La Seconde Guerre mondiale était-elle inévitable ?

Il y a une part d'exercice intellectuel un peu vain dans cette question. Après tout, la Seconde Guerre mondiale a bien eu lieu. Pourquoi alors s'interroger sur l'inévitabilité des événements qui ont conduit à son déclenchement ?

Probablement parce qu'en savoir plus sur les circonstances qui ont conduit à ce sauvage déclenchement de violence peut nous permettre d'éviter de recommencer.

Or la diabolisation absolue du régime hitlérien rend l'analyse difficile car elle conduit inévitablement à accorder à la dictature hitlérienne une rationalité et une légitimité qui lui est refusée par la vulgate actuelle.

A posteriori, la victoire a validé la déclaration de guerre à l'Allemagne par le Royaume-Uni et par son client, la France tout comme l'alliance avec l'Union soviétique. La terrible épreuve subie par le peuple juif d'Europe est avancée comme justification de la guerre.

Pourtant il est légitime possible d'avancer l'hypothèse que le génocide des Juifs ne fut pas la cause de la guerre, mais une conséquence de la guerre totale voulue par les Alliés et de leur refus de toute paix négociée (la capitulation sans conditions).

Des auteurs avancent que sans cet enchaînement fatal d'évenements, les Juifs de l'Europe allemande auraient connu un sort terrible, mais en grande partie auraient survécu tout comme les Palestiniens qui ont payé le prix fort lors de la naissance de l'Etat d'Israël en 1947.

L'écrivain conservateur Peter Hitchens avance sur son blog du Daily Telegraph que la guerre trouve son origine dans les garanties accordées par le Royaume Uni à la Pologne en mars 1939.

Selon Hitchens, sans cette garantie, le gouvernement polonais serait probablement parvenu à un accord avec l'Allemagne sur la question de Dantzig et du corridor pour relier ce territoire au Reich et, ce faisant, aurait préservé le pacte de non-agression avec l'Allemagne.

L'analyse de Peter Hitchens est plus subtile que ces quelques lignes de présentation et je vous engage vivement à la lire. D'autant plus que ce débat est impensable en France où le mythe de la France victorieuse dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale ne supporte pas le moindre doute car il est consubstentiel avec les deux régimes mis en place après 1945 avec la double onction gaulliste et communiste.

Pour en revenir au preésent, la triste expérience de la Seconde Guerre mondiale nous apprend que le sentiment d'impunité et la diabolisation sont les deux ingrédients du cocktail qui conduit au désastre.

Aujourd'hui, la politique israélienne se conduit à l'abri d'un sentiment d'invulnérabilité accordé par l'absolue sujetion dans laquelle se trouvent les Etats-Unis. La diabolisation réciproque des acteurs majeurs du conflit israélo-musulman interdit le dialogue et la négociation. Comment parvenir à une solution avec l'Iran si le régime est diabolisé ?

De même que la garantie accordée à la Pologne a envenimé les choses, l'appui inconditionnel des Etats-Unis à Israël rend vain tout espoir de paix reposant sur un accord sur le fond.

