In a chilly, ancient, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I and my fellows are hard at work as night falls on the peaceful, picturesque and ancient city outside. A nearby cathedral clock tower chimes the quarters amid the stillness. Our intent little faces show that we are concentrating hard. Any modern person, observing us, might think we were in the grip of some peculiar and mysterious cult. It is the hour of the week when we are allowed to work on our models, a remarkable feature of boarding school life in that irrecoverable time. These models come in lurid cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle. Within are a few disappointingly small scraps of grey plastic, capsules of glue and some fiddly transfers. With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations.
This war is the dominant theme of serious conversation, a source of metaphors and frame of thought. It is also our moral guide, the origin of modern scripture about good and evil, courage and self-sacrifice. Our teachers in many cases retain their military or naval ranks. I, for instance, was taught arithmetic by a Commander RN and geography by a Royal Marine captain. One of my headmasters, a wartime major, had helped design the British Army’s ammunition box. We spoke without embarrassment of ‘Glory’ as if we were Soviet propaganda broadcasts. For us boys there was Men of Glory, a book crammed with uplifting stories of martial courage. This was so successful that its author, Macdonald Hastings, later penned a second volume, More Men of Glory. There was no shortage of Glory at the time. For the girls, there was Women of Glory (edited by Clifford Makins), in which the equally courageous exploits of their sex were movingly recorded. Courage in pursuit of goodness, in the face of a terrible enemy, is what we most believe in. It is at Dunkirk and D-Day, or in the forests of Burma, or in the prisoner-of-war camps of Silesia or the Far East, where brave Britons of all classes defy their captors, or in the freezing midnight clashes between escort ship and U-boat, that we find our lessons about how to be good and live well. The stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son cannot compare with this. Even the Crucifixion grows pale and faint in the lurid light of air raids and great columns of burning oil at Dunkirk, a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day. This is a war just over the horizon of time, in which we wish we had taken part, and which dominates our boyish minds above all things. My chosen model, probably because I come from a naval family, is the destroyer HMS Cossack. My tongue is between my teeth as, finger dabbled in glue, I concentrate on a tricky piece of assembly. I am making childish attempts to reproduce the sound of exploding bombs and shells, or of aircraft engines in steep dives. All around me, others are doing the same, with plastic miniature Spitfires, Hurricanes and Sherman tanks.
I am still moved by the story of the Cossack, which on a freezing February night in 1940 seized and boarded the German freighter Altmark, boldly and riskily violating Norwegian neutrality as she did so. It was a moment of great romance, one of the last acts of old-fashioned patriotic, chivalrous war against an (apparently) normal enemy before the struggle changed into something wholly different. Concealed in Altmark’s hold were 300 British prisoners of war, captured by the raider Graf Spee and on their way to camps in the Third Reich. The Norwegian Navy, in a series of cursory searches, had failed to find them and had let the Altmark proceed.
This did not satisfy Captain Philip Vian, the Nelsonian commander of the Cossack, a man with the long, bony face, near-suicidal cold courage and weathered impervious calm of the old-fashioned fighting sailor. Vian was paid to fight, and he was not reluctant to earn his pay. His permanently narrowed eyes saw through any excuses or evasions. He forced the Altmark to run aground, and ordered his men to board her. They used cutlasses, the last time this ever happened in our long history of combat at sea.1 After making their way below, dispensing ruthless violence to any who got in their way, they heard British voices calling for help. They responded by shouting ‘The Navy’s here!’
I cannot now explain the mixture of thrill and comfort which those words sent through my whole being, an entire world of safety, honour, justice and warmth. All of these joys and virtues were packed into the lovely, low, grey shape of the Cossack, fierce and dark in the freezing Nordic sea, with her bridge dashingly open to all weathers (enclosed bridges were for foreigners and sissies) and her lovely rakish lines, built to fight and doomed to be sunk in battle – for that is what she was made for, and that is what quite properly happened to her.
My little plastic replica was an object of devotion, even idolatry, though nobody at my cathedral choir school would ever have thought to point it out. In those days the worrying details of religion were kept from children, much as the worrying details of sex were also concealed from us. We would have plenty of time to find out all about them when we were bigger. But the pseudo-religious side of World War II was (and still is) expressed in more than the remembrance services that oddly grow grander and more spectacular as the war sinks further into the remote past. There is a special sort of reverence attached to this particular conflict. You can – once you are alert to the problem – see the same sort of quasi-religion at Bentley Priory, the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. A stained-glass window commemorates the battle. This is interesting in itself, for stained glass is a religious form of art, much as the anthem is a religious form of music. The window is dominated by a Spitfire fighter, nose upwards, strongly resembling a cross. The imitation of another cross, another sacrifice, goes even further than the mourners of World War I went, with their talk (in a once-famous hymn) of ‘Valiant Hearts’ and the suggestion that the thousands of lives laid down were comparable to Christ’s sacrifice. One especially contentious verse runs:
Still stands His Cross from that dread hour to this,
Like some bright star above the dark abyss;
Still, through the veil, the Victor’s pitying eyes
Look down to bless our lesser Calvaries.
There is one difference – that this hymn is now almost forgotten. I, a regular churchgoer in traditional churches, have only once heard it (mumbled by a congregation who did not know the words or tune). This is mainly because the belief that the 1914–18 war was a ‘Great War for Civilisation’, or that it was a ‘War to End War’, has perished completely from the earth. You can find the expression ‘War to End War’ now in the fiction or journalism of the time and be amazed that this was what people actually, unselfconsciously believed. Will our descendants be as baffled by our devotion to the myth of the ‘Good War’? I suspect so, but the moment that will puncture the reverence still lies unknown in the future.
