Victor Davis Hanson: The Truth About World War II
https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-the-truth-about
Germany and its fascist allies started the war. They felt empowered to do so not because of supposed Allied aggression, but because of Western appeasement and isolationism.
In a recent and now widely seen Tucker Carlson interview, a guest historian named Darryl Cooper casually presented a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill.
Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response.
On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners
It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.
The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East.
The edicts variously targeted for elimination prominent Soviet officials, intellectuals, Jews, and commissars. Just as importantly, Hitler exempted German soldiers from any criminal liability in what was expected to be the mass killing of Russians and Jews in general.
In Mein Kampf, during the lead-up to the war, and even through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact years, Hitler had planned eventually to invade Russia, destroy the Soviet Union, put an end to what he called Jewish Bolshevism, and annex and then eventually resettle almost all of European Russia. In part he was encouraged by the German success in briefly absorbing much of Western Russia in late 1917 and early 1918.
Accordingly, Hitler and his planners envisioned a quick Russian campaign. Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, believed that Operation Barbarossa, which began on June 22, 1941, had essentially been won in its first eleven days. Halder matter-of-factly wrote in his diary that the Russian population would have to be disposed of during that first winter to save Germans the effort of feeding and maintaining them.
Hitler further assumed the liquidation of Soviet-style Marxism was inseparable from the destruction of all the Jews in the East, whose wartime persecution began in Poland just days after the German invasion in September 1939 and well before any Allied response.
True, some of the invading Wehrmacht officers may have been disturbed at the sheer mass of captives and Germans’ inability to offer even the bare essentials of humane treatment. But they quickly learned from Berlin’s doubling down on earlier eliminationist directives that they were not to worry about the millions of doomed Russian prisoners or the murders of Jews, given their deaths were consistent with prior Führer directives for the future resettling of western Russia.
At Nuremberg and after the war, many veteran generals of the Eastern Front claimed they privately opposed Hitler’s orders of total war that entailed liquidation of communists and Jews and assumed the mass death of Russian POWs. But very few could prove that they had not received such orders or had bravely opposed their implementation.
Who Was Responsible for Starting World War II?
As for Cooper’s claim that the Allies were to blame for starting a world war, nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler may have been frustrated that Britain and France declared war on him after his unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. But he had been warned by some advisers that the two allies would be finally forced to war, given that he had broken almost all his prewar promises to them about ceasing his serial territorial acquisitions.
Incidentally, the much-maligned Versailles Treaty was nevertheless far more lenient to Germany than what the Kaiser had envisioned in 1914 under the Septemberprogramm memorandum for a conquered France, the German-imposed peace on a defeated Bolshevik Russia under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, or any of Nazi Germany’s postwar treatments of conquered nations.
Hitler, remember, had betrayed and humiliated Neville Chamberlain by unapologetically reneging on the agreements he made in Munich, and he had erased an autonomous Czechoslovakia. Yet, Hitler strangely saw his Munich Agreement victory as a sort of temporary setback, despised the compliant Chamberlain, and often blamed him for talking him into delaying for even a brief period his planned wars of aggression.
Hitler ended the eight-month phony war after the destruction of Poland by invading Western Europe in April and May 1940, but not because he was frustrated that France and Britain had not taken up his initial peace offers. Instead, for all his hysterics and frustrations, he understood well that they had grasped the envisioned permanently subservient roles for both nations in a postwar Hitlerian world. And Germany knew that it had finally shocked naive European governments to their senses by the precivilizational brutality it displayed in Poland.
Instead, Hitler restarted the war in Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France because he wished to complete his pan-European conquests both before his long-planned and inevitable turn eastward against his erstwhile partner but existential enemy the Soviet Union, and before America inevitably entered the war on the side of the Allies. (Hitler sometimes whined that America’s late 1917–18 entrance had doomed imperial Germany’s supposedly certain last chance of victory).
On Britain’s Supposed Warmongering
Britain was, in fact, the only one of the six major belligerents in World War II that went to war on the principle of a third-party nation’s territorial integrity, without either invading another country or being itself invaded. Britain was also the only major power that saw World War II through from the first day to the very last. And of the victorious Big Three, it alone foresaw well before the war that it would likely end any cataclysmic war strategically diminished, its empire gone, and without its centuries-long global stature.
After the fall of France in June 1940, and the occupation and de facto control of most of Europe, there was discussion again in London, as during the phony war between October 1939 and April 1940, of finding a way for the British Empire to survive—given it was without any help from a now-occupied Europe, an isolationist America, and a collaborationist Russia.
So as early as late May 1940, after the German Ardennes invasion seemed unstoppable, some British and desperate French leaders advised the new Churchill government to seek out Mussolini to craft a modus operandi with Hitler.
Initial peace feelers followed. But all were quickly revealed to be impossible, given the buoyant and hubristic German-Italian agenda for a newly conquered Europe. That entailed a likely end of ongoing British rearmament, the surrender or flight to Canada of the British fleet, and fears that “peace” likely meant at worst something like a Nazi-imposed Oswald Mosley Quisling dictatorship, and at best a David Lloyd George Pétain-like collaborationist government—with a ceremonial role for the abdicated-but-still-lurking Edward VIII.
To the degree Hitler at any time wanted peace with the British Empire so that he could concentrate on Russia, that notion was largely predicated only on realpolitik—mostly his own growing fear and warning from his military advisers that the proposed invasion of Britain in 1940 was impossible anyway, given the unquestioned superiority of the British fleet.
By late 1940, even the idea of defeat of Britain by air alone was growing futile. In any case, Hitler always feared that he could neither invade nor permanently occupy Britain and felt, mirabile dictu, that invading Russia would be far easier for the land-based Wehrmacht than amphibious operations across the Channel. Destroying and pillaging communist Russia was of course far more consistent with his lifelong plans to obliterate Soviet Marxism and its supposed Jewish architects.
