October 13, 2024
Special Edition
What follows are Dr. Hanson’s musings on World War II. They are quite lengthy but present a valuable examination of a world-defining event.
World War II.
By: Victor Davis Hanson
Introduction: Revisiting the Revisionism of World War II,
Part One – September 18, 2024
Recently, remarks by Darryl Cooper on a widely viewed Tucker Carlson interview covered a wide range of topics.
Among them, he offered a series of statements about World War II that more or less exonerated the Axis powers and, by extension, contextualized the mass death of Russian POWS, Jews, and Russian civilians caused by German troops in the East in particular. This revisionist argument immediately led to controversy and renewed popular interest in the war—and in the role of historical revisionism, especially as practiced in podcasts and online interviews.
Many were puzzled by Carlson’s introduction of Cooper, who was described as the premier popular historian now writing in America. At first, I felt remiss in never having read a book or article of his on World War II—only to learn he has not written any. His oeuvre seems to consist of podcasts and blogs, where sources are not as commonly discussed and analyzed as in articles and books. I note this only because it is hard to find Cooper’s theories formally presented in print outside these online fora.
Yet because his views were so widely disseminated online and received so much condemnation—but also some support on the far right—and since this is an election year in which almost everything eventually becomes political (Cooper’s ideas are sometimes bandied about by the Left as supposed proof of MAGA extremism), I felt that I would offer a critique, sine ira et studio, of his various ad hoc comments—one more comprehensive than what I initially wrote for the Free Press.
Again, I note that Cooper was not writing an essay or summarizing a formal written argument but speaking extempore and deliberately provocatively. Ergo, in retrospect, he may not have meant all the unhinged and bizarre things he said, given that much of it is demonstrably untrue, if not perverse.
So, over the next few days, I will dispassionately try to adjudicate his arguments’ historical reliability and then, when and if needed, try to correct the record. What will follow is a running analysis of his recent comments on World War II.
I note that World War II is of particular interest to me. I wrote a large book on it, The Second World Wars, as well as several chapters devoted to the conflict in The Soul of Battle, Ripples of Battle, and Carnage and Culture, along with an introduction to E.B. Sledge’s landmark Marine memoir With the Old Breed, and perhaps an additional ten or so essays and articles.
In addition, I grew up with reminisces of the war from my father, Sgt. William F. Hanson, a Central Fire Control gunner on a B-29, who flew on some 40 combat missions from Tinian to Japan and was highly decorated for personal bravery and shooting down Japanese fighters. His first cousin, Cpl. Victor Hanson, Jr. (2nd Battalion, 29th Regiment, 6th Marine Division) was raised with him as a brother after the death of Victor’s mother, and after whom I was named. Victor was killed on the last day of fighting on Sugar Loaf Hill, Okinawa, on May 19, 1945. In addition, my uncles and cousins, all close to my parents, were veterans of several World War II combat theaters. I remember their stories from the Pacific theater island-hopping campaigns, duty on the Aleutians, and supplying the Russian army via transport through Iran.
Finally, I will end this short series with a few comments on the likely current catalysts for this new focus from the paleo-Right on World War II and its growing criticism of the Anglo-American role in the conflict.*
*I add that I owe a debt of gratitude to Tucker Carlson for inviting me nearly weekly on his Fox News show in the past, and I appreciate his voice, with which I often, if not usually, agree. In that regard, I hope these criticisms of his guest are seen as constructive and serve as a reminder to all of us that all sorts strive to enjoy his and others’ worldwide platforms that are admirably devoted to free expression and speech, especially of sometimes censored conservatives. But some guests, nonetheless, are not conservatives as much as conspiracists who deliberately distort the past or are not acquainted fully with it. And so, they can either willfully or naively mislead millions, in this case, about the courageous efforts of past Americans to thwart indisputable evil in World War II.
Revisiting the Revisionism of World War II,
Part Two – September 20, 2024
When we read the latest and now widely read denunciations of Churchill as a terrorist, drunk, psychopath, or warmonger, or accusations that the Allies fought a war of terror against their Axis enemies, we naturally expect those indictments more often emanate from the Left.
So, what drives Darryl Cooper and others’ new rightist revisionism of World War II, and how is it relevant in the 21st century?
