Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Secretary of State Lansing said of the peace he and President Wilson brought home: “[T]he Versailles Treaty menaces the existence of civilization.”87 In Italy, the wounded war veteran and Fascist leader Benito Mussolini warned: “The dilemma is this: treaty revision or a new war.”88 Hans von Seeckt of the German General Staff agreed: “We must regain our power, and as soon as we do, we will naturally take back everything we lost.”89

  Versailles had created not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace. Wedged between a brooding Bolshevik Russia and a humiliated Germany were six new nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The last two held five million Germans captive. Against each of the six, Russia or Germany held a grievance. Yet none could defend its independence against a resurrected Germany or a revived Russia. Should Russia and Germany unite, no force on Earth could save the six.

  THE FRUITS OF VICTORY

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE CAME out of Paris the great beneficiary of the Great War. The Hohenzollern, Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires had crashed in ruins. The challenge of a Wilhelmine Germany that had surpassed British production by 1914 was history. Germany was no longer a great power. The High Seas Fleet, the greatest threat to the Royal Navy since Trafalgar, had committed suicide at Scapa Flow. Britain had taken over Germany’s Atlantic cables and most of her merchant fleet to compensate for the loss of 40 percent of her own to U-boats. Germany’s islands in the South Pacific had been mandated to Australia and New Zealand. German South-West Africa had gone to South Africa. German East Africa (Tanganyika) had become a British mandate. The Cameroons and Togoland were divided between Britain and France. Mesopotamia and Palestine, taken from the Turks, had gone to Great Britain. Out of the war fought to make the world safe for democracy, the British Empire had added 950,000 square miles and millions of subjects. Said Lord Curzon, “The British flag never flew over more powerful or united an empire than now; Britons never had better cause to look the world in the face; never did our voice count for more in the councils of the nations, or in determining the future destinies of mankind.”90

  After the treaties of Versailles and Sèvres had been imposed on the defeated Germans and Turks, a man could walk from Kuwait to Cairo, turn south, and walk the length of Africa to Cape Town without leaving a British Dominion, colony, or protectorate. The dream of Cecil Rhodes, the Cape-to-Cairo railroad, could now be built without asking for transit rights from any power other than a fellow member of the British Imperial Conference. In 1921, Jan Smuts, now prime minister of South Africa, told his fellow prime ministers that the British Empire “emerged from the War quite the greatest power in the world, and it is only unwisdom or unsound policy that could rob her of that great position.”91

  “When Lloyd George returned from Paris with the Treaty of Victory,” wrote Churchill, King George V “took the unprecedented course of…driving him in his own carriage to Buckingham Palace. History will not overlook the significance of this act.”92

  THE COST OF VICTORY

  BRITISH GAINS, HOWEVER, had not come without costs. The war had proven the disaster Norman Angell had predicted in his 1909 The Great Illusion.

  The total number of fatalities for the British empire as a whole was 921,000: the originator of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Sir Fabian Ware, calculated that if the dead were to march abreast down Whitehall the parade past the Cenotaph would last three and a half days.93

  The highest casualty rate had been among young British officers, striking home with all the leaders of Britain’s great parties. The Liberals’ Asquith, Labour’s Arthur Henderson, and the Irish Nationalists’ John Redmond had each lost a son. The Unionists’ Bonar Law had lost two. British debt was fourteen times what it had been in 1914. While it appeared to the world that the British Empire had made out wonderfully well, Britain had sustained losses, tangible and intangible, from which she would never recover.

  Charles Mee, whose grandfather lost all ten brothers in the war, wrote in his book on Versailles that not only had there been a collapse of the political order in Europe, but

  the war had discredited much of the rhetoric of national pride, honor, and sacrifice, as well as faith in the notions of reason, progress, humanism. Nor did the notions of God, representational art, or Newtonian physics appear to be in such good repair. The “modern” Western civilization that had grown up since the Renaissance was under siege from outside, and from within, and offered scant support to the disintegrating political order.94

  “A generation had been decimated on the battlefields of Europe,” Mee continued. “No one had seen the likes of such slaughter before: the deaths of soldiers per day of battle were 10 times greater than in the American Civil War,” heretofore the bloodiest conflict in the history of Christendom.95

  Then there was her loss of moral authority. How could British and Europeans, who had just concluded four years of butchering one another with abandon, assert a moral superiority that gave them the right to rule other people? With the Turks’ defeat of the British at Gallipoli, word had gone out to Asia and the Arab world, as it had after Adowa and Tshushima: Europeans were not invincible. Awe of Western military prowess and power had been irreparably damaged in the eyes of subject peoples. The myth of Western invincibility had been destroyed.