• What might have been
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• A few responses to contributors on the Dunkirk matter. 'Stan' argues: ‘Germany would still have invaded Norway, Denmark and France and the low countries whether we promised to defend Poland or not. The invasion of France would have required our entry into the war, but even if we tried to keep out of it we could not have committed any more of the RN, RAF or army to protect our Far East interests in case we left ourselves defenceless against invasion by Germany - so Singapore et al would have fallen to the Japanese anyway.
• ‘We would have gained nothing by not declaring war in 1939 - just delayed it until May 1940. And seeing how we didn't actually do much until then (other than build up our depleted armed forces) it would have made absolutely no difference whatsoever.’
• Once again, he is taking the guarantee to Poland and the resulting September declaration of war by Britain and France as unavoidable givens. Why did Hitler invade France in May 1940? Because France had declared war on Germany in September 1939. Would he have done so if France had not declared war? My whole argument is that these events are not unavoidable givens. There was no political, military or other good reason for the guarantee to Poland, which was a sort of emotional spasm by Neville Chamberlain when he realised he had been fooled over Czechoslovakia (the only excuse for Chamberlain would have been if he had genuinely concluded the Munich agreement as a cynical way of delaying war till we were ready. But it wasn't so. He genuinely trusted Hitler to keep his word).
• If the guarantee to Poland wasn't inevitable (and it wasn't) then that means that our declaration of war in September 1939 (and France's) were likewise not inevitable. I'd add that, without our guarantee, the Polish government might well have behaved differently. It might even have conceded Danzig. It had by then developed a Polish-controlled port at Gdynia. And then what? I am as much of an admirer of modern Poland as anybody, and I regard the Nazi-Soviet (or Russo-German) partition of that country in 1939 as an act of appalling cruelty and barbarism.
• But the pre-1939 Polish state was not a specially lovely thing, and we should recall this, not least to avoid sentimentality about diplomacy.
• Hitler had regarded Poland as an ally, or at least as no trouble, for some years, and with reason. And that wasn't just because many Polish politicians were nearly as Judophobic as he was. He signed a non-aggression pact with Warsaw in 1934. Joachim von Ribbentrop offered to renew that pact in October 1938 while 'heroic' Poland was also squalidly gobbling up Czech land, scavenging after the break-up of Czechoslovakia.
• A brief note on this neglected incident. When Czechoslovakia was on its knees after Munich, Poland (as an ally of the Reich) demanded that it be given the ethnically-mixed Czech region known as Zaolzie - an old Versailles grievance. The Czechs, powerless and broken, caved in and (to German glee, as this spread the guilt of Munich) Polish tanks rolled into Cesky Tesin on 1st October 1938. The usual stuff followed - language persecution etc - and thousands of Czechs either left or were forced out.
• The Poles also refused Ribbentrop's Danzig offer at this time, apparently confident that their good relations with Berlin would survive.
• Then at the end of March 1939, having been fooled over Munich, which Chamberlain had genuinely believed was a permanent peace, Britain and France suddenly guaranteed Poland's independence (though not, interestingly, its territorial integrity, an implicit assumption that a deal might be done over Danzig. What's more the guarantee didn't apply to an attack by the USSR, luckily for Britain which would otherwise have had to declare war on Stalin in late September 1939).
• A month later, the Warsaw-Berlin non-aggression pact was unilaterally abrogated by Hitler (April 28, 1939, during an address before the Reichstag). Germany then renewed its territorial claims in Poland, which had been shelved during the period of the pact.
• Without the Franco-British guarantee to Poland, would events have followed this course? Impossible to be sure, but without that guarantee (which they touchingly believed would be fulfilled) the rather unprincipled Polish government might well have been more willing to give up Danzig, and so preserve the pact with Berlin (which until 31st March 1939 had been their principal foreign engagement). That concession, plus allowing the Germans unhampered roads and railways across the corridor, would have been a much less serious loss to Poland than the Sudetenland had been to Czechoslovakia. And, while it most certainly would not have been the end of Hitler's demands on Poland, it would certainly have delayed war in the East, and altered its shape and direction.
• In that case, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - a direct consequence of the decision by Britain and France to refuse Hitler a free hand in the East, without possessing the forces to carry out this policy - might never have taken place. Germany's drive into the USSR might have come earlier (and perhaps through Poland).
• But what Stan doesn't explain is why, without the guarantee to Poland and the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France (not the other way round, remember), Germany would have felt any urgent need to invade a largely passive France, hunkered down behind its Maginot fortifications, let alone to attack Britain. The German seizure of Norway and Denmark was also a consequence of the Polish guarantee. There is no reason to believe it would have happened had there been no Polish guarantee. Also, 'building up our depleted armed forces', as he dismissively describes it, was no small thing.