I will speculate in more detail at the end of this series that isolationist anger arising from contemporary interventions such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the supplying of critical weapons to Ukraine, or support for Israel prompts some conservatives and libertarians to see a long, misguided pattern of American intervention that is not in our interests—one that apparently, in their view, dates back to World Wars I and II.
In other words, they claim that the lessons of World War II—the charges of appeasement, the often-invoked disaster of Munich, the need for deterrence against dictators, all juxtaposed with the Allied victory—are used to justify subsequent unwise conflicts and indirectly account for the perceived pathologies of American society. Cooper and others, therefore, go back to 1939–45 and hope to undermine that “lesson” by suggesting that there is no lesson at all—given that it was the Allies, not Hitler, who were responsible for the war!
Of course, the problem with such non-interventionist revisionism is threefold:
First, British and French appeasement, along with American isolationism and Russian collaboration, really did empower Hitler, as he admitted after Munich (“Our enemies … are little worms. I saw them at Munich.”).
Second, given unchanging human nature, there are invaluable lessons about the causes of war from World War II to remember, as there are from every conflict—and World War II was the deadliest war in history.
Third, the problem is not the Munich paradigm or the idea that deterrence would have prevented Hitler from starting a world war, but the difficulty of properly identifying the applicable appeasing parallel to Munich and discerning the true aggressive nature of any alleged Hitler wannabe. The lesson is correct—the challenge is to see it applied properly to the correct events and persons.
As I cite in the conclusion, there may be other motives for the new revisionism. The end of World War II empowered the rise of the Soviet Union and, more indirectly, of Communist China, which, for some conservatives, calls into question whether the 70 million-person catastrophe was worth the eventual result.
These are not my views, but they may also help explain Cooper’s vitriolic attack on the Anglo-American war effort—especially the alliance with the Soviets to defeat Hitler and the simultaneous empowerment of their murderous creed to plague the postwar West for a half-century.
Throughout Cooper’s answers, Israel and the Jews also appear in all sorts of strange anecdotes and contexts. And his downplaying of German culpability for the atrocities in the East has naturally prompted accusations of anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic views. And why not, when he contextualizes and excuses the atrocities committed against POWs, Jews, and Russian civilians by the very invading army that, on September 29, 1941, at the ravine of Babi Yar, began slaughtering some 33,000 Jews?
Lastly, such revisionism is also, in part, a phenomenon of the Internet age, in the sense that off-the-wall, improvised personal podcasts and blogs can now reach larger audiences than university presses or academic books.
Therefore, historical theories can be proposed to large audiences far more easily than in the past without the filters of fact-checking or academic peer review, regardless of whether authors are formally trained in the study of history.
In any case, given our new technologies, Cooper can find an audience orders of magnitude larger on a Tucker Carlson podcast than historians can hope to find through traditional and even online publications. Hence, this extended reply to the interview follows.
Cooper’s more controversial remarks that follow are excerpted and printed in italics, followed by my non-italicized analysis. In the conclusion, I also quote from the transcript of his interview, which did not appear earlier in the critique.
Germany and the Causes of World War I,
Part Three – September 24, 2024
And so, when you do something like that with, I mean, again, like a historical event, like World War Two, where, I mean, the one rule is that you shall not do that. You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world: like how the whole thing from the First World War on up to the very end of the war, how these people might have genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by the allied powers.
There is no “rule that you shall not do that” when writing about World War I or World War II. The opposite seems more accurate.
In truth, World War II is the most written-about war in history. Tens of thousands of books and archival documents in dozens of languages do not agree, in part or in whole, with the pro-Anglo-American view. Most accounts of the 1943–45 fire-bombing of Germany, for example, written outside the Anglosphere but easily obtained in English, are critical (see, for example, Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945) and have created lively debate.
And, while now largely dominant in English-language scholarship, the American and British narrative is hardly monolithic.
The same diversity of opinion holds true for World War I.
The author may perhaps be unaware of an entire corpus of revisionist published works that seek to sympathetically understand–if not even exonerate–Germany’s role in World War I. Mark Hewitson’s Germany and the Causes of the First World War discusses the bibliographies of the various branches of revisionist interpretation of Germany’s role in World War I, which either offer legitimate reasons for Germany’s preemptive invasions or allot blame to the British and less frequently to France and Russia, for starting the war.
For two quite contrasting views on Britain’s entrance into World War I, see Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (which mostly blames Germany’s aggression) and Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (which sees it as mostly England’s fault).
