This week on Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens take on the World War II revisionists—starting, today, with Pat Buchanan and his book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World.

Buchanan’s central argument centers on Neville Chamberlain’s astonishing reversal. After the Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain agreed to Hitler’s territorial demands on the Sudetenland, Chamberlain changed his mind about the Fuhrer, deciding on confrontation, not appeasement. Even though Britain possessed only a handful of divisions to set against the many dozens of divisions at Hitler’s command, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain rose in the House of Commons to announce British support for Poland in the event “of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence.” What led to a general European war, and, then, to world war, Buchanan insists,

was not Hitler’s occupation of Prague but Britain’s guarantee to Poland. Had there been no war guarantee, Poland, isolated and friendless, might have done a deal over Danzig and been spared six million dead. Had there been no war guarantee…there would have been no British declaration of war on September 3, and there might have been no German invasion of France in May 1940, or ever. For there was nothing inevitable about Hitler’s war in the west.

Nothing inevitable about Hitler’s war in the West? Hanson and Hitchens will have none of it.