Blogs For Victory

Back in 1908 G K Chesterton wrote a book called Orthodoxy in which he explained his general views but the opening of it has always stuck with me:

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.

He went on to discuss the main bee in his bonnet on this – people who say they believe in themselves, pointing out that the madman is the most self-confident person. But this is applicable to any of the cynical maxims our worldly people believe that aren’t true. Another one – this one more relevant post-WWII – is that “you must not appease a tyrant”.

This is considered self-evidently true based on the fact that the British government – led, in turns, by Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – tried to appease Hitler and the final result was World War Two. Aha!, say our Worldly Experts, the key, then, is to never appease. Never let aggression stand. Go right after those tyrants!

Except, of course, they’re full of it.

As it turns out, I would actually support a general American crusade against evil in the world. I would support raising an American military of 30 millions equipped with the most deadly weapons we can devise to drive through the world killing every last tyrant, murderer, liar and thief we could find. I would then write it in stone on mountains all over the world – in letters carved ten feet deep and towering a hundred feet high – that if anyone in the world set out to do what the dead evil tried, we will be back to kill them all over again. It would be a long, bloody and expensive war but when it was done, all the real evildoers being dead, we could relax in a Long Peace, maybe lasting for centuries before people forgot and started it all happening again.

But that isn’t what anyone wants. I might be the sole person on Earth who can contemplate such a thing. But that doesn’t make me wrong. It just makes me someone who has thought the matter all the way through.

Those who run our world and tell us we must not appease and must not deal with tyrants and so forth are, however, just lying. They’ll appease and deal all they want – when it suits them. And when it suits them to have us oppose the aggressor/tyrant, they’ll have us do so. But only half-hearted. Not all the way! We must stand up to Putin! But, no, not to the point where we’re actually harming him! Its like when we went to war against Terrorism in 2001 but refused to fight the actual Terrorists (you know, the Mullahs in Tehran). All they’re doing, really, is coming up with rationalizations for a policy which profits them the most. And, right now, the policy they want the most is continued war in Ukraine so they can keep harping on the nonsense idea that Trump is somehow Putin’s puppet and his peace deal is worse than Chamberlain at Munich.

Of course, Chamberlain at Munich wasn’t actually Chamberlain at Munich.

The official word we have about Munich is that a craven and stupid Chamberlain sold out the Czechs in the vain hope that it would buy Hitler off and thus avoid a war. The subtext being that Chamberlain should have stood firm and gone to war for the Czechs in 1938.

This is an arguable point – there was much to commend itself in the idea of fighting Nazi Germany in 1938. In hindsight, of course, we can really believe that had this happened, the world would have ended up in a much better place in later years. And it might have – but we don’t know. All we know is what happened. In the event, the Czechs, themselves, refused to fight. They blame the Brits and the French for not fighting but that is, well, bizarre. The choice to fight or not fight was the Czechs. They had a very good army and their defenses in the Sudetenland were formidable. Once the guns went off, no way to know how things might have turned out…lots of people would have loved to see Hitler taken down a notch and if the Czechs had stood tall, they might have found some combat allies. In no event would fighting have made them worse off as surrender merely ensured seven years of Nazi occupation followed by forty six years of Soviet domination.

But here’s the real crux of the matter – if it was morally required to fight Hitler’s regime in 1938 then it was equally morally required to fight Stalin’s regime. Between the two of them, in 1938, there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference. Hitler’s regime went on to plumb the depths of depravity with the Holocaust, but that didn’t start until after WWII began and wasn’t fully implemented until 1942. We can’t demand people at the time know the future – especially something as unimaginable in 1938 as Auschwitz. You can’t, that is, claim that a later event requires prior action. All we can do for 1938 is look at 1938 and see what might be best given what was known at the time.

The first thing to remember about 1938 is that it was just twenty years since the end of World War One. A million Brits had been killed in that war. France had lost more than a million. Nobody in either country wanted a resumption of that. And British and French intelligence had determined, very firmly, that hardly anyone in Germany wanted a war, either. After all, the Krauts had lost nearly two million…and lost the war! The only thing the leaders of the world could see resulting from a war was another slogging match with piles of corpses and victory bought so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat. Once again – remember! – you do not know about the Holocaust. It hasn’t happened. Hitler’s regime is no more evil than Stalin’s and nobody is demanding war to the death against Stalin. The British, especially, realized how precarious their position was…they were still massively in debt from the war, but their economy was just starting to recover from the depth of the Depression…and they still ruled a quarter of the globe and their Navy was the largest in the world. Another twenty years of peace and the economic ship would be righted…and British global dominance would continue. Go into another World War? Total bankruptcy even if victorious…the Empire dissolved simply for lack of resources to hold it. The end of Britain’s dominant position in the world.

So, sure, who gives a darn about the Sudetenland? That is, who cares about a landlocked nation in the center of Europe that you can’t render direct aid to even if you wanted to? If selling it out got you twenty more years of peace (and British intelligence was appraised of the growing opposition to Hitler in the military plus Germany’s increasingly difficult financial situation as Hitler’s rearmament and public works programs strained the German economy) and the chance that the Hitler regime fades away before anything bad happens? Of course you do that.

But then back come the people who live by cynical maxims – but look at what happened! Europe overrun! War lasting for years! Total destruction of the Continent! All of it could have been stopped if Chamberlain had told Hitler to go jump in a lake at Munich!