The belief that 1914–18 had been the ‘War to End War’ melted away, of course, in September 1939, when it turned out to have been rather emphatically ‘The War that Did Not End War’. Indeed, it could equally have been called ‘The War that Led Directly to Another War’. In its place, there has grown a new belief in the ‘Good War’ of 1939 to 1945 (the opening dates of this conflict vary according to nationality). This war, we believe, was so good that men constantly seek to fight it again, so that they can bathe in its virtue.
Its passion and parables, and its characters, are nowadays better known than those of the Bible. Instead of the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the betrayal at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Supper at Emmaus and the coming of the Holy Ghost in tongues of fire, we have a modern substitute: Winston the outcast prophet in the wilderness, living on cigars and champagne rather than locusts and wild honey, but slighted, exiled and prophetic all the same. We have the betrayal at Munich, the miraculous survival of virtue amid defeat at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain, and the resurrection of freedom and democracy on D-Day. All these are observed and encouraged with smiling benevolence by the United States of America, godlike in its goodness, wealth and power – especially after its use of man-made thunderbolts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This faith’s symbol, in Britain, is the Spitfire, interestingly a defensive weapon mainly renowned for saving us from a putative invasion. Slightly less often, the Lancaster bomber is also an object of worship. That aircraft was undoubtedly an offensive weapon, but one about which we prefer not to think too much. Both are preserved as living relics in the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, which takes to the air for great national occasions including royal weddings, as if it is a sacrament of some kind.
So potent is this belief in the goodness of the war that even the deliberate mass killing of civilians in horrible ways through air attacks on the poor areas of cities is not merely excused but celebrated by devotees. Sir Arthur Harris, who actively, unapologetically and explicitly sought to kill as many Germans as he could, is commemorated by a statue in the heart of London, unveiled by the Queen Mother herself. The mildest criticism of such attacks is met (as this author can attest) with resentful fury and even personal insult. And the enormous role in the war of Stalin’s Soviet Union, an empire of secret police, slave camps, torture chambers and monstrous tyranny, is almost entirely forgotten. Not only do we largely forget, and know little of the Gulag, while (rightly) never for a moment forgetting German death and slave camps, we also seldom mention Stalin’s part in defeating Hitler. We are amazingly ignorant of his 1939 pact with the Third Reich, of his seizure of half of Poland (which was never reversed) and of his aggressive attack on Finland. And we know little of the huge land battles in the east, which decided the outcome of the war in Europe. We know absolutely nothing of the USSR’s strange, zigzagging conflict with Japan, out of step with the rest of the war.
The reason for this forgetfulness and ignorance is obvious. If it was a ‘Good War’ against the powers of Evil, how can it have been won with the aid of such a wicked power, a power we spent much of the following 50 years claiming to despise? Finland, almost our ally in 1940, sought to save its independence from the USSR by joining an informal alliance with Hitler between 1941 and 1944. Finland faced a mirror image of the moral dilemma experienced by Britain. Finland’s greatest enemy was the despotic, murderous USSR. The USSR’s most powerful foe, the despotic, murderous Third Reich, might help it survive. But the price of that survival was an alliance with a hideous regime. And so Finland chose the wrong side, in an episode that has since been politely forgotten. So are several other odd and anomalous events in the Nordic region between 1940 and 1945, especially civilised, social democratic Sweden’s opening of its borders and railways to allow the passage of German (or perhaps we should say ‘Nazi’) troops on their way to oppress others. This episode is not widely known outside Scandinavia. But it is bitterly recalled in Norway, its principal victim. During the German attack on the USSR, Sweden allowed an entire German infantry division to cross its territory from Norway to Finland, to take part in the attack on the Soviet Union. And this was only a small part of a much larger transit of troops over a long period. This lengthy, undeniable and embarrassing event is presented as a crisis in Swedish history, but Swedish historians argue about whether there was a true crisis, or if it was a pantomime to conceal the fact that Sweden never had any other intention than to let the Germans through.
The theology of the ‘Good War’ demands a great deal of evasion, suppression and forgetfulness of this kind.
And what can we say about World War II’s final settlement, at Yalta? Viewed coldly, this cynical action, a sort of large-scale protection racket in which Stalin played the racketeer and the Western Allies his cowed victims, was a far more disgraceful episode of appeasement than anything even contemplated at Munich in 1938. This unheroic pact meant the handing over of millions of innocent and defenceless people to a cruel foreign conqueror. Some of them – such as the Cossacks – were disgracefully sent in locked railway cars into the custody of Stalin’s NKVD execution squads. They had good reason to fear for their lives, but their frantic pleas to remain in the West were ignored. No doubt the penetration of our establishment by sympathisers of the Communist empire prevented us for many years from admitting the revolting nature of the Soviet state. But perhaps our embarrassment about having had such people as valued allies also played its part in that reticence.
In the same way, the view that post-Yalta Europe was a liberated and just continent is greatly undermined by the Potsdam Agreement. Under this pact, the victorious powers agreed to what would now be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ on an astonishing scale. The grisly horrors of this episode, in which the Allies falsely pledged to conduct the expulsions in a manner that was ‘orderly and humane’, are well documented. To our shame, they are almost entirely unknown outside the small number of professional historians whose job it is to remember such things. Yet this was one of the most important events of modern European history. It is not remembered because it does not accord with what we like to believe about ourselves. The self-justifying legend lies incongruously, like a child’s fluffy blanket, over the bones and rubble beneath.
