Victor Davis Hanson
And I told him that. I think, and maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe, but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities. But I believe, and I don’t really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland or just, I mean, at every step of the way, like, people are very often, I find surprised to learn there’s a two-step process.
So, get back to your main question about Churchill. If you go to 1939, when the Germans in the Soviet Union invaded Poland, as soon as that war wrapped up on the German side, Hitler started firing off peace proposals to Britain and France because they had already declared war. He didn’t expect them to declare war.
Actually, there’s a famous scene where he throws a fit when he finds out that they did do that. And so, he doesn’t want to fight France, he doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe when we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there, and he starts firing off peace proposals.
Hitler knew exactly what he was doing when he repeatedly broke his word and violated the Versailles Treaty. He was recklessly gambling that an appeasing France and Britain would not move when he militarized the Rhineland, forced the Anschluss with Austria, grabbed the Sudetenland, destroyed the independence of Czechoslovakia, and, right before his September 1, 1939 invasion, demanded that Poland give up the free city of Danzig and hold a plebiscite over the so-called Polish Corridor, to be rigged to ensure the German minority would prove the voting majority.
No British or French politician could possibly not hold Hitler accountable for starting a war with Poland after such continued aggressions—occurring in a general global atmosphere of both fascist Japanese fighting in China and the fascist Italian war on Ethiopia.
Moreover, the purpose of the Soviet-German accord of 1939 was to share in the dismemberment of Poland and thereby, at least for a while, to protect Hitler’s eastern flank when he inevitably turned westward, which he did a few months later after the destruction of Poland.
I am also confused by Cooper’s timeline: Churchill was not brought back into government until Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty on the very day Britain declared war on Germany, September 3, 1939, two days after Hitler attacked Poland.
Therefore, Churchill was not directly involved in the Prime Minister’s decision to declare war on Poland, although he felt Britain should have gone to war earlier over the prior German dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, after the German conquest of Poland, Hitler’s pseudo-peace proposals were sent to a still Prime Minister Chamberlain.
Churchill did not become Prime Minister until May 10, 1940, the very day Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France—although he warned Chamberlain about Hitler’s false intentions with his famous January 1940 line, “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.”
After he annexed Poland by early October 1939, Hitler certainly did not envision a “huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there, and [start] firing off peace proposals.” The truth was just the opposite.
Hitler felt he had for the time solved the “huge threat” in the east with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (or as Hitler put it, “German–Russian relations have been thoroughly and decisively established, as even British statesmen will also learn”), and the absorption of or alliance with almost all of Eastern Europe.
These were precisely the prerequisites needed to turn westward. (One of the very reasons why Stalin saw the pact as advantageous to the Soviet Union was that the Soviets expected that Hitler would predictably attack the Western democracies next and thus Moscow’s capitalist rivals would wear each other out.)
Later, after the subsequent destruction of the Western European democracies, Hitler still did not “fire off peace proposals” to Britain, as if he then would sincerely revert to prewar relationships with the British Empire.
Instead, after gobbling up almost all of Western Europe, Hitler (all while his planes were attacking British shipping, and his U-boats were hunting merchant ships and preparing their newly acquired Atlantic-coast submarine pens) was briefly pausing before attacking Britain to investigate whether Churchill would accept a German European continent with a subordinate, satellite role for Britain and its domains.
But again, why did Hitler even pause? And why now?
First, his generals and admirals reminded him in his ebullition that without out air supremacy or naval superiority, it would be almost impossible (as it had been for Napoleon) to invade Britain. Hitler had in late 1939 commissioned a study of how to invade and hold Britain, and his generals and admirals soon reported back that it was impossible.
Or as Goering put it, “[A] combined operation having the objective of landing in England must be rejected.”
Soon, Hitler himself would conclude that Britain could not be bombed into submission. Note that between September 1939 and July 1940, over the course of the Polish War and the Western European invasions, Hitler had perhaps already lost over 50,000 dead or missing German soldiers, along with some 40 percent of frontline Luftwaffe strength and well over 1,000 tanks.
Second, despite his losses Hitler felt that he was now at his zenith of strategic power. He was in control of an area that now comprises the entire European Union, with a nonaggression pact with the Soviets protecting his eastern flank.
He certainly assumed at this point that the United States would not intervene to aid a solitary and orphaned Britain, soon to be blitzed—especially if the beleaguered nation entered negotiations about a peace settlement. A few third-party negotiations through a megalomaniac Mussolini during the invasion of France had suggested that any Hitlerian accord would leave Britain permanently weakened and with no chance to enlist new allies, much less reverse the catastrophe of 1939–40. Germany’s aggressions and acquisitions, from Poland to France, were considered by Hitler as final and non-negotiable.
In sum, for a few weeks after the fall of France, Hitler sought a brief slowdown after his serial wars and cumulative losses of men and materiel. He was unsure how to force Britain to submit and began doubting he could invade the island. His “peace” proposals were bluffs of a sort, in addition to a temporary expression of his need to recuperate, and were of such a nature that Britain would be permanently weakened should it have accepted them.
Therefore, given the stiffening British resistance, by the early autumn of 1940, Hitler was already thinking of settling accounts with Stalin.
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