October 14, 2008

Reviewed by Michael McMenamin.

Michael McMenamin ([email protected]) is a lawyer in Cleveland and a Contributing Editor to Reason magazine.

In his controversial new book, A Republic, Not An Empire, American news commentator and perennial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan joins ranks with England’s John Charmley to argue that it would have been better for Britain to make an honorable peace with Germany in 1940 and let the Nazis and Russians fight it out, thereby preserving the Empire and the West. Implicit in this view is that Stalin’s Russia was a greater threat than Hitler’s Germany. John Lukacs’ new book, helps remind us why that thesis is wrong. Lukacs does so in a quiet, understated way, not even mentioning Charmley until the last chapter and then only in passing.

John Lukacs is a staunch anti-Communist who emigrated from Hungary in 1946 at the age of 23, a few steps ahead of the Soviet takeover. He is under no illusions about Communism. He explained in an earlier book, The Duel: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler, why Communism was a lesser threat in 1940: “In spite of its international pretensions and propaganda, Communism did not go very far outside the Soviet Union….alone among the great revolutions of the world….consider only how the American and French revolutions had soon been emulated by a host of other peoples, in Latin America and in Western Europe, often without the support of American or French armies….Communism was unable to achieve power anywhere outside the Soviet Union until after the Second World War.”

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

Lukacs’ theme in The Duel was that during the summer of 1940, “Hitler came closer to winning the war than we had been accustomed to think.” In Five Days in London, he narrows his focus to 24-28 May 1940 when Churchill faced down his opponents in the British War Cabinet, primarily Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, and persuaded the full Cabinet that Britain should not seek peace terms from Germany via Mussolini (and Hitler’s terms would have been quite generous at that point). Churchill persuaded his Cabinet that, “whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.” (At that point, the British expected to rescue fewer than 50,000 British and French troops from Dunkirk; over 338,000 were rescued within the week.)

But the War Cabinet debate was bitterly fought from May 24th to 28th, as Lukacs ably illustrates. A Liberal for most of his career before 1924, Churchill was mistrusted by many Conservatives. Halifax’s not indefensible position was that Britain should at least ask, through a third party like Italy, what Nazi peace terms would be so that they could be properly evaluated. For this reason, Lukacs explains, “Hitler was never closer to his ultimate victory than during those five days in May, 1940.”

Re-read John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory on these same five days in May, you find (at page 406) a similar account, including Charmley’s grudging admission that, in persuading the full Cabinet to support him where the War Cabinet had not, Churchill succeeded “in conveying a vision and a sense of leadership and history which Halifax simply could not command.” Why this was so is never adequately explained by Charmley, who attributes it to Churchill’s rhetorical skills and then concludes that chapter with negative references to his “theatricality” [Cadogan] and his “disorderly mind” [Halifax] while repeating “Rab” Butler’s view of Churchill as “the greatest adventurer of modern political history,” Lord Hankey’s description of him as “a rogue elephant,” and John Colville’s memorable “half-breed American.”

Lukacs knows that Churchill’s success was owed to more than rhetoric: much more. Churchill understood history with a depth and breadth shared by few world leaders then or since. No contemporaries instinctively saw the evils of Bolshevism as soon as he did, and the same was true when it came to Hitler.

Lukacs is good on this because he empathizes with a view which motivated many of those in England and America, who saw in Hitler, however repugnant his policies, a bulwark against Communism. As he acknowledged in The Duel, “Most people who opposed the struggle against Hitler were not necessarily his sympathizers.” Instead, like U.S. Senator Robert Taft, they had convinced themselves that Communism and the Soviet Union were a greater danger than Hitler. And the prime reason that Taft advanced for this view was that Communism appealed to the many, Fascism to the few. Or, in the words of one of Taft’s modern day supporters, “Nazism had no eschatology.”

Lukacs says this is plainly wrong, modestly claiming in his Preface that he has “an advantage” over others who have over the past two decades written on Churchill, Halifax and the politics of war: his “knowledge about Hitler” and “familiarity with documents and other materials relating to him.” However cavalier his claim, it is supported by the Hitler of History. His insight on Hitler and the type of threat he posed to Western civilization, far beyond military aggression, is compelling.

That an anti-Communist like Churchill also had such an insight on Hitler goes far to explain why, to the dismay of revisionists like England’s Charmley or America’s Buchanan, Churchill didn’t do the prudent, logical thing in May 1940 and seek a stand-down with Hitler. It also explains why Churchill subsequently agreed to a temporary alliance with Russia.

As Lukacs writes: “At the end of May 1940 and for some time thereafter, not only the end of a European war but the end of Western civilization was near. Churchill knew that, inspired as he was by a kind of historical consciousness that entailed more than incantatory rhetoric….If Hitler wins and we fall, he said, ‘then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and care for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’ These italics are mine. Churchill understood something that not many people understand even now. The greatest threat to Western civilization was not Communism. It was National Socialism. The greatest and most dynamic power in the world was not Soviet Russia. It was the Third Reich of Germany. The greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century was not Lenin or Stalin. It was Hitler. Hitler succeeded in merging nationalism and socialism.”

A problem with World War II revisionists is that, as Lukacs observes, “had Hitler won the Second World War, we would be living in a different world.” But what kind of world? Revisionists need to answer that. Lukacs makes a good case that Hitler, as “the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century,” would have inspired, if not imposed, a new populist, nationalist (and racist) paradigm for the world based on National Socialist Germany, replacing the market democracy paradigm which has prevailed throughout much of the world today. As for Churchill’s “New Dark Age” protracted by “perverted science,” imagine a world with a Nazi atomic bomb and long-range ballistic missiles. They weren’t so far away during those five days in May, 1940.

Winston Churchill, that “half-breed American,” could imagine that world very well indeed. Read Lukacs and you return in retrospect to what must have been the five most stressful days in Churchill’s life, when literally no one knew how any of it would come out. The Battle of Britain that summer may have been England’s finest hour, but those five days in May were his.