Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War

Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War

Author	Patrick J. Buchanan
Language	English
Subject	Winston Churchill
Publisher	Crown
Publication date	2008
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Pages	544
ISBN	978-0-307-40515-9

Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is a book by Patrick J. Buchanan, published in May 2008. Buchanan argues that both World War I and World War II were unnecessary and that the British Empire’s decision to join the war had a globally catastrophic effect. A stated purpose of the book is to challenge what Buchanan describes as a "Churchill cult" among the America's elite. Buchanan's analysis focuses on the role of Churchill in Britain's decisions to enter wars against Germany in 1914 and 1939.

Synopsis

Buchanan argues that the United Kingdom's decision to fight Germany in both world wars was a mistake that had disastrous consequences for the world.

World War I

Buchanan presents a revisionist perspective on Anglo-German relations before 1914. He argues that Britain's relations with Germany were not inherently hostile until the expansion of the Imperial German Navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, which Britain viewed as a strategic threat. Buchanan maintains this prompted Britain to redeploy the Royal Navy to European waters and solidify alliances with France and Russia—a policy he contends inadvertently drew Britain into World War I.

Key Controversial Claims

1. The Role of British Leadership
   • Buchanan places significant blame on Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, accusing him of fostering "Germanophobia" and zealously pursuing the Entente Cordiale with France, which he argues poisoned Anglo-German diplomacy.
   • He argues Britain could have de-escalated the naval arms race in 1912 by pledging neutrality in a Franco-German conflict—a missed opportunity for peace.
2. Myth of Prussian Militarism
   • Buchanan dismisses "Prussian militarism" as a British political construct, asserting Germany was "the least militaristic" European power before 1914.
   • He highlights Emperor Wilhelm II’s avoidance of war as evidence of German restraint, contrasting it with Churchill’s participation in multiple conflicts by 1914.
3. July 1914 Crisis
   • Buchanan absolves Germany of primary blame for the war’s outbreak, endorsing the German claim that Russian mobilization on July 31 forced their hand.
   • He accuses Churchill and Grey of secretly committing Britain to defend France without parliamentary or cabinet approval, thereby ensuring British entry into the war.

Buchanan characterizes the British "hunger blockade" of Germany in World War I as "criminal". He supports the argument of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in his 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace that the reparations imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles were "impossible" to pay.

World War II

Buchanan hypothesizes that World War II could have been avoided if the Treaty of Versailles had not been so harsh toward Germany. Buchanan views the treaty as unjust toward Germany and argues that German efforts to revise it were moral and just. He contends that the humiliation at Versailles fostered German nationalistic and ultimately contributed to the rise of Hitler. Buchanan argues that Britain, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia all indirectly assisted Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

According to Buchanan, Weimar-era German leaders such as Gustav Stresemann, Heinrich Brüning, and Friedrich Ebert were responsible statesmen working to revise Versailles peacefully, but they were undermined by Britain and France's inability and unwillingness to cooperate. Buchanan describes the Hitler's foreign policy program as more moderate than the war aims authorized by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in the Septemberprogramm in World War I. Buchanan contends that Hitler was interested in expanding into only Eastern Europe and did not seek territory in Western Europe or Africa. Furthermore, Buchanan argues that once Hitler came to power in 1933, his foreign policy was influenced by pragmatism rather than being governed strictly by Nazi ideology.

Buchanan asserts that Hitler regarded the Franco-Soviet Pact as an aggressive move directed at Germany that violated the Locarno Treaties, arguing that Hitler had a strong case. He states that Hitler used the claim of the violation of Locarno as a diplomatic weapon for which the French and British had no effective response. Buchanan argues that Hitler's public demands on Poland in 1938 and 1939—namely the return of the Free City of Danzig to the Reich, "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor, and Poland's adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact—represented a genuine attempt to build an anti-Soviet German-Polish alliance, particularly since Buchanan argues that Germany and Poland shared a common enemy in the Soviet Union. Buchanan claims that Hitler sought Poland as an ally against the Soviet Union, not as an enemy.

Buchanan agrees with the British historian E. H. Carr, who stated in April 1939 regarding the Polish "guarantee": "The use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo may be morally more culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it." Buchanan maintains that Hitler did not want a war with Britain and that Britain should not have declared war in 1939 on an Anglophile Hitler who, he claims, wanted to ally the Reich with Britain against their common enemy, the Soviet Union. Buchanan calls the Morgenthau Plan of 1944 a genocidal plan for the destruction of Germany promoted by Henry Morgenthau and his deputy, Harry Dexter White, which he views as a way of ensuring Soviet domination of Europe, and criticizes Churchill for accepting it.

Buchanan suggests that the scale of the Holocaust was influenced by Hitler's invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union which brought more European Jews under Nazi control. He argues that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have limited the extent of the atrocities. Buchanan criticizes Western betrayal, claiming that Churchill and Roosevelt conceded Eastern Europe to Soviet influence during the Tehran and Yalta Conference.

