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The 70th anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany today must prompt the inevitable question: was the war, which led to the death of more than 50 million people, really necessary?
We are used to thinking of the First World War as being essentially unnecessary. For decades since the Twenties, intellectuals, war poets, politicians, pacifists and even some historians have depicted that terrible conflict as being merely a terrible error, a pointless territorial struggle with no more true rationale to it than the 18th-century dynastic wars of Austrian or Spanish succession. I believe that to be a fundamentally false interpretation - the Kaiser's Germany was an evil empire out for global hegemony - but it is nonetheless a common one.
Now a new historical theory is springing up that argues that Hitler's war was just as "unnecessary" as the Great War, and it is gaining traction as the whole conflict slowly recedes, with each passing day, from the realm of memory into that of history.
Yet there is a profound moral issue at stake here: for if the Second World War was indeed unnecessary, did 397,762 British and Commonwealth servicemen and 65,000 civilians effectively die in vain? The war affected virtually every family in the English-speaking world: was their sacrifice really for nothing?
That is certainly the contention put forward by the American politician and pundit Pat Buchanan in his book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War last year, and it has also been argued by the so-called "revisionist" historians John Charmley, Robert Raico, Maurice Cowling and Alan Clark, as well as by the former historian David Irving.
Their argument is that the price Britain paid in fighting the Second World War broke her financially, allowed in socialism at home and lost her the British Empire and that, therefore, she should have merely allowed Hitler to take Poland in 1939.
They argue that the Chamberlain government should not have guaranteed Poland but that even once it had, the promise should not have been honoured. Power, in other words, should have outweighed concepts of national honour. With Britain protecting her empire, so the revisionists' argument goes, Hitler would have then fought the Soviet Union, to both sides' mutual exhaustion.
"If one traces his career from his entry into the inner Cabinet as First Lord in 1911 to his final departure from 10 Downing Street in 1955," Buchanan writes of Churchill, "that half-century encompasses the collapse of the British Empire. In 1955, all was lost save honour. India was gone. Egypt and the Suez Canal were gone. Palestine was gone. All the colonies in Asia and Africa were going. Russians and Americans were the hegemons of Europe and the Dominions were looking to Washington, not London, for protection and leadership. Britain was no longer great." Buchanan blames this squarely on Winston Churchill, rather than the man genuinely responsible for shattering our Great Power status: Adolf Hitler.
At the Central Hall, Westminster, at 6.30pm tonight, under the auspices of Intelligence Squared and the Evening Standard, Buchanan, Professor Norman Stone and the Cambridge don Nigel Knight will propose the motion: "Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world", which Antony Beevor, Professor Richard Overy and I will be opposing, before an audience of more than 1,500 people, with more welcome. It is a sign of the traction that the revisionist argument already enjoys that so many people are coming along, but does it really have any validity?
Simply because Churchill's career did indeed coincide with the demise of the British Empire does not mean that Churchill caused it. He was a faithful son of the empire, fought for it in his youth and believed in it throughout his life. He would not have done anything willingly or knowingly to damage it. Yet even he recognised that there were worse things in the world than spending the moral and financial capital built up by the empire over the four-and-a-half centuries of its existence. And one of them was referred to by Buchanan himself in the phrase quoted above: "All was lost save honour."
What kind of national honour would Britain have enjoyed if we had held on to the British Empire solely on the sufferance of a dictator such as Adolf Hitler? I believe the British Empire to have been a huge net boon to the myriad peoples whose prosperity, peace and national development were nurtured under its protection, yet it would not have been worth anything if we held it only at Hitler's pleasure, because we had done some kind of sordid deal with the most evil man of modern times, a deal by which Britain reneged on her promise to go to war if Hitler invaded Poland.
True enough, Britain was physically in no position to render any significant help to save poor, blitzkrieged Poland in the hour of her crucifixion - and could not even save her from falling under the Soviet boot by 1945 - but at least we kept our word in 1939, and with it our honour.
In the words of the hymnal "Earth's proud empires pass away", the British Empire was starting to slip away even before Hitler embarked on his quest for Lebensraum for his master race. The Government of India Act, which set the subcontinent on the path to self-government with a legislature in New Delhi, was passed in 1935. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were already self-governing dominions and the days of London's primacy had started to draw to a close long before the rise of Hitler.
The Second World War sped up the loss of our empire, it is true, but what better way could a nation sacrifice a great imperium than in winning the untarnishable glory of extirpating Nazism, the most loathsome and vicious ideology to besmirch human history? Britain since 1945 was indeed reduced to second-rank power but it was a national exhaustion that had to be undergone. The British Commonwealth was the only power to have fought Fascism all the way from 3 September 1939 right through to the Japanese surrender six years later. That glory will be everlasting.
Andrew Roberts's new book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, is published by Penguin. For more details on tonight's debate visit www.intelligencesquared.com.
Reader views (4)
How vapid and superficial this article is. Of course, Churchill was half American...
'all was lost save honour' - no mention then of our national survival? While I have read much of Buchanan's writings, including his American Conservative site, his writings should be read in the context of American introversion.
If the likes of Buchanan and his isolationist beliefs had been more widespread in the US in the late 30s and early 40s - and barring Pearl Harbour, that is if it had never been attacked - the world today would have looked very different indeed.
Furthermore, it was in the interests of America for Britain and its empire to physically do the fighting while the US was spared the loss of life that it would have suffered if they had been a true friend and entered the war earlier, say through a similar pact with Britain as we had with Poland.
But no, the US knew the toll WW2 would take on Britain, making it weaker at home and also in the eyes of the world, such that the US, in its ascendancy, would reap the spoils left from our former empire, not least the markets and oil as in the ME.
Worse than that, no mention made of the collusion between certain Wall Street financiers, US industrialists and nazi Germany, for instance in rubber technology and tetraethyl-lead used in fuel which Germany received from the US, without which it would not have been able to do all the invading it did. See A Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of hitler.
- Ralph, London, 03/09/2009 21:26
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Historians work is never done. Newton's laws, once discovered, sorted. Hitler's evil, thoroughly exposed, must be re-discovered over and over again.
- Bloke, Lambeth, 03/09/2009 14:44
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That the holocaust denier Irving is lumped in with the revisionists is telling. The war against fascism was not only necessary but vital for the simple reason that had Hitler prevailed in his 1000 year Reich for Europe, these useful idiots would not be allowed to have a debate with historians like Roberts, they would have been imprisoned long ago or executed.
I won't bother with all the homosexuals, gypsies and of course Jews that would have also died, but merely focus on the fact that Hitler, once he was victorious in Europe, would have eventually turned on the British Empire anyway. Like his pact with Stalin, he only made treaties for expediency. They were never to be honoured.
And I prefer honour to the kind of world that these revisionists would have been content to live in.
- Stephen Rothbart, Prague Czech Republic, 03/09/2009 12:14
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Mr Roberts.
Do you really believe this stuff about everlasting glory.
What are you on ?
For God's sake it won't make a scrap of difference in the broad sweep of history whether we fought or not.
We are finished as a nation as a result of this ridiculous conflict.
Reduced to a whimpering poodle snapping at Uncle Sam's heels, only to have the plug pulled the day after Japan's surrender.
We could have got a better deal off Adolf.
But we are not allowed to say that in our 'free' world are we ?
What kind of pride is that for a proud people ?
We are no longer proud.
Thanks to this stupid war.
- Hantsboy, Fleet UK, 03/09/2009 11:52
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