Channels, Spring 2019

Page 22 Lanning • The Long Defeat as an enormous challenge to be tackled head on rather than as a depressing emergency to be navigated. For almost a decade, Churchill was one of the few in Parliament urging Britain to fortify its military in light of Germany’s increasing efforts to rearm. Germany was acting in direct defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, and by 1935 Hitler had abandoned the treaty altogether.19 As Hitler’s unchecked belligerence and the threat of fascism gained momentum in Germany and other parts of the world, Churchill continued his warning cries calling for swift rearmament and collective action through the League of Nations: “Such a policy does not close the door upon a revision of the Treaties, but it procures a sense of stability, and an adequate gathering together of all reasonable Powers for self-defence, before any inquiry of that character can be entered upon. In this august association for collective security we must build up defence forces of all kinds and combine our action with that of friendly Powers, so that we may be allowed to live in quiet ourselves and retrieve the woeful miscalculations of which we are at present the dupes, and of which, unless we take warning in time, we may some day [sic] be the victims.” 20 Churchill did not want war. He was not – as some maligned him – a warmonger or a drunken fool. On the contrary, he was “looking for peace” and “looking for a way to stop war.”21 His solution was based on strength and action, not weakness. Germany could not be allowed to violate international law without punitive measures from law-abiding nations. And if those measures were not successful, punitive force had to be an option. It is a principle that has preserved today’s volatile world from falling into the ruins of another global conflagration: international law must be supported by the deterrence of security and military force if necessary. Unfortunately, it took World War II – the largest and costliest war in history – for the lesson to be learned.22 Such ideas relating to international security, fused into the United Nations Charter after the war, partly took their cue from the New Commonwealth Society, of which Churchill, serving as the body’s president, referred to in a 1937 speech as being “one of the few peace societies that advocates the use of force, if possible overwhelming force, to support public international law.”23 But Churchill’s suggestion in 1936 for a “Grand Alliance of all the nations who wish for peace against the Potential Aggressor, whoever he may be” went unheeded until the spring of 1939.24 Over these critical years, as it became ever clearer who the “Potential Aggressor” would be, Churchill exerted every effort in calling for Britain’s own military and national defenses to be modernized. He called for an organized aircraft industry, highlighted the deficiencies of the Royal Air Force, and sought to set up a Ministry of Munitions Supply. And, presciently, he stressed the need for anti-aircraft research and for some attention to what was in 1936 the very distant chance of an airborne invasion.25 19 History.com Staff, “Treaty of Versailles,” History.com, 2009, accessed March 22, 2018, https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/treaty-of-versailles ; Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker, eds., The Reader’s Companion to Military History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 20 Guedalla, Mr. Churchill, 256. 21 Ibid., 258. 22 Encyclopædia Britannica , s.v. “World War II,” accessed March 23, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II. 23 James W. Muller, ed., Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 101. 24 Guedalla, Mr. Churchill, 258. 25 Ibid., 259.