Maybe. Maybe not. Once again: we just don’t know what might have happened. We can only know what happened. And, as I said, there was a good argument to fight Hitler in 1938. But there was also a good argument not to: that is, his regime was on shaky ground financially and the Anglo-French alliance was massively more powerful than Germany, even if allied with Italy and Japan. We really condemn Chamberlain before the bar of history not because he appeased at Munich, but because in six weeks two years later Germany overran western Europe. That is, had Hitler not been able to take Paris, then Chamberlain’s memory would tend towards blessed rather than reviled – he would be remembered as the man who rearmed Britain and got her ready for WWII (the bottom line is that the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, the Lancaster bomber and the Crusader/ Valentine tanks were all products of Chamberlain’s government). And here’s the real kicker – the reason you can’t be too sure about any counter-factual argument – the reason Hitler was able to conquer western Europe in six weeks was a simple (if quite grand) command failure of the French army.

We all know the great German breakthrough at Sedan in May of 1940 – but what most people gloss over (if they even know about it) is the fact that the French had a complete armored division just south of Sedan, perfectly positioned to pinch off that German breakthrough and make mincemeat of the entire German plan. The whole of Manstein’s famous plan was based around a quick breakthrough and a dash to the sea to spread panic among the Anglo-French military organism. If the Germans didn’t breakthrough – and quickly! – then the whole thing would fall apart as the numerically superior and higher quality Anglo-French force redeployed to stop and then roll back the German effort. And what did the French do with their armored division south of Sedan? They dispersed among the infantry forces…blowing their perfect opportunity. This was compounded in following days as a whole series of French errors messed up any chance of a credible response…but even those failures were predicated upon the first.

And that was it. One terrible mistake. Don’t think it’s silly – it has happened plenty of times before. The Austrians at Austerlitz and the Prussians at Jena similarly made mistakes which allowed Napoleon to wipe them out quickly…almost effortlessly, it seems in hindsight. Even though, combined, their armies were larger than Napoleon’s. Take away the mistakes and the Campaign of 1805 would have gone a lot differently. So, too, the Campaign of 1940.

The reality is that the blitzkrieg model of warfare only works if your enemy sort of walks into it – does things which allow you to waltz on through their lines and raise havoc in their rear areas. It worked quite spectacularly in 1940…and thus sowed the seeds of Germany’s defeat because those Krauts really thought they had something there. That is, they could destroy anyone with a combination of tanks and close air support. They ignored their luck at Sedan, plus ignored that, at the end of the day, they sent almost their entire armored force and most of their air force against one small sector of the French line and then the French command pretty much did exactly what the Germans needed to make the gamble pay. That might happen again – but it almost certainly won’t. And for the Germans, it never happened again. Their hubris led them find themselves sixteen months later sitting outside Moscow and Leningrad without the slightest clue what to do next.

What is the reality? That a well managed defense still has all the advantage. The Germans, themselves, showed that – and right at the end of the war. At the Battle of Seelow Heights in April of 1945, the Germans were outnumbered ten to one and they still held the Russians for three solid days…and if the Germans had had anything left to deploy, the Russian attack would have failed.

As it relates to current events, the Russians tried to do a blitzkrieg in Ukraine and after making some advances, found themselves unable to move further save by lengthy and costly siege operations against an alert and well-commanded enemy. What happened in February of 2022 is what was most likely to happened in May of 1940 – save for some incredible stroke of luck. The Germans got theirs. The Russians didn’t. But, on the other hand, it also works the other way – the Ukrainians also lack the power to crush the Russians absent some incredible stroke of luck. The only way either side can triumph is to somehow bring overwhelming force to the crisis point faster than the other side and move reinforcements there. Given general Russian incompetence it is unlikely that Russia can do this, and given Ukraine’s inferior manpower it is unlikely they can as well.

They can keep killing each other! And given Russia’s superior manpower if Putin can hold his people to it long enough, eventually Ukraine would be totally defeated for simple lack of soldiers to hold the line. But this is a project of years – and the side on the offensive is going to lose more dead than the defenders. And it is a massive role of the dice for Putin to even try. We can’t bet on a miracle – we can only count on cold, hard facts. And the cold, hard facts say this war is a stalemate and the result cannot be altered by the forces on the ground…only the intervention of a new, third power Army can alter the equation…and no third power wants to jump in here. We don’t. The Europeans don’t. So, it is time for peace…and, yes, a peace which allows Putin to keep his ill-gotten gains.

Which is not, by the way, outside of human experience. In fact, it is the more common result of warfare. The French lacked the power in 1871 to expel the Germans from France…and so they made a peace where they surrendered Alsace to Germany. It was bad. Unfair. Lousy. But what can you do? You either can do a thing, or you can’t. The French couldn’t beat the Germans that year. Continued fighting would only result in more dead with no alternation in France’s favor…and a solid chance it would get worse for them. Swallow the pride, make the deal. So, too, with Ukraine.

And it isn’t despicable appeasement – it is just diplomacy. We acknowledge Russia’s rule in the Donbas (Ukraine does, too) in return for a cessation of hostilities and a chance for Ukraine to rebuild herself economically and militarily. In other words, for a chance – if really desired – to alter today’s outcome at some future date. If its that important to them – I suspect it isn’t as the lands Putin occupies are mostly inhabited by ethnic Russians and even the most ardent Ukrainian nationalist is not seriously going to want to war on Russia to take in Russians as fellow citizens. This is all that Trump is doing – trying to wrap up Putin’s stupid war and allow the world to move on without more killing.