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:

Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Here was the righteous cause deliberately and with a refinement of inverted artistry committed to mortal battle after its assets and advantages had been so improvidently squandered. Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

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!

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?