Hitchens on the English and their history

Whatever George McDonald Fraser’s other views, his memoir of life as a WW2 infantryman, ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’, is remarkably good, and ought not be tarnished by association with Hitchens.

As for “nationally cohesive” in 1940, I’m not sure that Jack Jones, Ernie Bevin, Nye Bevan, or even Morrison and Attlee would have agreed with that one. Unless Hitchens is actually talking about something else, of course.

As for “nationally cohesive” in 1940, I’m not sure that Jack Jones, Ernie Bevin, Nye Bevan, or even Morrison and Attlee would have agreed with that one. Unless Hitchens is actually talking about something else, of course.

This always strikes me about conservative (re)writing of 20th century history. Leaving aside all of the debates on imperialism they still seem to view domestic British society in the early 20th century as remarkably homogeneous and unified. It makes me wonder if they have heard of the general strike.

From a different perspective and perhaps even more directly to Hitchens’ point, I received Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain for Christmas and on the very first page of the preface he discusses the meeting of the war cabinet meeting of the 28th May, 1940. This is in the aftermath of the newly appointed Churchill’s (he had been PM for 18 days) decision to effectively sacrifice British troops at Calais to ensure that those stranded at Dunkirk might be able to escape. Churchill with the support of Arthur Greenwood, Clement Atlee and Archibald Sinclair defeated the proposal by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax to negotiate a peace with Germany and appoint a Vichy-style government in Britain (presumably with Halifax in the Petain role.) It doesn’t exactly point to a unified nation (though I have my suspicions as to which side of the debate Hitchens would support.)

Mark @4 -“though I have my suspicions as to which side of the debate Hitchens would support”

Which side would he support ? C’mon, don’t leave us hanging ?!

Sancho:

1-3 is simply brilliant.

America made history into a fnord? That does explain some things.

What David said. As the review makes clear, Hitchens P thinks the critical mistake was 1914 not 1940. Also Fraser was Scottish so it’s a bit off point given the subject of the book.

I skimmed through Hitchens’s linked review, until I got to this:

Tombs understates the importance of this pivotal moment [Britain’s going to war against Germany in 1914]. probably because of his competing love for France. As he suggests, nobody in France ever thought the 1914 war against Germany was pointless. For the French it was an unavoidable struggle for continued existence. But for England it was a war of choice, and in the century that has followed, that choice has begun to seem more and more unwise. It turned England from a creditor to a debtor nation, finished her naval supremacy, destroyed Protestant Christianity as a major social force, began the collapse of the empire, triggered the breakup of the United Kingdom itself and led, in the end, to the rather desperate decision of her elite to pass their sovereignty furtively to the European Union.

There might have been some very compelling reasons for Britain to have stayed out of WW1, including the avoidance of some 700,000 casualties (or whatever the exact figure: not looking it up now). But the notion that Britain’s involvement in WW1 led to all these consequences that Hitchens dislikes is bizarre and frankly borders on the ludicrous. He implies that if Britain had stayed out of WW1 it would still have its ‘naval supremacy’ and empire in 2016 and would not have joined the EU. All of that, in its breezy counterfactualism and disregard for everything else that happened in the intervening years, makes this passage sort of ridiculous, imo. YMMV, needless to say.

He may be a wanker, but stuck in an Amsterdam hotel that only had horrific cable, Hitchens’ voice on the BBC nonstop Paris shooting wankfest about how the West should rethink its facestomping Mideast fetish was actually refreshing. In the US, I guess, he’d be a paleocon.
And yeah, his late brother was a wet-brained wanker.

As far as I’m concerned nothing Hitch the Lesser writes is worth reading unless it is expounding upon his very serious concerns that Daylight Savings Time is nothing more than a perfidious German plot. I mean if you’re going to be a ridiculous crank you may as well be an entertaining one.

Re national cohesion in 1940: nobody I have discussed this with who was there at the time believed it was universal. Not only were there the Communist Party and their sympathisers opposing an imperialist bourgeois war (Nazi Germany being then allied to the Soviet Union), but there was also the pacifist (or as Orwell called them, the fascifist) left arguing that anything done to resist the Germans would make Britain as bad as, if not worse than, the Germans. But I don’t think anybody believed these were more than a small minority.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/empire-british-tv-india-dan-snow-jeremy-paxman

As to the collapse of the British empire in consequence of the strains of WWI, it seems to me the loss of the larger part of Ireland makes the claim plausible at first glance. Redefining N. Ireland as Britain instead of an imperial vestige merely serves current political needs.

I usually can’t resist litigating 1914, but the spectacle of P Hitchens & J Quiggin in presumable agreement is pleasure enough for my evening.

… 4: Going to look up the Marr book now.

In fact we were […] more or less self- sufficient

With notably rare exceptions.

tangential question, though not entirely unrelated:

The UK has a Royal Navy, and a Royal Air Force (the RAF!), and Royal Marines.

But no Royal Army. It’s the British Army, or the English Army if you’re John Lennon.

Granted, it’s all under the MOD, so no difference on that score. And officers of the British Army swear allegiance to the monarch, so it is still a royal army in that sense. But it is not *the* Royal Army.

What’s the history behind this? Possibly something to do with a tiff between king and parliament? But wasn’t that all put to rights a few centuries ago?

Eh, just looked at TBA’s blog. He’s too busy watching all those movies. Have only seen a couple of ’em, I think. (I did once go, some years ago, to see Aguirre, Wrath of God in a theater; was aware of it mostly b.c it was referenced in an IR bk [sad, but true].) OK, back to topic, or something in its vicinity.

