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Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick J. Buchanan
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 1143
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.8
ISBN: 030740515X
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5311
EAN: 9780307405159
ASIN: 030740515X
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Buy @ Intellika and save. Heavily discount book, NEW .Retails for $29.95 +. NEW, Mint Gift Quality Condition. Includes FREE Delivery Confirmation Tracking.
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Product Description
Were World Wars I and II—which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction—inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston Churchill first among them—the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.
Among the British and Churchillian blunders were:
• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that muti- lated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo- Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.
Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 75 more reviews...
 The America First Movement Redux August 6, 2008
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
"Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War," demonstrates just how dangerous a good writer can be when he is in possession of bad ideas. Patrick Buchanan, the well-known television pundit and former Presidential candidate, is essentially exploiting the current discontent with the Iraq war to revive the isolationist arguments of the largely pro-German, anti-English "America First" movement of the 1930s and 1940s in a radical and misguided effort at historical revisionism, recasting World War II as somehow just as "unnecessary" as the current quagmire in the Middle East. All the usual suspects are here: the "perfidious Albion" obsession, which sees England's every move as an attempt to lure its allies into armed conflict, the supposedly needless decision of Britain and France to draw a line in the sand at Hitler's invasion of Poland, the imponderable and unlikely "what-if" thesis that Hitler would have turned his attention to defeating Soviet Russia had the western allies let him have his way, and on and on. In the hands of a more reasoned and less polemical writer - Nial Fergusson, in particular, from whom Buchanan borrows all too freely - these ideas would at least have sufficient historical context to make them worthy of reasoned consideration. But Buchanan is a debater by nature and profession, trained to stake out extreme positions, advocate them ceaselessly, and never cede an inch of ground to intelligent counter-arguments. Basically, any book that paints Winston Churchill as one of 20th-century history's greatest villains while casting Hitler merely as a potentially useful bulwark against Communism cannot be considered as anything more than an attempt to garner attention through provocation, albeit skillfully done by Buchanan, whose gift for words could really be put to better uses.
 Brilliant Military/Political History August 5, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
Pat Buchanan's masterwork: CHURCHILL, HITLER AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR is one of the two finest works I have ever read on the 1910-1945 pre-war and wartime period. I have read and studied this period and the related histories of the US, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Austro-Hungary, and felt comfortable in what I "knew" even though I had suspicions of much else. Mr. Buchanan's magnificently researched and footnoted book not only confirmed much that I did know but also provided an abundance of new data and revelations that were both startling and saddening.
The book reads like a novel but is some of the most carefully crafted historical explanation I have ever read and should be required reading in the schools of the countries mentioned (though I'm sure they'd resist the exposure tooth and nail.) I look forward to re-reading this book in the near future and I have recommended it to numerous acquaintances. This is a "must read" book and one that will forever cause you to see the two world wars and their tragic aftermath in a new and, unfortunately, humbling light.
A masterpiece August 4, 2008
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
I never thought I would be writing a favorable review of a book by Pat Buchanan but, as that infamous Catholic theologian Martin Luther once said, "Heresy, so be it. It is still the truth."
Buchanan has written a masterpiece. Built on the foundation set down by the late great British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, Buchanan's book contains much that is new, is meticulously and exhaustively documented, and extremely well written. Whatever else he may or may not be, Buchanan has established himself as a scholar and a major historian of the twentieth century. He of course has also demonstrated great moral and intellectual courage.
Buchanan shows in detail that WW 11, far from being a "good" war, was, as his title says, a truly unnecessary war that resulted from an endless series of bad intelligence, bad policies, bad decisions, and bad moral behavior by the "best and brightest" i.e. the leaders, of all of the major powers over a period of 30 years, from 1914 to 1945. Never was the faith, trust, and fate of so many, so mismanaged by so few.
