Second thoughtsWas World War II, and the unparalleled misery it caused, as inevitable as many historians claim?
ROY WILLIAMS reviews: "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation" By Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster, 566pp, $34.95
"Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World" By Patrick J. Buchanan Crown Publishers, 518pp, $53 (HB)
"Buchanan and Baker advance the same core thesis: World War II was avoidable, and should have been avoided"WORLD War II had to be fought, according to conventional wisdom. Nazi Germany was bent on world domination and the extermination of the Jews; imperial Japan had designs on the Asia-Pacific. Western appeasement throughout the 1930s almost proved disastrous but, eventually, braver statesmen prevailed and the free world was preserved. Winston Churchill in particular has been idolised for his wartime leadership.
These notions remain deeply embedded in Western consciousness. Yet two generations of revisionist historians, from A. J. P. Taylor to Niall Ferguson, have shown the truth to be much murkier. Two recent books make the revisionist case with unusual passion, especially regarding Churchill's exalted status, and Graham Freudenberg's just-published Churchill and Australia has fuelled the fire.
These matters are not academic. The neoconservatives who hijacked George W. Bush's presidency belong to a modern Churchill cult. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for years afterwards, they routinely smeared their critics as appeasers of Saddam Hussein in particular and of terrorists generally. This line was echoed by John Howard and Alexander Downer.
Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker's masterpiece, would be despised by the neocons. Indeed, the book has had a mixed reception. And no wonder: Baker dedicates it to "the memory of American and British pacifists [who] tried to stop the war from happening". He concentrates on the period from 1933, when the Nazis won power in Germany, to the end of 1941, when the US entered the conflict The book is a collection of vignettes, chronologically arranged Baker, better known as a distinguished novelist, explains in the afterword that he relied primarily on newspaper articles, diaries, memos, memoirs and public praclamations, "each tied as much as possible to a par ticular date".
Hovering throughout is the spectre of the Holocaust, to which the title alludes. Here are three examples of Baker's style:
George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, gave his first speech in the House of Lords. It wasJuly 27,1938. "I cannot understand how our kinsmen of the German race can lower themselves to such a level of dishonour and cowardice as to attack a defenceless people in the way that the National Socialists have attacked the non-Aryans."
Heinrich Himmler wrote a memo describing his plans for alien populations. The Jews would go to a colony in Africa or elsewhere, he wrote. "However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible." Hitler read Himmler's memo and, according to Himm]er, he found it "good and correct". It was May 28, 1940. "With respect to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer has decided to make a clean sweep," Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. "The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence." It was December 12, 1941.
The cumulative effect of hundreds of such snippets is extraordinarily powerful. Patrick Buchanan's
The Unnecessary War is a more conventional work of history. Buchanan is no pacifist. Once a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, he was a competitive candidate in the Republican Party's presidential primaries in 1992 and 1996. As well as being a fine wordsmith, Buchanan is an old-fashioned American conservative: ornery, isolationist and proud of it.
Despite their radically different philosophies, Buchanan and Baker advance the same core thesis: World War II was avoidable, and should have been avoided The horrors tha war wrought are incontestable. More than 10 million Allied servicemen died and nearly six million from the Axis powers. Bombing of cities and towns became a routine strategy, devastating large tracts of Europe and coastal Japan. The Holocaust was perpetrated and nuclear weapons were invented and used. By 1945, total civilian deaths exceeded 40 million.
There were longer-term consequences as well: the final disintegration of the British Empire, the entrenchment of Joseph Stalin's tyranny in the Soviet Union, 40 years of brutal communist rule in eastern Europe and in China, the Cold War and the modern tragedy of Vietnam.
How and why did the world's 20th-century leaders allow all this to happen? Cold War statesman George F. Kennan once wrote: "All lines of inquiry lead back to World War I" Buchanan's early chapters are devoted to the origins of that war and its aftermath. Baker deals with those subjects only briefly, at least in any explicit way, but there is much in his book that casts a retrospective light.