Iolanthe is correct. According to Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army

the Bill of Rights of 1689 requires Parliamentary consent for The Crown to maintain a standing army in peacetime. Parliament approves the continued existence of the Army by passing an Armed Forces Act at least once every five years.

> What’s the history behind this?

The british army originated as a mess of administratively- and organisationally separate corps/regiments/services and only gradually coalesced into a unified organisation with a formal singular existence in… some time between mid-victorian times and the first world war? Couldn’t be called “royal” if there’s no legal entity you can point at, and by the time the entity did exist it was traditional.

@reason If you hate second guessing history, can you justify second guessing what Obama did yesterday, or what Trump is advocating for tomorrow?

@29. A lot depends what you mean by “1940”. Unlike 1914 there was little or no popular enthusiasm for war – it was a case of “get it over with.” This was not just related to the memory of the slaughter of 1914, but more importantly to the fear of the aerial holocaust which was widely expected from German bombing (my mother carried a gas mask to work as a child for several months). Combined with the fact that the British declaration of war was, on the face of it, to prevent Germany from recovering territories lost in the Versailles peace settlement, which everyone agreed could not last, this all made popular enthusiasm for the war unlikely, and most people would have preferred to avoid war if they could. Chamberlain’s policy of trying to force Germany to accept a negotiated settlement of the post-Versailles controversy was popular for this reason, and for as long as it looked as if it was working. But I think the public mood changed sharply in the summer of 1940, once it became clear that a long war with Germany was inevitable. There was, of course, no “consensus” – there never is in such circumstances, but all the evidence is that after Dunkirk the public mood was pretty cohesive.

39: I tend to avoid WW II in the East because it is so complicated. Burma put some hopes in Japanese assisted liberation, and there was an Indian force that fought with the Japanese, but for the most part the Japanese were brutal occupiers and exploiters and the Greater East-Asian thing was not taken seriously. There were puppet regimes but mostly such chaos that even the exploitation was inefficient.

At the same time the Comintern had supported liberation movements of usually minor effectiveness in every nation for at least a decade. Ho in Vietnam was the classic example (unless Mao in China). For the most part, liberation movements could see that Japanese occupation was not going to last, preserved their resources for after the war while trying to neither alienate the Allies nor allying with the old colonial powers.

WW II in the East did not at all end in 1945 with the Japanese surrender. Indonesian War against Dutch and British claimed ~200k lives before 1949. That the West tries to mark it that way simply shows that WW II was at least in part a war between competing colonialists. Same as WWI to me, which really didn’t end until 1921-22 in Europe.

War is States versus peoples, really.

The UK has a Royal Navy, and a Royal Air Force (the RAF!), and Royal Marines. But no Royal Army. It’s the British Army, or the English Army if you’re John Lennon.

As others have said: historically it was a collection of regiments raised for the occasion by local dignitaries, so you might have the Duke of Somewhere’s Regiment. (We’re talking about the 17th and 18th centuries here.) The Duke of Somewhere would be colonel, with the responsibility to deliver a battle ready regiment by a certain time, and the work of command would be done by a placeholder-colonel (or “lieutenant-colonel”) who actually knew what he was doing (unlike the Duke).

Note that many bits of the army are individually royal. It’s the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Royal Tank Regiment etc.
Artillery and engineers, incidentally, weren’t historically really part of the army; they came under the entirely separate Board of Ordnance as late as the 18th century, trained and picked their own officers, and didn’t allow purchase.

Not only were there the Communist Party and their sympathisers opposing an imperialist bourgeois war (Nazi Germany being then allied to the Soviet Union)

And, just to clarify, “opposing” in this context doesn’t just mean “saying publicly that it’s a bad idea”. It means “sabotaging production in war industries with the deliberate intent of driving Britain to seek a peace deal with Nazi Germany”.

AcademicLurker @43
Interesting. While (some) Indians did fight w the British army, others (as b mcmanus notes) fought w Japan (spec. the followers of Subhas Chandra Bose).

@AcademicLurker
Noted. Sounds somewhat logical that the INA wd have been seen more as heroes than the BIA post-independence, at least by many Indians, though I also am no expert on this.

I should add that I’m unfamiliar with the politics of the various Indian newspapers and, as I suppose readers here are well aware, historical memory is often used as a political football. The articles I’m recalling might have been from reputable sources or might have been from National Review style right wing rags for all I know. The basic idea that that the place of the Indian Army veterans in the national memory is more complicated than that of their compatriots in the other allied countries seemed plausible enough. I suppose I should beware of falling for some sort of “The vets coming home from Vietnam were spit on when they got of the planes” type BS when it’s in a context I know little about.

“The Tory counterfactual that the Liberal decision to go to war in 1914 entailed the loss of Empire”

Are you suggetsing that the Tories opposed WWI? I have never heard of that.

There’s a genre of modern Tory history that regrets the war against Hitler – see Maurice Cowling, John Charmley, also Alan Clark, if he counts.

There is also the great “declinist” Corelli Barnett, who seems to think it was the right decision but that lots of wrong decisions before and after made it a terrible disaster (though he thinks that getting rid of the Empire was a good thing and that in fact the 1914 “superpower” was overextended and overcommitted, with insufficient resources to meet the rising threats).

