My thoughts on Peter Hitchens' "The Phoney Victory - The World War Two Illusion".

Peter Hitchens’ The Phoney Victory – The World War Two Illusion (I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2018) is an extremely thought provoking read which argues that Great Britain did not have much of a victory in WW2.  By the end of hostilities this country was broke, the Empire unsustainable, and the Poles - for whom we went to war - were left under Soviet communist rule and were not even allowed to participate in any victory parades.

He also exposes the harsh reality of Churchill’s romantic idea of the “special relationship” with the USA.  Churchill’s flawed decision making and his manipulation of events come under scrutiny as well.

The book chapter by chapter.

Ch.1. The British Guarantee to Poland of March 1939.

Mr Hitchens argues that there were some in the British political establishment who wanted war with Germany at all costs.  He suggests that one of the reasons was to prove Britain’s standing as a “great power”, another was that “something must be done” to stop German expansion.

The British guarantee to Poland was a pretext for war with Germany, and Germany alone.  It excluded coming to Poland’s aid if attacked by Russia.

Ch.2 Plucky little Poland.

Hitchens points out that Poland was not a paragon of democratic virtue.  It was governed by a military dictatorship and was passively anti-Semitic.  Furthermore, after Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany, parts of that stricken country were seized by Poland, with Hitler’s approval.

 Ch.3 Appeasement and Pacifism . . . or “The Left has its Cake and Eats it.”

In the late 1930s Tory Prime Ministers Baldwin and Chamberlain had begun building up the RAF and RN for defence, but the British economy could not support the spending required for a large “continental army”.  Labour and the Left opposed such defensive rearmament, but hypocritically campaigned against appeasement.

Ch. 4 The war we could not afford.

With British rearmament under way the government sought to buy armaments from the USA, but the USA refused to give any loans or credit as Britain, and indeed France, had reneged on debts owed to the USA following WW1.   Consequently, American politicians would only allow the sale of supplies and war materials on a cash and carry basis.  By January 1941, after only 16 months of war, Britain had run out of cash!

Ch.5 America First.

Of the British belief that they have with the USA some sort of “benevolent and sweet-natured ‘special relationship’”, Hitchens has this to say: “Not only is there no such thing, there is a case for saying that the USA has often singled this country out for exceptionally harsh treatment”.

Twice in the book he tells us that in 1919 Woodrow Wilson warned the British to stop imagining Americans were their cousins, or even Anglo-Saxons.

As in the twentieth century the USA became evermore economically powerful it grew increasingly resentful of British naval supremacy, and had absolutely no intention of going to war to protect or save the British Empire.  In fact, I would point out that Theodore Roosevelt once advocated seizing Canada, a British Dominion, by force.

Hitchens also notes that: “If Hitler had not voluntarily declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbour, it is far from certain that America would ever have become directly involved in the European War”.  I have heard similar comments from American historians and commentators in Ken Burns’ documentary The Roosevelts – An Intimate History, and Jeremy Isaacs’ The World at War.

Ch.6 The Invasion That Never Was.

Hitchens suggests that both Hitler and Churchill did not take an invasion of Britain seriously.  As Hitchens states: “The idea of an invasion, never a reality, suited both men at the time.  For Hitler it was a way of persuading a battered, unhappy British population to press their leaders to give in.  For Churchill, more successfully, it was a way to raise morale, production and military effectiveness by creating a constant atmosphere of tension and danger”.

Mr Hitchens informs us that as early as 12 July 1940 Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, overheard Churchill in conversation with leading British generals stating that he doubted whether invasion was a serious menace, but intended to give the opposite impression.

After naval losses in the Norwegian Campaign, the Germans did not have, if they ever did, enough cruisers and destroyers to protect an invasion on a narrow front, let alone a broad front.  On 7 August 1940, before the Battle of Britain began in earnest, General Franz Halder expostulated, according to Hitchens: “I regard their (his naval counterparts) proposal as complete suicide. I might just as well put those troops that have been landed straight through a sausage machine.”

Hitchens also points to the decision taken, while the Battle of Britain was at its height, to despatch tanks and Hurricanes to the Middle East!

Ch.7  In Peril on the Sea.

This chapter is centred on the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.  Mr Hitchens seems unimpressed by its outcome.  Be that as it may, he ‘sails’ off all over the world to opine on Atlantic Convoys, British Mediterranean strategy, convoying supplies of British military hardware to Russia, the defence of Singapore and Malaya, and British obligations to Australia and New Zealand.

