Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Churchill, however, was informed by aides that “Stage II” of Lend-Lease, upon which the economic survival of Britain depended, might hinge on his support of the Morgenthau Plan. By Friday the fifteenth, he had broken. “The future of my people is at stake,” Churchill told a protesting Eden, who said the plan would never be approved by the Cabinet, “and when I have to choose between my people and the German people, I am going to choose my people.”77 Churchill initialed the plan, inserting the words that the destruction of the warmaking capacity of the Ruhr and Saar would be but “one step in the direction of converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character.”78

  In Washington, a storm broke over the savage peace to be imposed. Secretary of War Stimson memoed FDR that the Morgenthau Plan was a flagrant violation of the principles of the Atlantic Charter and his own words about “freedom from want and freedom from fear.” In his diary, Stimson wrote that Morgenthau’s “Carthaginian views” amounted to “Semitism gone wild with vengeance.”79 In a week, the U.S. press was ablaze over the plan and FDR was back-pedaling. Churchill, however, would carry the plan to Stalin and Molotov.

  Seven days after the Wehrmacht had crushed the Polish Home Army, which had risen in Warsaw on a signal from the Red Army, which then sat idle on the east bank of the Vistula to observe the slaughter, Churchill slipped into Moscow “to divide the spoils of Eastern Europe.”80 There, he revealed to Stalin what he called his “naughty document”:

  “Americans including the President would be shocked by the division of Europe into spheres.” On Rumania, Russia had 90%, Britain 10%; in Greece Britain had 90%, Russia 10%. Stalin ticked it.

  “Might it not be thought cynical if it seemed we’d disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” said Churchill, half guilty at, half revelling in, the arrogance of the Great Powers.81

  As Stalin’s armies were already in Rumania and Bulgaria and had joined hands with Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia, Churchill was discussing where the Iron Curtain would fall across Europe, and secretly and cynically ceding Eastern Europe and the Balkans to Stalin, save Greece. The couplet of Kipling, who lost his son in the Great War, comes to mind: “If any question why we died,/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

  Churchill’s concessions at Moscow were far worse than Chamberlain’s at Munich. For the Poles were terrified of Stalin’s Russia, while the Sudeten Germans clamored to join Hitler’s Germany. What did Churchill think the fate of the Poles, who had defeated the Red Army in 1920, would be under Stalin? How could he not have known what Stalin had in store for the Poles when Stalin in 1944 had refused U.S. and British planes permission to fly supplies to the dying Home Army?

  At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill gave moral legitimacy to Stalin’s control of half of Europe by signing a “Declaration on Liberated Europe.” Writes Nisbet, the one hundred million Europeans east of the Oder

  had to watch what democracy and freedom they had known before the war disappear, and then suffer the added humiliation of seeing such words as “free elections,” “sovereignty,” “democracy,” “independence,” and “liberation” deliberately corrupted, debased, made duplicitous, in the Declaration on Liberated Europe, the very title of which, given the ugly reality underneath, was a piece of calculated Soviet effrontery—one, however, that both Churchill and FDR acquiesced in.82

  Yet Churchill “was so pleased with Yalta, noted a British diplomat, he was ‘drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man.’”83 Within days of his return from the Crimea, Churchill got word on how Stalin interpreted the Declaration on Liberated Europe:

  On March 6, messages reached Churchill about the mass arrests taking place in Cracow, with whole trainloads of Polish intellectuals, priests, professors, and labor union leaders being taken to a huge work-prison camp in Voroshilovgrad. As many as 6,000 Home Army officers were put in a camp near Lublin, overseen and directed by Soviet officials indifferent to the publicity.84

  To Churchill, the independence and freedom of one hundred million Christian peoples of Eastern Europe were not worth a war with Russia in 1945. Why, then, had they been worth a war with Germany in 1939?

  To this day, a question remains unanswered. Did Churchill ever give a damn about Poland? His ambivalence toward and his often-expressed contempt for, Polish leaders and the Polish people with whom Britain was allied, was on public display in his history of the world war. In 1948, long after Poland had been consigned to Stalin’s custody, Churchill wrote that the Nazis were “not the only vultures upon the carcass” of Czechoslovakia:85

  The heroic characteristics of the Polish race must not blind us to their record of folly and ingratitude which over centuries has led them through measureless suffering…. We see them hurrying, while the might of Germany glowered against them, to grasp their share of the pillage and ruin of Czechoslovakia…. Glorious in revolt and ruin; squalid and shameful in triumph. The bravest of the brave, too often led by the vilest of the vile! And yet there were always two Polands; one struggling to proclaim the truth and the other grovelling in villainy.86

  Churchill wrote these savage words after Polish pilots helped win the Battle of Britain and Polish patriots had endured nine years of Nazi and Stalinist hell. From these words one begins to understand why Churchill seemed so unconcerned with the fate of the Poles for whom his nation had gone to war. The moral issue cannot be ignored. Was it moral to issue a war guarantee to Poland that Britain’s leaders knew they had neither the power nor the intent to honor? Ask the Poles, the ones who survived.

