Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble…. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these large transferences which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.113

  At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill and FDR sought to limit the German lands ceded to Poland, but capitulated to Stalin’s demand that the new provisional Polish-German border be set at the Oder and western Neisse rivers. This meant “11 million people—9 million inhabitants of the eastern German provinces and 2 million from Old Poland and the Warta District” would be driven out of their homes.114

  Two million Germans would die in this largest forced transfer of populations in history, a crime against humanity of historic dimensions in which twenty times as many Germans were driven from their homes between 1944 and 1948 as the 600,000 Palestinians of the war of 1948, and more Germans died than all the Armenians who perished in the Turkish massacres of World War I. The territories of East Prussia, Pomerania, Eastern Brandenburg, Silesia, Danzig, Memel, and the Sudetenland were relentlessly and ruthlessly “cleansed” of Germans, whose families had inhabited them for centuries. While this crime against humanity was being perpetrated, the Allies at Nuremberg, including Stalin’s USSR, were prosecuting the Germans for crimes against humanity. Alfred M. de Zayas, an American historian of the horror, says Churchill “knew what was going on.”115

  The responsibility for the decision to uproot and resettle millions of human beings, to evict them from their homes and spoliate them—and this as a quasi-peacetime measure—is…a war crime for which individuals bear responsibility, even if many would still hesitate to put the correct label on the crime and its perpetrators.116

  To Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times, Churchill and FDR acquiesced in “the most inhuman decision ever made by governments dedicated to the defense of human rights.”117

  In his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Churchill would invoke the same defense as the Germans prosecuted at Nuremberg—ignorance: “The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place.”118 Nor was this the last of the human rights atrocities to which Churchill gave assent:

  A fateful decision was made…on February 11, 1945. The discussion revolved around reparations for the Soviet Union, which demanded the use of German work forces. This was nothing more or less than trade in human beings, slavery. But the statesmen had coined a euphemistic phrase for it: “Reparations in kind.” Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to the Soviet demand. The Yalta agreement on “reparations in kind”…clearly demonstrates the complicity of Roosevelt and Churchill in this slave labor program.119

  After Churchill returned from Yalta to celebrate his agreement with Stalin, a disgusted Labour MP, John Rhys Davies, rose in the House of Commons on March 1, 1945, to declare, “We started this war with great motives and high ideals. We published the Atlantic Charter and then spat on it, stomped on it and burnt it, as it were, at the stake, and now nothing is left of it.”120

  Churchill’s last meeting with Stalin came at Potsdam in July 1945. According to Eden, his performance was “very bad.”121 Not only had he not read his briefs, Churchill seemed captivated by Stalin: “I like that man.”122

  By August 1945, Churchill had become alarmed at the consequences of what he had done at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. Now out of power, he told Parliament, “Sparse and guarded accounts of what has happened and is happening [in the new Poland] have filtered through, but it is not impossible that tragedy at a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.”123 Added Time, “Europe had emerged from history’s most terrible war into history’s most terrifying peace.”124

  Yet as late as November 1945, Churchill, though out of power, was again praising Stalin so effusively—“this truly great man, the father of his nation”—that Molotov ordered Churchill’s speech published in Pravda.125

  At war’s end, Hitler and his evil and odious regime had been buried, and Churchill had played a historic role in its demise. But all three of the great causes of his life—keeping socialism from Britain’s door, preserving his beloved empire, and preventing any single hostile power from dominating Europe—had been lost. And he had been dismissed by the people he had led to victory, and had himself been a collaborator in the betrayal of the peoples for whom Britain had gone to war.

  Churchill had been right when the others had been wrong—about the character of the Bolsheviks, the amorality of Hitler, the imperative to rearm. But he had been horribly wrong when others had been right.

  AS MILITARY STRATEGIST

  NOR DOES CHURCHILL’S REPUTATION as a legendary military strategist survive scrutiny. From August 1914 to May 25, 1915, when he was replaced by Balfour as First Lord, Churchill was involved in two of the greatest blunders of the Great War. First came the Antwerp fiasco of 1914, where he sent his untested naval brigade to help defend Antwerp and went over to command the resistance, only to see Antwerp seized by the Germans in weeks and his naval unit decimated and interned for the duration.

  In 1915 came the Dardanelles disaster and resignation as First Lord. The campaign was MacArthurian in concept: to breach the Dardanelles with battleships, slice Turkey in two, seize Constantinople, convince the Balkan neutrals to join the Allies, and open a new supply route to Russia. But the execution was appalling. Churchill had violated Nelson’s dictum: Ships do not fight forts. The Royal Navy’s attempt to force the Dardanelles without landing ground troops to assault the Turkish forts from the rear resulted in the loss of three battleships and the crippling of three more by mines on the first day. There followed weeks of delay as the Turks fortified Gallipoli peninsula. Then came the British-French-Anzac invasion that resulted in months of battle, two hundred thousand casualties, and the worst Allied rout of the war.

