Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  On February 11, a Joint Session of Congress had roared its approval as Wilson had declared the principle forever associated with his name:

  National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. “Self-determination” is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.110

  Prophetic words, but in dealing with the defeated the statesmen of Versailles not only ignored the “imperative principle,” they violated it again and again and again. In a letter home, May 31, 1919, Charles Seymour, head of the Austro-Hungarian division of the American delegation and future president of Yale, described a memorable scene:

  We went into the next room where the floor was clear and Wilson spread out a big map (made in our office) on the floor and got down on his hands and knees to show us what had been done; most of us were also on our hands and knees. I was in the front row and felt someone pushing me, and looked around angrily to find that it was Orlando [Italian premier and leader of the Italian delegation to the conference] on his hands and knees crawling like a bear toward the map. I gave way and he was soon in the front row. I wish that I could have had a picture of the most important men in the world on all fours over this map.111

  Thus were sown the seeds of the greatest war in the history of mankind.

  Point 18 declared that “all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction…without introducing new…elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world.”

  Point 18 is a parody of what was done at Paris.

  There was scarcely a promise Wilson made to the Germans at the time of the armistice that was not broken, or a principle of his that he did not violate. The Senate never did a better day’s work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where Americans soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace.

  Lloyd George, who had realized all of Britain’s ambitions and was, as T. E. Lawrence said, “head and shoulders above anyone else at the peace conference…the only man there (in a big position) who was really trying to do what was right,” saw what was coming.112 He returned home triumphant but grim. Awarded the Order of Merit by George V, he said, “We shall have to do the whole thing over again in twenty five years…at three times the cost.”113

  The dilemma at Paris was that Allied goals were irreconcilable. No peace could meet Wilson’s ideals and Foch’s demands. Clemenceau had wanted a truncated, disarmed Germany, weighted down with reparations so heavy she could never rise again to threaten France. Wilson had wanted a peace of no victors, no vanquished. As U.S. historian Thomas Bailey wrote, “The victor can have vengeance, or he may have peace, but he cannot have both” from the same treaty.114

  At a London dinner party soon after Adolf Hitler had taken power in Berlin, one of the guests asked aloud, “By the way, where was Hitler born?”

  “At Versailles” was the instant reply of Lady Astor.115

  Rising from obscurity to build a mass movement in a demoralized Germany, Hitler first drew public notice, then attracted ever-larger crowds by delivering again and again a vitriolic speech he titled simply “The Treaty of Versailles.”116

  On April 8, 1945, when Hitler was holed up in his bunker, Germany was smashed and ablaze, and Stalin was at the gates of Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, Churchill, too, in a memo to the Foreign Office traced the origins of the unnecessary war back to Versailles—and Woodrow Wilson:

  This war should never have come unless, under American and modernizing pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer onto the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable.117

  The men of Versailles had brought home the peace of vengeance the people wanted. Their children would pay the price for their having failed to bring home a peace of justice. That price would be 50 million dead in the war that would come out of the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.

  CHAPTER 4

  “A Lot of Silly Little Cruisers”

  FAR-CALL’D OUR NAVIES melt away…1

  —KIPLING, 1897

  IN 1921, BRITAIN WAS STILL the first power on earth, but her strategic situation had deteriorated. Germany was defeated, disarmed, and destitute, but Russia, Britain’s ally in the Great War, was gone. America, whose food, munitions, and loans had kept the Allies fighting until two million Yanks arrived in France, had rejected Versailles, refused to join the League of Nations, disarmed, and retreated into neutrality.