Declinism as a genre predates even WW1, such classics as “The Battle Of Dorking” and also a spoof “Imperial Japanese History Textbook for the years 2006” I found at Hay-On-Wye, blame various domestic traitors for the forthcoming disaster. “The Broken Trident” (1928) foresaw a resurgent Germany using airpower to smash its oppressors.

And of course we can never have too much of C.D.Broad’s “War Thoughts In Peace Time”:

http://www.ditext.com/broad/war.html

“Now England is likely, for the next century at least, to be a declining power, whose legal claims and traditional status are much higher than its real position in the fellowship of nations warrants. It is therefore peculiarly liable to be placed in situations in which it will be threatened with what will seem to be gross acts of aggression and insolence. One of the hardest and most unpleasant duties of Englishmen in the immediate future will be to pocket their pride, to try to realize the growing disparity between the legal or traditional and the equitable position of their country in the world, and to adjust their actions to the latter rather than to the former. In this we need not expect to be helped by any excessive display of good manners or delicate consideration on the part of foreign nations; we must be prepared in the future for a continuance of that mixture of cant, truculence, and sharp practice, which is the traditional note of the United States in its diplomatic relations with the world in general and England in particular. Happily it has so far been the great political virtue of the English to know when they are beaten, though not to acknowledge it; and we have been masters at the art of erecting dignified fictions to cover our retreat from untenable positions. We are likely to need all our skill in this art if we are to avoid disaster during the difficult period of international readjustment which lies ahead of us. In future, when we are lectured by Mrs. Hominy, denounced by Mr Jefferson Brick, bullied by Colonel Chollop, and used as stepping stones in the political career of the Honourable Elijah Pogrom, it may be wholesome for us to recollect how we used to admonish continental nations for their own good in those Palmerstonian days when we were rich and they were poor. Forsan et haes olim meminisse juvabit.”

The Battle Of Dorking:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602091h.html

“And yet, if ever a nation had a plain warning, we had. If we were the greatest trading country, our neighbours were the leading military power in Europe. They were driving a good trade, too, for this was before their foolish communism (about which you will hear when you are older) had ruined the rich without benefiting the poor, and they were in many respects the first nation in Europe; but it was on their army that they prided themselves most. And with reason. They had beaten the Russians and the Austrians, and the Prussians too, in bygone years, and they thought they were invincible. Well do I remember the great review held at Paris by the Emperor Napoleon during the great Exhibition, and how proud he looked showing off his splendid Guards to the assembled kings and princes. Yet, three years afterwards, the force so long deemed the first in Europe was ignominiously beaten, and the whole army taken prisoners. Such a defeat had never happened before in the world’s history; and with this proof before us of the folly of disbelieving in the possibility of disaster merely because it had never fallen upon us, it might have been supposed that we should have the sense to take the lesson to heart. And the country was certainly roused for a time, and a cry was raised that the army ought to be reorganised, and our defences strengthened against the enormous power for sudden attacks which it was seen other nations were able to put forth. And a scheme of army reform was brought forward by the Government. It was a half-and-half affair at best; and, unfortunately, instead of being taken up in Parliament as a national scheme, it was made a party matter of, and so fell through. There was a Radical section of the House, too, whose votes had to be secured by conciliation, and which blindly demanded a reduction of armaments as the price of allegiance. This party always decried military establishments as part of a fixed policy for reducing the influence of the Crown and the aristocracy. They could not understand that the times had altogether changed, that the Crown had really no power, and that the Government merely existed at the pleasure of the House of Commons, and that even Parliament-rule was beginning to give way to mob-law. At any rate, the Ministry, baffled on all sides, gave up by degrees all the strong points of a scheme which they were not heartily in earnest about. It was not that there was any lack of money, if only it had been spent in the right way. The army cost enough, and more than enough, to give us a proper defence, and there were armed men of sorts in plenty and to spare, if only they had been decently organised. It was in organisation and forethought that we fell short, because our rulers did not heartily believe in the need for preparation. The fleet and the Channel, they said, were sufficient protection. So army reform was put off to some more convenient season, and the militia and volunteers were left untrained as before, because to call them out for drill would “interfere with the industry of the country.” We could have given up some of the industry of those days, forsooth, and yet be busier than we are now. But why tell you a tale you have so often heard already? The nation, although uneasy, was misled by the false security its leaders professed to feel; the warning given by the disasters that overtook France was allowed to pass by unheeded. We would not even be at the trouble of putting our arsenals in a safe place, or of guarding the capital against a surprise, although the cost of doing so would not have been so much as missed from the national wealth. The French trusted in their army and its great reputation, we in our fleet; and in each case the result of this blind confidence was disaster, such as our forefathers in their hardest struggles could not have even imagined.”

Bruce Wilder@45: The unoriginal comment about Inskip was made by Churchill, who had wanted Inskip’s job as coordinator for himself. Not an impartial witness. As for Inskip “sabotaging production in war industries with the deliberate intent of driving Britain to seek a peace deal with Nazi Germany”, come off it. Inskip had only moderate powers as coordinator, but his two main achievements were to liberate naval aviation from their main enemy, the RAF, and to boost spending on aircraft production. There is no evidence whatever that he wanted a peace deal with Nazi Germany; indeed, his resignation in January 1939 was generally believed to be due to his opinion that war with the Nazis was inevitable.

It is worth repeating Ajay’s point, that the people in Britain in 1940 who really wanted peace with Nazi Germany and sabotage of the war industries were the Communists and their supporters. I don’t see why you can’t acknowledge that.

