Right. It really is just that simple.
Posted on 09/09/2018 9:55:03 PM PDT by OddLane
In a chilly, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I work intently on my model of the destroyer HMS Cossack. Such models come in lurid cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle. With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations.
This is a war just over the horizon of time in which we wish we had taken part, and which dominates our boyish minds above all things. Courage in pursuit of goodness, in the face of a terrible enemy, was what we most believed in. Even the Crucifixion grew pale and faint in the lurid light of air raids and great columns of burning oil at Dunkirk...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I read this with as open a mind as I could generate, He takes a whiz all over his country and “their finest hour.” After all, whom should we believe? The great man Churchill, or Peter Hitchens?
The British Empire declined greatly before WW II and even more so afterwards.
From the perspective of a Brit, Mr. Hitchens captures the harsh reality that for the UK the world wasn’t so much saved as just reordered in a way that continued the decline of his once great nation at an even greater pace than before.
From the World War II till today, no one who honestly thinks about it can deny the decline of the UK into its present semi-totalitarian, Islamo-Leftist politically correct unfree condition.
Hitchens b*tches about a lot of stuff, including his country’s weakness moneywise and reliance on the Saudis and Chinese Communists for economic support, not to mention the Russian oligarchs who make London their home away from home these days.
I’m not sure why this is being posted, but I guess Hitchens may be someone who needs to be smeared as we appear to be on the verge of trouble in Syria, dead serious trouble.
Hitchens reminds everyone when the topic of Syria comes up that the admirers of Bin Laden as in Al-Qaeda are the opponents of Assad and those guys fighting the dictator Assad are a bunch of terrorists who butcher and kill but have a nice propaganda department called the “White Helmets”.
Britain’s mistake was getting entangled into WWI on behalf of the French.
We should have told the Brits that unless they stopped their Naval Blockade of Germany during WWI, we weren’t going to risk our ships to supply them.
That’s what a true neutral would have done.
MYTH 1: WE WERE FORCED INTO WAR BY THE GERMANS
Britain actively sought a war with Germany from the moment Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939. Even before then, there were powerful voices in the Foreign Office urging the need to assert ourselves as a Great Power.
Nonsense.
Right. It really is just that simple.
Lots of insightful comments by Hitchens and some blindsighted one.
The British Fleet was severely damaged in the early parts of WW2, with the Germans sinking the Hood and the Japanese sinking the Ark Royal and possibly another one of their SIX carriers. The Brits didn’t make many more large carriers as I recall. We did and when we lost one, we built two more large ones and a bunch of Escort Carriers that also packed a real punch (though not mentioned in many of our history books).
The British has troops all over the world from minor ones in Latin America to Africa (Desert Rats, Montgomery, Alemaine, Tobruk, etc - from Egypt to Libya to Tunisia (?), plus Syria and Iraq, Palestine Mandate territory, Aden, etc.
Also major forces in India, Burma, possibly Pakistan, Malaysia/Singapore, Thailand (thousands of them were POWS who died building the Bridge Over the River Kwai), etc.
They were brave but not properly armed. Their air forces were too small to offer adequate protection to their forces which is why they got so badly beaten by the Germans and Japanese.
The Lend Lease Destroyers deal, no matter which way you cut it, helped save Britain by keeping its supply line from America and other allied countries open despite tremendous losses.
The RAF was heroic. You can’t say anything bad against them. Outnumbered by modern German Messerschmidts and Focke-Wulfs, Heinkels and Stukas, they fought when nobody thought they could.
I once asked my WW2/Cold War Lt. Col. father-in-law’s good friend, Cmdr. English (RAF), which did he fly during the war, Hurricanes or Spitfires. To which he replied in typical British officer style, “Both”.
Actor Christopher Lee and I talked about what he flew in No. Africa re the British versus American aircraft. He liked both, esp. the US Mustang with the newer British Merlin engines. He was also in the SAS, a fact unknown to most of his fans.
Dunkirk was an amazing feat despite the losses they and the French/Belgians suffered in KIA and POWS. Do you think our “limousine boaters” of today would even think of attempting something so dangerous?
I’d take an old crabber on the Chesapeake Bay over what we have in Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyards.
