The Phoney Victory

The World War II Illusion

Peter Hitchens

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786724281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Was World War II really the `Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations. In this book, Peter Hitchens deconstructs the many fables which have become associated with the narrative of the `Good War'. Whilst not criticising or doubting the need for war against Nazi Germany at some stage, Hitchens does query whether September 1939 was the right moment, or the independence of Poland the right issue. He points out that in the summer of 1939 Britain and France were wholly unprepared for a major European war and that this quickly became apparent in the conflict that ensued. He also rejects the retroactive claim that Britain went to war in 1939 to save the Jewish population of Europe. On the contrary, the beginning and intensification of war made it easier for Germany to begin the policy of mass murder in secret as well as closing most escape routes. In a provocative, but deeply-researched book, Hitchens questions the most common assumptions surrounding World War II, turning on its head the myth of Britain's role in a `Good War'.

‌Chapter One

‌The British Guarantee to Poland of March 1939

‘It is come to this, that the words of the Prime Minister of England, uttered in the Parliament of England, are to be regarded as mere idle menaces to be laughed at and despised by foreign powers?’

(General Jonathan Peel MP, on Palmerston’s refusal to fulfil his promise of aid to Denmark against Bismarck, 27 June 1864)

‘I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute.’

(Lord Palmerston, speaking at Tiverton after escaping censure for his betrayal of Denmark, 23 August 1864)

For this chapter I am indebted more than I can say to an undeservedly obscure work by Simon Newman, March 1939: The British Guarantee to Poland.1 The huge controversy and puzzle about this strange, dishonest and inexplicable guarantee hide in plain sight. It is amazing that so little is said about an action so evidently dangerous and misguided. Even Winston Churchill (who continued to believe that a war for Czechoslovakia in 1938 would have been wise) jeered at the guarantee even as he welcomed it. He wrote, in chapter 19 of The Gathering Storm,

And now, when every one of these aids and advantages has been squandered and thrown away, Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand, to guarantee the integrity of Poland – of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State. There was sense in fighting for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when the German Army could scarcely put half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, when the French with nearly sixty or seventy divisions could most certainly have rolled forward across the Rhine or into the Ruhr. But this had been judged unreasonable, rash, below the level of modern intellectual thought and morality. Yet now at last the two Western democracies declared themselves ready to stake their lives upon the territorial integrity of Poland. History, which, we are told, is mainly the record of the crimes, follies, and miseries of mankind, may be scoured and ransacked to find a parallel to this sudden and complete reversal of five or six years’ policy of easy-going placatory appeasement, and its transformation almost overnight into a readiness to accept an obviously imminent war on far worse conditions and on the greatest scale.2

He added: ‘Moreover, how could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? Only by declaring war upon Germany and attacking a stronger Western Wall and a more powerful German Army than those from which we had recoiled in September 1938.’

And then:

Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Here was the righteous cause deliberately and with a refinement of inverted artistry committed to mortal battle after its assets and advantages had been so improvidently squandered. Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.3

But did we have to fight at all, at this stage in the crisis? It depends very much on what is meant by ‘have to’. Our supposed obligation to Belgium in 1914 turns out to be at best elusive and at worst fictional. In the epigraph to this chapter I recall Lord Palmerston’s breach of his promise to defend Denmark against Prussian aggression in 1864, mainly on the grounds that it would endanger this country without helping Denmark. Far from being inscribed in the annals of shame, the episode, though certainly disgraceful, is almost entirely forgotten. Likewise, our supposed guarantee of Belgium, the pretext for war in 1914, was far from clear, and was neatly avoided by Gladstone during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, a piece of self-interested deviousness now unknown to almost every living Englishman. When we did honour this supposed commitment in 1914, more as a pretext for what the Cabinet had secretly decided to do than because it was a real obligation, it led swiftly to national bankruptcy and ultimately to national insignificance. As for Belgian neutrality, that country itself abandoned neutrality for much of the interwar period, unwisely returned to neutrality in 1936, and wished it had not done so in 1940. It is now a proud member of the far-from neutral NATO alliance, which maintains its headquarters on Belgian soil. So what was the point of going to war for that?

The Polish guarantee was in a long tradition of pledges either unwisely given or never meant to be kept. Or so it seems. And yet there is a strong argument for the belief that it did have a purpose, even though its aim was certainly not to save Poland.

A. J. P. Taylor, in his Origins of the Second World War, traces Britain’s seemingly involuntary tumble into war a little further back than our 1939 pledge to come to the aid of Warsaw. He begins in 1938. The Munich Agreement of that year followed a curious backwards ballet in which Britain and France retreated from commitments to the Czech state. The two countries cynically used each other’s different doubts as excuses for failing to fight for Prague. France did so out of a sour, weary and reluctant realism. It could not face war, but was still sure it was wrong to give in. Britain did so out of a belief, real or imagined, that redrawing the Czechoslovak borders was a worthy aim in itself.

Very well then, argued the French premier, Édouard Daladier; in this case Britain will not object to guaranteeing the survival of Czechoslovakia, once it is shorn of its German-populated borderlands.

