Was World War II worth it?

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Posted: May 11, 2005
1:00 am Eastern


By Patrick J. Buchanan
© 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.



In the Bush vs. Putin debate on World War II, Putin had far the more difficult assignment. Defending Russia's record in the "Great Patriotic War," the Russian president declared, "Our people not only defended their homeland, they liberated 11 European countries."

Those countries are, presumably: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Finland.


To ascertain whether Moscow truly liberated those lands, we might survey the sons and daughters of the generation that survived liberation by a Red Army that pillaged, raped and murdered its way westward across Europe. As at Katyn Forest, that army eradicated the real heroes who fought to retain the national and Christian character of their countries.

To Bush, these nations were not liberated. "As we mark a victory of six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox," he said:


For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end the oppression. The agreement in Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. ... The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs in history.


Bush told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe. And it was not freedom. It was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century. Where Hitler killed his millions, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Castro murdered their tens of millions.

Leninism was the Black Death of the 20th Century.

The truths bravely declared by Bush at Riga, Latvia, raise questions that too long remained hidden, buried or ignored.

If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that was a monstrous lie.

As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called "Uncle Joe" and "Old Bear," why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings.

Other questions arise. If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war?

If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain refused. In 1939, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Poland. Chamberlain agreed. At the end of the war Churchill wanted and got, Czechoslovakia and Poland were in Stalin's empire.

How, then, can men proclaim Churchill "Man of the Century"?

True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?

The war Britain and France declared to defend Polish freedom ended up making Poland and all of Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. And at the festivities in Moscow, Americans and Russians were front and center, smiling – not British and French. Understandably.

Yes, Bush has opened up quite a can of worms.

Leave it to Pat Buchanan to bemoan the end of WWII and bring up Yalta once again.

Key question...how was FDR and Churchill to keep Stalin from imposing his own vision of political order in countries between Moscow and Berlin as the Red Army kicked out the Nazis? How, when these descisions were being made in 1943, were the Western Allies to argue that Stalin should turn over these countries, that had not yet been liberated, to the West? How was the West to keep Stalin from forging a separate peace with Germany, or to maintain its peace with Japan if it took this stance of keeping what was not yet theirs?

Defeating Hitler was the main goal. As bad as Stalin was (he was evil), Hitler was worse. The Red Army was taking the fight to the Nazis in 1943, at that time, only the RAF and USAAF were able to do so. Look at the body count if you want to see who bore the brunt of defeating Germany.

No US general, including Patton, thought it was worth rushing to Berlin to take the city at the cost of 1 million additional casualties, especially when the invasion of Japan loomed up ahead.

Buchanan would've been an appeaser.

quote:

Originally posted by O Man:
Leave it to Pat Buchanan to bemoan the end of WWII and bring up Yalta once again.

Key question...how was FDR and Churchill to keep Stalin from imposing his own vision of political order in countries between Moscow and Berlin as the Red Army kicked out the Nazis? How, when these descisions were being made in 1943, were the Western Allies to argue that Stalin should turn over these countries, that had not yet been liberated, to the West? How was the West to keep Stalin from forging a separate peace with Germany, or to maintain its peace with Japan if it took this stance of keeping what was not yet theirs?

Defeating Hitler was the main goal. As bad as Stalin was (he was evil), Hitler was worse. The Red Army was taking the fight to the Nazis in 1943, at that time, only the RAF and USAAF were able to do so. Look at the body count if you want to see who bore the brunt of defeating Germany.

No US general, including Patton, thought it was worth rushing to Berlin to take the city at the cost of 1 million additional casualties, especially when the invasion of Japan loomed up ahead.

Buchanan would've been an appeaser.

I pretty much agree. I heard Buchanan on T.V. yesterday and heard him saying Churchill made a mistake. I thought he must've fallen and hit his head. Sometimes war is the answer.

The West made a number of mistakes at the end of WWII - not least of which was the agreement to partition Europe.

We made other mistakes, though, which cost us dear... Partitioning Korea, supporting the French attempt to re-occupy Vietnam in 1954 (Ho Chi Minh was a US ally in WWII)

Euphoria at the end of the European and Pacific wars, fear of communism (and the support of even the most odius of govermnents if they would fight against communism) and a desire to re-establish pre-war colonial holdings led directly to the wars and rebellions of the '50s and '60s.

In a very real sense, we're still dealing with the direct aftermath of WWII - all over the world.

20/20 hindsight - we won the war, but really fouled up the aftermath.

Sounds kinda familiar...?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: CrazyPoet,

Two interesting bits of trivia: The US and Britain ordered German POW's to continue drilling. Churchill and, I believe, Patton, favored reconstituting what was left of the Wehrmacht and marching on a weakened USSR with US, British, and German troops. The plan was ultimately, of course, abandoned.

