[Peace-discuss] The good war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who holds that WWII was at least a "necessary war," 
reviews a couple of books (among others) that attack this central shibboleth of 
American war-making.  --CGE

	New York Review of Books
	Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008
	Churchill and His Myths
	By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

	...

	Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
	by Nicholson Baker
	Simon and Schuster, 566 pp., $30.00

	Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War":
	How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World
	by Patrick J. Buchanan.
	Crown, 544 pp., $29.95

...After the Luftwaffe attacked London in September 1940, Churchill broadcast an 
eloquent denunciation of "these cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings." He 
always had a capacity for believing what he wanted to believe, sometimes to the 
point of cognitive dissonance, and that phrase was rich coming from him. Two 
months earlier he had told Beaverbrook (one more of his disreputable circle) 
that the only thing that could now defeat Hitler was "an absolutely devastating, 
exterminating attack by very heavy bombers."

Those words are quoted by Nicholson Baker in Human Smoke, a genuine curiosity 
(which has already appeared on The New York Times best-seller list, while being 
denounced as "a bad book" by Lukacs). It is an anthology or collage that the 
novelist has compiled from contemporary sources — notably the old newspapers he 
collects — and is made of short items, mostly from the years 1939–1941. One 
dated "It was June 15, 1940" will tell us that the war cabinet was discussing 
the merits of poison gas (whose use against "uncivilised tribes" in Iraq 
Churchill had defended in 1920), another, "It was July 2, 1941," that Reinhard 
Heydrich had issued murderous instructions to the SS.

These clippings are printed usually without comment, though not without purpose. 
In reply to the phrase "selective quotation," Conor Cruise O'Brien once observed 
that all quotation was selective, otherwise it wouldn't be quotation, but 
Baker's method is not so much selective as openly polemical: his items are 
presented in such a way as to defend those who opposed the war, and indict those 
who waged it. This doesn't always work. The admirable Jeanette Rankin, 
Republican of Montana, the first woman to be elected to the House of 
Representatives, one of fifty who voted there against the declaration of war in 
April 1917, and the only one who did so in December 1941, comes out well. As 
William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette wrote, one may entirely disagree with 
her vote after Pearl Harbor, "But Lord, it was a brave thing!" Gandhi comes out 
badly, on the other hand, with his offensive advice to the European Jews to 
accept their fate: "I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, 
if not thousands, to appease the hunger of the dictators"—fatuous words, 
admittedly said before millions rather than thousands were immolated.

"Was it a 'good war'?" Baker asks. "Did waging it help anyone who needed help?" 
He doesn't present a precise or a consecutive argument in reply. But there are 
really several more distinct questions. Is all war wrong? Was this war wrong? 
And even if it was justified, was it waged with means which defiled its purpose? 
In Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Patrick Buchanan raises further 
questions almost more unusual than Baker's, while his thesis is still more 
provocative, insisting that this particular war was needless.

Although Buchanan's argument isn't stupid, it requires something like a 
historiographical sleight of hand, and is conducted backward, as it were. He 
cannot say that there was nothing wrong with Hitler, and he doesn't argue, as 
some right-wing English historians such as John Charmley and the late Alan Clark 
have done, that Hitler represented no threat to England and the British Empire 
and that he should have been given a free hand in Europe. And from his position 
as an American conservative nationalist, Buchanan is scarcely going to follow 
Charmley and Clark and say that the real enemy of Great Britain and its empire 
was the United States.

Instead he says that Hitler would never have come to power had it not been for 
the previous war followed by the vengeful Versailles settlement, and that the 
war in 1914 had itself been mistaken, or even provoked by British policy, 
however little the English ostensibly wanted it (apart from Churchill, needless 
to say; Buchanan quotes Sir Maurice Hankey: "He had a real zest for war"). This 
is not new. Between the wars it was regularly asserted by high-minded Englishmen 
and Americans that no country was ever more responsible than any other for any 
war; that Germany had been at least as much sinned against as sinning; and that 
the postwar settlement was a grave injustice. Since these were specifically 
liberal doctrines, it is amusing to see them reiterated by Buchanan, who is not 
specifically liberal.

What Buchanan seems unaware of is how much those views have been undermined by 
recent scholarship. One may well think the whole idea of war guilt foolish, and 
the clause in the Versailles Treaty attributing such guilt to Germany "caddish," 
as Harold Nicolson called it. And yet many historians in the field now concur 
that Germany bears the principal responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. 
As Bernard Wasserstein shows in Barbarism and Civilization, his excellent recent 
history of the twentieth century, a belief that war was the only way that 
Germany could achieve its rightful aims had "become deeply entrenched in the 
collective mentality of the German political elite by 1914."

