Nicholson Baker, author of the revisionist tract about World War II, “Human Smoke,” has sent us a letter in respect of last week’s editorial, “The War for History.” The letter is in the adjacent columns. Mr. Baker insists that his book doesn’t suggest Roosevelt and Churchill were as bad as Hitler and that it’s not what he believes. We’re glad to hear it, though it only underscores for us the troubling nature of the book, which, among its other faults, suggests that the Allied attacks on Germany should be blamed for the depredations against the Jews that the Nazis had long had at the core of their program. Why would a man who claims to comprehend Hitler as the “Ur-source and instigator of the horrors that beset the middle of the 20th century” want, in the middle of a new world war, to spend his time putting the gloss on the advocates of an appeasement and pacifism that would have handed the world to Hitler without a fight?

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It is instructive to recall the plight of England, Europe, and the world in June 1940. German armies were rolling practically unopposed through France, and the British Expeditionary Force had just been evacuated by the skin of its teeth at Dunkirk. The swastika already flew over Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, and Norway; on June 17, after Marshal Petain capitulated to Hitler, it would be raised in France. Nazi Germany was the unchallenged master of the Continent, and the full might of its military was about to be turned on Britain.

At this fateful moment, the British people and government had two choices. They could follow the pattern of the previous decade by appeasing Hitler and acquiescing in the Nazification of Europe — which is to say, in the end of Western civilization. Some members of the British government did indeed urge this course, not knowing or caring that such an ignominious peace could only be a truce, at the expiration of which Britain would face an even stronger and more ruthless Germany. Or Britain could fight on, without allies, greatly outnumbered on the battlefield, and facing the all too real prospect of a German invasion.

It was in this dark hour that Winston Churchill made his immortal vow. “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,” he told the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. …”

If Mr. Baker had his way, surrender is just what Britain would have done. “In 1940,” he writes in his letter, “Britain elected to pursue a long, slow war of attrition, founded on a hunger blockade of Europe and the nightly bombing of civilian centers.” His clear implication is that this choice was the wrong one — that capitulation to Hitler would have been preferable to resistance, because “exploding things on people’s heads” can never “get us closer to where we should be going.” In “Human Smoke,” he argues explicitly that only Churchill’s irrational lust for “prestige” led him to defy Hitler. Reason, he suggests, was on the side of Lord Halifax, the arch-appeaser whom Churchill inherited as Foreign Secretary.

In June 1940, Halifax represented what Mr. Baker calls the “balm of moderating wisdom.” And who could be against wisdom and moderation? Who relishes the idea of “exploding things on people’s heads”? The very fact that Churchill was willing to fight on, Mr. Baker suggests throughout “Human Smoke,” proves that he was immoderate, unwise, and bloodthirsty. It also makes him effectively co-responsible for World War II, including the Holocaust. If this is not “moral equivalence,” it is close enough.

Why is it, then, that in the summer of 1940, even Winston Churchill’s fiercest critics were glad to see him in office? Mr. Baker’s antipathy to Churchill can’t hold a candle to that of George Orwell, who as a socialist and anti-imperialist had been a fierce critic of the Tory Churchill during the 1930s. Yet “from the collapse of France onwards,” Orwell wrote, “nearly everyone who was anti-Nazi supported Churchill,” for the simple reason that “there was nobody else … who could be trusted not to surrender.” To Orwell, a passionate democrat who lived through the hour of democracy’s greatest danger, Churchill possessed the indispensable qualification for the leader of a democracy in wartime: he was “able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting.”

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On the eve of American entry into the Battle of Iraq, Nicholson Baker was one of those Slate magazine queried in respect of where they stood. Wrote Mr. Baker: “We can keep it from happening. What slowed the bombing in Vietnam? The shouts of the protesters in front of the White House, disturbing Nixon’s tranquility. Public embarrassment stopped it. Heap shame and opprobrium on Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Bush. They are foolish, small-minded, cowardly men who will not hesitate to order the bombing of civilians from several miles in the air in order to squash a dictator that they helped bring to power.” We are mere newspapermen, not psychoanalysts. But our guess is that Mr. Baker knew when he wrote those words that Bush and Cheney had seized the esprit of Churchill and Roosevelt and that one way to get at them would be to tarnish the heroes of the earlier war.