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Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by [Patrick J. Buchanan]

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Patrick J. Buchanan

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World Kindle Edition

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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

Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

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546 pages
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Crown Forum
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May 27, 2008
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Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
The End of “Splendid Isolation”

[T]he Queen cannot help feeling that our isolation is dangerous.1
—Queen Victoria, January 14, 1896

Isolation is much less dangerous than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.2
—Lord Salisbury, 1896

For as long as he had served the queen, Lord Salisbury had sought to keep Britain free of power blocs. “His policy was not one of isolation from Europe . . . but isolation from the Europe of alliances.”3 Britannia would rule the waves but stay out of Europe’s quarrels. Said Salisbury, “We are fish.”4

When the queen called him to form a new government for the third time in 1895, Lord Salisbury pursued his old policy of “splendid isolation.” But in the years since he and Disraeli had traveled to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, to create with Bismarck a new balance of power in Europe, their world had vanished.

In the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, Japan defeated China, seized Taiwan, and occupied the Liaotung Peninsula. Britain’s preeminent position in China was now history.

In the summer of 1895, London received a virtual ultimatum from secretary of state Richard Olney, demanding that Great Britain accept U.S. arbitration in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela. Lord Salisbury shredded Olney’s note like an impatient tenured professor cutting up a freshman term paper. But President Cleveland demanded that Britain accept arbitration—or face the prospect of war with the United States.

The British were stunned by American enthusiasm for a war over a patch of South American jungle, and incredulous. America deployed two battleships to Britain’s forty-four.5 Yet Salisbury took the threat seriously: “A war with America . . . in the not distant future has become something more than a possibility.”6

London was jolted anew in January 1896 when the Kaiser sent a telegram of congratulations to Boer leader Paul Kruger on his capture of the Jameson raiders, who had invaded the Transvaal in a land grab concocted by Cecil Rhodes, with the connivance of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.

These two challenges, from a jingoistic America that was now the first economic power on earth, and from his bellicose nephew in Berlin, Wilhelm II, revealed to the future Edward VII that “his country was without a friend in the world” and “steps to end British isolation were required. . . .”7

On December 18, 1897, a Russian fleet steamed into the Chinese harbor of Port Arthur, “obliging British warships to vacate the area.”8 British jingoes “became apoplectic.”9 Lord Salisbury stood down: “I don’t think we carry enough guns to fight them and the French together.”10

In 1898, a crisis erupted in northeast Africa. Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who had set off from Gabon in 1897 on a safari across the Sahara with six officers and 120 Senegalese, appeared at Fashoda in the southern Sudan, where he laid claim to the headwaters of the Nile. Sir Herbert Kitchener cruised upriver to instruct Marchand he was on imperial land. Faced with superior firepower, Marchand withdrew. Fashoda brought Britain and France to the brink of war. Paris backed down, but bitterness ran deep. Caught up in the Anglophobia was eight-year-old Charles de Gaulle.11

In 1900, the Russian challenge reappeared. After American, British, French, German, and Japanese troops had marched to the rescue of the diplomatic legation in Peking, besieged for fifty-five days by Chinese rebels called “Boxers,” Russia exploited the chaos to send a 200,000-man army into Manchuria and the Czar shifted a squadron of his Baltic fleet to Port Arthur. The British position in China was now threatened by Russia and Japan.