‘re stability and homogeneity in Britain during the inter war years. Is there any good social history on the time worth reading

There’s quite a lot on Britain between the wars. R.K. Webb’s ’68 textbk Modern England lists inter alia (p.486, fn.1): Graves and Hodge, The Long Weekend (all of which, iirc, was assigned in a course I took in college; I might have read 5 or 10 pages, perhaps a chapter, I don’t remember as it was a long time ago); McElwee, Britain’s Locust Years; Blythe, The Age of Illusion; Mowat, Britain between the Wars. And I know other stuff has been published in the last 40 or so years, incl a recent book whose title/author are escaping me; a bit of not-too-recondite research shd prob turn up the more recent stuff w/o much difficulty.

Actually, I am well briefed on pre-war British rearmament. The subject of the OP, and my remarks, was the Tory attitude toward history. I thought Mark’s remarks @4 about the way Tories like to re-write history seemed to me to be on point.

Dan Hardie provides a further, if less artful, demonstration of attempting to use arrogant assertion and a tendentious focus on details to obscure a larger pattern. Baldwin and Chamberlain retarded British rearmament. They had their reasons, political and economic, to deny the urgency and moderate the response to the growing threat of European war. It is to the credit of others that attempts were made to make up for the shortfall in resources with technical and tactical innovation.

The policy of the National government of denial and appeasement proved, in the main, to be catastrophic for Britain and its Empire. Trying to make the hapless Inskip into an unsung hero of the Battle of Britain is a silliness, as is bringing up communist sabotage as a contrast medium in order to detect Tory patriotism.

Bruce Wilder@60: seems to me you’re the one keen on rewriting history. You started by blaming Inskip, who was substantially responsible for strengthening the defences of Britain in the late 1930s, for sabotaging that effort: a claim you now seem to have quietly abandoned.

Now you’re saying that Baldwin and Chamberlain “retarded British rearmament”. May I remind you (I won’t say inform you, since I suspect you know this perfectly well but would prefer to keep it quiet) that the people most vociferously determined to retard British rearmament after 1936, and to attack the rearmament programme, were not Tories at all, but a substantial portion (not of course all) of the Labour Party: Cripps, Bevan, Cole, Laski, and the young Michael Foot (whose subsequent book, “Guilty Men”, attacking Tories for not having done enough to oppose Hitler, is a masterpiece of hypocrisy).

The Socialist League, of which they were members, went as far as to call on the Trades Union Council to refuse to collaborate in munitions production, and to oppose the recruitment of semi-skilled workers in industries needed for armaments production. Cripps argued that rearmament was intended only to maintain the existing class domination. How that was to be done by Inskip’s policy of strengthening British aerial defences is beyond me.

So no, it wasn’t just Communist sabotage of the British war effort, it was a determined attempt by a section of Labour to stop there being any war effort. Meanwhile, Tories (including Inskip whom you so depise) were trying to make sure that if there were such a war effort, it would be effective.

Do you have some difficulty in understanding that sometimes some Tories may be right, and some left-wingers be hopelessly wrong?

For what it’s worth, left-wing opposition to defence spending (which long predated German rearmament) was based on the belief that an uncontrolled arms build-up would lead to war, as it had been believed to do in 1914. It was not based on support or liking for the Nazis, but on a belief that a future war would be unbelievably catastrophic, and the main victims would be ordinary people. Communist opposition to the war after 1939 essentially followed the same logic – it was an internecine struggle among capitalists and imperialists, which the worker should stay out of. So far as I know, active sympathy for the Nazis was pretty much confined to portions of the Right, and not very significant ones at that.

David@64: “So far as I know, active sympathy for the Nazis was pretty much confined to portions of the Right.” Support for the Soviet Union in its alliance with the Nazis after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact doesn’t count as ‘active sympathy’, then? Riiiiight.

On the one hand, government approval of the Munich deal versus some quotes from some of the opposition politicians in the Labour Party (and of course the official position of the CP.) No doubt all right-thinking people know which is more signficant.

Ze K @67 is correct. One aspect of the Munich agreement is that France and Great Britain were making a deal with the Germans to keep the Soviets from acting on the Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty, which stipulated that if France agreed, then the Soviet Union could be an ally against Germany. The easy assumption that re-armament was aimed against the Nazis is unwarranted. There may not have been much desire to actually get down to fighting Germany on the continent, but there was great interest in fighting in Finland, against the USSR.

LFC @68 omits the Stalinist industrialization drive, which was in many respects a huge re-armament campaign…”guns, but no bread, much less butter” Frankly the notion that Stalin didn’t think he needed a giant army to fight Hitler but just did all that for reasons isn’t thinking. That’s just demonization. For good or ill, Stalin was just a man.

And earlier it was Stalin who was an opponent of Hitler in Spain. But it was the “neutrality” of Roosevelt, Blum and whoever in England that helped Franco the most. The Loyalist government was not a Communist government. It seems to me that the assumption Stalin determined the outcome of the civil war was more convenient than honest.

Reverting back to Finland (and the Baltic states,) I think Hitler at the time correctly considered those moves against him in preparation for war. And war fever about brave little Finland should be considered indirect support for Hitler.

As to not believing that Hitler hadn’t actually invaded June 22, I think that’s a case of assuming your opponent would do the smart thing. June 22 was too late in the year to be a smart time for invading Russia.

