Tucker’s Problem and Ours

And particularly so, as in the course of a two-hour discussion, during which Carlson failed to push back even once, Cooper had some rather astounding things to say, such as that Churchill was the “real villain” of World War II, and that he bears primary “responsibility for the war becoming what it did, something other than an invasion of Poland.”

So alarmed were they by the wide and young audience for Cooper’s charges that three of the most eminent contemporary historians set about to refute them in short order: Andrew Roberts, who is, along with Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s leading biographer; Victor Davis Hanson, the author of numerous books on warfare from the Peloponnesian Wars to the great world wars of the previous century; and Niall Ferguson, the author of 16 works of history and formerly a professor of history at both Oxford and Harvard.

They find that Cooper’s analysis fails the basic test of chronology, that he appears to have never read Mein Kampf; and that most of his arguments are recycled from Nazi apologists, if not from Joseph Goebbels himself.

First to chronology. The German armies invaded France and the lowland countries — Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg — in May 1940. Churchill was not yet prime minister. So it can hardly have been his bellicosity that provoked Hitler. And it was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who guaranteed the security of Poland in 1939, at a time when Churchill was not even a member of the cabinet. That guarantee put Hitler on notice that Britain would fight to defend against the expansion of his war aims. Hitler, in Hanson’s words, knew that the Nazis had shocked the world with their “pre-civilizational brutality” in Poland, including widespread bombing of civilians to spread terror and death, and the Western nations would not be lured into any further deals with him. He restarted the war in Europe in May 1940 in order to consolidate his control of the continent before turning east toward Russia.