But what awakened Lord Salisbury to the depth of British isolation was the Boer War. When it broke out in 1899, Europeans and Americans cheered British defeats. While Joe Chamberlain might “speak of the British enjoying a ‘splendid isolation, surrounded and supported by our kinsfolk,’ the Boer War brought home the reality that, fully extended in their imperial role, the British needed to avoid conflict with the other great powers.”12

Only among America’s Anglophile elite could Victoria’s nation or Salisbury’s government find support. When Bourke Cockran, a Tammany Hall Democrat, wrote President McKinley, urging
him to mediate and keep America’s distance from Great Britain’s “wanton acts of aggression,” the letter went to Secretary of State John Hay.13

Hay bridled at this Celtic insolence. “Mr. Cockran’s logic is especially Irish,” he wrote to a friend. “As long as I stay here no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England.” Hay refused even to answer “Bourke Cockran’s fool letter to the president.”14

Hay spoke of an alliance with Britain as an “unattainable dream” and hoped for a smashing imperial victory in South Africa. “I hope if it comes to blows that England will make quick work of Uncle Paul [Kruger].”15

Entente Cordiale
So it was that as the nineteenth century came to an end Britain set out to court old rivals. The British first reached out to the Americans. Alone among Europe’s great powers, Britain sided with the United States in its 1898 war with Spain. London then settled the Alaska boundary dispute in America’s favor, renegotiated the fifty-year-old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and ceded to America the exclusive rights to build, operate, and fortify a canal across Panama. Then Britain withdrew her fleet from the Caribbean.

Writes British historian Correlli Barnett: “The passage of the British battlefleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific would now be by courtesy of the United States,” and, with America’s defeat of Spain, “The Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, now American colonies, were gradually closed to British merchants by protective tariffs, for the benefit of their American rivals.”16

Other historians, however, hail the British initiative to terminate a century of U.S.-British enmity as “The Great Rapprochement,” and Berlin-born Yale historian Hajo Holborn regards the establishment of close Anglo-American relations as probably “by far the greatest achievement of British diplomacy in terms of world history.”17

With America appeased, Britain turned to Asia.

With a Russian army in Manchuria menacing Korea and the Czar’s warships at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, Japan needed an ally to balance off Russia’s ally, France. Germany would not do, as Kaiser Wilhelm disliked Orientals and was endlessly warning about the “Yellow Peril.” As for the Americans, their Open Door policy had proven to be bluster and bluff when Russia moved into Manchuria. That left the British, whom the Japanese admired as an island people and warrior race that had created the world’s greatest empire.

On January 30, 1902, an Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed. Each nation agreed to remain neutral should the other become embroiled in an Asian war with a single power. However, should either become involved in war with two powers, each would come to the aid of the other. Confident its treaty with Britain would checkmate Russia’s ally France, Japan in 1904 launched a surprise attack on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur. An enraged Czar sent his Baltic fleet to exact retribution. After a voyage of six months from the Baltic to the North Sea, down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, the great Russian fleet was ambushed and annihilated by Admiral Heihachiro Togo in Tshushima Strait between Korea and Japan. Only one small Russian cruiser and two destroyers made it to Vladivostok. Japan lost two torpedo boats. It was a victory for Japan to rival the sinking of the Spanish Armada and the worst defeat ever inflicted on a Western power by an Asian people.

Britain had chosen well. In 1905, the Anglo-Japanese treaty was elevated into a full alliance. Britain now turned to patching up quarrels with her European rivals. Her natural allies were Germany and the Habsburg Empire, neither of whom had designs on the British Empire. Imperial Russia, Britain’s great nineteenth-century rival, was pressing down on China, India, Afghanistan, the Turkish Straits, and the Middle East. France was Britain’s ancient enemy and imperial rival in Africa and Egypt. The nightmare of the British was a second Tilsit, where Napoleon and Czar Alexander I, meeting on a barge in the Neiman in 1807, had divided a prostrate Europe and Middle East between them. Germany was the sole European bulwark against a French-Russian dominance of Europe and drive for hegemony in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—at the expense of the British Empire.

With Lord Salisbury’s blessing, Joe Chamberlain began to court Berlin. “England, Germany and America should collaborate: by so doing they could check Russian expansionism, calm turbulent France and guarantee world peace,” Chamberlain told future German chancellor Bernhard von Bulow.18 The Kaiser put him off. Neither he nor his advisers believed Britain could reconcile with her old nemesis France, or Russia, and must eventually come to Berlin hat-in-hand. Joe warned the Germans: Spurn Britain, and we go elsewhere.

