Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Territories cut away, colonies gone, Germany was to have her limbs broken so she could never fight again. Germany was forbidden ever again to build armored cars, tanks, heavy artillery, submarines, or an air force. The High Seas Fleet was seized as war booty, as was the German merchant fleet. Her navy was to consist of six small battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo boats. The General Staff was abolished and the army restricted to one hundred thousand men. Germany was to remain forever naked to her enemies.

  Goaded on by Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers, Lloyd George made good on his pledge that Germany be made to bear the full cost of the war—to include the pensions of Allied soldiers. But Wilson’s public pledge of no indemnities had first to be circumvented. And someone else would have to persuade Wilson, for the president had come to detest Lloyd George.

  “Mr. Prime Minister, you make me sick!” the president blurted, after listening to another shift of position by the “Welsh witch” of John Maynard Keynes’s depiction.22 Keynes, who was with the British delegation, would return home to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the savage book charging the Allied leaders with having crafted a vindictive peace that must, by crushing Germany with debt, set the stage for a new war.

  The British were behind this scheme to include pensions. For as the damage done to the British Isles by air or naval attack was minimal, and the confiscation of Germany’s merchant ships had replaced British losses at sea, Britain was entitled to perhaps 1 percent or 2 percent of reparations. If Germany could be made to pay the pensions of millions of British soldiers, however, Britain’s share of reparations could soar to more than 20 percent. Including pensions would also triple the reparations bill for Germany.

  Lloyd George enlisted South Africa’s Jan Smuts, a lawyer one historian calls “the great operator of fraudulent idealism,” to persuade Wilson that forcing Germany to fund the pensions of Allied soldiers would not violate his pledge to limit reparations to civilian damage done in the war.23 An outraged U.S. delegation implored Wilson to veto the reparations bill, arguing that it did not follow logically from any of his Fourteen Points.

  “Logic, logic, I don’t give a damn about logic,” Wilson snarled. “I am going to include pensions.”24 Henry White, one of five members of the official U.S. delegation, reflected the dejection and disillusionment idealistic Americans felt: “We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.”25

  In 1920, the Allies would set the final bill for reparations at thirty-two billion gold marks, an impossible sum. Under Article 231 of the treaty, the “war guilt clause,” Germany was forced to confess to and accept full responsibility for causing the war and all the damage done. Under Article 227, the Kaiser was declared a war criminal to be arrested and prosecuted.

  Forcing the Germans to confess to a historic crime and agree to a lie—that they alone were to blame for the war—was as foolish as it was unjust. Though the Kaiser had been bellicose throughout his reign, by 1914 he had been in power twenty-five years and never fought a war. In the two Moroccan crises, it was he who had backed down. Though he had foolishly given the Austrians a blank check to act against Serbia, when the Austrian archduke was murdered by Serb nationalists on June 28, 1914, by the last days of July, no monarch in Europe was trying more desperately to arrest Europe’s plunge to war.

  The effect on the German psyche of forcing the nation to confess to a crime Germans did not believe they had committed was poisonous:

  There is no better way to generate hatred than by forcing a person to sign a confession of guilt which he is sacredly convinced is untrue. The wanton humiliation, unprecedented up to that time in the annals of Christendom, created the thirst for revenge which the National Socialists so cleverly exploited.26

  “The forced admission of German war guilt in the Treaty of Versailles would have been a colossal political blunder even if it had been true: and it was not true,”27 adds British historian Russell Grenfell.

  Today, men do not appreciate what Versailles meant to the Germans, who, triumphant in the east, believed they had laid down their arms and accepted an armistice and peace in the west based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. British Labour leader Sir Roy Denman offers this analogy:

  These terms are difficult to bring home to British readers. But, supposing that Britain had lost the U-boat war in 1917 and Germany had imposed an equivalent peace; it could have meant British recognition that its policy of encirclement [of Germany] had caused the war; confiscation of British colonies and the British merchant fleet; Dover and Portsmouth occupied; the Royal Navy reduced to half a dozen destroyers; south-east England demilitarised; Liverpool a free port, with a corridor under German rule to Harwich; crippling reparations. No post-war British government would have accepted this indefinitely.28

  THE STARVATION BLOCKADE

  WHY DID THE GERMANS SIGN?