Taylor’s commentary on this is as scathing as Churchill’s on the Polish guarantee. Not that he was kind to the Polish promise either, saying:

The assurance was unconditional: the Poles alone were to judge whether it should be called upon. The British could no longer press for concessions over Danzig; equally they could no longer urge Poland to cooperate with Soviet Russia […] from this moment peace rested on the assumption that Hitler and Stalin would be more sensible and cautious than Chamberlain had been – that Hitler would continue to accept conditions at Danzig which most Englishmen had long regarded as intolerable, and that Stalin would be ready to cooperate on terms of manifest inequality.4

Of the Czech pledge, cozened out of London by Paris, Taylor wrote,

In this casual way, the British government, which had steadily refused to extend their commitments east of the Rhine and had professed themselves unable to help Czechoslovakia when she was strong, now underwrote Czechoslovakia when she was weak and, what was more, implicitly underwrote the existing territorial order throughout eastern Europe.5

This order was, of course, about to collapse in the most spectacular way, mainly because the Munich pact had made it inevitable that it would do so. Taylor says Britain never expected to be called upon to keep its promise. But he adds:

Daladier had built better than he knew. He had committed Great Britain to opposing Hitler’s advance in the east; and six months later the commitment came home to roost. At about 7.30 p.m. on the night of 18 September 1938 Daladier gave Great Britain the decisive, though delayed, push which landed her in the Second World War.6

Well, almost. Britain’s initial response to Hitler’s seizure of Prague and the Czech lands was complacent and mild – which is not surprising given that this seizure was an inevitable, predictable consequence of the Munich settlement. Czecho-Slovakia (it had gained the hyphen after Munich) was by March 1939 no more than a rump state whose constituent parts were hostile to each other. It was not viable, and could never have lasted long. The Czech president Hácha’s nightmare journey to Berlin at this point, much recorded in the standard histories, was at Hácha’s request, not Hitler’s. He knew that his country was breaking up. This territory was coveted by stronger neighbours – including Poland and Hungary – and unable to defend itself. Slovakia was keen to escape the rule of Prague, as it had been before and would be again. But the Prague takeover then became the pretext for the Polish guarantee. And, by giving Poland the power to take us to war alongside it whenever it chose, Britain made that war inevitable. Did its supposedly peace-loving appeasing leaders in fact mean to achieve precisely that aim?

Simon Newman’s account suggests that, during those six months between March and September 1939, there were forces in British diplomacy that actively sought a policy of war with Germany at all costs, and at last succeeded in getting one on the pretext of Poland. Their aims were idealist and emotional rather than nationalist or strategic. They needed to win popular support for a war policy. But they were not the aims claimed by Prince Charles almost 80 years later, of overthrowing oppression and saving the Jews of Europe. It is fascinating to note that the complete unmasking of Nazi hatred of the Jews – during the Kristallnacht pogroms of 9 and 10 November 1938 – do not feature anywhere in explanations of British, French or American changes of foreign policy towards Germany. Germany still had many active and brave foreign reporters on its territory at the time. The homicidal racial savagery of these events – and the lawless complicity of the authorities – were beyond doubt. What any observant person had known for years was now on plain, shameless display to all. But war was not declared, and diplomatic relations were not broken off. Our national policies at the time were not about disapproval of the internal doings of other countries. They were about preserving the standing and reputation of Britain as a Great Power.

There were, it is true, discussions about adopting an idealist foreign policy, but this was much more to do with national status and cajoling the USA into an alliance than it was to do with the plight of the Jews. Indeed, at this very moment, Britain was doing all it could to reduce Jewish immigration to its Palestine colony or ‘Mandate’, after years of anti-Jewish protests and anti-Jewish violence by the Arab population (very probably encouraged by outside influences). By following this policy Britain was actively obstructing the largest single escape route open to European Jews who wished to flee Nazi persecution, violence and state-sponsored theft. The 1917 policy of creating a ‘national home’ for the Jews in the Mandate had been more or less checkmated by Arabists in the Foreign and Colonial Services, who saw Arab friendship as the best way of securing the (supposedly endangered) approaches to the Suez Canal. This futile aim – for the Canal was useless throughout the war – was itself a by-product of Britain’s then obsession with the growth of Italian naval and military power in the region. And that was in turn the result of our curious and idealistic decision, worthless in practice to the Abyssinians, to abandon the Hoare–Laval agreement in 1935. This secret pact, now much derided, sought to avoid a dangerous confrontation between the League of Nations and Mussolini, who had invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). As A. J. P. Taylor says, the agreement was not an outrageous arrangement by the standards of the time, and was in fact a compromise on the lines of those already made by the League over Corfu and Manchuria. It was influenced by Britain’s then naval weakness in the Mediterranean, and Italy’s growing strength there. It is hard to recall now that Britain was for some time gravely worried by Italy’s naval challenge to its Mediterranean supremacy. Had the Hoare–Laval Pact’s contents not been leaked to the French press, it might well have passed more or less unnoticed. As it was, it gave a great opportunity to those who believed in what would nowadays be called an ‘ethical foreign policy’ to demand a hostile stance against the aggressi...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction • The Myth as I Loved it: ‘The Navy’s Here!’
• Chapter One • The British Guarantee to Poland of March 1939
• Chapter Two • Plucky Little Poland
• Chapter Three • Appeasement and Pacifism from Fulham to Bridgwater, or ‘The Left Has Its Cake and Eats It’
• Chapter Four • The War We Couldn’t Afford
• Chapter Five • America First
• Chapter Six • The Invasion that Never Was
• Chapter Seven • In Peril on the Sea
• Chapter Eight • Gomorrah
• Chapter Nine • Orderly and Humane
• Conclusion • From Phoney War to Phoney Victory
• Notes
• Select Bibliography