by Ralph Raico
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5 d “First Catch Your Hare”
Early in the war, Churchill, declared: “I have only one aim in life, the defeat of Hitler, and this makes things very simple for me.” “Victory victory at all costs,” understood literally, was his policy practically to the end. This points to Churchill’s fundamental and fatal mistake in World War II: his separation of operational from political strategy. To the first the planning and direction of military campaigns he devoted all of his time and energy; after all, he did so enjoy it. To the second, the fitting of military operations to the larger and much more significant political aims they were supposed to serve, he devoted no effort at all.
Stalin, on the other hand, understood perfectly that the entire purpose of war is to enforce certain political claims. This is the meaning of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means. On Eden’s visit to Moscow in December, 1941, with the Wehrmacht in the Moscow suburbs, Stalin was ready with his demands: British recognition of Soviet rule over the Baltic states and the territories he had just seized from Finland, Poland, and Romania. (They were eventually granted.) Throughout the war he never lost sight of these and other crucial political goals. But Churchill, despite frequent prodding from Eden, never gave a thought to his, whatever they might be. His approach, he explained, was that of Mrs. Glass’s recipe for Jugged Hare: “First catch your hare.” First beat Hitler, then start thinking of the future of Britain and Europe. Churchill put in so many words: “the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims.”
Tuvia Ben-Moshe has shrewdly pinpointed one of the sources of this grotesque indifference:
Thirty years earlier, Churchill had told Asquith that . . . his life’s ambition was “to command great victorious armies in battle.” During World War II he was determined to take nothing less than full advantage of the opportunity given him the almost unhampered military management of the great conflict. He was prone to ignore or postpone the treatment of matters likely to detract from that pleasure. . . . In so doing, he deferred, or even shelved altogether, treatment of the issues that he should have dealt with in his capacity as Prime Minister.
Churchill’s policy of all-out support of Stalin foreclosed other, potentially more favorable approaches. The military expert Hanson Baldwin, for instance, stated:
There is no doubt whatsoever that it would have been in the interest of Britain, the United States, and the world to have allowed and indeed, to have encouraged the world’s two great dictatorships to fight each other to a frazzle. Such a struggle, with its resultant weakening of both Communism and Nazism, could not but have aided in the establishment of a more stable peace.
Instead of adopting this approach, or, for example, promoting the overthrow of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans instead of even considering such alternatives Churchill from the start threw all of his support to Soviet Russia.
Franklin Roosevelt’s fatuousness towards Joseph Stalin is well-known. He looked on Stalin as a fellow “progressive” and an invaluable collaborator in creating the future New World Order. But the neo-conservatives and others who counterpose to Roosevelt’s inanity in this matter Churchill’s Old World cunning and sagacity are sadly in error. Roosevelt’s nauseating flattery of Stalin is easily matched by Churchill’s. Just like Roosevelt, Churchill heaped fulsome praise on the Communist murderer, and was anxious for Stalin’s personal friendship. Moreover, his adulation of Stalin and his version of Communism so different from the repellent “Trotskyite” kind was no different in private than in public. In January, 1944, he was still speaking to Eden of the “deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian state and government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin.” In a letter to his wife, Clementine, Churchill wrote, following the October, 1944 conference in Moscow: “I have had very nice talks with the old Bear. I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us & I am sure they wish to work with us.” Writers like Isaiah Berlin, who try to give the impression that Churchill hated or despised all dictators, including Stalin, are either ignorant or dishonest.
Churchill’s supporters often claim that, unlike the Americans, the seasoned and crafty British statesman foresaw the danger from the Soviet Union and worked doggedly to thwart it. Churchill’s famous “Mediterranean” strategy to attack Europe through its “soft underbelly,” rather than concentrating on an invasion of northern France is supposed to be the proof of this. But this was an ex post facto defense, concocted by Churchill once the Cold War had started: there is little, if any, contemporary evidence that the desire to beat the Russians to Vienna and Budapest formed any part of Churchill’s motivation in advocating the “soft underbelly” strategy. At the time, Churchill gave purely military reasons for it. As Ben-Moshe states: “The official British historians have ascertained that not until the second half of 1944 and after the Channel crossing did Churchill first begin to consider preempting the Russians in southeastern Europe by military means.” By then, such a move would have been impossible for several reasons. It was another of Churchill’s bizarre military notions, like invading Fortress Europe through Norway, or putting off the invasion of northern France until 1945 by which time the Russians would have reached the Rhine.
Moreover, the American opposition to Churchill’s southern strategy did not stem from blindness to the Communist danger. As General Albert C. Wedemeyer, one of the firmest anti- Communists in the American military, wrote:
if we had invaded the Balkans through the Ljubljana Gap, we might theoretically have beaten the Russians to Vienna and Budapest. But logistics would have been against us there: it would have been next to impossible to supply more than two divisions through the Adriatic ports. . . . The proposal to save the Balkans from communism could never have been made good by a “soft underbelly” invasion, for Churchill himself had already cleared the way for the success of Tito . . . [who] had been firmly ensconced in Yugoslavia with British aid long before Italy itself was conquered.