  Yet Britain still had the most powerful nation in Asia as an ally, and the Anglo-Japanese alliance dating to 1902 had proved its worth in war. Japan had rolled up Germany’s possessions in China and the Pacific. Her warships had escorted the Anzac troops to European battlefields. Her naval dominance of the Far East freed up British fleets to deploy in home waters to defend against the High Seas Fleet. Had Japan been hostile, Britain would have been in mortal peril, a point graphically put by Australian prime minister W. H. “Billy” Hughes:

  Look at the map and ask yourselves what would have happened to that great splash of red down from India through Australia down to New Zealand, but for the Anglo-Japanese Treaty. How much of these great rich territories and portions of our Empire would have escaped had Japan been neutral? How much if she had been our enemy?…Had [ Japan] elected to fight on the side of Germany we should most certainly have been defeated.2

  CHOOSING BETWEEN FRIENDS

  WHEN LLOYD GEORGE HOSTED the Imperial Conference of 1921, the critical issue was whether to renew the Anglo-Japanese treaty. While the treaty conflicted with the League of Nations covenant, which outlawed old-world alliances, more critically, it complicated Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had called in the British ambassador to instruct him on how great an impediment the treaty was to Anglo-American comity. America was brazenly demanding the severance of a Britain alliance vital to the security of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific.

  London had no illusions about its ally. Lord Curzon considered the Japanese “restless and aggressive…like the Germans in mentality…. Japan is not at all an altruistic power.”3 Lloyd George felt they “might have no conscience.”4 Yet the benefits of the alliance were apparent. With the Bolsheviks in power in Russia, Britain had as an ally and codefender of India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the greatest naval power in the western Pacific. Moreover, the Japanese had been scrupulously faithful.

  The problem was the Americans, who were demanding that the Anglo-Japanese treaty be scrapped. “It was one of the most crucial national-strategic decisions England had ever had to reach in her history,” writes Correlli Barnett.5 The Cabinet was divided, as several of its most powerful personalities retained a romantic view of Anglo-American cousinhood:

  Churchill was half-American by blood and a life-long romantic about the destiny of the English-speaking peoples, while Arthur Balfour and Austen Chamberlain had been earlier believers in pan-Anglo-Saxonism. Balfour had visited America in 1917, and the warmth of his reception had melted even his frosty detachment.6

  Canada insisted that U.S. goodwill be maintained, as did Prime Minister Smuts: “The only path of safety for the British Empire is a path on which we walk together with America.”7 But Lord Curzon and Lloyd George wanted to renew the treaty, as did the Foreign Office, Chiefs of Staff, and Pacific Dominions Australia and New Zealand. Without the Japanese alliance Britain was a third-rate power in Asia, and should Japan turn on the empire that spurned her, America would do nothing to save them. The Dutch and French also had Asian colonies they could not protect against a predatory Japan. They, too, wanted the alliance renewed.

  Not to renew the allia
nce…carried with it the likelihood of changing Japanese forbearance towards the British Empire into hostility. The British ambassador in Tokyo warned indeed that Japan would be so mortified and humiliated by British refusal to renew the treaty as to produce an “attitude of resentment and a policy of revenge.”8

  Tough-talking “Billy” Hughes asked the critical question: “Is this Empire of ours to have a policy of its own, dictated by due regard to its own interests, compatible with its declared ideals…or is it to have a policy dictated by some other Power?”9

  At Versailles, Hughes had sassed President Wilson to his face. When Wilson asked if Australia was willing to risk the failure of the peace conference and a dashing of the hopes of mankind over a few islands in the South Pacific, Hughes, adjusting his hearing aid, cheerfully replied, “That’s about the size of it, Mr. Wilson.”10

  In Imperial Conference councils, Hughes argued vehemently that the British Empire must not ditch Japan:

  [S]hould we not be in a better position to exercise greater influence over the Eastern policy [of Japan] as an Ally of that great Eastern nation, than as her potential enemy? Now if Japan is excluded from the family of great Western nations—and, mark, to turn our backs on the Treaty is certainly to exclude Japan—she will be isolated, her national pride wounded in its most tender spot.11

  When the Australians were assured that the League of Nations would prevent aggression, they replied that the United States had not joined the League and was not bound by its decisions.

