Why war in 1939?

Bad history means a bad future.

Mistakes about the past cause mistakes in the present, but all societies need historical myths and these are always based on mistakes.

I was interviewed for Queens', Cambridge by Professor Richard Overy who gave me my scholarship when I was 17, but when I went up to my dismay he had moved and been replaced by a specialist in mediaeval Burgundian numismatics.

I normally do not have the patience to watch videos but, on a whim, I googled him yesterday. I came across an interesting lecture he gave the summer before last about why the Second World War broke out. By the way, I can recommend his account of what happened in his book 'The Dictators'.

He is a very good historian who makes the points, still not widely enough understood by the public, that Hitler did not want war with England and France or world domination. 

He did not care about overthrowing Jewish Bolshevism either. He cared about establishing a large colonial empire, but not Bismarck's colonial empire, scraps of territory in Africa and the Pacific which were confiscated during the First World War. Instead he wanted an empire in Eastern Europe, where Slavs in conquered territories lived as helots or were starved to death. 

Hitler believed England and France were powerful because of the size of their empires, even though our so-called White Dominions were by 1935 independent countries and the British Empire cost much more money than it brought in.

Professor Overy says near the beginning of his lecture that Hitler in late 1938 did not expect war with Poland. 

He expected Poland to become a German satellite, like Slovakia or Romania, but the Poles "very sensibly" did not want that.

But was it so very sensible of them? 

Being allies of Hitler might have been the lesser of two great evils. 

I have quoted before A.J.P. Taylor's question.

"In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better – to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?"

Actually Taylor was not accurate and more Czechoslovakians died. The net says 345,000, of whom 277,000 were Jews. But Taylor's question still has pith.

6 and a half million Poles died in the war, they lost the eastern half of their territory and ended up ruled by Stalin and his Russian Communist successors until 1989.

Clearly Hitler made a huge mistake invading Poland, as things turned out in the end. Did the Poles do so by not making a deal with him?

Hitler's mistake is comparable to Saddam's in deciding the night before the invasion of Kuwait to take not a small piece of territory but the whole country. Both men were gamblers who bet the wrong way. They lost and their countries lost with them.

The famous British journalist Peter Hitchens thinks that England and France made a mistake in going to war with Hitler over Poland that is comparable to George W Bush's and Tony Blair's in invading Iraq in 2003. 

They certainly were gamblers who bet the house on a losing horse, though it was other countries that lost badly as a result of their mistake. 

Historian Maurice Cowling thought going to war in 1939 was a mistake and so I am sure does another great historian, John Charmley, whose book on why Britain went to war seems to me the last word on the subject. 

At the end of the lecture Professor Overy addresses parallels between 1939 and 2019 and says the days of wars for territorial expansion in Europe are over. 

He doesn't say why. My guess is that future European wars will be terrorist campaigns and ethnic insurgencies waged by non state actors. 

He mentions parallels between Hitler and Vladimir Putin but I wish he had talked about how false parallels between 1938 and later events have misled politicians over and over again: from Suez in 1956 to the Vietnamese war and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He might have talked too about how myths of the Second World War have coloured politics throughout the Western world, but not beyond the West, with mostly bad consequences.

I wrote these words 9 years back. The ideas seemed new to me then but seem almost a cliché now.

The whole history of the post-war period until this moment is a meditation on the Second World War and Nazism. This is the reason for the European Union and the euro. It was also the reason for the Cold War and America's engagement with the wider world. Cold warriors viewed Communist Russia as the equivalent of Nazi Germany, overlooking the distinction that Russia unlike Germany was a satiated power and not given to military adventures within Europe. It was much of the reason why Stalin forced Communism on Eastern Europe in the first place. It is the reason why talk of races and racial superiority and the psychology of nations became profoundly unfashionable and why the colonial empires were dissolved. It is the reason for an unprecedented migration of brown-skinned people to make their homes in the formerly white countries where they will presently form the majority. It is even the reason, by extension, why discriminating on the grounds of sex, religion, sexuality, even age are no longer permitted by law. By further extension it is part of the reason why hierarchy can only be publicly justified by meritocratic arguments, why traditions are considered oppressive and the masculine and martial virtues such as patriotism and love of battle are no longer considered virtues at all.