The Kaiser let the opportunity slip and, in April 1904, learned to his astonishment that Britain and France had negotiated an entente cordiale, a cordial understanding. France yielded all claims in Egypt, and Britain agreed to support France’s preeminence in Morocco. Centuries of hostility came to an end. The quarrel over Suez was over. Fashoda was history.

The entente quickly proved its worth. After the Kaiser was persuaded to make a provocative visit to Tangier in 1905, Britain backed France at the Algeciras conference called to resolve the crisis. Germany won economic concessions in Morocco, but Berlin had solidified the Anglo-French entente. More ominous, the Tangier crisis had propelled secret talks already under way between French and British staff officers over how a British army might be ferried 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 of Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, British and French officers plotted Britain’s entry into a Franco-German war from the first shot. And these secret war plans were being formulated by Liberals voted into power in public revulsion against the Boer War on a platform of “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” Writes historian Robert Massie,

[O]n January 16 [1906], without the approval of either the Prime Minister or Cabinet, secret talks between British and French staff officers began. They focussed on plans to send 100,000 British soldiers to the Continent within two weeks of an outbreak of hostilities. On January 26, when Campbell-Bannerman returned to London and was informed, he approved.19

As Churchill wrote decades later, only Lord Rosebery read the real meaning of the Anglo-French entente. “Only one voice—Rosebery’s—was raised in discord: in public ‘Far more likely to lead to War than Peace’; in private ‘Straight to War.’ ”20 While praising Rosebery’s foresight, Churchill never repudiated his own support of the entente or secret understandings: “It must not be thought that I regret the decisions which were in fact taken.”21

In August 1907, Britain entered into an Anglo-Russian convention, ending their eighty-year conflict. Czar Nicholas II accepted Britain’s dominance in southern Persia. Britain accepted Russia’s dominance in the north. Both agreed to stay out of central Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Great Game was over and the lineups completed for the great European war. In the Triple Alliance were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Opposite was the Franco-Russian alliance backed by Great Britain, which was allied to Japan. Only America among the great powers remained free of entangling alliances.

“You Have a New World”
Britain had appeased America, allied with Japan, and entered an entente with France and Russia, yet its German problem remained. It had arisen in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. After the French defeat at Sedan and the abdication of Napoleon III, a united Germany stretching from France to Russia and from the Baltic to the Alps had emerged as the first power in Europe. Disraeli recognized the earthshaking importance of the unification of the German states under a Prussian king.

The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of the last century. . . . There is not a diplomatic tradition, which has not been swept away. You have a new world. . . . The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.22

Bismarck had engineered the wars on Denmark, Austria, and France, but he now believed his nation had nothing to gain from war. She had “hay enough for her fork.”23 Germany should not behave “like a nouveau riche who has just come into money and then offended everyone by pointing to the coins in his pocket.”24 He crafted a series of treaties to maintain a European balance of power favorable to Germany—by keeping the Austro-Hungarian Empire allied, Russia friendly, Britain neutral, and France isolated. Bismarck opposed the building of a fleet that might alarm the British. As for an overseas empire, let Britain, France, and Russia quarrel over colonies. When a colonial adventurer pressed upon him Germany’s need to enter the scramble for Africa, Bismarck replied, “Your map of Africa is very nice. But there is France, and here is Russia, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa.”25

As the clamor for colonies grew, however, the Iron Chancellor would succumb and Germany would join the scramble. By 1914, Berlin boasted the world’s third largest overseas empire, encompassing German East Africa (Tanganyika), South-West Africa (Namibia), Kamerun (Cameroon), and Togoland. On the China coast, the Kaiser held Shantung Peninsula. In the western Pacific, the House of Hohenzollern held German New Guinea, German Samoa, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline islands, and the Northern Solomons, of which Bougainville was the largest. However, writes Holborn,

