body counts between Hitler and Stalin (i’ll agree they were both fantastically capable at churning out corpses), but let’s consider a curious question: why did Buchanan call Hitler “barbarous?” According to Buchanan’s puerile “revisionist” take, the poor man was just trying to restore some Aryan dignity by kicking subhuman ass and getting him some lebensraum (the project that evil imperialist WC ruined)…what’s so barbarous about that?
Finally, somebody should have told the Poles, Russkies, and other Slavs in the path of Hitler’s revival tour that all he was trying to do by invading their asses was to prevent another blockade of the heroic German people. Maybe then they would not have fought so hard and happily adjusted to their new role as slaves to the enlightened Aryan world order.
This is all bullshit that contradicts every contemporary piece of evidence of the times and only matches the very flimsy ad hoc liberal narrative that also caused the war in the first place
Wow, I stand corrected after that blistering point-by-point rebuke of my flimsy liberal narrative. What makes it even more devastating, is the sneaking suspicion that Buchanan could not have done better in tearing down my bullshit than you did in that tour-de-force critique! Clearly, it’s back to the drawing board…I’ll have to completely redesign my World War One course (not to mention revisit my dissertation which was on WWII) with all that compelling “evidence” you brought forward!
You're doing great.
everyone has deep held opinions about this but surely we can all find it ludicrous that Britain gave war guarantees to a country they had zero hope of defending which made said country brazenly defy Germany only to fold to them in a matter of hours and after the Allies won they just handed that country over to Stalin. bleak.
Please consider an edit to replace “hope” with “intent”.
Please note that Poland never surrendered to either Nazi Germany nor Communist Russia while maintaining a government in exile in London and a shadow government in Warsaw each with their respective armies.
The elements of the Polish Army that escaped Poland after the initial invasion by Germany then Russia 2-weeks later escaped and fought under the British Command (that turned the tide of the war at key moments).
Inside of occupied Poland the Home Army harassed the Germans valiantly beginning in Sept 1939 eventually capturing a V2 rocket that was evaluated by Polish engineers then disassemble to be smuggled out of Poland to Britain, broke the Enigma Code & provided the code to Britain, infiltrated one of the first concentration reporting the conditions to the British.
To be certain, the British (Churchill) placed little value on the contributions of Poland to the war effort as they were content sitting on their hands and fingering themselves to eventually betray Poland at Yalta.
It has been written that Poland fights for the security of the world but their fighters died for Poland. Several centuries prior to WW2, a Polish Army devastatingly defeated the Islamic Army laying siege of Vienna because the Polish Army overcame obstacles that the Islamic Command thought impossible to overcome on their flank. Today Poland is probably the best ally that the USA has in Europe.
Pardon my pontification as my Polish family fought with the Allies, for the Allies and within the Home Army throughout WW2.
Poland was only to happy to get a piece of Czechoslovakia when that country was parted out.
Well, it's hard to say exactly what would have happened if Britain had stood back and allowed Hitler free rein, of course. What we can say is what Hitler would have wanted in that case. His Stufenplan called for alliances with Britain and Italy; the joint conquest of France and eastern Europe; then the destruction of Russia and the wholesale replacement of its population with the Volk. On the way he would have destroyed the Jewish and Slavic population of Europe. So much was clear already from Mein Kampf. It is, I suggest, incumbent on Buchanan, and his reviewers, to say whether they think this is indeed what would have happened, and if so, why if would have been preferable to the way history actually panned out.
Absolutely would have been preferable. The West is a dying civilization, slowly being conquered by the third world. We are weak and pathetic and the same forces Hitler fought in WW2 now control the West today whom are sacrificing our civilization and culture, which took millennia to create, on the alter of idealism, progressivism, and communism. I reject all of it. Ethnic conflicts are once again on the horizon and people need to realize that and not put the generations after us in danger.
If you really think that the triumph of Nazism across Europe would be preferable to where we are today, then there is so little in common between us that further discussion is a waste of time.
That isn't what would have happened and your pov is basically coloured by propaganda.