This pseudo-pious, historically absurd view of the war is most powerfully summed up in the extraordinary mural which dominates the chamber where the United Nations Security Council holds its meetings. The UN itself says that the artwork ‘represents man’s efforts to emerge from a dark past of war and slavery to a better life and a future illumined by science and the arts’.2 But the painting, by the Norwegian artist Per Lasson Krohg, is patterned much like a stained-glass window, and full of pseudo-religious (not necessarily Christian) symbolism. Chained captives are released from dungeons, children hold doves or hand apples down from branches, a phoenix rises, magical light pours through an opened door, a great white horse rears, a soldier lays aside his gun, smiling gatherings in traditional dress celebrate joyfully, men and women weigh out gold, or peer through microscopes or telescopes. More light floods the upper part of the mural. Shadow obscures its lower sections. Beneath, an evil dragon lies dying in the darkness, a sword driven through its vitals. At the centre, a couple kneel together in what looks like prayer, clasping each other’s forearms tightly. She holds flowers. Actually the same couple appear elsewhere in another, less optimistic, picture by the same artist. Per Krohg suffered under the German occupation of his country and spent a year doing forced labour. The couple at the heart of the UN mural are very similar to a deeply melancholy study that Krohg painted at the time of the German seizure of his country, which had brought much misery into his life. No doubt he saw the defeat of Germany as an occasion for almost religious joy, as many in the occupied countries did – especially if they were not then handed over to Stalin. The painting in the Security Council chamber depicts the beginning of a new, liberated and enlightened era, even a new world – not just the end of a war, but the end of a whole stage of human history, and the beginning of a new age of peace, brotherhood and prosperity.
The same belief, that we live in a world made nobler by a crusading war against naked evil, was well expressed, in typical terms, by a prominent member of my own generation. His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, heir to the English throne, was the speaker in the BBC religious broadcast ‘Thought for the Day’ transmitted on 22 December 2016. He recalled:
I was born in 1948 – just after the end of World War II in which my parents’ generation had fought, and died, in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. That, nearly seventy years later, we should still be seeing such evil persecution is, to me, beyond all belief. We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.3
This formula, that the war was (except accidentally) ‘a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe’ is in my view almost completely false, as I shall show. Would that it were true! But worse, such beliefs have led men to link virtue with modern wars of choice.
And it is such wars, begun in the name of goodness and civilisation, which in my view brought us directly to the ‘evil persecution’ to which the prince was referring. He spoke of the great rivers of refugees, then fleeing a Middle East turned into a zone of destruction and a scene of sectarian hatred. There is a strong argument for saying that these refugees, in many cases turned into economic migrants by their exile, were created by deliberate, ostensibly benevolent Western interventions. Western interference and invasion in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria all helped to bring this crisis about. All of these were driven, to some extent, by a belief in, and a desire to emulate the ‘Good War’ of 1939 to 1945. In an age where traditional colonial and territorial wars are very much out of fashion, only the concept of idealist, righteous war made these actions acceptable in Western democracies. Only later, when eyes and minds had cleared, and emotions were no longer inflamed by idealism, did some start to clamour for the prosecution of those responsible for the war crimes that resulted. But it was popular support for Utopian war that made these war crimes possible.
The Hitler war became – and remains – a war so idealist, so ideological, that it has no room for the old-fashioned British virtues of generosity to the foe and self-mocking pluck. These were permitted and even encouraged during the more openly cynical 1914–18 combat. We would be shocked, for instance, had there been a Christmas truce between front-line soldiers during the Hitler war. Nor would Allied air squadrons have sent wreaths to the funeral of a German flying ace inscribed ‘To a gallant and worthy foe’, as they did to the funeral of Manfred von Richthofen in 1918. The Germans in the Kaiser’s war may have been ‘Huns’, but they were not ideological enemies guilty of ‘intolerance’ and of ‘monstrous extremism’. And it is very common for those describing the 1939–45 war today to refer to ‘Nazi’ warships, ‘Nazi’ aircraft and ‘Nazi’ soldiers, rather than using the more accurate word ‘German’. No doubt there were National Socialists present in large numbers. But the uniforms they wore and the flags they flew were mainly those of country, not of party. Many of the military objectives for which they fought would have been accepted as perfectly legitimate by the pre-Hitler democratic governments of Germany. The soldiers and forces of the USSR, for the most part our ally in the same conflict, are interestingly seldom if ever referred to as ‘Communist’ troops, though this would be the consistent thing to do.
The oddest and most telling victim of this fierce new form of idealism was poor P. G. Wodehouse, an undoubted patriot but a political innocent, who was astonished to find himself treated as a traitor for making a joke out of his own internment. Once, long before, he had written a satirical book, The Swoop!, mocking the thrillers of William Le Queux and others, which predicted a German invasion of England before 1914. In those days, such things were permissible. But his sense of humour had not kept up with the times. He lived more or less outside and beyond the real present, in an everlasting Eden of country houses, majestic aunts and dotty noblemen. Perhaps his only acknowledgement of the existence of Hitler had been in a September 1936 short story, ‘Buried Treasure’. It was typically unserious, and ran:
The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler’s Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and soon would be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.
‘He’ll have to let it grow or shave it off,’ said the Whisky and Splash. ‘He can’t go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course.’
This, of course, was entirely the wrong attitude for conditions of total war. It is incomprehensible to those who now know the depths to which Hitler’s state sank before it died, which nobody even guessed at in those times. In fact, it is interesting to read the works of Hitler’s sternest opponents in the pre-1945 era, because they too did not know the half of it. They write of him as a violent, cruel and intolerant tyrant, but of the usual European kind. They did not know what we now know. They were also not trying to sustain support for war in a large democracy whose citizens did not much want to give up their increasingly prosperous lives and submit to rationing, blackouts and conscription.
