Mention the Wars, Don’t Mention America

A.N. Wilson’s history of Britain between the death of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II is the history book that he was born to write. It allows him to display all his talents as a literary stylist, insightful potted-biographer, controversialist, scholar, and determined jockey of any number of favored hobbyhorses. Unfortunately, however, it also allows him to give full rein to his particularly virulent strain of anti-Americanism. This is post-Iraq war history-writing at its most trenchant and opinionated.Just as after World War I, the Germans longed for a Dolchstosslegende, a stab-in-the-back myth, that could blame the catastrophe of 1918 not on the stoical Germans but on a sinister cabal of socialists, Jews, bankers, and defeatists, so Mr. Wilson presents a homegrown British Dolchstosslegende which blames Britain’s loss of Great Power status on Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and American Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. The reason the British have been in decline since 1941, he argues, is all down to those scheming, ungrateful, perfidious Yanks.Yet while Mr. Wilson presents this (grossly unfair) view of the Special Relationship as a kind of Restoration murder-tragedy where one’s best friend secretly mixes poison into the wine of the victory cup, he also paints an immensely rich, funny, readable portrait of the Britain that is being done to death. Bicycling clubs, Elgar’s music, Gertrude Jekyll gardens and Lutyens houses, the notorious rector of Stiffkey, Laurel and Hardy, Churchill’s Whiggery, the origin of the Lady Godiva myth – the sheer range of Mr. Wilson’s knowledge and interests are wittily displayed in a series of learned mini-essays that delight.Yet when it comes to World War II, and especially whenever the Americans are involved in the narrative, the author simply loses his equilibrium. “By 1941 Churchill had peaked as a war leader,” Mr. Wilson writes, yet goes on (correctly) to praise “the Grand Rhetoricaster” for stopping the Normandy landings from taking place any earlier than the summer of 1944, which was perhaps Churchill’s greatest strategic contribution of them all. Of Pearl Harbor he writes: “The US navy was effectively put out of action,” whereas in fact the aircraft carriers were out at sea and thus escaped attack, and several of the destroyers that were hit were back in action within weeks.The Red Army of 1941 was “brilliantly trained,” according to Mr. Wilson, which is simply not true. Nor has the case been even “semi-substantiated” that the Duke of Kent was posing as a potential Quisling to lure over Rudolf Hess to Scotland. Mr. Wilson’s castigations of Bomber Harris as “a very crude personality” who should have been “arrested as a murderer” for his “lunatic idea” that the war could be won through the bombing campaign belies Albert Speer’s own belief – which he quotes – that six more raids like the June 1943 one on Hamburg would force Germany to sue for peace. Both men might have been wrong, but they weren’t lunatics. Nor can pre-war Dachau be likened to a modern-day “boot camp.” The statement that in 1938 most Austrians idolized Hitler might be true, but the subsequent phrase “just as most of them still do” is truly outrageous.President Truman was not an obscene war criminal for dropping nuclear bombs on Japan. Mr. Wilson seems to believe that Japan was on the verge of surrender in August 1945, whereas its cabinet specifically turned down the idea of making peace after Hiroshima and was only persuaded by Nagasaki to do so. Even after Nagasaki there was an attempted coup by Japanese army officers hoping to continue the war.In accusing the Americans of foisting bankruptcy onto postwar Britain, when it was, after all, we who spent money we hadn’t got, Mr. Wilson makes the common error of modern declinologists of supposing that Britain was not also exhausted in terms of morale as much as of finance by 1945. When the global power vacuum appeared with Britain’s collapse, it was imperative for the other half of the English-speaking peoples to step into the breach. If that meant dismantling imperial preference – a system designed before the war to keep American imports out – then that was the price that had to be paid. Why should anti-American trading systems have been allowed to survive a war that America helped to win anyhow?Had the roles been reversed we would have taken advantage of their short-term necessity, just as we did during the American Civil War in the 1860s. It is wrong to state that America was willing to help Britain in 1940 “only on condition that Britain surrendered any claim to be a world power,” or that America demanded “the effective dismantling of Britain as a front-rank world economic power.” America offered massive military aid on generous Lend-Lease terms and gave Britain 50 destroyers in return for a few 99-year leases on some Atlantic bases we needed them to patrol anyhow. One gift horse after another is given intimate mouth inspections by Mr. Wilson, who can hardly see anything positive about America at all.Mr. Wilson contends that the Americans “made specific decisions, and took specific steps, to undermine and destroy British hegemony,” but he fails to provide the necessary evidence to support the thesis. It was we who lost Greece, Yugoslavia, Crete, Singapore, Hong Kong, and thereby destroyed our hegemony. And we were a major beneficiary of Marshall aid, which hardly fits in with Mr. Wilson’s contention that the Americans deliberately set out to destroy the British economy after the war. America had no specific duty nor “Manifest Destiny” to prop up the British Empire beyond the term of its natural life, yet Mr. Wilson writes as though she had.After admitting that the American GIs came to help liberate the Continent from Nazism, Mr. Wilson cannot help adding, “But they also came, with dollars, nylons and cigarettes, to seduce our women and to drive out our older ways of doing things. And the jury is out as to how far General Eisenhower brought blessing or disaster to Europe in his management of the final stages of the campaign to conquer and subdue the Germans.” This book is argumentative, thought-provoking, polemical, and very well-written; it is not a textbook for the schools.Mr. Roberts’s “Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe” was just published by HarperCollins. He writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph, where this review first appeared.

Mention the Wars, Don’t Mention America

Mention the Wars, Don’t Mention America

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