Not for a moment were Bismarck’s colonial projects intended to constitute a revision of the fundamentals of his continental policy. Least of all were they designs to undermine British naval or colonial supremacy overseas. Bismarck was frank when he told British statesmen that Germany, by the acquisition of colonies, was giving Britain new hostages, since she could not hope to defend them in an emergency.26

By 1890, Bismarck had been dismissed by the new young Kaiser, who began to make a series of blunders, the first of which was to let Bismarck’s treaty with Russia lapse. This left Russia nowhere to turn but France. By 1894, St. Petersburg had become the ally of a Paris still seething over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. France had broken free of the isolation imposed upon her by Bismarck. The Kaiser’s folly in letting the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse can hardly be overstated.

While Germany was a “satiated power, so far as Europe itself was concerned, and stood to gain little from a major war on the European continent,” France and Russia were expansionist.27 Paris hungered for the return of Alsace. Russia sought hegemony over Bulgaria, domination of the Turkish Straits to keep foreign warships out of the Black Sea, and to pry away the Austrian share of a partitioned Poland.

More ominous, the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 stipulated that a partial mobilization by any member of the Triple Alliance—Austria, Italy, or Germany—would trigger hostilities against all three.28 As George Kennan writes in The Fateful Alliance,

A partial Austrian mobilization against Serbia, for example (and one has only to recall the events of 1914 to understand the potential significance of this circumstance) could alone become the occasion for the launching of a general European war.29 --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From Booklist

Taking his swing at the origins of World War II, conservative pundit Buchanan incorporates the subject into his warnings, expressed in several populist jeremiads (State of Emergency, 2006), of the decline of the West. Certainly World War I, with which Buchanan begins, was a catastrophe for Western civilization whose ramifications continue to be felt. Buchanan’s interpretation generally holds that British and American participation in both WWI and WWII was avoidable if British leaders had recognized that Germany was no threat to the vital interests of the British Empire. Banking his thesis on such supposed benevolence from Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler, Buchanan criticizes various British policies of the 1920s and 1930s (who doesn’t?), and argues collaterally with Hitler’s statements disclaiming fundamental conflicts with Britain. The weakness in Buchanan’s line of thinking, of course, is that by 1939, Hitler’s international word was worthless; yet Buchanan hinges his case on what might have happened had Britain let Hitler go after Poland in 1939 as it had Czechoslovakia. Speculating a better future had the West permitted Nazi Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe, Buchanan cites the historical costs of Britain and France having at last drawn the line against aggression. Convinced? Controversial as is his wont, Buchanan reminds his large readership that the immediate ignition of WWII can still be disputed. --Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0011UGM3W
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Forum (May 27, 2008)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 27, 2008
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 15213 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 546 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #280,387 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #153 in WWI Biographies
- #155 in World War I History (Kindle Store)
- #307 in History of Germany

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Amazon Customer

Run and Read this Book

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2018

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Buchanan is a decent man who foresaw in the 1980s the folly the USA might fall into if we followed neocon advice. And the neocons will never forgive him for it.

Similarly, the neocons hate him for examining Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin in the harsh like of reality. His conclusions can be summed up:
1. The two world wars were an absolute calamity for civilization.
2. The UK and Churchill were the tie that bound up all in a multidecade world conflict.
3. Hitler's designs lay east into a conflict with the USSR.
4. Hitler and his Nazi regime was the less dangerous totalitarian murder cult, relative to Stalin and his political offspring.
5. The USA is now and has been ruled by the same sort of fanatics that drove Great Briton from empire to third rate power.

A prophet has no honor in his home country.