So when total, ideological war came, and swept him up, Wodehouse still did not grasp the difference. He thought he had been captured by Huns, menacing but at heart ridiculous, at whom he could laugh. He thought the 1939 war was another conflict between nations, in which there was room for a little light humour. Alas for him, he had been captured not by Huns but by Nazis, who by the end of 1940 had to be taken seriously at all times, though at the beginning of that year they could still – just about – have been met with levity. In comedy, timing is all. Much early British war propaganda takes the same view as Wodehouse, portraying Hitler as an absurd and laughable figure and the Germans as strutting Prussians. There was even a song (little heard after May 1940) about how we would ‘hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’. This was much hated by professional soldiers. Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator had also parodied Hitler as a clown. It is now difficult to watch, for that reason. The devisers of this stuff were no more deluded than Wodehouse, but were forgiven for their error, because so many people had mistakenly laughed at such things during the long months when they had thought they were fighting a normal war against a normal enemy.
In 1939 and early 1940, very few people outside Germany knew any better, least of all the British political class. Prominent among Wodehouse’s furious righteous critics for what (in any sane world and by any reasonable standard) was a minor error, was the strange figure of Duff Cooper. Cooper, one of Churchill’s closest allies, is still mostly revered for having been on the ‘right’ side during the Great Betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938. He was an early disciple of the mighty Churchill. Even then, one has to ask how right that side actually was, given the likely outcome of a war between a Britain with a tiny army, defended by biplanes, and Hitler’s Germany in 1938. The idea that an Anglo-German war at this moment would have ‘stopped Hitler’ is amazingly common. Perhaps this is because most British people have a poor grasp of Eastern European geography and do not (for instance) know that Vienna is east of Prague. Thanks to the Anschluss with Austria, Czechoslovakia was, by autumn 1938, virtually indefensible, surrounded on three sides by German territory and airfields. We shall see Duff Cooper again in a slightly different light in the pages to come. But his treatment of Wodehouse was an early warning of the power of the myth of the ‘Good War’. In a good war, the enemy cannot just be the enemy. He must always be evil, and that is our sole motive for fighting him.
World War II, like all events that have become myths, is a dangerous subject. Oddly enough, in the years immediately after 1945 it was more rationally discussed than it is now, because there were so many people prominent in daily life who had experienced it as it actually was.
It is since it has solidified into a legend, especially in my generation, that it has lost all nuance. The belief that it was an unequivocally ‘Good War’ has grown with extraordinary speed, and has recently been reinforced by later ‘Good Wars’ which have ostensibly been modelled on it.
Promoters of the ‘Good War’ do not claim to have ended war, as defenders of the 1914 conflict used to do until this became impossible in 1939. They know better.
So the myth is not damaged by the procession of small and medium-sized conflicts that have followed, even when (as in former Yugoslavia and recently independent Ukraine) they have taken place on 1939–45 battlegrounds and between the same foes in modern dress. On the contrary, the ‘Good War’ claim has been repeatedly promoted by those who have wanted more wars and hoped to persuade us that they too would be good. And it has been fascinating to watch the Serbs and Russians, whom we regarded as our ‘noble allies’ in the Balkans and Ukraine in the 1940s, having their positions reversed; our friends in these modern wars have been the Croats and Ukrainians, who in many cases were very much not on ‘our’ side in 1941.
Why is this fantasy of a ‘Good War’ so hard to criticise? For it certainly is hard to criticise. Those who do so will rapidly find themselves accused of Nazi sympathies, defeatism, moral indifference and similar unlovely failings. I plead ‘not guilty’ to all of these charges.
I am not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings. There are not many feelings left to hurt. The general reluctance to criticise the war cannot really be explained by a tactful desire not to upset those who took part. Few who fought in it now survive. Most of those who went through it as combatants (my father was one of them) regarded it with a bleak and unsentimental eye. Those who brought it about and led us through it are all long in their graves, so we have no need to spare their feelings. Its most towering figure, and the one who did most to shape our idea of what happened, died when I was a schoolboy in short trousers. Yet even so I still feel nervous about what I am about to say here.
What I mainly fear is that it will be twisted, deliberately misunderstood, misinterpreted or simply lied about by people unwilling to see the myth re-examined. This will be because that myth – of a benevolent war fought for the good of mankind – has in recent years become essential to many campaigns for fresh wars. And in those campaigns for these wars, the Churchillian example has been repeatedly paraded as justification, however much of a stretch the comparison may be. In normal life, the so-called ‘Godwin’s Law’ states that the person who first introduces a Hitler comparison into any argument is the loser of that debate. In campaigns for war, that person is the winner. In these conflicts the enemy is always Hitler, the promoters of war are always Mr Churchill or President Roosevelt, and the opponents of war are always Neville Chamberlain, set on shameful appeasement.
It was so when President Harry S. Truman heard of the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Until then, the policy of the USA had been to stay out of Korea because it was outside America’s ‘defence perimeter’. But the ‘appeasement’ fear changed that, or perhaps was useful in explaining a major change in policy which caused the USA to intervene. Truman wrote,
I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. […] If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.4
Later in the Korean War, in December 1950, he said: ‘We will continue to take every honorable step we can to avoid general war. But we will not engage in appeasement. The world learned from Munich that security cannot be bought by appeasement.’5
It was so at Suez, where Anthony Eden (though he was too fastidious to make the Hitler claim) compared the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to Mussolini and warned of the cost of ‘giving in to Fascism’.
