Taken on its own, Five Days in London is an exciting and informative, though hyperbolic, account of the period when Mr. Lukacs contends that Winston Churchill saved the world from Hitler. During the five days in question--Friday, May 24, 1940 to Tuesday, May 28--Mr. Churchill, named Prime Minister earlier in the month and still being challenged for power within the Conservative Party by Lord Halifax, who favored appeasing Hitler, was trying desperately to save as much of the army from Dunkirk as he could.  With prospects for continuing the fight looking bleak, particularly if the army was lost, and with Churchill still distrusted by many colleagues, Mr. Lukacs contends that it was a near run thing whether Halifax would take power himself and enter into negotiations with Hitler to keep Britain out of the war.  But more than that, he argues that Britain would have eventually been doomed had Hitler been allowed to dominate the continent without British opposition.  In effect then, by beating off the Halifax challenge and keeping England active in the war, Churchill prevented Hitler from consolidating his grip on Europe and preserved the possibility of later Allied victory.

The book is very much a response to those who have contended that Britain and America would have been better off leaving continental Europe to fend for itself while Hitler and Stalin slugged it out in the East and then walked in later to pick up the pieces.  I have to confess that I'm partial to that theory myself.  However, I would gladly concede the broader point that Mr. Lukacs seems to be making, that it would have been destructive to the very soul of the West to bargain with Nazi Germany.  Even the case that we had a moral obligation to confront such evil is rather compelling.  Indeed, were Mr. Lukacs serious about these arguments and willing to apply them generally, I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as to the vital importance of these five days.  But there's a curious dichotomy in his writings.  As much emphasis as he gives this brief interlude in 1940 and as much credit as he gives Winston Churchill and the British for stopping Hitler, Mr. Lukacs writing elsewhere is almost entirely derisive of the very similar resistance that America mounted to the Soviet Union after the War.  And he's especially hostile--and this is bizarre because Mr. Lukacs is considered a conservative--to the great Republican presidents of the Cold War: Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

The strange contempt for Mr. Reagan is a staple of an earlier book, The End of the Twentieth Century: and the End of the Modern Age.  The criticism of President Eisenhower happens to be available on-line, in Mr. Lukacs's review of Eisenhower and Churchill, by James C. Humes (John Lukacs, Harper's).  In fact, in that review Mr. Lukacs argues that Nazi Germany was powerful even into 1944, and so had to be destroyed, but that the Soviet Union, even in the 1950s, was in retreat and, apparently, need not have been confronted.  Mr. Lukacs even argues that Churchill tried to stop the Cold War in 1953 and 1954, urging Mr. Eisenhower to negotiate a settlement, and that it might have been possible to end the conflict right then.

Obviously we're pretty far out in the realm of speculative history by now.  On the one hand, had Churchill not stood tall in May 1940 we have the specter of Nazism rampant.  On the other, the Soviets wanted nothing more than peace after Stalin died.  It can serve little purpose to quarrel with either or both of these scenarios.  However, we can ask some consistency and, in that regard, it seems fair to ask of Mr. Lukacs why Hitler and Nazi Germany were so evil that even to negotiate with them would have been intolerable while the Soviet Union would have made a suitable partner in peace talks.  Would it have been permissible in his view to leave Eastern Europe under communist rule in order to secure such a peace?  How far would he, who is so willing to anathematize Halifax, have been willing to appease the Soviets?

It's hard to know why Mr. Lukacs even takes these diametrically opposed stands with regard to Nazism and Communism, but one wonders if it's not some kind of Eurochauvanism.  He can plausibly argue that almost all of Europe resisted Hitler to some degree and that Britain played the key role in his eventual defeat.  But Europe still has Communist parties even today.  The Soviets could always find eager collaborators in all the European nations they dominated.  And no one other than America deserves terribly much credit for winning the Cold War.  Perhaps it's just the Hungarian patriot in him coming out and refusing to concede that Europe spent the entire second half of the 20th Century virtually prostrate while the upstart Americans and Russians feuded over the carcass.  Whatever the case may be, Mr. Lukacs is an anti-anti-communist, an ideology which has no comparable form at the other side of the political spectrum--just try to imagine someone styling himself an anti-anti-Nazi.

In light of the author's inconsistency then, and the lack of any objective difference between Nazism and Soviet Communism, I for one am unwilling to suspend disbelief and grant him his thesis that these five days were necessarily pivotal in the history of the West.  It's a very readable and often thrilling book, but the situation it describes was perhaps less dire than Mr. Lukacs would have us believe.  At any rate, he fails to convince that much more hung in the balance than a potentially humiliating moment for England.  Considering that the British ended the war with the Empire in tatters abroad and with Socialism firmly entrenched at home and ended the Century with sovereignty steadily shifting to the Franco-German bureaucrats of the EU, it's hard to see what the point was of preserving British pride for five days in 1940.

(Reviewed:10-Nov-02)

Grade: (B) Orrin C. Judd

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