Hitchens appears to support A. J. P. Taylor (The Second World War and its Aftermath) who submits both that Britain should have abandoned the Mediterranean when Italy entered the war, and the attempt to build a strategic bomber force.  Mr Hitchens suggests that the resources saved should have been used to protect Atlantic Convoys and confront Japanese expansion in the Far East.  Such policies would have resulted in Britain not being engaged with German land forces anywhere or being able to attack Germany itself from the air.  In such circumstances I question whether there was any point in being at war with Germany at all.

Hitchens quotes A. J. P. Taylor’s opinion that in 1941 Crete was lost for the lack of three fighter squadrons.  He also points out that the defence of Singapore and Malaya would have been transformed if the 676 fighters and 446 tanks sent by Churchill to Russia in 1941 had gone there instead.  They are correct.

However, I would point out that there were even more fighter aircraft available in 1941 than Hitchens and Taylor were aware of.  From the start of 1941 hundreds of Spitfires and Hurricanes from Fighter Command were being sent almost daily on fruitless operations over northern France in an ineffective attempt to divert Luftwaffe fighter groups from The East.  In the course of that year over 462 British fighter pilots were lost – more than in the Battle of Britain.*  I suggest those pilots and aircraft would have been of very much more use in Crete, the wider Mediterranean area, and the Far East.

*Denis Richards, Royal Air Force 1939-1945 Vol 1, The Fight at Odds (HMSO 1953).

Ch.8 Gomorrah.

The title of this chapter was the code name for RAF Bomber Command’s attack on Hamburg in the summer of 1943.  Hitchens believes the policy of carrying out such attacks on cities was immoral and ineffective.   However, he attaches no blame to the bomber crews themselves and his verdict on their chief, Sir Arthur Harris, is very fair, as this extensive quote from the book reveals:

“Not long after Dunkirk, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone.  Winston Churchill speculated in a letter of 8 July 1940 to his friend and Minister of Aircraft Production, the press magnate Lord (Max) Beaverbrook, that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help bring Hitler down.  Arthur Harris, later the chief of RAF Bomber Command, realised the significance of these extraordinary words.  Perhaps not wholly trusting politicians to defend the actions they had ordered if they later became unpopular or not respectable (as they did), he kept a copy of the letter.

Harris commendably refused a peerage in 1946 because postwar sensitivity had denied his bomber crews a campaign medal.  Harris, though an unattractive man, emerges from this with some integrity.  When a man of his sort was needed to pursue a bloody form of warfare without hesitation, he was welcomed in the councils of the great and treated with courtesy.  When, later, a startled and chastened world understood what he had actually done, he was urged to leave by the tradesmen’s entrance.  He made it very clear that he knew what was happening, and despised those who had once fawned on him and now dismissed him.  They had given him his mandate.  As far as he was concerned, they bore the ultimate responsibility.”

I would argue that Bomber Command’s campaign was far from ineffective.   Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, when interviewed on Jeremy Isaacs’ The World at War said that another six raids on German cities such as that carried out on Hamburg would have ended the war.  He also considered that from 1943 the bombing of Germany was, in effect, a “second front”.

Furthermore, Adam Tooze in his The Wages of Destruction – The Making and Breaking of The Nazi Economy (Penguin Books, 2007) writes of speeches made by Speer in the autumn of 1943:

“Speer reminded his audience of his triumphant address to the Sportspalast only a few months earlier, at which he had promised increases in armaments production of 15 – 20 per cent per month.  The RAF’s sustained attack on the Ruhr had put paid to that.  ‘Since the beginning of the air attacks,’ Speer explained, ‘we have it is sure, had a slow rise in production but only 3 to 5 per cent monthly.  That is absolutely insufficient’.  In fact, Speer was over-optimistic.  The monthly index of armaments showed no consistent increase whatsoever in the second half of 1943.”

Ch.9 Orderly and Humane.

This chapter deals with the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Germans from large parts of central Europe after the ‘Good War’.

My concluding thoughts.

Peter Hitchens suggests in The Phoney Victory that Britain entered World War Two at the wrong time for the wrong reason with insufficient finances and inadequate military resources, and then fought the war with a highly dubious strategy only to end bankrupt with the Empire disintegrating, and a ‘pensioner’ of the USA.  After such a devastating analysis, I find it surprising, to put it mildly, that he thinks Winston Churchill was correct in continuing the war in 1940!