• Then we have D.G.Harthill, who posted: ‘Keith Rogers informs that Hitler “admired Britain” ’. He had an odd way of showing it. E.g. in his Directive No.13 of May 24, 1940: ‘The next object of our operations is to annihilate the French, English and Belgian forces that are encircled in Artois and Flanders.’ On learning the ineffectiveness of artillery shells in Dunkirk’s sand dunes, ‘he suggested that anti-aircraft shells with time fuses be used instead’ in order ‘to cause a mass bloodbath among the English who were waiting for rescue’. His army aide recorded that he particularly wanted ‘SS units to participate in the final annihilation’ of the encircled British. Göring recorded Hitler’s objections to the Heer’s humane treatment of British POWs: ‘They round up the British as prisoners with as little harm to them as possible. The Führer wants them to be taught a lesson they won’t easily forget.’ (‘The Blitzkrieg Legend’, Karl-Heinz Frieser, p. 312)
• Karl-Heinz Frieser, a colonel in the Bundeswehr and head of the Department of World Wars I & II at the Potsdam Military History Research Institute wrote: ‘Hitler’s decision to launch the Polish campaign is one of the most catastrophically wrong decisions in German history.’ (Frieser, p.17) It was ‘catastrophically wrong’ because the Anglo–French guarantees to Poland turned a two day campaign into the start of the Second World War leading to Germany’s destruction. Hitler had gambled that after the repeated surrenders by the Western powers since 1935 they would surrender yet again—he was surprised as any when they did not. Hitler’s chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt, described the ‘ghostlike scene in the Reich Chancellery’ following the translation of Britain’s declaration of war: ‘[T]here was total silence … Hitler sat there as if petrified and stared straight ahead. … After a while, which seemed like an eternity to me, he turned to Ribbentrop who kept standing at the window as if frozen. “What now?” Hitler asked … Göring turned to me and said: “If we lose this war, may Heaven have mercy on us!” ’ (Frieser, p.12)’
• Again, Mr Harthill refuses to go back to the real point of decision - the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland in early 1939. He presupposes the inevitability of the Polish guarantee, and thus the inevitability of war in September 1939 and the inevitability of combat between British and German forces in May 1940. All this is quite correct if you assume the Polish guarantee was inevitable. My point is that it wasn't, and that it was unwise.
• Of course, once we were engaged in war, Hitler would not have hesitated to use maximum violence against us. His 'admiration' for the empire was conditional on the Empire staying out of continental affairs.
• As for the thoughts of Karl-Heinz Frieser, it is perfectly true that Hitler was amazed that Britain actually declared war in September 1939 (Ribbentrop had told him it wouldn't happen). But he (and the world) were soon afterwards still more amazed by the swift collapse of French and British arms in France (read William Shirer's account of it all, in his Berlin Diary - it is now impossible to imagine a world in which France was viewed - as it was in September 1939 - as a near-invincible military power. But it was so.
• As for Goering's remark, the Germans did not, of course lose *that* war. They won it almost totally. Britain was defeated, but not actually occupied or subjugated, and had no realistic hope of bringing troops into direct combat with the Germans on the European continent - the only way in which we could actually have won. (Does anyone have any thoughts about what would have happened to Britain if Hitler had decided to launch against her one half of the forces he sent into the USSR in 1941?)
• So the invasion of Poland and the war which followed, and which really ended at Compiegne with the French surrender on 21st June 1940, did not 'lead to their destruction'. The war that they lost was the subsequent war, against the USSR (which they also started) and eventually the USA (against whom they also declared war). Had they been content with their May 1940 victories, they would probably have endured unchallenged until now. And there's another line of speculation for anyone who's interested.
• It's also true that with a very few small things turning out differently, they could have been holding a victory parade in Red Square by October 1941, soon afterwards in possession of the Caucasus oilfields and most of the Soviet industrial and extractive economy, plus millions of new slaves, and so more or less invincible on European soil.
• But once again, I doubt if either of these things would have been possible if France and Britain had remained in powerful armed neutrality, building up their forces, repairing their alliance with Belgium, manoeuvring Roosevelt into engagement and gaining knowledge of Hitler's methods, on Germany's Western flank. And if this position is so immoral, then surely so was that of the USA, which stayed out of the European war until Hitler declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, one of the few instances when he actually fulfilled a diplomatic obligation that didn't suit him.
• 31st March 1939 is the day to think about. From then on, all that happened was more or less inevitable. But without that guarantee, things could have been very, very different. The question is, would it have been better or worse? And in my view that is the subject under discussion.

