To understand Winston Churchill’s policy of aid to Joseph Stalin, one must look back upon what it was that Britain and the free world faced prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union…
Mr. Henry Regnery is a wise and good man. But as Aristotle observes, no man can be wise in all things. And Henry Regnery—notwithstanding his great wisdom in other matters—has been most unwise in what he has written recently about the statesmanship of Winston Churchill in the Second World War.*
Regnery writes from the perspective of American isolationism of 1940, and sees “perfidious Albion” manipulating innocent America at every turn. But it is simply grotesque for him to write that. “The American declaration of war against the Axis powers was a triumph for Churchill and the culmination of many months of careful effort…” If it was Churchill’s “careful effort” that resulted in our going to war with the Axis, then he must have had some occult power over the Japanese and German governments. The United States was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor before any declaration of war, and it was the lunatic Hitler who declared war on the United States first. It is by no means certain that we would have gone to war with Nazi Germany in December 1941 if Hitler had not taken the option out of our hands. However much Churchill may have wished or prayed for such an outcome, it is difficult to see what his “many months of careful effort” could have had to do with it.
The gravamen of Regnery’s complaints about Churchill’s statesmanship has to do above all with the latter’s policy of all-out aid to Stalin’s war effort. Regnery writes:
In April 1942, Churchill told the House of Commons that the war could be ended ‘only through the defeat of the German armies.’ Following Adolf Hitler’s decision to turn against his former ally, Joseph Stalin, therefore, Churchill supported the Soviet Union in every possible way, making no conditions of any kind—’To help Russia, there was nothing he would not do,’ as he told the House of Commons.
To understand Churchill’s policy of aid to Stalin—or, more precisely, of aid to the Red Army fighting the Wehrmacht—one must look back upon what it was that Britain and the free world faced prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. What is least understood today—and what is most fundamental to understanding everything else—is the “correlation of forces” in the world, following the fall of France in the spring of 1940. To put it all into a nutshell, Hitler had, from a strategic viewpoint, won the war. He was the conqueror of nearly all of western continental Europe. Spain maintained a precarious neutrality, by professing its political sympathy. The two other neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, were more useful to him unconquered. Allied with Italy and Japan, Hitler seemed on the very verge of giving the law to the entire world, even more completely than Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon had ever dreamed of doing.
One thing, and one thing only, stood between Hitler and the full fruition of his ambitions: Churchill’s Britain. No one could be master of the world who was not master of the surfaces of the seas. To defeat Britain was however well within the compass of Hitler’s power, had he applied it with ordinary prudence. At that time, Britain had no allies. The United States was sunk in the deepest isolationism. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt privately believed that America’s fate was linked to Britain’s, he was launched upon a campaign for re-election in which he would vie with his Republican opponent in promising American mothers, “again and again and again,” that their sons would not be sent to fight in any “foreign wars.” The United States would, in this fateful year, send food and weapons to Britain, but there never was any possibility, right up until the moment of Pearl Harbor, that it would enter the war voluntarily. Meanwhile, the U-boats were sinking shipping into Britain faster than Britain and the United States together could replace it. Hitler’s true policy, following the fall of France, was to concentrate upon the defeat Britain. According to Basil Liddell Hart, Britain at this juncture was a sinking raft in the North Atlantic. The United States could have continued pumping air into it, but not as fast as Hitler could let it out. If Hitler had focused his efforts upon the war at sea—which he was winning handily—he could have starved the island into submission, probably in no more than a year.
Yet America’s fate was linked to Britain’s. Geography has made us in all essentials as much an island nation as Britain. With our enormous coastlines, on both the Atlantic and the Pacific, we are vulnerable to any hostile nation, either in Europe or in Asia, that controls the sea lanes to those coastlines. American isolationists have been subject to the delusion that the Atlantic and the Pacific are barriers to aggression from overseas. In fact, the oceans are not barriers, but pathways. The delusion has been fostered by the fact that the British navy, for over a century, has barred hostile powers the way to our shores. The Monroe Doctrine was predicated upon the barrier of the British navy. It is worth remembering, by the way, that the United States triumphed in the American Revolution, but only when the French navy intervened to keep the British fleet separated from the British army.
