Replies

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”.