122 people found this helpful

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Pseudo D

Pat the Great

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2017

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What can be said about Pat Buchanan? Shortly after the Trump inauguration, Sam Tanenhaus in Esquire wrote "When Pat
Buchanan tried to make America Great Again" and Tim Alberta of Politico wrote "The Ideas Made It, but I Didn't". Tucker
Carlson, who became the premier prime-time Fox host this year, simply said "There's nobody smarter than Pat Buchanan".
Presumably he meant something like "among mainstream political pundits" but the point is taken. And he's not some
ivory tower guy. He ran for President three times, and that was only after serving in several administrations. He's been
compared to Steve Bannon, but he's also Stephen Miller because he wasn't even 30 when he led Nixon's great comeback.
Like Ann Coulter, Pat is often criticized for writing the same doomsday book over and over (until the two memoirs about
the Nixon years). So I'll endorse this as his most ambitious work of scholarship. It has been widely criticized; I like history
but I'm not competent to judge those things. The thesis was made in "A Republic, Not An Empire", but "Churchill, Hitler
and the Unnecessary War" expands it to over 500 pages of reflection beginning with the time before World War I. If
intellectuals are supposed to challenge prevailing presuppositions, it seems that Pat is here doing his job. Hitler's goal
was world domination? Ok, but this book goes into great detail about the specifics of what was going on in Eastern
Europe, Russia, etc. and what the military strategies and calculations were among all the parties involved. A lot of this
is still counterintuitive today. Let's assume that John Lukacs' critique was basically accurate. I'd still say that Pat has
done a service by provoking serious thought about this history in a way that no figure of comparable stature has done.

57 people found this helpful

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Outstandingly clear.

Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2018

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Outstandingly clear. Could not put it down.
The story of how Churchill's , and other British elite, persistently poor analysis and flawed judgement and decision making led to two world wars and the loss of empire for them; and to the weakening of Western civilization overall.

62 people found this helpful

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snakeriverhombre

But necessaryforaOneWorldGovernment itwas!

Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2018

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This was a great book for people studying the real history of WWI and WWII, and not the false tale of the victors/Allies which unfortunately for the sake of truth smoother out any other views on these historical events, no matter how accurate and more correct they obviously are. If one likes this book then I would definitely recommend “the myth of German Villainy” by Brenton l. Bradbury just so one can hear both sides of the story!!

43 people found this helpful

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RoninCT

Everyone should read this book!

Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2017

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History is written by the victors and that's definitely true for both World Wars. But this book will enlighten the reader because it presents a different narrative than we were taught in school and is reinforced by our media and entertainment industry. It will anger the thoughtful reader to learn of the stupidity and arrogance of Europe's leaders and US presidents in taking the world into a war in 1914 which they could have avoided; could have stopped even after it started; and after it was over, laid the groundwork for the Second World War. What's astonishing is that WW2 also could have been avoided, but once again, stupid and arrogant leaders took the world down the path to death and destruction. This book is a must read for the scholar and the amateur historian, for liberals and conservatives alike.

73 people found this helpful

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Jerry

The original Neo-con

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2017

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Churchill is the original Neo-con. Funny how he is held up as a conservative hero when he was on both sides of the political spectrum

39 people found this helpful

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R. Sam

Excellent book

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2018

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An excellent analysis of the how the Second World War in Europe began. Buchanan looks at all of the actors involved in the start of the war. British stupidity and duplicity, Polish intransigence, French reluctance, Stalin's cunning, and Hitler's desire to revise the unjust treaty of Versailles really stand out. These arguments are from books elsewhere which Buchanan forges into his own book. Three of most important books he draws upon are AJP Taylor's Origins of the Second World War, William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade, and Ralph Raico's Great War and Great Leaders. If you do not know these books you should read these books in addition to Buchanan.You will then understand the origins of the Second World War in Europe.

35 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Excellent exposé of Britain's disastrous foreign policy.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

This book reinforced my views on Britain's declarations of war in 1914 and 1939, providing facts which cannot be refuted. Those who blindly claim that we had to "fight fascism" and that "we won the war" should, upon reading Buchanan's book, if not change their minds, at least ask themselves uncomfortable questions and take an objective rather than an emotional view.

