More from Peter Hitchens on WW2

The 'Demetriou' Conundrum and other topics.

I don't think I've quoted Winston Churchill out of context at all, in the matter of the reoccupation of the Rhineland and his support for the League of Nations route (for all I know, still proceeding in some forgotten committee room in Geneva). My point is and remains that if even Churchill wasn't calling for an immediate military response to expel Germany from the reoccupied Rhineland (which would, I am sure, have led to the fall of Hitler had it happened, but alas, alack, it was never likely to happen) then it is absurd to pretend that such a thing was a realistic possibility. In which case we must look elsewhere for the decisive moment in the long procession towards war between Britain and Germany. In which case, where? I think a persuasive case has been made for the Polish guarantee. Britain had the freedom to choose what to do. It chose wrongly. But if this is the pivotal moment, then we went to war by mistake, for a cause already lost, rather than to save the world. And that makes nonsense of the Churchill myth, in which we were compelled by historic duty to stand, as it were, at the Pass of Thermopylae, against the Barbarians, and save civilisation by our exertions. As it happens, we were more or less mugged on a squalid street corner of history, having wandered foolishly with a full wallet into a bad part of town, and thinking we could talk our way out of trouble. We were lucky to escape with our lives.

The Churchill myth has arisen for several reasons. One, it is comforting (like the belief that we are good at football summed up in the moronic lumpen chant 'Two World Wars and One World Cup') especially when we consider what a diminished country we now are (this is specially well-known to those who actually know anything about the state, and the standing, of Britain in 1939).

Two, it fosters the weird belief that the Second World War was primarily a conflict over goodness between free, democratic Britain and wicked Nazi Germany, from which France feebly dropped out early, and which the USA joined late. (The USSR, which does not quite fit this narrative, tends not to be mentioned in this version, well summed up in another lumpen football chant directed at the French 'If it wasn't for the English you'd be Krauts!’) This is epitomised in the way in which we tend to refer to the 'The Germans' as 'The Nazis' (though we do not refer to the USSR as 'The Communists') and to speak of a 'war against Fascism'. The second of these is specially interesting. If we are being completely specific, then we were at war with Mussolini's Fascist Italy from late 1940 until 1943 - though we had for many years sought an alliance with him. But if we are using 'Fascist' as a sort of generic term for vaguely conservative militaristic dictatorships, then what do we call the regime of General Metaxas, our gallant Greek ally against Mussolini in 1940-41? And how do we view Spain's General Franco, and his canny refusal to join Hitler in war against us, which probably saved the Mediterranean for British sea power? I don't think 'war against Fascism' works. Nor does 'war against Nazism' work very well. It was Germany we were at war with, something we confirmed once we committed ourselves to the unconditional surrender of Germany, which meant we no longer cared who was in power in Berlin. We also, as I sometimes remind readers, did nothing to save the murdered Jews, not even attempting to bomb to the railway lines which took the victims to the death camps, and ignoring reports of those camps for years. Whereas we were quite willing to 'de-house' by bombing the German working class, who had voted till the end against Hitler and the Nazis.

Well, Britain and Germany were in that war, and fought each other, though Britain did not engage the main body of the Germans between 1940 and 1944 (and in both 1939-40 and 1944-45 did so as one army among allies. Some spoilsports might even say that the war in the West - even after D-Day and the Italian landings - was not the main theatre, which was the Russian Front from 1941 onwards).

And if we were so keen on making war on wickedness, then why did we have wicked Stalin as our principal ally on land?

Likewise, if we were so much against appeasement in 1939, why did we appease Stalin at Yalta, and act (as we had at Munich towards the Czechs) as the enforcers of a more powerful nation's desires?

Churchill told the Polish leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk on October 1944 at the lovely British Embassy in Moscow (with its startling view of the Kremlin across the river) that he, Mikolajczyk, must accept the new borders of his country, ordered by Stalin, or ‘You are out of business forever. The Russians will sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation.’ This is more or less what Chamberlain had told Eduard Benes at Munich, substituting Czechoslovakia for Poland and Hitler for Stalin. Stalin kindly saw Churchill off from Moscow airport, waving his handkerchief.

You will have to read Patrick Buchanan's uncomfortable book to read the awful, self-deluding remark made by Churchill after Yalta, in which he compared his Yalta conduct favourably with Neville Chamberlain's Munich behaviour (plainly conscious that others might make a different, less kind comparison).

Britain didn't go to war with Germany because it was a wicked regime. No more did the USA or the USSR, who also liked (and still like) to pretend that this was so. Hitler was the aggressor (or at least the one who declared war) on both of them, and it is interesting to wonder how war between them would have come about otherwise. Nor was our involvement in the war at any point really central to German concerns, except after we had been thrown out of France and wouldn't make peace. I have said before that, by the time we had reached that point, Churchill was absolutely right. A Hitlerian peace, following military defeat, would have been worse than the long slow decline into unimportance and weakness we chose instead.

Germany did not (as has been pointed out) attempt to build a global navy before the war, nor take over the French Fleet when this might have altered the balance of naval power. No country seriously intending to challenge Britain could have done so without making huge naval and air war preparations. Even in its then decayed state, the Royal Navy could hold the Channel provided the RAF did not crack. Nor did the Luftwaffe ever develop a bombing force, or a heavy bomber equivalent to the Lancaster squadrons which we turned on Germany. The Blitz was misery for those who endured it, and unforgiveably barbaric, likewise the V1s and V2s, but small by comparison with the destruction we rained on Germany (Not, as I have mentioned elsewhere, that this destruction was either militarily effective or morally justified). Nor did Germany, at the height of its military power, make serious preparations to invade Britain. 'Sealion' was not much of a plan, and was never pursued with any zeal. Surely, if conquest and utter defeat of Britain had been at the heart of Hitler's purpose, he would have had the ships and planes and the plans to achieve it. Compare this with the awesome (in the proper use of the word) assembly of men and materiel which Hitler directed against his real objective, the USSR.

So the question still arises. Why did we go to war with Germany when we did? And no clear answer comes back. We would have done far better to do as the USA did, and calculate our intervention to suit our own needs. Who knows what that might have led to? But it would be unlikely to have been worse than what we in fact faced - the loss of our empire and our power, plus a narrow escape from subjugation.

On that basis we should judge present and future calls to go to war against 'evil dictators’ (Nasser, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein), all of which have produced severe unintended consequences. And we might remember that our most successful military alliance of the 20th century was the original NATO (not the absurd body which now goes under that name), which defeated the USSR not by engaging in emotive wars over Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956 or Berlin again in 1961, or Prague in 1968, or Poland in 1981, or any other Soviet outrage. But by remaining so strong that Moscow dared not attack it, and was unable to split it.

We might also re-examine our own decayed, debauched national culture and realistically examine our standing with clear eyes, casting aside all sentimentality and self-delusion, and particularly rejecting the soppy falsehood known as 'The Special Relationship'. It does not exist.