A Review of Peter Hitchens. The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018.A few years back I drafted a review of a volume which attempted to revise or question some of the commonly held views about the coming of the Second World War and how it was waged…and how it may well have been, in reality, lost by the Western Allies.The volume was a short study by the English author and writer for the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens, and its title was The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion. The review received almost no notice, so I have taken the liberty of going back to substantially edit and revise what I wrote then; and I offer it now.Hitchens’ little book does not seek to remake the historiography of the Second World War, or in particular, the basically known outline of it. There are no new startling revelations hidden for eighty years in dusty archives now excavated and held up to public view. But he does seek to question sharply some of the momentous decisions made during the war, as well as the foreseeable (and profoundly disastrous) conclusions that resulted from those decisions.Hitchens makes that very clear from the outset:“This book makes no claim to be primary research. It simply takes a number of events and developments that have been separately described by reputable historians and journalists, and connects them in a way that has not been attempted before.” (p.26)He takes pains to declare unequivocally what he is not writing, what he disavows. Near the beginning of his some 229 pages he states that The Phoney Victory does not suggest that Britain should have made peace with Hitler after the fall of France in 1940—far from it, the country would have had to continue the conflict sooner or later. He is not suggesting that England should have remained aloof and out of the war, just the contrary, he is suggesting that the island nation was not ready for warfare in September 1939, and thus let events dictate strategy rather than the reverse. Nor is he suggesting that war against Hitler was unnecessary: “At some point, for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be ended, probably by force, from within or without.” (p.22)What he does assert, and this is his main thesis throughout, is “that the war could have been fought differently and that [for instance] the British guarantee to Poland, by consciously giving Warsaw control over our decision to declare war, was one of the gravest diplomatic mistakes every made by a major country.” (p.22)Hitchens grew up in an England which had seen its empire and its former glory days disappear. That process really began with World War I and its severe effects on the island nation: the country’s governing class and the cream of its youth extinguished on the killing fields of Ypres and the fatal escarpments of Gallipoli, its treasury depleted, its social structures undermined. And after World War II that process took on an inevitability that really no one, including a Winston Churchill, could halt or reverse. Britain was shorn of its material grandeur and soon, too, its colonial empire, even if it still clung on perilously and fiercely to the memory of its long history of accomplishment, of military valor—and glory.In Hitchens’ youth the words of Churchill echoed in every schoolboy’s ear eight decades after the British retreat from France at Dunkirk in late May 1940: “This was their finest hour” (that immortalized phrase uttered in Parliament on June 18, just two days after the defeated French sued for peace in 1940). World War II had been “the good war,” as we continue to term it, in which freedom, truth and morality had triumphed over evil, darkness, and barbarism.Hitchens cites Prince Charles (December 2016), then Heir Apparent to the British Throne, in summarizing the generally held view of why the Allies went to war in 1939 (and in 1941): to defeat “intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.” (p. 8) But such a view is contradicted by the facts and by the history of the period which Hitchens sets out to document. That was not how the war and its aims were initially couched and presented. And, as Hitchens details, the moralizing of the war, turning it into a uniformly “good war,” leaves far too much out that should cause succeeding generations to question both the motives and decisions of those responsible for conducting the war and insuring the subsequent peace, in particular, Sir Winston Churchill.Hitchens examines several major questions surrounding both Britain’s entry into the Second World War and how it was conducted. In particular, he takes a hard and thorough look at the Polish guarantee of March 31, 1939. As he indicates, this guarantee to come to the aid of Poland by Britain and France came as result of the occupation of the rump Czech Republic by Germany two weeks earlier, and the resultant voiding of the Munich Agreement of September 1938. But the terms of the Polish guarantee were almost certain to lead to war with Germany, and British leaders knew it. Hitchens cites historian Simon Newman (March 1939: The British Guarantee to Poland. Oxford; 1976) to the effect that the fate of England, and then Europe, rested solely in the hands of a military junta in Warsaw whose decision to begin or respond to conflict would automatically, ineluctably trigger Britain’s involvement. Not only that, but a secret protocol basically exempted any British response should an attack come from the USSR. (p.60) Thus, when Stalin’s legions invaded the eastern half of Poland in mid-September, Britain’s response was to essentially do nothing.Quoting Newman, and citing both Lord Halifax and Churchill, Hitchens asserts that this was clearly designed to keep open the possibility of a future alliance with Stalin, something British and French diplomats had contemplated as early as summer 1939. Indeed, Sir Winston had, on October 1, 1939, declared:“We could have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present lines as friends and allies in Poland instead of as invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” (p. 60) (Italics are Hitchens’)Eventually, Britain (and the United States) did ally with Stalin against Hitler. But, asks Hitchens, how does an alliance with a power arguably just as bad as Germany under its Fuhrer support the lily-white “good war” narrative? And more specifically, when the Americans and English leaders understood what Stalin and his NKVD legions had done and were doing, not just in 1945, but much earlier?Certainly, the arguments in favor of a Soviet alliance in 1941 are strong in a purely strategic way. Britain, and then the US, were engaged in a total war against the German dictator who had, also, taken direct aim at Russia, reaching the suburbs of Moscow in December 1941. Thus, the refrain “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” took shape and made sense, and there followed massive and critical support, mostly from America, to bolster the Russian war effort, and late in the war at Yalta and then at Potsdam to turn a very noticeable and glaring blind eye to exactly what Stalin and his Communist minions were doing in Eastern Europe. By the time of Sir Winston’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946, recognition of this came too late.Indeed, as noted American historian Sean MacMeekin (Bard College) has amply documented in his massive study, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (2021), there was only one real winner in the war: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.In addition to the concessions made to the Soviet dictator at Yalta, it is the Potsdam Agreement (August 1945) which Hitchens examines most critically. One of its central protocols—insisted on by Stalin and acceded to by the Western Allies—directed the forcible population transfers of some thirteen or fourteen million German civilians living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and in other Eastern European countries, countries in which they had lived for centuries, to Germany. These population expulsions were to be made, according to the wording at Potsdam, in an “orderly and humane” fashion. Yet, most of those transfers were accomplished during the frigid 1945-1946 winter, quite brutally, with civilians taking almost nothing with them, save the clothes on their backs. During the painful transit, often by foot or wagon cart, thousands were massacred by Communist guards and partisans, hundreds of thousands of others died of the cold or starvation, as many as 1.5 million by some estimates.Hitchens cites the comprehensive study by Ray Douglas (Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War; 2012) for graphic historical detail. But Douglas’s account is not the first. A few years after the war, the English jurist F. J. P. Veale had authored Advance to Barbarism (1953), denouncing the implicit criminality of such a “peace” as the consummation of a “good war.” More recently, authors and historians as diverse as Nikolai Tolstoy (The Secret Betrayal, 1944-1947; 1977), Alfred de Zayas (Nemesis at Potsdam, 1941-1945: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans; 1979), Canadian James Bacque (Other Losses; 1989), and Joachim Hoffmann (Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945; 1999) have documented the horrors for millions of civilians that occurred during that period.The response to such accounts has been, of course, to point to the barbarities and criminality committed by the Nazis, by the SS and Einsatzgruppen, especially during Operation Barbarossa. In a sense, that argument goes, the “Germans deserved what they got” for supporting, evenly tacitly, Hitler and his aggression and criminality, and insisting that such actions, the expulsions, were necessary to achieve homogeneity and to placate Stalin. Yet, as Hitchens rightly points out, two wrongs do not create a right. War often dictates brutality and “other losses” which traditionally have been ancillary to or an unintended, if foreseen by-product of war. But the mass uprooting of thirteen million civilians at the point of a bayonet, almost entirely women, children and older men was not “orderly and humane,” and the Western Allies knew that. Under the Nuremburg rules, it would have been a war crime itself.Indeed, as Hitchens discusses in his critical appraisal of the English program of indiscriminate night bombing aimed at civilians, directed by Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, it is indeed one thing to argue that the Allies engaged in tactics and actions that sometimes crossed the line, but a close examination reveals that both the English and Soviets engaged in explicit assaults on civilians as part of their overall strategy. He carefully examines the firebombing of Hamburg, “Operation Gomorrah,” which practically devastated the entire population center of that city. He follows with a list of major cities where similar destruction and misery were mercilessly inflicted, including Dresden in February 1945, an act of barbarism committed long after the result of the war was settled. It was a strategy that failed, save in the incredible misery it inflicted on the most helpless and defenseless of the German civilian population.It is now pretty much beyond debate that Harris’s air campaign really did not shorten the war, did not slow down perceptibly German arms production (which was dispersed into rural areas), and did not put much of a dent in German morale. Only the actual capture of German ground in 1944 and 1945 did that.In defense of such tactics, the German bombing of Coventry and the Blitz are cited, as if those attacks somehow justify the later massive incineration of dozens of German cities. (p. 170) To the response that such action was needed to fend off a potential German invasion, Hitchens points out that most of the attacks came after such an invasion was a moot point, that is, after the German failure at Stalingrad made German defeat more or less inevitable:“Even if you believe that Hitler seriously intended to invade this country in 1940 or later, which the evidence shows he did not, the choice was out of Hitler’s hands before the main bombing campaign began in 1942….The final outcome of the German-Soviet war was not altered by the British bombing of Germany, which