1933

 Looking at Europe today, one should be reminded of 1933. Churchill wrote a huge volume, The Gathering Storm, and also had a short, schoolboy version that I read as a schoolboy. The short version started in 1933 when Germany elected a new Chancellor. The Chancellor-elect promised to abrogate the Treaty of Versailles as soon as he took office, the treaty which Germany had been forced to sign after losing WWI, a treaty where Germany promised never again to have any military.

In Churchill's version of history, Churchill thundered in Parliament against the UK allowing the Chancellor-elect to take office: he said that the UK must demand regime change, he insisted that the next German Chancellor must agree to uphold the Treaty of Versailles, and he claimed (after 1945) that WWII would have been averted without the loss of a single life if only the Parliament had listened to him.

Only I checked the morgue, something much more difficult in the '50s, and found no Churchill speeches saying that the UK military must insist on regime change in Germany in 1933. Basically, the Great Powers, France and the UK, wanted a re-armed Germany to give them a little time when the Evil Union in the East began their inevitable invasion.

In Churchill's version, he kept giving speeches, all ignored, that the UK must stop Germany before they became invincible, something that could have been accomplished with no bloodshed in '33, very limited bloodshed in '35, some bloodshed but certain victory in '38 when the cowardly PM Chamberlain surrendered to Germany and called it 'Peace in Our Time,' and finally, an ignominious defeat of the UK by Germany when PM Chamberlain finally agreed to go to war in '39. Almost all wrong. War in '38 would have been, as Waugh said, 'war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or no reason at all, with the wrong allies.'

In '38, France wanted to complete the Maginot Line and the UK wanted to complete the radar shield, so France would never have joined the UK in war in '38, and, had Chamberlain not bought the year to complete the radar shield, Germany would probably have won the Battle of Britain. (Of course, Churchill relied on the fact that the radar shield was Top Secret, so he never mentioned it in his histories, he said the RAF won the Battle of Britain by eating lots of carrots that enabled them to see the Luftwaffe coming, even at night, in plenty of time to scramble and shoot most of the Luftwaffe down.)

Then, after the UK and France let Germany re-arm, in 1939 Germany and the USSR made the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact signed in Moscow on 24 August 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop (for which the Allies hanged von Ribbentrop after the war).

But no problem, the UK and French armies were safe behind the Maginot Line. Oops.

The UK and France agreed to let Germany rearm as a bulwark against the USSR, but then (briefly) Germany and the USSR were allies and took all of Poland, bringing Germany into war with the UK and France (but the USSR were not mentioned in the UK-French Declaration of War for invading Poland, only Germany).

And now all of Europe are again sure, as they were in '33, that the SovietsRussia are ready to invade and conquer all of Europe, so all of Europe must join together against the SovietsRussia. And no persons who say they will vote against war with the SovietsRussia can be allowed to be elected to high office in any EU country, and, should it appear that some people who are not ready to go to war with the SovietsRussia are running for election in the EU, the European Courts must remove those people from any elections before they can be elected, or, if elected, remove them from office. All of Europe know they must defeat the SovietsRussia and they can't let anyone or anything stand in their way.