The Question of Villainy

On the idea of Churchill as the chief villain of the Second World War

Darryl Cooper’s interview with Tucker Carlson provoked a series of rebuttals. Of his arguments, one of those his critics found most objectionable was that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain” of the Second World War (or “a chief villain” in Cooper’s subsequent X thread).

Cooper stated that “the war was not inevitable” and that “almost no one but Churchill's faction wanted it”. Churchill was “the leader most intent on making it happen.” The war “was the worst possible outcome, and… it could have been avoided if not for the warmongers - chief among them Winston Churchill.” More particularly, “...of all the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation.” He was particularly damnable as “for two-and-a-half centuries, Europeans had refrained from tactics like mass starvation and other means of targeting civilian populations when they fought each other”, and Europe before the war “was a high point of civilization in that regard”; Churchill reversed that tradition.

Cooper focused mainly on the period from the war’s beginning to Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister, a useful moment to analyse as Churchill differed greatly from Neville Chamberlain in his intentions for the war and how he conducted it. My own work has thus far focused more on the events preceding September 1939, when Churchill was in Parliament but out of government. A stronger case against Churchill emerges from studying the whole period from 1933 until 1945. His reputation as the prescient seer of danger obviously relies on his actions, or a selection of them, before the war whereas his image as a steadfast defender or saviour of civilisation derives more from his actions as Prime Minister from May 1940, including his refusal of German peace offers.

Fraser Nelson asked Andrew Roberts about Churchill’s bellicosity before becoming Prime Minister. Roberts replied that Churchill

“did not take the war to Hitler. Hitler took the war to the West. The guarantee to Poland was a guarantee to an independent sovereign country that had not in any way provoked the attack that Hitler unleashed against it. So the British government had every right to guarantee Poland. Setting a tripwire is not a warmongering thing to do unless the totalitarian power wants to trip over the wire.”

Chamberlain set the tripwire in March 1939 under extreme pressure from his Cabinet, from Churchill and like-minded MPs, and from what could be called the ‘Focus press’ and the section of public opinion that trusted it. Chamberlain’s reluctance was such that when Germany ‘tripped over the wire‘, he still sought to avoid declaring war, though was forced by his colleagues to do so (resignation would have only brought Churchill to power sooner). That is, warmongers triumphed over peacemakers; the isolation and cornering and later removal of Chamberlain were necessities for them to bring about the war and take power. It is true, as Roberts says, that Britain “did not take the war to Hitler”, at least under Chamberlain. Britain declared war on Germany but scarcely fought it until the Norway campaign in April 1940, primarily a Churchill initiative. To say that “Hitler took the war to the West” by invading Poland, though, is absurd. Obviously that was a move eastwards, and Hitler wrongly believed it would not lead to war with the West. He would likely never have perceived a need to invade if the British guarantee had not encouraged the Polish government to be intransigent. And Roberts avoids saying why no wires were laid against, or tripped by, the Soviet invasion of Poland two weeks after Germany’s.

Roberts implicitly endorses British-French dictation of the affairs of Europe, which accords with his defence of Britain and Churchill’s roles in causing the First World War, also in league with France and (as it was then) Russia. This would be a consistent if not agreeable position if it did not entail exculpation of the Soviet Union. Cooper attributed the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 to the need to secure control of Romanian oil. The oil-rich Soviets, between their invasion of Finland and being invaded by Germany, menaced the nations of the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea, including annexing part of Romania’s territory by threatening a full invasion. Like Germany, the Soviets wanted the states of Eastern Europe to be friends or vassals of themselves. As with Poland, had not British and French politicians discouraged Romania from friendship and co-operation with Germany, the Soviets surely could not have had their way without starting the war. Roberts asserts that "the Soviets didn't have any plans to attack Hitler" and that the Soviet losses in the initial stages of the German invasion were as vast as they were because the forces were deployed too far forward, treating this as an error deriving from Stalin’s misplaced trust of Hitler. Why would Stalin place his main forces on a frontier with a power he trusted? Stalin most likely expected war with Germany, especially given his own actions toward it, and preferred the world to witness Germany as the aggressor, confident that his gargantuan forces would withstand and reverse the incursion; eventually, with much American help, they did, and they continue to be applauded by anti-fascist historians for doing so.

Roberts appears to select whatever explanations justify Churchill’s pro-Soviet stance, which long predated the war. Churchill schemed with the communist empire at least as early as 1934 in private meetings with the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky, and by 1937 congratulated Maisky (at a reception with the king, no less) on the Soviets’ vast and rapid armament and its contribution to Germany’s encirclement. Niall Ferguson similarly misleads and gives credit unduly: “Churchill had to make common cause with Stalin to beat Hitler; but he knew Stalin for the brutal dictator that he was, and he was among the very first to see that World War II would soon be followed by Cold War I.” Of course Churchill could “see” by 1946 what the alliance had accomplished. He chose to treat the Soviets as a threat after helping deliver much of Europe into their dominion.

Darryl Cooper referred to Hitler’s offers of peace to Britain, which Churchill’s defenders give him great credit for refusing. According to Churchillians, any settlement with Hitler would merely provide a pause for him to regroup and resupply, later to resume world conquest; Britain would sooner or later become a subject. According to Victor Davis Hanson,

“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.”

