Peter Hitchens is a very strange person with some very odd views. He believes that Britain and France should not have gone to war with Hitler over Poland; that Hitler had no designs on Britain, and that Britain could have come to terms with Hitler following the invasion of Poland. He takes a cynical view of the U.S. relationship with Britain and believes that the U.S. government took advantage of World War II deliberately to weaken Britain. A reformed Trotskyite, he nevertheless continues to view the world through a fog of emotion and second-guessing of historical events. He styles himself a conservative, but of course that’s only in a European sense; amongst American conservatives he’d be considered fairly wish-washy.
Remember, he’s a Tory, which is very different from a conservative in the American tradition. I never knew he flirted with Trotskyism, though. Are you sure you aren’t mixing him up with brother Christopher?
From a purely selfish point of view Britain would have been much better off staying out of WWII, they bankrupted themselves and lost their empire and gained what? Nothing.
There were three Axis powers and in descending order the threat they posed to the British Empire was Japan, a massive threat, Italy, a substantial threat, Germany no real threat at all, yet the Brits put their war effort into precisely the reverse order.
What did the Brits achieve for fighting the war? The Jews of Europe were still murdered and Poland and Czechoslovakia remained occupied by a genocidal totalitarian regime.
If there was no shame in fighting a “Cold War” against the murderous tyrant Stalin post-1945, where would the shame in Britain fighting a similar cold war against the Nazis?
Build up a massive army and air force, use them and the navy to protect the island and let the International Socialists slog it out with the National Socialists. Would the end result have been any different? The Germans and the Russians carve up central and eastern Europe, Germany imposes a German dominated economic union on France and the rest of western Europe, peace eventually prevails.
Meanwhile the Brits can concentrate their forces in Malaya and Hong Kong to fight the Japanese. Tanks, modern fighters and heavy bombers roaring up and down the Malayan peninsula backed up with hundreds of thousands of Australian and Indian troops would have put up bit of a better show defending Singapore than the lightly armed skeleton forces that Churchill was forced to allocate there.
The Brits lost everything in WWII and gained nothing.