WAS IT 'THE GOOD WAR'?

PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

April 4, 2008

Richard Cohen writes "Yes, it was a good war," in his column challenging the thesis of pacifist Nicholson Baker in his new book, Human Smoke, that World War II produced more evil than good.

Baker's compelling work, which uses press clips and quotes of Axis and Allied leaders as they plunged into the great cataclysm, is a virtual diary of the days leading up to World War II. Riveting to this writer was that Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes as this author in my own book out in May, Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War.'

On some points, Cohen is on sold ground. There are things worth fighting for: God and country, family and freedom. Martyrs have ever inspired men. And to some evils pacifism is no answer. Resistance, even unto death, may be required of a man.

But when one declares a war that produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust a "Good War," it raises a question: good for whom?

Britain declared war on Sept. 3, 1939, to preserve Poland. For six years, Poland was occupied by Nazi and Soviet armies and SS and NKVD killers. At war's end, the Polish dead were estimated at 6 million. A third of Poland had been torn away by Stalin, and Nazis had used the country for the camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.

Fifteen thousand Polish officers had been massacred at places like Katyn. The Home Army that rose in Warsaw at the urging of the Red Army in 1944 had been annihilated, as the Red Army watched from the other side of the Vistula. When the British celebrated V-E day in May 1945, Poland began 44 years of tyranny under the satraps of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

Was World War II "a good war" for the Poles?

Was it a good war for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, overrun by Stalin's army in June 1940, whose people saw their leaders murdered or deported to the Gulag never to return?

Was it a good war for the Finns who lost Karelia and thousands of brave men dead in the Winter War?

Was it a good war for Hungarians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Rumanians and Albanians who ended up behind the Iron Curtain? In Hungary, it was hard to find a women or girl over 10 who had not been raped by the "liberators" of the Red Army. Was it a good war for the 13 million German civilians ethnically cleansed from Central Europe and the 2 million who died in the exodus?

Was it a good war for the French, who surrendered after six weeks of fighting in 1940 and had to be liberated by the Americans and British after four years of Vichy collaboration?

And how good a war was it for the British?

They went to war for Poland, but Winston Churchill abandoned Poland to Stalin. Defeated in Norway, France, Greece, Crete and the western desert, they endured until America came in and joined in the liberation of Western Europe.

Yet, at war's end in 1945, Britain was bled and bankrupt, and the great cause of Churchill's life, preserving his beloved empire, was lost. Because of the "Good War" Britain would never be great again.

And were the means used by the Allies, the terror bombing of Japanese and German cities, killing hundreds of thousands of women and children, perhaps millions, the marks of a "good war"?

Cohen contends that the evil of the Holocaust makes it a "good war." But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause. As for the Japanese atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, they were indeed horrific.

But America's smashing of Japan led not to freedom for China, but four years of civil war followed by 30 years of Maoist madness in which 30 million Chinese perished.

For America, the war was Pearl Harbor and Midway, Anzio and Iwo Jima, Normandy and Bastogne, days of glory leading to triumph and the American Century.

For Joseph Stalin, it was a good war. From his pact with Adolf Hitler he annexed parts of Finland and Rumania, and three Baltic republics. His armies stood in Berlin, Prague and Vienna; his agents were vying for power in Rome and Paris; his ally was installed in North Korea; his protege, Mao, was about to bring China into his empire.

But it was not so good a war for the inmates of Kolyma or the Russian POWs returned to Stalin in Truman's Operation Keelhaul.

Is a war that replaces Hitler's domination of Europe with Stalin's and Japan's rule in China with Mao's a "good war"?

We had to stop the killers, says Cohen. But who were the greater killers: Hitler or Stalin, Tojo or Mao Zedong?

Can a war in which 50 million perished and the Christian continent was destroyed, half of it enslaved, a war that has advanced the death of Western civilization, be truly celebrated as a "good war"?

LOOKING BACK AT 'THE GOOD WAR'
September 2, 2011

In the early morning hours of Sept. 1, 1939, 72 years ago, the German army crossed the Polish frontier.