Hitler’s miscalculation may have owed to his failure to anticipate that Roosevelt would make the USA the ‘arsenal of communism’. At any rate, so what if Hitler wanted Britain to sue for peace on his terms? Every party to a negotiation wants that, yet negotiation remains worthwhile in most circumstances, especially for countries that cannot afford war. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin didn’t want a negotiated peace, and each of them made their hostility clear before Barbarossa: Churchill by his campaign of lying about German air power and offensive plans in Parliament and the press, Roosevelt by his declaration that America’s frontiers were on the Rhine, and Stalin by his massing of forces, his annexations and the global operations of the Comintern, the Popular Front and front groups.

In such company the idea of Churchill as the chief villain is doubtful. Stalin was working toward world communism by armed force, espionage and revolution. Roosevelt was working toward a world co-ruled by the USA and the USSR. Both aimed at the termination of the British Empire. Churchill was far exceeded in callousness by Stalin and appears to have been sickened by his inhuman utterances at Yalta while Roosevelt chuckled. Churchill and Roosevelt in the earlier stages are hard to separate. Churchill’s conduct of the war once he became Prime Minister imply that he believed, and may have been assured on behalf of Roosevelt, that the USA would ‘enter the war’, and he presumably thought it a genuine friend of Britain, only realising his mistake, and only partially, once Britain was already financially dependent upon and controlled by the US Treasury thanks to the workings of Lend-Lease, the provision of which he had publicly called "the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history". Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and the Soviet agent Harry Dexter White had no sincere regard for Britain. To them it was just a base for anti-fascism. Churchill’s delusions about ‘English-speaking peoples’ and (later) the ‘special relationship’ appear to have obscured the difference of interests between the two states.

Idiocy is scant mitigation, and the charge of instigating the war sticks, as does that of averting peace and initiating the targeting of civilians. Churchill wanted regime change in Germany by whatever means; that entailed regime change in Britain, which he led. Once in Downing Street, he wanted Britain to remain at war with Germany regardless of the cost and with no apparent route to any better settlement than what Hitler offered. He sought opportunities to escalate the war and retaliated against German air attacks targeting British industry with air attacks targeting German industry and civilians; the German reaction was then exploited by his government’s Ministry of Information for its Anger Campaign, which ‘justified’ further attacks on German civilians, and so on. He rejoiced at the German invasion of the Soviet Union and seized the opportunity to formalise the alliance with them that he had personally fostered for the previous seven years. His government formalised ‘area bombing’, originally called ‘de-housing’, as policy in 1942.

Churchill and two greater villains

Victor Davis Hanson, addressing the question of who initiated the bombing of civilians, resorts to confusing prose:

“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.”

Certainly Hitler’s regime was culpable for its slaughter of Poles and Dutch, but the targeting of civilians had stopped thereafter; Churchill’s air raid on Berlin in September 1940 resumed it with the expectation that it would provoke retaliation against British cities. Whatever anger Kristallnacht and the German occupation of Prague had generated among some of the British public was only enough to help bring about the diplomatic state of war in 1939; in 1940 and after, the British people still had to be deceived, brutalised and incited to engage in total war as Churchill deemed necessary.

The bombing of German cities, for Andrew Roberts, was warranted as it substantially diminished German war production. More generally, as Roberts said,

“Nobody knew how that war was going to end. You had to fight it with every means you had. The munitions factories that we did take out were absolutely essential to war production and material… Imagine if the war had been won by Darryl Cooper’s hero.”

Nobody knows how any war will end. That was as true through the preceding centuries of more limited, humane warfare as it was in the 1940s. And the war did not have to be declared in the first place and could have been ended by negotiation once it was underway.

Neville Chamberlain attended to the financial cost of war and expressly sought to rearm only within Britain’s capacity to borrow by normal means. Lend-Lease and Britain’s wartime borrowing facility with the USA were not normal and, as mentioned, put British finances under the control of the US Treasury. Chamberlain expected the USA to take advantage of British weakness, as it did. He understood that if Britain exceeded its limits, the empire would become unsustainable, as it did. He was co-operative with France but did not encourage bellicosity toward Germany. He was not committed to the Europe of Versailles. He was strongly distrustful of the Soviet Union and avoided the alliance with them that his Cabinet, by the summer of 1939, tried to force on him. He had never encouraged immigration into Britain or striven to adapt British policy to immigrant demands.

Contrast all this with Churchill. Certainly he was a villain compared to his predecessor. To say that he was the chief villain, more so than Roosevelt and Stalin, is excessive. Hitler’s villainy is harder to judge as war propaganda continues to mar the study of history, but on the question of who wanted war between Germany and Britain, obviously it was much truer of Churchill than him; it was the future of Britain, primarily of the ordinary native population, that should have been the concern of British leaders, not the travails of Jews in Germany for two nights in September 1938 or ‘Czechoslovakists’. To have ‘allowed’ the Germans to enact those crimes, i.e. to have refrained from issuing ultimatums and declaring war, would have been both the pragmatic and the moral choice for Britain, and anyway a smaller wrong than ‘allowing’ the Soviets to enact far greater crimes throughout the existence of their regime. The war was an immeasurably graver catastrophe than ‘standing by and watching’. Churchill lobbied for, and then set Britain upon, the worst course it could take. Still, he was more the chief British villain than the chief of all villains.