Many later American uses of the comparison are explored in a fascinating online essay, ‘This Guy is a Modern-day Hitler’, by Norman Solomon.6
At a press conference on 28 July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson invoked the Munich test to justify deepening involvement in Vietnam. He said: ‘Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.’ There have even more absurd parallels. At a World Affairs Council session in Boston on 15 February 1984, Secretary of State George Shultz said: ‘I’ve had good friends who experienced Germany in the 1930s go there [Nicaragua] and come back and say, “I’ve visited many communist countries, but Nicaragua doesn’t feel like that. It feels like Nazi Germany.”’
Perhaps the most ludicrous of all these false comparisons was the Hitlerisation of the Panamanian despot Manuel Noriega in August 1989. The USA’s Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, no doubt accurately, accused Mr Noriega of giving safe havens to drug traffickers, of laundering drug money, and of allowing Panama to be used as a cocaine trans-shipment point. But he then said, nonsensically, ‘That is aggression as surely as Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland 50 years ago was aggression. It is aggression against us all, and some day it must be brought to an end.’ Shortly afterwards the United States invaded Panama and deposed and imprisoned Mr Noriega.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in June 1990, President George Bush (senior) said: ‘A half century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor who should, and could, have been stopped. We are not going to make the same mistake again.’ Even this was not really a reasonable comparison. The USA had indulged Saddam Hussein when he was attacking their enemy, Iran. They also did far too little to deter Saddam’s seizure of Kuwait before it happened. At an astonishing meeting between Saddam Hussein and April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq, on 25 July 1990, eight days before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam asked Ms Glaspie,
If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab – our strategic goal in our war with Iran – we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq [this in Saddam’s view included Kuwait, which he regarded as a lost province of Iraq], then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States’ opinion on this?
Ms Glaspie then said to the Iraqi leader:
We have no opinion on your Arab–Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
One account of the exchange notes, in parentheses, ‘Saddam smiles’.7
The New York Times published a different version on 23 September 1990 in which Ms Glaspie was reported to have said,
But we have no opinion on the Arab–Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi [Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.8
Neither version suggests a 1940 Churchillian determination to stand firm at all costs. Both are rather more similar to the early Churchillian diplomatic response to the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, in which the Last Lion in fact called forcefully for … more talks.
Excuses have been made for Ms Glaspie, but even those who try to defend her have noted that John Kelly, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East, in an appearance before the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, was asked by the Republican chairman Lee Hamilton, ‘Do we have a mutual defense pact with Kuwait that would obligate us to come to their defense in the event they were invaded by Iraq?’ John Kelly confirmed that no such pact existed.9 This was on 31 July, two days before the invasion. Once again, this is normal diplomacy, lacking the ability to know the future. This power of prophecy is an ability that all those who evoke Winston Churchill’s spirit believe they will have when they are tested. Alas, they seldom possess it in real life.
The ghost of Neville Chamberlain was also summoned from the beyond to aid calls for war against the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević. Milošević was ‘the closest thing to Hitler Europe has confronted in the last half-century’, Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan wrote in January 1999.10 About the same time, President Bill Clinton also likened Milošević to the German Führer, saying, ‘And so I want to talk to you about Kosovo today but just remember this – it’s about our values. What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?’11 The Washington Post reported that ‘the president compared Milošević explicitly to Hitler’.12 Any hesitation in launching war against him was of course dismissed as ‘appeasement’. It was so again in the second Iraq war in which no real menace to other countries was ever proven. The British prime minister, Anthony Blair, arguing for the policies that led to the joint US–UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, used the same comparison. Saying that he respected the sincerity of those opposing him, Mr Blair recalled that many people had sought to appease ‘fascism’ in the 1930s for the sake of avoiding war. ‘A majority of decent and well-meaning people said there was no need to confront Hitler and that those who did were war-mongers,’ he reminisced. ‘When people decided not to confront fascism, they were doing the popular thing, they were doing it for good reasons, and they were good people … but they made the wrong decision.’13 In April 2017, President Donald Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, made perhaps the most unconvincing of all such comparisons. After the USA accused the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, of using chemical weapons, he suggested Mr Assad was worse than the German dictator, saying, ‘You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.’14 He was met with mocking laughter.
But the comparison continued to be used, however much it might be mocked. In June 2017, Mr Trump denounced his forerunner’s policy towards Cuba (the end of an embargo and a general opening up of diplomatic and economic contacts, with no major military significance). President Trump’s White House aides briefed US media that Obama’s initiative had been a ‘failed policy of appeasement’.
Amusingly, the only real instances of active appeasement since Yalta have generally been highly popular with and much praised by major political figures, powerful media and foreign policy establishments. The first is the ‘peace process’ under way in the Middle East since the 1970s, when Israel was first urged, by its supposed friendly allies, to give ‘land for peace’. This description could also be applied to the Munich Agreement. This compelled Czechoslovakia to give up land in return for not actually being invaded and bombed. But it was concluded largely for the internal ease, diplomatic contentment and satisfaction of outside powers.