Also, the surrender of Japan is widely credited to the use of nuclear bombs. However, Japan also surrendered because only days before the USSR war declared war on Japan and entered occupied China. The Japanese, rather intelligently, would rather surrender to the US rather than the Allies, generally, and face partitioning.

How can Buchanan put the blame on Churchill for wanting Britain to fight for Poland?? Hitler invaded Poland, fercrissakes ... there's the blame! Was the British (and French) alliance with Poland a bad thing? Was attempting to keep German expansionism in Europe in check a bad thing? That's ludicrous on its face, but Buchanan has a history of avering the U.S. and Britain both should have let Hitler have whatever he wanted, because whatever it was had nothing to do with U.S. interests.

And the holocaust, which isn't even mentioned in his latest screed? Here are Buchanan's own words to Wolf Blitzer a few days ago. "Had there been no war, there would have been no holocaust, in my judgment". Uh-huh. Kristallnacht was 1938.

All that aside, in the end, Stalin broke his Yalta promises. And there was little if anything either the U.S. or Britain could have done to keep Russia from Eastern Europe.

The Treaty of Versailles created Hitler and caused WWII, at least in the European theatre.

quote:

The Treaty of Versailles created Hitler and caused WWII, at least in the European theatre.

Yes, it did, no question. Or more accurately, it created the socioeconomic context in which a Hitler could emerge and thrive.

quote:

Originally posted by Jack White:

quote:

The Treaty of Versailles created Hitler and caused WWII, at least in the European theatre.

Yes, it did, no question. Or more accurately, it created the socioeconomic context in which a Hitler could emerge and thrive.

Yes - it's often the settlement following one war that sets the stage for the next one.

quote:

Originally posted by Scottological:
Two interesting bits of trivia: The US and Britain ordered German POW's to continue drilling. Churchill and, I believe, Patton, favored reconstituting what was left of the Wehrmacht and marching on a weakened USSR with US, British, and German troops. The plan was ultimately, of course, abandoned.

This is an interesting point. You could make an argument that we should have pushed the Soviets back out of Eastern Europe. After all, we were first to develop a bomb. You could also make an argument that Churchill and Truman appeased Stalin. A result of this appeasement was the following:

"Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia – endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century."

quote:

Originally posted by KKL:

quote:

Originally posted by Scottological:
Two interesting bits of trivia: The US and Britain ordered German POW's to continue drilling. Churchill and, I believe, Patton, favored reconstituting what was left of the Wehrmacht and marching on a weakened USSR with US, British, and German troops. The plan was ultimately, of course, abandoned.

This is an interesting point. You could make an argument that we should have pushed the Soviets back out of Eastern Europe. After all, we were first to develop a bomb. You could also make an argument that Churchill and Truman appeased Stalin. A result of this appeasement was the following:

"Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia – endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century."

My only question is why Buchanan only seems to care about the "christian" countries.

Do people and nations of other faiths not matter to him?

quote:

You could also make an argument that Churchill and Truman appeased Stalin.

You can make the argument, maybe, but I think it's a stretch. Roosevelt and Churchill were both aware that a speedy conclusion depended on Russian success on the eastern front, and that's what U.S. aid to the Russian army helped accomplish at the end. After that, Russian moves into Eastern Europe merely reflected the realities of the political order and power that existed then, the result of the ground successes of the Red Army. I tend to agree with those historians who think it's unlikely a harder line towards Stalin would have prevented this.

Another "what if" that's interesting to speculate on: what if we'd dropped our first bomb three months earlier, and on Berlin (or Frankfort or Stuttgart or Munich) instead of Hiroshima? What kind of post-war Stalin would we have seen in that event?

quote:

Originally posted by CrazyPoet:
My only question is why Buchanan only seems to care about the "christian" countries.

Do other faiths not matter to him?

I think the point he was trying to make was that Stalin took these countries under the miserable umbrella that is Communism, where any religion suffers.

Buchanan's yammering about Yalta 60+ years later is akin to all the BS about the US dropping the atom bomb on Japan...it all looks great in hindsight, but when the decisions had to be made at the time, when the future was not known, leaders in US and UK had to make decisions that ensured the primary mission was completed, i.e., defeat Germany and Japan in the war at hand.

Buchanan sounds like the fools in the UK who criticize Churchill that by fighting Hitler, they won the war but lost the Empire. That was the rationale for Chamberlain's policy of Appeasement...by keeping Hitler happy, he would keep the Empire safe. Didn't work. Britain was destined to lose the Empire eventually because of industrialization and its own democraticization, just like E Europe was going to be run by the Russians because they were there and we were not.

If any body is interested in interesting and quite different take on WWII, I can recomend reading "The Ice Breaker" by Suvorov.

As a side note: if any of you are Alan Furst fans, he has a new novel coming out tomorrow. "Spies of Warsaw" it's called. Same pre-WWII milieu.

