World War II (a very bad idea)

In a nutshell: I think most of us grew up believing that Chamberlain was mistaken to try to appease Hitler (and so avoid WWII). Here I explore the idea that the only mistake was that he failed.


I was born in February 1945, just before the end of WWII. I grew up believing that to be British was best, that the Germans were pretty dodgy, the Japanese unspeakable, and above all that WWII was not just inevitable, but right, and we were on the side of the righteous.

(Time passed. Nothing in my education or experience dispelled the war mythology, though I am pleased to say that I discovered that both the Germans and the Japanese are exceedingly meritorious. )

WWII is taken as an example of how important it is to stand up to tyranny - and how bad it is to try and appease an aggressor. In recent times Saddam Hussein was explicitly described as another Hitler. "Just like we did with Hitler, we have to do the necessary, and do it now, and certainly we can't appease him because it will just get worse". The Balkans have provided other examples.

These supposed parallels, and how to deal with them, should set alarm bells ringing.

WWII did not have to happen. It was not a good thing. As alternatives go, it was probably the worst possible thing. Appeasement was an option. A very good option. Of course, History has taught us that Any Attempt At Appeasement Was A Very Bad Thing. Chamberlain with his "piece of white paper" has been held up to ridicule ever since.

Chamberlain returned from Munich on 30th September 1938.He had attempted to negotiate a way around the tensions of the time. He felt he had succeeded and described his achievement as "Peace in our time". It is generally not known, now, that this agreement, though short lived, was considered by many to be a notable coup and was hailed, as such, internationally.

OK. So this is a watershed moment with two possible outcomes. Outcome number 1: Appeasement succeeds and WWII is avoided. Outcome number 2: Appeasement fails and WWII results.

Well, we know it was number 2. That's history. But it's also odd. What's odd about it is the stuff about it being good, right, inevitable and the way to deal with bullies. But what I find even stranger is that the appeasement alternative was deemed Very Bad. Does this stand up to any kind of scrutiny? My thesis is that appeasement, probably at any cost, would have left the world in much better shape than WWII.

Before I begin, I want to be completely clear that this post is not about rehabilitating Hitler. He was undoubtedly a nasty bit of work and his aspirations deeply suspect (actually the same could be said about Churchill, but that will be explored elsewhere). I am not a neo-Nazi. I'm not even a pacifist. OK, with that out of the way, let's move on.


How much harm can one man do?

In this scenario, appeasement works and Hitler is left to do what he wants to do. How much harm can he do? I'm sure the answer is "quite a lot". But I'm comparing scenarios. The issue is not that Hitler would not have done harm if left to get on with it. The issue is how much harm, relative to that actually caused during WWII.

Hitler was born in 1889. By 1960, say, he would have been 71 years old. He was not a healthy man, so he might well have been dead by then. He had political rivals who may have usurped him (don't forget that he did come to power by democratic means). He may have been assassinated. So from 1938 we're looking at perhaps 22 years worth of his reign, probably much less.

Rather than try and quantify how costly it might have been to leave Hitler in place, I'm going to take the simpler course and show, instead, how costly WWII was in so many ways. A cost in money, materials and life so huge that it is hard to believe that any despot could do worse.

How much harm did WWII do?


Material destruction

In 2008 money terms, the monetary cost of WWII was about 6 trillion dollars ($6,000,000,000,000). For comparison purposes, that would meet the full cost of running Britain's National Health Service, with its 1.3 million salaried employees, for the next 40 years, without having to raise a penny in taxes! Or enough to give every man, woman and child on the planet $1,000.

The material destruction beggars belief. The number of ships sunk was in the region of 4,500. Something like 20,000 Spitfires were destroyed and 12,000 heavy bombers. Entire cities like Dresden and Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disappeared. Over one million homes were destroyed in London, another 800,000 in other parts of the UK.

In today's money a Spitfire would have cost maybe £250,000, so for every four destroyed we could make a bonfire of £1,000,000. A bomber would have cost maybe a million, so we are looking at 12 billion there. Who paid? Well our parents of course, but you and me too (oh yes, hang on to your hat, war debt was still being paid off in 2006!). The government used tax revenues, or debt, or simply printed money to fund the immediate costs, but in the end it was we who paid.

