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We Could Have Won WWII But We Decided Winston Was a Bridge Too Far
10 May 1947, London Zeitung
by Stanley Baldwin
There was a time in May of 1940 that we came close to giving the country over to Winston [Churchill] but we turned away from that path and awarded the Prime Minister slot to Lord Halifax. Yes, it is possible that we could have won this last war if we had chosen him but it was considered indecorous and was thought of as perhaps telegraphing our desperation to the enemy. We knew Winston had a martial background and that he wanted to make a real fight of it but the cost to our reputations would have been too high. The war was rightly called the Phoney War because we had all but lost everything by that late date. As it turned out, of course, the war only lasted less than a year anyway.
Water under the bridge. Winning isn’t everything, after all. Think of the devastation that would have followed if Winston had had his way with the military. What would have happened, I wonder: bombing cities? fire bombing? desperate refugees fleeing across the country? starvation? homelessness?
What scared me the most was the prospect of the Russians in Berlin and us still defeated anyway. All Stalin needed was a couple more years to turn the tide — and with Winston as PM that might have given him that edge. Then Stalin would have had all the countries east of the Baltic and the Adriatic and probably more.
Later that year, with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, we saw the Americans entry into the Pacific war and at least — so far — they have knocked that barbaric regime back on it heels. So, all was not lost. Much good has come from the decisions we made at that time. It’s not perfect but it’s a result that allows us to hold our heads up high these days, knowing we had performed our duties well and to the best of our abilities.
[Translated from the original German]
Published in Politics
It’s the sharp end of the stick that actually always and always should get the credit for winning battles and a war. Logistics and stomachs and all that do not address the issue of will and pure cussedness that enabled the Russians (not the Soviets) to win the war.
Stalin had to call up the Russian spirit by calling it the “Great Patriotic War” — he had to back off of his lies about universality (what we call empire building) and call upon the spirit of the Russians to win the war. Shooting his own troops in the back wasn’t enough.
Of course, you also have to consider that the war never would have even started if not for the “non-aggression” pact between Hitler and Stalin divying up Poland between them and securing Germany’s eastern flank.
Yes, this is seldom pointed out except by those of us on the right: WWII started when the Germans invaded Poland from the west and the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. The Brits and the French only went after the one side when they declared hostilities — yet, we all know that there were two hostiles.
If you truly are arguing that Stalin calling the war a “Great Patriotic War” was what motivated Soviets to die then I have some prime Oceanside property to sell you in Kansas. The fact that you mention Stalin as possibly being a believer in internationalist socialism is astoundingly ignorant, to put it nicely. Stalin believed in socialism under one nation rule, he did not ever believe or make it known that he supported or loved a world wide proletariat revolution. After all it was Lenin who had formulated that Socialism would have to be led by certain underdeveloped nations, not a one time event like Marx had predicted.
As to sticks and cussedness the Reds were not known for combat effectiveness. Losing around 25-30 million people in a war and remaining in the fight was not the result of bravery but rather the drastic lack of public knowledge of the war, the stakes of the war, the economic and military might of the USA, and the Japanese not taking the Army’s military position to invade the USSR.
Sticks cannot be held by skeletons, they have to be held by a living person. That person must be fed.
It’s proving to be a waste of time with you. You and I are reading different things. Sorry but don’t waste your time for my sake because I won’t respond.
I was paraphrasing Churchill himself, who said after losing the election that the British people awarded him the order of the boot.
https://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/order-of-the-boot/
It’s nice to have someone who is an intimate of Trump in the comments.
It reminds me of all the leftists who asserted that Bush could hardly read.
Perhaps if you started bringing some evidence to your assertions then I would be more amenable to believing them.
That is an excellent comment.
What happened was that William Beveridge published a report in November 1942 proposing a welfare state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_Report
There are several explanations for Churchill’s defeat. One was that Conservative officers were still overseas and their ability to vote or run for Parliament was quite limited whereas Labour leaders were at home, having been mostly involved with unions and factories.
This, of course, is disputed by Labour. Churchill also opposed most of the Beveridge Report.
Winston Churchill gave a broadcast on 21 March 1943 entitled “After the War”, where he warned the public not to impose “great new expenditure on the State without any relation to the circumstances which might prevail at the time” and said there would be “a four-year plan” of post-war reconstruction “to cover five or six large measures of a practical character” which would be put to the electorate after the war and implemented by a new government.
An interesting picture of pre-war medical practice can be found in AJ Cronin’s novels.
Postwar Socialism pretty much turned out the way we now expect. Churchill was returned to power in 1951 and remained PM until 1955. Last laugh and all that.
I keep pointing out that if Churchill were voted for directly by the UK he might have won in our kind of system. But, the Conservatives were in bad repute there and with great justification. The British people were damned if they were going to reward the party with a win. It makes sense but we always think about this in American terms.
That wasn’t me.
But I think it really was the Soviet Union that won the war – or, rather, had a big role in the Allied victory. They could be patriots too.
It would be interesting to see what would have happened in WWII if we had let the USSR collapse. Do the Nazis overrun the place and overextend themselves anyways? Does Russia sue for piece amidst a civil war? Does the lack of the USSR fighting mean WWII takes a few years longer? If it takes longer, does Hitler get nukes?
A piece of this, a piece of that . . . (Sorry, old joke.)
Sorry, pal. I have to get my eyes calibrated better.
Agreed on who won the war. And they were patriotic Russians — that’s for sure.
A lot of the alternative histories think that we would just have a Cold War develop between us and the Nazis. Problem is that they would have the whole Eurasian continent and probably Africa and Australia, too.