Still, it is hard to fathom arguments that blame Germany’s enemies for the outbreak of World War I. Germany began the conflict with a preemptive attack on France on August 3, 1914, two days after it declared war on Russia, which had joined the war to support Serbia, itself attacked by Austria in late July 1914.
The German invasion of Belgium and France was consistent with the Kaiser’s increasingly un-Bismarckian policy of brinkmanship and, more specifically, hinged on the eponymous 1905 “plan” of the then-Chief of Staff of the German Army, Alfred von Schlieffen, for a quick, cartwheeling invasion of France that would shock, surround, and incapacitate it, thus enabling Germany to defeat Russia despite a two-front war.
Germany’s aggressive confidence was predicated on the idea that, in the near half-century following the dramatic German victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, France had only suffered further relative military decline and would offer temporary and feeble resistance.
The German general staff expected that its larger, better-equipped, and more mobile army would overrun France in months if not weeks (which it initially almost did). Thus, the war did not begin out of German fear of being encircled. Instead, it was a deliberate preemptive choice to strike at an opportune time of growing tensions, in which Germany felt that it could achieve its prewar agendas through a superior military.
Accordingly, in the first weeks of the war, Germany was already preparing terms of surrender for an anticipated quickly-defeated France. The most infamous blueprint would be completed and formalized in late summer 1914 as the September program memo drafted by the Chancellor’s secretary Kurt Riezler. It included the destruction of a free Belgium, the end of Luxembourg, and vast permanent annexations of strategic French territory, along with the German absorption of key Atlantic ports and demands for huge indemnity payments. This was an expansionist, not a defensive, agenda.
In the East, Germany’s even more ambitious prewar aims were eventually realized through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), which ceded to Germany over a third of Russia—and populations nearing 50 million—along with unprecedented transfers of many of Russia’s critical natural resources.
The spoils that the Kaiser and his generals imagined from the defeated nations were good indicators of why Germany went to war in the first place. Both these two accords, one potential and one realized—along with earlier Prussian terms handed to France through the Treaty of Frankfurt after Germany’s victory of 1871—were far harsher on Germany’s enemies than what Germany itself suffered through the much-misunderstood Versailles Treaty of 1919. (Versailles was also far milder than the Allies in 1945 forced upon a defeated German Third Reich.)
Cooper does not discuss Germany’s own proposed peace terms to understand the 18th—and 19th-century standard of postbellum demands on the defeated or seek to understand how the Versailles Treaty did not keep the peace with Germany while the far-harsher 1945 terms so far have.
In sum, Germany started World War I most likely because it felt that the Western powers and Russia blocked it from its colonial, military, economic, and political aspirations. And it decided that only by a preemptive war could it achieve its supposedly deserved role of continental supremacy. Therefore, Berlin opted for a surprise strike to take out France and Belgium, then pivot with decisive forces to reinforce the Eastern front and, with a two-front victory, establish a German-dominated Europe—presenting Britain, America, and Russia with an irrevocable fait accompli.
Finally, Adolf Hitler did not constantly cite the course and outcome of World War I as a conflict in which enemies had attacked and invaded Germany. Instead, he railed about the prior war as a near-miss offensive opportunity, one that came very close to achieving its agenda of expropriating large swaths of Western Europe and Russia into an envisioned colossal German state.
The Accidental Millions of Russian POW Deaths?
Part Four – September 25, 2024
That’s not what I’m saying. Germany put itself into a position, and Adolf Hitler was chiefly responsible for this. Still, his whole regime is responsible for it that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.
There are letters as early as July or August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they were setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they were rounding up. So, it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can’t feed these people.
We don’t have the food to feed these people. One of them actually says that rather than waiting for them all to starve slowly this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?
Again, unfortunately, nothing could be further from the reality of German plans for the conquest of Russia in 1941.
It’s unlikely that even “one of them” among the officer corps would have truly been unexpectedly forced to allow Russian POWs and civilians to starve to death—given the natural surprise of mass Russian surrenders. Instead, the mass deaths of Russian soldiers and Jews were no accident but consistent with long-arranged Nazi plans and protocols.