Had Britain fallen, British naval power would have been joined to that of Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, together with all the facilities for naval construction that those nations commanded. American naval power could have been swept from the seas. Bear in mind that ships sail in all directions, and there is nothing in nature that said we could send great armies to Europe in two world wars, but that the Axis could not have sent great armies here. Without the British and American navies, there would have been no means of preventing Hitler and his allies from landing, let us say, 10,000,000 men in Mexico. (Remember the Zimmerman telegram of World War I.)
Hitler’s invasion of the U.S.S.R. was an incredible blunder. It was the one way in which he could throw away the victory he had already won. Stalin not only was no threat to him in 1941, but also was an active ally, supplying him with the oil and grain that fueled his war machine. Stalin’s aid to Nazi Germany nullified the effects of the British blockade, which had been more potent even than American intervention in bringing about Germany’s defeat in World War I. And once Britain had been defeated—and America isolated if not itself defeated—Hitler could have done anything he wished to Stalin’s regime, which could not have survived without British and American help. It was a miracle that Hitler did the one thing that could have sacrificed everything he had—from his own point of view—accomplished.
Why in the world Regnery thinks we—that is, Britain and America—should not have done everything we could have done, to assist Hitler in his pathway to destruction, is incomprehensible. We know exactly how the victorious Third Reich would have ruled the world. All inferior races—at least ninety percent of the human race—would have been either exterminated (like the Jews) or enslaved. In Poland, many thousands of children were taken from their parents (the parents being sent to slave camps). Those of the children judged to have Aryan genes were saved, the rest killed (and these were non-Jews). Plans for Britain also included selective breeding to purify the race. Non-Aryan males who were to be spared as slaves were to be castrated. What the plans for America would have been can easily be imagined. They would, of course, have included the destruction of American no less than European Jewry, and the re-enslavement of the blacks. But that would only have been the beginning.
Regnery writes, as if it is a reproach, that: “Churchill’s conduct of the war can only be understood in view of his determination to win, whatever the cost and whatever the consequences.” Here is a passage from Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940:
You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never before surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival of the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
If the horrors of Nazidom fade into the past, it is only because Churchill’s Britain rallied to Churchill’s leadership and accepted the grim burden of that unrelenting struggle. It led in the end to the victory Churchill had so fearlessly proclaimed as his aim in those darkest days of 1940. But without Churchill, Hitler would have succeeded, and many millions of us—certainly the present writer and his descendants among them—would not be here to remember him.
Churchill did indeed say “victory at all costs.” But he did not say, and never implied, that he would not do whatever was in his power to minimize those costs. No one was more keenly aware than Churchill of the terrible losses of World War I, and of how they led to the pacifism and general demoralization of the democracies in the West. This had applied most of all to France, but Britain too had suffered the tragic loss of all that was best and brightest of its “Rupert Brooke” generation. Churchill never forgot how this had poisoned the politics of the inter-war generation.
One of the most important facts about Churchill’s leadership—one that is not even hinted at by Regnery—is that British battle deaths for the six years from 1939 to 1945 made up approximately one-half of the toll of the four years from 1914 to 1918. According to the Information Please Almanac (1990) the figures are 908,371 empire dead in World War I and 460,728 for World War II. American figures for W.W. II are 291,557. Comparable figures for the U.S.S.R. are listed as 6,115,000, although the latter figure is said to be “deaths from all causes.” However, the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1974) says that the “U.S.S.R. has been reckoned to have lost 11,000,000 combatants and 7,000,000 civilians.” The figures it gives for the United Kingdom (not the empire as a whole) are 264,443 and 92,673; for the United States, 292,131 and 6,000.
To say that British and American losses were very small compared to those of the Soviet Union is not to minimize their significance to the British and Americans. But their relative size is a tribute primarily to the leadership of Churchill. Regnery implies that Churchill believed in giving Stalin all he asked for and asking nothing in return. But what Churchill wanted—and what he got—was the Red Army to tear the guts out of the Wehrmacht, which it did. I cannot think of a better bargain in all of world history!
This bargain was gained in large measure by Churchill’s resistance to the demands made—both by Stalin and by the American chiefs of staff—for a second front on the Continent, in 1942 and 1943. Churchill prevailed in preventing the Normandy invasion for two years, or until there was complete control of the air and sea in the channel. Also, during that period, the Wehrmacht suffered enormous losses on the Eastern Front, and the reserves it could deploy in the West were vastly reduced. None of these considerations prevailed with General George C. Marshall. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans and Britons survived the war only because of Churchill.
