CONTENTS ITLE PAGE DEDICATION EPIGRAPH PREFACE: What Happened to Us? NTRODUCTION: The Great Civil War of the West The End of “Splendid Isolation” Last Summer of Yesterday “A Poisonous Spirit of Revenge” “A Lot of Silly Little Cruisers” 1935: Collapse of the Stresa Front 1936: The Rhineland 1938: Anschluss Munich Photo Insert Fatal Blunder April Fools “An Unnecessary War” Gruesome Harvest Hitler’s Ambitions Man of the Century America Inherits the Empire NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY PATRICK J BUCHANAN COPYRIGHT To Regis, William, James, and Arthur Crum My Mother’s Brothers and Veterans of World War II I HAVE A STRONG belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country…believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us…but there is a more serious danger, that is lest we overtax our strength However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourself to pass beyond it.1 —LORD SALISBURY, 1897 The Queen’s Speech [A] EUROPEAN WAR can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets The wars of peoples are more terrible than those of kings.2 —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1901 Speech to Parliament PREFACE What Happened to Us? AND IT CAME to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him —GENESIS, 4:8 ALL ABOUT US we can see clearly now that the West is passing away In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell All the empires that ruled the world have vanished Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century As a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World We are slowly disappearing from the Earth Having lost the will to rule, Western man seems to be losing the will to live as a unique civilization as he feverishly indulges in La Dolce Vita, with a yawning indifference as to who might inherit the Earth he once ruled What happened to us? What happened to our world? When the twentieth century opened, the West was everywhere supreme For four hundred years, explorers, missionaries, conquerors, and colonizers departed Europe for the four corners of the Earth to erect empires that were to bring the blessings and benefits of Western civilization to all mankind In Rudyard Kipling’s lines, it was the special duty of Anglo-Saxon peoples to fight “The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease.” These empires were the creations of a self-confident race of men Whatever became of those men? Somewhere in the last century, Western man suffered a catastrophic loss of faith—in himself, in his civilization, and in the faith that gave it birth That Christianity is dying in the West, being displaced by a militant secularism, seems undeniable, though the reasons remain in dispute But there is no dispute about the physical wounds that may yet prove mortal These were World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years’ War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misruled accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting A quarter century ago, Charles L Mee, Jr., began his End of Order: Versailles 1919 by describing the magnitude of what was first called the Great War: “World War I had been a tragedy on a dreadful scale Sixty-five million men were mobilized—more by many millions than had ever been brought to war before—to fight a war, they had been told, of justice and honor, of national pride and of great ideals, to wage a war that would end all war, to establish an entirely new order of peace and equity in the world.”1 Mee then detailed the butcher’s bill By November 11, 1918, when the armistice that marked the end of the war was signed, eight million soldiers lay dead, twenty million more were wounded, diseased, mutilated, or spitting blood from gas attacks Twenty-two million civilians had been killed or wounded, and the survivors were living in villages blasted to splinters and rubble, on farms churned in mud, their cattle dead In Belgrade, Berlin and Petrograd, the survivors fought among themselves—fourteen wars, great or small, civil or revolutionary, flickered or raged about the world.2 The casualty rate in the Great War was ten times what it had been in America’s Civil War, the bloodiest war of Western man in the nineteenth century And at the end of the Great War an influenza epidemic, spread by returning soldiers, carried off fourteen million more Europeans and Americans In one month of 1914—“the most terrible August in the history of the world,” said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—“French casualties…are believed to have totaled two hundred sixty thousand of whom seventy-five thousand were killed (twenty-seven thousand on August 22 alone).” France would fight on and in the fifty-one months the war would last would lose 1.3 million sons, with twice that number wounded, maimed, crippled The quadrant of the country northeast of Paris resembled a moonscape Equivalent losses in America today would be eight million dead, sixteen million wounded, and all the land east of the Ohio and north of the Potomac unrecognizable Yet the death and destruction of the Great War would be dwarfed by the genocides of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and what the war of 1939– 1945 would to Italy, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic and Balkan nations, Russia, and all of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals The questions this book addresses are huge but simple: Were these two world wars, the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves, necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West? INTRODUCTION The Great Civil War of the West [W]AR IS THE creation of individuals not of nations.1 —SIR PATRICK HASTINGS, 1948 British barrister and writer OF ALL THE EMPIRES of modernity, the British was the greatest—indeed, the greatest since Rome— encompassing a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people Out of her womb came America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, five of the finest, freest lands on Earth Out of her came Hong Kong and Singapore, where the Chinese first came to know freedom Were it not for Britain, India would not be the world’s largest democracy, or South Africa that continent’s most advanced nation When the British arrived in Africa, they found primitive tribal societies When they departed, they left behind roads, railways, telephone and telegraph systems, farms, factories, fisheries, mines, trained police, and a civil service No European people fondly remembers the Soviet Empire Few Asians recall