13 people found this helpful

J Reviews

A new perspective

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2020

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I’ve been recommending this book to everyone. Really worth reading.

I will say that the author clearly went in with a worldview and omitted everything which contradicted that worldview. But if you’re a critical reader, that shouldn’t be an issue.

Churchill ruined the west, who’da thunk?

7 people found this helpful

saracen

A distance from the usual victors propaganda

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2018

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A critical work far from the victors propaganda, it is an eye opener and when read in conjunction with similar works yields a better understanding of the myth, reality and lies we are told of the history of the Second World War .

16 people found this helpful

Patrick Lenihan

A good book, providing an interesting perspective, that ultimately fails to convince!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 11, 2016

Verified Purchase

If you are interested in the causes of World 1 & 2; the potential for alternative responses to the events at the time and potentially different resulting outcomes, and, you have an open mind, you will probably enjoy this book. Buchanan has a clear take on the issues: Britain should have stayed out of the conflicts that became WW1 & WW2; and, Churchill was a poor statesman who bears a significant level of responsibility for Britain entering both wars. In my opinion Buchanan makes a good case. However, he fails to fully explore the logic of his arguments and therefore ignores the dangers that would have arisen had Britain followed his line. For example, if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union one would expect them to go onto develop atomic weapons just as the Soviets did. Would this be a better outcome than what actually happened? Over time the Nazi regime, with its cult of war and aggression, armed with nuclear weapons, and in control of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would be a very dangerous adversary for Britain, France and the USA. Buchanan also claims that Nazi Germany was the lesser evil when compared to the Soviet Union. He does this by citing the many deaths that occurred as a result of communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cambodia. Whilst these were truly appalling events, he either ignores, or does not know of the Nazi plans for the mass starvation of the Soviet population after the war, which may have caused 20 million additional deaths to those the Nazi's actually caused. Following on from achieving this "goal" it is quite possible that the Nazi's would then go on to commit other atrocities against the remaining populations of Eastern Europe whom they also regarded as being sub-human. Buchanan also states a preference for Nazism over Soviet communism as Nazism was a national movement that was purely concerned with its own country whilst Soviet Communism was an international movement that threatened the world. However, Buchanan ignore the evidence of Nazi Germany being involved in fermenting/supporting right wing/fascist governments in Austria, Spain, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia (before being invaded), Bulgaria and Finland. It must be very naive to assume that if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union that it would not then seek to broaden it's influence and infiltrate the politics to other countries including Britain, France and even the USA? In conclusion a thought provoking read that will be of interest to many people who wish to think beyond the "standard version" of this part of history. However, casual or new readers on this subject should be wary of Buchanan's conclusions as there are many other viewpoints out there!

31 people found this helpful

Alan J. Stedall

I unlearnt a lot

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2022

Verified Purchase

Sic: “When deterrence [against Germany] failed, Britain was faced with an obligation to declare a war it could not win, to honor a war guarantee it should not have given, on behalf of a nation [Poland] it could not save”.

A very readable, well argued case that the British, French and US war with Germany could well have been avoided, leaving the fascist and communist totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin to fight each other to a standstill. From the British standpoint we would have avoided 400,000 deaths and the bankruptcy of our nation.

Churchill rightly said: "History will be kind to me, for I shall write it".

Buchannan's book portrays a history of events leading up to WW2 very different to Churchill's own "Gathering Storm" and, frankly, far more convincing.

As a patriotic Briton, and hitherto a staunch admirer of Churchill, I found Buchanan’s book a painful read.

Buchanan portrays Churchill as a serial exerciser of poor judgment, with an intense personal lust for the excitement of military conflict. The consequent question is whether Churchill did everything possible to avoid WW2 or whether his enthusiasm to declare war against Germany was an act self-indulgence.

I unlearnt a lot.

Highly recommended.

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Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World Kindle Edition

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Patrick J. Buchanan

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