Almost the entire Nazi hierarchy had already assumed before the war that millions of captured Russian soldiers and civilians would be denied sustenance and thus would necessarily perish. Again, these assumptions were all formalized before the invasions, given Berlin’s anticipated rapid and successful war of “extermination”—which was in turn consistent with Hitler’s grand plans for the East going back to his rantings in Mein Kampf nearly two decades earlier.
Furthermore, the so-called “Hunger Plan” of Herbert Backe, a Reich Minister and high SS officer (who committed suicide at Nuremberg before a likely conviction and execution), was presented to the Nazi ruling hierarchy as early as a May 1941 pre-invasion meeting. Backe’s agendas outlined the deliberate starvation of some 20-30 million Russians (“useless eaters”), as the necessary cost of expropriating for Germany the harvests of Ukraine, Belarus, and most of European Russia. (See Alex J. Kay, The Extermination of Red Army Soldiers in German Captivity, 1941–1945: Causes, Patterns, Dimensions for references to the preplanned POW exterminations.)
The German military itself was hardly unaware of these starvation plans. Aside from Backe’s own SS connections, the Wehrmacht itself even assisted in drafting his particulars, most notably through the agency of Reich Minister General Georg Thomas (an SS Obergruppenführer who helped plan the starvations before his later reinvention as a supposed anti-Hitler plotter).
Accordingly, the Chief of Staff of the Army, Franz Halder (who escaped the noose at Nuremberg by offering postwar service [“the Halder Group”] to the Allies) assumed Russian prisoners would perish—especially in the context of forced laborers who inevitably became unable to continue work. Indeed, he wrote in his diary, “Prisoners of war in the POW camps who are not working have to starve to death.”
The now-infamous pre-invasion “Criminal Orders” of Spring 1941, issued as Fuhrer directives, described in detail categories of Russian soldiers and civilians slated for extermination.
The exemption given the German military from legal culpability for mass murder was a veritable blank check to expand ad libitum on those orders. Again, what followed was the murder of over 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar (which in its ongoing operations eventually included tens of thousands of additional Russian POWs and civilians and continued at the execution site until 1943), the Einsatzgruppen death squads working with, and often subject to the authority of, the German military, the death camps, and the starvation of several million Russian prisoners of war.
All these formal “programs” logically permeated the behavior of German troops in the East, from the outset in Poland to the invasion of Russia. Goering himself testified at Nuremberg that the preliminaries for the Final Solution and its general objectives of mass murder in the East were envisioned as early as January 1939 and formalized in the summer of 1941, well before the January 1942 Wannsee blueprint detailing the practical mechanisms of how to end Jewry.
General Von Manstein’s ridiculous brief at Nuremberg—arguing variously that he and his high-ranking officers were unaware of the death squads or the orders for the liquidation of Russian civilians and deliberate starvation of POWs or were too impotent to oppose them—convinced no one and were even contradicted at his trial by SS officers themselves.
The idea that two million Russian prisoners died in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa because bothered and bewildered German commanders did not know what to do with them is ahistorical.
That allegation parrots the postbellum excuses of complicit German generals themselves, who oversaw what would eventually result in well over 4 million prisoner deaths and who were responsible for the SS slaughter teams operating within their jurisdictions.
Churchill, the Chief Villain of World War II?
Part Five – September 27, 2024
And I told him that. I think, and maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe, but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn’t kill the most people. He didn’t commit the most atrocities. But I believe, and I don’t really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland or, I mean, at every step of the way, like, people are very often, I find surprised to learn there’s a two-step process.
So, get back to your main question about Churchill. In 1939, when the Germans in the Soviet Union invaded Poland, as soon as that war wrapped up on the German side, Hitler started firing off peace proposals to Britain and France because they had already declared war. He didn’t expect them to declare war.
There’s a famous scene where he throws a fit when he finds out they did that. And so, he doesn’t want to fight France. He doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe when we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there, and he starts firing off peace proposals.
Hitler knew exactly what he was doing when he repeatedly broke his word and violated the Versailles Treaty. He was recklessly gambling that an appeasing France and Britain would not move when he militarized the Rhineland, forced the Anschluss with Austria, grabbed the Sudetenland, destroyed the independence of Czechoslovakia, and, right before his September 1, 1939 invasion, demanded that Poland give up the free city of Danzig and hold a plebiscite over the so-called Polish Corridor, to be rigged to ensure the German minority would prove the voting majority.