Another Buchanan take on the causes of WWII:


Munich, 1938
When President Bush, before the Knesset, used the word "appeasement" to label those who would negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he invoked the most powerful analogy in any debate over war and peace.

No man wishes to be regarded as an "appeaser."

But, as this writer has discovered since my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World" was launched Memorial Day, there is a deep well of ignorance about what happened that September, 70 years ago.

Why did Neville Chamberlain go to Munich? How did Munich lead to World War II?

The seeds of the crisis were planted at the Paris peace conference of 1919. There, the victorious Allies carved the new nation of Czechoslovakia out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But instead of following their principle of self-determination, the Allies placed under the rule of 7 million Czechs 3 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 150,000 Poles and 500,000 Ruthenians. These foolish decisions spat upon Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, under the terms of which the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians had laid down their arms.

By 1938, Germany had arisen, re-armed and brought Austria into the Reich, and was demanding the right of self-determination now be granted to the 3 million Germans in Czechoslovakia, who were clamoring to be free of Prague to rejoin their kinsmen.

Britain had no alliance with, and no obligation to fight for, the Czechs. But France did. And Britain feared that if Adolf Hitler used force to bring the Sudeten Germans back to German rule, France might fight. And if France declared war, Britain would be drawn in, and a second bloodbath would ensue as it had in 1914.

Chamberlain went to Munich because he did not believe that keeping 3 million Germans inside a nation to which they had been consigned against their will was worth a world war.

Moreover, Britain was unprepared for war. She had no draft, no Spitfires, no divisions ready to be sent to France. Why should the British Empire commit suicide by declaring war on Germany, to support a Paris peace agreement that he, Chamberlain, believed had been unjustly and dishonorably imposed on a defeated Germany?

Chamberlain believed not – and, after three trips to Germany that September, he effected the transfer of the Sudeten Germans to Berlin's rule, where they wished to be. He came home in triumph to be hailed as the greatest peacemaker of all time.

Why, then, are "Munich" and "appeasement" terms of obloquy?

The answer lies in what happened next.

Chamberlain returned from Munich to a rapturous reception, waving a paper he and Hitler had signed, and declared: "For the second time in 60 years, a British prime minister has returned from Germany with peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time."

This was palpable nonsense. Hitler had already turned to the next item on his menu, Danzig, a city of 350,000 Germans, detached from the Reich at Versailles and made a Free City to give the new Poland an outlet to the sea. Hitler did not want war with Poland. Indeed, he wanted the kind of alliance with Poland he had with Italy. But, first, Danzig must be resolved.

Here, too, the British government agreed: Danzig should be returned. For of all the amputations of German lands and peoples at Versailles, European statesmen, even Winston Churchill, regarded Danzig and the Polish Corridor that sliced Germany in two as the most outrageous. The problem was the Poles, who refused to discuss Danzig.

Then, in March, Czechoslovakia suddenly began to fall apart. The Sudetenland had been annexed by Germany. Hungary had taken back its lost lands, and Poland had annexed the disputed region of Teschen. Slovakia and Ruthenia now moved to declare independence, and Prague began to march on the provinces.

Hitler intervened to guarantee the independence of Slovakia and gave Hungary a green light to re-annex Ruthenia. Czech President Hacha then asked to see Hitler, who bullied him for three hours into signing away Czech sovereignty and making his nation the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Chamberlain, now humiliated, mocked by Tory back-benchers, panicking over wild false rumors of German attacks on Romania and Poland, made the greatest blunder in British history. Unasked, he issued a war guarantee to Poland, empowering a Polish dictatorship of colonels that had joined Hitler in dismembering Czechoslovakia to drag the British Empire into war with Germany over a city, Danzig, the British thought should be returned to Germany.

It was not Munich. It was the war guarantee that guaranteed the war that brought down the Empire, and gave us the Holocaust, 50 million dead and the Stalinization of half of Europe.

Buchanan has some valid points, but leaves out some critical points.

Hitler had set out on an agressive re-armament program, aimed at providing both offensive and defensive capabilities well in excell of rational defensive requirements (he then tested those new arms in the Spanish Civil War).

No single country in Europe had the military or industrial base to stand up to the newly-rearmed Germany, leaving alliances or appeasement as the only viable option to resist German expansion.

The Poles took essentially the same stance that we would have in their place (and which many other countries have done) - refusing to negotiate under threat of violence.

Hitler had the option to work things out via negotiation, but chose to invade instead.

Buchanan is correct in stating that the British and French had no specific obligation to assist Poland. Quite true. Both countries (at least a substantial portion of their leadership) felt, however, that it was in their interests to take a stand together, rather than risk being taken apart piecemeal.

Even at this point, a negotiated settlement was possible, but Hitler was over-confident, and decided to swallow all of Western Europe (no-one was strong enough to stop him, so why not?)

And the Holocaust? It was already underway - I'm afraid that Buchanan has this one dead wrong.