Wedemeyer’s remarks about Yugoslavia were on the mark. On this issue, Churchill rejected the advice of his own Foreign Office, depending instead on information provided especially by the head of the Cairo office of the SOE the Special Operations branch headed by a Communist agent named James Klugman. Churchill withdrew British support from the Loyalist guerrilla army of General Mihailovic and threw it to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito would mean was no secret to Churchill. When Fitzroy Maclean was interviewed by Churchill before being sent as liaison to Tito, Maclean observed that, under Communist leadership, the Partisans’
ultimate aim would undoubtedly be to establish in Jugoslavia a Communist regime closely linked to Moscow. How did His Majesty’s Government view such an eventuality? . . . Mr. Churchill’s reply left me in no doubt as to the answer to my problem. So long, he said, as the whole of Western civilization was threatened by the Nazi menace, we could not afford to let our attention be diverted from the immediate issue by considerations of long-term policy. . . . Politics must be a secondary consideration.
It would be difficult to think of a more frivolous attitude to waging war than considering “politics” to be a “secondary consideration.” As for the “human costs” of Churchill’s policy, when an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Soviet model, Churchill retorted: “Do you intend to live there?”
Churchill’s benign view of Stalin and Russia contrasts sharply with his view of Germany. Behind Hitler, Churchill discerned the old specter of Prussianism, which had caused, allegedly, not only the two world wars, but the Franco Prussian War as well. What he was battling now was “Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism,” the “two main elements in German life which must be absolutely destroyed.” In October, 1944, Churchill was still explaining to Stalin that: “The problem was how to prevent Germany getting on her feet in the lifetime of our grandchildren.” Churchill harbored a “confusion of mind on the subject of the Prussian aristocracy, Nazism, and the sources of German militarist expansionism . . . [his view] was remarkably similar to that entertained by Sir Robert Vansittart and Sir Warren Fisher; that is to say, it arose from a combination of almost racialist antipathy and balance of power calculations.” Churchill’s aim was not simply to save world civilization from the Nazis, but, in his words, the “indefinite prevention of their [the Germans’] rising again as an Armed Power.”
Little wonder, then, that Churchill refused even to listen to the pleas of the anti-Hitler German opposition, which tried repeatedly to establish liaison with the British government. Instead of making every effort to encourage and assist an anti-Nazi coup in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with cold silence. Reiterated warnings from Adam von Trott and other resistance leaders of the impending “bolshevization” of Europe made no impression at all on Churchill. A recent historian has written: “by his intransigence and refusal to countenance talks with dissident Germans, Churchill threw away an opportunity to end the war in July 1944.” To add infamy to stupidity, Churchill and his crowd had only words of scorn for the valiant German officers even as they were being slaughtered by the Gestapo.
In place of help, all Churchill offered Germans looking for a way to end the war before the Red Army flooded into central Europe was the slogan of unconditional surrender. Afterwards, Churchill lied in the House of Commons about his role at Casablanca in connection with Roosevelt’s announcement of the policy of unconditional surrender, and was forced to retract his statements. Eisenhower, among others, strenuously and persistently objected to the unconditional surrender formula as hampering the war effort by raising the morale of the Wehrmacht. In fact, the slogan was seized on by Goebbels, and contributed to the Germans’ holding out to the bitter end.
The pernicious effect of the policy was immeasurably bolstered by the Morgenthau Plan, which gave the Germans a terrifying picture of what “unconditional surrender” would mean. This plan, initialed by Roosevelt and Churchill at Quebec, called for turning Germany into an agricultural and pastoral country; even the coal mines of the Ruhr were to be wrecked. The fact that it would have led to the deaths of tens of millions of Germans made it a perfect analog to Hitler’s schemes for dealing with Russia and the Ukraine.
Churchill was initially averse to the plan. However, he was won over by Professor Lindemann, as maniacal a German-hater as Morgenthau himself. Lindemann stated to Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician: “I explained to Winston that the plan would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor. . . . Winston had not thought of it in that way, and he said no more about a cruel threat to the German people.” According to Morgenthau, the wording of the scheme was drafted entirely by Churchill. When Roosevelt returned to Washington, Hull, and Stimson expressed their horror, and quickly disabused the President. Churchill, on the other hand, was unrepentant. When it came time to mention the Morgenthau Plan in his history of the war, he distorted its provisions and, by implication, lied about his role in supporting it.
Beyond the issue of the plan itself, Lord Moran wondered how it had been possible for Churchill to appear at the Quebec conference “without any thought out views on the future of Germany, although she seemed to be on the point of surrender.” The answer was that “he had become so engrossed in the conduct of the war that little time was left to plan for the future”:
Military detail had long fascinated him, while he was frankly bored by the kind of problem which might take up the time of the Peace Conference. . . . The P. M. was frittering away his waning strength on matters which rightly belonged to soldiers. My diary in the autumn of 1942 tells how I talked to Sir Stafford Cripps and found that he shared my cares. He wanted the P. M. to concentrate on the broad strategy of the war and on high policy. . . . No one could make [Churchill] see his errors.
Ralph Raico is professor of history at Buffalo State College and a senior scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Due to space limitations, the 169 detailed footnotes – which thoroughly document all assertions in Professor Raico’s paperRaico’s paper – are not included. They are, of course, included in the printed version of the paper, published in The Costs of War, available from the Mises Institute.