It is notorious that the terms imposed by the Allies on Germany in June 1919 were fiercely punitive. Certainly, Germany was left ravaged and embittered. Yet its high command had surrendered in November 1918 on the basis that the peace would be governed by US president Woodrow Wilson's grand-sounding "Fourteen Points". The overriding principle was supposed to be this: "Unless justice be done to others, it will not be done to us."
Justice was denied. No German representatives were invited to the conference at Versailles and the "big three" Allied leaders -- Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau -- lacked the character to resist populist howls for revenge. Lloyd-George had inflamed passions at the "khaki election" of December 1918 and he was bound to bring home, in Buchanan's words. "the peace of vengeance that British voters demanded".
Worst, for eight months after the armistice, Britain maintained a naval blockade of the Continent. This caused, and was intended to cause, widespread starvation in Germany. Hundreds of thousands died, mostly women and children. The terms to which Germany eventually acceded included a reparations bill of 32 billion gold marks, a debt so onerous that it crippled the economy in the '20s "To repair a broken window now costs more than the whole house would have cost before the inflation," lamented Stefan Zweig, a young Viennese writer who is quoted several times in Human Smoke.
The German people's confidence in moderate politicians steadily waned. Adolf Hitler's emergent National Socialist Party exploited that discontent and appealed to injured national pride. At Versailles the Allies had confiscated Germany's navy and merchant fleet. They had also revoked the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, agreed between Germany and Russia in March 1918. Germany had been victorious on the eastern front, but was stripped of its hard-won gains. In all, Buchanan estimates, it lost one-tenth of its peoples, one-eighth of its territory and all of its overseas colonies. Further, Germany was required to accept sole blame for causing the war. This, the now-infamous "war guilt clause", provoked a furious initial response from German foreign minister Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau: "Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie. We are far from declining any responsibility but we deny that Germany and its people were alone guilty."
There are historians, such as best-selling Briton Andrew Roberts, who still defend the Treaty of Versailles and-or World War I in general. They assert that Wilhelm II was an evil megalomaniac, that Germany, enslaved to a spirit of Prussian militariam, planned to conquer Europe, if not the world; and that liberal demovracy itself was at stake. Britain had no choice, they say, but to go to the rescue of Belgium when German troops entered its territory in late Julv 1914.
Yet as Buchanan and others have cogently demonstrated, the truth is more nuanced. Granted, the Kaiser was a vain and impulsive man, guilty during his reign of several gross diplomatic blunders. But in 1913 he acceded to Britain's demand that Germany limit the size of its navy to 60 per cent of the British fleet and, in the critical month of August 1914, he tried to avert a full-scale European war.
Germany, however, was facing two grave problems in 1914, one born of strength and the other of weakness. The German empire's industrial output had grown enormously, to the dismay of powerful vested interests in Britain. Meanwhile, Germany's geostrategic position in Europe had deteriorated. Britain, France and Russia, so frequently at loggerheads during the 19th century. were bound by various treaties and understandings to support each other militarily. Britain also had achieved rapprochement with Japan and the US.
Simon Schama has argued that there was another key factor at play: the turbulent political situation in Britain. Herbert Asquith's reformist Liberal government was barely re-elected in 1910 and by 1913 its position was even shakier The Liberals dreaded the thought of another Tory administration but were plagued by internal divisions. Lloyd-George - brilliant, charismatic and ambitious - was chancellor of the exchequer. Churchill - equally ambitious but bellicose, erratic and distrusted by his colleagues (he had defected from the Tories in 1904) - was first lord of the Admiralty.
By mid-1914, despite mobilisations of troops on the Continent, full-scale war was not inevitable. Buchanan shows that, until the fateful weekend of August 1-2, 1914, a clear majority of Asquith's cabinet (12 of 18) opposed any British involvement. A week earlier. Asquith had written: "There seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators."
What changed? Buchanan contends that Churchill and Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, got to the waverers in cabinet. They saw a chance to crush Germany and seized on an obscure 1839 treaty under which Britain was entitled (but not compelled) to aid Belgium in the event of a violation of its neutrality. With support from Bonar Law's Tories and jingoists in the tabloid press, they invoked British honour. Crucially, they swayed Lloyd-George. His instincts were against aggression but he had opposed the Boer War and was scared of being tagged as weak. Asquith, too, caved.
