Who really won, and who really lost, World War II?

Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw of “five decades of untold suffering and death that followed” the invasion. Five decades!

What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an evil empire ruled by one of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, Josef Stalin.

Beyond the Elbe River, the Nazis were annihilated, but victory belonged to an equally evil ideology, for the “liberators” of Auschwitz had for decades run an archipelago of concentration camps as large as Himmler’s.

So, who really won, and who lost, the war?

Winston Churchill wanted to fight for Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938, and Britain went to war for Poland in 1939. Yet if both nations ended up under Bolshevik rule for half a century, did Britain win their freedom? Why did Britain declare war for a cause and country it could not defend?? What vital British interest was imperiled by Hitler’s retrieval of a port city, Danzig, that had been severed from Germany against the will of its 300,000 people and handed to Poland in 1919?

Why then did Britain declare war? Because Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had insanely given the Poles a blank check, a war guarantee on March 31, 1939: If Germany uses force to retrieve Danzig, and you resist, we will fight at your side. Britain’s war guarantee guaranteed the war.

British actions during the war seem inexplicable.

When Stalin’s army invaded Poland, Sept. 17, 1939, two weeks after Hitler, Britain did not declare war on the Soviet Union.

Rather than attack Hitler after he invaded Poland, Britain and France remained behind the Maginot Line and waited until Hitler’s armies stormed west on May 10, 1940, the day Churchill took power.

In three weeks, the British army had been defeated and thrown off the continent. In six weeks, France had surrendered.

After Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain in 1940, Britain refused all of Hitler’s offers to end the war, holding on till June 1941, when Hitler turned on his partner Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.

Churchill is the “man of the century” for persuading Britain to stand alone against Nazi Germany in 1940, Britain’s “finest hour.” But at war’s end, what was the balance sheet of Churchill?

The Poland for which Britain had gone to war was lost to Stalinism and would remain so for the entire Cold War. Churchill would be forced to accede to Stalin’s annexation of half of Poland and its incorporation into the Soviet Bloc. To appease Stalin, Churchill declared war on Finland.

Britain would end the war bombed, bled and bankrupt, with her empire in Asia, India, the Mideast and Africa disintegrating. In two decades it would all be gone.

France would end the war after living under Nazi occupation and Vichy rule for five years, lose her African and Asian empire and then sustain defeats and humiliation in Indochina in 1954 and Algeria in 1962. Who really won the war? Certainly, the Soviets who, after losses in the millions from the Nazi invasion, ended up occupying Berlin, having annexed the Baltic states and turned Eastern Europe into a Soviet base camp.

The Americans, who stayed out longest, ended the war with the least losses of any great power. Yet, America is a part of the West, and the West was the loser of the world wars of the last century.