4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization
Col. Mike Walker, USMC (ret)
On 4 June 1940, Winston S. Churchill, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, gave a speech to House of Commons. It was unarguably the most important moment of the 20thcentury.
The question was not just of war or peace but also deciding the course for all humanity. In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the Commonwealth of Nations had stood, faced and battled the greatest alignment of evil in all history when the forces for good were at their absolute nadir.
Churchill was to announce whether evil indeed had triumphed or the fading forces of good would carry on come what may.
A Tragic Background
The terror had begun earlier. In March 1939, the German Nationalist Socialist war machine dismantled Czechoslovakia. In reaction, France and the United Kingdom enacted economic embargoes against Nazi Germany. Storm clouds of another Great War began to form on the horizon.
As the days of 1939 slipped away battle lines were drawn amongst the world’s seven great powers. A quick survey did little to encourage the embattled Free World leaders in London and Paris. In East Asia, Japan was occupied with its predatory war against China and the United States a neutral sleeping giant. As for the rest, the three great radical socialist states – nationalist socialist Germany, communist socialist Russian and Fascist socialist Italy – unexpectedly congealed into a tenuous mutual assistance bloc. How that happened is an often-ignored chapter of World War II.
On top of the economic pain inflicted on Germany, Hitler realized that in the event of war the Royal Navy would blockade their ports. That could cripple his war machine but there was a solution at hand: Soviet Russia could supply everything the Werhmacht needed. Conversely, if the leaders in London and Paris could win over Moscow then another world war might be averted.
In the months that followed the destruction of Czechoslovakia, gaining the support of Josef Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became THEpolitical drama waged between the liberal free-market democracies and Nazi Germany. Hitler emerged as winner when he formed an alliance with Stalin formalized in the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or German-Soviet Nonaggression) Pact of 23 August.
That ensured Nazi Germany would not have to fight a two-front war – what Hitler believed to be a prime reason why Germany lost the First World War. But Germany gained even more. A second important piece of the German-Soviet alliance dealt with economic support. Due to the embargoes, the German war machine was in desperate need of oil, manganese, rubber, and other resources.
By July 1939, German-Soviet trade negotiations had progressed and an agreement was signed on 19 August, just days before the Non-Aggression Pact. Later, on 11 February 1940, an expanded German-Soviet Commercial Treaty was penned that provided even more critical raw materials to the Werhmacht. The amounts provided by Moscow exceeded of 2,000,000 tons of supplies to include 900,000 tons of oil. It was no exaggeration to say that the Nazi German blitzkriegs of 1940-1941 ran on Soviet fuel.
Hitler had been able to join forces with Stalin because Nazi Germany was willing to give the Soviets what the Western Allies would not: A free hand to invade and seize neighboring nations in eastern Europe – all outlined in secret protocols within the August pact. Central to agreement was the joint invasion of Poland.
On 1 September, Nationalist Socialist Germany simultaneously attacked Poland from eastern Germany and East Prussia. On 17 September, The Red Army invaded Poland. Hitler and Stalin, two radical socialist leaders, plunged the planet into the Second World War.
The timing could be seen as an act of Providence for the Western Allies for if the Soviets also had invaded Poland on or about 1 September, they would have been compelled to go to war with both dictatorships. Instead, France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany alone on 3 September.
When the Soviets struck Poland on 17 September, both Paris and London realized the battle for Poland was lost and they could not wage a war against the combined power of Nationalist Socialist Germany and communist socialist Russia. As a matter of survival, they found political expedients to restrict the war to Germany. It was a painful – even shameful – but absolutely necessary compromise. Europe continued to fall into darkness.
Dire June 1940
The subsequent events that led to Churchill’s speech read as an almost overpowering litany of depressing setbacks. Disaster and defeat seemed to be waiting at every turn and in culmination beat down the spirit of even the most ardent resister.
Stalin’s war making did not stop with Poland. The Red Army invaded Finland in November 1939 and in March 1940 the Soviets forced a peace on the Finns that strongly favored Moscow. To add to the lands gained in Poland and Finland, on 3 June 1940, Stalin secretly issued alert orders for the Red Army to prepare for an imminent invasion of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. While the West was appalled and watched helplessly, it was not a shock to the senior leaders of the two radical socialists regimes as Hitler and Stalin had agreed to everything in August 1939.
