Quite a tumult has erupted on both sides of the Atlantic over Nicholson Baker’s new history of the years leading up to World War II, “Human Smoke.” The book just got panned in the Observer in England and here in the Sun and also in the New York Times, though the Times praised it as well. The theme of Mr. Baker’s book is the heroism of the pacifists who held out against entry into World War II. But a search of his tome discloses no reference to the most famous peace advocate of all, Bertrand Russell.

And no wonder. It turns out that Russell was all for the war, if sadly, and made no secret of it. In February 1941, Russell wrote of the “tragic alternative” he confronted. His piece, published in the New York Times, is a record of the cognitive dissonance that plagued those poor souls who survived one fruitless and destructive war, swore never again, and then had to reconcile a boundless aversion to the blood-letting of the past with the advent of a genocidal regime bent on world domination.

Russell was one of the most celebrated pacifists of his day. He had been jailed in Britain for his outspoken criticism of Allied efforts during World War I, and, like the majority of his countrymen, he supported appeasement at Munich. Indeed, he went further than his countrymen by declaring what many Britons felt but dared not say. “War,” Russell said, “should, at this moment in history, be avoided, however great the provocation.”

The next moment in history saw greater provocations than Russell had imagined. “Before the war began,” Russell would write in his essay, “it might have seemed preposterous to suppose that Hitler could aim at world domination. Now, it seems probable that he does so and his success is sufficiently possible to call for the utmost vigor in resistance.”

Russell had no illusions of what a successful resolution of the war might bring. But he had come to realize what Mr. Baker still hasn’t — that even civilization’s demise would be preferable to its survival in Nazi hands. “I scarcely dare to hope that the world after the war will be a good world, if we win, but if we lose, it will be hell, probably for a long time to come.”

To Americans who claimed their republic would best serve Europe by remaining an above the fray example of democratic freedom and military restraint, Russell, a heretofore stalwart critic of British imperialism, could only express dismay. “If Hitler wins … America … will remain unknown to [his] hopeless serfs, and, if they did know of it, I fail to see how it could console them.

“As for the Nazis, they would view the edifying spectacle with contempt, so long as it did not constitute a military menace. They have not in the past shown themselves susceptible to moral example.”

Russell wasn’t the only famous preferrer of peace to opt, in the end, for war. Albert Einstein, unlike Russell, is mentioned several times in Mr. Baker’s book, but never in a manner that might challenge the author’s thesis that total war was unnecessary — indeed, criminal — in the fight to defeat Hitler.

Early in his narrative, Mr. Baker describes Einstein’s famous Two Percent Speech of 1930, in which he called on citizens of all nations to refuse any form of compulsory military service. More than 400 pages later, Mr. Baker mentions — offhandedly, as though the change was inexplicable — that Einstein had become a war supporter. But Einstein, like Russell, left a persuasive argument for rejecting his previously unqualified objection to military action.

Einstein’s reversal of opinion on military service was striking. “This heroism at command,” he had written only a few years earlier, “this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism — how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I would rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings.”

As Hitler rose to become Germany’s dictator, however, Einstein recognized that pacifism was no longer a viable means of preserving European peace, and he announced that, were he a younger man, he would enlist. In “A Re-examination of Pacifism,” issued in 1935, Einstein explained his about-face to his fellow pacifists.

Einstein concluded that when peace is temporarily secure, pacifists should pursue their long-term goal of creating a permanent peace, which he had previously advocated through militant pacifism as a means to world government. But in Germany, militant pacifism was no longer possible. The only way for the rest of the world to deal with Germany was from a position of military strength.

Einstein and Russell were both viewed as quixotic. Both were unwilling to associate themselves with any but the loftiest political goals. As the Nazis stormed across Europe, however, all but the most stubborn dreamers awoke to the nightmare before them and turned to the only leaders capable of delivering the West from the gravest threat it had ever faced.

Now the nightmare of Nazism has passed, and a new threat has emerged to confound another generation dreaming that peace and freedom might flourish without the sacrifice of determined and courageous guardians.

Mr. Rowe, an analyst at Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is a contributor of the Sun.