  “What is the substantial alternative to the renewal of the Treaty?” asked Hughes. “The answer is, there is none. If Australia was asked whether she would prefer America to Japan as an Ally, her choice would be America. But that choice is not offered her.”12

  Lloyd George wanted to take up the U.S. challenge by standing by the Japanese treaty and building warships. He feared that a Japan expelled from the Western camp might turn to the pariah powers, Germany or Russia. Sir Charles Eliot, Britain’s ambassador to Japan, warned of a Tokyo-Berlin axis if the treaty were terminated. But Churchill continued to press the Cabinet to cast its lot with the Americans:

  Churchill, the Secretary of State for War and Air, argued that “no more fatal policy could be contemplated than that of basing our naval policy on a possible combination with Japan against America.” Lloyd George retorted by saying that “there was one more fatal policy, namely, one whereby we would be at the mercy of the United States.”13

  All agreed that if the Americans would offer a U.S.-British alliance to replace the Anglo-Japanese treaty, it should be taken up. But no such offer was on the table. Given the U.S. aversion to alliances—the nation had not entered a formal alliance since the Revolutionary War—America was not going to offer Britain war guarantees for her Asian colonies. U.S. Marines were not going to fight for Hong Kong.

  The proper course, argues Barnett, would have been to put the issue straight to the Americans: We will terminate our Anglo-Japanese alliance if you will sign an Anglo-American treaty to defend each other’s Pacific and Asian possessions. Otherwise, we will keep the ally we have. Disastrously for Britain, she chose to appease the United States.

  “AN ACT OF BREATHTAKING STUPIDITY”

  “YOU PROPOSE TO SUBSTITUTE for the Anglo-Japanese alliance and the overwhelming power of the British Navy a Washington conference?” Billy Hughes roared when the Commonwealth Conference agreed to terminate the Japanese alliance and attend a Washington conference to reduce the size and power of the Royal Navy.14 At that conference, from November 1921 to February 1922, the British were forced to choose. And the decision seemed predetermined, as the British delegation was headed by Balfour, a believer in the myth of the transatlantic cousins striding arm in arm into the future.

  At Washington, Britain terminated her twenty-year-old alliance that had proven its worth in the Great War. The Anglo-Japanese treaty was replaced by the Four-Power Treaty, by which America, Britain, France, and Japan agreed to settle their disputes by diplomacy and to respect one another’s “rights in relation to their insular possessions and insular Dominions in the region of the Pacific Ocean.”15 The Four-Power Treaty had no enforcement provision.

  “We have discarded whiskey and accepted water,” said a Japanese diplomat of Tokyo’s lost alliance.16 Britain had done the same.

  America’s diplomatic victory would prove a disaster for the British Empire. With the termination of the Japanese alliance, Australia and New Zealand ceased to be strategic assets and became liabilities, as Britain now lacked the naval power to defend the two Pacific Dominions. Now alone in Asia, Britain faced a hostile Soviet Union, a xenophobic China, and a bitter Japan. And America had made no commitment to come to the defense of the British Empire in the Far East.

  To Japan, the alliance had been her link to the Allies and great powers. It meant she was not isolated in Asia or in the world. She had as her ally the most respected of the world’s empires. Writes British historian Paul Johnson,

  [S]o long as Britain was Japan’s ally, the latter had a prime interest in preserving her own international respectability, constitutional propriety and the rule of law, all of which Britain had taught her.

  That was why the destruction of the Anglo-Japanese alliance by the USA and Canada in 1921–2 was fatal to peace in the Far East. The notion that it could be replaced by the Washington Naval Treaty…was a fantasy.17

  Arthur Herman, biographer of the Royal Navy, concurs. “Only naval ties with Britain kept Japan on a course of international propriety and rule of law, and constrained its thirst for empire.”18 In severing the alliance, Britain had committed “an act of breathtaking stupidity.”19 Japan no longer had an incentive for good behavior. Treated as a pariah, she began to play the part.