On Sept. 3, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, having received no reply to his ultimatum demanding a German withdrawal, declared that a state of war now existed between Great Britain and Germany.

The empire followed the mother country in. The second world war was on. It would last six years, carry off scores of millions and end with Germany in ruins, half of Europe under Josef Stalin’s rule and the British Empire on the way to collapse.

Though it may prove to be the mortal wound that brings about the death of the West, most today accept World War II as inevitable, indeed as “the good war.”

For it is said and believed that Adolf Hitler was not only the incarnation of evil but also out to conquer, first Poland and then Europe and then the world.

To stop such a monster, one must risk everything.

Which makes these two sentences in the final chapter of British historian Richard Overy’s new book, 1939: Countdown to War, riveting:

“Few historians now accept that Hitler had any plan or blueprint for world conquest. … (R)ecent research has suggested that there were almost no plans for what to do with a conquered Poland and that the vision of a new German empire … had to be improvised almost from scratch.”

But if Hitler had no “plan or blueprint for world conquest,” this raises perhaps the great question of the 20th century:

What was Britain‘s stake in a Polish-German territorial quarrel to justify a war from which the British nation and empire might never recover?

How the war came about is the subject of Overy’s book.

By August 1939, Hitler had come to believe that Polish intransigence over the city of Danzig meant Germany would have to resolve the issue by force. But he desperately did not want a war with Britain like the one in which he had fought from 1914-18.

To prevent a German-Polish clash from bringing on a European war, however, Hitler had to sever the British-Polish alliance formed the previous spring.

To split that alliance, Hitler negotiated his own pact with Stalin, a coup that meant any British declaration of war to save Poland would be an utterly futile gesture. But when the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced, spelling Poland‘s doom, Britain publicly reaffirmed her commitment to Poland.

Hitler instantly called off an invasion set for Aug. 26.

In the last analysis, says Overy, British “honour,” Chamberlain’s honoring of his war guarantee to the Poles, caused Britain to go to war.

When and why was this commitment given?

On March 31, 1939, Chamberlain, humiliated by the collapse of his Munich agreement and Hitler’s occupation of Prague, handed, unsolicited, a war guarantee to a Poland then led by a junta of colonels.

To understand the rashness, the sheer irrationality of this decision, one must understand the issue involved and Britain‘s situation in 1939.

First, the issue: The Polish-German quarrel was over a city, Danzig, most British leaders believed had been unjustly taken from Germany at the end of World War I and ought to be returned.

The German claim to Danzig was regarded as among the most just claims Germany had from what most agreed by then had been an unjust and vindictive Treaty of Versailles.

What did the people of Danzig themselves want? Writes Overy:

“In May 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Danzig’s National Socialist Party won 38 out of the city’s 72 assembly seats and formed the city government. … By 1936 there was a virtual one-party system. … The strongly nationalist German population agitated in 1939 to come … back home to Germany.”

In short, the Germans wanted their city back, and the Danzigers wanted to go home to Germany. And most British had no objection.

Yet Britain backed up Poland‘s refusal even to negotiate, and when that led to war, Britain declared war on Poland‘s behalf.

Why did Britain do it? After all, the war guarantee was given in response to the destruction of Czechoslovakia, but the Polish colonels had themselves participated in that destruction and seized a slice of Czechoslovakia.

Second, despite the guarantee, Britain had no plans to come to Poland‘s aid.

Third, Britain lacked the means to stop Germany. When Hitler bombed Warsaw, British bombers dropped leaflets on Germany.

If Britain had no ability to save Poland and no plans to save Poland, why encourage the Poles to fight by offering what the British knew was a worthless war guarantee? Why declare a European and world war for a country Britain could not save and a cause, Danzig, in which Britain did not believe, in an Eastern Europe where Britain had no vital interest?

Said British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, “(We must) throw all we can into the scales on the side of law as opposed to lawlessness in Europe.” And throw it all in they did.

And what became of Poland? At Tehran and Yalta, another prime minister, Winston Churchill, ceded Poland to Stalin’s empire, in whose captivity she remained for a half-century.

http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-was-it-the-good-war-976

http://buchanan.org/blog/looking-back-at-the-good-war-4857