As to the postwar settlement, Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six Months That 
Changed the World and Zara Steiner in The Lights That Failed: European 
International History, 1919–1933 (to take but two recent learned studies) concur 
that Versailles wasn't really such a vindictive treaty in the circumstances. 
Buchanan has a point when he indicts the entire Wilsonian creed of 
self-determination, and its hypocritically partial application after 1918, 
quoting another critic for whom Versailles "draped the crudity of conquest...in 
the veil of morality." But it is mere rhetoric for him to say that "France and 
Britain got the peace they had wanted. Twenty years later, they would get the 
war they had invited."

Where Buchanan, in his vehement way, is obviously right is that the war to 
defeat Hitler had largely unintended and immensely destructive outcomes. In a 
chapter entitled "Fatal Blunder," he condemns as utter folly the British 
guarantee to Poland in 1939, the proximate cause of the war, thereby allowing 
himself another swipe at Churchill, who said that "the preservation and 
integrity of Poland must be regarded as a cause commanding the regard of all the 
world." These words sounded very hollow after the alliance with Stalin and its 
consequences, including the repressive Communist regime in Poland. (Buchanan 
makes free with the word "blunder": he also calls Hitler's horrible 
Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 "an historic blunder.")

Whether or not one follows Buchanan's apocalyptic vision of the West in terminal 
decline — like other conservatives, he doesn't seem to have noticed that 
communism has been routed — it is of course true that World War II led to the 
cold war and the forty-year subjection of Eastern Europe. But then much of what 
he is saying was said more concisely by A.J.P. Taylor long ago, in a throwaway 
line glossing the very speech that is Lukacs's main text, and the one phrase 
"victory at all costs." Taylor writes:

	"This was exactly what the opponents of Churchill had feared, and even he 
hardly foresaw all that was involved. Victory, even if this meant placing the 
British empire in pawn to the United States; victory, even if it meant Soviet 
domination of Europe; victory at all costs."

Here was the nub of the problem. To defeat Hitler meant paying a very heavy 
political price, and meant waging war, when there seemed no other way in 
1940–1941, with methods which would have seemed atrocious not long before. "At 
all costs" for Churchill also meant the ruthless bombing of German and Japanese 
cities and the killing of their civilian inhabitants. Nothing is more chilling 
in Human Smoke than Churchill's language about this, especially since, as Baker 
puts it, Churchill saw bombing in pedagogic terms:

Let them have a good dose where it will hurt them most.... It is time that the 
Germans should be made to suffer in their own homelands and cities.... The 
burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs [will bring home their errors] in 
a most effective way.

Why, it might almost be Hillary Clinton threatening "to totally obliterate" a 
distant country.

And yet the strangest thing is that Churchill knew what a hateful regression all 
this was, or a part of him knew that. In My Early Life, his most engaging book, 
he writes a romantic reverie about cavalry warfare in the good old days, cast 
aside in "a greedy, base, opportunist" manner by

	"chemists in spectacles and chauffeurs pulling at the levers of aeroplanes.... 
War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and 
squalid...we now have entire populations, including even women and children, 
pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination."

Ten years after writing that, Churchill led the way in cruel, brutish, and 
exterminatory war-making against women and children, partly thanks to his 
uncompromising personality, partly thanks to what was seen as the logic of the 
situation. Three years after he hoped for "devastating, exterminating" attacks 
on civilians, he was shown blazing German towns filmed from the air, and 
exclaimed, "Are we beasts? Have we taken this too far?" And two years after that 
he tried (not very creditably) to dissociate himself from the destruction of 
Dresden by Bomber Command. He was the same man— the same immensely complex 
man—in 1930, 1940, 1943, and 1945. He was the same man still when, in his last 
speech as prime minister before his final retirement in 1955, he wondered sadly, 
"Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world?"

Those words are quoted by John Lukacs at the end of his essay, though he doesn't 
draw any further moral. Lynne Olson does. In the best sentence in her book, 
about the Suez adventure of 1956, she writes, "Not for the first time, and 
certainly not for the last, the lessons of Munich and appeasement were wrongly 
applied to a later international crisis." Likewise, having rightly observed that 
"there has arisen among America's elite a Churchill cult," Patrick Buchanan 
devotes a chapter, "Man of the Century," to denouncing the cult, and the man. He 
not only looks askance at Churchill's saying in September 1943 that "to achieve 
the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we 
will not go"; he chastises the administration of George Bush the Younger—who 
installed a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office—for having emulated "every 
folly of imperial Britain in her plunge from power," and having drawn every 
wrong lesson from Churchill's career. There is by now an entire book to be 
written about the way that "Munich," "appeasement," and "Churchill" have been 
ritually invoked, from Suez to Vietnam to Iraq, so often in false analogy, and 
so often with calamitous results...

Full article at <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21410>.