  The Japanese Foreign Office that failed to win renewal of the British treaty fell in influence. Japan’s military rose. By 1930, “feeling isolated and vulnerable…Japan had become a military dictatorship ruled by a clique of imperialist-minded generals and admirals.”20

  “ROLLS ROYCE–ROLLS ROYCE–FORD”

  ON THE FIRST DAY of the Washington Conference, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes seized the world’s imagination with a plan to slash the size of all the great navies of the world. No nation would be more affected than Britain, for whom sea power meant survival. As of November 1918, the Royal Navy was still the world’s preeminent sea power, with sixty-one battleships, more than the U.S. and French fleets combined, and twice the battleship strength of the combined fleets of Italy and Japan.21 The Royal Navy deployed 120 cruisers and 466 destroyers, though British admirals felt even this had barely been adequate to defend Britain’s empire and trade in a war where Admiral Tirpitz’s U-boats had taken so terrible a toll.

  But by 1921 the British had not laid a battleship keel in five years. The Americans, however, with Asst. Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt the driving force, had been building ships since war was declared in 1917. After Armistice Day, the United States had laid the keels for ninety-seven destroyers and ten cruisers as part of FDR’s drive to make the U.S. Navy the “greatest in the world.”22

  Hughes was calling for a ten-year holiday in shipbuilding and the scuttling of British, U.S., and Japanese capital ships until the three navies reached a 5-5-3 ratio. Britain and the United States would be restricted to 500,000 tons, Japan to 300,000. No warship would be allowed to displace more than 35,000 tons. Hughes’s plan spelled an end to the British super-ships.

  The Washington Naval Conference, writes James Morris in Farewell the Trumpets, was a “surrender by the British Empire…of the maritime supremacy which had been its inalienable prerogative, and its surest protection since the Battle of Trafalgar…. [T]he Royal Navy was no longer the guarantor of the world’s seas, nor even primus inter pares.”23

  As a result of the treaty the British scrapped 657 ships, with a total displacement of 1,500,000 tons; they included 26 battleships and battlecruisers, among them many a proud stalwart of Beatty’s Grand
Fleet. Never again would a Fisher at the Admiralty be free to set the standards of the world’s navies according to British requirements. No such magnificent fighting ships as Queen Elizabeth, the apex of British naval assurance, were ever again constructed in British dockyards…. So ended Britain’s absolute command of the seas, the mainstay and in some sense the raison d’être of her empire.24

  As Admiral David Beatty, the First Sea Lord, who had commanded the battle cruisers at Jutland, listened to the details of Hughes’s plan, “he came forward in his chair, ‘with the manner of a bulldog, sleeping on a sunny doorstep, who has been poked in the stomach by the impudent foot of an itinerant soap-canvasser.’”25 The official documents of the naval conference, wrote journalist Mark Sullivan, could not

  convey as much essential fact to the distant and future reader as did the look on Lord Beatty’s face…when Mr. Hughes, in that sensational opening speech of his, said that he would expect the British to scrap their four great Hoods, and made equally irreverent mention of King George the Fifth.26

  “Beatty saw the treaty as an abject surrender,” writes Arthur Herman, “but the politicians forced him and the Admiralty to swallow this deeply bitter pill.”27

  Japan took her inferior number as a national insult. This looks to us like “Rolls Royce–Rolls Royce–Ford,” said one Japanese diplomat. Yet the ratios would enable Japan to construct a fleet 60 percent of Britain’s, though Japan had only the western Pacific to patrol while Britain had a global empire.

  To induce Japan to accept the inferior number, Britain agreed not to fortify any possession north of Singapore. Equally magnanimous, the United States agreed to no further fortification of the Philippines, Guam, Wake, or the Aleutians. Existing bases could be maintained, but any new or strengthened British base north of the Straits of Malacca or U.S. naval base west of Hawaii was prohibited. The seas around China had been turned into a Japanese lake.