  Also, Wilson’s sermons on “self-determination” and Lloyd George’s hymns to the “rights of small nations” had been heard beyond the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. The genie of nationalism was out of the bottle. Balfour had promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. To defeat the Turks, T. E. Lawrence had stirred up the smoldering embers of Arab nationalism. Not a day passed that some popular leader did not arrive in the lobby of Wilson’s hotel to plead for independence for a province or colony he had never heard of. At Paris, British diplomat Harold Nicolson spoke of “that sense of a riot in a parrot house.”96 A “chastened Wilson” returned to tell Congress: “When I gave utterance to those words [that “all nations had a right to self-determination”] I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.”97

  The right of all peoples to self-determination, to which the Allies paid homage at Paris, was an ax that would strike the roots of every Western empire. By the time Lloyd George returned to London, Ireland was in revolt. Rebellions had broken out in Egypt, Iraq, and India.

  While Germany had been diminished, a more formidable rival had arisen. World financial leadership had passed to a United States that had profited from selling to the Allies while avoiding heavy combat until the summer of 1918. America had shown herself to be a mighty military power, perhaps the greatest. From three hundred thousand men in arms in 1917, she had raised an army of 4 million and transported two million soldiers to France, where they had been decisive in the final victory.

  Britain had ceased building warships in 1918. America had just begun. By 1921, the United States had become the first nation in a century to achieve naval parity with Great Britain. And an epidemic of Anglophobia had broken out in America over the belief that the British Empire had gorged itself in a war where 116,000 Americans had made the supreme sacrifice to make the world safe for democracy. Then there were those “six British votes” in the League of Nations: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Canada.

  Disillusionment with the treaty Wilson brought home would deepen in the 1920s and 1930s, as all the Allied powers, save Finland, defaulted on their war debts and America fell deep into Depression.

  Perhaps the greatest loss Britain suffered was in her standing and credibility with the American people. British propaganda had convinced us the Germans were beasts and we must join the good war for a new world where Prussian militarism would never menace mankind again. But after Versailles enlarged the British Empire by 950,000 square miles, as the Allies walked away from their war debts mocking Uncle Sam as “Uncle Shylock,” Americans came to believe they had been hoodwinked and swindled. They came to concur with British his
torian H.A.L. Fisher: Versailles had “draped the crudity of conquest…in the veil of morality.”98

  France and Britain got the peace they had wanted. Twenty years later, they would get the war they had invited. And the next time Britain rang for help, America would take her time answering the call. The Yanks would not be “coming over” until after France had been overrun and Britain thrown off the continent at Dunkirk. Americans’ bitterness over the belief they had been played for fools was something the British never understood. I yet recall hearing, as a child in the 1940s, of how the British had cut the cables, how the Lusitania had been carrying contraband, how the tales of German atrocities in Belgium had been lies, how the British had sent “Black and Tans” to shoot down Irish patriots, how we had been deceived by “lying British propaganda” into sending our boys into a war “to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

  The revisionist historians of World War I did their work well.

  And something new and ominous had come out of the war. The Russia of the Romanovs was gone. Atop the largest nation on earth sat a grisly gang of Bolshevik terrorists committed to world revolution and the destruction of all the Western empires and nations. In March 1920, after a trip to Europe, Churchill, who had been almost alone in urging Allied intervention in Russia, wrote Lloyd George what one historian calls “one of the great prophetic documents of European history.”99

  “Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny” was Churchill’s message.100 “We may,” he wrote, “be within measurable distance of a universal collapse and anarchy across Europe and Asia.”101

  You ought to tell France that we will make a defensive alliance with her against Germany, if, and only if, she entirely alters her treatment of Germany…. Next you should send a great man to Berlin to help consolidate the anti-Spartacist anti-Ludendorff elements into a strong left-center block. For this task you must have two levers: first, food and credit, which must be generously accorded in spite of our own difficulties (which otherwise will worsen); secondly, early revision of the Peace Treaty by a Conference to which New Germany shall be invited as an equal partner in the rebuilding of Europe.102

  What alarmed Churchill was the prospect of civil war in Germany, leading to a dictatorship of Right or Left. Communist coups had briefly succeeded in Budapest and Bavaria, and an attempt had been made to seize power in Berlin. All had been brutally suppressed by German Freikorps.

  There was fear that a man of the right like Gen. Erich Ludendorff might sweep aside the democratic regime that had arisen on the Kaiser’s abdication but been discredited in many German eyes by having submitted to the Allied diktat at Versailles. In March 1920, the Kapp putsch, a rightist attempt to seize power in Berlin, was blocked only by a general strike called by the Social Democrats. Churchill had perceived the real threat: Germany was now so prostrate she could no longer fulfill her ancient duty—to keep the Russians out of Europe.

  Lloyd George’s attitude toward Churchill’s obsession with Russia was dismissive. When Churchill’s name came up over dinner at Lady Astor’s, the prime minister became irritable, remarking that Winston “has bolshevism on the brain.”103

  In his memoirs, Lloyd George mocked Churchill’s preoccupation with the Bolsheviks, “blaming it on his aristocratic lineage. ‘His ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes in Russia.’”104

  Yet it is to Churchill’s eternal credit that, almost alone among Allied statesmen, he recognized the danger of the regime of Lenin and Trotsky, and, at risk to his relationship with Prime Minister Lloyd George, repeatedly urged Allied intervention to kill the viper in its crib. So prescient was Churchill that his subsequent behavior toward Stalin seems inexplicable.

