Is Pat Buchanan Wrong About World War II?
Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, is a great book.
Why do I say this? Because I have been a World War II revisionist historian since 1958.
The publisher provides this summary on Amazon.
Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment?In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen–Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.
Among the British and Churchillian errors were:
• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War
I agree 100% with these conclusions. The conclusions regarding World War I were common among revisionist historians in the 1920's. These opinions became establishment opinions until the second half of the 1930's. Then intellectual opinion in the United States shifted along with Roosevelt's pro-Britain foreign policy. The best book on this shift is known by almost no one in academia: James J. Martin's two-volume masterpiece, American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941 (1964).
Revisionist historians of World War II -- academic pariahs -- have long agreed with the last three conclusions regarding World War II.
A site member takes issue with Buchanan.
Thought it was an interesting book. But I think that for non-interventionists the story that Hitler and Stalin could have been left to battle each other with the West as the big winners is probably wishful thinking. Paul Gottfried made two crucial points against Buchanan's(and the non-interventionists) view of WWII:-That Hitler had no westward designs is wrong:
"And there is no reason to believe that Hitler would not have moved his armies westward after bringing down Poland, with or without a British guarantee to the then beleaguered Poles. A wealth of evidence, including broad hints in the Hossbach Denkschrift (November 1937), in which Hitler had revealed his plans for territorial acquisition to his generals, indicate that German westward expansion was in the cards even before the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938."
-Germany only lost because it was fighting on two fronts:
"Nazi Germany failed over the long term to control European Russia, because it was fighting a two-front war. Buchanan's wish for a great war, between Russia and Germany that would have spared “tens of millions” in Western Europe, is not based on convincing evidence. The only way Hitler was driven from power was in a two-front war, and tens of millions necessarily died to achieve that end. Although actions might have been taken to end that war sooner, and in a less unconditional and more humane fashion, without conceding Eastern Europe to Stalin, England could not have gotten rid of the Nazi government without taking up arms. Certainly the U.S. could not have afforded that luxury."
Paul Gottfried has brought up the good point that Germany's system was a more viable candidate for holding power since it was less economically destructive in peacetime.
http://takimag.com/article/buchanan_kennan_and_the_good_war#axzz54XFEoBKU
We read: "Paul Gottfried has brought up the good point that Germany's system was a more viable candidate for holding power since it was less economically destructive in peacetime." Gottfried did not say this in the article the site member linked to. This was not the opinion of Ludwig von Mises in 1944, when he wrote Omnipotent Government.
Many popular fallacies concerning socialism are due to the mistaken belief that all friends of socialism advocate the same system. On the contrary, every socialist wants his own socialism, not the other fellow’s. He disputes the other socialists’ right to call themselves socialists. In the eyes of Stalin the Mensheviks and the Trotskyists are not socialists but traitors, and vice versa. The Marxians call the Nazis supporters of capitalism; the Nazis call the Marxians supporters of Jewish capital. If a man says socialism, or planning, he always has in view his own brand of socialism, his own plan. Thus planning does not in fact mean preparedness to coöperate peacefully. It means conflict (pp. 242-43).
In his conclusion of his review of Buchanan's book, Gottfried wrote this:
Having noted my areas of disagreement with Buchanan (or Buchanan/Kennan), it also seems necessary to note that generally I agree with almost everything else in this book. Whether the theme is Churchill’s critical role in unleashing the First World War, the disastrous consequences of England’s entry into that struggle (which helped to widen it into a World War), the folly of the Congress of Versailles, or the mistake of the British in exchanging their naval alliance with Japan for one with the U.S. in the 1920s, Buchanan’s book is on the mark. Although not likely to influence our neo-Wilsonian political class, his reassessment should cause some intelligent Americans somewhere to rethink our country’s role in the world. Moreover, unlike his questionable interpretations about the Second World War, his conclusions about World War One are so self-evidently correct that one must wonder why they are not more widely represented. The passages about World War One from Kissinger and other diplomatic historians whom Buchanan cites sound like the most hysterical propaganda manufactured by Wilson’s Department of Information. There is little to no evidence known to me that would justify this one-sided interpretation of Germany’s sole responsibility for the War or the soundness of the Treaty of Versailles. Although Buchanan, for the sake of comprehensiveness, should have gone into the now fashionable theories about exclusive German blame for the War, what Buchanan does present is enough to show us the dubious nature of all such anti-German views about the events of July and August 1914.
DEFENDING POLAND
Hitler invaded Poland because Poland refused to grant Germany highway and railway access to the free city of Danzig, which had been carved out of East Prussia by the League of Nations. The city was 90% German. Every Weimar government wanted this, not just Hitler's government.
Poland was no innocent bystander. Poland had grabbed a chunk of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Pact. It signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934. It violated this principle: "Don't make deals with the devil." The plan backfired in September 1939.
Had Britain not interfered, this would have been no skin off Britain's nose. Why did Britain go to war? Because British governments had been using a foreign policy based on the balance of power on the European continent for over 400 years by 1939. The British were always making alliances with weaker nations in order to balance stronger nations. That led to endless mini-wars. But, beginning with the French and Indian War, which George Washington started in 1754 at Jumonville Glen, this strategy led Britain into a series of world wars. The British Empire got a stay of execution from 1815 until 1914, but then World War I destroyed Western Europe.
Behind Britain's decision to enter both wars was the Roundtable, also known as Milner's Kindergarten. These people were best described by journalist and historian Otto Scott as too clever by half. In the first half of his book, The Other End of the Lifeboat (1985), Scott goes into the details of the background of the fools in high places who led the British Empire into the World War I and World War II. Their decisions in 1914, and again in September 1939, led to the bankruptcy of the British Empire in 1946. Sadly, Scott's book was not given any publicity by the publisher, and it disappeared.
HITLER THE STRATEGIST
Germany could never have defeated the Soviet Union. It came close to defeating Stalin. Stalin had a mental breakdown in June 1941 as the German army moved eastward toward Moscow. He recovered psychologically only after Soviet leaders came to him to beg him to exercise leadership. He had thought they were coming to arrest him. But it is clear in retrospect that there were distinct limits on the ability of the German military to extend their control farther eastward than about 1,000 miles. There is no possibility that Germany could have held eastern Russia against guerrilla warfare and then Soviet military mobilization. East of the Urals, there was no possibility that Germany was going to remain in control. Hitler did not understand what Napoleon had learned in 1812. Russia was led by four unbeatable commanders: general cold, general mud, general dust, and general fire.
Hitler's invasion of the USSR was an example of his utter incompetence as a military strategist. He refused to order his tank forces to wipe out the British at Dunkirk. He declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, when he did not have to. The Axis Pact with Japan was strictly defensive. Japan had started the war.
There was no possibility that the inefficient socialist economy of Germany could have held out against the systematically militaristic economy of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was always a massive military economy. At the end, in the classic words of Richard Grenier, the USSR was Bangladesh with missiles.
It may be true that Germany would later have marched westward after defeating Poland. We cannot know this for sure. What we do know for sure is that Hitler was a fool strategically. Every invasion, westward or eastward, depleted the fragile economy of National Socialism. Germany was not an economic powerhouse. It was a centrally planned economy. As a centrally planned economy, it was inherently irrational. That had been Mises' point in 1920 in his classic essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." For the details of just how irrational Hitler's economy was, read Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction (2006). CONCLUSION I think Buchanan has analyzed the origin of both wars competently. I wish his view were found in every high school and college history textbook on the 20th century. It is found in none of them.