No long-lasting peace or friendship has resulted. But Israel’s ability to defend itself against military attack has been severely reduced by the loss of strategically valuable land. Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula, a hugely valuable defensive zone, won in battle in 1967, in return for paper promises of peace. Significantly, the Egyptian leader who signed this agreement, Anwar Sadat, was murdered by an Islamist fanatic three years later. Egypt’s agreement to the treaty is only maintained thanks to enormous cash subsidies and arms supplies from the USA. It is deeply unpopular in Egypt. The Israeli embassy in Cairo, in a fortified block, came under sustained siege by a mob in September 2011, during the ‘Arab Spring’. Enthusiastic Western media reports of this ‘Arab Spring’ had failed to notice (or at least to report) a strong anti-Jewish undercurrent, as in the scrawling of Stars of David on posters of the then president, Hosni Mubarak, whose resignation the crowds sought and won. The embassy staff barricaded themselves in a ‘safe room’ and had to be rescued from a terrible fate by Egyptian commandos. Relations between the two peoples remain icy. While some Israelis travel to Egypt, very few Egyptian private citizens ever visit Israel. If they do, they are regarded by neighbours and by the authorities with suspicion.
This dubious treaty was followed by further attempts to exchange actual land for yet more notional ‘peace’, under pressure from the USA, at Madrid in 1991 and through secret talks in Oslo in 1993. The 1993 episode led to a more or less forced public handshake between the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, on the White House lawn. Observers present at the occasion (including this author) could see little sign of genuine reconciliation in the two men’s stances or facial expressions. These efforts, all of which tend towards the creation of an armed, sovereign and hostile Palestinian state bordering Israel and within rocket range of its only major airport and its capital city, are almost universally regarded as constructive and just. The so-called ‘two-state solution’, which requires such an arrangement, is official policy in almost every major foreign ministry involved in the conflict. Israel’s allies long to bring it to a conference at which such an arrangement could be imposed upon their alleged friend.
The second example of appeasement in action, and admired, is the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland. This is an agreement under which the Irish Republican Army and various ‘Loyalist’ gangs have officially abandoned their programmes of murder, torture and bombing in return for the release of many of their worst offenders. They have also been given promises that unprosecuted bombers and killers will not normally be pursued for their crimes, or if they are, will only serve minimal sentences. The agreement also entailed the withdrawal or dismantling of British armed forces and surveillance stations, the disbanding of counterterrorist organisations, and the removal of British and royal flags and symbols from Northern Ireland. The IRA won a permanent place in government, and several well-paid posts, for its political front organisation Sinn Féin. It also obtained the special freedom for that party to raise funds abroad, a freedom not given to other UK parties. Above all, they won the promise (at some point in the future) of an irreversible referendum to transfer Northern Ireland from British to Irish sovereignty, their ultimate aim. This referendum, once called, may be held as often as every seven years until it produces the required result. If anyone is in any doubt about the nature and direction of this treaty, it is worth noting that a vote to remain under British sovereignty, if it took place, would not be irreversible. The IRA may be assumed to have kept large stocks of guns, ammunition and explosives. Despite official claims of ‘decommissioning’, no testable or checkable or transparent verification process took place. Violent terrorist events since the surrender, including the Omagh murders (the worst single bombing of the entire conflict), are invariably attributed to ‘dissident’ IRA groups amid cries that ‘the peace process cannot be derailed’. This is an interesting expression. Why cannot it be derailed? If it is a genuine peace agreement between equals, why can apparent breaches of it by one side not be punished? If the British government failed to implement agreed concessions, Sinn Féin would be quick to derail the peace process. That is why it continues, relentlessly, in one direction only. Nobody even dares suggest that the Provisional IRA might be unofficially encouraging such attacks to press home demands in Sinn Féin’s unfinished campaign to whittle away the remaining influence of London over Northern Ireland.
Mysteriously, these supposedly dissident groups are never punished or disciplined by the IRA itself, although the past history of Irish Republicanism, particularly the civil war of the 1920s and the 1938–40 period during which Éamon de Valera hanged several IRA leaders, suggests that those who defy their leaders, and refuse to accept agreements made by these leaders, may normally expect violent repression. The agreement was also not signed by its principal beneficiary, Sinn Féin. The only actual signatories were the British and Irish governments. Once again real material concessions were given in return for paper or verbal promises. The British prime minister, Anthony Blair, had his own Neville Chamberlain moment, saying rather inaccurately in a handwritten ‘piece of paper’ that there would be no prisoner releases until violence had been given up for good and that those who used or threatened violence would be excluded from government.
It is hard to see how this series of events was not a form of appeasement. Yet it remains politically popular and admired, its darker consequences being quietly ignored or forgotten. Those who criticise it, such as this author, are accused of being against peace. Appeasement doth never prosper. For if it prospers, none dare call it appeasement.
When we do appease, it is approved both by the political ‘centre’ and by the mass media. Yet despite the fact that the Hitler–Munich comparison seldom fits the circumstances, this model continues to be applied to the enemy of the day, whoever he is – currently Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. The ‘appeasement’ label is hung, in the same crude way, round the necks of any who suggest that a warlike stance is not justified. Both charges – that the enemy is Hitler and that those who oppose a warlike stance are appeasers – are increasingly used in the active and peculiar campaign to worsen our relations with the Russian Federation and create needless tension at the edges of Eastern Europe. Quite significant people, from Hillary Clinton to the Prince of Wales (he who believes that the 1939 war was ‘a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe’), have publicly equated Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler. In May 2014, referring to the actions of the Russian president in Ukraine, during a tour of Canada, the prince told a woman who had lost relatives in the Nazi Holocaust, ‘And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.’ In March 2014 Mrs Clinton told a private fundraising gathering in Long Beach, California that President Putin’s campaign to provide Russian passports to those with Russian connections living outside his country’s borders was reminiscent of Hitler’s protection of ethnic Germans outside Germany:
Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the thirties. All the Germans that were […] the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying ‘They’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people’ – and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.15
So it is understandable that the apologists for such conflicts – and there are many of them – might not wish to hear my case fairly. It does not just undermine a treasured and comforting story about the past, which casts Britain and the USA as brave and good. It also undermines potent and influential modern pressure groups and factions which repeatedly employ this version of history to justify and encourage new conflicts.