The Second World War was a contest of industrial capacity. Many of the most important strategic problems centered on problems of technological development and the building of industrial capacity. All of the major participants struggled to mobilize technological and industrial potential, and the extended time-frames for doing so were significant strategic problems.

In this context — of anticipatory industrial mobilization — the individual psychology of leaders has an important correspondent in the mass psychology of peoples. It is hard to mobilize great masses of people in advance of actual fighting, even if the coming of war is widely anticipated. FDR, in the U.S., was quite far-sighted, but struggled to find a political path that would allow him the scope to mobilize the industrial resources of the U.S. Getting behavior, commitment and sacrifice appropriate to an emergency, in advance of actual war, was not easy. And, at the same time, actual war posed obvious dangers and costs, best avoided until preparations were further along.

The conventional wisdom, with much to support it, is that Stalin had weakened the Red Army leadership and related institutions of state with the Great Purge as well as with the brutality of his forced industrialization programs. But, it is also true that the Soviet Union, despite the fantastic pace of its industrialization, lagged months or years behind where it needed to be, to best Germany. Stalin may have been engaged in wishful thinking about when Hitler would attack, but he knew a contest would come, and he knew in rough terms what it would require of the Soviet Union, industrially; he knew his country was not ready and that the Red Army lacked the resources to resist or even significantly retard German advances. Characteristically, he ordered desperate tactics that increased Soviet losses. In the event, the Soviet Union, in an heroic effort of almost unimaginable scale, did manage to complete its industrialization beyond the Urals and to outproduce Germany. It was exactly 3 years to the day that Operation Bagration began. Operation Barbarossa had been huge, involving three quarters of all German military resources. Bagration was bigger. At key points of confrontation, the Russians showed up with seven times as many aircraft and tens times as many tanks as the opposing German forces.

By almost any measure, Britain did an inadequate job of industrial mobilization. This was what the Guilty Men were guilty of. Technical acumen was not matched by organizational efficiency. They paid a large price during the war itself, and afterward, when exhausted, they limped along for several years of privations proportional to having lost, because they had had to run down so much of their economic capacity even to squeeze how the effort they did.

ZeK@67: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union “had a non-aggression pact, not an alliance”. Sure, the invasion of Poland by the Germans from one side and the Soviets from the other was an act of pure non-aggression, not an alliance. And the massive deliveries of raw materials to Germany before Barbarossa was a simple matter of non-aggression, too.

Bruce Wilder@71: you seem to be arguing both that Britain’s post war problems were due to having committed so much of the economy to armaments, and also that Britain should have put more effort into producing armaments. Have I misunderstood you?

Also, you state that the British rearmament effort was industrially inefficient. Do you have any sources to explain why it was more inefficient than in other countries, bearing in mind that there were substantial inefficiencies in the German, French and US armaments systems?

Lfc- thanks.

David @77
although Stalin was deeply shocked at the invasion, he recovered quickly

This is basically what Evans says. The “retreated to his dacha” tale is a side pt. Doesn’t really matter whether or not he did. Since I really don’t know much about this, I’ll accept that it prob didn’t happen and that Khruschev made it up and somehow it got ‘into the bks’ or some bks — I don’t have time/inclination to go into it further.

It’s interesting to see how blithely people dismiss the unprovoked, aggressive Soviet invasion of Poland. Also unmentioned is the unprovoked, aggressive Soviet invasion of Finland.

If the Soviet invasion of Poland to recover territories it lost during and after WWI is ok, then the German invasion of Poland to recover territories it lost after WWI should be ok too.

It is always enjoyable watching Soviet apologists do backflips to excuse the aggressive warfare of the Soviet Union from 1939-1941, seeking territory through conquest.

Bruce Wilder@84: all right, I misunderstood you, which I always admitted might be possible. So, what would be a correct understanding of your apparently self-contradictory post?

And is “adopting a tendentious interpretation” Wilderspeak for disagreeing with Wilder?

Bruce: also, if “organisational efficiency” was a poor choice of words on your part – I wouldn’t really blame you, nobody always chooses words correctly – what would be a better choice of words to explain your belief that British rearmament was mismanaged in ways that did not affect the rearmament of other states?

“Tendentious” is not actually a word I had ever used before. I looked it up. Merriam-Webster has “strongly favoring a particular point of view in a way that may cause argument: expressing a strong opinion”. Well, if that’s what you meant, I happily plead guilty. Would you prefer that I should express weak opinions, feebly abstain from favouring a particular point of view, or say nothing that might cause argument? Do you think that all CT commentors should act so?

No, I don’t think so. Am I wrong in supposing that what you really mean is “disagreeing with Bruce Wilder”?

Rich: I can read as well as you do. I found Bruce’s comment hard to understand, but honestly acknowledged that I might have misunderstood it. Your elucidation, that what Bruce meant was that inefficient organisation of the British armament effort produced both inadequate rearmament and postwar exhaustion, makes very good sense: though I note that Bruce now seems to have retreated from his claim that the problem was in fact with British organisational inefficiency.

I look forward to learning what, in Bruce’s view, the British problem actually was. I would not be at all surprised to find there were considerable problems, but I would like to know why Bruce thinks they were worse in Britain than elsewhere. I would discount as trivial explanations on the lines that armament problems in the US (which was not being bombed or invaded) were less than in Britain, Germany or Russia (which were).

