“The still-accepted idea that while the German armies were fighting in Poland, an Allied ground offensive across the so-called Siegfried Line would not only have been possible but decisive is groundless,” writes historian John Lukacs, “it was not possible because it was not planned, and it was not planned because it was not possible.”42
“The British stand in September 1939 was no doubt heroic,” writes Taylor, “but it was heroism mainly at the expense of others.”43
When Stalin attacked Poland on September 17, there was no British declaration of war on Russia. The war guarantee covered only a German attack. Indeed, Churchill saw a bright side to Stalin’s attack on Britain’s bleeding ally. “Hitler’s path to the east is closed,” he exclaimed.44
“If Beck was at fault as a diplomat,” writes Davies, “the fault lay not in his…suspicions of Hitler and Stalin, but in his naive belief in the sincerity of allied guarantees and assurances.”45
Whatever the sins of Colonel Beck, of the Poles it must be said: Unlike the British and French, they rejected both Hitler and Stalin. Unlike the Czechs and the Austrians, they went down fighting and behaved more honorably than did the nations upon whom they had so unwisely relied. Again, Davies:
The [Polish] colonels were not going to bow and scrape to an ex–Austrian corporal. Their instinct was to fight, and to go down fighting. Every single Polish official who had to deal with Nazi and Soviet threats in 1939 had been reared on the Marshal’s moral testament: “To be defeated but not to surrender, that is victory.”46
After dividing Poland with Stalin, Hitler turned west to deal with the nations that had declared war on him. On May 10, 1940, he launched his blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and into the Ardennes. In three weeks, the British army had been hurled off the continent. In six weeks, France had fallen. The Wehrmacht was at the Pyrenees.
PRIMARY BENEFICIARY
THE BRITISH-FRENCH WAR GUARANTEE to Poland would result in defeat and disaster for all three nations. But there would be one great beneficiary.
Consider the hellish situation Stalin faced in March 1939. A pariah state with a reputation for mass murder and an archipelago of slave-labor camps, the USSR was isolated from the Western democracies, hated and feared by its neighbors, and threatened by Nazi Germany and by Japan in the Far East. Stalin knew a goal that motivated the man who wrote Mein Kampf and now ruled Germany was the extermination of Bolshevism.
He had watched Hitler annex Austria, carve the Sudetenland out of Czechoslovakia, turn Bohemia and Moravia into protectorates and Slovakia into an ally, retake Memel, and begin to move on Poland—without a shot being fired. Stalin knew: After Poland, his turn would come. That would mean a Nazi-Bolshevik war in which he must face Germanic power alone.
On March 31, 1939, came deliverance. Britain and France declared they would fight for Poland, the buffer state between Russia and Germany. British Tories had become the guarantors of Bolshevism. Moscow had been given free what Stalin would have paid a czar’s ransom for.
Within days, the Allies had given a war guarantee to Rumania. Now any German attack through Poland or Rumania, against Russia, would cause Britain and France to declare war on Germany before Hitler could reach him. And war between Nazi Germany and Britain and France would weaken all three and fertilize the ground for Communist revolution in all three nations. Stalin’s relief and joy can only be imagined.
British and French emissaries soon arrived to offer Stalin an alliance. Typhoid Mary was suddenly the most courted lady in Europe. But without any commitment of his own, Stalin already had the benefit of an alliance with Britain. The Polish war guarantee, wrote Henderson, “relieved Russia of all fear of German aggression against herself, and instead of being obliged any longer to consider her own safety, she could now afford to think only of her personal advantage.”47
All the British emissaries could offer Stalin was an alliance to fight Hitler. They could not offer him the Baltic states and half of Poland. Hitler could. All Stalin need do was join Hitler in a partition of Poland, as Russian czars and Prussian kings had done in centuries past.
At Ribbentrop’s request, and as a sign of his good faith, Stalin agreed to deport to the Reich four thousand Germans living in Russia. Between one thousand and twelve hundred of them were German Communists.
The world over, Communists professed to be sickened by the Hitler-Stalin pact. How could the world leader of international Communism crawl into bed with the Nazi monster? But Stalin would have been a fool not to take Hitler’s offer. His pact with Hitler allowed him to occupy and bolshevize six Christian nations and gave the Red Army two years to prepare for the coming war with Germany. Writes Hillgruber,
Stalin’s decision of August 1939…put the Soviet Union in the most favorable position it had enjoyed since its creation in 1917. In place of the conception of “capitalist encirclement” that had dominated its policy, there emerged an appreciation of its position as a great power, respected and indeed wooed by all of the participants in the war, its political weight waxing as the war continued and absorbed the energies of the combatant nations.48
Had Britain never given the war guarantee, the Soviet Union would almost surely have borne the brunt of the blow that fell on France. The Red Army, ravaged by Stalin’s purge of senior officers, might have collapsed. Bolshevism might have been crushed. Communism might have perished in 1940, instead of living on for fifty years and murdering tens of millions more in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A Hitler-Stalin war might have been the only war in Europe in the 1940s. Tens of millions might never have died terrible deaths in the greatest war in all history.
