Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Niall Ferguson
have suggested as much, and there were certainly influential voices urging such a deal. Yet the evidence indicates clearly that Hitler was insincere in his offers. From 1936 onwards, he was bent on the destruction of British power; and only the timing of his strike was left to be decided. An equally plausible counterfactual would have been a British pre-emptive strike in 1939 - over Poland, perhaps. This, of course, was what Churchill advocated. But such a course of action at the time seemed fraught with peril, not least because of British military unpreparedness and the conclusion, shortly before the partition of Poland, of Hitler’s pact with the Russian government.
What of the alternative hypothesis - that any sort of resistance to German power was futile? Certainly, the costs of continued fighting against the occupation were higher than in areas (such as the Channel Islands) where the populations simply acquiesced. On the other hand, the ‘Free English Government’ set up by Churchill and Eden on the other side of the Atlantic enjoyed considerable popular support. Thousands of young men answered their appeal to fight on, no matter what the costs. Few had military experience, much less proper equipment; but they were able to maintain a persistent guerrilla war against the occupiers. The numbers of hostages shot in reprisals ran into thousands. Nevertheless, the exiled Churchill remained convinced that only such sustained resistance could secure him the support of the American Viceroy and his officials. There, in the neo-classical surroundings of the Northern capital, New York, Churchill urged America to mobilise for total war.
Yet what was in it for Roosevelt, who had finally become the North’s prime minister at the third attempt? There was - or seemed to be - a legitimate government in England. A minor princeling from the House of Saxe-Coburg had been installed in the Stuarts’ place as ‘Edward VII’. Lloyd George had accepted the post of prime minister and had recruited a number of other senior politicians into his Cabinet including Samuel Hoare and R. A. Butler. True, this government was very clearly subordinate to the occupying authorities - the military under General von Brauchitsch and, more importantly, the senior SS officer in Britain, whose first act on arriving in Britain had been to take into ‘protective custody’ over 2,000 political suspect people listed in his notorious ‘Black Book’Yet (as Andrew Roberts shows) the propaganda broadcast by the BBC - now under a new DirectorGeneral, William Joyce - was extremely persuasive. The Anglo-German Friendship Treaty signed in 1941 between Ribbentrop and Lloyd George was presented as the historic fulfilment of Britain’s destiny as a European island. British membership of the new ‘German-European Union’ could be made to seem more geographically rational than the previous Anglo-American transatlantic empire. In any case, Roosevelt had no stomach for a fight with the German navy in the Atlantic.
However, when the Japanese launched their offensive into British Asia, sweeping into Singapore, Malaysia, Burma and India, he had to think again. ‘What if the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor?’ asked Churchill in his celebrated address to the American House of Commons (a reference to the principal Anglo-American naval base in the Pacific). Prophetically, Churchill warned of a ‘Bamboo Curtain’ across the Pacific if America did not bestir itself. He also pointed out that German military preparations, about which the Free English had some intelligence, implied a future naval and airborne attack on America.
The key to a victory over Germany in Europe, however, lay in Eastern Europe. On one key point, the radical right and the German conservatives agreed: in the belief that expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia was the essential precondition for a victory over Anglo-America. In fact, this proved surprisingly easy to achieve. The Russian aristocrats
What of the alternative hypothesis - that any sort of resistance to German power was futile? Certainly, the costs of continued fighting against the occupation were higher than in areas (such as the Channel Islands) where the populations simply acquiesced. On the other hand, the ‘Free English Government’ set up by Churchill and Eden on the other side of the Atlantic enjoyed considerable popular support. Thousands of young men answered their appeal to fight on, no matter what the costs. Few had military experience, much less proper equipment; but they were able to maintain a persistent guerrilla war against the occupiers. The numbers of hostages shot in reprisals ran into thousands. Nevertheless, the exiled Churchill remained convinced that only such sustained resistance could secure him the support of the American Viceroy and his officials. There, in the neo-classical surroundings of the Northern capital, New York, Churchill urged America to mobilise for total war.
Yet what was in it for Roosevelt, who had finally become the North’s prime minister at the third attempt? There was - or seemed to be - a legitimate government in England. A minor princeling from the House of Saxe-Coburg had been installed in the Stuarts’ place as ‘Edward VII’. Lloyd George had accepted the post of prime minister and had recruited a number of other senior politicians into his Cabinet including Samuel Hoare and R. A. Butler. True, this government was very clearly subordinate to the occupying authorities - the military under General von Brauchitsch and, more importantly, the senior SS officer in Britain, whose first act on arriving in Britain had been to take into ‘protective custody’ over 2,000 political suspect people listed in his notorious ‘Black Book’Yet (as Andrew Roberts shows) the propaganda broadcast by the BBC - now under a new DirectorGeneral, William Joyce - was extremely persuasive. The Anglo-German Friendship Treaty signed in 1941 between Ribbentrop and Lloyd George was presented as the historic fulfilment of Britain’s destiny as a European island. British membership of the new ‘German-European Union’ could be made to seem more geographically rational than the previous Anglo-American transatlantic empire. In any case, Roosevelt had no stomach for a fight with the German navy in the Atlantic.
However, when the Japanese launched their offensive into British Asia, sweeping into Singapore, Malaysia, Burma and India, he had to think again. ‘What if the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor?’ asked Churchill in his celebrated address to the American House of Commons (a reference to the principal Anglo-American naval base in the Pacific). Prophetically, Churchill warned of a ‘Bamboo Curtain’ across the Pacific if America did not bestir itself. He also pointed out that German military preparations, about which the Free English had some intelligence, implied a future naval and airborne attack on America.
The key to a victory over Germany in Europe, however, lay in Eastern Europe. On one key point, the radical right and the German conservatives agreed: in the belief that expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia was the essential precondition for a victory over Anglo-America. In fact, this proved surprisingly easy to achieve. The Russian aristocrats