Fascism was a reactionary response to Bolshevism. It didn't emerge from the ether. Prior to any hostilities in WW2, the Bolsheviks had killed upwards of 10 million of their own people. Marxism was taking over the world. If the NSDAP hadn't taken Germany the Marxists likely would have. Stalin was an aggressor. He was fighting Japan in August of 1939. He invaded 14 countries which Churchill, Lebrun and Roosevelt didn't seem to be bothered by. Which suggests this fear of totalitarianism was not the reason for the Allies to go to war. (America entered the war late for a reason and the new deal was a political revolution that changed America just as Fascism and Communism were revolutions).
Hitler understood that the age of super powers was beginning and for Europe to survive they had to become a Super power - he said so in speeches. They were a bulwark against communism which would have taken all of Europe. The Wehrmacht and SS were made up of Europeans from every European Nation including 50,000 Jews. Erhard Milch was a Field Marshall but you never hear about that or about Rudolph Hess because it changes the whole narrative. You seem to care greatly for the Slavs and Jews but not the outcome with regards to Europe. Look at Germany at the end of the war - how were they treated by the Soviets? Look at Europe today, are they in a good place? Are they Sovereign? The ideology that won the war is the same that is consigning Europe to ruin today. And the same that is killing Ukraine today.
As I said, it's impossible to say what would have happened. What I described was what Hitler explicitly said he wanted, and what he had already started in 1940. As to whether the outcome of WW2 as it actually happened, well, it was about as good as anyone good have hoped for at the time. We didn't have a nuclear war, for example. Saying that Europe isn't in great shape now does not mean that the alternatives would have been better: I think it's pretty likely they would have been a lot worse.
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
As a follow-up, by the way, I wonder what followers of Buchanan’s preferred alternative make of the probability that Germany would have had the atom bomb (Uranverein) within a few years in the event of peace with Britain. Curiously, so would Britain (Tube Alloys). We might have had a cold war style standoff in Europe: or more likely prolific use of nuclear weapons by Germany in Russia. I expect Buchanan would have blamed Churchill for that too …
Poland's position was far from "unenviable", they made their bed quite deliberately during the WWI peace talks and were quite pleased to have England back their unending arrogance rather than humble themselves to their Versailles mistakes
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
One of the foundational tenets of National Socialism was total autarky. The Nazis were truly anti-trade and anti-capitalist -- the German nation was to be entirely self-sufficient. Thus, military expansion was a necessity, for agricultural land, minerals, and fossil fuels. The idea of "letting the Russians and Germans fight it out" assumes that both entities would have been worn out at the end, but that was not a given.
I suppose if the purpose of a book is to blame Churchill for everything, that the author has to make it appear that Churchill was actually primarily responsible for those things. It's pretty clear that Buchanan goes beyond the bounds of historical discourse in his attempts to do that. A few examples that spring to mind: the conduct of the First World War was not dictated by Churchill. Although as First Lord of the Admiralty for the first 16 months he was certainly responsible for the Royal Navy's enforcement of the economic blockade, it was not his decision. And his statement to the House in 1919 was made more than three years after he was removed from the Admiralty: he had just returned as Secretary for War. The Versailles Treaty was largely determined by Lloyd George, and Churchill was in fact arguing for less stringent terms. The treaty with Poland was unwise at best, in that it offered guarantees that Britain could not and did not actually deliver, but it was nothing to do with Churchill. Coming on to Churchill's taking over as PM in May 1940, by which time the economic blockade had already been put in place by Chamberlain, it is indeed the case that Churchill refused a peace treaty, at a time when Germany had apparently conquered much of Europe and was starting its own bombing ("the Blitz") of Britain, which of course included non-combatants: like it or not, it was a conventional mode of warfare in the 20th century on all sides. The concessions made by the Western allies to the Soviet Union were probably as good as anyone could have got negotiating from a position of social and economic exhaustion.
> Churchill made allies with a more wicked and more ambitious man and conceded him far more territory than Hitler had been eyeing.
