Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War

Cover of Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

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Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (ISBN 9780307405159) is a 2008 book by Pat Buchanan where he criticizes British involvement in World War II, going so far as to blame it for The Holocaust, which he calls "not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war."

Wait, what?

Yes, Buchanan seriously attempts to argue that The Holocaust was primarily the result of the Allied nations going to war against Germany. Buchanan begins by pointing out that "The mass deportations and destruction of the Jews of Europe, however, did not begin in 1939 or 1940. They began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941…" However, the actual dates between the invasion of the Soviet Union and the mass deportation of Jews is much closer than Buchanan implies, with the deportation of German Jews beginning in December 1941, the Wannsee Conference conference in January 1942 deciding the fate of the other European Jews, and the mass deportation of Jews beginning in earnest in the summer of 1942.

This only makes sense if one ignores large swaths of Hitler's writings, which is exactly what Buchanan does. R. L. Hymers Jr., a conservative Baptist pastor who voted for Buchanan in 2000 and therefore no natural enemy of Buchanan's, says in his review of the book that Hitler felt like he "'had to' wipe out the Jews because they would destroy all mankind on earth. Specifically, he makes mention of a 1924 interview where Hitler says he has "come to the realization that in the future the most severe methods of fighting will have to be used" clearly showing genocide to be a real possibility.

Hymers also points out that Buchanan gets many of the situations regarding the war totally backwards. Hymers specifically notes this claim from the introduction of the book.

Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.

Hymers notes some rather basic errors with the history Buchanan mentions:

It was Hitler who invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, two full days before Britain declared war on Germany. Furthermore, Britain did not “bring” the United States into the war. The United States did not come into the war until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, well over two years after Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. Even after the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. still did not enter into war with Germany. President Roosevelt declared war on Japan alone. It was Hitler himself who unnecessarily and unwisely (for his cause) declared war on the United States soon after the American fleet was bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Thus, World War II was not started by Britain. It was started by Hitler, and it was Hitler who then expanded it by declaring war on the United States!.

Lies by omission

“”Here is a difference between Patrick Buchanan and David Irving. The latter employs falsehoods; Buchanan employs half-truths.

—John Luckacs

The biggest tactic that Buchanan uses throughout this book is lying not by saying things that are wrong, but by leaving out rather important details. Early on in the book, for example, Buchanan writes that "From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." However, this statement leaves out two rather important details: The first one being that the pick of 1871 is oddly convenient because, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, "that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to Germany." The other important detail is that, although Germany never went to war specifically during that time, it was still "seizing colonies in Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one."

This same failure to tell the full story can even be found in the sources that Buchanan uses. One reviewer noted Buchanan was fully willing to go along with A. J. P. Taylor writing, "Only Danzig prevented cooperation between Germany and Poland." but won't quote him calling Winston Churchill, "The savior of England." It's also just odd Buchanan would cite somebody like Taylor in the first place, given Buchanan writes negatively about "British elites of the twentieth century" and their "streak of Germanophobia," given Taylor was infamous for exactly that.