Stephen@75 Munich 1938 and cries for war against the USSR over Finland in 1939 argue very strongly that it is indeed too easy to assume that re-built English war-fighting capacity wouldn’t be aimed at the USSR at some point. The English opposition was relentless from 1917 until well into the war with Germany.

jwl@83 grossly misrepresents the Soviet invasion of Poland. Poland was defeated, leaving the as yet unoccupied areas in a formal state of anarchy. That may not be a provocation in the sense of a hostile act, but it is a crisis demanding action. Yet somehow I am confident that jwl would be just as outraged if the Soviets had left a formally independent “Polish” government in the eastern part allotted to them.
Indeed, I’ve taken up wondering whether the jwls of the world wouldn’t have preferred to see the Nazis regretfully moving into all of Poland in the name of maintaining order, right up to the pre-war Soviet border. After all, that might have made Hitler’s first year drive on Moscow a sucess?

The border adjustments with Finland were not quite the outrage jwl pretends. My best judgment is that the primary reason for the inability of the Finnish government to accept that the Soviet Union was anticipating an existential struggle with Nazi Germany in which defense in depth for Leningrad was required, was because it was as deeply committed to the final overthrow of the USSR as Germany. They risked their entire country in an unequal struggle for something that was not going to threaten their existence. When the Nazis invaded the USSR, the Finns of course found it a mere Continuation of their own war.

I am surprised that jwl didn’t cite the best case for his fake universalist standard, where Nazi=Communist=aggressive war-makers in a planet enslaved largely by the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese and Spanish empires, namely, the Baltic states. But here too I expect the jwls would have preferred the Baltics remained allies of the Germans, for again, that might have made the difference in taking Leningrad. That land was going to belong to one side or the other, whether formally acknowledged to so so, or not. That being the case, yes, better it was the USSR.

jwl @92
The rules on aggressive war… are all irrelevant

If one takes “the rules on aggressive war” broadly to mean something like the norms/customs prevailing (even if often violated) in international society — and these existed long before the formal codification of aggressive war as a crime at Nuremburg — then they are certainly not irrelevant. If you are going to denounce “backflips” and “special pleading,” you need some reasonable foundation on which to do so, and I don’t see how you can dispense with the law of armed conflict, broadly understood to include the prevailing normative conventions, in that context.

p.s. When Louis XIV took Strasbourg in 1681, his critics didn’t simply yawn and say “power politics as usual.” They drew on existing conventions about acceptable international behavior in their criticism (cf. the criticism of the so-called Chambres des reunions, the “courts” Louis XIV set up to rubber-stamp some of his territorial acquisitions).

I don’t know quite what’s going on with jwl. I do know what’s going on with steven johnson: the usual.

Here’s jwl @83:

It’s interesting to see how blithely people dismiss the unprovoked, aggressive Soviet invasion of Poland. Also unmentioned is the unprovoked, aggressive Soviet invasion of Finland…. It is always enjoyable watching Soviet apologists do backflips to excuse the aggressive warfare of the Soviet Union from 1939-1941, seeking territory through conquest.

So @83, jwl denounces Soviet aggression (with at least some basis, imo), and then @92 he/she asserts that “the rules on aggressive war” are “irrelevant.” Excuse me? How can you denounce aggressive war @83, and then @92 declare the rules on aggressive war to be irrelevant?

As for s. johnson: nothing, in his view, the Soviets did from 1939 to 1941 was anything other than completely justified, b.c they needed “defense in depth” against a German invasion. Meanwhile, they neglected the condition of their equipment so badly that, according to Evans, they lost more of their (somewhat obsolescent) tanks to mechanical failures than to the Germans in the opening days of the German invasion. Peter T has said that they were in the process of transitioning in tactics and whatnot, which may well be the case, but if you are really concerned about an invasion you know is coming eventually, wouldn’t it make sense to have your tanks in decent repair? Wouldn’t it make sense to do something other than rush headlong at the German divisions, apparently the tactic used by some Red Army units in the opening days?

I don’t know, but I think this thread is on the verge of going through the looking glass. YMMV.

International law is less like codified domestic law than it is like the “laws” of feud. You have to have a plausible pretext, some degree of support from one’s peers and be able to make a case in the current context. Your actual practice has to be reasonably matched to the situation (so killing someone in return for a libel is probably okay, burning their house down with the family inside is not). It’s probably a reasonable judgement that, while Germany and Italy openly flouted the conventions, the USSR mostly stayed (just) within the bounds.

Europe in 1914 had an established mechanism for settling disputes such as the one between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. You had a Conference of the Great Powers and they haggled over the issues until some compromise was reached, usually involving multiple trade-offs. In July 1914, Britain and France proposed such a Conference; Germany and A-H refused.

There were efforts to revive this between the wars, but Germany and Italy were not amenable to the practice, and the USSR’s position was anomalous. In this situation, all looked to improve their defences wherever opportunity offered. Britain beefed up the navy and air force, France built the Maginot Line (and entered into alliances with Czechoslovakia and Rumania). Stalin tried for a general pact guaranteeing current borders – clearly aimed at Germany (it’s still hard to know how genuine he was) and then for the non-aggression pact when that did not go through (largely because of Polish objections). Which he then used to move the border westwards – not just Poland but also Bessarabia, Ruthenia and the Baltics. Given that Russia had some claim to all these (bar Ruthenia) and faced open hostility and the imminent prospect of invasion, it was not a totally out of court set of moves.

