No, Winston Churchill Was Not the ‘Chief Villain’ of the Second World War

The podcaster Darryl Cooper, Tucker Carlson’s most recent guest on his Twitter interview show — and whom Carlson describes as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United states” — has set tongues wagging over his assertion that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”

“Now,” Cooper clarifies, “Churchill didn’t kill the most people; he didn’t commit the most atrocities” — two massive concessions, Mr. Cooper! — “but when you really get into it and tell the story right, and don’t leave anything out, you see that [Churchill] was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”

As the kids these days say: “Big, if true.”

Cooper tends to ramble when answering Carlson’s questions, but best I can tell, he assigns Churchill “chief villain” status on the basis of several interrelated factors:

(1) Before the war, when he was not yet in government, Churchill agitated for a British guarantee of Poland’s security, should that country be invaded by Germany.

(2) As prime minister in the spring and summer of 1940, Churchill refused to entertain German peace feelers and carried on the war even after the Fall of France.

(3) Because Churchill kept the British in the war in 1940, the war ground on, and this set the conditions for German and Soviet atrocities in the east, which wouldn’t have happened if the war had ended sooner.

(4) Britain, under Churchill’s leadership, waged a bombing campaign of German cities, which caused the deaths of many German civilians.

(5) Churchill and Britain, by refusing to quit, stayed in the war in the hope that other powers such as the Soviet Union and, most critically, the United States would eventually join her in defeating Germany.

(6) The results of the war, including the destruction wrought on Europe and the rise of Soviet power, have led to the diminishment of the Western world.

All this deserves a serious response, but before we begin, I will go ahead and concede at the outset Carlson and Cooper’s complaint that the “Munich 1938: Churchill vs. Chamberlain and the Appeasers” dynamic has been used and abused in the post-war period, often to our detriment. Not every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, and not every international negotiation is Munich 1938. But do you know who was Hitler? Hitler. What was a travesty as bad as Munich 1938? Munich 1938.

Cooper’s revisionist history is simply folly.

Books could be written on this subject — indeed, thousands have been! — so I will limit myself to two points:

First, pace Cooper, Britain simply would never have been safe if she had quit the war and made peace with Germany in 1940, and Churchill was right to oppose a negotiated peace. Second, an early German victory in Europe would not have been “better” for the West than the real outcome of the war.

Britain Couldn’t Tolerate Nazi Germany — and Nazi Germany Wouldn’t Tolerate a Free Britain

Cooper’s primary complaint against Churchill, it seems to me, can be summarized in his argument that Churchill’s leadership irrationally and malignly convinced Britain to fight on in 1940 when it could have sought a negotiated settlement with Germany, and that choice caused the murderous disasters of the later years of the war and its aftermath. “The reason I resent Churchill so much for it,” Cooper says, “is that he kept this war going when he had no way [to win]. He had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers.”

I’m not going to denigrate revisionist history in its entirety or as a discipline. But Cooper is doing revisionist history in the most juvenile way possible: by assuming that his preferred counterfactual would have worked out better than what happened in reality, or that the various actors (including some very bad men such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, who are well documented to have sometimes made very poor decisions) would always act entirely rationally and in their best interests.

Let’s state the facts plainly: It was manifestly not irrational for Churchill to see a victorious Nazi Germany as an existential threat to the United Kingdom. One need not think, as Cooper insinuates, that Zionists, monetary gain, or the influence of financiers motivated Churchill’s opposition to Nazism. One need not believe, as Cooper says he does, that Churchill was merely a “psychopath” who “wanted a war.” We don’t have to assume or infer Churchill’s thinking on this subject. He explained himself fully in his “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat” speech to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940.

Why did Churchill think it better that Britons take up this “ordeal of the most grievous kind” and fight the war to a “victorious conclusion”? Why did Churchill implore the British people to face the fact that they had “many, many long months of struggle and of suffering” in front of them? Because Churchill rightly understood that the war was being fought for national survival.

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. [emphasis added]

Was Churchill wrong? Cooper seems to think that a victorious Nazi German empire on the European continent would have behaved as benignly as the European Union has. Or that even if Germany had gone to war with the Soviet Union, a war between German fascists and Soviet Communists would have redounded to the benefit of Britain and the West, especially compared with the alternative, i.e., what really happened.

I’m sorry, but I am skeptical of that very poor assumption.

