On the battleground of history, ignorance is still the enemy

The history of war remains a battlefield long after the guns fall silent. In an article for the Times (behind a paywall) entitled “Forget fairytales and learn some real history”, Edward Lucas takes Vladimir Putin to task for peddling “Soviet myths about history” in his speech last week at the Holocaust commemoration in Jerusalem. His criticism of the Russian President is justified. He is less so, however, when he turns his fire on Britain’s war record and “our comic book approach to history”. 

Full disclosure: Lucas is not only a Times columnist, but my successor as Editor of Standpoint. He and I have known one another since we both covered the peaceful revolutions in 1989: he for the BBC World Service, I for the Telegraph. He is an acknowledged expert on Eastern Europe and especially the Baltic states; but he sometimes takes their perspective on the past a little too much to heart.

He seems to have done so in the case of Finland, one item in his catalogue of British wartime iniquities: “I doubt many people in this country will mark December 5, 2021, which will be the 80th anniversary of our declaration of war on Finland, a friendly democracy whose only fault was to be the subject of unprovoked attacks by our Soviet ‘ally’.” 

Let us unpack this sentence. In December 1941, when the British Government, led by Winston Churchill, declared war on Finland, Hitler stood at the gates of Moscow. The Finns were his loyal allies, participating in the siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and tying up Soviet forces that were desperately needed elsewhere. In that siege, which lasted until 1944, some 800,000 civilians died, mainly of starvation.

The Finnish “Regent” at the time was Marshal Mannerheim. Finns may regard him as a founding father, but he was in many ways comparable to another of Hitler’s allies, Admiral Horthy, the “Regent” of Hungary, another authoritarian leader who participated in Operation Barbarossa, the genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union. If anything, Mannerheim’s conduct was worse than Horthy’s, because he had more choices. In 1944, when Horthy tried to make peace with the Allies, the Nazis responded by arresting him and occupying Hungary. Hitler never threatened Finland, even when Mannerheim sued for a separate peace with Stalin.

It is true, of course, that Finland had been attacked by the Soviet Union in the “Winter War” of 1939-40. Far from siding with Stalin — then still Hitler’s partner in the occupation of Poland — the British and French offered diplomatic support and the Soviets were expelled from the League of Nations. Churchill planned to help the Finns by sending an expeditionary force of more than 100,000 troops through Norway and Sweden. It was only cancelled because the Finns surrendered.

The British, then, have nothing to be ashamed of in their wartime relations with Finland. It is the Finns who, like so many other EU member states, have a shameful war record of collaboration with the Nazis. Without such collaboration, the war would not have lasted so long or been so destructive. All those who took part in the Nazi domination of Europe were also complicit in the Holocaust. That is why this commemoration matters.

It is troubling that Lucas seems blind to the unique role that Britain played in the period when it stood alone against Nazi Germany. In a letter to the Editor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor rebukes him for ignoring “the fact that Britain and France were the only two countries to declare war on Nazi Germany before they themselves were attacked”. When Churchill fought on after the fall of France in 1940, he argues, Britain “was not fighting for herself alone but to liberate a Continent that would otherwise have been united, but not in freedom.” Bogdanor continues: “That, whatever Lucas says, has yielded Britain with a ‘moral capital’ which should never be forgotten either here or on the Continent.”

It is surprising that such basic facts should still need to be pointed out. Yet ignorance of the past, even of the Second World War, is now widespread among the youngest generations. The danger Europe now faces comes less from revisionist distortions of history than from sheer ignorance of the facts. Those who know little or nothing are much more likely to succumb to conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial, than those with a firm grasp of history. It is fine for newspaper columnists such as Edward Lucas to play the part of agents provocateurs: they keep debate alive. But they need to preserve a sense of perspective and stick to the facts. The British did stand alone against Hitler — and we are right to be proud of our record.