Stalin offered the Finns a large slice of Karelia in return for a small buffer zone to the north of Leningrad. When they refused, he took it and more by force. I’ve not read any account of Finnish calculations, but it was possible they refused because they hoped to regain all of Karelia in conjunction with Germany. They certainly had revanchist ambitions in that direction.

The first German tries at combined operations were a chaotic mess (tanks out of fuel all the way from Munich to Vienna, units lost, huge traffic jams….). They learned. the Red Army watched, absorbed the lessons and hastily tried to upgrade to match after a long period of low defence spending. They were in the middle when Germany attacked. Some tried the old ways, some the new, both with inadequate or inappropriate support. What they did get right was mobilisation, industrial relocation and and ferocious concentration on key priorities.

@Peter T
Given that Russia had some claim to all these (bar Ruthenia) and faced open hostility and the imminent prospect of invasion
Imminent? More like eventual, no? (Otherwise why sign the ’39 pact, if not to delay it?)

“combined operations”
Does this mean any tactical combination or co-ordination of two or more ‘arms’ (i.e., infantry, armor, air, in the modern context)?

LFC and jwl can argue out how the hopelessly unprepared Soviet army conquered Poland for the Nazis yet were defeated by the Finns. For those who care to draw conclusions as to why presumably sane adults would re-write history with inanities like that, it’s very simple: Stalin will never be forgiven for beating Hitler. Hence jwl’s sincere regret that all of Poland wasn’t occupied by Hitler. Or LFC’s equally sincere belief that Munich is just a faux pas while the Nonaggression Pact was clearly a malicious crime.

The attitude that no decent person would protest the New Improved History is understandable.

@steven johnson
LFC and jwl can argue out how the hopelessly unprepared Soviet army conquered Poland for the Nazis yet were defeated by the Finns.

I never said the Soviet army conquered Poland for the Nazis. The Soviets moved into E. Poland after the Germans had basically defeated the Polish army, iirc, though they did get some resistance.

Stalin will never be forgiven for beating Hitler. Hence jwl’s sincere regret that all of Poland wasn’t occupied by Hitler. Or LFC’s equally sincere belief that Munich is just a faux pas while the Nonaggression Pact was clearly a malicious crime.

Complete and utter, defamatory nonsense. I never said Munich was a faux pas while the M/R pact was a malicious crime. And obviously the USSR contributed greatly to the defeat of Hitler and shd get full credit for that, which in Anglo-American collective memory it often doesn’t.

Your remarks are here just defamatory bullshit.

The fact is that you have, iirc, never written here so much as a single syllable critical of Stalin for anything, ever. Rather than face that, you turn on a spigot of false accusations, charging me w viewing Munich as a ‘faux pas’, which is ludicrous on its face, and implying that jwl and I somehow favor the Axis, also ludicrous on its face. I’m done w this thread.

Stephen @ 89

I find your style of argument rude. You are a bit of a troll, I think. I am not here to lecture on the history of Britain’s involvement in WWII.

I brought up the example of Inskip’s appointment, because it was a clear instance of obdurate resistance to war preparation on the necessary scale and with the necessary vigor. It was a good example, I thought, of Tories forgetting their own role in the destruction of the Empire they pine for.

The creation of the post had been forced on Baldwin by people like Churchill, who were rightly alarmed by the pace of German rearmament, the facts about which the Baldwin government had made misleading statements that had been exposed as wishful thinking. Having conceded the creation of a post for hurrying preparations, Baldwin appointed a lawyer of no particular conviction or military experience.

Your argument was that Inskip’s appointment was proof that the Conservative leadership was right, because radar and commie saboteurs. You chose to make no sense and now you are confused. I don’t see how I can help.

Britain was forced into fumbles and desperate expedience by its poor preparation, and to a large extent the scale and vigor of their preparation were a policy choice. They could have done more and should have, given the evidence before them and the extent of unemployment in Depression Britain.

Rich: I can read as well as you do. I found Bruce’s comment hard to understand, but honestly acknowledged that I might have misunderstood it. Your elucidation, that what Bruce meant was that inefficient organisation of the British armament effort produced both inadequate rearmament and postwar exhaustion, makes very good sense: though I note that Bruce now seems to have retreated from his claim that the problem was in fact with British organisational inefficiency.

If you could read as well as Rich then you wouldn’t need his elucidation, you wouldn’t benefit from it. By definition, no?

You can’t read as well as Rich can; you can’t read as well as Bruce can. We know this — you know this — because you’ve tried it and failed, because you needed his help to see something that Rich saw unaided and Bruce didn’t even need pointing out for. You need to learn from this, not only the content that Rich saw that you didn’t, but that he saw things you didn’t, that he — other people — have deeper insight and quicker more-reliable understanding than you do.

[the bulk of thinking — deductive reasoning, text analysis, self-reflection — is learned skills, which means that some people learn them badly. Innate biology counts for a lot, at the beginning, but turning your innate insight into a tool that delivers reliable conclusions is something you have to be trained for.]

Among the more surprising facts I took away from Snyder’s Bloodlands is that Stalin up to the middle 30s was more afraid of Poland than Germany. Poland of course had given the Soviets a bloody nose in 1920 and there certainly was no shortage of anti-Russian sentiment in the Polish leadership at the time, but then how could the Soviet leadership ignore the anti-Russian, anti-Slavic hate propaganda of the Nazis and their Lebensraum im Osten plans?

Also, in this context: Stalin had hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens murdered because they were considered ethnic Poles.