The true record of Churchill’s resistance, in the last year of the war, to Stalin’s aggrandizements, is not to be found in his communications with Stalin. Rather is it to be found in the strategic disputes with the Americans. Suffice it for the moment, that Churchill pressed for a meeting with the Russians as far to the east as possible. He opposed the Riviera landing. He opposed allowing the Russians to take Berlin. He opposed the withdrawal westward to the Yalta lines in the summer of 1945. But Churchill’s influence on the ailing Roosevelt and the joint chiefs, and with their strategic decisions, diminished steadily as the war progressed, and as the American forces increasingly dominated the alliance.
Regnery reserves his most biting comments on Churchill for his wartime statements of friendship with and confidence in Stalin. After quoting what Churchill said to the House of Commons, on his return from Yalta, Regnery writes: “It is evident that Churchill had a great facility for self-delusion.’’ All these statements can be lumped under the “nice doggy” school of political rhetoric. What Regnery ignores is the fear, never absent from Churchill for a moment, that Stalin might once again do a deal with Hitler, pull out of the war, and let Hitler turn his full force once again against the western allies. There is plenty of evidence that Stalin tried in fact—and more than once—to do just this, but Hitler’s bloodthirsty racial hatred would not permit him to cooperate. But all of Churchill’s wartime expressions of confidence in Stalin had no other purpose than to continue and maximize the Red Army’s contribution to the defeat of the common enemy.
Regnery’s complaints against Churchill are addressed also to his accepting—or condoning—of the allied bombing, with great loss of life, of German cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden, in the latter days of the war. But I do not recall Regnery mentioning the Nazi bombings of Rotterdam, London, or Coventry in the earlier period of the war. Nor does he mention the enormous slaughter by the Wehrmacht (and not the S.S. alone) of unarmed civilians on the Eastern Front. In fact, Regnery does cite several instances of Churchill showing a tender conscience concerning these bombings, something I do not recollect any of the other war leaders doing.
Post-war studies have concluded that the area bombings were militarily ineffective, and a poor use of allied resources. But this is wisdom after the event. Churchill accepted what the experts, who were on the spot at that time, recommended, as did Roosevelt (and Hitler before them). I do not see that this detracts from the overall excellence of his leadership.
Finally, Regnery complains bitterly of Churchill’s alleged acquiescence in the border changes, and the population transfers in eastern Europe, especially those involving Poland and eastern Germany (again in the news). Of this, and of many other matters, one must say only that the greatest of statesmen is limited, both in his foresight and in his power. Churchill watched helplessly as the Americans undermined his strategy for reaching middle Europe before the Russians. Once that strategy was abandoned, and Stalin was in possession of the ground, there was little more that Churchill could do. But let us not deceive ourselves: The measure of Churchill’s genius is not what he failed to do for Poland. It is rather what he succeeded to do for Britain, and for the principles of Anglo-American constitutional freedom.
Churchill’s contribution to that freedom did not end with his wartime premiership. In his speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, and also in many other speeches, he forged the doctrine of containment that the United States, together with post-war Britain, did eventually put into effect. Both the NATO alliance and the European unity movement owe their earliest and most powerful impulses to Churchill. The disintegration of the Russian Communist empire, which we hope we may be witnessing today, owes more to his foresight and his genius than to that of any other man. He is surely the greatest statesman of our century, and of many other centuries besides, and belongs with the immortals of all time.
Postscript
The foregoing essay was written in March of 1990. Events have moved so rapidly in the intervening two years, that it seem superfluous, if not bizarre, to speak “in defense of Churchill.” The disappearance of the Leninist-Stalinist regime from the stage of world history, without defeat in war, is a world-historical event without precedent. It is the greatest, if not the final testimonial to the wisdom and foresight of Sir Winston. Let us remember once again that it was Sir Winston, at Fulton, Missouri, in April of 1946, who launched the Cold War, and the policy of containment. Although President Truman introduced Sir Winston, and sat on the platform as he delivered his speech, it was only a year later that the “Truman Doctrine” formally inaugurated the American policy that pursued the lines that Sir Winston had laid down. No praise of President Truman can be too great for pursuing this policy, once it had been adopted. No praise of Senator Vandenberg can be too great for bringing the Republican Party out of the dismal swamps of isolationism, so that the policy of containment became, and for over forty years remained, a bipartisan policy. No praise of President Reagan (or Prime Minister Thatcher) can be too great, for bringing the policy of containment to a victorious conclusion. But let us not forget who initiated the policy that led to this, perhaps the most remarkable of the triumphs of freedom in world history.