  Germany faced invasion and death by starvation if she refused. With her merchant ships and even Baltic fishing boats sequestered, and the blockade still in force, Germany could not feed her people. When Berlin asked permission to buy 2.5 million tons of food, the request was denied. From November 11 through the peace conference, the blockade was maintained. Before going to war, America had denounced as a violation of international law and human decency the British blockade that had kept the vital necessities of life out of neutral ports if there were any chance the goods could be transshipped to Germany. But when America declared war, a U.S. admiral told Lord Balfour, “You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are.”29

  U.S. warships now supported the blockade. “Once lead this people into war,” Wilson had said in 1917, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”30 America had forgotten. The blockade was responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children after the Germans laid down their weapons and surrendered their warships. Its architect and chief advocate had been the First Lord of the Admiralty. His aim, said Churchill, was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”31 On March 3, 1919, four months after Germany accepted an armistice and laid down her arms, Churchill rose exultant in the Commons to declare, “We are enforcing the blockade with rigour, and Germany is very near starvation.”32

  Five days later, the Daily News wrote, “The birthrate in the great towns [of Germany] has changed places with the death rate. It is tolerably certain that more people have died among the civil population from the direct effects of the war than have died on the battlefield.”33

  Even the entreaties of “brave little Belgium” for whom the British had gone to war fell on deaf ears. Herbert Hoover, who would be credited with saving a starving Belgium, “spent as much time arguing with the British as with the Germans about getting food to the Belgians,” writes U.S. historian Thomas Fleming.

  The “poor little Belgium” of British propaganda meant little to the British admirals and bureaucrats who were sure the Germans would make off with the victuals…. Churchill, who favored letting the Belgians starve and blaming the Germans, called Hoover “a son of a bitch.”34

  Americans “have been brought up not to kick a man in the stomach after we have licked him,” said Hoover. “We have not been fighting women and children and we are not beginning now.”35 Put in charge of all relief efforts, Hoover wanted to feed the starving Germans. Congress refused.

  In February 1919, Congress appropriated $100 million for food, but Germany was not to get a loaf of bread or a bowl of soup.36 So severe was the suffering that, on March 10, the British Commander on the Rhine publicly urged that food be sent to the population as the specter of starving children was damaging the morale of his troops. General Sir Herbert Plumer’s letter was read to the Big Three in Paris:

  Please inform the Prime Minister that in my opinion food must be sent into this area by the Allies without delay…. The mortalit
y amongst women, children, and sick is most grave and sickness due to hunger is spreading. The attitude of the population is becoming one of despair, and the people feel that an end by bullets is preferable to death by starvation.37

  His troops, said General Plumer, could no longer stand the sight of “hordes of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from British cantonments.”38 Pope Benedict XV’s plea for an end to the blockade was ignored. One visitor to Germany who witnessed it all wrote:

  The starvation is done quietly and decently at home. And when death comes, it comes in the form of influenza, tuberculosis, heart failure or one of the new and mysterious diseases caused by the war and carries off its exhausted victims. In Frankfurt, even as late as March 1920, the funerals never ceased all day.39

  In 1938, a British diplomat in Germany was asked repeatedly, “Why did England go on starving our women and children long after the Armistice?”40 “Freedom and Bread” would become a powerful slogan in the ascent to power of the new National Socialist Workers Party.

  Decades later, Hoover, a former president and senior statesman, was still decrying the post-Armistice “food blockade” of Germany as “a wicked thrust of Allied militarism and punishment” that constituted “a black chapter in human history.”41

  “Nations can take philosophically the hardships of war. But when they lay down their arms and surrender on assurances that they may have food for their women and children, and then find that this worst instrument of attack on them is maintained—then hate never dies.”42

  “BEASTS THEY ARE”

  ON MAY 7, 1919, at Trianon Palace Hotel, Clemenceau, Wilson beside him, handed the Germans the terms of peace: “The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of your account,” said Clemenceau. “You have asked for peace. We are ready to give you peace.”43

  As the German foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau read his reply to Clemenceau, he refused to stand:

  We can feel all the power of hate we must encounter in this assembly…. It is demanded of us that we admit ourselves to be the only ones guilty of this war. Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie. We are far from declining any responsibility for this great world war…but we deny that Germany and its people were alone guilty. The hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since 11 November by reason of the blockade were killed with cold blood after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured to them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment.44

  When he heard this bristling German defiance, “Clemenceau’s face turned magenta.”45 Lloyd George snapped the ivory paper knife he was holding and said, “It is hard to have won the war and to have to listen to that.”46

  Wilson exploded. “What abominable manners…the Germans are really a stupid people.”47 “Isn’t it just like them?” he whispered to Lloyd George.48 Said Balfour, “Beasts they were, and beasts they are.”49

  Still, the Germans refused to sign. “What hand would not wither that binds itself and us in these fetters?” said Chancellor Philip Scheidemann.50 He resigned his office.

  But with families starving, Bolshevik uprisings in Munich, Cologne, Berlin, and Budapest, Trotsky’s Red Army driving into Europe, Czechs and Poles ready to strike from the east, and Foch preparing to march on Berlin at the head of an American-British-French army, Germany capitulated.

  Five years to the day after Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, German delegates signed what Wilson had promised his countrymen would be “peace without victory.”