Hitler too carried on with his bloody campaigns of conquest. In a matter of two months, Nationalist Socialist Germany invaded and conquered Denmark (9 April), Luxembourg (10 May), the Netherlands (10-14 May), and Belgium (10-28 May). Norway, which also had been invaded on 9 April, still fought the Germans but its cause was hopeless. The same was true of France. Defended by what many considered the finest army in the world, the Third Republic was decisively beaten by 4 June.
The German Werhmacht seemed omnipotent.
Fighting beside the French Army was the British Commonwealth (the British Expeditionary Force or BEF) and it too had been pushed to brink of annihilation by Hitler’s panzers. Only through raw courage, daring, creativity, and at great risk, was the bulk of the BEF saved (Operation Dynamo). It was the one victory rising up in a sea of failures.
By 4 June 1940, the Commonwealth of Nations had lost it most powerful allies in Europe and stood alone in the face of relentless Nationalist Socialist aggression aided and abetted by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Finally, the Commonwealth of Nations had to be prepared to deal with socialist-fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, who had secretly informed his generals on 26 May at he soon intended to enter the war as Hitler’s ally.
Britain’s Friends in the United States were of little use
While possessing tremendous latent power, the United States was of no material help on 4 June 1940. Lend-lease did not begin until much later – March 1941 – and the American armed forces woefully inadequate. The US Navy was America’s sole first-rate modern force of consequence. Naval aviation also was well developed consisting of 6 carrier air groups and 3 long-range patrol wings that were joined by 2 US Marine Air Groups.
In contrast, the US Army stood at just under 190,000 by the close of 1939 and modestly grew to 269,000 in 1940. As a comparison, the British Army held 1,650,000 soldiers in June 1940. The Commonwealth added about 400,000 more with most serving in the Indian Army.
The US Army only began to build its first main gun battle tank in 1939 and armed with an undersized 37mm cannon. By 1940, the US Army possessed 112 of these already obsolete M2 tanks (again in contrast, the British Army had over 800 main-gun tanks in 1940 although most were lost during the battle of France). Even the Italian and Japanese armored forces were superior to the Americans in June 1940.
US Army Air Corps aircraft were more numerous (18 bomber and 30 fighter squadrons) and capable but lagged behind the other major powers – the one bright light shone on the limited presence of modern P-39 and P-40 fighters along with A-20, B-25, and B-17 bombers. The rest of the Air Corps was obsolete.
Eighty years ago the world teetered on the brink of great unspeakable darkness.
Whole books can be written on how 20thcentury radical socialism created police-state societies that repressed every type of freedom from speech, music, and architecture to every other form of art and creative activity. The socialist dictatorships decided what information people could or could not have access to as well as where could live or work or even travel. But let us refine the inhumanity to the grimmest of human rights abuses: State sponsored murder.
The Soviet Union killed over 20 million “enemies of socialism.” The top three methods of extermination were (1) direct murder, (2) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor gulag camps, and (3) starvation through man-made famines.
Nationalist Socialist Germany murdered 11 million “enemies of the state.” Like the Soviet Union, the Nationalist Socialists used a modified version of Soviet “big three” methods: (1) direct executions, (2) death camps for mass-scale genocide, and (3) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor concentration camps.
While fascist socialism did not devolve into a concentration camp-mass murder gulag system it enacted anti-Semitic laws in 1938 and allowed the Nazis to send Jews and other enemies of Nationalist Socialism in Italy and other Italian controlled areas to Nazi concentration or death camps.
Imagine a world dominated by Communism, Nationalist Socialism and Fascist Socialism.
How many millions of innocents would have been slaughtered under the radical socialist behemoths had the Commonwealth surrendered? How many millions or more would have been condemned to slave labor camps? And the remaining billions of all humanity would have been doomed to a life of soul crushing oppression under the boot of radical socialism.
Those were the stakes in June 1940.
The Commonwealth’s Reply
For the war leaders in London, outwardly there was little or nothing to look to in hope of getting past the omnipresent gloom. Only internal strength could see the Commonwealth of Nations through its moment of greatest peril. In the face of all that, on 4 June 1940, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill gave Hitler his answer:
“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
What the Commonwealth of Nations achieved by refusing to surrender and battling back sewed the seed for liberty and justice to be enjoyed by billions of people for generations after.
And a special debt is owned not just to the heroes from the British Isles and Commonwealth nations but to the heroic Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis and many others who fought for all our freedoms even though they would not gain their own full independence until years into the future. And also a great debt is owed to the French, Poles, Norwegians, Czechs and other Europeans whose nations had fallen under the yoke of totalitarian socialism but carried on the struggle by whatever means possible – and at great cost.
