Anglican Pacifist Fellowship - Second World War

Second World War

During the war, "as well as campaigning for peace at every opportunity, APF had a support role for conscientious objectors... Anglican pacifists became involved in social projects as an alternative to military duties" .

Lansbury was particularly active in this period, though his life was nearing its end. In contrast to Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, Lansbury took a pro-active diplomatic approach towards preventing a war. He sought negotiation with all the major parties in order to arbitrate a peaceful settlement, as related in his book My Pilgrimage for Peace, published in 1938. His efforts were, however, in vain, and most APF members now acknowledge that, to counteract Hitler by non-violent means, Governments should not have allowed the economic and political situation of instability in the Weimar Republic to arise in the first place. This issue is discussed at depth in APF's 1989 publication, What to Do About Hitler: A Pacifist Symposium. Notably, many early pacifists had argued against the excessively harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles from its inception.

It is notable that, by 1944, Vera Brittain was on Hitler's list of those English people posing the greatest threat to his regime. The leader of the Reich clearly felt deeply threatened by her pacifism. Upon a successful Nazi invasion of Britain, the Gestapo were to arrest her immediately. Undaunted, she continued writing further tracts on the immorality of saturation bombing, as the British Royal Air Force undertook its campaign against target cities such as Dresden, .

Another famous female Christian to actively work for APF during the war period was the Anglo-Catholic intellectual, Evelyn Underhill. Although initially opposed to pacifism (and, in fact, working for Naval Intelligence during World War I), after much soul-searching, she found pacifism to be the correct Christian position by 1939 and threw herself whole-heartedly behind APF's work, for "Not content to be merely a proclaimer of pacifism, Underhill tried to live by its principles" .

Writing in a famous pamphlet for APF entitled Church and War (1940), Underhill stated that, "If she remains true to her supernatural call, the Church cannot acquiesce in War for War, however camouflaged or excused, must always mean the effort of a group of men to achieve their purpose... by inflicting destruction and death on another group of men... it is often difficult to define the boundary which divides legitimate police action from military action; nevertheless, Christians must try to find that boundary and to observe it" .