The battles were won with Russian blood.

The war was won by American capitalism and democracy.

Everyone else lost, even if difficult to accept. Hitchen's nuance is good in acknowledging the
complex nature of this conflict.

We DIDN'T win the war! Like us all,

PETER HITCHENS grew up on
stories of Britain’s heroic victory
over Hitler... but now, without
questioning the bravery of our
troops, he’s written a book
challenging all we think about WW2

In a chilly, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I

work intently on my model of the destroyer HMS Cossack. Such models come in lurid
cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes
of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle.
With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just
missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations.

This is a war just over the horizon of time in which we wish we had taken part, and
which dominates our boyish minds above all things. Courage in pursuit of goodness, in
the face of a terrible enemy, was what we most believed in. Even the Crucifixion grew
pale and faint in the lurid light of air raids and great columns of burning oil at Dunkirk.

But the Second World War, like all events that have become myths, has become a
dangerous subject. As a nation, we are enthralled by the belief that it was an
unequivocally ‘Good War’, a belief that has grown with extraordinary speed. Yet I did
not have to look far to see a rather different picture. My parents were brought together
by the tempest of that war and were marked by it for the rest of their lives.
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
Celebration: British troops cheer the news on May 8, 1945, that war in Europe is over

My father, Commander Eric Hitchens, who served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, was
never wholly sure who had won. He neither felt he was living in a victorious country
nor felt it had rewarded him justly. I remember well how, sometimes, late in the
evening, he would look thoughtfully into the middle distance and say: ‘Ah, well, we
won the war… or did we?’

My mother, too, who had served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and endured
the Blitz, experienced the peacetime of victory as a disappointment, into which the
ghosts of a more inspiring past sometimes intruded quite a lot.

Enough time has surely passed for us to admit that the military and political conduct of
the war by our leaders was not always as good as it should have been, that the ‘Good
War’ was often incompetently fought, with outdated equipment, by a country in
 decline. Events of the war, often minimised or avoided in popular or school histories,
reveal a country seeking to be more important, rich and powerful than it was, and
failing in all cases.

The myth that it was all glorious, and that it saved the world, is a comforting old muffler
keeping out the clammy draughts of economic failure and political weakness.

Even today, the self-flattering fantasy that we won it, and the nonsensical but common
belief that we did so more or less alone, still leads to foolish economic and diplomatic
policies based on a huge overestimate of our real significance as a country. One day,
this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us simply
because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is
why it is so important to dispel it.

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
Their hero: Peter and his brother Christopher in 1955 and their father Eric, a Royal Navy
officer, in 1950

The myths go right back to the start of the war. The uncomfortable truth is that from
the very beginning, it was Britain which sought a conflict with Germany, not Germany
with Britain. Hitler’s real targets lay elsewhere, in Ukraine and Russia, and he was
much less interested in us than we like to think.
Nor did we go to war, as many like to believe, to save or even help the endangered
Jews of Europe. The veteran Labour MP Frank Field’s claim in his recent resignation
letter that ‘Britain fought the Second World War to banish these [anti-Semitic] views
from our politics’ is the most recent example of this common but mistaken belief.

Britain simply did not declare war in 1939 to save Europe’s Jews – indeed, our
government was indifferent to their plight and blocked one of their main escape routes,
to what was then British-ruled Palestine. We also did nothing to help Poland, for
whose sake we supposedly declared war.

Forget, too, the ‘special relationship’ with the US: America was a jealous and resentful
rival to whom we ceded our global status and naval supremacy. And Washington’s
grudging backing came at a huge price – we were made to hand over the life savings
of the Empire to stave off bankruptcy and surrender.

Even the threat of a German invasion was never a reality, more a convenient idea
which suited the propaganda purposes of Hitler and Churchill. What began as a
phoney war led in the end to a phoney victory, in which the real winners were
Washington and Moscow, not us – and an unsatisfactory, uncomfortable and unhappy
peace.