There is a substantial lobby behind the drive for eastward expansion of NATO, some of it not wholly disinterested. The New York Times, as long ago as 1998, found that US arms manufacturers had made ‘enormous investments in lobbyists and campaign contributions’, to promote the cause of NATO’s eastward extension. The newspaper said they stood to gain billions of dollars in sales of weapons and other equipment from the expansion.16 The shocking crudity of this direct pursuit of self-interest is the sort of thing one might have expected to appear in an Eric Ambler thriller of the 1930s, in which merchants of death cynically invest in – and hope for – future war (See Uncommon Danger, for example). But in this case it is not leftist fiction but demonstrable fact. Against such forces one fights with difficulty. Even now, when the expansion of NATO has become a fact and a settled policy, and has spread up to the borders of Russia itself, bodies which support it continue to receive support and contributions from major companies in the defence sector.
So I cannot prevent the various calumnies that will follow. But I can guard in advance against what will be claimed.
So, to begin. I am not saying that Britain should have made peace with Hitler in 1940 – quite the reverse. I believe that Winston Churchill’s refusal to contemplate such a peace was his greatest action, and his greatest contribution to our history.
I am not saying that Britain should have remained neutral throughout the European War that began in 1939. I am saying that we might have done better to follow the wise example of the USA, and wait until we and our allies were militarily and diplomatically ready before entering that conflict. I am suggesting that our diplomacy, especially after March 1939, allowed others to dictate and hasten the timing of that war in ways that did not suit us or our main ally, France.
Above all, I am not saying that the war against Hitler was unnecessary. At some point, for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be ended, probably by force, from within or without. Even if you do not believe that the internal affairs of other countries are the business of other countries, you may hope that repulsive regimes may be brought to an end. And sometimes the most effective way of doing so is inflicting foreign policy defeats on them, robbing them of prestige at home.
The startling thing is that, as matters turned out, Britain ended up playing a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag. It is still difficult to mention this, or to criticise aspects of our war effort. But it is so.
I am saying that the war could have been fought differently and that the British guarantee to Poland, by consciously giving Warsaw control over our decision to declare war, was one of the gravest diplomatic mistakes ever made by a major country. A. J. P. Taylor concluded in his Origins of the Second World War that the outbreak of war had been the result of mistakes by both sides. I am not so sure. The behaviour of the Foreign Office between March and September 1939 strongly suggests that it sought a war, largely to assert Britain’s standing as a Great Power. We dragged France, which had similar feelings but also knew in its heart that it was no longer truly great, into conflict. Hitler simply did not understand this sudden idealistic spasm in Britain, and was not sure how to respond to it.
It is hard for us, too, to understand how the people who welcomed Neville Chamberlain home from Munich with cheers of joy because he had bought peace, could so quickly have resigned themselves to war. But they did.
Some historians, such as Donald Cameron Watt in How War Came, believe Hitler thought that we would not declare war. Watt repeatedly rejoices that we did in fact do so, but is less keen to mention that, having declared war, we did not then do very much voluntary fighting. If Hitler did think we would not declare war (and his dispositions of warships in the hours before the outbreak suggest he was at least hedging his bets), he was mistaken. But did he think that? It is perfectly possible that he thought we would do what we did – declare war for the sake of appearances, and then do little or nothing about it. His ‘Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War’, issued on 31 August 1939 and cited by Cameron Watt, seems to be based on the belief and even hope that Britain and France would declare war. It stipulated: ‘In the west, it is important that the responsibility for the opening of hostilities should be made to rest squarely on Britain and France.’ This is also the point at which he stated, ‘Attacks on London are to be reserved for my decision.’17 He was well aware of the danger that some actions in war make later peace deals far harder to reach.
But Hitler was quite correct in thinking that, whatever we said, we would not fight for Poland. We did not do so. From the outbreak of war to the surrender of Warsaw and the disappearance soon afterwards of the entire Polish nation, we did nothing to help the Poles. Yet we had solemnly agreed to guarantee their independence in a treaty finally signed on 25 August 1939, less than a week before the German invasion. We could hardly pretend we had forgotten, that we did not mean it, that circumstances had changed or that the agreement had weakened over time. It is an astonishing episode of conscious duplicity, and can only be understood in the following way:
Poland was a pretext for war, not a reason. And it was a pretext for an essentially irrational, idealistic, nostalgic impulse. We were a Great Power, after all. We had to do our duty and stand up to Germany, even if we had no serious weapons with which to do so. We may even have feared (with some justification) that Germany would never provide us with any excuse to go to war with it.
This explains the peculiar events of the following months, in which British forces engaged German forces off the coast of Uruguay and in Norway, but not in Poland. Likewise French forces, which faced the German frontier in strength, made no significant moves to attack Germany in support of Poland. We were at war with Germany, in a mainly theoretical way, though admittedly it cannot have felt very theoretical at the Battle of the River Plate or at Narvik. Much of the Anglo-German war would continue, for most of the next six years, astonishingly far away from the European continent whose fate it decided.