  In his 2005 work on Churchill subtitled A Study in Character, Robert Holmes may have come closest to the truth when he wrote that Churchill “had no objection to throwing other peoples to the wolves if it genuinely helped the British sledge to reach safety.”87

  In defense of Churchill, Andrew Roberts wrote in 2007: “Once it dawned on Churchill that Russia wanted to swallow up and partition Poland once again—just as she had done so often in previous centuries—it was simply beyond his power to prevent it.”88

  The Roberts defense raises the question: Did it take until 1945 for it to dawn “on Churchill that Russia wanted to swallow up and partition Poland,” when Russia had already partitioned Poland with Hitler’s Germany in 1939? To suggest it did not dawn on Churchill until Yalta that Stalin would hold any land and people he conquered is to suggest Churchill was childishly naive. But how can this be, when Churchill had been among the most farsighted statesmen in assessing the character of the Bolshevik regime and in urging its extermination in 1919?

  Churchill had to know in 1939, when he was pounding the war drums and calling for partnership with Stalin, that any victory in alliance with Stalin would bring Communism into the heart of Europe and replace Nazi tyranny with Bolshevik tyranny. Was it worth bankrupting and bleeding his country and bringing down the empire for this? Was it worth declaring war to keep 350,000 Danzigers separate from a Germany they wished to rejoin, if the cost was to consign one hundred million people to the mercy of Stalin’s butchers?

  In 1919, like no other Western leader, Churchill had excoriated the “foul baboonery of Bolshevism.”89 By 1919, writes Martin Gilbert,

  Churchill had no doubt that of “all the tyrannies in history,” he told an audience in London that April, “the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading.” The atrocities committed under Lenin and Trotsky were “incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale, and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible.”90

  To Churchill, the Soviet regime consisted of a “foul combination of criminality and animalism.”91 So savage were his denunciations that Lloyd George began to describe Churchill as a “dangerous man” with “Bolshevism on the brain.”92

  Churchill knew of the mass murders on Lenin’s orders, the massacre of the Czar’s family, Stalin’s slave-labor camps, the forced starvation in Ukraine, the Great Pu
rge of the old comrades and Russian officer corps, the show trials, the pact with Hitler, the rape of Finland and the Baltic republics, Katyn. As historian John Lewis Gaddis writes, “[T]he number of deaths resulting from Stalin’s policies before World War II…was between 17 and 22 million,” a thousand times the number of deaths attributed to Hitler as of 1939, the year Churchill was clamoring for war on Hitler and an alliance with Stalin.93

  Among the most knowledgeable statesmen in the West, Churchill had to know this. Yet in January 1944, twenty-five years after he had urged the Allies to invade Russia and kill the Bolshevik snake in its crib, twenty years after he had castigated the Labour Party for entering trade negotiations with the “foul filth butchers of Moscow,” Churchill was writing Foreign Secretary Eden of the “deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian state and government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts toward Stalin.”94

  Addressing the House of Commons on May 24, 1944, Churchill declared, “Profound changes have taken place in Soviet Russia. The Trotzkyite form of communism has been completely wiped out…. The religious side of Russian life has had a wonderful rebirth.”95

  In October 1944, after meeting with Stalin to discuss the secret deal to divide the Balkans and leave Stalin in control of all but Greece, Churchill wrote Clementine: “I have had very nice talks with the Old Bear. I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us & I am sure they wish to work with us.”96

  This is the very echo of Chamberlain at Munich.

  At Yalta, Churchill raised a glass to Stalin:

  It is no exaggeration or compliment of a florid kind when I say that we regard Marshal Stalin’s life as most precious to the hopes and hearts of all of us…. I walk through this world with greater courage and hope when I find myself in a relation of friendship and intimacy with this great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia, but the world.97

  Allowances may be made for toasts between heads of state on foreign soil, but they do not extend to remarks made when Churchill returned from the summit that will live in infamy alongside Munich.

  “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin,” Churchill said on his return from Yalta.98 He declared to the House, “I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”99 “This must surely rank as one of the most serious political misjudgments in history,” wrote Royal Navy captain and historian Russell Grenfell.100

  If Chamberlain was naive about Hitler, how defend Churchill’s naive trust in Stalin, twenty-five years after Lenin’s Revolution and Red Terror?

  In 1943, General Franco had written the British ambassador in Madrid to express his fear that Stalinism and the Soviet Union would emerge from the war deep inside Germany and dominate Europe. General Franco asked the ambassador to send his memo on to London. Churchill himself wrote back to reassure the Spanish ruler:

  Do you really believe that a single nation is strong enough to dominate Europe after this war? And that it will be actually Russia…. I venture to prophesy that, after the war, England will be the greatest military Power in Europe. I am sure that England’s influence will be stronger in Europe than it has ever been before since the days of the fall of Napoleon.101

  Three years later, on March 5, 1946, Churchill would be in Fulton, Missouri, declaring, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill was describing the line he and the Old Bear had drawn up together at Teheran, Moscow, and Yalta.