CHAPTER 12
Gruesome Harvest
IF WAR SHOULD COME…nothing is more certain than that victor and vanquished alike would glean a gruesome harvest of human misery and suffering.1
—NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, JULY 31, 1939
ON JUNE 18, 1940, Churchill declared in one of his most memorable addresses, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to do our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” One British historian has another perspective on his country in its critical hour:
The plight of the summer of 1940…marked the consummation of an astonishing decline in British fortunes. The British invested their feebleness and isolation with a romantic glamour—they saw themselves as latter-day Spartans, under their own Leonidas, holding the pass for the civilised world. In fact, it was a sorry and contemptible plight for a great power, and it derived neither from bad luck, nor from the failures of others. It had been brought down upon the British by themselves.2
The statements of Churchill and Correlli Barnett do not conflict. The summer of 1940 was among the finest hours of the British people. But they themselves were responsible for their perilous situation.
* * *
MILITARY DEATHS, MAJOR POWERS, WORLD WARS I AND II
* * *
WWI
WWII
Russia [USSR]
1.8 million
10.7 million
Germany
2.0 million
5.5 million
France
1.375 million
212 thousand
Habsburg Empire
1.1 million
n/a
UK & Dominions
921 thousand
491 thousand
Italy
460 thousand
301 thousand
USA
116 thousand
417 thousand
* * *
For each dead serviceman, three or four were wounded. Figures do not include millions of dead from the influenza epidemic after WWI or millions of civilian and military dead in nations of Eastern and Central Europe and the Balkans fought over by Hitler and Stalin in WWII.
* * *
VICTORS AND VANQUISHED
AFTER DUNKIRK, WITH THE FALL of France immine
nt, Mussolini saw history passing him by: “I can’t just sit back and watch the fight. When the war is over and victory comes I shall be left empty-handed!”3
“Mussolini had long been champing at the bit to grab a piece of French territory as well as a crumb of the glory,” writes Alistair Horne. “He told Marshal Badoglio: ‘I need only a few thousand dead to ensure that I have the right to sit at the peace table in the capacity of a belligerent.’”4
When the French government fled Paris for Bordeaux, Mussolini, still seething over the League of Nations sanctions, declared war on Britain and invaded France, evoking FDR’s riposte: “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has stuck it into the back of its neighbor.”5
To Churchill, who had lauded Mussolini as “so great a man and so wise a ruler,” Il Duce had suddenly become Hitler’s:
little Italian accomplice, trotting along hopefully and hungrily at his side….
This whipped jackal Mussolini, who to save his own skin has made of Italy a vassal state of Hitler’s empire, goes frisking up at the side of the German tiger with relish not only of appetite—that could be understood—but even of triumph.6
That fall, Mussolini’s armies invaded Egypt and Greece, where they quickly floundered. To rescue his ally, Hitler sent armies into the Balkans and North Africa. Thus, by June 1941, Hitler occupied Europe west to the Pyrenees and south to Crete. These conquests had come about not because of some Hitlerian master plan, but because of a war with Britain that Hitler had never wanted, and an invasion of Greece by Mussolini that Hitler had opposed.
As Hitler’s armies drove deep into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany soon occupied all the lands on which the Kaiser’s army had stood on November 11, 1918. This was the apogee of Nazi power. Except for Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland, almost all of Europe was under either German occupation or a pro-Nazi regime.
Six months after invading the Soviet Union, however, Hitler had been stopped in the east and had declared war on the United States. Nazi Germany was doomed. She would take three years to die and take down millions with her. Germany would be destroyed and Fascism forever disgraced. But the price would be scores of millions dead and the devastation of Europe. And the peace of 1945, Stalin’s peace east of the Elbe, would make Jan Smuts’s “Carthaginian peace” of 1919 appear magnanimous. The true winners of the greatest war in history would be the two powers that continue to celebrate V-E Day.
America. Last of the great powers to go to war, the United States emerged as the first nation on earth, unrivaled in the air or at sea, with the fewest casualties, four hundred thousand dead, relative to her population. Save for Pearl Harbor and the Aleutians, the homeland had been unmolested. Americans had liberated Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, and the Philippines. The battles of Midway and Normandy, of Iwo Jima and the Bulge, would become the stuff of legend. For Americans, it became “the Good War.” Leadership of the West would pass forever from Britain and Europe to the United States and the twentieth century would be the American Century.
The Soviet Union. While Russia lost millions of soldiers and civilians and suffered devastation, Stalin emerged from the war as the most powerful czar in history, with the Red Army occupying Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. In the aftermath, Communist parties loyal to Stalin would vie for power in Paris and Rome and Communist revolutionaries would help tear down the empires of the West. In 1949, Stalin would treble the subject peoples of Communism as China fell to the armies of Mao Tse-tung, converting America’s wartime ally into Stalin’s partner in world conquest. In 1949, too, Stalin’s scientists, with stolen American technology, exploded an atomic bomb.
For almost all the other nations and people of Europe, the war would prove more a disaster than a triumph.
