WWII Anniversary: The Lessons We Haven't Learned

“Now I believe for the first time there will not be war”. This was an English diarist in September 28, 1938, slightly less than a year before the Second World War broke out, writing on the eve of the Munich agreement.

Of course, we all know with hindsight that you would have had to be an imbecile to have imagined such a thing by that stage in the advance of Nazi Germany. Had Hitler not already made his hostile intentions perfectly clear in Mein Kampf, in his aggressive rearmament in breach of the Versailles treaty terms, his Austrian Anschluss, his increasing persecution of the Jews and his noises about the Sudetenland?

But actually this diary entry was from the extremely well-connected and well-informed Duff Cooper who at the time was serving in the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. He later changed his mind about treating with Hitler and resigned his position. The point though is this: if even a man like that could, however briefly, gull himself into the immensely fashionable narrative that another global conflict with the Germans was unthinkable is it any wonder that the outbreak of the Second World War 75 years ago today caught so many by surprise?

Duff Cooper’s naivety (as it seems now, though I think “wishful thinking” is a fairer term) was shared by many writers and politicians and ordinary folk of the period. Read the diaries of almost anyone in the emigre community of artists, boulevardiers and journalists in Paris in that era: few of them entertained the idea until the very last minute (June 1940) that such a glorious city could possibly fall to the Germans.

Read more from this story HERE.