Now I know that some people think that though war is a bad thing, it does benefit the economy. Actually this is codswallop. If you believe that, then why don't I come around to your place and bash your windows in? You could return the favour and bash mine in. Somehow this destruction will help us both. Err, not really.

People killed

People killed? Well, something like 70 million in all, and of those 50 million were civilians. For each person killed, many other lives would have been changed forever - widows, orphans, aged parents who did not expect to outlive their children.


The holocaust

Almost six million Jews died in various extermination camps during the war. Would this have been different had the war not started? For hundreds of years Jews were subject to various forms of discrimination and harassment in Europe, and it is clear that they had a rough time in Germany and Austria before the war - e.g. Kristal Nacht in 1938.

However, whatever governments or groups get up to in civilian times, I believe that the position is much worse during a time of war. Then the prevailing administration can award itself draconian powers, can suppress (or make) all the news it wants to, can arrest and hold people without trial and so on - all in the name of national security.

I don't think it is any accident that the holocaust happened during WWII, and personally believe that nothing like it could have happened under civilian jurisdiction, no matter how unpleasant daily life may have been.


Creation of the State of Israel

Israel was created as a state in 1948. Would this have happened without WWII in general and the Holocaust in particular? I think it is unlikely, though the history of the region is complicated (Ottoman Empire, Palestine, British Mandate etc). If I am right the tensions in the Middle East today can be seen as a particularly harmful consequence of WWII and its aftermath.


Centralisation of power (and its retention)

This is one of those consequences that I believe has been very bad indeed, though it probably goes unnoticed by most people. Government gets Big during wars and essentially wants to run everything and everyone. If you are philosophically inclined towards laisser faire and small government, which I am, then this is a bad thing.

A state of war meant that the UK government was free to pull together resources as it saw fit - either during the war itself (e.g. the de facto nationalisation of the rail network by the Railway Executive Committee, The Ministry of Food being absorbed into the Ministry of Agriculture and the subsequent control of both the supply and price of food in the form of rationing), or in the immediate aftermath (e.g. Bank of England nationalised in 1946, NHS created in 1948).

Bad though this is during a time of war, it is the nature of big government not to let itself get small and many powers were retained long after the war ended, right through to modern times. Even today, in England, four pounds in every ten is spent by the government (and it tends not to spend that money very wisely). That is an enormous drag on the economy.


Agriculture

This follows on from the previous section and serves I hope to show how wide ranging the consequences of centralised power can be. The UK government, in common with others in Europe, got quite twitchy about food production during the war. It's not clear why, since there was not much privation during the war, and that that there was tended to be caused by malice or incompetence (e.g. food shortages in Holland and Jersey).

Sadly this preoccupation did not end with the war and governments have made it their business to push agriculture very hard. This has led to exponential growth in the use of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, as well as mechanisation of farming. To what end? Well, massive food surpluses, an insidious system of subsidies that encourage the above and huge environmental degradation, as well as trade barriers that have left the 3rd world unable to sell into Europe. It has also led, paradoxically, to a flight from farms so that now many farmers live alone and the suicide rate among farmers is twice that of other workers.

There is much more that could be said, but not here. I include the above just to try and show the distortions that I think can be traced to a war time mindset, that persist long after the war is over.


The war with Japan

Would there have been a Pearl Harbour without the war in Europe? Difficult to say. There were pacts between Germany and Japan in 1936 and 1938, and in 1942 after Pearl Harbour. My guess is that having an ally like Germany which was already at war, and doing quite well at it, increased their propensity to attack America.


The Cold War

Rather a huge topic. To me it seems that the Allies were at best uneasy bedfellows. Their treaties masked huge ideological and political differences. After the war there seems to have been a bit of a land grab by all the victors, though the Potsdam Conference in 1945 pretty well presaged it. Notably France and Poland were not invited to attend.


Given that the Cold War could easily have become WWIII this might have been 'the' catestrophic consequence of WWII. Even in the absence of such, the Cold War nevertheless changed the world - Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Balkans etc etc etc).


