Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Incredibly, Wilson agreed, though he knew such an alliance violated a cardinal principle of U.S. foreign policy since Washington: no permanent alliances. Moreover, a commitment to go to war for France must be seen as a vote of no confidence in the new League of Nations’ ability to maintain the peace by replacing the old balance-of-power politics with the new world’s ideal of collective security.

  There was also a huge element of impracticality about the Treaty of Guarantee. As the war had demonstrated—when U.S. troops had not begun to enter Allied lines in great numbers until a year after war had been declared—no U.S. army could be raised, trained, and transported across the Atlantic in time to stop a German invasion. The Treaty of Guarantee thus entailed a permanent commitment by the United States to liberate France. No Senate in 1919 would approve such a commitment, as no U.S. vital interest was involved. President Grant had never thought to intervene when France was invaded in 1870, and, from 1914–1917, as Germans occupied the northeast of France, America had remained neutral. Even Theodore Roosevelt, an enthusiast of U.S. intervention in the war, wrote in 1919, in an article published after his death, “I do not believe in keeping our men on the other side to patrol the Rhine, or police Russia, or interfere in Central Europe or the Balkan peninsula…. Mexico is our Balkan peninsula.”63

  Only German U-boats sinking American ships had brought the United States into the war. And the America of 1919 was not going to commit to war for any other country. This was not isolationism. It was a foreign policy tradition of 130 years. Americans went to war when American interests were imperiled. And whose flag flew over Alsace was no vital interest of the United States.

  Lloyd George had cooked up this scheme, but built into it an escape hatch. If either the Senate or Parliament refused to approve the Treaty of Guarantee, the other nation was absolved of its commitment. Without a dissenting vote the House of Commons and House of Lords issued France the war guarantee. But the Senate never even took up the treaty. Britain was off the hook. France was left with no security treaty and no buffer state, only a fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland.

  Both banks of the Rhine were to remain demilitarized in perpetuity. But, after 1935, when the occupation was to end, the sole guarantee of their permanent demilitarization would be the French army.

  MOST FAVORED NATION

  AFTER GERMANY MOUNTED THE scaffold came the turn of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Under the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon, that ancient empire was butchered, cut into pieces to be distributed to the nations that had supported the Allies. Northern provinces went to the new Poland. Czecho-Slovakia, which had emerged as a new nation in 1918 under Thomáš Masaryk, was ceded rule over three and a half million ethnic Germans, three million Slovaks, one million Hungarians, 500,000 Ruthenes, and 150,000 Poles. All resented in varying degrees being forced to live in a nation dominated by seven million Czechs.64

  Whether to coerce three million Germans to come under a Czech rule most of them despised was fiercely argued at Paris. On March 10, the chief of the field mission for the U.S. delegation, Archibald C. Coolidge, called it a grave mistake and “filed a memorandum in which he proposed a frontier almost the same as that established in 1938 after ‘Munich.’”65

  Coolidge’s reasoning was as follows:

  To grant to the Czechoslovaks all the territory they demand would not only be an injustice to millions of people unwilling to come under Czech rule, but would also be dangerous and perhaps fatal to the future of the new State. In Bohemia, the relations between the Czechs and the Germans have been growing steadily worse during the last three months. The hostility between them is now intense…. The bloodshed on March 3rd [sic] when Czech soldiers in several towns fired on German crowds…was shed in a manner that is not easily forgiven.66

  South Africa’s Jan Smuts also warned that the Czech lust for land, Hungarian as well as German, might bring disastrous results: “With some millions of Germans already included in Bohemia in the north, the further inclusion of some 400,000 or 500,000 Magyars in the south would be a very serious matter for the young state, besides the grave violation of the principles of nationality involved.”67

  The Big Four did not heed Smuts and Coolidge. They listened instead to Eduard Beneš, the Czech foreign minister who was promising to model Czechoslovakia on the Swiss federation, where minorities would enjoy equal standing and cultural and political autonomy. On the eve of Munich, 1938, Lloyd George would charge Beneš with having deceived the Allies at Paris.

  Why did the Czechs succeed at Paris at the expense of their neighbors? First, they had chosen the winning side. Second, their new territories would come at the expense of Germany, Austria, and Hungary, who were to be punished and weakened. “No pity must be shown to Hungary,” said André Tardieu, the “Father of Trianon,” who chaired the committee dealing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.68 Third, Beneš and Masaryk were, like pianist Ignace Paderewski who represented the Poles, great favorites at Paris:

  In Allied eyes, and this is especially true of Woodrow Wilson, T. G. Masaryk had become a George Washington, William the Conqueror and Jeanne d’Arc rolled into one. Masaryk, “the father of his country,” the “outstanding democrat and patriot,” could do no wrong. His word was accepted as gospel.69

  Fourth, the Czechs knew what they wanted and were resolute and ruthless in taking it. As Hungary and Austria were reeling in defeat in 1918, Czech troops moved into Slovakia. They then seized the Polish enclave of Teschen, “whose coal heated the foyers and powered the industry of Central Europe from Krakow to Vienna,” and occupied German Bohemia, which would come to be known as the Sudetenland.70 Masaryk told Parliament, “The Germans will have to be satisfied with self-determination of the second class….”71 Clemenceau supported the Czech seizures.