No British or French politician could possibly not hold Hitler accountable for starting a war with Poland after such continued aggressions occurring in a general global atmosphere of both fascist Japanese fighting in China and the fascist Italian war on Ethiopia.
Moreover, the purpose of the Soviet-German accord of 1939 was to share in the dismemberment of Poland and thereby, at least for a while, to protect Hitler’s eastern flank when he inevitably turned westward, which he did a few months later after the destruction of Poland.
I am also confused by Cooper’s timeline: Churchill was not brought back into government until Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty on the very day Britain declared war on Germany, September 3, 1939, two days after Hitler attacked Poland.
Therefore, Churchill was not directly involved in the Prime Minister’s decision to declare war on Poland. However, he felt Britain should have gone to war earlier over the prior German dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, after the German conquest of Poland, Hitler’s pseudo-peace proposals were sent to the still Prime Minister Chamberlain.
Churchill did not become Prime Minister until May 10, 1940, the very day Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Although he warned Chamberlain about Hitler’s false intentions with his famous January 1940 line, “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.”
After he annexed Poland by early October 1939, Hitler certainly did not envision a “huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there, and [start] firing off peace proposals.” The truth was just the opposite.
Hitler felt he had, for the time, solved the “huge threat” in the east with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (or as Hitler put it, “German–Russian relations have been thoroughly and decisively established, as even British statesmen will also learn”), and the absorption of or alliance with almost all of Eastern Europe.
These were precisely the prerequisites needed to turn westward. (One reason Stalin saw the pact as advantageous to the Soviet Union was that the Soviets expected Hitler to predictably attack the Western democracies next, and thus, Moscow’s capitalist rivals would wear each other out.)
Later, after the subsequent destruction of the Western European democracies, Hitler still did not “fire off peace proposals” to Britain, as if he then would sincerely revert to prewar relationships with the British Empire.
Instead, after gobbling up almost all of Western Europe, Hitler (all while his planes were attacking British shipping, and his U-boats were hunting merchant ships and preparing their newly acquired Atlantic-coast submarine pens) was briefly pausing before attacking Britain to investigate whether Churchill would accept a German European continent with a subordinate, satellite role for Britain and its domains.
But again, why did Hitler even pause? And why now?
First, his generals and admirals reminded him in his ebullition that without air supremacy or naval superiority, it would be almost impossible (as it had been for Napoleon) to invade Britain. In late 1939, Hitler commissioned a study of how to invade and hold Britain, and his generals and admirals soon reported back that it was impossible.
Or, as Goering put it, “A combined operation having the objective of landing in England must be rejected.”
Soon, Hitler himself would conclude that Britain could not be bombed into submission. Note that between September 1939 and July 1940, over the course of the Polish War and the Western European invasions, Hitler had perhaps already lost over 50,000 dead or missing German soldiers, along with some 40 percent of frontline Luftwaffe strength and well over 1,000 tanks.
Second, despite his losses, Hitler felt that he was now at the zenith of strategic power. He was in control of an entire European Union area, and a nonaggression pact with the Soviets protected his eastern flank.
He certainly assumed at this point that the United States would not intervene to aid a solitary and orphaned Britain, soon to be blitzed—especially if the beleaguered nation entered negotiations about a peace settlement. A few third-party negotiations through a megalomaniac Mussolini during the invasion of France had suggested that any Hitlerian accord would leave Britain permanently weakened and with no chance to enlist new allies, much less reverse the catastrophe of 1939–40. Germany’s aggressions and acquisitions, from Poland to France, were considered by Hitler as final and non-negotiable.
In sum, for a few weeks after the fall of France, Hitler sought a brief slowdown after his serial wars and cumulative losses of men and materiel. He was unsure how to force Britain to submit and began doubting he could invade the island. His “peace” proposals were bluffs of a sort, in addition to a temporary expression of his need to recuperate. They were of such a nature that Britain would be permanently weakened should it have accepted them.
Therefore, given the stiffening British resistance, by the early autumn of 1940, Hitler was already thinking of settling accounts with Stalin.
World War II. Churchill, the Terrorist?