Britain. From Norway to France, to Greece, Crete, to Libya, Britain lost every battle with the Germans—until El Alamein in 1942. She would end the war with four hundred thousand dead and a Pyrrhic victory, and never again be great. Churchill had devoted his life to three causes: the preservation of the empire, keeping socialism at bay, and preventing any hostile power from dominating Europe. By July of 1945, all three had been lost and Churchill dismissed by the people he had led to victory.
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Churchill declared in 1942.7 By 1946, liquidation had begun. By 1947, India, crown jewel of the empire, was gone and Britain had transferred her duties to Greece and Turkey to help stop Communist aggression to Truman’s America. Poland, the nation for which Britain had gone to war, nine other Christian nations, and Albania were now in the death grip of Stalin.
“We killed the wrong pig,” Churchill is said to have muttered.
By 1948, Palestine was gone and Britain was surviving on Marshall Plan aid. In 1956, President Eisenhower ordered Great Britain, which had invaded Suez to overthrow Nasser, to get out of Egypt. Threatening to sink the pound if Britain did not depart, Ike brought down the government of Churchill’s heir, Anthony Eden. By Churchill’s death in 1965, the empire had vanished and Britain was applying for admission to a Common Market dominated by Germans and the France of an ungrateful Charles de Gaulle, who vetoed British entry.
What had all the “blood, sweat, toil and tears” produced?
In Eastern and Central Europe, Hitler’s rule had given way to Stalin’s. Pax Britannica had given way to Pax Americana. And for this the British Empire had sacrificed itself. Yet there was this notable success: Britain had restored Ethiopia’s emperor to his throne. Said one caustic critic, “It has been ironically said that the British brought Hailé Selassié back to Addis Ababa in order to bring the Russians into Vienna, Berlin and Port Arthur.”8
France would be occupied for four years, the Vichy era marked by widespread collaboration. French Indochina would be overrun by Japan. By war’s end, Syria and Lebanon were gone. In 1954, the French, defeated at Dienbienphu, were run out of Vietnam by General Giap and Ho Chi Minh. In 1962, France was driven out of Algeria by the terror tactics of the FALN. North Africa was gone and France’s sub-Sahara empire was crumbling.
Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland would endure four years of Nazi occupation. The Dutch East Indies, lost to Japan in 1941, were taken into receivership by a despotic Japanese collaborator named Sukarno.
Poland, trusting in her war guarantee, suffered hundreds of thousands of dead resisting the Nazi-Soviet onslaught in September 1939. The Polish officer corps would be massacred by Stalin’s NKVD in killing fields like Katyn Forest. Poland would be occupied five years by Nazis and become the site of such horrors as Treblinka and Auschwitz. Poland’s Home Army, at the urging of the Red Army on the far side of the Vistula, would rise in Warsaw in 1944. And as that Red Army looked on, refusing to help, the Polish Home Army and Warsaw’s civilian population would suffer losses as heavy as 9/11 every day for two months, and finally be annihilated by the Wehrmacht and the SS.9
“The cream of Poland’s patriotic and democratic youth had been eliminated,” writes one historian.10 Poland’s Catholic population would be decimated, her Jews virtually exterminated. Poland would lose six million people and fifty years of freedom. Writes historian Norman Davies, “Poland’s reliance on Churchill…proved worthless.”11
The British-French war guarantee of March 31, 1939, that brought Britain, France, and Poland into an alliance against Germany ended in calamity for all three. Britain would have to be rescued and France liberated by the Americans. Poland would be abandoned, first to Hitler then to Stalin.
“The Western Allies entered that war with a two-fold object,” wrote Liddell Hart. “The immediate purpose was to fulfill their promise to preserve the independence of Poland. The ultimate purpose was to remove a potential menace to themselves, and thus ensure their own security. In the outcome, they failed in both purposes.”12 By war’s end, Britain “had become a poor dependent of the United States.”13
Germany w
ould end the war occupied, in total ruin, with millions of civilians dead from the carpet bombing of the Allies and the reprisals of the Red Army. In one of the great exoduses of human history, thirteen to fifteen million Germans would be driven out of lands their ancestors had lived on for centuries. Two million would perish in the long orgy of rape and revenge. The problem of German minorities in European countries would be solved by exterminating some and “ethnically cleansing” the rest. Of the Stalinized states of Central and Eastern Europe it may be said: They were now more ethnically pure than they had been before the war.
Italy would be bombed and invaded by Anglo-American forces and Mussolini executed by Communist Partisans, his body hanged upside down with that of his mistress Clara Pettacci in a Milan gas station. Well before the war’s end, his New Roman Empire had vanished.
The Baltic republics, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, seized by Stalin in June 1940 as his plunder from his pact with Hitler, would suffer untold horrors, with the cultural, political, religious, and intellectual leaders of the three tiny nations disappearing forever in the labor and death camps of the Gulag Archipelago.
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and eastern Germany would end up as captive nations of a new Soviet Empire, ceded to Stalin by Churchill and FDR. They would suffer half a century of tyranny at the hands of the political criminals who ruled Eastern Europe for the Politburo.
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 30