In thus remembering Churchill, we act in the service of something more than pious commemoration. The voice of something misnamed “America First” is once again abroad in the land. We are reminded of Charles Lindbergh and Fritz Kuhn standing together—before Pearl Harbor—in warning of American involvement in a war that was alleged to be mainly in the interest of Jews. We are reminded that similar voices, only last year, warned against a war in the Gulf that was allegedly in the interest, not of the United States, but of Israel. We should remember that in the year 1946, before Senator Vandenberg’s heroic achievement, it was the unspoken but effective collaboration of isolationist Republicans and American Communists that led to our rapid demobilization and withdrawal from Europe, and to a defense budget of pre-war dimensions. It was this that almost resulted in Stalin’s conquest of western as well as of eastern Europe.
After Hitler’s invasion of the U.S.S.R. in June of 1941, Churchill made his famous remark that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons. Churchill never doubted that, in the decisive respect, Stalin’s Russia was Hell. And he knew that, notwithstanding there was but one God, there was more than one Devil, or at least more than one devil to do the Devil’s work. Now that the two most Satanic regimes of history lie in history’s dustbin, let us not forget who, more than anyone else, put them there. But it would be an ill tribute to his memory, to think even for one moment, that the danger of tyranny is ended. There is no end of history, and the danger of tyranny is coeval with the human condition. Churchillian statesmanship is never more necessary than when we become prone to the illusion that we can do without it. Let us not forget that the greatest war in human history, according to Winston Churchill himself, was the easiest of all great wars to have prevented.
*“War and Leadership,” Modern Age, Summer 1989, pp. 199-207
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Dr. Jaffa writes:
“The measure of Churchill’s genius is not what he failed to do for Poland. It is rather what he succeeded to do for Britain, and for the principles of Anglo-American constitutional freedom.”
Stanisław Cat Mackiewicz writes:
“In the course of the second world war, Poland played a minimal role in influencing the outcome while suffering a maximum of losses. The opposite is true of England: she played a maximum role in influencing the outcome while suffering a minimum of losses. Therein rests the key difference between the excellence of English government and the incompetence of Polish government.”
(Green Eyes, chapter 21, my translation)
And two more quotes as a minor rebuttle or guantlet thrown – also from Cat Mackiewicz in defense of America First Isolationism:
“English politics and England played an enduringly evil part in the affairs of France, Italy and Spain over the course of the XIX and XX centuries. England engineered quarrels between the various European nations and provoked wars between them. The role of England towards Italy, Spain and France is no less hostile than it is towards Poland, with the minor exception of the fact that English meddling in Polish affairs was usually particular, temporary, and rare while the harm perpetrated by England in the politics of France or Italy has been permanent. I make this claim based on a long process of reflection on the history of the last few generations of Europe…the superiority of English politics to European politics rests in the fact that for Europeans foreign policy is merely a reflex of internal politics. National parties and political dynamics are at odds with one another and the foreign policy of the nations of Europe are more often than not the first punches in these internal squabbles. In the English two-party system, foreign affairs are outside of the domain of inter-party quarrels. The opposition party always does a great service to His Royal Highness by making various promises to foreigners to which England herself is not bound. In fact, as soon as the opposition takes power, it forgets its former promises. This solidarity of both parties in foreign policy – a thing unheard of and foreign to continental powers – is the strength of England. Someone once said that Churchill’s politics were no different from Bevan’s except that it was Churchill’s job to fool Washington DC while it was Bevan’s job to fool Moscow. There is great truth in this impertinence.”