  In defense of his decision to approve Stalin’s annexation of that half of Poland he had gotten out of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Churchill wrote in 1953:

  I wanted the Poles to be able to live freely and live their own lives in their own way. That was the object which I had always heard Stalin proclaim with the utmost firmness, and it was because I trusted his declarations about the sovereignty, independence, and freedom of Poland that I rated the frontier question as less important.102

  But how could a statesman of Churchill’s rank—twenty-five years after he had described Bolshevism as the bloodiest tyranny in history—place his “trust” in a despot who had massacred, starved, and murdered millions of his own countrymen? Upon what ground could Churchill stand to condemn his dead rival Chamberlain for having briefly trusted Hitler, when he, Churchill, admits to having trusted Stalin to respect “the sovereignty, independence and freedom of Poland”?

  ETHNIC CLEANSING AND SLAVE LABOR

  AT MUNICH, CHAMBERLAIN HAD agreed to the transfer of 3.25 million Sudeten Germans to Berlin, rather than fight a futile war to keep them under a Czech rule they wished to be rid of. At Teheran and Yalta, Churchill signed away one hundred million Christians to Stalin’s terror and agreed to let him annex the Baltic states and 40 percent of Poland, the nation for whose “integrity” Britain had gone to war. At his wartime summits with Stalin, Churchill also agreed to the ethnic cleansing of thirteen to fifteen million Germans from their ancestral homes, two million of whom would die in the exodus. He agreed to Stalin’s use of Germans as slave laborers, and to the forced repatriation of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks to a barbaric Asiatic regime he had called the foulest murderers in all of history.

  After Normandy, thousands of German prisoners who were ethnic Russians fell into British hands and were transferred to England. As they had been captured fighting in German uniforms, they were entitled under the 1929 Geneva Convention to treatment as POWs. But when their disposition was debated in London, an exasperated Churchill memoed Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office: “I thought we had arranged to send all the Russians back to Russia…. We ought to get rid of them all as soon as possible. This was your promise to Molotov as I understood it.”103

  As British historian A. N. Wilson writes, “The tragedy of the twentieth century is that in order to defeat Hitler, Churchill believed it was not merely necessary but desirable to ally himself to Stalin.”104

  More than “ally himself to Stalin,” Churchill colluded with Stalin in such historic crimes as the forcible return of millions of resisting POWs and Russians, whether “Soviet citizens” or not, from Allied-occupied territory to the NKVD. Stalin was especially interested in the Cossacks who had fought Soviet rule in the civil war of 1919–1920 and fled with their families to the West. Though they had never been “Soviet citizens,” the Cossacks were sent back. As Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago,

  In Austria that May [1945], Churchill…turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them, he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children who did not want to return to their native Cossack rivers. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.105

  Britain’s betrayal of the Cossacks was “an act of double-dealing consistent with the spirit of traditional English diplomacy,” Solzhenitsyn wrote of Churchill and others who betrayed them. “In their own countries FDR and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious.”106

  In the winter of 1940, Churchill had made an explicit pledge to the German people: “We are opposed to any attempt…to break up Germany. We do not seek the humiliation or dismemberment of your country.” But, as the tide began to turn against Germany, Churchill began to weasel out of his pledge to the German people and the Atlantic Charter commitments he had made at Placentia Bay in August 1941.107 Article 2 of the Charter’s program for peace, agreed to by FDR and Churchill, read: “The Alliance desires to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.”

  But at Teheran in 1943, Churchill agreed to Stalin’s annexation of half of Poland. To compensate the Poles, Chur
chill would agree to transfer to Warsaw the eastern provinces of Germany. As he related in his memoirs, Churchill used three matchsticks to show a “pleased” Stalin how this might be done.108

  On October 14, 1944, at the British embassy in Moscow, Churchill and Eden bullied the Poles into ceding half their country to Stalin. They applied

  massive pressure on [the Polish leader] Mikolajczyk to induce him to give his consent to the Curzon Line without Lvov or Galicia. The encounter is so revealing of the realities of power politics, that one can hardly help thinking back to the infamous Berlin meeting in March 1939 between President Hacha of Czechoslovakia and the German dictator, who, after receiving Hacha with the honours due a Head of State, proceeded to instruct him to sign away the independence of his people.109

  At the meeting, Churchill acted as Stalin’s enforcer, brutalizing his Polish ally to yield or face the consequences. Unless you accept the new borders demanded by Moscow, Churchill told Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, “you are out of business for ever. The Russians will sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation.”110

  Stalin was pleased. As Churchill’s plane took off from Moscow, the Soviet dictator was seen standing in the rain, waving a white handkerchief.111

  On May 24, 1944, Churchill declared that the principles of the Atlantic Charter did not apply to a defeated Germany: “There is no question of Germany enjoying any guarantee that she will not undergo territorial changes if it should seem that the making of such changes renders more secure and more lasting the peace in Europe.”112 On December 15, Churchill rose in the House of Commons and formally repudiated the Atlantic Charter: