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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:  116 reviews
Sales Rank: 2154
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
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| Customer Reviews:
 Great book to read November 16, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have been reading about the war and W.S.Churchill for some 30 years and I must say this is one of the most facinating book. It really shows the different options Britain had before the start of the second world war. I could not put it down.
 Buchanan: No Anglophile November 16, 2008
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
Patrick J. Buchanan's book "The Unnecessary War", Proports to shed new light on the folly of British appeasement and blunder leading up to World War II. Beginning with Churchill's appointment of First Lord of the Admiralty during the Great War and eventual leadership of the British government during the second world war. Buchanan asserts that Churchill was a duplicitous war hungry politician. What is earth shattering about that? Historians with a greater pedigree than Buchanan have written extensively on Churchill and his manipulations. That Churchill was playing "Realpolitik" with the leaders of Europe and America are well documented. What I found to be somewhat shocking is Buchanan's near apology for Hitler and the terrors he unleashed. Buchanan states that Hitler was badly mistreated on the diplomatic front by the western powers and all he wanted was "Living space" for his poor Germanic peoples. Buchanan comes close to blaming Great Britian and the allied powers for forcing Hitler into war. Revisionist excrement. The book is repleat with repetition of marginal points of fact stated in previous chapters. Reagan-esque jingo of hate against "The Evil Empire" burble and bubble to the surface as it relates to "Uncle Joe" Stalin and the USSR. Yawn. What would have been worth the price of the print would have been a look into the war crimes of American Industry and banking in supporting Nazi Germany. There is plenty "Unnecessary" about this book.
 absolutely and totally insane November 10, 2008
4 out of 15 found this review helpful
This book is essentially the old pro-axis view of the world circia 1940. It adopts the German arguments of the 1930s that the priority of the British should be to preserve their empire while giving germany a free hand in europe. That a world war with germany would "doom" the British empire. Why anyone would choose to make these particular highly discredited arguments now is beyond comprehension.
The historical arguments made in the book are basically naive (being generious) garbage. He proposes total appeasement of Germany, Japan and Italy in the run-up to the second world war. And he is just shy of suggesting a British-German alliance against the soviet union.
The root problem with all this nonsense is you have believe that the axis countries in world war 2 had limited satisfiable moral objectives. Buchanan sees it somehow but I sure don't.
The material on the first world war is even worse. The author is basically unfailiar with events, personalties and basic history of the era. The British-German alliance was destroyed not by British actions, it was destroyed by the combination of the German's building the high seas fleet and invading belgium. Its been fundemental to british policy for centuries that no hostile power with a large navy will be allowed to dominate the belgian/neartherlands coast.
This book should have never been written. Its crazy-talk.
 Churchill, the adventurer, Hitler, the ideologist November 6, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
In this remarkable book about the origins and consequences of the great wars of the 20th century, Buchanan shows how the British Empire exhausted itself in two politically unjustifiable conflicts with the German Reich until Europe lay in ruins, with its eastern half enslaved by the Soviets and its western half leased out to the Americans. He describes, primarily by means of quotations, the state of mind of the persons strutting the international stage during that tumultuous period, centering on what went on in Britain.
First and foremost among these actors, he concentrates on Winston Churchill, who, early into the frightening game, had declared: "A European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and in the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors".
Why such a level-headed man, only a decade later, should go all out to bring about such a war and to maintain it for 30 years cannot be explained rationally and rather belongs to the domain of psychiatry - for the catholic scholar Buchanan it is perhaps a question of ethics as well.
In the eyes of Buchanan, Churchill was a man without moral restraints (as he was for many contemporaries), acting entirely on the spur of the moment who would have no qualms doing precisely that of which he accused his adversaries, a man like Shakespeare's Richard III who said: "Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, deceive more slyly than Ulysses did, and, like a Simon, take another Troy". At the end of his political career, he had, indeed managed to take another Troy, but ruined the British Empire in doing so; his country was relegated into the backrow of international powers, right next to its former enemy.
As opposed to that, Buchanan holds the sins of the German side against England to be rather venial citing many direct sources, but also the comments of famous historians like Keegan, Taylor or Kennan to prove his point. He underscores that in both of the Great Wars the German side went out of its way to avoid conflict with Britain, only to be rejected again and again, because London was loath to let go of the doctrine of "divide and reign" even though, in an expanding world,it was no longer applicable.
