WW2

The Second World War ran from Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 to Japan’s surrender aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, killed between 70 and 85 million people, and settled the political shape of the following half-century. For conservatives the war is the decisive case against two propositions they reject: that aggression can be managed by negotiation with regimes that reject the premises of negotiation, and that military strength is a provocation rather than a deterrent.

Churchill’s argument in the 1930s was not that war was desirable but that the choice had already been narrowed by inaction. Rearmament proposed in 1934 was cheap; the same security purchased in 1940 cost the Empire its solvency. The conservative reading treats this as a general lesson about the price of deferred decisions, not merely a judgement on Neville Chamberlain.¹

Key Takeaways

• Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war two days later.
• The Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 ceded the Sudetenland to Germany; the remainder of Czechoslovakia was occupied in March 1939.
• The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 partitioned Eastern Europe between two totalitarian states.
• Soviet military deaths and civilian losses together exceeded 25 million, the largest national toll of the war.
• The post-war settlement produced NATO in 1949, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the division of Europe until 1989.

History And Context

The Versailles settlement of 1919 left Germany defeated but intact, resentful but not disarmed in spirit. Hitler took power in January 1933 and repudiated the treaty’s military clauses in March 1935. The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 met no Allied response, though the German force was small enough that a French movement would have compelled its withdrawal.

Britain’s policy of appeasement had defensible foundations. The 1914–18 casualty figures were within living memory, the Dominions signalled reluctance, the Treasury warned that rearmament would exhaust reserves, and air staff estimates of civilian deaths from bombing were catastrophic and wrong. Chamberlain returned from Munich on 30 September 1938 to public relief. Churchill’s Commons speech five days later called the agreement a total and unmitigated defeat, a judgement that was a minority position at the time.¹

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact removed the last constraint. Poland fell in five weeks; France in six in 1940. Britain fought alone from June 1940 to June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the war became global on 7 December 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Allied coalition combined American industrial capacity, Soviet manpower, and British intelligence and naval reach. Its internal contradiction — a war against totalitarianism fought alongside Stalin — produced the settlement at Yalta in February 1945 that consigned Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe to Soviet control, an outcome Churchill described in 1946 as an iron curtain across the continent.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives draw four conclusions from the war.

First, deterrence is cheaper than war. The costs of the 1930s were not avoided by delay but deferred and multiplied. Britain entered the war holding substantial overseas assets and left it dependent on American loans, with the 1945 Anglo-American Loan Agreement finally repaid in 2006. The conservative inference is that defence spending in quiet years is insurance, and that the political temptation to redirect it to visible domestic benefits is the point at which security is lost.

Second, character in leadership matters more than procedure. Churchill’s position in May 1940 rested on little institutional authority. He had spent the decade from 1929 to 1939 out of government, returning to the Admiralty only on the outbreak of war, and was distrusted by much of his own party. The War Cabinet debate of 26 to 28 May, in which Halifax pressed for exploring Italian mediation, turned on judgement rather than machinery.²

Third, the war vindicated national loyalty against its critics. The resistance to Nazism was mounted by nations, not by international bodies. The League of Nations, designed for exactly this contingency, failed in Manchuria in 1931, Abyssinia in 1935, and Czechoslovakia in 1938. Conservatives read this as evidence that collective security without a nation willing to bear the cost is a form of words.

Fourth, the war demonstrated the moral distinction between constitutional and total states. Both Allied and Axis powers committed acts that ought to trouble their descendants — the area bombing of German cities, the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the difference between a state that debated these acts in a parliament and one that industrialised the murder of six million Jews is a difference in kind. Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian rule as a system aiming at the elimination of spontaneity itself remains the standard account of that distinction.³

Differing Positions

Revisionist historians challenge the conservative framing. A. J. P. Taylor argued in 1961 that Hitler was an opportunist operating within the ordinary logic of German statecraft rather than a man executing a fixed plan, and that the war arose from diplomatic drift rather than from a failure of nerve.⁴ The claim was contested at the time and remains so, but it complicates the appeasement narrative.

A second position defends Chamberlain on the evidence available in 1938. Britain had a handful of operational Hurricane squadrons at Munich and eighteen by September 1939; radar coverage was incomplete in 1938 and functioning in 1940. On this reading, Munich bought the year that made the Battle of Britain winnable.

A third argument holds that the conservative reading understates the Soviet contribution. Roughly three-quarters of German military casualties were inflicted on the Eastern Front, and the Western liberal democracies won a war whose decisive land battles were fought by a regime as murderous as the one it defeated. That fact sits awkwardly with any account of the conflict as a straightforward moral contest.

References

1. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Cassell, 1948).
2. John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (Yale University Press, 1999).
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951), pt. 3.
4. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Hamish Hamilton, 1961).