Steven Jihnson @101: “Stalin will never be forgiven for beating Hitler”. By some surviving adherents of Hitler, very possibly. By people committed to liberal democracy, Stalin will never be forgiven for being a totalitarian mass murderer who would, given the chance, have imposed his tyranny far further than he did. These two classes of people are very different. If you truly think that anyone opposed to the Soviet Union, or its current successor, is therefore a fascist, there really is no help for you.

Bruce Wilder@107: I’m still waiting, without too much hope, for your explanation of why British rearmament in the 1930s was particularly inefficient, and how Inskip sabotaged it by getting it concentrated on naval forces and anti-aircraft defences. See Peter T@108.

You seem less than entirely coherent when you claim my “argument was that Inskip’s appointment was proof that the Conservative leadership was right, because radar and commie saboteurs”. I don’t think anyone has said Inskip’s appointment had anything to do with commie saboteurs. If you believe Stafford Cripps, who did indeed call in the 1930s for trades unionists to oppose rearmament, was a Communist, you are deeply mistaken. If you believe that the Communist Party’s calling 1940 for sabotage (fortunately ignored by the workers, victims as always of false consciousness) never happened, I would suggest a little light reading on the period.

As for radar: yes, with Inskip’s coordination the UK did concentrate on radar and other methods of aerial defence. I can’t help feeling grateful for that. Perhaps you would have preferred a British defeat in 1940?

Ze K@119: you refer to”the 1940 unprovoked, aggressive invasion of Iceland by British-Canadian-American invaders”. If you were better informed, you would know that no Americans were involved; that Iceland was at the time part of the Kingdom of Denmark, of which the eastern parts had been unprovokedly invaded by Nazi Germany (a year after the two had signed a non-aggression pact, ho bloody ho); that the Icelanders welcomed the arrival of the British forces as being infinitely preferable to the arrival of the Germans (do you understand why?); and that under international law, if one belligerent starts things going by occupying part of a neutral country, the other is fully entitled to occupy another part to oppose them.

I trust this will explain to you why no British statesmen were tried and hanged at Nuremburg for the occupation of Iceland. Why no Soviet leaders were tried and hanged for their aggressive wars, why, that’s another matter entirely. I rather think an enormous number of T-34s had something to do with it.

Stephen @ 116

British rearmament in the 1930s was insufficient because Baldwin and Chamberlain didn’t want to spend the money and didn’t take Hitler seriously. They thought if the fascists and commies fought that would be a fine thing, and perhaps Hitler could be appeased with the gift of other peoples’ countries — Czechoslovakia or some African colonies.

Ultimately, by not investing in a timely way in industrial capacity, military and naval stocks and upgrading the operational capacities of the army and navy, Britain was unable to respond adequately in the early days of the conflict with either Germany or Japan. Chamberlain did not want conscription, so there wasn’t much of an army. Chamberlain’s appeasement policy of gifting Germany Czechoslovakia squandered Britain’s credibility as an ally; the rich irony of excusing Munich while expressing high dudgeon about the realpolitik of Molotov-Ribbentrop requires heroic levels of obduracy. The Germans took Norway against bumbling, ineffective opposition from Britain. Britain did nothing in the phony war, and when the real war came, the pitiful remains of the British Army had to be hauled from Dunkirk on a flotilla of private boats. The British navy was ill-prepared for convoy duty and the loss of merchant shipping was catastrophic. Fortress Singapore was a bad joke.

During the war, Britain was forced into desperate expedients to make up the deficit and was dependent on handouts from the U.S. and its overseas dominions. It was unable to build up its industrial or technical capacities and still squeeze out sufficient effort to survive. Merchant shipping had to be moved from the Indian Ocean to make up losses, with the consequence of an Indian famine that killed millions and the immobility of a two and half million man army that couldn’t be moved, couldn’t fight.

Bruce@123: I agree that I may sometimes get small facts wrong. Nobody’s perfect. You, on the other hand, seem to get fairly major facts wrong and then run away when criticised. I’m still waiting for your retraction of your claim that Inskip sabotaged the rearmament effort. I’m patient, but not optimistic.

Iceland in 1940 was in personal union with Denmark, but with Denmark controlling its foreign policy. There was no significant Icelandic opposition to the British occupation. Do you think there should have been?

The attribution of the Caligula quote in Guilty Men (of which the previously anti-rearmament journalist Michael Foot was the most spectacular hypocrite) is to “a great statesman”.If you wish to think that is an adequate description of Lindemann, I can’t help you.

In the department of small facts: it’s Foot, not Foote. Not that I blame you.

I don’t suppose that I will ever get you to accept that the main opponents of rearmament in the 1930s were in the Labour party, not the Conservatives.

Steven johnson @113: “losing Ireland was huge, and … it had to do with WWI”.
Normal history suggests that the third Home Rule Bill for Ireland was enacted before WWI. Feel free to differ.

TM @112
Among the more surprising facts I took away from Snyder’s Bloodlands is that Stalin up to the middle 30s was more afraid of Poland than Germany. Poland of course had given the Soviets a bloody nose in 1920 and there certainly was no shortage of anti-Russian sentiment in the Polish leadership at the time, but then how could the Soviet leadership ignore the anti-Russian, anti-Slavic hate propaganda of the Nazis and their Lebensraum im Osten plans?

I raised this question, phrased somewhat differently, in the first two sentences of my comment @68.

Ze K 119, this is just sickening.