My translation from Londonihilists, chapter 8 “On England & Europe”
And on the subject of the war guarantee to Poland:
“The guarantee of our independence which Chamberlain was kind enough to give us in his speech to the house of Lords on 31 March 1939 cannot be viewed as anything but a political maneuver, part of the English strategy for starting a German-Russian war. The goal of the war guarantee to Poland was to bring the Germans and the Russians into close proximity, bayonet to bayonet. Given Hitler’s temperament, such a new geography would have to lead to a wider war sooner or later. By giving Poland war guarantees, the British were gambling that this would provoke Hitler to challenge Polish independence and eventually lead to a war with Russia…If England had truly believed that the Polish army was capable of enduring a war with Hitler, then she would have come to Poland’s aid in the summer of 1939 with intensive financial assitance. Yet the truth is that in the summer of 1939 England invested 500 million pounds in China while negotiating down their financial assistance to Poland’s army to the silly sum of 5 million pounds – a sum which demonstrated they had no intention of ever helping Poland. Compare this to later in the war, when the British discovered that they needed Polish cannon fodder and were capable of spending 10 million pounds per month (per month!) on General Ander’s II Corps. During the war, England financed the Polish government in London because the Polish government in exile was useful as a bargaining chip in British-Russian negotiations. The British did their best to maintain the Poles in their pro-English prejudices – not because the English desired strong Polish-British alliance, but for the same reason why England has ever become suddenly interested in Poland throughout history: to leverage the potential of a Polish anti-Russian posture in any future negotiations with Russia. England would use the threat of Polish troubles to gain concessions from Russia in negotiations. The Polish lamb was kept alive only to be sacrificed when it was opportune for England…following the war, the English reimbursed all of their expenditures on the Polish government in exile and the Polish army by confiscating the gold held in the Bank of Poland which had been ferried out of Poland for safe keeping in Canada…”
My translation from Londonihilists
Chapter 12, “Of Broken Promises
And another excellent quote which puts to rest the idea that there was some great moral difference between Nazi Germany and Churchill’s England that required American blood – an argument which seems to take no account of which country perpetuated a racist empire throughout the world (it was certainly not Germany):
“I write all of this sitting in the ruins of Warsaw, massacred by the barbarism of the German occupation. Each of my compatriots speaks to me of some macabre event that touched them and their families. I am surrounded by the living memories of the suffering. This is probably what motivates me towards feeling repulsed by all who enjoy causing others to suffer, who revel in suffering of any kind. I am proud to have been born into a religion whose Founder preached mercy and empathy for the suffering of strangers above all. Thus I must stress yet again that the English nation has made great strides in smothering and hiding its sadistic impulses. Of course they cover British colonialism in a fog of smoke. We know nothing of it really – it is as if one said of Hitler’s occupation of Poland that all we know is that the Germans were here and had built some good roads during their stay. The English let loose their sadism with no moral limits towards yellow and black nations for so many years while in England itself great philanthropic societies were formed.”
My translation from “A glass of coniac”
Chapter 3 of Londonihilists (in which Cat describes the sadism of English culture to disabuse Poles of the notion, visible in Dr. Jaffa’s text, that German racism was somehow a threat to the world while English racism did not exist)
Another excellent quote:
“The formal act of accusation made in the Nuremburg trials against Goering and other German dignitaries regarding the German preparations for a war of aggression, as well as the Nuremburg trials themselves, make clear the importance of the Hossbach conference as well as illuminating the prewar English orientation. Hossbach was not the name of a location, but of an officer responsible for writing the protocol. The conference itself took place in the chancellor’s palace in Berlin. Other than Hitler and Hossbach, Goering, von Blomberg, von Fritsch, Raedar and baron von Neurath were all present. These were the commanders of the German air force, infantry, navy and the minister of foreign affairs. The conference took place 5 November 1937. It was there that Hitler made known his plan to attack England. Hitler began his political career under the slogan of the struggle with communism and Russia, but essentially by the time of the Hossbach conference (fall of 1937) he was focused above all on planning an attack against England. He saw England as the chief barrier to German plans for increased living space…During this conference – a conference to which the English themselves attach great historical importance – Hitler makes clear that he has no intention of attacking Poland. In other words: from 1938 onward, England is threatened by Hitler. England correctly interprets the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the anslus of Austria as preparations for a German war against England. As we know, England always makes