Inside the British government, some leaders wanted to meet the Nazis at a conference and negotiate a peace treaty. They would have let Hitler continue to control the German army and most of Europe.
Those who favored the idea of a peace conference feared that they’d lose a fight against Hitler. This fear was reasonable in light of the fact that the British military needed to be evacuated from Dunkirk to avoid be captured in its entirety.
But peace negotiations would imply and require at least a modicum of trust. Those opposed to a peace conference pointed out that Hitler was not to be trusted.
Inside the British government, there was a tension between those who wanted a peace conference and those who opposed the idea. Prime Minister Winston Churchill would break that tension, as historian Larry Arnn writes:
The day on which Churchill put an end to the idea of a peace conference was May 28, 1940. He walked into the cabinet room and made a stirring speech, which in the diary of Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton ended with these words: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” This speech, which provoked a demonstration of enthusiasm that swept throughout the government, was not a product of any trend or great evolution of history. It spoke in defiance of those forces.
A bit more than a year later, in late 1941 and early 1942, Churchill was developing his strategy for the war. The air war raged over England, but the Germans had not invaded Britain, and the British military was rebounding from the debacle at Dunkirk.
The British were not yet ready for a direct confrontation in Europe with the German military. As historians Peter Maslowski and Allan Millett write,
Reverting to their traditional approach of defeating continental enemies, the British wanted to avoid a direct confrontation with a full-strength Wehrmacht in northern Europe until this confrontation carried no risk of a 1914-1918 stalemate. Instead they urged operations in the Mediterranean theater, where they were already engaged and where their scarce naval, air, and ground forces had some some ability to check the Germans and Italians. Churchill stressed that the Mediterranean theater offered many strategic opportunities, since the African littoral could be wrested from the Vichy French forces in Morocco and Algeria and the German-Italian army campaigning in the Libyan-Egyptian area against the British 8th Army. Churchill argued that a 1942 campaign in this area would divert German troops from Russia and strengthen the British war effort. What he did not say was that this campaign would be British-commanded (thus presumably using the greatest Allied expertise in generalship) and help restore the integrity of the British Empire, which Churchill desperately wanted to preserve.
Especially in the areas of North Africa, including Egypt, and the Near East, maintaining some sense of the British Empire was crucial to keeping the peace. This would become painfully clear after the war.
The French and British presence in the Near East had already become less decisive in the wake of WW1. The Europeans had paid too high a price, both in terms of lives and in terms of money, to continue to devote a high level of resources to keeping the region policed.
Although the Near East had been civilized millennia before Europe, the region’s civilizations had become notably less humane and less peaceful in recent centuries. The French and British presence in broad swaths of the area - much of which had formerly been Ottoman possessions - kept a lid on the periodic feuds and bloodbaths which erupted on a regular basis.
Churchill was, even in the grim days of early 1942, thinking ahead to a postwar era, and thinking of ways to maintain peace in that era. Sadly, the British Empire would continue fading, and more than half a century of violence in Near East, during the postwar decades, has shown that the absence of French and British occupational troops led to increased violence.
Human civilization paid a high price in order to defeat Hitler. While millions of Germans were freed from his cruel Nazi dictatorship, millions of people in the Near East were left exposed as major European powers could no longer afford to keep the peace there.