It was a capitulation to what Zweig perceptively called "false heroism". In 1915, Zweig lamented the mindset "that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military". Buchanan observes:
Churchill was exhilarated. Six months later, after the first Battle of Ypres, with tens of thousands of British soldiers in their graves, he would say "I am so happy I cannot help it --I enjoy every second "
In the event, Churchill had neither a successful nor an honourable war. His ill-considered plan to take the Dardanelles in 1915 was a disastrous failure, for which the Anzacs paid dearly at Gallipoli, and he played a central and shameful role in the naval blockade of 1918-19. The alienation of Germany was but one of several momentous consequences of World War I. Buchanan highlights the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the emergence of the US as a fully-fledged world power.
But, above all else, according to historian N. K. Meaney: "The war had reinforced and extended the appeal and influence of nationalism. The right of the state in the name of the nation to demand absolute obedience and total sacrifice had been widely accepted." Hitler exploited these sentiments with singular cunning. But, as Buchanan argues persuasively, Hitler's ambitions for Germany were limited. He could have tolerated the retention of Alsace-Lorraine by France; until 1939 he confined his activities in western Europe to building defensive fortifications up and down the Rhineland. He had no desire to fight Britain, which he respected, let alone the US. His greatest fear was another war on two fronts.
Hitler dreamed of
Lebensraum for Germany. Famously, he "turned his gaze to the east", to the lands and peoples of Austria. Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states and Poland and beyond to the Ukraine. Some of this territory was historically and culturally German; portions of it had been carved up by the Allies at Versailles. Hitler wanted a contiguous, self-sufficient empire that would be safe from blockade and starvation. The more thoughtful Western leaders, notably British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, understood that Germany harboured some well justified grievances; and, across Europe, nightmarish memories of 1914-18 still haunted millions.
How, then, did World War II come about? Buchanan and Baker agree on one thing: appeasement was not the main problem. Buchanan argues convincingly, on strictly pragmatic grounds, that Britain was right not to go to war in February 1938 in protest against the Anschluss. So, too, seven months later, at the Munich conference, when Chamberlain recognised Germany's retaking of the Sudetenland. Most of the population there was sympathetic to Germany, as was the vast majority in Austria; and, in any case, Britain was not militarily capable of defending their borders.
In my opinion, most of the blunders by the Allies in the '20s and '30s involved not craven timidity but hypocrisy or over-aggression, or plain ineptitude. It is not surprising that entreaties from the pacifist movement were ignored. (These were made eloquently and often by Mohandas Gandhi, Zweig and others, and are documented in Human Smoke.) It is harder to fathom the dismal failure of realpolitik.
Buchanan identifies many strategic missteps, not least Britain's dealings with Italy, which were clumsy and arrogant. Italy had fought with the Allies in World War I, losing 460,000 men; and, for all his odious faults, Benito Mussolini was quick to recognise the menace posed by Nazi methods and ideology. But by 1936 he felt compelled to "cast his lot with the Hitler he loathed".
Britain's two most calamitous errors stemmed from feckless bravado. The first was the war guarantee given to Poland on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain's panicky response to Hitler's occupation earlier that month of the rest of Czechoslovakia. (This was a breach by Hitler of the Munich agreement but, again, most of the local people empathised with Germany.) As for Poland, it was militarily indefensible, and Germany's claim on the port city of Danzig was especially strong. Chamberlain intended the Poland guarantee to deter Hitler, and to an extent it did, but it also emboldened the Polish government to reject German offers "widely recognised as mild".
In late August 1939 Hitler concluded an expedient non-aggression pact with Stalin, and German troops entered Poland on September 1. Britain still had a choice. It was powerless to help Poland by military means and Hitler had ordered his generals to make no aggressive moves in the west. War in the East between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was now likely in the short to medium term, and if it had ensued must have weakened both regimes substantially. Buchanan argues that Britain would have been wiser to denounce Hitler outright and await events (and, with France, rearm in the meantime).