It led to a permanent decline in our status, and a much accelerated, violent and badly
managed collapse of our Empire.

I recently obtained, long after his death, the medal my father should have received for
his service on the Russian convoys while he was still alive. It came in a cheap plastic
case, like a tourist trinket, emphasising our decline in the long years since. Beyond
doubt there were many acts of noble courage by our people, civilians and servicemen
and women during that war. It is absolutely not my purpose to diminish these acts, or
to show disrespect to those who fought and endured.

At the end of March 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was reported to be
‘uneasy’ that our Ambassador in Warsaw could obtain no information as to the
progress of negotiations during this time between Germany and Poland. Simon
Newman, in his book March 1939: The British Guarantee To Poland, records
Chamberlain telling the Cabinet on March 30, 1939, of his fears Polish negotiators
were giving way to Germany. The British government, so often portrayed as anxious
for a way out of war, was worried it would be cheated out of a confrontation it wanted
to have.

The British people, who had mostly supported the Munich climbdown in September
1938, and turned out in their thousands to cheer it, were now persuaded war was at
least a tolerable policy. This was achieved by the dubious claim we must stand firm
over Poland or lose all honour.

How strange, in retrospect, that the USA managed to remain aloof from all this and
came out of the war stronger and richer rather than (as we did) weaker and poorer,
and seldom, if ever, has it had its honour impugned for waiting till it was ready to fight.
Might we, too, have done better to wait?
The Polish guarantee transformed Britain from a nervous spectator of central
European diplomatic manoeuvres into an active participant, reluctantly but resolutely
accepting the need for war.

MYTH 2: POLAND WAS A BASTION OF DEMOCRACY

From the outbreak of war to the surrender of Warsaw in 1939 and the disappearance
soon afterwards of the entire Polish nation, we did nothing to help the Poles. Cabinet
minutes ahead of the declaration of war reveal a refusal to discuss the fact that British
forces were quite incapable of coming to Poland’s aid if it were attacked. Why?
Because, although we wanted war, we never intended to fight.

Poland mattered hardly at all to the government. Britain had no major interests in
Poland, which was not a particularly democratic or free country. Since a violent military
putsch in May 1926, Poland had been an authoritarian state without true free
elections.

In 1939, it was not the martyred hero nation, champion of freedom, justice and
democracy, of propaganda myth. It was deeply anti-Semitic in practice. Far from being
‘Plucky Little Poland’, Warsaw’s military junta selfishly joined in with the
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after Munich.

The truth is our over-confident and poorly informed government believed blockade and
the economic and numerical superiority of France and Britain would teach Germany a
lesson about the limits of power and force Hitler to negotiate. Yet our supposedly
moral position involved knowingly giving a false promise to a country we did not much
like or trust.

MYTH 3: WE FOUGHT TO PROTECT THE JEWS

The industrial mass murder of European Jews did not begin until after the war had
started. It may even have been made easier by the night and fog of secrecy which war
makes possible.

For years before the war, the persecution of Jews in German territory was obvious to
the world and nobody doubted that the Nazi state was directly responsible. Yet we did
not go to war or even break off diplomatic relations.

Even the complete unmasking of the Nazis’ murderous intentions towards Europe’s
Jews during the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9-10, 1938, does not feature
anywhere in explanations of British, French or American changes of foreign policy
towards Germany.

Britain and other free countries took in very few fleeing Jews, even in the much
celebrated Kindertransport programme. It had, in fact, severely restricted Jewish
migration to Palestine following Arab and Muslim pressure, just when they most
needed such a refuge.

Nobody could have known this would end in the extermination camps. Yet, when
confronted with undoubted evidence of the Holocaust, later in the war, Britain and the
US took no direct action to prevent it. The official view remained throughout that the
best response to this horror would be to win the war, which was what the various
governments involved were already seeking to do anyway.

MYTH 4: CHAMBERLAIN WAS NOTHING BUT AN APPEASER

The Left still like to think that it was their outrage at Hitler which finally drove the
appeasers, including Chamberlain, into action.

