Victor Davis Hanson is a neo-conservative historian. Recently, he took aim at Buchanan’s book ‘Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.’ This is my interaction with his critique.

Normandy, France — Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

This is a willful misreading of Buchanan’s book by neo-conservative Victor Davis Hanson. Buchanan nowhere says that the British were ‘awful’ or the Americans were ‘naive’ or that we should take pity on the Germans. What he offers is a reading of history that is complex and refuses to see anybody wearing white hats. He offers a reading of history that takes into account that total depravity doesn’t only apply to the ‘bad guys.’ If anybody is the villain in Buchanan’s account it is Lenin and Stalin. It seems that Hanson likes questioning the past as long as the conclusions about the past only reinforce the prevailing myth.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Once again Hanson involves himself in critical review jerry-rigging. Buchanan never comes close to suggesting that anybody should take pity on Hitler, though he does reveal how Churchill thought Hitler was a man to be admired in 1937. In September of 1937 Churchill wrote of Hitler,

One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich!

Once again, Buchanan never comes close to saying this. What Buchanan says is that all the evidence indicated that Germany’s aspirations were Eastward in direction from which she desired to find Lebensraum (living room). Buchanan notes that Germany’s natural enemy both geographically and ideologically was communist Stalinist Russia. Buchanan suggests that it would have been a good thing for England to husband her power until the Nazi’s and Communists had essentially killed one another.

Second on Hanson’s point above he seems to rightly suggests that it would have been a terrible thing for the West to live in cold war peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi third Reich that killed Jews without bothering to mention what a terrible thing it was for the West to live in cold war peace with a murderous butchering Russian Communist system that killed Christians. This Russian Communist system was sustained by the West with its governments that were festooned with communist spies. My point here is that the argument can be made that the situation that finally occurred was not any better or worse then the situation that would have occurred if the communists had been crushed and the West had had to make cold war peace with the Nazis.

On the left, the novelist Nicholson Baker in a book of nonfiction, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.

Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation and communications concentrated inside them. From Baker’s comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary — or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.

I have no use for Leftists, whether they are of the neo-con version such as Hanson or whether they are the people like Nicholson Baker. Still, it is not only leftists who have suggested that the fire bombing of Dresden or the carpet bombing of Tokyo was a war crime. Buchanan points out in his book that these actions by the Allies ended up being counter-productive to their war effort because Nazi propaganda minister Goebbel’s used these atrocities to inform the German people that they had to fight to the bitter end because the Allied goal, as seen in the fire bombing of innocent civilians was to utterly annihilate Germany.

Listen to a description of what happened at the civilian center of Dresden and keep in mind that the attack here had no military objective save the pretext of impeding German military use of roads that would be used to check a Communist offensive. The German military, it was said, would be impeded due to the presence of refugees clogging up said roads. The true aim of Dresden was to strike terror in the hearts of the German civilian population. This action was completely contrary to the whole notion of ‘Christian War.’ Here is one description:
In two waves three hours apart, 650,000 incendiary bombs rained down on Dresden’s narrow streets and baroque buildings, together with another 1,474 tons tons of high explosives…The fires burned for seven days.

More than 1600 acres of the city were devastated (compared to the 100 acres burned in the German raid on Coventry) and melting streets burned the shoes of those attempting to flee. Cars untouched by fire burst into flames just from the heat. Thousands sought refuge in cellars where they died, robbed of oxygen by the flames, before the buildings collapsed above them collapsed.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who as one of twenty-six thousand Allied prisoners of war in Dresden helped clean up after the attack, remembers tunneling into the ruins to find the dead sitting upright in what he would describe in “Slaughterhouse Five” as “corpse mines.” Floating in the static water tanks were the boiled bodies of hundreds more.

And in an ‘I can top you’ boasting mode, U.S. General Curtis LeMay later said,

“We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagaski combined.”

The only reason those who pursued these policies weren’t prosecuted for war crimes is because they won. By any objective Christian standard these actions were criminal.

In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.

I am a bit surprised to learn that Hanson admits they weren’t perfect. Still, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Western Democracies were smarter than their adversaries. The utter lack of intelligence is seen in the way they constantly kissed the murderous Jo Stalin’s ass. The Western Democracies are complicit in the deaths of millions and millions of people for the alliance they made with Stalin. I agree that the Western Democracies were better than Hitler or Stalin since they weren’t killing Jews or Christians by way of policy. That is they were better until 1973 when they started their own holocaust.

Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.

Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 — or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.

Many scholars suggest that Versailles was more than just ‘flawed.’ Second, it remains true, even in international politics, that a previous wrong doesn’t make a subsequent wrong right contrary to what Hanson is trying to argue. All because Germany pursued wicked peace settlements doesn’t justify a wicked peace settlement being forced on Germany.

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never “stabbed in the back” at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II — and 60 years without war have followed.

Is Hanson channeling William Tecumseh Sherman? Notice what Hanson advocates here is the same thing that Bush is trying to do now in Iraq. There is something that will not die in the neo-con mindset that believes it can social engineer the world to fit in its image. Also notice that this ‘advice’ is completely contrary to the Washingtonian counsel of no entangling foreign alliances. Finally, 60 years without war? Who is Hanson trying to fool? Oh, I forgot… Korea, and Vietnam were not wars.

Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.

You mean the tools like Roosevelt applied that Stinnett pointed out in his book Day Of Deceit? You mean the tools like the agreements at Tehran, Potsdam, and Yalta? You mean tools like getting in bed with communists? You mean the tool that tore Japan away from its alliance with England in exchange for American promises? The way to have stopped the juggernauts was by remaining strong during the years between the wars. Instead the Allies foolishly believed that a league of nations would outlaw war. The way to have stopped the juggernaut was to not have believed that Utopian arrangements like the Kellogg-Briand act or the Locarno agreement could end war. It is true that Fascist aggression was stopped but only at the price of embracing Communist aggression. What of the gulag-archipelago juggernaut that we did not stop precisely because we did stop the fascist juggernaut? What of the re-education camps of Mao that we did not stop precisely because we did stop the militaristic juggernaut of Japan? What of the mass execution by communists in the Katyn Forrest that we did not even investigate because we were determined to stop the fascist juggernaut? The Nazis deserved to be impugned, castigated, and morally denounced till the cows come home, but self-righteousness about stopping them can never be achieved without asking what we allowed in their place. The Nazis killed their millions but the Communists their tens of millions, and the West continues to try and justify the death of those tens of millions by telling themselves that “We stopped the Fascists.”

Hanson places the date in the blockquote above as 1942. By then the mistakes of our grandfathers and great grand-fathers were already so far gone that few options were left save completing what had been started without foresight.

I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.

No one questions the bravery of that generation. The enlisted man probably had never heard of Versailles and most of the officer corps was just trying to stay alive. Those men were extraordinarily brave. If they made any mistake it was the mistake of trusting their leadership, but then good hearted trusting people tend to make that mistake. The fault doesn’t lie with those who died in the agony of battle. The fault lies with those who held the levers of power. The fault lies first with the Stalins and Hitlers but continues to include the Churchill’s, the Roosevelt’s and others.

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once scoffed at the peacetime wisdom of postwar critics that came across as mass-produced, feel-good “bottled piety.” Others might call it ingratitude.

Leave it to Hanson to finish his piece by invoking a murderer who himself should have been brought up on war crimes charges.

Still, I am grateful for my grandfather’s war efforts. I am just not grateful a policy was pursued that left Christian Europe decimated and delivered Europe from Nazism at the cost of delivering it to Communism.