  By the time Masaryk, Beneš, and the Allies were finished, they had created in the new Czechoslovakia the tenth most industrialized nation on earth, having stripped Austria and Hungary of 70 to 80 percent of their industry,

  from china and glass factories to sugar processors…to the breweries of Pilzen and the Skoda works producing world-class armaments, locomotives, autos, and machinery. The wealth these companies generated would make Czechoslovakia coveted by Germany and envied by its other, less amply endowed neighbors.72

  The new nation—one-half Czech, one-fourth German, with Slovaks and Hungarians constituting a fifth of its population—was bordered by four nations (Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Poland) all of which bore deep grievances against her. “[T]he Peace Conference,” writes David Andelman in A Shattered Peace, “had turned Czechoslovakia into a polyglot highway from Germany to the Balkans…with a fifth column in its midst.”73

  South Tyrol, to the bitterness of its two hundred thousand Austrian inhabitants, was turned over to Italy as war booty for switching sides and joining the Allies in 1915. Vienna, seat of one of the greatest empires of Christendom, became the capital of a tiny landlocked country of fewer than seven million.

  TRIANON

  HUNGARY, HOWEVER, WAS THE “ultimate victim of every sort of prejudice, desire, and ultimate diplomatic and political error of the powers gathered in Paris. It had no real advocate there….”74

  By the Treaty of Trianon, signed June 4, 1920, Hungary was mutilated, the kingdom reduced from an imperial domain of 125,000 square miles to a landlocked nation of 36,000. Transylvania and the two million Hungarians residing there went to Rumania as a reward for joining the Allies. Slovakia, which a predominantly Catholic Hungary had ruled for centuries, was handed over to the Czechs. Other Hungarian lands went to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. A slice of Hungary was even ceded to Austria.

  “Hungary, which might have played a key role in Clemenceau’s cordon sanitaire,” writes Andelman, “instead became a victim on every side.”75

  The U.S. Congress refused to approve the Treaty of Trianon and in August 1920 signed a separate peace. Hungarians regarded the imposed peace of Trianon as a national crucifixion, the greatest national disa
ster since the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, which led to a century and a half of Ottoman occupation.

  On February 1, 1918, Wilson had told the world:

  There shall be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages. People are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to another by an international conference…. “Self-determination” is not a mere phrase…. Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned, and not as part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival States.76

  What Wilson had promised the world, and the nations that laid down their arms, would not happen, did happen, with his collusion. József Cardinal Mindszenty, primate of Hungary, looked back in his Memoirs upon the injustice done his nation and people at Paris:

  Before the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, Hungary comprised almost 109,000 square miles of land. When the treaty was signed, only 35,000 square miles remained…. Benes and Masaryk showed fraudulent maps and statistics to the other delegates at the conference…. President Wilson had proclaimed the right of self-determination; but this principle was completely ignored when the Allies lopped off two-thirds of Hungary. No one bothered to consult the people about their wishes.77

  Of the eighteen million under Hungarian rule in 1910, ten million were taken away. Of the lost ten million, Cardinal Mindszenty estimated that more than three million were of Hungarian nationality. Hungarian bitterness at the Wilsonian peace was as deep as it was in Germany.

  At Paris, Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians had no right of self-determination not subject to Allied veto. Germans were handed over to Denmark, Belgium, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Lithuania without their consent. Plebiscites were granted to peoples who wished to break free of German rule. But in Alsace, Lorraine, Danzig, the Corridor, Memel, Bohemia, and South Tyrol, Germans were denied any plebiscite or voice in choosing the nation to which they wished to belong. Three million Hungarians had been force-marched into new nations. By 1920, 885,000 were under Czech rule, 1.7 million under Rumanian rule, 420,000 under Serb rule. The Little Entente of Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia was created partly out of fear of a Hungary whose lands and peoples each had torn away.

  And though it was promoted by and allied with France, serious statesmen regarded it with scorn, like George Kennan:

  The Little Entente, on which the Czechs, with French encouragement, had tried to base their security, had seemed to me an artificial, unwise arrangement founded in the quicksands of the vengeful, emotional, and unrealistic spirit that dominated French policy in the years just after World War I.78

  As for the newborn nations baptized at Paris, they were almost as multiethnic as the Habsburg Empire, but lacked her history, lineage, and moral authority. Czechoslovakia was but half Czech. Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews had been handed over to Prague. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes contained Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Hungarians, and Bulgarians, the last forcibly transferred to the new kingdom by the Treaty of Neuilly. Poland was a polyglot nation. In a 1931 linguistic census,

  Poles formed only 68.9 per cent of the total population. The Ukrainians with 13.9 per cent, the Yiddish-speaking Jews with 8.7 per cent, the Byelorussians with 3.1 per cent, and the Germans with 2.3 per cent made up nearly one-third of the whole. In specific areas, they constituted a dominant majority.79

  RUMANIA

  LIKE THE CZECHS, the Rumanians would emerge as one of the great winners at Paris. Wedged between the Allies, Serbia, and Czarist Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Rumania began the war as a neutral. In August 1916, however, after receiving a secret offer of Transylvania and the Banat, to be taken from Hungary, Bucharest joined the Allies.