In sum, Hitler wanted “peace” with Britain only in the sense that he could envision no way of conquering it by land, sea, or air. In perhaps the war’s greatest miscalculation, Hitler believed that the supposedly easier conquest of Russia would then force a completely orphaned Britain to sue for peace on his terms.
On Churchill, the Supposed Warmonger and Terrorist
Cooper describes Churchill as a supposed terrorist and warmonger. Yet in the dark days of late May and June 1940, to avoid factionalism among his new war cabinet, Churchill was willing to allow his colleagues temporarily to sound out peace possibilities through the intervention of Mussolini. But he darkly predicted that any ensuing humiliating Axis terms would likely shock even the more malleable and naive of his war cabinet.
In fact, by May 1940 Churchill had proved very magnanimous to the disgraced Chamberlain, whom he insisted stay on in his wartime cabinet, believing either that a naive or misguided Chamberlain might have sincerely sought to delay Hitler at Munich in order for Britain to find time to rearm, or blindly but genuinely thinking Hitler had no additional territorial agendas in Western Europe.
In any case, by May 1940, a once disgraced, chastised, and now far more realistic Chamberlain was well treated by an ally of Churchill and opposed any further obsequious concessions to Hitler. Chamberlain knew from bitter experience trusting Hitler would not bring peace but just guarantee war and a weaker and ultimately defeated Britain.
Churchill far more often blamed the earlier Stanley Baldwin government for Britain’s 1939–1940 predicament. It had stubbornly resisted and then delayed British rearmament in the foolish belief in either collective security, Hitler’s benign intentions toward Britain, or some sort of fantasy of redirecting Hitler permanently and exclusively eastward against Stalin.
In sum, Churchill was not eager for war, and on occasion expressed hope that Hitler would focus on rebuilding Germany, settle down, and stay within his borders. Nonetheless, throughout the late 1930s he had begged and cajoled the Baldwin, and later, the Chamberlain governments to rearm to the teeth to deter what he felt would be inevitable and destructive Nazi and Japanese offensive wars.
It is true Churchill wanted to preserve the British Empire at all costs. Yet integral to that strategy was rearming to a degree that would deter both Germany and Japan, given he privately grew despondent that post–Depression British financial and military weakness signaled to both Hitler and the Japanese that London would not be able to hold on to its empire or deter its enemies and thus would inevitably invite aggression.
So, if believing a strong military would deter Hitler and avoid war is somehow bellicose, then Churchill might conceivably have pleaded guilty.
As far as being a “terrorist,” Churchill soon and almost alone grasped the ultimate fantasies of Hitler’s planned genocide, world domination, the end of free nations, and a nightmarish global future. He had good reason for such pessimism after Hitler had once again, for the nth time, broken his word; he invaded Poland and began a policy of slaughtering civilians, and rounding up and murdering Jews. Most of his military planners realized after summer 1940 that the evacuated and depleted British army could not stop Hitler in Europe. Even the British fleet could not guarantee a successful blockade of German ports. That bleak reality left the RAF’s bomber command as the only tool to slow Hitler down.
Who started a systematic campaign of terror bombing?
The Luftwaffe first indiscriminately bombed civilian targets in Poland to instill panic, terror, and mass death. It continued that tactic unapologetically in Holland by destroying the center of Rotterdam during the first two weeks of May 1940. And despite Hitler’s false claims that the Allies had started bombing civilians first, he soon honed his air strategy of incinerating civilians against Coventry and London.
In terms of soldiers lost versus civilians killed, Britain waged a less lethal war than most of the other belligerents, losing fewer soldiers than its two allies and killing far fewer of their enemies as well. Dresden and Hamburg paled before the American incendiary campaigns against Japanese cities between March and July 1945, followed by the two atomic bombs. And America’s bombing of civilian targets paled before the Japanese’s army systematic and decade-long slaughter of millions of Chinese civilians, not to mention Hitler’s agendas of destroying European Jewry.
Cooper cites as proof of British terror Operation Razzle, designed to torch German forests. But it proved a pipe dream and fizzled, indicative of the weakness and desperation of the RAF of 1939–1941 that could not conduct successful precision bombing daylight raids across the occupied European continent—lacking fighter escort, updated radar, effective navigation, and reliable four-engine heavy bombers.
The RAF, having learned from bitter experience, warned Americans in 1942 that it was suicidal to fly daylight, unescorted precision bombing raids over occupied Europe into Germany and eastern Europe. After thousands of lost B-17s and dead airmen, the Americans gradually agreed and found success only in mid- to late 1944 with the onset of fighter escorts, the liberation of France, improved tactics, and a depleted Luftwaffe.
Thus, in 1939–1940, how else was Britain to stop Hitler’s rampages, given his overwhelming momentum and unquestioned strength on the continent?
Again, true terror might be properly gauged by the number of civilians a military killed versus the number of its soldiers lost. Japan mostly likely won that sick contest by butchering some 15 million to 20 million Asians, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders, although Hitler came close through the Holocaust, the deaths of millions of Red Army prisoners, and unrestricted butchery waged against Polish and Russian civilians.
As terribly as the German and Japanese people suffered, it was minuscule in comparison to the tens of millions of innocents that Germany and Japan butchered in their respective campaigns to absorb Russia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and China—not to mention the Holocaust.
In sum, Germany and its fascist allies started World War II, initiated the mass warring on civilians, and institutionalized genocide. And they felt empowered to do so not because of Allied aggression or terrorism, but because of initial Western European appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration. That is what enticed Hitler and the Axis powers into starting a war they soon had no chance of winning, once their formidable enemies sized up their true intentions and likewise embraced the prior Axis notion of total war.
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