Buchanan’s Unnecessary War Challenges Conventional Wisdom

Pat Buchanan is no stranger to controversy. A former Nixon speech writer, he is also a man with a gift for words. His latest book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War is both controversial and readable. Excellently researched, Mr. Buchanan maintains that the British didn’t have to fight the Nazis in World War II.

Mr. Buchanan has observed, “By threatening war for Poland, Britain impelled Hitler to cut his deal with Stalin. Result: Annihilation of Poland, Stalin's serial rape of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as Hitler swallowed Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France. By mid-1940 Hitler controlled Western Europe, Stalin Eastern Europe; and the British had been routed at Dunkirk and ensnared in a war that would cost 400,000 dead and bring down the empire. Yet, Poland was not saved!”

Mr. Buchanan maintains that if Britain and France had not made the guarantee to Poland, Hitler would have managed to secure Danzig (a city of 350,000 whom, Mr. Buchanan notes, didn’t want to be in Poland) and created an anti-Russia alliance with Poland. The war would have been fought only on the eastern front, and Hitler and Stalin would bleed each other dry.

Historical “what-ifs” are rather hard to prove one way or the other, and Mr. Buchanan does let his rhetoric get ahead of his reason when he talks about how things could have been different. Nevertheless, he is right that the war cost Britain its empire. Whether that was good or bad has yet to be decided by historians, but surely the policy-makers of 1939 had no intention of losing it. In the final analysis, Mr. Buchanan is right; if the idea was to defend the empire, the British got the 1930s completely wrong.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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