war through politics and diplomacy first and with the body and blood of its soldiers only if absolutely necessary. England never makes war except in coalitions. It is this second principle of English war habits that I emphasize above all. Since the war against Napoleon, England never made war except as the political head of a grand coalition…in 1938, where was England to find a partner in war? In France? …France is pacifist, the munitions industry is on strike. France desires no war. America? .. England knows America will not enter the war easily. American public opinion must be conditioned for war first…Thus all English political memoranda of the years 1938-1939 is preoccupied by only one thing: Russia, Russia, Russia. The English are preoccupied with the question of how to turn Hitler’s plans away from a first strike against England and towards war against Russia. Churchill, writing in his memoirs says this on 26 September 1938:
‘Upon returning home to Morpeth mansions, I was greeted by 15 people. All conservatives: Lord Cecil, Lord Lloyd, sir Edward Grigg, sir Robert Horne, mr. Boothby, mr. Bracket, mr. Law. They were all quite excited and had only one thing in mind: the necessity of helping Russia. I was impressed by the strength of their convictions, how far removed they were from considerations of class, party interest or ideology…’
Of course, when these English conservatives spoke of helping Russia, they did not mean sacrificing English blood to save Russia, they meant getting Hitler to set his sights on war against Russia. It need not be said that everyone was aware that Hitler’s first strike would be fatal. Hitler’s air force was at that time the equal of the combined might of England, France and the United States. One could hope that a war waged against Hitler by the entire world would see Hitler fall. Yet no one could have any illusions that the first nation to fight Germany would not be smashed…the idea to make sure that Russia would be Hitler’s victim so that they could fight a weakened Germany was in the English mind….the Polish war guarantee which so thrilled us was nothing but an habitually English vague claim that did nothing to defend us…by April 3, 1939 – three days after Chamberlain’s guarantee – Hitler issues new orders. British diplomacy celebrates its first victory as Hitler orders the preparation of Operation White and proclaims that war with Poland can begin any day from 1 September 1939. On April 28, Hitler gives a speech accusing Poland of breaking the Polish-German non-aggression pact….On 30 March 1946 during the Nuremberg trials, Ribbenttop is responding to questioning by Horn:
Question: Six months later the war against Poland began. What were the reasons that led to this conflict?
Ribbentrop: As I said yesterday, the reason for the war against Poland was the British war guarantee….
This opinion is shared by the British prosecutor in Nuremburg, sir Hartley Shawcross…’I note with pride that England was named as the principle danger to Germany at that conference.’ He goes on to quote Hitler as saying ‘England is the force working against Germany and our goal is to throw her to her knees.’
In other words; both the accused Germans and the accusing English in Nuremberg clearly state that the invasion of Poland on September 1st 1939 was the beginning of the German war against England. It was not England who was defending Poland, but we who were defending England in the worst possible circumstances. …Poles should consider Churchill’s own words with regard to Sweden:
‘The Swedes have a good army, they could easily have entered Norway. They could have taken positions at Trondheim before the Germans did. We could easily have made alliance with them. Yet what would have been the Swedish fate in the following months? Hitler would have taken a terrible revenge over this nation. Sweden had to choose then between slavery and neutrality. We cannot blame Sweden for behaving as we did on our island.'”
My translation from “A Bounced Check”
Green Eyes, chapter 9.
The point? There was no moral effort in Churchill’s war. He was ready to sacrifice any race – Jewish, German, Russian, Polish – just as the British had sacrificed other races they treated as inferior – all for British imperial glory.
The lesson of World War II is that imperialists will stop at nothing to gain and keep power and the peoples of the nations used by the imperialists in their wars should overthrow them – not kill eachother.
Churchill, along with Grey, was one of the Englishmen who brought death to many of a prominent British generation in World War I, when England’s play was to stand pat. For someone, who was apparently alert to the horror of the Soviet Union well before Hitler appeared on the scene, Churchill became rightly concerned about Hitler, but, as the world, in general, did, failed to keep Stalin sufficiently in the picture. Supporting the ultimatum about Poland, after Chamberlin’s Munich surrender, was foolhardy, particularly since Hitler appeared to be headed for a confrontation with Stalin,
In fact, Stalin was, apparently, on a collision course with Hitler. Ernst Topitsch”s Stalin’s War and Viktor Suvorov”s The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II present fascinating evidence that Stalin was prepared to attack Hitler if he hadn’t been attacked first. The reason that the Germans rolled up so much of Stalin’s forces in the beginning was that the German troops, stacked near the border were prepared for offense and not trained for defense.
The Japanese, of course, (followed by Hitler) came to Churchill’s rescue in December 1941.
Great essay!