Although the Cold War did not have the material destruction of WWII, it cost all of us plenty - those pretty little things in the photograph are "mothballed" jet fighters costing 10s of millions each. They are fully functional, but it is unlikely that they will ever be used again. I really can't get a grip on the cost but it was, of course, financed by (you guessed it) tax, debt and by printing money, i.e. inflation. Whatever this huge sum is, it was diverted from its alternative use of civilian prosperity.


The rest

This is a partial list of things (good, bad or just interesting) that were materially affected by WWII:

• Advent of the atomic age (and indeed the first hostile use of atomic weapons)


• A huge acceleration of technological development (e.g. biplanes at the start of the war and jet planes by the end)


• Mobility and mass migrations of populations


• Destabilisation of Middle East


• Growth of state welfare programmes in Western Democracies


• Collapse of the British Empire


• Unsustainable industry and agriculture


• Massive increase in pollution of all sorts


• Stimulation of consumerism to mop up surplus industrial capacity


• Move away from rail and ship to road and air

How much harm can one man do? (Take 2)

I said it was easier to start by looking at the harm we already know WWII did - either directly, or by subsequent social and political change. I felt that by the time we got here it should be a no-brainer. If Hitler had been active up to say 1960, as I suggested, then for him to have equalled the harmfulness of WWII, he would have had to kill more than 3,000,000 people a year, every year, and destroy resources at the rate of $300 billion a year, every year. And he would have had to do this in the context of a civilian regime, not a war-time one.

I personally don't think he could have achieved this. Now I guess you either agree with this or you don't. It can be challenged, but it stands up to the challenge pretty well.

For example you might cite the number of people that Stalin killed; he is probably the most convincing contender. At the top end the estimates would have us believe that he killed 2 out of 3 in Russia, but that seems highly unlikely. Many estimates settle at the 20 million level. However, these include not just murders, but death through incompetence too - such as mass starvation following collectivisation, poor conditions in labour camps and so on. The lowest estimate I found, for actual state executions, was 650,000.

Pol Pot, the lunatic who ruled Cambodia in the 70s is credited with the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians in the infamous "killing fields".

The Rwandan massacres and reprisal killings accounted for something like 800,000 deaths, mostly in 1994.

The awful thing about this is that by "standing up to tyranny", "fighting for freedom" and "defending democracy" we seem to have done ourselves much more immediate and long term harm than if we had not stood up to tyranny, fought for freedom or defended democracy. It reminds me of a cold war slogan, popular in America: "Better dead than Red". That was kind of catchy until someone put up the alternative: "Better Red than dead". The choice of most I suspect.

The imponderables

There are many scenarios that I haven't explored, and can't do justice here. For example, suppose we had done what I suggest, and simply done nothing against Hitler.

Well, maybe he would have stopped after he had addressed what he (and the German people, and at least some politicians in Britain and France) believed were the injustices inherent in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI.

What if he had continued? Invaded various western European countries, or Russia. Well I never said that WWII could be avoided in all circumstances - just that we would have been much better off if it could have been avoided. If it happened, then it happened and those countries were invaded anyway.

It is interesting to speculate on the course of the war if Britain had remained neutral. Would he have invaded? Actually this is not likely; he regarded Britain, at that time, more as a friend than foe. But if he had? Well, then I guess that for a period of some decades the language of administration in Britain would have been German rather than English.

What about the fate of British Jews? This is an important and difficult question. I personally have no doubt that the Jews in Europe did far worse during a time of Total War than otherwise. But that may not have applied everywhere.

My conclusions

I believe that Chamberlain was right to try and appease Hitler and that the failure to do so has cost all of us an unimaginable amount in direct suffering and loss of prosperity.

Worse, I believe that a self-serving myth has arisen around this, namely that it is always worth "fighting for democracy / freedom / civilisation / you name it". This allows governments to justify their intervention in theatres like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. The latter provides perhaps the most contemporary parallel to my arguments above. Saddam Hussein was not a nice man, but as time passes it seems more and more that the intervention has been a worse alternative for all parties than leaving him alone.

(Sources: I'm a lazy SOB, so I'm not going to spend half this life or any other trawling through original material with a handlens looking for "the truth" (does it exist?). However, I don't just grab the first handy fact off the first handy website just because it suits my argument. Most of my numbers come from Wiki or .gov websites. I believe that I am not an order of magnitude out on any of them)