CAPITOL IDEAS : The Good War? Maybe Not
Bethell, Tom
caPITol IDeaS
The Good War?
Maybe Not
by Tom Bethell I have childhood memories of World War II: the drone of distant night bombers in formation (coming from America? heading to Germany?...
...He was spot on...
...Thus the parallel with the Polish guarantee...
...It was over for the British and the other empires...
...The whole of Eastern Europe fell under Communist domination for 45 years...
...They chose neither...
...And it was lost...
...Well, we don’t know that...
...The first was the Versailles Treaty of 1919...
...From Britain’s point of view I believe it was not a good war...
...John McCain pressed for Georgia’s admission into NATO and said, “Today, we are all Georgians...
...I was interested to read about the pledge to Poland, because I had known little about it...
...Tragically, that’s what happened, over the next few years...
...Without the war it wouldn’t have happened...
...That become the rallying cry of British war-skeptics...
...68 THe amerIcan SPecTaTor December 2008/January 2009 Tom beTHell The Versailles terms became ever more onerous as the meeting progressed, but Germany, facing a naval blockade and starvation, signed on the dotted line...
...caPITol IDeaS The Good War...
...great Wehrmacht-obstructing con crete blocks littering the road from the South Coast (Worthing, Bognor Regis) to London...
...Only Danzig prevented cooperation between Germany and Poland...
...She was recalling a lost age...
...There are times when a country must go to war, but good judgment is a prerequisite...
...If Warsaw would consent to Germany’s building of an extra-territorial road and railway line across the Corridor,” Buchanan writes, “Berlin would leave Warsaw in control of the economic and railway facilities in Danzig and guarantee Poland’s frontiers...
...A recent, analogous turn of events, potentially involving Russia and the United States, reminds us that the Polish guarantee of 1939 should always be remembered as an object lesson...
...Hitler then humiliated him with a triumphant tour of Prague after he had taken over the Sudetenland...
...Buchanan’s book is not about the war itself but about the events leading up to it...
...This was not so much because he gave away the store—Czechoslovakia wasn’t his to give and he had been in no position to defend it—but because he made the mistake of trusting Hitler...
...Maybe Not by Tom Bethell I have childhood memories of World War II: the drone of distant night bombers in formation (coming from America...
...On one point I disagree with Buchanan...
...I n revisiting the preliminaries to World War II, I want to make one more point...
...But the Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck rebuffed the German offer...
...They couldn’t...
...Germany was to surrender all its colonies and possessions and was saddled with the cost of British military pensions and many other burdens...
...And east was where he went anyway...
...Even the short-lived Soviet version fell...
...He was explicit in Mein Kampf that east was the most promising direction for German expansion, not west or south...
...I wonder, though...
...It was a belated conquest dressed up as a treaty...
...What they mean is that if the destruction of the Third Reich had not happened, an even worse outcome would have come our way...
...But it had been transferred to Poland, along with a linking corridor, to give that country a port on the Baltic...
...It’s of interest that in the prewar period Hitler and Churchill did agree on one thing: the menace of Bolshevism...
...Meanwhile they had made, especially for me, a cut-down, child-sized army uniform, and I was so proud to wear it...
...Russia then attacked and beat back the Georgians...
...Possibly Russia wants to restore the whole of Georgia to Russian control—I don’t know...
...How so...
...Britain’s David Lloyd George at first opposed any “vengeance and avarice...
...It seems to me that expanding NATO out to Russia’s borders has been a foolhardy exercise and one can only hope that the Germans and French will put a halt to it...
...I have been reading Patrick J. Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War, and it is an informative and courageous work...
...Tom bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...In 1920 the Poles had rolled back the Red Army and briefly considered themselves a great power...
...We certainly shouldn’t believe any of this subjunctive history...
...Has enough time passed to raise the question whether it really was the good war...
...In August, military forces in Georgia invaded two breakaway or autonomous provinces and attempted to reunite them with Georgia...
...That particular alternative history is no more reliable than any other...
...But the popular press in London whipped up the public and a spirit of retribution soon consumed all the parties (Georges Clemenceau of France in the thick of it...
...Gone to the beaches of Normandy...
...They have already decided how things would have turned out if the actual course of events had somehow been derailed...
...A lunch discussion of that guarantee, held in London at the time of Sir James Goldsmith’s funeral and attended by Buchanan, was the inspiration for the book...
...E arlier there had been munich—a fiasco for Chamberlain...
...As Buchanan asks, at the end of his account of Versailles: “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...
...Very much approvingly...
...It was 95 percent German, and Germany had a strong historical claim to the port...
...Let’s try to keep a sense of proportion about these things...
...War against Germany to protect Poland showed poor judgment...
...With the news that Hitler was now planning to recapture Danzig, Chamberlain decided he had to make a stand...
...But in The Gathering Storm, published after the war, he changed his tune...
...Churchill (not yet prime minister) immediately supported the pledge, saying that “the preservation and integrity of Poland must be regarded as a cause commanding the regard of all the world...
...Then the plane (a flying bomb) exploded two or three miles away...
...One possibility is that Hitler decides to move east and attack the Soviet Union...
