Today is the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, in which the UK, US, and Soviet Union agreed on plans to force German civilians to work as slaves for years after the war. Clearing minefields was a popular assignment (popular with the assigners, that is) and also agricultural labor (i.e., American president FDR was carrying on in the rich American Democrat tradition of agricultural slave labor). This post looks at the question of whether the benefits of this slave labor justified, for the UK, the costs of going to war and staying at war.
I’ve been listening to When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, in which participants describe the heroism of the British and their Allies during the 1944 Normandy invasion (also the cheerful and willing collaboration of most people in France). It’s a worthwhile book, but it doesn’t explain why the British sacrifice was worth it other than “Nazis are bad.”
Let’s back up to 1900. Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is an predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.
What if the UK had never fought World War I? (As the victors, we typically think of Germany as the aggressor but it was the UK, without ever having been attacked, that declared war on Germany in 1914.) Let’s assume that Germany would, therefore, have attained all of its war goals. Would that have been worse than what the UK has done to itself? Germany’s goals in WWI were to steal some territory from neighboring countries, especially ports, but certainly not to take anything from the UK other than perhaps a competitive edge in colonizing far-away places that the UK didn’t hold onto even after ostensibly “winning” WWI. By not entering the war, the UK would have avoided the death of 6 percent of its male population (nearly 1 million men, though let’s keep in mind Hillary Clinton’s trenchant observation that “Women have always been the primary victims of war.”) and preserved a huge amount of treasure that it could have applied to beefing up its home defense and Royal Navy. Perhaps even more important, would the German people have elected Adolf Hitler if Germany had won WWI? The Nazis represented a dramatic change from previous German governments and a big part of Hitler’s appeal was that he would turn around the downward trajectory of the loss of WWI and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Without the British stepping in to fight WWI, therefore, they wouldn’t have had to consider whether to fight WWII. The UK would have needed to coexist with a more powerful Germany, but not a Germany with a plan to dominate all of Europe. Maybe a more powerful Germany could have pushed the UK aside in some of its colonial ambitions, but the UK lost all of its colonies in the “fight WWI and WWII” case.
The “fight WWI, but leave the Nazis alone and don’t fight WWII” analysis is a little tougher. Hitler supposedly didn’t want to fight the English, whom he admired. He envisioned a German-dominated European union (not too different from today’s “European Union”, including the idea of Jew-/Israel-hatred in most parts of Europe) and, even after the British declared war (without having been attacked in any way), a negotiated peace with the UK (see the background section of Operation Sea Lion in Wokipedia). If the British had used their resources to turn Britain into an island fortress rather than into daily fights with the Germans maybe Germany would never have bothered to bomb or invade the UK (Ireland was neutral regarding the Nazis and Germany never bothered Ireland). The UK might have lost some of its worldwide influence to a more powerful Germany, but the UK has lost all of its worldwide influence in the “fight WWI and WWII” case. As bad as Nazi Germany was, it never did anything so bad that the French weren’t happy to collaborate with the Nazis. Given the huge cost in lives, money, and years of home-front sacrifice, it seems that the UK would be in a better place today if it had let the Germans have a free hand in Europe from 1939 onward.
We can’t even say that the British sacrifices in WWI and WWII defeated the Nazis because we are informed that Nazis today (“far right”) are more numerous than ever and live all over the US and UK. Who wants to explain how the UK’s involvement in WWI and WWII makes rational sense in the light of how things turned out for the UK (i.e., the spectacular decline of the nation).
Related:
- Proving that none of my ideas are original, the Journal of Diurnal Epistolary Communication (Daily Mail) published a scholarly work on this subject in 2009… “PETER HITCHENS: If we hadn’t fought World War 2, would we still have a British Empire?”: how come we look back on the Second World War from conditions we might normally associate with defeat and occupation? … We are a second-rate power, rapidly slipping into third-rate status. … We had then, as we have now, no substantial interests in Poland, the Czech lands, the Balkans or – come to that – France, Belgium or the Netherlands. … [regarding WWI] We had gained little and lost much to defend France, our historic enemy, against Germany. In a strange paradox, we had gone to war mainly to save our naval supremacy from a German threat – and ended it by conceding that supremacy to the United States, our ally. … What about the Holocaust? There seems to be a common belief that we went to war to save the Jews of Europe. This is not true. We went to war to save Poland, and then didn’t do so. … When, in 1942, the Germans began their ‘Final Solution’, reliable reports of the outrage were disbelieved or sat on. Later, when the information was beyond doubt, we turned down the opportunity to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. It is certainly hard to argue that the fate of Europe’s Jews would or could have been any worse than it was if we had stayed out of the war. [Maybe Jews would have been better off if the Nazis hadn’t been opposed in their efforts to dominate Europe. The Germans might have become so strong that they could have forced the UK to give up some of its colonial territory and then Germany would have forced Jews to move there, which was the original Nazi idea (get Jews out of Europe, not kill all Jews).]