  In September 1939, Churchill returned to the Admiralty and began to urge an invasion of neutral Norway to cut Germany off from Swedish iron ore, which, during the winter when Sweden’s closest port was iced over, was transported across Norway to Narvik, then to Germany. Attlee and Labour had balked at any violation of Scandinavian neutrality, and the Cabinet went back and forth on the wisdom of mining neutral waters and seizing Narvik.

  Churchill, however, tipped Britain’s hand to Berlin. On February 17, the destroyer Cossack intercepted the Altmark in Norway’s coastal waters, rescuing British prisoners being taken to Germany for internment. Most were seamen from merchant ships sunk by the Graf Spee. An infuriated Hitler now feared the British would invade Norway and turn his northern flank. He ordered plans prepared to preempt the British with an invasion of his own. Appointing von Falkenhorst to head it, Hitler told him, “The success which we have gained in the East and which we are going to win in the West would be annihilated by a British occupation of Norway.”126 As Andrew Roberts writes:

  The captured records of Hitler’s conferences reveal that in early 1940 he still considered “the maintenance of Norway’s neutrality to be the best course for Germany,” but that in February he came to the conclusion that: “The English plan to land there and I want to be there before them.” His definite decision to order an attack on Norway was taken a few days after Churchill had ordered the British destroyer HMS Cossack to sail into Norwegian waters and board the German ship Altmark in order to liberate British prisoners. Churchill capitalised on this success and much was made of the event. The Norwegian Government protested against the violation of their neutrality, but their passive acceptance served to convince Hitler that Norway was actually Britain’s accomplice, and it became the detonating spark of the pre-emptive action that he now ordered: the invasion of Norway.127

  On April 9, despite Churchill’s assurances that the Royal Navy had absolute command of the North Sea, Ger
man troops, many concealed in the holds of merchant ships, seized Oslo and five other Norwegian ports, including Narvik, within hours of the anticipated arrival of British marines. On April 11, the First Lord rose to reassure Parliament, “Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north and in forcing Scandinavia out of neutrality….”128

  [I]t is the considered view of the Admiralty that we have greatly gained by what has occurred in Scandinavia and in northern waters in a strategic and military sense. For myself, I consider that Hitler’s action in invading is as great a strategic and political error as that which was committed by Napoleon in 1807 or 1808, when he invaded Spain.129

  Churchill’s assurances could not long cover up the debacle the British had suffered in Norway. For “the disastrous British campaign in Norway,” writes Ian Kershaw, “the main responsibility rested with Churchill, but it was Chamberlain who paid the political price.”130 And for having succeeded where Churchill failed, in the preemptive occupation of neutral Norway, Admiral Raeder was sentenced at Nuremberg to life imprisonment.

  According to Roberts, Churchill had blabbed his Norwegian plans at a secret meeting of neutral press attachés and German intelligence had picked up vital information on the British attack.

  Lloyd George was apoplectic:

  We are not suffering from one blunder. The Norwegian fiasco is one of a series of incredible botcheries….

  When we decided that it was essential for our own protection that we should invade the territorial waters of Norway despite Norwegian protests, we ought to have anticipated a swift counter-stroke from Germany.131

  George Kennan reached the same conclusion: The British, by violating Norwegian neutrality, had drawn Hitler into Scandinavia.

  The British themselves, toying as they did with the idea of an expeditionary force across northern Norway to Finland, and finally deciding to encroach on Norwegian neutrality themselves by mining the leads along the Norwegian coast, had a heavy responsibility for Hitler’s decision to move on Scandinavia….132

  Churchill had blundered disastrously. During April and May, Britain suffered repeated defeats in Norway until the force was withdrawn. While the debacle was Churchill’s doing, it was Chamberlain who fell. Churchill’s greatest fiasco since Gallipoli vaulted him to national power.

  Two years later, under pressure from Stalin to open a second front, Churchill, now prime minister, launched a cross-Channel raid on the French port of Dieppe. A bloodbath ensued, with two-thirds of the six thousand commandos, mostly Canadians, killed, wounded, or captured, and RAF losses of three-to-one against the Luftwaffe. Canadians have never forgotten what one officer called the bloodiest nine hours in Canadian military history. Many blame Churchill for the loss of their bravest sons in an assault even German defenders regarded as a suicidal sacrifice of brave soldiers.

  In his fortnightly letters on strategy and security, published in 1939 as Step by Step, Churchill repeatedly denigrated the submarine as an obsolete weapon of war and contended the airplane was vastly over-rated as a threat to battleships. On March 22, 1937, Churchill wrote:

  The technical discoveries since the war have placed the submarine in a position of far less strength and far greater danger than was apparent even at the moment when the U-boat warfare was decisively mastered. So far as any lessons can yet be drawn from the Spanish war, it would seem that the claims of air experts to destroy warships at their pleasure and discretion have, to put it mildly, not so far been made good.133

  On May 17, 1937, Churchill again wrote:

  I do not myself believe that well-built modern warships properly defended by armour and antiaircraft guns, especially when steaming in company, are likely to fall prey to hostile aircraft…. [T]he submarine also is not nowadays regarded as the menace it used to be…. [T]he new methods which have been discovered and perfected make the submarine liable almost certainly to be found and thereafter hunted to death far more easily than was possible even in the days when the British Navy strangled the U-boats.134

  On September 1, 1938, Churchill again disparaged airpower as against battle fleets, and dismissed the submarine:

  [A]ircraft will not be a mortal danger to properly-equipped modern war fleets, whether at sea or lying in harbour under the protection of their own very powerful anti-aircraft batteries reinforced by those on shore….