But it was Chamberlain’s Tories who rearmed the country and manoeuvred Britain into
its first People’s War. Despite the Munich Agreement of 1938, when Chamberlain
returned to London to rapturous crowds following a negotiated peace with Hitler, he
had already begun an ambitious programme of rearmament, including the
development of radar capabilities.

By the summer of 1939, he was quietly certain of war because, heavily influenced by
the other supposed pacific appeaser, Lord Halifax, he had decided to bring it about. To
reassert Britain’s status as a Great Power, there must be war, or at least a declaration.
No doubt he hoped and expected that it would be either brief, or static, confined to the
high seas. Crucially, the rearming was not intended for a continental land war but for
imperial and national defence. But without it, we would have been sunk.

Expenditure on the Navy increased from £56,626,000 in 1934-5 to £149,339,000 in

1939-40. The naval building programme from 1936 to 1939 included six capital ships,
six aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 49 destroyers and 22 submarines.

Army spending rose from £39,604,000 in 1934-5 to £227,261,000 in 1939-40. RAF

spending went up from £17,617,000 to £248,561,000 in the same period. All these
figures are equivalent to many billions now. Labour opposed almost all this
rearmament at the time, only later claiming the moral high ground.

MYTH 5: WE STOOD ALONE AGAINST THE NAZI MENACE

The whole edifice of modern British patriotism and pride is based upon the belief that
Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace after the fall of France. But it is a
romantic myth. Not only did French and Belgian troops (often wholly selflessly) help
British troops to escape through Dunkirk, but Britain also had a large and loyal Empire
behind it throughout the war. And the part we played after 1940 is far less than we
would have liked. Just nine months after it had begun, Britain had lost the war it
declared. It had been driven from continental Europe, penniless and stripped of most
of its military hardware.

British troops would not be in contact with the main body of the principal enemy again
for four whole years – in a six-year war. Our role on land, between 1940 and 1944 in
colonial or sideshow wars on the fringes of the conflict and even after D-Day, was as
an increasingly junior partner to the USA and the USSR.

The prospect of peace with Germany on humiliating terms would linger like a nasty
smell until the Battle of Stalingrad and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made
eventual German defeat certain. In the end we were rescued by others, and remain
rescued – perhaps more rescued than many of us would like.

MYTH 6: THE LOOMING SHADOW OF INVASION

The threat of German invasion was never a reality, but served as propaganda which
suited both Hitler and Churchill at the time.

For Hitler it was a way of persuading a battered, unhappy British populace to press
their leaders to give in. For Churchill, more successfully, it was a way to raise morale,
production and military effectiveness by creating an atmosphere of tension and
danger.

Despite their might on land, the Germans in 1940 did not possess a single landing
craft, as we understand the term. Their small navy had been devastated by the
Norwegian campaign, losing ten destroyers in two battles at Narvik. There had never
been sufficient concentrations of German troops in France for such a huge operation.
Hitler’s famous directive of July 16, 1940, sounds menacing because of its use of the
deeply shocking phrase ‘to occupy [England] completely’. But it is subtly cautious,
plainly intended to persuade Britain to ‘come to terms’.

Hitler was cool towards an invasion, and serious plans for a cross-Channel attack
were sketchy. Major forces were never assembled or trained for such an enormous
and risky operation.

But appearances had to be maintained. In the post-Dunkirk months, Germany

attacked coastal convoys, military industries and eventually centres of population.

British pilots, and allies of many nations, fought with extreme bravery in the air in 1940.
But the belief it was an all-or-nothing struggle in which every sinew was strained is
undermined by the fact that in September 1940, 30 Hurricanes, with their pilots, were
ordered to Khartoum in the Sudan.

Tellingly, too, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, heard the premier refer to ‘the
great invasion scare’ in conversation with Generals Paget and Auchinleck in July
1940, and imply that it was serving a useful purpose.