Who knows what would have happened? Could it have been worse than what did happen? On September 2, 1939 speaking in the House of Commons, Chamberlain rediscovered his pacifist convictions and proposed a peace conference. Predictably, this appalled Churchill and most of the Tory backbench, as well as many in the Labour Opposition. Later that night the cabinet voted for war and, the next day, Chamberlain dolefully declared it.
Yet again in a time of crisis, in the words of military historian Robert Cowley, "politicians seemed more afraid of what would happen to them if they didn't go to war than if they did". Baker quotes the French prime minister in 1940, the much-maligned Philippe Petain:
"It is easy, but also stupid, to talk of fighting to the last man, " Petain said, with tears in his eyes. It is also criminal in view of our losses in the last war."
But what of the elephant in the room? All other considerations aside, were the Allies honour-bound to fight the war to "save the Jews"? That is a widely held belief but it is mistaken. Hitler did not fight World War II to bring about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a direct and foreseen consequence of Germany being simultaneously at war with Britain and the US, as well as Stalin's Russia. The Jewish population of Germany in the '30s was about 450,000. The Nazis wanted their mass deportation, either by resettlement (various destinations were proposed. including Palestine, Madagascar. even Alaska) or by immrgratiun to friendly countries. As the SS's atrocities worsened, more and more Jews in Germany wished desperately to escape.
Kristallnacht (November 9-10 1938) was a watershed.
To the world's shame, no nations and few citizens responded. There were noble exceptions: Baker highlights the magnificent efforts of the Quakers, of former US president Herbert Hoover and of certain churchmen. But, in the main, indifference and bigotry prevailed. Baker shows how US president Franklin Roosevelt stymied all attempts to increase America's tiny quota of Jewish immigrants.
Once hostilities broke out, the Jews' position became yet more perilous, both in Germany and the occupied territories in the east, especially Poland. Emigration from Germany ceased altogether in October 1941 and two months later, following Pearl Harbor, the US entered the war. By early 1942 the Nazi high command realised that Germany was doomed. Then, and only then. was the final solution put into effect in all its systemic hideousness.
Where was Churchill in all this? He defected back to the Tories in 1921 and served a patchy stint as chancellor of the exchequer from 1924 to 1929. Then his career languished. It is a tenet of the Churchill cult that during the '30s he was one of the few voices of courage and good judgment. This is nonsense. Baker reminds us that Churchill's tactical acumen was poor and that, on several occasions, he expressed fulsome admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. Openly anti-Semitic Nazi sympathisers (such as American aviator Charles Lindbergh) at least urged peace.
By early 1938 Churchill was agitating for war, notwithstanding Britain's military unpreparedness, and he was elated when war came ("the glory of Old England thrilled my being"). After succeeding Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940, he vetoed any idea of peace negotiations with Hitler, interned all "enemy aliens and suspect persons" in England (mostly Jewish refugees) and ordered another starvation blockade of the Continent (including occupied France).
For five years he directed Britain's war effort with determined savagery and child-like relish, as is well documented in Freudenberg's fine book. In July 1945, soon after the war ended in Europe, Britain held a general election. Churchill expected a grateful nation to return him and the Tories to power; instead, Clement Attlee's Labour Party won in a landslide. The beleaguered British people were fond of Churchill but at another level had seen through him. His career had borne out A. G Gardiner's prophetic warning in 1913: "Churchill will write his name in history; take care that he does not write it in blood."
Of course, for as long as World War II was raging, it was essential that the Allies prevailed. But should the war have been fought at all? Freudenberg emphatically says yes: Churchill was wrong about many things, but his decision in May 1940 to fight the Nazis "is his eternal greatness". Buchanan and Baker contend otherwise, and they persuade me. Buchanan endorses some wry advice of late 19th-century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a hard-headed conservative if ever there were one. He regarded preventative war as "like committing suicide from fear of death". Baker prefers the teaching of Gandhi, which echoes Christ's in the Sermon on the Mount: "We have found in non-violence a force which, if organised, can without doubt match itself against all the most violent forces in the world."
The above article appeared in "The Australian Literary Review" of 3 December, 2008