Part Six – October 1, 2024
He says, let’s not do this. We can’t do this. And of course, a year goes by, 1940 comes around, and they’re still at war. And so, he launches his invasion to the west, takes over France, and takes over western and northern Europe. Once that’s done, and the British have escaped at Dunkirk, there’s no British force left on the continent. There’s no opposing force left on the continent. In other words, the war is over, and the Germans won…Fall of 1940. There’s literally no opposing force on the continent. And throughout that summer, Adolf Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you. We don’t want to fight you, offering peace proposals that said, you keep all your overseas colonies. We don’t want any of that. We want Britain to be strong. The world needs Britain to be strong, especially as we face this communist threat and so forth like this.
What’s going on? And I think that if there were people in Britain who, well, if they hadn’t put it this way if they hadn’t been so successful at delegitimizing the peace approach by demonizing Neville Chamberlain and so forth and holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland, that people would have been, they would have understood, like, we don’t need another repeat of the first World War, which is not what ended up happening, but that’s what everybody thought was going to happen.
And so, Churchill, I mean, you have a guy, Churchill wanted a war. He wanted to fight Germany…The reason I resent Churchill so much is that he kept this war going when he had no way. He had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally, by 1940, sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest, just to burn down sections of the Black Forest. Just, just rank terrorism, you know, going through and starting to, you know, what eventually became just a carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods. The purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible. And all the men were out in the field. All the fighting-age men were out in the field. And so, this is old people, it’s women and children.
After his October victory over Poland, with the help of the Soviet Union, Hitler, according to Darryl Cooper, after “a year [went] by” attacked France.
In fact, Hitler invaded both Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940—just six months after his victory in Poland. He invaded the Netherlands, France, and Belgium about seven months after the capitulation of Poland.
In that intervening period between October 1939 and June 1940, when Hitler was supposedly begging for peace—and during his invasion of seven countries—his U-boats had already torpedoed over 300 British and Imperial ships. Hitler, it is true, in August 1940, dropped some leaflets of his speeches calling for a truce with Germany and the British Empire, but he was already waging a nonstop maritime war against Britain, and his planes were attacking British ships.
Again, Hitler only dropped leaflets over Britain for a brief period because he knew he could not invade it by air or sea (and formally called off Operation Sea Lion in September 1940). He picked up the leaflet tactic from the British. Throughout the “Phony War,” it blanketed German cities with leaflets appealing to the German people not to support Hitler’s wars—a campaign that would eventually result in some six million British leaflets being dropped.
But the idea that Germany wanted Britain to “stay strong” is absurd unless defined in terms of a “strong” Vichy- or Quisling-like government appearing in Britain. Does Cooper know of one single hostile nation that fought Hitler, then capitulated to or came to terms with the Third Reich and managed to retain its independence and autonomy? Who would trust Hitler’s word after two years of serial lies and the invasion of seven countries?
The idea that a solitary Britain and Churchill knew they did not have a chance and so should have stopped fighting and either joined Hitler in their own non-aggression pact to save the empire or accepted supposedly reasonable German terms is patently untrue.
That theory is belied by what actually happened, which was largely foreseen by Churchill, who, as Prime Minister, dispatched troops to North Africa to prevent the Italians from nearing Suez and sent his fleet to clear out the Italian navy from the Mediterranean.
Churchill presciently understood the advantages of an empire, much of it out of Hitler’s reach. He assumed that if Britain were not invaded and survived the Blitz, Hitler would eventually turn East, and if somehow triggered elsewhere, the United States would eventually enter the war. Both events happened, but the two developments hinged on Britain not ending the war.
Churchill’s rejection of Hitler’s Quisling terms and his resistance during the Blitz won over the Americans to the notion of helping Britain on a large scale, confused the Germans, and likely made the Soviets fear that they might be next targeted given the clear impossibility of Germany absorbing Britain.
In sum, Churchill most certainly did find “a way” to stay in the war and embolden others to help defeat Hitler by resisting Hitler’s impossible terms (again, why would anyone believe that Hitler would keep his word after the Rhineland, the Anschluss, Munich, Poland, and the Western invasions?).
As for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, he was culpable for appeasement, though not as much as his predecessor Stanley Baldwin. Both were far too slow in managing rearmament, while Chamberlain was culpable for trusting Hitler before and during Munich.
That said, after the Czechoslovakia disaster, Chamberlain, as Prime Minister, became a hawk and pushed for the declaration of war after Hitler invaded Poland. Chamberlain selected Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. The next year, Churchill returned his magnanimity by keeping him in the war cabinet after he became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940. He considered Chamberlain’s experience vital for maintaining stability on the home front.