In order to appreciate the inertia of such political ideas, we can get a clue from Robert Vansittart - whom Buchanan rather neglects - in 1939 permanent head of the British Foreign Office, later to become chief of the propaganda machine. On the first page of a collection of articles and speeches from WW2, "Bones of Contention", Vansittart declares that, for him, the problem of Germany was "the problem of preventing her from gaining again in peace the victory she could not gain at war", and further along in the book he traces the origins of this antagonistic attitude "not to Adolf, but to Friedrich and Wilhelm".
Thus, what made Germany "utterly inexcusable" for Vansittart was the mere fact that the country existed at all and this made her the legitimate target of Britain's European policy - Germany was damned if she went to war, and damned if she did not.
In connection with WW2, the British assessment of Hitler is obviously a key issue for Buchanan. He tells us that many members of the political establishment, in the 1920s and 1930s, came to realise the stupidity and injustice of the document signed at Versailles which had upset the balance of Europe, and worse; the outcome was a number of agreements with Hitler which clearly ran against the spirit and the letter of Versailles, not to mention later agreements, such as Stresa.
One of the decisive issues of this period is, obviously the fate of Czechoslovakia which became critical when Germany, in the autumn of 1938, regained those areas that were largely inhabited by Germans. Six months after Munich, the Germans occupied what was left of the country and made it a protectorate. Buchanan spends a great deal of time on the discussion of the events that caused this move. He shows how complicated the situation of the country had become once the ethnic Germans had gained their independence: now the other parts of this artificial construct claimed equal rights. The Slovaks wanted a state of their own (they got it 50 years later). West-Ruthenia - in case anybody still remembers where it lay, after 1945, it eventually ended up as part of the Soviet union - wanted and obtained union with Hungary. The authoritarian government in Warsaw claimed the Teschen industrial area. Seeing such a chaotic situation arise without much interference from Berlin, the Germans seized the opportunity and occupied the land, thus keeping it completely out of the turmoil of WW2, oppressed, yes, but an island of peace in a continent at war. The other neighbours grabbed the leftovers.
The consequences of these events are described in a chapter entitled "A fatal blunder". In line with other historians, Buchanan critcises the British decision to press a guarantee upon Warsaw to bolster that country's position in the ongoing negotiations with Germany about Danzig and the corridor. Such a guarantee had no real substance, because London could, in no way, protect Poland, but in doing so, Britain tied her hands and gave to the Poles the power to decide about peace or a new war in Europe. Poland promptly overplayed her hand
The further development of WW2 allows Buchanan to follow Churchill's incoherent actions, taking as an example the British Prime Minister's vacillating attitude towards Stalin and the Soviet Union; the reader is left with the choice between almost criminal opportunism and unbelievable political blindness. Churchill had carried out his aim to "set Europe on fire" in order to beat his adversary, he sat among the victors at Potsdam, but he had to acknowledge at Fulton, a year later, that there had been a minor slip-up, now that it was no longer an admiring German dictator who stood on the other side of the North Sea, but the unscrupulous leader of a world power which the western Allies had nurtured in order not to leave continental Europe under the influence of a single nation. A Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.
The conservative thinker Buchanan, at the end of his book, sees the present United States in a position quite similar to Britain's 100 years earlier: over-extended in military and economic terms, with its limited means squandered all over the globe. The reader cannot help but feel that the fate of the US may be decided in Afghanistan - the third nation, after Britain and the Soviet Union, to be defeated in the land beyond the Khyber pass.
A great read regardless of your leanings October 13, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Don't let the authors name deter you. This is not a conservative manifesto. Readers from any political background have much to gain.
This book is one of the better books I have read. Very detailded, yet written in a way that it reads almost like a novel. You don't get drowned in numbers or names, rather you get real insight into the situations and people responsible (intentionaly and unintentionaly) behind the world wars. I ecspecially like how it doesn't paint the people so black and white as many histories do; Buchanan gives the reader reasons why they acted as they did, and why, at the time, they went against thew alternatives.
Its a scary reminder of what can happen in a state of panic, and how a crisis can lead to far worse if we don't stop and think before making a rash move.
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