Maybe to Stalin; no to the concession. When Churchill came to office in 1940, Germany and its allies occupied almost all of Europe and was eying up Russia to the Urals. When he left office, more than half of Europe was liberated: and the rest was not.
Your point about the Blitz is telling. You don't understand the facts around 1941 and who started bombing who and to what degree.
The Germans lacked strategic bombing capability throughout the whole war. That is a fact. The British civilians killed during the Blitz was a response to civilian deaths in Berlin not an initiative of the Germans. (Just like the fact the Germans didn't kill 400,000 British soldiers at Dunkirk). The deaths of British civilians by German dive bombers during the Blitz was muted (40,000 in 1941) compared to the bombing deaths of German civilians throughout the war (150,000 at Dresden alone).
Britain had lost the war and Churchill decided to surrender their empire to the Americans in a deal with the communists to fight Germany. Those are the facts. Europe was divided at the end of the war. Britain never recovered from the War. Today the ideological forces that drove the communists and Americans to victory has basically subsumed Britain to the point that it is turning into a third world country.
Churchill was driven by the Focus Group and was basically isolated in the conservative party initially in his desire for War. Men like Rudolph Hess sought peace while Churchill consigned millions of men and women and children to death and basically handed half of Europe over to Communism. He isn't a hero and if you read about his actual character he wasn't this magnanimous man, that was largely propaganda. He was an indebted drunkard obsessed with sending men to war like toy soldiers (he was frequently caught playing with toy soldiers as an adult). When groups like Antifa attack statues of Churchill today they don't realize that Churchill was Anti-Fa. That is who he was historically speaking.
There was a considerable amount of discussion of aerial warfare in the 1930s. It was popularly held that "the bomber will always get through" -- the general assumption of all sides was that bombing would be an integral part of warfare. The theory of Blitzkrieg (shock and awe is its modern version) included bombing, although the Luftwaffe operated strategically as much as tactically. So the invasion of Poland, for example, was accompnaied by bombing of Polish infrastructure. From 18-27 September 1939 Warsaw came under heavy bombing with numerous civilian casualties. The point here is that heavy bombing of enemy cities was a part of the prevailing doctrine of warfare: it wasn't something tha Churchill invented, and the notion that German use of bombing in Blitzkrieg was a response to Brtish bombing is nonsense.
I didn't say bombing during blitzkrieg I wrote bombing during the Blitz.
Your points are all weak and subjective. I don't think you know much about the subject matter frankly.
Discussing points of history is one thing: making personal remarks about other participants is another.
> What were Britain’s alternatives to an unnecessary war with Germany? Buchanan suggests a tantalizingly straightforward one: just leave Hitler to fight Stalin!
Britain tried to leave Hitler alone ultimately leading to the Munich treaty, which Hitler immediately broke. And than proceeded to apply with Stalin.
I am not certain that WW2 was unnecessary given the historic militancy of Germany and the traditional paranoia of Mother Russia with the lands between the two borders considered by each to a mere buffer zone.
The main issue in Europe today, which is drawing them inexorably towards the war they so obviously want, is the same issue it has been for 1000 years - where lies the border between Russia and Germany?
Torgau is too far West. Stalingrad is too far East. The rest is up for grabs.
Good root cause analysis…
The not-so-hidden subtext is not whether WW2 was unnecessary — on some views it had already started in 1937 with the Sino-Japanese War — but whether Britain and the USA has been on the right side. My reading of this review is that Buchanan hated Churchill and so blamed him for everything that went wrong about the war; and that one of those things Buchanan thought was wrong was not looking favourably on Hitler. It’s a little surprising how many people still agree with that second point.
From my perspective it is not a choosing between Stalin or Hitler but against both.
Hitler would not have only fought RUSSIA ONLY, mainland Europe would have been under the Nazi boot. There would be no France as we know it. It would be the Third Reich from the North African Desert, to the Arctic Circle. The Atlantic all the way to Rostov, and Saint Petersburg..