In 1914, the Kaiser may have briefly dreamed that Germany might become the dominate power in Europe. Hitler was even less ambitious. He dreamed that all Germans in central and Eastern Europe who wished to, would be reunited, and that Germany would dominate Eastern Europe. He probably intended eventually to invade Soviet Russia. We know Stalin certainly intended to eventually invade Eastern Europe and Germany.
Meanwhile the British, French and the Americans meanwhile drove their WW 1 allies, Japan, and Mussolini (who hated Hitler) to Hitler. The line in the sand which the British drew that actually triggered the war, and was prompted by Churchill, was a pledge to defend the corrupt, anti-semetic, military dictatorship of Poland's and it's refusal to even discuss it's two decade subjugation of more than two million ethnic Germans who wanted only to become again part of Germany. Instead Poland lost six and half million dead, and became subjugated to Soviet Russia for fifty years.
Actually the book gets better and better as it moves along and his concluding discussion of the causes, and the results of the war, is absolutely masterful, especially his frank discussion of the holocaust which some still believe was a cause OF WW 11 but which in fact actually caused BY the "good war."
The Unnecessary War will change forever the level of discussion about "The good war", and that is a welcome development and a great advance in the study of twentieth century history for which we can all be grateful to Mr. Buchanan.
I would also recommend Thomas Flemming's THE NEW DEALERS WAR, as a companion book. It deals specifically with FDRs responsibility for the "Good war."
Excellent Book August 4, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
After reading this book, you'll probably realize that everything you ever knew about World War II was wrong. Controversial, to be sure, but it's well documented and presented in a credible and highly readable manner.
Highly recommended.
 Buchanans false image of Hitler in to the "Unnecessary War" August 2, 2008
4 out of 12 found this review helpful
By Prof. Ivo Cyprian Pogonowski,
Buchanans false image of Hitler in to the "Unnecessary War"
Patrick Buchanan presents a false picture of Hitler's rationality and intentions in his book Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War." There are few people that would question the opinion that Hitler was a disgrace for Germany, and brought calamity known as "Gotterdammerung," to German people, by his foolish notions of German superiority, and his lack of education and command experience. Buchanan seems to be unaware of Hitler's Parkinson's Disease, which was contracted after his gas-poisoning on the western front during WWI.
In a German military hospital, after difficult recovery and a bout of blindness, caused by the gas poisoning, Hitler contracted meningitis and suffered an other attack of blindness, and wound up with permanently trembling left hand, as well as, personality change, which made him more cunning than he was earlier. Hitler was from then on worried about his own longevity and during his political career he was a man in a hurry, which fact was well described by professor M. Kamil Dziewanowski in his book "War at Any Price."
Hitler thought that he was "Germany's man of destiny" and that only he could accomplish his conquest of "Lebensraum" for the next German millennium. In fact the essence of the policies of the Hitler's government, at all times, was the implementation of the doctrine of Lebensraum, or "German living space."
The aim of Hitler's government was to size the lands inhabited by others, who were to be enslaved or exterminated and replaced by "racial Germans." These aims were to be realized by a series of wars. Each time Germany was to launch a quick, victorious campaign against w weaker, unprepared, and isolated enemy, whose resources were to help prepare for the next war.
This sequence was to lead to the conquest of the great agricultural lands of the Slavic two-thirds of Europe, and eventually to Germany's hegemony over the entire world. These lands, located mainly in the Soviet Union and Poland, were to become German Lebensraum during Hitler's lifetime. Hitler did not want to hear such warnings as that the American steel making capacity was the largest in the world and that USA, located between two oceans, enjoyed a uniquely strong and advantageous strategic position.
Hitler hoped that the German "Aryan" population would double under his rule, thanks to earlier marriages and larger families, while Germans with hereditary defect were to be sterilized. In fact eventually, Hitler's government kidnapped some one-half million blond children from occupied Poland to be brought up in Germany as "racial Germans."
Hitler believed that the Jewish minority was the main enemy of internal German racial purity and an important focus for consolidation at home in preparation for expansion abroad. Hitler felt that the wars for German Lebensraum represented an inevitable life-and-death struggle between races for the "survival of the fittest." Hitler was willing to let Germany perish in his attempt to implement the doctrine of lebensraum, rather than turn back and be "disgraced forever."