...In a Washington Post piece in August, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote that the prospects of NATO membership emboldened Georgia to launch its attack on the breakaway provinces...
...You can make it come out any way you want...
...But surely it was doomed anyway...
...Let’s pretend that we can rewrite history, this time without Chamberlain’s pledge...
...Die for Gori...
...The armistice that ended World War I was based on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points...
...I hope so...
...Some believe, for example, that Hitler would have conquered the whole world and we all would have become slaves of the Nazis...
...The second, Neville Chamberlain’s war guarantee to Poland in March 1939...
...The country became mere Britain, no longer Great...
...Perhaps, in the end, we can all agree on one thing: that the war in and of itself was a terrible thing, maybe the worst in history...
...If attacked, then, December 2008/January 2009 THe amerIcan SPecTaTor 69 caPITol IDeaS Georgia could call on its NATO allies (us) to come to its defense...
...And notice that that evil empire was a product of World War II—the not-so-good war...
...It also invaded other parts of Georgia, including Gori, birthplace of Stalin...
...I hope not...
...On its face, it may seem odd to call a book courageous that questions the need for a war in which 50 million people died...
...His book is subtitled, in part, “How Britain Lost Its Empire...
...Against Russia...
...He promised to go to war if Poland asked for help...
...New points were added to Wilson’s 14...
...the skittering contrails of a “dogfight” in a clear blue sky...
...Lest we forget, a guiding principle of NATO is collective security: “An attack on one is an attack upon all...
...The unmitigated disaster of World War I already saw to that...
...After Versailles Germany lost access to Danzig, among other territories...
...The British “cared nothing for Danzig,” Taylor added, or if they did, “they sympathized with the German case...
...But support for the war has been so sustained and the denunciations of its critics so vehement that something must be said...
...Perhaps it’s an interesting game but it won’t prove anything...
...Die for Danzig...
...For America the war had its advantages (but not for the 417,000 who were killed...
...Hitler wanted Poland in his “anti-Comintern Pact,” and “the fiercely anti-Bolshevik, anti-Russian, Catholic Poles seemed natural allies in a crusade to eradicate Communism...
...Chamberlain has been criticized for it, but we are a hundred times more likely to have heard him vilified as an appeaser, returning from Munich waving a piece of paper and promising “peace in our time...
...The difference is that the “good war” proponents got in first with their “even-worse-without-it” argument, and they have stuck to their guns...
...And I remember my mother saying, repeatedly, “Oh, before the war…” How different everything had been...
...not seen again by me...
...So would a war against Russia now to protect Georgia’s independence...
...A deal was expected...
...I shall focus on two events in particular...
...Maybe, with a neutral Poland, an advance to the east would have meant the early end of the Soviet Union, or mutual destruction of the German and Russian armies...
...I don’t know...
...They forgot, as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote, that they had gained their independence in 1918 “only because both Russia and Germany had been defeated...
...So it accepted what seemed to be reasonable terms...
...He seemed weak and naïve...
...Canadian soldiers bivouacked in the house opposite...
...And certainly the war was good for the Soviet ruling class...
...Does this mean that we should avoid such speculation...
...Notice, however, that those in the “good war” camp all along have engaged in just such counterfactual speculation...
...Now, some refer to World War II as “the good war...
...Herbert Hoover, then involved in famine-relief work, called the post-armistice “food blockade” of Germany “a wicked thrust of allied militarism and punishment,” and a “black chapter in human history...
...But engaging in such speculation ensnares us in counterfactual history and, as you can readily see, it’s all guesswork...
...What I do know is that Sen...
...The “loosely worded pledge” was “one of the most ill-considered in British history...
...That was his fatal blunder...
...The engine stopped, and there was a thirty-second silence...
...In addition, the historians Andrew Roberts and Paul Johnson and the politician and diarist Alan Clark joined in that discussion...
...Let’s try to stop anything like it from happening again...
...70 THe amerIcan SPecTaTor December 2008/January 2009...
...The 350,000 Danzigers were agitating for a restoration to Germany...
...Now they had to choose between Russia and Germany...
...Britain had no means of bringing effective aid to Poland, yet it obliged Britain itself to declare war on Germany if Poland so requested...
...I saw one of those V1 “doodlebugs”—pilotless planes with an engine like an unsilenced motorbike— making its guttural way across the Surrey skies toward the North Downs...
...World War I became known as the Great War— although not approvingly...
...The British historian Roy Denman has called this guarantee “the most reckless undertaking ever given by a British government,” putting peace or war in Europe in the hands of an “intransigent, swashbuckling military dictatorship...
...John Maynard Keynes said that the “peace” of Versailles, in which Germany had been deliberately humiliated, would last for 20 years...
...He had delusions of grandeur...
...Germany had triumphed in the east and its troops still occupied France...
...Obviously they do not call World War II the good war because they believe that the terrible things that happened—50 million dead, including 6 million Jews—really were good...
...then, one morning, gone...
...Therein lay the foolishness of the pledge,” Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times...
...Now what happens...
...How could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee?…Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people...
Vol. 41 • January 2009 • No. 10