was relatively minor before the 1942 raid on Cologne and did not become intense until well into 1943. By the time significant and sustained bombing had begun, Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA was in the war.” (p. 178)A major question addressed by Hitchens is British military preparation during the 1930s, and his re-examination of what the country might have done differently. In this, as he is elsewhere in his volume, he is critical of Churchill, not for his inspiring rhetoric or even for his resilience during the war, but for his consistent failure as an armchair strategist, a record that began during the First World War (e.g. Gallipoli) and continued with Sir Winston’s fascination with “the soft underbelly of Europe,” with Crete and Greece, then Italy, and with his neglect of British defense in Malaya and Southeast Asia. He is aware of Andrew Robert’s published defense of the English lion, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), and he does not discount the critical role the British leader played. Rather, it is the nearly impenetrable mythology that has developed around Churchill that troubles him and, which he insists, has cemented the unquestioning, rosy view of “the good war.” There have been earlier attempts to dissect and critique the Churchill legacy, including by historians Maurice Cowling (e.g., The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933-1940; 1975) and John Charmley (e.g., Churchill: The End of Glory; 1993), but the general view continues, and even minor criticism is often equated, in England, as being “unpatriotic” or “revisionist.” Hitchens, in his non-academic and easily-read manner, seeks to use his arguments to reach the non-academic reader.Interestingly, he defends Neville Chamberlain against the charge that he was an appeaser. Like Charmley in his defense of the unfortunate English leader, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (1989), Hitchens points out that Chamberlain, between 1934-1935 and 1939-1940 more than tripled British military spending, including a whopping jump in budget from 17,617,000 pounds to 248, 561,000 pounds for the RAF. (p. 48) “The truth is…Britain under [Stanley] Baldwin and Chamberlain most certainly did rearm, though for imperial and national defence, not for a continental land war….” (p. 82)Which, then, raises the question: at any time prior to the American entry into the war in December 1941 could England, even in alliance with France, have actually stopped Hitler?Historians Richard Lamb (in his Mussolini as Diplomat: Il Duce’s Italy on the World Stage; 1999) and Roy Denman (in Missed Chances: Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century; 1997) believe England missed perhaps its last best opportunity to halt German expansion westward with the collapse of the Stresa Front in 1935, which had brought together the United Kingdom, France, and Italy in an alliance directed specifically at preventing the very kind of action that would occur in 1938 with the German Anschluss of Austria and then probably with Czechoslovakia. In 1934, with the attempted Nazi coup in that country and the murder of its Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss, Mussolini had rushed Italian troops to the Austrian border at the Brenner Pass and threatened Germany if it should attempt to seize the country.Yet, British actions torpedoed Stresa. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement, completed secretly with the Germans without the knowledge of (or input from) France or Italy, and the terribly bungled and contradictory English attempt to address Mussolini’s impending invasion of Abyssinia and the abortive Hoare-Laval plan (agreed between British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval in January 1935, which would have given Italy some lands in that mountainous empire, but preserved its independence with access to the sea given by Britain) infuriated Il Duce. Despite his dislike and disdain for the German Fuhrer, such dealing convinced him that he could not trust Britain. And thus it thrust him into the arms of Germany.As Lamb states: “Mussolini was on the brink of accepting the Hoare-Laval proposals; indeed he had already told Laval that they satisfied his aspirations. His acceptance would have meant the end of the Abyssinian war, and Italy would have happily rejoined the Stresa Front, leaving Hitler isolated.” (Lamb, p. 149)But that was not the case, and until the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, and, perhaps more importantly, the entry of the United States into what then became truly a world conflict, Britain found itself increasingly dependent financially and materially on the Americans—and, as Hitchens recounts, the continuing transfer of British gold reserves and wealth to the United States.And the final outcome of the war saw the complete emergence of America as the world’s leading power (with a challenge from the USSR), while Britain’s decline continued, and within a matter of a decade or so, the end of its once great colonial empire.Throughout his text Hitchens intersperses his account with illustrative references from contemporary novels about the war, plus commentary by individuals of the period. In so doing, he offers a wider, certainly more human face of the events he examines. While no academic tome, nor breaking new ground, Peter Hitchens’ little book shows in broad strokes how the Second World War was managed (and at times badly bungled), and then, tragically, despite the military success of the Allies, was turned into a phony victory.It has now been over eighty years since the end of the war. With the triumph of the Internet and the radical decentralization of the ways we receive information and our understanding of the past, older accepted verities and assumed truths about World War II and its aftermath—despite the furious efforts of establishment gatekeepers—have come under fire.Peter Hitchens’ volume is one cannonade in that battle and raises significant questions which need to be addressed.The post The Illusion of Victory: Standard World War II History Examined appeared first on LewRockwell.