"President Roosevelt one day asked what this War should be called. My answer was, 'The Unnecessary War.' If the United States had taken an active part in the League of Nations, and if the League of Nations had been prepared to use concerted force, even had it only been European force, to prevent the re-armament of Germany, there was no need for further serious bloodshed."[xii]
Churchill goes on to describe not so much a stable peaceful world, as a delicate and increasingly dangerous imperial balance. There is no way to know that he's mistaken. There was great opposition to Nazism in Germany, and some shift in history whether a greater understanding of the tools of nonviolent action, or a more Churchillian militaristic resolve, or an assassination or coup (there were a number of failed plots) might have defeated it.
But the point here is not that the world might have gotten lucky. Rather, the world acted foolishly, both by the standards of the time, and even more so by today's. The Marshall Plan following WWII, for all its deep flaws, was an effort not to repeat the stupid way in which WWI had been ended. People were too much aware immediately after WWII of how they had created it after WWI.
The Treaty of Versailles was only one thing among many that did not have to happen. The people of Germany did not have to allow the rise of Nazism. Nations and businesses around the world did not have to fund and encourage the rise of Nazism. Scientists and governments did not have to inspire the Nazi ideology. Governments did not have to prefer armaments to the rule of law, and did not have to wink at German outrages while encouraging a German attack on the Soviet Union. A major change to any one of these factors would have prevented WWII in Europe.
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[i] Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), p. iv. Cited by Scott Manning, "What Did Churchill Mean by 'Unnecessary War'?" July 17, 2008, click here
[ii] When the Czar of Russia in 1898 invited all of the world's governments to a peace conference, which would be held in the Hague in 1899, one leading peace advocate wrote to another that now, finally, "the world will not shriek Utopia!" meaning that peace would at last be taken seriously. Sadly, it was not. The major war-making governments shrieked "Utopia" at the top of their lungs. And well-meaning activists were divided between efforts to ban war and efforts to ban particular atrocities, thereby "humanizing" war. Nonetheless, a treaty was produced requiring nations to at least try to settle disputes through arbitration, and a court was created to arbitrate. Key ingredients for avoiding both world wars were placed on the world's shelves and allowed to gather dust. See James Crossland, War, Law, and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). See also "Convention (I) For The Pacific Settlement Of International Disputes (Hague I) (29 July 1899)" Click Here
[iii] Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, "Versailles Treaty: Reconstructing Patriarchy After WWI," June 28, 2019, .wilpf.org/versaillestreaty
[iv] The Great Peacemakers, "Jane Addams Biography," .thegreatpeacemakers.com/jane-addams.html
[v] Cited by Jeffrey Sparks, "Yes, Woodrow Wilson predicted World War II - but so did J. M. Keynes," December 28, 2014, click here
[vi] Thorstein Veblen, "Review of John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace," Political Science Quarterly, 35, pp. 467-472, click here Cited by Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Pluto Press, 2005), Chapter 2 "The Veblenian Prophecy. From the Councils to Versailles by Way of Russian Fratricide, 1919-20."
[vii] Steve Coll, The New Yorker, "Woodrow Wilson's Case of the Flu, and How Pandemics Change History," April 17, 2020, click here
[viii] Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post, "In 1918, the Spanish flu infected the White House. Even President Wilson got sick," March 14, 2020, click here
[ix] Bob McGovern and John Kopp, Philly Voice, "In 1918, Philadelphia was in 'the grippe' of misery and suffering," September 28, 2018, Click Here
[x] This quotation of Foch has been widely cited, including by Winston Churchill, though there are reasons to doubt that he said it on the date cited, if he said it at all. However, there is strong agreement that it encapsulates his sentiments at the time of the Treaty of Versailles. See Dr. Beachcombing, "Foch and the Twenty Year Armistice: A Myth?" July 11, 2016, click here
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