  Prime Minister Ian Bratianu, who had negotiated the secret treaty, had also been assured of Russian military aid, which never came. By year’s end, 1916, Austro-Hungarian and German armies occupied Bucharest. King Ferdinand, Queen Marie, and the government had fled to the protection of the Russians in Bessarabia.

  Not until the final weeks of war did Rumania rejoin the struggle. Yet Bratianu and Queen Marie, a granddaughter of Victoria and first cousin of George V, arrived in Paris to demand full payment for having fought on the side of the Allies, though Bucharest had violated Article V of the 1916 treaty by concluding a separate peace. Between them, Bratianu and Queen Marie succeeded in doubling the size of Rumania. They got Transylvania and the eastern Banat from Hungary, Bessarabia from Russia, northern Dobruja from Bulgaria, and Bukovina from the dismantled Habsburg Empire.

  Western Banat went to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—a polyglot nation, 43 percent Serb, 23 percent Croat, 8.5 percent Slovene, 6 percent Bosnian Muslim, 5 percent Macedonian, 3.6 percent Albanian, and the rest a mixture of Germans, Hungarians, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies.80

  So it was that the men of Paris redrew the maps of Europe, and planted the seeds of a second European war.

  The winners at Paris were the Czechs, Rumanians, and Serbs. The losers were the Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Russians. The Italians felt cheated of what they had been promised in the Treaty of London. The Poles felt they had been denied Teschen because of favoritism toward the Czechs. Thus was Europe divided between satiated powers, and revisionist powers determined to retrieve the lands and peoples that had been taken from them.

  With the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon, and Neuilly, the Allies at Paris had made a dog’s breakfast of Europe. For America, they had stripped the Great War of any morality. When Wilson came home with a peace that denied the defeated their right of self-determination, made a mockery of his Fourteen Points, honored the secret treaties he denounced, and enlarged the British, French, Italian, and Japanese empires by a million square miles and tens of millions of subjects, Americans concluded that their 116,000 sons died for nothing. In The World Crisis, Churchill would express puzzlement as to why the Americans ever went to war.

  American historians will perhaps be somewhat lengthy in explaining to posterity why the United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917…. American ships had been sunk before by German submarines; as many American lives were lost in the Lusitania as in all the five American ships whose sinking immediately preceded the declaration of war. As for the general cause of the Allies, if it was good in 1917, was it not equally good in 1914?81

  “There were plenty of reasons of high policy for [America] staying out in 1917 after waiting so long,” Churchill concluded. History has proven him right.

  Lloyd George sensed the tragedy the Allies were setting in train. Perhaps with Burke in mind—“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom”—he retired to Fontainebleau on the last weekend of March and wrote one of the more prophetic documents of the century:

  You may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police force and her navy to that of a fifth rate power; all the same, in the end if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919 she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors…. Injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven….

  I am, therefore strongly averse to transferring more Germans from German rule to the rule of some other nation than can possibly be helped. I cannot conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land.82

  About the creation of a Polish Corridor, severing Germany in two, Lloyd George warned:

  The proposal of the Polish commission that we should place 2,100,000 million Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throu
ghout its history must, in my judgment, lead sooner or later to a new war in the East of Europe.83

  Rather than loosen the bonds Bismarck had forged among Germans, the peace of Versailles reinforced a spirit of nationhood. The treaty had defeated its own purpose, writes John Laughland, for it

  allowed the Germans to think of themselves as victims. The debt itself, which obviously fell uniformly on the entire nation, also made the Germans feel solidarity with one another; they became united in their common protest. It made Bavarians and Saxons feel for the territorial losses of Prussia, whereas fifty years previously, such losses would have concerned only Prussians. The tribute which the Germans had to pay to the French thus united them in common resentment. With Germany bordered to the East with nothing but new weak states, this was a fatal combination.84

  When you strike at a king, you must kill him, Emerson said. At Paris the Allies had scourged Germany and dispossessed her of territory, industry, people, colonies, money—and honor by forcing her to sign the “War Guilt Lie.” But they had not killed her. She was alive, united, more populous and potentially powerful than France, and her people were now possessed of a burning sense of betrayal. Novelist Anatole France had written, as he saw victory with America’s entry into the war, “Even if beaten, Germany will pride itself on having resisted the entire world; no other people will be so inebriated by their defeat.”85

  The treaty writers of Versailles wrote the last act of the Great War and the first act of the resurrection of Germany and the war of retribution. Even in this hour men saw what was coming: Lloyd George in his Fontainebleau memorandum; Keynes as he scribbled notes for his Economic Consequences of the Peace; Foch (“This is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years”); and Smuts (“This Treaty breathes a poisonous spirit of revenge, which may yet scorch the fair face—not of a corner of France but of Europe).”86