It’s too often forgotten — perhaps especially on this side of the Atlantic, by the likes of Darryl Cooper — that it was Winston Churchill and not the Appeasers in the British establishment, including the high-ranking members of Churchill’s own Conservative Party, who was standing in the great continuity of British geopolitical strategy that had guided the island nation successfully for centuries. The English, and later the British, over hundreds of years, saw it as their primary strategic goal to contest the establishment of a hegemonic power on the continent. The Brits almost always pursued this by assembling a coalition of weaker powers to resist the then-strongest continental power. They understood, as Cooper apparently does not, that should any European power control the resources of the continent as a whole and the coastal approaches to Britain, it would be extremely difficult to defend their island from invasion.

One need not be an Anglophile to understand that England — even if out of only geostrategic self-interest — was right to contest Habsburg Spain’s Armada in the 16th century, Louis XIV’s expansionist France in the 17th century, and Napoleon’s imperial challenge in the early 19th century, if the mission was national independence, which it was. The United Kingdom, though it holds an outsized place in the world’s imagination, is remarkably small in size and population. Every one of the aforementioned powers could have conquered Britain. But the British repeatedly waged war on the continent in order to prevent any single power from threatening Britain’s independence, a goal which, one would think, the neo-nationalist friends of Tucker Carlson would understand.

The wars against Imperial Germany in 1914 and National Socialist Germany in 1939 were fought on the same hard-boiled strategic logic: Could Britain tolerate a dominant and expansionist Germany’s defeating France and controlling the Channel ports? The answer was no, not if she wished to remain the master of her own fate.

I concede that there is a legitimate argument, such as that made by Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, that Britain could have and probably should have avoided entanglement in the First World War. It’s possible (I repeat, “possible”) that a victorious Imperial Germany could have defeated France and Russia quickly and then withdrawn from neutral Luxembourg and Belgium out of deference to British power, which was then at its apogee.

But I ask Cooper: Give me an example of a nation, such as Nazi Germany in 1940, that, after winning several relatively easy and (for the aggressor) relatively bloodless military victories against historic rivals, deciding unilaterally that it has been satiated. When has a nation in the position that Germany was in 1940 ever decided to beat its swords into plowshares and its spears into pruning hooks when its former enemies are on their knees? There is no example of such a thing, and no British government could have tolerated a hegemonic and victorious Nazi Germany in 1940.

Cooper asserts that Hitler sent out multiple peace feelers after his victory in Poland and after the defeat of France. But he would, wouldn’t he? Of course it would have been in Germany’s interest for Britain to get out of the war. But would it have been in Britain’s? The answer is undoubtedly no if it meant that a militaristic and hostile nation as powerful as Germany would be secure in its redoubt, established in its newfound possessions, and able to build up its strength across the Channel.

Moreover, so what if Germany had given her word to Britain that she would not be threatened in the future? Has there ever been a regime as untrustworthy as Hitler’s Germany? Has there ever been a regime that so routinely breached its international commitments? In the mid 1930s, Germany began openly violating its treaty obligations that limited the size of its military. In 1936, Germany violated the Locarno and Versailles Treaties by remilitarizing the Rhineland. In 1938, Hitler provoked the Sudetenland crisis, which led to the Munich Agreement, after which he promised he was through with territorial demands. But then, of course, in 1939, Hitler broke his word and Germany absorbed the rump of Czechoslovakia and began immediately making demands on Poland. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland (a violation, by the by, of the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934). In May 1940, Germany invaded neutral Belgium and neutral Holland, violating the commitment to uphold their sovereignty and neutrality. In 1941, Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on its then-ally the Soviet Union after having signed the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.

In what universe does Cooper believe that Hitler’s Nazi Germany could have been a trustworthy interlocutor with whom Britain could negotiate a peace? Cooper might foolishly believe that now, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the British people in 1940 disagreed.

German Victory in 1940 Would Not Have Been Better for Europe or the West

To believe that Britain would have been better off by quitting in 1940, you would have to believe that a Germany controlled by Adolf Hitler was not going to use its immense power to ever threaten Britain again. But to believe that Europe and the West, as a whole, would be better off, one must also believe that our post-war world, with all its problems, is somehow worse than (1) a total Nazi victory over the Soviet Union, (2) a total Soviet victory over Germany and likely Soviet occupation of all of Europe, or (3) a tenuous and temporary truce between the two totalitarian belligerents — after an ocean of blood had been spilled — would have been.