France wasn't under the Nazi boot. The Petain government was extremely popular. This idea of a reviled Vichy France is extremely overblown as propaganda. The French were the first to fight the Anglo Americans in Africa in Operation Torch and the last Waffen SS unit to fight the Soviets in Berlin was French. What does that tell you about French attitudes to the Nazis?
More Allied bombs were dropped on France than Japan.
A majority of the Waffen SS was non German. The National Socialist movement was European. The last defense of Europe against the Communists. And they were betrayed by their Anglo American brothers. Which resulted in a divided Europe that has never recovered and is now being destroyed by the American-Zionist political occupation to this day
> France wasn't under the Nazi boot
That's not correct. All of France was put under military occupation in 1942, and the Vichy regime became the merest puppet.
> More Allied bombs were dropped on France than Japan.
Something to do with the fact that the Allies invaded German-occupied France and fought their way across it, but Japan surrendered after the two atomic bombs?
It probably has to do with
a) France being closer to Allied Air Bases than Japan
b) The Allies engaging in mass saturation bombing with not much precaution in preventing civilian death. Sarkozy spoke about French civilian deaths by the Allies on the anniversary of DDay.
C) the idea the Vichy government was unpopular is propaganda. Petain was highly popular. French forces fought the Anglo Americans in Africa first in Operation Torch. The French Waffen SS was the last unit to fight the Soviets at the fall of Berlin.
A. True of course. The Allies were gearing up for the invasion in 1945 but fortunately it never had to happen.
B. That's what bombing looked like at that time.
C. Irrelevant (to this specific point). The southern part of France was not on the allied invasion route: and in 1942 Germany had already put the whole of it under military occupation anyway.
You skate on thin ice when you try to design alternative scenarios to what unfolded. The new situation has innumerable alternatives, not a predictable sequential path. It is human nature to speculate on the “ if only I had….” The theory of a German Russian conflict that exhausted and weakened both beyond recovery is a scenario that would create a thousand new roads untaken depending on the outcome one might hope for.
The fact remains that some very nasty characters were able to rally their nations to fight each other with unspeakable ferocity, tenacity and brutality. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt and an entire cast of secondary actors did what they thought was necessary for a host of good, bad or horrible reasons. Bad guys, better guys, good guys and some that history will judge and rejudge over time.
There is some truth to some of the facts about British war crimes etc. But what is left out is that Hitler repeatedly broke his promises over and over, and over. But we should trust him!
There is nothing said about Czechoslovakia, how Nazi party members living in Czechoslovakia began terroristic attacks, coordinated from the Nazi party in Germany. How Germany promised to only take the Sudetenland, based on falsified claims of massacres of Germans by the Czechs, and after Chamberlain’s blessing “oops! actually, even though we signed an agreement to take only the Sudetenland, we’re just going to take all of Czechoslovakia!”
So of course Poland should trust Hitler to take just Danzig and become allies with Poland! Who cares what he had written years earlier in Mein Kampf! And Hitler of course was a man of his word!
"who the Nazis were and why they did what they did"
"What Hitler did want was to build a Versailles-proof Reich, which required reclaiming the lands and peoples they had lost in the treaty as well as expanding to the east."
Yes, "expanding to the east" means the genocide, forced enslavement, and sterilization of the entire population of "the east," which includes Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia. You can read what Hitler thought about the Slavs in Mein Kampf, and what we know of the Nazi's Generalplan Ost. It meant hundreds of millions murdered directly, or sent on death marches from Europe to Siberia, and the remainder of the population forced into slave labor and sterilized so that these lands could be repopulated with a 100% German population.
Stalin managed to actually kill more than Hitler, but Hitler intended to kill more than Stalin (around 75% of the population of Poland and the Soviet Union) and would have done so had he not been stopped.
Even decent people write stupid books.
GREAT BOOK!!!
I’m writing about alternate World War II scenarios through “what if” stories, but these are historical analyses with real grounding in the facts—not just fiction—so feel free to check out the series.
Thanks!