Later actions we took, especially the bombing of German civilians from 1942 to 1945,
are often justified by the plea that our very existence was in peril, when by then it was
not. Hitler’s real aim, especially after 1941, was the conquest of Ukraine and Russia.

MYTH 7: WE CAN THANK THE ‘SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP’

Hitler had well-founded suspicions that the USA, far from being a friend to this country,
was hostile to and jealous of the British Empire. Indeed, the Anglo-American alliance
refused to solidify as long as Britain still appeared to Americans as a selfish, mean
and bullying Great Power quite capable of looking after itself. Attitudes began to
change only when Britain, admitting it was running out of money, came to America’s
doorstep as a penniless supplicant, offering America the chance to save the world.

The extraordinary (and all but unknown) transfer of Britain’s gold to the USA
throughout 1939 and 1940 was the lasting proof that a deliberate, harsh British
humiliation had to precede any real alliance. The stripping of Britain’s life savings was
an enormous event.

Secret convoys of warships were hurrying across the Atlantic loaded down with
Britain’s gold reserves and packed with stacks of negotiable paper securities, first to
Canada and then to Fort Knox in Kentucky, where much of it still remains. It was not
for safekeeping, but to pay for the war. Before Britain could become the USA’s
pensioner, we had to prove we had nothing left to sell.

The ‘Lend-Lease’ system, which provided limited American material aid to Britain, was
far from the act of selfless generosity Churchill proclaimed it to be. Even the
Americans’ Bill had a gloating, anti-British tinge, given the number H.R. 1776 in
reference to the year of the US Declaration of Independence.

The Destroyers for Bases Agreement, too, was quite grudging. It led to 50 decrepit
American First World War destroyers being handed over in return for the USA
obtaining bases in several British territories on the Western side of the Atlantic.

This shocking surrender of sovereignty indicates Britain was, piece by piece, handing
naval and imperial supremacy to its former colony. It symbolises the true relationship
between the USA and Britain in the post-Dunkirk months, as opposed to the
sentimental fable still believed.

MYTH 8: BRITISH BOMBING OF GERMANY WAS JUSTIFIED

MANY believe British bombing in the Second World War killed German civilians only
by accident, in what would now be called ‘collateral damage’. But documents and
recorded remarks reveal this was not so.

The policy of bombing German civilians, mostly working-class opponents of Hitler in

dense, poor housing, was adopted after a confidential report showed the RAF simply
could not bomb accurately by night. Bombing was not confined to such moments as
the Hamburg and Dresden firestorms, but sustained and directed at almost every
major German city.

None of the justifications for this policy stands up. It did surprisingly little damage to
German war production. It was incredibly wasteful of the brave young aircrews, who
had no choice in the matter, who died in appalling numbers night after night.

It did not save us from invasion. Systematic large-scale bombing did not really begin
until March 1943, by which time Hitler was in retreat in the East and in no position to
invade Britain.

While it did draw guns and planes from the Eastern Front, the same effect would have
been achieved by attacks on military and industrial sites, which were highly effective
when tried, and would have ended the war much more quickly.

It also removed vital aircraft from the Battle of the Atlantic, in which the Royal Navy
grappled with German U-boats and came dangerously close to defeat. This is not
hindsight. Powerful voices were raised against it at the time, some on moral grounds,
some pointing out that it was militarily unjustified. But they were over-ruled and
mocked.

MYTH 9: HEROIC BRITAIN WON THE WAR

Britain played a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British
troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag.
Chamberlain and Daladier, the French Prime Minister, started a war which Stalin and
Roosevelt would later take over and finish. It destroyed the Third Reich and created a
new order in Europe in which Britain and France would be second-rate powers.

It may be the only case in history of a second-hand war being taken over by other
belligerents and used for their own purposes. Certainly Britain and France did not
achieve their aim in declaring war. Both sought to stay in the club of Great Powers and
found themselves being asked to leave.