  “A CARTHAGINIAN PEACE”?

  THOUGH HE BELIEVED THE “Germans had behaved disgracefully in the war and deserve a hard peace,” Prime Minister Smuts argued that this was “no reason why the world must be thrust into ruin.”105 It was he who first branded Versailles a “Carthaginian peace,” laying responsibility for the vindictive treaty at the feet of Woodrow Wilson:

  “Making the world safe for Democracy!” I wonder whether in this reactionary peace—the most reactionary since Scipio Africanus dealt with Carthage—he [Wilson] still hears the mute appeal of the people to be saved from the coming war…. What a ghastly tragedy this is.106

  A dissent is in order. Carthage, torched and pillaged, its soldiers put to the sword, its women violated, its children sold into slavery, vanished from history. Germany had suffered, but Germany had survived. Historian Correlli Barnett calls Smuts’s characterization of Versailles as a Carthaginian peace “sentimental nonsense.” Henry Kissinger, too, regards German complaints over Versailles as “self-pitying nonsense”:

  Germany had ignored the Fourteen Points as long as it thought that it had a chance of winning the war, and had…imposed a Carthaginian peace on Russia at Brest-Litovsk, violating every one of Wilson’s principles. The only reason Germany finally ended the war had to do with pure power calculations—with the American army involved, its final defeat was only a question of time…. Germany was exhausted, its defenses were breaking, and Allied armies were about to drive into Germany. Wilson’s principles in fact spared Germany much more severe retribution.107

  Undeniably, there is truth here. For while the stories of raped nuns and Belgian babies being tossed about on bayonets were propaganda lies, the German army in Belgium and France had behaved less like Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia than Sherman’s army in Georgia. At Brest-Litovsk, Berlin had imposed far more extensive surgery on a Russian empire that was stripped of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, White Russia (Belarus), and the Caucasus. One-third of Czarist Russia’s population, half of her industry, three-fourths of her iron ore, nine-tenths of her coal mines were gone, and the nation was made to pay an indemnity of six thousand million marks.108

  However, as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues, Germany had simply applied to that “prison house of nations,” the Russian Empire, the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, permitting its captive peoples to go free.

  To understand the German outrage, one must view Versailles through German eyes. As of November 11, 1918, Germans did not see themselves as defeated. German armies were in retreat in the west, but no Allied soldiers stood on German soil. “At the moment of the November 1918 ceasefire in the West,” writes German historian Andreas Hillgruber, in the east,

  newspaper maps of the military situation showed German troops in Finland…down through Pskov-Orlov-Mogilev and the area south of Kursk, to the Don east of Rostov. Germany had thus secured the Ukraine…. In addition, German troops held the Crimea and were stationed in smaller numbers in Transcaucasia.109

  Also, Germany had accepted an armistice on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, enunciated in his address to Congress January 8, 1918. The fourteen were amended to twenty-four by addresses to Congress, February 11, at Mount Vernon on July 4, and in New York City on September 27. These Twenty-four Points were to serve as the basis of the peace. So Wilson had pledged to the Germans. Under Points Seven and Eight, Germany was to depart Belgium and restore French rights in Alsace-Lorraine lost in 1871.

  But where Point 1 called for “open covenants, openly arrived at,” South Tyrol, Austrian for six hundred years, was given to Italy under a secret treaty with Britain in 1915, and all German islands in the North Pacific were given to Japan to comply with a secret treaty with Britain in 1917.

  Point 2, “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas…in peace and war,” except for “international action” to enforce “international covenants,” was dropped by Wilson at the insistence of the British.

  Point 3 called for “removal of all economic barriers and establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all nations.” But Germany was denied the right to enter a customs union with Austria and forced to grant unrestricted Allied access to her markets, while being denied equal access to Allied markets.r />
  Point 4 declared that “national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.” Germany was forced to disarm, but the Allies, while demobilizing their huge armies and reducing the size of their fleets, never fully did. Hitler would use the Allied refusal to match German disarmament to justify German rearmament in 1935.

  Point 5 called for the “free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.” This was trampled underfoot as the Allies scrambled to seize and confiscate every German colony as well as the private property of German citizens who lived there.

  Point 9 read, “A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Yet, ceding South Tyrol all the way to the Brenner to Italy, to honor a secret treaty, made Wilson and the Americans appear to the Tyrolese and their Austrian kinsmen as liars and hypocrites.

  Point 13 declared an “independent Polish state…should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations.” But the Poland created at Paris held captive millions of Germans, Ukrainians, and White Russians, ensuring conflict with Russia and Germany when those nations got back on their feet.

  Point 17, enunciated on February 11, 1918, amended on July 4, was the self-determination clause: “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty…[or] of political relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned.”