The fact that Hitler lacked education and preparation for the task he set for Germany, under his rule, is evidenced during Hitler's writing in prison in Bavaria of his "Mein Kampf" program. There Hitler was visited and given eight lengthy lectures on by major general, professor of geopolitics, as well as editor of "Zeitschrift fuer Geopolitik," Karl Haushofer (1869-sicide in 1946). The cell mate of Hitler, Rudolf Hess, was a student of Haushofer and he arranged for his visits with Hitler in prison, in order to help Hitler formulate a strategy, for which task Hitler was not prepared either by schooling or experience.
Hauhoffer taught Hitler that the defeat of the Soviet Union was of fundamental importance and that the control of the Soviet and Arab oil would put Germany in position to gradually acquire British and French colonies by blackmail. without fighting a war. "Germanic Britain" was also to be junior partner of continental German-Nazi power. This notion caused Hitler to treat "gently" the British on the battlefield and during escape to England from France in 1940, in comparison to the atrocities ordered by Hitler in Poland beginning in 1939.
Hitler believed that his own intuition and eight lectures by Haushofer, qualified him to be the "Germany's commander in chief." Hitler learned from Haushofer that Germany lost WWI because of insufficient food and manpower and therefore should form a strategically and numerically superior anti-Soviet alliance of Germany, Japan, Poland and other countries in order to destroy the Soviet-Union in a simultaneous attacks from east and west, without having to fight on a western front. For this purpose Hitler formed the "Anti-Comintern Pact" which according to Buchanan, Poland should have joined and thereby "saved the world" from an "Unnecessary War."
Patrick Buchanan seams to be oblivious of all the facts mentioned above, and the real history of Hitler's efforts to persuade Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, which were described among others in the book "Diplomat in Berlin, 1933-1939" by Jozef Lipski, Polish Ambassador to Germany during Hitler's administration. Soviet fear of a two-front war, simultaneously against Germany and Japan, is well described by Pavel Sudoplatov, an NKVD general under Beria, in his book "Special Tasks." The attack on the Soviet Union from east and west was "Hitler's best case scenario" supported by the German military commanders.
Poland was in hopeless situation being located within Hitler's Lebensraum and considered a spoiler of grandiose Lenin's plans for "Communist World Revolution," because of the Polish spectacular victory over the Red Army, in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. At that time the commander of the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky's order of July 4, 1920 was: "To the West, over the corpse of "White" Poland, on the road to the worldwide conflagration."
Hitler's fury against Poland was caused not only by Poland's refusal to join in the German-Japanese attack on the Soviet Union; but also by being an obstacle to German access to the Soviet territory. Poland's resolve to defend itself, actually derailed Hitler's strategy and drove him to betray his Japanese allies who were fighting the Siberian Soviet army since 1937.
Thus, the Japanese considered Hiller a traitor, never to be trusted again, but to be used in the coming Japanese-American war. Japan not only lodged a formal protest in Berlin against the "Ribbentrop - Molotov Pact," but also started cease-fire negotiations with the Soviets after extremely heavy losses in the battle on the Kalka River at Kalkhim-Gol. A Soviet-Japanese cease-fire was signed on September 15, 1939, it was put in force the next day, on Sept. 16th and on September 17th 1939, the Red Army, freed of the hostilities against Japan, joined the Germans in the invasion of Poland.
Note: Books by Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
Jews in Poland - A Documentary History
Hippocrene Books, January 1998; 432 pages
ISBN: 0781806046
Poland - An Illustrated History
Hippocrene Books (2000 - First Printing; 2003 - Second Printing; 2008 - Third Printing);
282 pages
ISBN: 0-7818-0757-3
Poland - A Historical Atlas
Hippocrene Books, New York 1987 - First Printing; 1988 -Third Printing;
320 pages
ISBN: 0-87052-282-5
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