The British are fools. When they had good leaders they abandoned them. When they had bad leaders, they kept reelecting them until some catastrophe happened and they had to call in the “old guys” to save their asses.
The statements about British anti-Semitism were sadly true, but FDR could have ordered the destruction of some of the worst Nazi concentration camps. The people who I knew in those camps wanted to be bombed. It would have given them a chance to escape or to kill the SS bastards.
My relatives in Lemberg largely didn’t make it to the camps. They were shot down in a 2,500 person massacre and buried in a sandpit. The few survivors were possibly sent to Belzec and Auschwitz. None returned home, ever.
I might add the a late friend of mine, Stefan Korbonski, a leader of the Polish Home/Free Army, gave food and weapons to the Warsaw Ghetto forces despite other leaders of the Poles refusing to do so. He was honored as a Righteous Gentile by Israel, its highest award that is given to a non-Jew. And diplomat Yon? Karski advocated aid to the Jews of Poland when he was in England as the Polish Govt in Exiles liaison there.
IF I recall accurately, it was the Polish forces who finally took Monte Cassino, after American, British and Indian troops failed to do so with very heavy casualties, and the Polish Free Air Force was outstanding flying against the Germans in French and elsewhere in Europe.
Hitchens tries to hard to denigrate everything British. The British didn’t know how or when to prepare for WW2, but they fought like lions when they were in it. Montgomery was a fool and Patton was smarter (Monty was brave but wasted a lot of men and equipment in not well-thought-out operations).
In the end, Britain survived, not the King Lion it once was, but it was still a feisty little country unless the Labor Party sold it out to Marxism and anti-Semitism. Now the country has a new incoming enemy, radical Islam so in 30 years, Hitchens will probably write another anti-England history about this new Battle of Civilizations, if he still has his head.
I liked Christopher Hitchens a lot better. He was really challenging as a thinker and I don’t think he disparaged his country like Peter has.
The Hitchens and the Cockburns, as families, are enough to drive any country mad. As thinkers and writers, some of them are pretty good, some pretty bad. But then again, they are “British”.
Do you mean he didn’t say: “touche”?
Britain’s mistake was getting entangled into WWI on behalf of the French.
___________________________________________________________
Britain declared war on Germany because the Germans attacked neutral Belgian.
Yes, because those dastardly Germans sneak attacked us there!
[pop culture movie ref.]
A recent modern presidents would have declared the so-called war criminal, made a red line, and sent in the lawyers ... while saying that Perl Harbor-like incidents can be absorbed because America is a big country and sent in more lawyers ...
Adolf Hitler declared war on us on December 11, 1941. We didn’t declare war on him.
MadMax, excellent informative post.
The author of this piece laments the loss of the British empire, and freely admits that it was failing before WWII. He tries to focus on WWII as the accelerator of this demise. Therefore, he states myths as facts, and facts as myths. This skewed view leads to a radically incorrect interpretation.
The British decline occurred primarily because it lost to many good men in WWI. It was devastating conflict for the empire. That explains the pre-war decline. The post war decline is far faster, and is solely due to the choice of the British people. Socialism. Britain choose not a competitive vibrant economy, it choose socialism. The decline over just a few decades almost mirrors the devastation of Argentina, who had the most vibrant South American economy until Socialism.
There is a clear historical lesson. Socialism destroyes economies, and destroyed economy cannot support an empire. Intellectual honesty could save those British colonies, whom protect a free world still. Unfortunately, the author lacks the vision of reality.
I guess the remaining Jews would have been better off too facing the same fate as the 6 million that went before them.
Peter Hitchens is British.
On September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany.
In case YOU did not pay attention in history class.
Hitchens can certainly shock folks with his views but I find them always refreshing.
He hits hard at political correctness every time and whatever he has to say about World War 2 in saying so he shows no disrespect to his father, who served in the Royal Navy as a career officer right through the war and beyond.
He is simply saying WW 2 was one more nail in the coffin of the UK.
Hitchens calls himself the scribe of his country’s “obituary” and he is just trying to describe the dying process during the Second World War.
Fascinating. As the veterans of the past have all but faded away, soon, all we have left will be secondhand stories and recordings. It would be interesting to hear if Mr. Lee (or anyone else for that matter) had some stories to tell about his adventures in those planes of yore.
(But then again, that’s probably what books are for)
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