  “A huge crowd and two German delegates led like felons into the room to sign their doom” was how an American observer in the Hall of Mirrors that day described it. “[I]t was like the execution of a sentence.”51 The New York Times’s Charles Selden wrote, “[T]he stillest three minutes ever lived through were those in which the German delegates signed the Peace Treaty today.”52

  The same day, June 28, “the government of the new ‘Czechoslovak Democracy’ sent a wire to the leaders of Yugoslavia congratulating them on the anniversary of the Sarajevo murder of the archduke and his wife and expressing their hopes of ‘similar heroic deeds in the future.’”53

  By forcing German democrats to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which disarmed, divided, and disassembled the nation Bismarck had built, the Allies had discredited German democracy at its birth.

  At Scapa Flow, naval base of the Grand Fleet in the Orkneys, northeast of Scotland, where the High Seas Fleet had been interned, Adm. Ludwig von Reuter, rather than surrender his warships, ordered them scuttled. With a signal from the flagship at noon on June 19, German sailors pulled the sea cocks, sending ten battleships, nine armored cruisers, eight heavy cruisers, fifty torpedo boats, and one hundred submarines to the bottom.54 As the unarmed German sailors fled in lifeboats, they were fired on by enraged British sailors.55 Not until July 12, 1919, did the Allies fully lift the starvation blockade. When Admiral von Reuter returned to Wilhelmshaven in 1920, thousands of Germans thronged the docks to hail him as “the last hero” of the High Seas Fleet.

  The Germans felt utterly betrayed—and blamed America.

  “President Wilson is a hypocrite and the Versailles Treaty is the vilest crime in history,” said the social democrat Scheidemann, who had brought down his government rather than sign.56 “If these are the peace terms, then America can go to hell,” said General Ludendorff.57

  Men who believe in the rule of law believe in the sanctity of contract. But a contract in which one party is not allowed to be heard and is forced to sign at the point of a gun is invalid. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles only when threatened that, should she refuse, the country would be invaded and her people further starved.

  Though Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had been invited to Vienna to negotiate the peace of Europe, no German had been invited to Paris. Francesco Nitti, the prime minister of Italy when Versailles was signed, in his book The Wreck of Europe, expressed his disgust at the injustice.

  In the old canon law of the Church it was laid down that everyone must have a hearing, even the devil: Etiam diabolus audiatur (Even the devil has the right to be heard). But the new democracy, which proposed to install the society of the nations, did not even obey the precepts which the dark Middle Ages held sacred on behalf of the accused.58

  From the hour of signature, the Germans never felt bound. Said Vorwarts, the unofficial voice of Berlin, “We must never forget it is only a scrap of paper. Treaties based on violence can keep their validity only so long as force exists. Do not lose hope. The resurrection day comes.”59

  THE RHINELAND

  LLOYD GEORGE HAD WANTED a peace that would enlarge the empire, satisfy Northcliffe, have the Jingoes cheering him in the House, and eliminate Germany as a commercial rival and world power. He got it all: the High Seas Fleet, the Kaiser’s colonies, the German merchant marine, the promise of full reparations. He could afford to appear magnanimous.

  But France had lost 1,375,000 soldiers and millions more were wounded, maimed, or crippled. She demanded full compensation for the ruination of a fourth of the country and terms of peace that would guarantee that Germans would never again attempt what they had done in 1870 and 1914.

  Clemenceau wanted to detach all German lands west of the Rhine and create a “Rhenish Rhineland,” a buffer state—and to occupy the east bank of the river with Allied troops for thirty years. Poincaré, a Lorrainer, wanted to annex all 10,000 square miles of the Rhineland, as did Foch, who warned, “If we do not hold the Rhine permanently, no neutralization, nor disarmament, nor any kind of written clause can prevent Germany…from sallying out of it at will.”60

  Annexing the Rhineland would have put five million Germans and much of Germany’s industrial plant under permanent French control. Lloyd George was adamant that no German land be annexed by France. He feared a spirit of revenge would be created in Germany like that created in France by the 1871 loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Wilson also recoiled at so flagran
t a violation of his principle of self-determination. But as the French negotiator André Tardieu argued, to France, such measures were matters of national survival:

  For France, as for Great Britain and the United States, it is necessary to create a zone of safety…. This zone the naval Powers create by their fleets, and by the elimination of the German fleet. This zone France, unprotected by the ocean, unable to eliminate the millions of Germans trained to war, must create by the Rhine, by an inter-allied occupation of that river.61

  What the Channel and Royal Navy were to Britain, what the Atlantic and U.S. Navy were to America, the Rhine and French army were to France, the moat and sword of national survival. “To ask us to give up the occupation [of the Rhine],” said Tardieu, “is like asking England and the United States to give up their fleets of battleships.”62

  France was forced to settle for a fifteen-year occupation. But the price Clemenceau exacted for giving up any claim to the Rhineland was high: an Anglo-American-French alliance. Under a Treaty of Guarantee, America and Britain were to be obligated to come to France’s aid should Germany attack her again.