The Long View 2007-07-30: Summer Schedule, Beginning with John Lukacs

This isn’t one of John’s usual blog posts. It ends up something like a mini-book review of Five Days in London: May 1940 [Amazon link]. John approached the book as an opportunity for historical counterfactual, using the notes from the British Inner Cabinet.

One of the things I took away from this book is the idea that, if you must write “Hitler Wins” stories, those few days around Dunkirk are by far the best point of departure. Niall Ferguson’s argument for Alternative History as a tool of historiography is really very narrow: it works best when it focuses on the paper trail left by decision-makers in the context of a single important decision. Those meetings of Churchill’s cabinet certainly meet those criteria. A change not of fact, but of will, would have created an alternative future that is in fact somewhat predictable. The hypothesis of a German invasion is unnecessary. Neither is a Fascist Britain: Churchill frightened his colleagues with the specter of Prime Minister Mosley, but in fact Lloyd George would have made a plausible British Petain.

Summer Schedule, Beginning with John Lukacs

For almost the first time since the Web appeared, I am without access to it for most of the day.

For the next few weeks, I am working on a special project (special as in “Special Olympics” rather than “secret”) that involves working away from my PC, and indeed without immediate access to any computer. Blogging is for people with the ability to surf the Web and take note of interesting items here and there. For the upcoming period, I can use my computer for a little while in the mornings and evenings, but I don’t have time to read online or compile links as I normally would.

Still, rather than leave the blog inactive until the second half of August, I will continue making comments. Indeed, this caesura gives me the opportunity to focus on a few matters that otherwise might have been drowned out by the flow of Internet-mediated events.

For instance, as I mentioned previously in this space, I just finished reading John Lukacs brief history Five Days in London: May 1940 [Amazon link]. It’s a very Rankean exercise: Lukacs has gone over the records of the British Inner Cabinet at the time of Dunkirk at the end of May in 1940. The French military situation had become unsustainable by then; that was the point when, in the normal course of things, you would expect the British to be talking about seeking terms from the Germans.

Lukacs’s main point is that, very elliptically, they did. In the five-man War Cabinet, the chief figures were Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, and of course the newly elevated Prime Minister Churchill. Contrary to what many people in Britain supposed at the time, Chamberlain supported Churchill on almost everything. The advocate for negotiation was Halifax, the foreign minister. Halifax was by no means an appeaser, or at least he was not after the beginning of the war. However, he did suggest, with increasing insistence, that it would be wise to sound out Mussolini. What makes this interesting as documentary history is that a great deal of interpretation is needed to figure out just what Halifax wanted to sound out the Italians about.

In later years, Halifax said that all he was interested in was trying to ensure that the Italians stayed out of the war. Lukacs, though, makes a good argument that it was always clear that Mussolini, if officially approached, was to act as an intermediary with the Germans. Halifax, with the cabinet’s authorization, did hold some conversations with the senior Italian representative in Britain at the time. His reports on the talks are miracles of indirection, all subjunctives and head verbs, with scarcely a non-abstract noun to be seen.

At least in Lukacs’s telling, Churchill never wanted any part of this, but he was a new prime minister, and in a National (Tory-plus-Labour-plus-Liberal) Government to boot. He thought, with reason, that if he had just told Halifax in the first instance not to pursue the idea of negotiations, that Halifax might have resigned from the government. At that time, the general population did not appreciate quite how dire the military situation was. The collapse of the National Government could have led to a collapse of the consensus for continuing the war.

None of this is altogether news, though there were several things that I was surprised to learn. It seems that Churchill actually did invite Lloyd George to join the cabinet at about this time (the Outer Cabinet, if I understand the situation correctly, with George as Minister of Agriculture). By this point, Lloyd George really was an appeaser; or at any rate, a pro-German. Lukacs says that Churchill, despite his rhetoric, really was making preparations for a complete collapse. He would not have made peace with Germany, Lloyd George was recognized by all, including the Germans, as a reasonable candidate for that role.

One of the things I took away from this book is the idea that, if you must write “Hitler Wins” stories, those few days around Dunkirk are by far the best point of departure. Niall Ferguson’s argument for Alternative History as a tool of historiography is really very narrow: it works best when it focuses on the paper trail left by decision-makers in the context of a single important decision. Those meetings of Churchill’s cabinet certainly meet those criteria. A change not of fact, but of will, would have created an alternative future that is in fact somewhat predictable. The hypothesis of a German invasion is unnecessary. Neither is a Fascist Britain: Churchill frightened his colleagues with the specter of Prime Minister Mosley, but in fact Lloyd George would have made a plausible British Petain.

All very entertaining, but here’s a typical Lukacs jaw-dropper for you: At one point, he asserts that the Left was actually very weak in Europe during the 1930s. The real struggle was between two Rights: the snazzy, modern, Art Deco Right of Hitler and Mussolini, or the Frock-Coat Reactionary Right of people like Churchill. This is non-obvious, but not necessarily ridiculous.

Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly

Why post old articles?

Who was John J. Reilly?

All of John's posts here

An archive of John's site

Support the Long View re-posting project by downloading Brave browser. With Both Hands is a verified Brave publisher, you can leave me a tip too!