Even Primer Minister Churchill and General Eisenhower are branded as Nazis today. Nazis could not loose.
Actually Hitler might not have come to power if France and Belgium had not invaded and partially occupied Germany in 1923. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr
This is barely covered in history books today, but led to a refugee crisis and hyperinflation in Germany that discredited the Weimar government and let Hitler gain power. Before the occupation Hitler was almost unknown and Germany was disarmed. After the occupation Germans agreed with Hitler that Germany needed to rearm under a strong leader.
If my ancestors in former USSR fought a little slower then it would be Germany, not Japan, that were nuked first. Never heard thank you from my German colleagues. Germany surely knows when to fold, both in WWI and WWII.
WWII was the last good war, where the Allies defeated pure evil, created the United Nations, and abolished war. It is troubling to question that.
You do not even mention the possibility of Nazi Germany and USSR destroying each other. UK entered the war to save Poland, but ended up turning it over to the Commies.
UK entered the war to save itself and its empire. It would be only a matter of time when Germany – united Western Europe attacks Britain, with combined strength. Think Phillip is making the point that if Britain were defeated in WWII then it hardly were in worse shape then in is in now, after 80 years of “democratic” rule, after all the extra slaughter and hostilities that ensued. Regarding other Philip’s point, about murder of Jews: If Hitler did not need to fight UK, it would not have a need to ally with Arab national socialists and Islamists such as Iraqi Baath party and Mufti of Jerusalem, who suggested to Hitler to kill European Jews instead of expelling them to Land of Israel.
Even if saving the Jews has a bit of an ex-post-facto justification about it now, the enormity of Nazi crimes remains. (Although here we are some 80 years later and significant portions of Europe seem ready to sign off on another genocide at the hands of the Arabs)
FWIW the Germans were going to do a bunch of other crazy stuff if they won. (Damming Gibraltar, etc) It would have been terrible culturally, like the Cultural Revolution, but for Europe. (Not that western Civ is in a particularly good way now, thanks mostly to the Communists)
Many good points, but hypotheticals are rather dangerous.
Let’s not forget that the UK was an empire and countries do not become one out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. There is nothing inherently evil with an imperial model per se, but it usually takes wars to build and maintain one – if nothing else to ward off others that try to “promote democracy” and bite some of your subjects. So, chances are that sooner or later the UK would have stepped into another messy war, potentially even more devastating.
What if instead UK had been conquered by india and pakistan, and London’s population was less than 30% ethnically British? Oh wait …
The actual census data is 36.8%, but point still stands.
Honestly, I was shocked to learn this.
I do not want to comment on the “stay out of it” question but do think it is worth saying that, other things being equal, it was the fiscal behaviour of the USA, especially before Pearl Harbour, that was responsible for deliberately draining the British Empire of its resources. It was done as a way to weaken the UK’s ability to compete with the USA and done at a time when there was no alternative to paying up other than giving in.
Anon, US got few minor British assets in Western Hemisphere, hardly decisive in dismantling British empire. Without it US Congress would not approve land lease and transfer of military assets to Great Britain. For Pete’s sake, queen of the seas UK needed dozens of old US WWI destroyers… Britain was by far the largest recipient of US military help and land lease program.
American ethos was born in wars of independence from Britain, and many people did not know what Nazi Germany were, and some who knew, Harvard for example, loved it.
Britain would have allied with Germany once it became clear what Stalin had planned for Europe. Britain’s main enemy in the Great Game was always Russia.
See Operation PIKE, Operation RASPBERRY.
All the ‘wise men’ of the British foreign policy establishment were aghast at Churchill’s anti-Germany fetish.
CCRead, regarding “Britain would have allied with Germany “: Britain did, as soon as bigger threat of Hitler taking of the Europe and united Europe against Britain passed. USSR considered Churchill’s speech about “iron curtain” to be declaration of cold war. But no way Britain would support united militaristic Europe. Britain always supported Westphalian system in Europe, a balancing act of individual liberal states, and rationally they were right. United by Hitler western Europe would be much more powerful then Russia, which needed American and British help to fight Hitler, and thus was a bigger threat. When Germany attacked USSR Churchill gave speech in support of USSR and Stalin.
Churchill was just a war time leader that Britain appointed and removed as soon as victory was achieved. Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler which prompted Hitler’s aggression, then declared war on Nazi Germany, and promptly lost it in France, Benelux, Greece.