Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the...

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World | Patrick J. Buchanan | A Definite Keeper!

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Churchill, Hitler,...

	Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World Patrick J. Buchanan Crown, 2008 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 113 reviews view larger image
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As good as fiction book, but it's history and all too real.

As interesting as any fiction you might read, except, it is history and you know what is going to happen, but you find yourself wanting to know what happens next!

Buchanan's work is not a Macro view of the war, it is an adventure into the microcosm of world leaders who determined the outset of WWII. He'll take you to the beginning, WWI, and lead you down the path into the how's and why's of WWII. But from a fresh perspective. From the perspective of world leaders, there quotes, there actions and there blunders that lead us to WWII.

It is not a yawn of a history book, it has the feeling of history with the excitement of fiction.

Cons:
No book is perfect and from time to time, Buchanan would reiterate topics repeatably or in long winded form.

I also think it would have been a plus to dedicate a small chapter on how Hitler started the war machine.

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A Definite Keeper!

Overall I found Mr. Buchanan's effort well worth reading. However, there seemed to be far too much repetition in the text, almost as if a filler was needed to reach a specific chapter's word count.

As my bias, I would have preferred the scope of Mr. Buchanan's book to have included America. An expansion of America's purpose in having the British end the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, for example. And then the role that FDR and his administration played in the march to "The Unnecessary War." The tale of the SS St. Louis, the American "commitments" to the Poles, to the French, ..., etc., all would provide a broader context to our understanding and beliefs now these sixty-plus years on.

While the references an author has used can always be pointed to as their holding a bias, from strictly an American perspective, in addition to Bailey, Chamberlin, and Tansill, I would have also liked to see Sanborn's "Design for War: A Study of Secret Power Poltitics 1937-1941" and Beard's "American Foreign Policy in the Making 1932-1940" also referenced.

As to "What-ifs" - No Undeclared War in the Atlantic, No Lend-Lease, ... No commitment by America to the British and Dutch to fight for their colonies against the Japanese, ... Many, many "What-ifs."

But then, the American "Arsenal for Democracy" really was the jobs program that ended the American "Great Depression" and began a multi-generational debt obligation.

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The America First Movement Redux

"Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War," demonstrates just how dangerous a good writer can be when he is in possession of bad ideas. Patrick Buchanan, the well-known television pundit and former Presidential candidate, is essentially exploiting the current discontent with the Iraq war to revive the isolationist arguments of the largely pro-German, anti-English "America First" movement of the 1930s and 1940s in a radical and misguided effort at historical revisionism, recasting World War II as somehow just as "unnecessary" as the current quagmire in the Middle East. All the usual suspects are here: the "perfidious Albion" obsession, which sees England's every move as an attempt to lure its allies into armed conflict, the supposedly needless decision of Britain and France to draw a line in the sand at Hitler's invasion of Poland, the imponderable and unlikely "what-if" thesis that Hitler would have turned his attention to defeating Soviet Russia had the western allies let him have his way, and on and on. In the hands of a more reasoned and less polemical writer - Nial Fergusson, in particular, from whom Buchanan borrows all too freely - these ideas would at least have sufficient historical context to make them worthy of reasoned consideration. But Buchanan is a debater by nature and profession, trained to stake out extreme positions, advocate them ceaselessly, and never cede an inch of ground to intelligent counter-arguments. Basically, any book that paints Winston Churchill as one of 20th-century history's greatest villains while casting Hitler merely as a potentially useful bulwark against Communism cannot be considered as anything more than an attempt to garner attention through provocation, albeit skillfully done by Buchanan, whose gift for words could really be put to better uses.

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The `cult' of Churchill

Was Britain's guarantee of Poland in 1939 heroically cynical or imperially suicidal? Why did the pacifist Chamberlain, who had no means of aiding Colonel Jozef Beck and Poland against the Germans, commit the UK to Poland's defense (encouraging Beck to spurn negotiation on Danzig)?

Did victory over Hitler (six years later) preserve Britain and sacrifice it's empire on an altar of vanity? Did the victorious UK, laden with debt and obligation to the US (which took full postwar advantage) fall irreparably to third world status? Did England (Churchill) amorally welcome an equally evil regime (Stalinism) into east Europe?

Such questions are pondered in this book. Was Churchill the mythic hero routinely disinterred and used by ideologues to plan new wars, or was he a complex opportunist with a history of strategic blunders and (later) switching sides on same issues?

Though some may say this is artful advocacy, this work raises many valid issues and is well worth reading. Churchill was indeed as human as the rest of us, and dear old England made some fatal choices in the mid-20C. Those choices (ultimately) led to the sacrifice of a grand empire that benefited the few at the expense of the many (readers may want to read Ian Kershaw's `Making Friends with Hitler').

If there is a flaw in this book it's the author's allusion to the Britain's continental `balance of powers' policy and subsequent failure to examine this policy in detail (after all, Chamberlain merely followed two centuries of successful policy in picking continental underdogs to urge them to kill off each other).

It's surprising (and laudable) the author didn't cite Rudolf Hess's 10 May 1941 enigmatic mission to the Duke of Hamilton as proof of spurned peace. Or the reconciliation attempts of Lord Londonderry (Churchill's cousin, a WWI veteran with an annual income of £100,000 unconnected from those that actually earned it for for him).

If there's a glaring omission in this work, it's the lack of any mention or discussion of the Hoßbach Memorandum, which recorded Hitler's clear intent to launch an aggressive war 5 November 1937 (it hung many of the Nüremburg defendants in 1945).

It's lamentable the author omits the price France (as the underdog in British policy, immobilized by communists and apologists like Lord Londonderry) paid. France lost over 1.4 million men in WW1 (1914-18) - more men than the United States - a much larger nation - has lost in it's entire history (1607-2008).

Clemenceau uttered a gem when confronted 20 May 1919 ("Que voulez vous que je fasse entre deux hommes dont un se criot Napoléan et l'autre Jésus Crist?) "What do you expect when I'm between two men- one of whom (Lloyd George) thinks he is Napoleon and the other (Wilson) thinks he's Jesus Christ? Both (Lloyd George and Wodrow Wilson) had no personal stake in the war - they had the luxury of academic interpretation and philosophy (they got France, under the `balance of powers' policy to do the hard lifting).

Clemenceau's nightmare materialized within six weeks in 1940: France lost another 90,000 men and 200,000 wounded (the US, wisely, sent it's best wishes).

This book is well worth reading, but incomplete. The warning it sends on imperial mistakes is timely, and I take that to be the real message. Certainly the past few years routine disinterment of Churchill to aid foreign adventures advocated by a few `poly-sci' ideologues is warning enough.

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