The devastating cultural revolution of the past 50 years would not have happened in a
country where the victorious governing classes were confident and assured. And our
absorption into the EU – which is the continuation of Germany by other means – is not
the fate of a dominant victor nation.

MYTH 10: WE WERE GLORIOUS IN VICTORY

The general impression is that the end of hostilities brought a new sunlit era of
optimism in a ravaged continent. Yet victory led swiftly to an appeasement of Stalin at
least as bad as our appeasement of Hitler in 1938, with nations handed over bound
and gagged to the Kremlin’s secret police regime. And the following months and years
brought death on a colossal scale, of which we nowadays know almost nothing.

Under the Potsdam Agreement, between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans were
driven from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. We shall
never know how many died – estimates vary from 500,000 to 1.5 million. Most were
women and children, defenceless civilians. In one incident, 265 Germans, including
120 women and 74 children, were killed by Czech troops. They were removed from a
train, shot in the back of the neck and buried in a mass grave they had been forced to
dig.

These disgusting slaughters were not the result of enraged citizens taking their
revenge on former oppressors, but state-sponsored and centrally controlled. There are
many more examples, but most of them, recorded in Professor R. M. Douglas’s
harrowing and distressing book Orderly And Humane (the phrase comes from the
Potsdam Agreement itself) are known, in this country at least, only to professional
historians.

A whole page of horror in European history, from which we have much to learn, has
been erased. And, as so often in these matters, those who raise these matters can
expect to be falsely accused of minimising the crimes of the Nazis, as some in
Germany have sought to do. But this is a stupid lie.

As Prof Douglas says: ‘Whatever occurred after the war cannot possibly be equated to
the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans during it, and suggestions to the contrary
are deeply offensive and historically illiterate.’ But the fact that a respectable academic
has to make this point illustrates how very difficult it still is, nearly 80 years later, to
look objectively at the Second World War.

Later still, as our diminished power and influence became clear in so many ways, the
ghost of our 1940 defeat – and the necessary but reluctant compromises we had to
make in order to survive it – still haunts our lives.
 The most popular film in British cinemas of summer 2017 was Dunkirk. But it made no
attempt to explain to a new generation why the entire British Army was standing up to
its armpits in salt water, being strafed by the German air force, having wrecked,
burned or dumped arms and equipment worth billions in today’s money.

Nobody wants to know. Perhaps it is time they did.

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
Eric Hitchens features in the front row, second left, as a naval officer in Malta in about 1950

But the sad truth is that this country deliberately sought a war in the vain hope of
preserving a Great Power status our rulers knew in their hearts it had already lost. The
resulting war turned us into a second-rate power.

MYTH 1: WE WERE FORCED INTO WAR BY THE GERMANS

Britain actively sought a war with Germany from the moment Hitler invaded Prague in
March 1939. Even before then, there were powerful voices in the Foreign Office urging
the need to assert ourselves as a Great Power.
Poland was a pretext for that war, not a reason – as was demonstrated by the fact that
we did nothing to help Poland when Hitler invaded. It was an excuse for an essentially
irrational, idealistic, nostalgic impulse, built largely on a need to assert Britain’s
standing as a Great Power.

This goes against everything we’ve been taught to believe. But the behaviour of the
Foreign Office between March 1939 – when Britain pledged to guarantee Polish
independence in the Anglo-Polish alliance – and the declaration of war in September
1939 strongly backs this up. Lord Halifax’s Foreign Office, contrary to the myth that it
was a nest of appeasement, had for some time been keen on a showdown with
Germany, despite our grave military weakness. During this period, British officialdom
descended into childish frenzies over baseless frights about non-existent German
invasions of several countries in Europe.

One such scare may have actually given Hitler the idea for threatening
Czechoslovakia, until then not one of his major objectives. He then began, for the first
time, to consider such a policy seriously.

As for Poland, Warsaw’s military government had, since 1934, had surprisingly good
relations with Hitler. And many in Britain feared there was a real possibility Poland
might make a deal with Germany, leaving Britain with no immediate reason to go to
war in Europe.