Posted on 06/05/2008 3:01:21 PM PDT by K-oneTexas
The Bad War? by Victor Davis Hanson
NORMANDY, France -- Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.
Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.” Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.
Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich!
On the left, the novelist Nicholson Baker in a book of nonfiction, "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization," builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.
Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation and communications concentrated inside them. From Baker's comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary -- or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.
In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence -- and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war -- Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.
Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.
Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 -- or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis' pain and anguish.
The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never "stabbed in the back" at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II -- and 60 years without war have followed.
Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.
A Nazi armored division or death camp stopped its murderous work not through reasoned appeal or self-reflection, but only when its fuel, supplies and manpower were cut off.
I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.
Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- other than their own innate courage. The dead in our cemeteries over here in Europe never bragged that they were eagerly fighting the "good" war, but rather only reluctantly finishing a necessary one that someone else had started.
They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring -- or faulting -- the intelligence and resolve that won it.
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once scoffed at the peacetime wisdom of postwar critics that came across as mass-produced, feel-good "bottled piety." Others might call it ingratitude.
It wasn’t necessary for Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor. How does Buchanan rationalize that?
The one worst thing about the Second World War is that we saved Stalin and handed Eastern Europe over to him. This led in turn to the rise of Mao and the Communist states in Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and so on.
Yet it’s hard to see what else we could have done. Maybe what Hanson suggests is correct—that we should have stepped into Germany and straightened them out. But not easy to do.
And meantime, Lenin was busy in Russia. Should we have stepped in there, too?
Certainly it was a mistake to give Hitler a piece of Czechoslavakia, and Chamberlain’s error has been almost universally recognized, by left and right alike.
Could Britain have kept its empire? Were the people in Africa better off under imperial rule? Who knows? But what Hanson suggests might have led to a better turning point in history—occupying Germany earlier than we did—is certainly suggestive. At least it puts into question what I confess I never questioned before—that it was all the fault of the French for imposing a debt burden on Germany that they couldn’t pay. Maybe so, maybe not.
Buchannan et al books are so inaccurate factually that they do not qualify as Revisionist History but as Revisionist Fantasy.
Dr Hanson nailed it. It is just a desperate attempt by certain people to rewrite history to fit their current political opinions rather then have to reconsider their political opinions.
I haven’t read the book but I do recall Churchill saying something similar. That we went to war to save Poland but at the end, we were in worse shape than before. Poland and all of Eastern Europe in the hands of the Communists.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/hitler-obersalzberg.html
Colonel-General von Brauchitsch has promised me to bring the war against Poland to a close within a few weeks. Had he reported to me that he needs two years or even only one year, I should not have given the command to march and should have allied myself temporarily with England instead of Russia for we cannot conduct a long war. To be sure a new situation has arisen. I experienced those poor worms Daladier and Chamberlain in Munich. They will be too cowardly to attack. They won't go beyond a blockade. Against that we have our autarchy and the Russian raw materials.
Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans. My pact with the Poles was merely conceived of as a gaining of time. As for the rest, gentlemen, the fate of Russia will be exactly the same as 1 am now going through with in the case of Poland. After Stalin's death-he is a very sick man-we will break the Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of the German rule of the earth.
The little States cannot scare me. After Kemal’s [i.e. Ataturk] death Turkey is governed by cretins and half idiots. Carol of Roumania is through and through the corrupt slave of his sexual instincts. The King of Belgium and the Nordic kings are soft jumping jacks who are dependent upon the good digestions of their over-eating and tired peoples.
That’d be Pat in the suspenders. Nice.
You should check out the ludicrous pieces Pat Buchanan has up on Human Events. What is even worse is the commentators who are cheering Pat for his insights about WWII. The ignorance on display in some of the comments is so breathtaking it makes one wonder just how those dolts were able to even turn on a computer, let alone use it.
Silver bullet explanation: Buchanan’s family listened to Father Coughlin.
Hanson plays very fast and loose with many facts. I hope due to ignorance, not mendacity.
Well, to tell the truth, I didn’t even think it was worth the trouble of arguing with Pat. At least Hanson offers some interesting hindsights and speculations. Buchanan has become one of those guys who starts off with a conclusion—isolationism is good—and then builds an argument to support it, rather than examining the evidence. I don’t find that kind of one-track mind very interesting.
I’ve never read a Buchanan-penned book. He is a strange man with even stranger historical notions.
This is correct. Buchanan is a clown. The real question is, if it was a exigence to trow a 2nd nuclear warhead on Nagasaki after the successful blast of Hiroshima. Nobody in the former enemy countries like Japan or Germany believes that and it is taken there by some people as a evidence that the principal ethic of the US forces and their former president was not much better than the one of their colleagues in Japan or Germany at that time.
Although this is complete BS of course, the fact of the second, practically needless strike damaged the image of America quite effective and has still its impact. I.e. in the discussion around the recent Iraq-war and whether European countries should be engaged or not the ethical integrity of the US and its way to wage a war was indeed crucial.
BTW - there is a quite similar discussion around the bombing night of Dresden in 1945 although this was in the first instance a British action. Interestingly the US forces -in sharp difference to their British allies- usually avoided needless destruction during their bombing raids over Germany. The USAF conduct in aerial warfare over the Pacific was much harder than in the European theater.
Regards from Europe!
Andreas
The problem would have been that the German army in 1918 was not at the total end. Therefore a occupation would have taken a few million more death allied soldiers and millions and bazillions of money for the occupation forces. Therefore such was no desirable solution in that time. The post-WWII occupation of Germany might had its positive effect for the US (although this was also a quite expensive operation), but something similar was not thinkable in 1918.
It is indeed true that the treaty of Versailles promoted Hitler and his buddies in Germany. Versailles and the bad economic situation in the 20ties were the trigger for the problems of the young and unstable German "Weimar"-democracy and let to its collapse. Therefore it would have been smarter to be more generous. Espechially those who imposed the heaviest burdens on Germany, -the French- had to pay the highest price for their pettiness in 1940.
I’ve read about two chapters of “A Republic, Not an Empire.” Nothing too off the wall about it yet, but it’s a big book, plus Pat wrote this back during the Clinton years, so he was probably mellower then.
Hansons notion that the Allies should have occupied Germany in 1918 as they did in 1945 overlooks the “minor” point that in at the time of the 1918 Armistice the German Army was still in Russia and France.
Is there anyone out there who can explain for me: 1) why Buchanan writes these tomes, 2) what was he eating the night before that the idea came to him in a dream, and 3) who the heck is buying them??
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