The timing of our declaration of war very nearly led to our defeat and might even have brought about our subjugation. It almost led to a shamefaced withdrawal from the war – the almost inevitable outcome, had the USSR been defeated. It would probably have had these miserable consequences, if Hitler had been as preoccupied with Britain as many still imagine he was. Fortunately for us, he was not, and turned his guns on Stalin instead. Our declaration of war most certainly did lead directly to national bankruptcy and a permanent decline in our status, both conceivably avoidable. It also led to a much accelerated, extremely violent and badly managed collapse of our empire.
Beyond doubt there were many acts of noble courage by our people, civilians and servicemen and -women during that war. It is absolutely not my purpose to diminish these acts, or to show disrespect to those who fought and endured. My mother had to undergo the Liverpool Blitz, a severe ordeal made worse by the fact that it received far less publicity than its London equivalent, and so the people of that city had to suffer without the sympathy or knowledge of outsiders. My own father took part in the Murmansk convoys, a form of warfare both extremely dangerous and highly politically complicated. In fact, his unexpected role in a Soviet–British alliance illustrates rather well the shocking lengths to which Britain had to go to survive the war it had itself sought to start. Our national dislike of the idea of a realpolitik alliance with Stalin, in the summer of 1939, was a great folly. It prevented us from getting Soviet cooperation at a far lower price than the one we eventually paid for it. I can hardly be accused of being ignorant of the sacrifice and courage of the war, or of being unmoved by the actions of the generation of my late parents, whom I continue to admire and love. I recently obtained, long after his death, the medal my father should have received while he was still alive for his service on those convoys. It came in a cheap plastic case, like a tourist trinket, emphasising our decline in the long years since.
But enough time has surely passed for us to admit that the military and political conduct of the war by our leaders was not always as good as it should have been.
To point out the startling fact that for four years of a six-year war, the British Army was not in direct contact with the main body of the enemy is not to impugn the courage of its soldiers. They did not decide who they fought, or where they did it. To say that our major military effort for a crucial period was the deliberate killing of German civilians in their homes is to criticise those who chose and ordered this action. It is emphatically not an attack on those who (at great sacrifice) were instructed to implement it. I hate to point out that in many cases the Royal Navy, which is for me a beloved institution, failed badly in combat with the enemy. But it was so. The loss of the battlecruiser HMS Hood at German hands was a consequence of decades of neglect. The futile sacrifice of the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse (dealt with at length in Chapter 7) can, by contrast, be blamed directly on political folly. There was no serious military purpose in sending those great ships into danger. It was a political gesture which the Admiralty failed to prevent, though it knew it was a terrible mistake. It is still hard to know how to square the shocking PQ 17 convoy decision – to scatter and flee in the face of the enemy – with centuries of fighting tradition. But it is surely time to recognise that the ‘Good War’ was often incompetently fought, with outdated equipment, by a country in decline, as well as wrongly directed.
And so on. But these, like the other under-reported, forgotten, largely unknown or plain embarrassing episodes I shall highlight, are not disconnected incidents.
This book makes no claim to be primary research. It simply takes a number of events and developments that have been separately described by reputable and established historians and journalists, and connects them in a way that has not been attempted before. I believe the result is a story quite different from the endlessly popular industry of ‘revelations’ about spies, exciting special operations and the rest, which supplies the publishing industry with much of its material to this day without really extending our knowledge and understanding of the events involved.
These events, which popular and school histories tend to avoid or minimise, reveal a pattern. That pattern, I shall argue here, is of a country seeking to be more important, rich and powerful than it was, and failing in all cases. As a result, it became still less powerful, still poorer and still less important. Out of a phoney war came a phoney victory and an unsatisfactory, uncomfortable and unhappy peace. It also reveals a country unwillingly handing over its wealth and status to a far from friendly rival, in order to stave off conquest by an actual enemy.
Finally, it reveals a country that did not enter the 1939 conflict to save human civilisation, and certainly not in any hope of saving Europe’s Jews, as so many (including the heir to the throne) nowadays believe. Indeed, it shows a country actively unsympathetic to the plight of Europe’s Jews, actively frustrating the growth of the Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine, which it had promised to create only 22 years before. Yet this was also a country that deliberately sought a war of choice over a bad issue and at a bad time, when it could have avoided it till circumstances were far more favourable. It did so, or rather its leaders did so, mainly in the vain hope of preserving a Great Power status its rulers knew in their hearts it had already lost. As it happened, the resulting war ended that Great Power status forever. Finally, it describes a country that found that wars fought for abstract objectives often leave their victors worse off than they were when they started.
Perhaps the postwar years of privation, debt and rationing, when Britain had all the outward appearance of a defeated nation, persuaded us to assert ever afterwards that we had stood alone (which was not quite true) and saved the world (which was partially true but which might not have been necessary if we had not so rashly risked the world in a fit of grandeur in the first place). These beliefs allowed us to think that the pains and humiliations that followed the costly victory of 1945 were therefore justified. We have since mythologised the experience so completely that a prime minister only has to say the word ‘appeasement’ to silence opponents and bring legislators and journalists to his side, on any wild adventure he chooses to start. There has been enough of this. Now there is a danger that there could be too much of it. The illusion is maintained by grandiose politicians and by football crowds, who sing the praises of ‘Bomber Harris’ and chant ‘Two world wars and one World Cup!’ to comfort themselves for yet another English footballing defeat at German hands. If it is some other continental country’s team that has bested us yet again at our national game, they chant instead (inaccurately) ‘If it wasn’t for the British, you’d be Krauts!’
The self-flattering fantasy that we ‘won the war’, and the nonsensical but common belief that we did so more or less alone, still leads to foolish economic and diplomatic policies based on a huge overestimate of our real significance as a country. One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it.