Churchill’s Choice: Hitler vs. Stalin
I find the glorification of Churchill quite disgusting. It is typical British-American arrogance to ignore the outcome of WW2 for the peoples of Eastern Europe, not to speak of the Germans. Churchill knew from the beginning about the terrible fate of the Russians and many other East European peoples under Bolshevist dictatorship. He obviously didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-German hatred. Knowing that he bombed German cities, killing thousands of civilians long before the Germans were retaliating, makes him in my opinion even worse than Hitler. Why did he go into alliance with Stalin against the Germans? That is his crime and the recognition of it will come. —H.W. via email.
The choice before Churchill and Britain in 1939-40 was anything but clear-cut. There were good reasons, however, supporting the choice they made.
While considering the fate of Eastern Europe it is reasonable also to consider that of Western Europe, and what Europe would have looked like had Hitler triumphed, and moved on into the nuclear age.
Before assuming that Churchill didn’t care about Bolshevism, it is necessary to read a little. Read about 1919-20, when he supported the Whites against the Bolsheviks, earning no love from his practical, wise and eminent colleagues, who didn’t see what he did.
Read on into the 1930s. Who occupied the Rhineland in violation of treaties? What was the March 1938 Anschluss about? What happened at Munich? What about March 1939, and the absorption of all those Bohemians, Moravians and Slovakians into the Reich? Which country first allied herself with Russia—Britain or Germany? Cities like Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam were all hit before the RAF had dropped a single bomb on the Reich. Indeed, for many months after the war started in 1939, the most the British would drop were pamphlets. Bombing, some in the government believed, would amount to destruction of private property.
Why side with Stalin in 1941? If your back is to the wall you tend to welcome allies without being too choosy about them. It is a legitimate criticism that Churchill was too trusting of Stalin; those arguments are not coming out, they’ve been out for thirty years. But if he hated Germans, his postwar declaration that the only way to salvage Europe was through rapprochement between France and Germany was an odd way to express it. “My hate,” he wrote later, “died with their surrender.”
In 1931 Churchill wrote “Mass Effects in Modern Life”: words that still ring today:
No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.
“Implicit in those words,” says Dr. Larry Arnn, “are the speeches of 1940. Churchill told the British people we must fight to the death—better to die than to give this thing up. The sin of Hitler, almost superhuman in its scale but not, is that he tried too form a polity that would eliminate the very heart of humanity. No one saw that more clearly than Winston Churchill.”
2 thoughts on “Churchill’s Choice: Hitler vs. Stalin”
Congratulations to your son. He is a sharp observer. In another few years he will be writing something like my favorite what-if: “If Churchill had Not Won the 1945 Election.” (Scroll to this heading on my last Brexit post.)
On Poland, he is spot-on. On the Polish guarantee, Churchill writes in Their Finest Hour that it was unfortunate, but inevitable:
No one can be certain, but I think your son is as likely as anyone to be right about the outcome, had Hitler turned away from Poland, avoiding war with Britain and France, and invaded Russia in, say, April 1941. Certainly the Wehrmacht would have been formidable, fresh and unattenuated from its conquests in the West, however successful. Would Churchill even have become Prime Minister had Western Europe not been attacked? Certainly the appeasers dominated Parliament until the Polish confrontation.
This was the jist of my argument with Professor John Charmely’s Churchill’s Grand Alliance, a readable critical work. His book was challenged mainly over a brief section arguing that Britain should have backed away from war with Germany after France fell, preserving the Empire and British greatness.
Had that happened, I argued, Hitler might have launched his Soviet invasion earlier than in June, leaving him time to get to Moscow before winter, and ultimately emerged triumphant. At the very least, he’d have had more time to develop an atomic bomb. And would efforts on the bomb been as urgent as they were in Britain and America, had they not both been in the war up to their necks by 1942? It’s legitimate to wonder.
Full marks to your son, and may he keep reading and writing!
Sir, would you please weigh in on an ongoing ‘alternative history’ debate between myself and my thirteen year old son (who is a serious history buff). He’s convinced that if Hitler had not been constrained by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and, having taken Poland, simply attacked Russia ASAP with a view to taking out the Bolsheviks, he would have succeeded. Stalin’s army purge of 1938 left the Russian army in disarray and it was ripe for the taking.
He maintains that Britain and France were actually in defensive mode in 1939-40 and that the alliances with Poland were not acted upon in good faith.
He is convinced that if Hitler hadn’t turned his attention westward and, instead focused on destroying Stalin, the allies might have quietly let him get on with it!
Does he have a point?