War and peace: endgame studies

I have known of wars lasting from six weeks to hundred years. In each case, sooner or later, the hostilities stopped and eventually some kind of peace prevailed. The two things, war and peace, are often mentioned together — not only because that is the title of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, but because the two things do belong together. (Permanent war only ever existed in the imagination of Leon Trotsky.)

What is the time for a combatant to seek peace? The most likely reason to search for it is when doubts arise whether the war being fought is winnable. And of course, a powerful argument for peace is to stop the carnage and the destruction of infrastructure. My intention in this essay is to discuss a few attempts aimed at concluding peace.

Let me start with the parachute jump of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, into Scotland in May 1941. I think we must accept that Hess acted on his own and was not sent on a peace mission by Hitler. There is, however, no doubt that it was a peace mission, but by Hess alone. The timing is significant. The jump took place one month before the German assault on the Soviet Union. Hess must have hoped to be able to persuade the British authorities either to join the Germans or at least to stay neutral, and not to support in any way the Russian defences. Hess was not allowed to meet Churchill. Instead, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. After the end of the war he was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg in the company of other Nazi leaders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in Spandau, Berlin, in 1987.

We all know about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, how Russia and Germany signed a non-aggression treaty and divided Eastern Europe among themselves. But according to one historian, Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart (on page 488 of his book, The History of the Second World War), there was another meeting between the two Foreign Ministers four years later in June 1943 in Kirovograd, Ukraine, which was under German occupation at the time. (Liddell Hart offered no evidence that such a meeting took place and his account has not been generally accepted by other historians.)

The purpose of the meeting, if it happened, was clear: to discuss the possibility of a separate peace between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A separate peace was of interest to both parties, perhaps more for the Germans than for the Russians. German confidence had been dented by the debacle in Stalingrad. Just a few months before, General Paulus had surrendered on the 2^nd February with nearly 100,000 of his troops. In November 1942 Rommel had been stopped at El Alamein. The dream of reaching the Suez Canal was long over and the Axis forces in North Africa were forced to surrender in May 1943. And there was the threat of the Second Front in Europe. Sooner or later the Americans were coming.

In spite of all that the Germans overestimated their chances of winning the war in the East. Racial prejudice must have played a significant part in that. In Nazi ideology, Slavs were Untermenschen. How could they possibly rival German technology?  So when it came to negotiations, Ribbentrop is said to have offered the River Dnieper (now Dnipro) as the German-Soviet border, leaving the whole of what are now Ukraine and Belarus under German occupation. That was less of an initial offer, more a calculated insult.  Molotov, according to Liddell Hart, wanted nothing less than a return to the borders of the USSR in June 1941. The meeting broke up. There were other exploratory attempts (see H. W. Koch: “The Spectre of a Separate Peace in the East: Russo-German ‘Peace Feelers’, 1942-44.” Journal of Contemporary History 10, July 1975, pp. 531-549) but none of them led to any action.

There is another scenario that might have led to peace negotiations between all the belligerents of the Second World War which, I feel, I must mention here — although this belongs to the realm of Alternative History. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had a good chance to assassinate Hitler on 20^th June, 1944. That could have been followed by forming a German government led by the military opposition to Hitler.

The situation is far too complicated for me to discuss possible scenarios. I mention only one. Who would have done what, had a new German government decided to open the front in the West but carry on fighting the Soviet Union? Eisenhower and Montgomery would have obeyed orders, but what would General Patton have done? What, indeed, would Churchill have done? What about Roosevelt? I don’t dare to enter this field. It is too explosive.

While still sticking to the subject of peace, next I wish to discuss some peace negotiations that did manage to end a long war half a century ago. The war was fought over the territory of a large colony acquired by the French in the last few years of the 19^th century. The French called it Indochina; it consisted of what are now the nation states of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. In the Second World War they lost it to the natives of the land. When the war ended, the French tried to re-occupy the lost colony. As it happened, the Vietnamese outmanoeuvred them, thanks to the heavy weaponry they received from the Soviet Union which they used effectively. Against French expectations they managed to transport this received weaponry  to the battlefield at Dien Bin Phu, where they won a famous victory.

Interestingly, this was the second time that such a débâcle against insurgents had happened to the French military. The first time had been some 150 years before, during the Franco-Spanish War (known in Britain as the Peninsular War). I still remember reading an account of Spanish guerillas moving a very big gun across rivers and ragged mountains in order to besiege a French fortress. It is described in a novel by C.S. Forester, called simply The Gun. I believe it is a true story.

Returning to the fighting in Vietnam, the French colonial armies were defeated in 1954 by the Vietnamese. The following Conference in Geneva divided Vietnam along the 17^th parallel into  North and South, the North controlled by the Communists and the South dependent on American support that, as usual in such a situation, waxed and waned. The US military personnel kept on increasing in the hope that the increased number would keep the Communists at bay. When in spite of all that the Communists achieved considerable success by guerilla tactics, the wane period started: American military personnel were gradually withdrawn. The actual figure was 549,000 in 1969; it was reduced by nearly a factor of ten to 69,000 three years later.

By then it was obvious that the war against the North Vietnamese could not be won, although none of the Presidents from Truman to Nixon acknowledged the unfortunate fact. Someone had to act. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, was as good at realpolitik as Otto von Bismarck a century before. He took the initiative. He began secret talks in Paris with Le Duc Tho, a member of the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party. These talks led eventually (January 1973) to a peace agreement. The terms were simple: first a ceasefire, followed by the withdrawal of all American military personnel. In return, the North Vietnamese released all their American prisoners of war.

Actually, the military situation in Vietnam was not the only reason why the Americans wanted peace. The war was not popular among the public, especially in the coverage of liberal newspapers and television networks. Wars rarely are popular among those who have a good chance to end up in a body bag. The draft that had been introduced led to a legion of draft-dodgers and draft-card burners. Some moved to Canada to avoid the draft. (Similar sentiments have driven many young Russians to leave Mother Russia in the last couple of years.)

What is the lesson of these case studies? Firstly, a separate peace between two antagonists in a global conflict is difficult to bring about. Once they had launched their war of aggression, the Germans failed to make peace either with the British or with the Soviet Union. In Vietnam, the attempt to make peace after the French defeat also failed: the war went on for another two decades. For Vietnam, on the other hand, one can claim that the right post-conflict policy by both parties can lead to good relations. This was confirmed by the Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham Minh Chinh, on his visit to Washington in May 2022, when he met President Biden.

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