Buchanan also writes that the United States should have stayed out of World War II events. However, he contends that because the United States insisted that the United Kingdom sever the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1921, Japan ultimately aligned itself with the Axis and later attacked Pearl Harbor. Buchanan blames Churchill for insisting the British Cabinet yield to pressure to end the alliance with Japan in 1921.

Buchanan concludes his book with a critique of former President George W. Bush, arguing that just as Churchill led the British Empire to ruin by engaging in unnecessary wars with Germany, Bush led the United States to ruin by following Churchill's example in involving the United States in an unnecessary Iraq, extending security guarantees to numerous nations where the United States lacks vital interests, and leaving the country with insufficient resources to fulfill its commitments. Finally, Buchanan highlights the symbolism of Bush placing a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office as evidence that Bush's neoconservative foreign policy was influenced by Churchill.

Reviews

The book debuted at sixteenth on the New York Times best-seller list in its first week.

The book has received mixed to mostly negative reviews.

The Canadian journalist Eric Margolis in the Toronto Sun described Buchanan's study as a "powerful new book." Margolis wrote that neither Britain nor the United States should have fought in World War II and that it was misguided for millions to die to prevent the ethnically 90% German Free City of Danzig from rejoining Germany. Margolis accepted Buchanan's conclusion that the British "guarantee" of Poland in March 1939 was the greatest geopolitical blunder of the twentieth century.

Jonathan S. Tobin in The Jerusalem Post gave Buchanan's book a negative review and suggested the author is antisemitic and represents a "malevolent" form of appeasement. The American writer Adam Kirsch, in The New York Sun, criticized Buchanan for using no primary sources and for suggesting a conspiracy among historians to hide the truth about the two world wars. Kirsch remarked that if such a conspiracy existed, Buchanan would not need only secondary sources to support his arguments. He accused Buchanan of hypocrisy for denouncing Churchill as a racist opposed to non-white immigration to Britain while advocating similar policies in the United States. He wrote that Buchanan's apocalyptic language about the West's decline owed more to Oswald Spengler than to American conservatives. He also argued that Buchanan's heavy reliance on Correlli Barnett's 1972 book The Collapse of British Power reflects that both Buchanan and Barnett are conservatives dissatisfied with historical outcomes, preferring to focus on how history might have been better if Britain had not fought in the world wars or the United States and Britain in the Iraq.

In a review, the American journalist David Bahnsen called Buchanan's book an "anti-Semitic piece of garbage" and accused Buchanan of uniquely positing the Holocaust as an understandable, though excessive, response to the British "guarantee" of Poland in 1939.

The British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, reviewing the book in The New York Review of Books, contended that Buchanan had grossly exaggerated the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles, noting that most historians believe Germany started World War I. Wheatcroft also argued that Buchanan's criticism of British "area bombing" in World War II neglects the limited options available to Churchill in 1940. Wheatcroft wrote that while Buchanan cited right-wing British historians like Alan Clark, Maurice Cowling, and John Charmley for their views that Britain should not have fought Germany or should have made peace in 1940, he ignored their broader point that they viewed the United States, rather than Germany, as the main rival to the British Empire.

The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs, in a review in The American Conservative, compared Buchanan to David Irving, arguing that the only difference was that Irving used lies while Buchanan used half-truths. Lukacs commented that Buchanan selectively cites the left-wing British historian A.J.P. Taylor only when it supports his arguments. Lukacs objected to Buchanan's argument that Britain should have allowed Germany to conquer Eastern Europe, stating that Buchanan ignores the brutality of Nazi rule in that region during World War II. Finally, Lukacs claimed that Buchanan has often been accused of Anglophobia and felt that Buchanan's lament for the British Empire was insincere. Lukacs concluded that Buchanan's book was not a work of history but a thinly veiled allegory for the modern United States, with Britain representing the U.S. and Germany, Japan, and Italy standing in for modern Islam, China, and Russia at various points.

The British and American writer Christopher Hitchens, reviewing the book in Newsweek, claimed that Buchanan ignored the aggression of Imperial Germany, noting that Wilhelm II encouraged Muslims to wage jihad against Western colonial powers during World War I, oversaw the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa, and supported the Young Turks government during the Armenian genocide. Hitchens argued that Imperial Germany was dominated by a "militaristic ruling caste" of officers and Junkers who recklessly sought conflict, and that Buchanan's assertion of Germany being "encircled" before World War I was unfounded.

See also

• John Charmley
• The Death of the West
• Hitler's War

Sources

• Buchanan, Patrick 'Pat' Joseph (May 27, 2008), Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, New York: Crown, ISBN 978-0-307-40515-9.

External links

• Hanson, Victor Davis; Hitchens, Christopher (July 9, 2008), Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War, Uncommon Knowledge, Fora TV, archived from the original on March 28, 2010, retrieved October 30, 2009.
• "Nazis 'offered to leave western Europe in exchange for free hand to attack USSR'". The Daily Telegraph. London,
• "Churchill's War" by David Irving – lecture on YouTube