Churchill empathized with his now clearly ill predecessor (Chamberlain was dealing with bowel cancer and would die in November 1940), and later considered Chamberlain naïve but “sincere.” Churchill rationalized his dereliction because he may have thought he was buying time to rearm or felt that Hitler had gotten all he wanted or needed and would cease.
So, it was not Churchill who destroyed Chamberlain’s reputation. Chamberlain earned his public humiliation after his return to Britain by waving around the Munich agreement, promising “peace for our time,” and then empowering Hitler to swallow Czechoslovakia and invade Poland.
Churchill had many assets besides bombers. In 1940, he still had the largest navy in the world, which was preventing a German invasion, blockading shipping headed for Germany, neutering the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean, fighting the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, and supplying the British army that was defeating the Italians in North Africa. And by 1941, before Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, he was fighting the Germans in Greece, Crete, and North Africa. (Germany would soon rue the loss of combat and supply planes lost in these Mediterranean campaigns on the eve of the Russian invasion.)
Moreover, Britain began its Ultra intercepts in 1939 and, throughout the war, provided its military and the Americans with critical intelligence that may have helped change the course of the entire war.
World War II. Churchill, the Terrorist?
Part Seven – October 2, 2024
As far as terrorism and terrorist bombing, who exactly started the first systematic campaign of terror bombing?
It was the Luftwaffe.
Without provocation, German planes first indiscriminately bombed civilian targets in Poland to instill panic, terror, and mass death (150,000–200,000 Polish civilians killed in the actual invasion, perhaps the majority of them during the German bombing of Warsaw and smaller cities like Frampol, Wieluń, and Sulejów). Hitler continued that terror tactic unapologetically in Holland, where it flattened the center of Rotterdam (nearly 1,000 civilians dead, over 20,000 homes destroyed) during the first two weeks of May 1940.
Despite Hitler’s demonstrably false claims that the Allies had started civilian bombing, he continued his strategy of incinerating civilians against Coventry and London. One of the reasons that the British began leaflet “bombing” after they had declared war on Germany was in order not to become the first in the conflict to bomb civilian targets, as Hitler had done from the very start in Poland.
As I pointed out earlier in the first part of my series of replies, in terms of soldiers lost versus civilians killed, Britain waged a less lethal war than almost all of the other belligerents. It lost fewer soldiers than its two allies and killed far fewer of its enemies as well.
Dresden and Hamburg paled before the American incendiary campaigns against Japanese cities between March and July 1945, followed by the two atomic bombs. Yet America’s bombing of civilian targets resulted in far fewer civilian deaths than did the Japanese army’s systematic and decade-long slaughter of millions of Chinese, not to mention Hitler’s agendas of destroying European Jewry and slaughtering so-called “Slavic sub-humans” in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Cooper cites as proof of the British embrace of terror the ill-fated Operation Razzle, designed by Bomber Command to torch some German forests. However, the brief attacks proved a huge fizzle and incurred large bomber losses without effective bombing. The Black Forest, not far from the border with France, was, according to British intelligence, a massive depot of German arms and supplies—a fact which explained the first British missions in mid-June 1940, just days before the fall of France.
The bombing also reflected the weakness and desperation of the RAF of 1939–41, which could not conduct successful daylight precision-bombing raids across the occupied European continent. It lacked fighter escort, updated radar, effective navigation, accurate bomb sights, and reliable four-engine heavy bombers.
The RAF in 1942 warned Americans from bitter experience that it was suicidal to fly daylight, unescorted precision-bombing raids over occupied Europe into Germany and Eastern Europe. After thousands of lost B-17s and dead airmen, the Americans gradually agreed. They found sustainable success only in mid to late 1944 with the arrival of fighter escorts, the liberation of France, improved tactics, and a depleted Luftwaffe—and even then, they at times copied British area bombing.
Again, true terror might be properly gauged by the number of civilians a military killed compared to the number of its soldiers lost. Japan most likely won that sick contest by butchering some 15-20 million Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. However, Hitler came close through the Holocaust, the deaths of millions of Red Army prisoners, and the unrestricted butchery of Polish and Russian civilians.