  This, added to the undoubted obsolescence of the submarine as a decisive war weapon, should give a feeling of confidence and security, so far as the seas and oceans are concerned, to the Western democracies.135

  Churchill could not have been more wrong. During his eight months as First Lord,

  the carrier HMS Courageous was torpedoed in Bristol Channel in September 1939. In the next month, a German submarine penetrated the defences of Scapa Flow and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak. In the first nine months of the war, Britain lost 800,000 tons of shipping to a relatively small number of enemy submarines and magnetic mines.136

  In the first year of Churchill’s premiership, antiquated British Swordfish biplanes torpedoed, crippled, and sank Italian battleships in Taranto harbor, and a Swordfish from the Ark Royal crippled the rudder and steering gear of Bismarck, enabling British warships to close in for the kill.

  On December 10, 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, where Japanese aircraft had crippled or sunk eight U.S. battleships, the battleship Prince of Wales, on which Churchill had crossed to Placentia Bay for his Atlantic Charter summit with FDR, was sunk, along with the battle cruiser Repulse, within an hour of each other, by Japanese fighter-bombers and torpedo planes. Six months later at Midway, four Japanese carriers were sent to the bottom by U.S. aircraft. Churchill had rarely been more wrong.

  THE MORAL PROGRESS OF CHURCHILL

  FROM MOST BIOGRAPHIES, the young Churchill appears to have been the model of a Christian warrior. As a young officer who rode in the cavalry charge at Omdurman, he came home to tell the story in The River War. In the book Churchill expressed his moral outrage that Lord Kitchener had left fifteen thousand wounded Dervishes to die on a field of battle and profaned the tomb and desecrated the body of the Mahdi. In a passage deeply offensive to Kitchener, Churchill called this a “wicked act, of which the true Christian…must express his abhorrence.”137

  The young author, however, gave himself cover from retribution by friends of the Sirdar by dedicating his 250,000-word, two-volume history—to the prime minister. The dedication read:

  The Marquess Of Salisbury, K.G., Under Whose Wise Direction The Conservative Party Have Long Enjoyed Power And The Nation Prosperity, During Whose Administrations The Reorganization Of Egypt Has Been Mainly Accomplished, And Upon Whose Advice Her Majesty Determined To Order The Reconquest Of The Soudan.138

  “Everyone likes flattery,” said Disraeli, “and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

  Nevertheless, Churchill’s conduct as a twenty-three-year-old cavalryman seems in the most admirable and honorable tradition of a soldier. But something happened to Churchill at the Admiralty, and with the coming of the Great War for which he had so ardently lusted.

  Churchill had no more respect for the rights of neutral nations than von Moltke, who had said, “Success alone justifies war.”139 Had the German army not first violated Belgian neutrality in 1914, Churchill planned to do so himself—with a blockade of Antwerp. As First Lord, he urged the Cabinet to seize Dutch and Danish islands, though both nations were neutral. He pressed for a blockade of the Dardanelles when Turkey was still neutral.

  Churchill’s starvation blockade was without modern precedent. To deny food to women and children was a violation of international law and a transgression against human rights. During the Boer War, Lord Salisbury had declared:

  Foodstuffs, with a hostile destination, can be considered contraband of war only if they are supplies for the enemy’s forces. It is not sufficient that they are capable of being so used; it must be shown that this was in fact their destination at
the time of the seizure.140

  The starvation blockade of the First Lord Winston Churchill, writes historian Ralph Raico, “was probably the most effective weapon employed on either side in the conflict…. About 750,000 Germancivilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.”141 That is almost a hundred times the number of civilian dead attributed to German atrocities in Belgium.

  As to the purpose of the hunger blockade, Churchill was direct: “to starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”142

  Churchill would claim that, on the evening of Armistice Day, 1918, he had urged Lloyd George to send shiploads of food to Germany.143 In a September 17, 1937, column, answering a charge in the German press that he was an enemy of Germany, Churchill wrote in self-defense:

  At the moment of the Armistice, as is well known, I proposed filling a dozen great liners with food, and rushing them into Hamburg as a gesture of humanity. As Secretary of State for War in 1919, I pressed upon the Supreme Council the need of lifting the blockade, and laid before them the reports from the generals on the Rhine which eventually produced that step.144

  There is, however, no supporting evidence that Churchill ever made any sustained effort to end the starvation blockade he imposed as First Lord in August 1914.

  While Germany introduced poison gas to the battlefield, Churchill became an enthusiast of its use against enemies of the empire. When the Iraqis resisted British rule in 1920, Churchill, as Secretary for War and Air, wrote Sir Henry Trenchard, a pioneer of air warfare: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas…. I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [to] spread a lively terror.”145