Why should anyone believe that? Britain was more vulnerable in the 1940s than she had ever been before, as Churchill well understood. The advent of airpower reduced the ancient protection of the English Channel and the Royal Navy. After a negotiated peace, the Luftwaffe would have been based an hour’s flight away from London on the far side of the Channel. And, remember, a Germany that had made peace with Britain may well have developed atomic weapons by the time circumstances forced a resumption of hostilities. Would Britain, or Europe for that matter, really have been better off with a third Anglo–German war fought out with nukes over London and Berlin?

It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that one has the foresight to know, as Cooper apparently thinks he does, that there would have been a lasting peace after Britain’s capitulation or that a general war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany — a war that Hitler had been predicting and promising since the 1920s — but one without Britain’s involvement, would have turned out better for Europe.

It may well be true, if the Wehrmacht had not been forced to commit troops to defend against Britain in the west, if the Luftwaffe had not been worn down in the Battle of Britain, and if Germany could have concentrated all her resources and energies entirely on the east, that Germany might have been successful in invading the Soviet Union. After all, it was a close-run thing in the winter of 1941.

But was it, really? Throughout the war, Germany put the bulk of its resources in the east. Even if an extra 20 or 25 percent of German power could have been leveled against Soviet Russia, it’s likely — as the best military scholars believe — that Germany would not have defeated the enormous Red Army and the Soviet state and enforced the occupation of European Russia. That’s my position, too: I think Germany loses the great contest in the east even if Britain is out of the picture.

But what if I am wrong about all that? What then? Would it really have been better for Britain, for the United States, and for the West if a victorious and simply gigantic Nazi empire had stretched from the English Channel to the Ural Mountains? How would that have worked out for England? Why should anyone think that a free Britain could have survived in the shadow of such a power? And, of course, if such a war had been fought and won by Germany, the crimes of the Nazi regime — the mass starvation of millions of Soviet POWs and the slaughter on a mass scale of millions of Jews and other Untermenschen — would still have occurred. Question for Darryl Cooper: Would Churchill still have been the chief villain then?

Similarly, if the Soviets had won the war and had driven the Nazis out of Eastern and Central Europe, you’d have the Red Army encamped on the Rhine or the English Channel. Would Europe have been better off if the KGB had operated prisons in Paris, Rome, and Bonn rather than only in East Berlin, Warsaw, and Budapest?

Or what if it had all ended in a draw? What if the fascists and Communists had beat themselves to a pulp and spilt blood on a monumental scale before finally agreeing to an armistice, with the border — who knows? — somewhere in Poland. Now you’d have Europe divided into a fascist empire in the west and a Communist empire in the east, readying always for another turn of the roulette wheel of war. Again, would this have been better than what really transpired?

As much as some may want to deny, or lament, it, the outcome we came to in the war as it was fought — a bloc of free nations in Western Europe unified and protected by a military alliance that included the United States, one that eventually prevailed over the Communist empire in the east — is probably one of the least-bad results that was possible once the shooting started.

Could things have turned out differently and genuinely happily for the continent? Perhaps, but that probably would have required a Western intervention to strangle Nazism in its crib after the Rhineland crisis in 1936. But does Darryl Cooper know who advocated a hard line against Hitler’s Germany in 1936, when a combined Franco-British force would have undoubtedly defeated Germany at a comparatively tiny cost? Winston S. Churchill.

One can be unhappy with the current state of affairs in the Western world — I know I am — without engaging in flights of fancy or denigrating and warping the record of the men who chose to defend the West and fight the Second World War knowing only what they knew at the time. One can wish that Britain or Germany or America were in better shape than they are today, recognize correctly that some of our present illnesses have their roots in the massive conflagration of 1939–45, and still understand that there was a real need to fight it and to win it.

The United Kingdom and the United States were not perfect then, as they are not now. But they were free nations, and they were undoubtedly the Good Guys in the Second World War. No amount of too-cute-by-half podcast revisionism will change that, and we need not be embarrassed by that truth. Churchill was not a perfect man. He made many well-documented mistakes. But his foresight about what Hitler’s Germany was and his brilliance in 1940 are well remembered because they are examples of genuine leadership. No, Churchill wasn’t any kind of villain. Indeed, he was one of the greatest of the Great Men of history. His achievement was simple though not easy: He saved the Western world from darkness and tyranny.