As terrible as the suffering of the German and Japanese people became, it was minuscule in comparison to the tens of millions of innocents that Germany and Japan butchered in their respective campaigns to absorb Russia, China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific—to say nothing of the Holocaust.
In sum, there was no prewar Allied terror plan to wipe out millions of enemy civilians to absorb and colonize their territories, as was true of the Germans in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Japanese in China, and the Italians in East Africa.
World War II. Churchill, Warmonger?
Part Eight – October 4, 2024
And they were wiping these places out as gigantic, scaled terrorist attacks, the greatest scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.
Why would he do that?
Because it was the only means that they had to continue fighting. At the time, they didn’t have the ability to reinvade Europe. And so he needed to keep this war going until he accomplished what he hoped to accomplish. We know now. There’s actually a really great series of books. It’s one of the best I recommend to everybody, but it’s really expensive now, and it’s six long volumes called History of British Special Operations in the Second World War. And one of the books gets into the level of just the extent of media operations, propaganda operations, and everything that they were running in the United States to eventually drag us into that war. And that was his whole plan. His whole plan was, we don’t have a way to fight this war ourselves. This war is over. We need either the Soviet Union or the United States to do it for us. And that was the plan and kept the war going long enough for that plan to come to fruition. And to me, that’s just, it’s a craven, ugly way to fight a war. And what was the motive? Well, Churchill’s got a long and complicated history….
Yeah. Well, look, I think on one level there was a sense that Churchill was sort of humiliated by his performance in the first world War as the head of the admiralty, and he was out in the cold for a long time….
Yeah, which, that [Gallipoli] was his operation. And so, he was rightly held responsible for that and seen as responsible for one of the great disasters that the British suffered during that war. And so, I think part of it was probably kind of personal. He wanted redemption. He wanted to go out there and prove that he’s the warlord, that they can go out there and fight this big war. Probably. I think part of it.
I read about Churchill, and he strikes me as a psychopath, but he’s also a sort of…. I mean, he was a drunk. He was very childish in strange ways. People would talk about how as an adult, as prime minister, they’d find him in his room and he’s playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff, would get mad when people would interrupt him when he was doing this. This is a strange fellow. There are all those things. But then you get into, why was Winston Churchill such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life? And there’s ideological reasons. In 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous-now article called “Zionism versus Bolshevism”. And he basically makes the case, which was true to a large extent, that all of Eastern Europe, the pale of settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived, other than the United States, which is from where a lot of them had traveled to that area, had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit that all the young Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it.
Britain did not initiate area bombing between 1939–42 that resulted in “the greatest scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.” That is absurd on so many levels.
To take just a few examples, the Romans alone in the Third Punic War leveled the city of Carthage and killed some 450,000 of the original half-million population. The aggregate careers of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane likely resulted in some 30-40 million civilian deaths.
The British government did not allow area bombing on non-military targets until May 15, 1940—following the deliberate German bombing of the inner civilian core of Rotterdam. In response, Bomber Command hit industrial sites in the Ruhr.
Britain responded to the German attack on London by an ineffectual bombing raid on Berlin in August 1940. Between 1939–42 there were almost no effective British or American area bombings of German cities, even after the initial appearance of the British Lancaster bomber, primarily due to the distances involved, the lack of fighter escort, a full-strength Luftwaffe not yet drained by the Eastern Front and Allied inexperience.
In sum, carpet/area/“terrorist” bombing by the Allies did not begin to any great degree until 1943, when Hamburg and Berlin began to be hit with both traditional and incendiary bombs dropped by hundreds of Allied bombers. The tactic came, again, in response to the prior German embrace of hitting civilian targets, the conduct of the German army on the Eastern Front (four million prisoners left to starve by the beginning of 1943), and rumors of Germany’s Final Solution that had begun in earnest in 1942 (e.g., the death camps opened at Treblinka in July 1942 and at Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1942).
British propaganda tried but failed to “drag us into the war.” The United States entered only after being attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, some 27 months after the invasion of Poland and the British-French declaration of war on Germany. Scholars argue over whether the U.S. would have even declared war on Germany after Pearl Harbor had not Hitler first declared war on America on December 11, 1941.
Churchill drank daily. But few historians believe he was a “drunk.” Almost none of the critics who clashed with him on major decisions of World War II argued that his supposedly wrong choices were due to being intoxicated.
…
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
You must be logged in to post a comment.