Des pensées hérétiques

Dans les colonnes du Daily Mail, l'écrivain et journaliste Peter Hitchens rend compte de la parution de deux ouvrages aux Etats-Unis qui remettent en cause les idées reçues sur la seconde Guerre mondiale.

Il est fort douteux qu'aucun des deux ne soit traduit et publié un jour en français et encore moins en allemand.

Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq, asks Peter Hitchens
It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life.
Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British, had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable.

Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it, as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in both cases.

What do you think? Tell in the comments section at the bottom of the page

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Heroism: Tommies commandeer a German machine gun during battle for Caen in 1944

With my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my bedroom floor.

I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible bravery by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours.

I read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now.

After this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency, quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the essence of Britishness. To this day I can't watch them without a catch in the throat.

This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything else must be set.

So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I didn't really want to know if it wasn't exactly like that. But it has rather forced itself on me.

When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did.

I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB.

They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars.

And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were.

They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein.

Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America."

And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country.

When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.

Now here comes another. On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry.

I read them, unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster, in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness.


Same story? British soldiers at Basra Palace during the Iraq War - a conflict justified on the precedent of the Second World War

They are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War.

We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.

Well, I didn't feel much like Neville Chamberlain (a man I still despise) when I argued against the Iraq War. And I still don't.

Some of those who opposed the Iraq War ask a very disturbing question.

The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong.

In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war?

What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?

Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here.

The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?"

The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"

Don't read on if these questions rock your universe.

The two books, out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke.

I know Pat Buchanan and respect him, but I have never liked his sympathy for "America First", the movement that tried to keep the USA out of the Second World War.

As for Nicholson Baker, he has become famous only because his phone-sex novel, Vox, was given as a present to Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky.

Human Smoke is not a novel but a series of brief factual items deliberately arranged to undermine the accepted story of the war, and it has received generous treatment from the American mainstream, especially the New York Times.

Baker is a pacifist, a silly position open only to citizens of free countries with large navies.

He has selected with care to suit his position, but many of the facts here, especially about Winston Churchill and Britain's early enthusiasm for bombing civilian targets, badly upset the standard view.


In his element: Churchill preferred war to peace. claims U.S. author Patrick Buchanan
Here is Churchill, in a 1920 newspaper article, allegedly railing against the "sinister confederacy" of international Jewry.

I say "allegedly" because I have not seen the original. I also say it because I am reluctant to believe it, as I am reluctant to believe another Baker snippet which suggests that Franklin Roosevelt was involved in a scheme to limit the number of Jews at Harvard University.

Such things today would end a political career in an instant.

Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief.

If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident.

Its outbreak halted the "Kindertransport" trains rescuing Jewish children from the Third Reich. We ignored credible reports from Auschwitz and refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it.

Baker is also keen to show that Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised mass murder.

The implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause of it, is specially disturbing.

A lot of people will have trouble, also, with the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his regime was well known: "A highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism."

Three years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane.

Buchanan is, in a way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own sake, and preferred it to peace.

As the First World War began in 1914, two observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as "radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a really happy man".

Churchill also (rightly) gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British armed forces between the wars.

It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing against.

Well, every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing spectacularly right, as Churchill did.

Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

Surveying Buchanan's chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions.

The First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict.


Blood brothers: By Christmas 1940, Stalin (right) had murdered many more people than Hitler, and had invaded nearly as many countries

We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA.

We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war.

This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable.

Worse still is Buchanan's analysis of how we went to war.

I had always thought the moment we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the time. Nobody? Yes.

That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13: "Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations."

He then even more wetly urged "Herr Hitler" to do the decent thing and withdraw.

Buchanan doesn't think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, and I suspect he is right.

But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it.

The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.

We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies.

As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.

Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other's bowels?

Was Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the British Empire?

The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never built a surface navy truly capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he left it too late to build enough submarines to starve us out.

He was very narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, but how would we have fared if, a year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead?

But he didn't. His "plan" to invade Britain, the famous Operation Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned.

Can it be true that he wasn't very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would drone for hours.

Of course he was an evil dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our Press and politicians, including Churchill himself.

By Christmas 1940, Stalin had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as many countries.

We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain.

And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London.

Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense.

No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved.

But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

• Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, is published on May 6 by Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, is published on May 13 by Crown Publishing.