the Empire of Japan except with hatred But all over the world, as their traditions, customs, and uniforms testify, men manifest their pride that they once belonged to the empire upon whose flag the sun never set America owes a special debt to Britain, for our laws, language and literature, and the idea of representative government “[T]he transplanted culture of Britain in America,” wrote Dr Russell Kirk, “has been one of humankind’s more successful experiments.”2 Ferguson, Niall Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Power Order and the Lessons for Global Power New York: Basic, 2003 Ferguson, Niall The Pity of War New York: Basic, 1999 Ferguson, Niall The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West New York: Penguin Press, 2006 Ferrell, Robert H American Diplomacy: A History New York: W W Norton, 1959 Fleming, Thomas The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I New York: Basic, 2003 Friedrich, Otto Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s New York: Harper & Row, 1972 Fromkin, David Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War? 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Buchanan, Patrick J “Was World War II Worth It?” Creators.com, May 11, 2005 Davies, Norman “How We Didn’t Win the War…But the Russians Did.” www.timesonline.co.uk November 11, 2006 ADDITIONAL Letter, George Kennan to Pat Buchanan, re: A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny, Nov 5, 1999 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was probably the only first-grader at my parish school in 1943 who knew the Lusitania had been carrying contraband when torpedoed off the Irish coast in 1915, and that Americans had been warned not to sail upon her by the German consul in an ad in the New York Times For awakening a lifetime love of history, I owe a debt to my father His dinner table at which eventually sat nine children was a nightly tutorial in the heroes and villains of the great dramas of the bloodiest century in human history My thanks also to British historian Andrew Roberts for his having hosted a luncheon in London at the time of the funeral of my friend Sir James Goldsmith Andrew, Paul Johnson, Alan Clark, and I argued late into a bibulous afternoon about the war guarantee to Poland in March 1939 Out of that lunch came the idea for this book My gratitude also goes to the late George F Kennan In 1999, when A Republic, Not an Empire was published and under attack, I sent Dr Kennan a copy, as I had cited his views Weeks later, a gracious letter came back informing me he had taken time to read the book and agreed with the thesis The war guarantee had been a tragic mistake It was then that I decided I would one day write a book on the war guarantee that guaranteed the war in which scores of millions of the best and bravest of our world perished and a mortal wound was inflicted upon our civilization Among others who must be thanked are Fredi Friedman, editor, agent, and friend since she came to visit me in the Reagan White House to suggest I write my memoirs While those memoirs have yet to be begun, Fredi and I have sinced worked together on seven books Her steadfast support for this one is especially appreciated My thanks also to Sean Desmond, who has edited previous books of mine and rolled the dice with Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War.” My gratitude goes also to two scholars who volunteered to read and critique the manuscript, both of whom recommended further reading into the history of the era, including many of the titles now in the bibliography They are the independent historian Joseph R Stromberg of Auburn, Alabama, and David Gordon, the editor of The Mises Review And, again, my thanks to Dr Frank Mintz of Martinsburg, West Virginia, my friend of a decade, for his monthly runs to McLean, carrying corrected copies of the manuscript and endnotes, and with whom I have spent dozens of hours conversing about these chapters and the historic events and figures whose roles are herein presented Finally, eternal gratitude to Shelley, who has indulged my addiction to this book and tolerated my nightly trips to the basement in predawn hours to insert anecdotes and arguments, ideas and quotations mined from the stack of histories and biographies on the bed table ABOUT THE AUTHOR Patrick J Buchanan, America’s leading populist conservative, was a senior adviser to three American presidents, ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1992 and 1996, and was the Reform Party candidate in 2000 The author of nine other books, including the bestsellers Right from the Beginning; A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; State of Emergency, and Day of Reckoning, Buchanan is a syndicated columnist and a founding member of three of America’s foremost public affairs shows, NBC’s The McLaughlin Group, and CNN’s The Capital Gang and Crossfire He is now a senior political analyst for MSNBC PREVIOUS BOOKS BY Patrick J Buchanan The New Majority Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories Right from the Beginning The Great Betrayal A Republic, Not an Empire The Death of the West Where the Right Went Wrong State of Emergency Day of Reckoning Copyright © 2008 by Patrick J Buchanan All rights reserved Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York www.crownpublishing.com Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buchanan, Patrick J (Patrick Joseph), 1938– Churchill, Hitler, and “the unnecessary war”: how Britain lost its empire and the West lost the world/Patrick J Buchanan.—1st ed Includes bibliographical references World War, 1939–1945—Causes Great Britain—Foreign relations—1936–1945 Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874–1965 Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945 I Title D742.G7B83 2008 940.53'11—dc22 2007048445 MAPS BY JEFFREY L WARD eISBN: 978-0-307-40956-0 v3.0 ... ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY PATRICK J BUCHANAN COPYRIGHT To Regis, William, James, and Arthur Crum My Mother’s Brothers and Veterans of World War II I HAVE A STRONG belief that there is a danger of the. .. destroyed the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires and ushered onto the world stage Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler And it was the war begun in September 1939 that led to the slaughter... across the Channel to France in the event of a war with Germany Unknown to the Cabinet and Parliament, a tiny cabal had made a decision fateful for Britain, the empire, and the world Under the guidance