this issue

THE JOURNAL OF
WINSTON CHURCHILL
SUMMER 2007
NUMBER 135
THE CHURCHILL CENTRE AND SOCIETIES
UNITED STATES • UNITED KINGDOM • CANADA • PORTUGAL • AUSTRALIA
PATRON: THE LADY SOAMES LG DBE • WWW.WINSTONCHURCHILL.ORG
®
®
Founded in 1968 to foster leadership, statesmanship, vision, courage and boldness among democratic
and freedom-loving peoples worldwide, through the thoughts, words, works and deeds of Winston Spencer Churchill.
THE CENTRE IS THE SUCCESSOR TO THE CHURCHILL STUDY UNIT (1968) AND THE INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL SOCIETY, UNITED STATES (1971).
GOVERNORS AND TRUSTEES
Dr. John V. Banta • Randy Barber • Winston S. Churchill
Paul H. Courtenay • Senator Richard J. Durbin
Governor Jim Edgar • Marcus Frost • Gary Garrison
Laurence S. Geller • Christopher Hebb
Judith Mills Kambestad • The Hon. Jack Kemp
Christopher Matthews • Nigel Knocker OBE
Richard M. Langworth CBE • James W. Muller
Amb. Paul H. Robinson, Jr. • The Hon. Celia Sandys
Michael J. Scully • Suzanne Sigman
HONORARY MEMBERS
Winston S. Churchill • Sir Martin Gilbert CBE
The Lord Deedes KBE MC PC DL
Robert Hardy CBE • The Lord Heseltine CH PC
The Duke of Marlborough JP DL
Sir Anthony Montague Browne KCMG CBE DFC
Elizabeth Nel • The Hon. Colin L. Powell KCB
Ambassador Paul H. Robinson, Jr.
The Lady Thatcher LG OM PC FRS
OFFICERS
Laurence S. Geller, President
77 West Wacker Drive,
Suite 4600, Chicago IL 60601
Tel. (312) 658-5006 • Fax (312) 658-5797
Email: lgeller@strategichotels.com
Suzanne Sigman, Secretary
42 Dudley Lane, Milton MA 02186
Tel. (617) 696-1833 • Fax (617) 696-7738
Email: s.sigman@comcast.net
Christopher Hebb, Treasurer
1806-1111 W. Georgia St., Vancouver BC V6E 4M3
Tel. (604) 209-6400 • Email: cavell_capital@telus.net
BUSINESS OFFICE
Daniel N. Myers, Executive Director
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Suite 307
Washington DC 20036
Tel. (888) WSC-1874 • Fax (202) 223-4944
Email: dmyers@winstonchurchill.org
UNITED STATES CHAPTERS
The Churchill Centre is represented in the United States
by local organizers in Alaska, Arizona, California (3),
Chicago, DC/Delmarva, Denver, Florida, Georgia,
Michigan, Nashville, Nebraska, New England, New
Orleans, New York City, North Carolina, Ohio,
Philadelphia and Texas (2). See inside back cover
for local contacts.
AFFILIATES
California Churchillians (Desert, North & South)
Rocky Mountain Churchillians • WC Society of Georgia
North Carolina Churchillians • SWSCS Vancouver Island
Washington Society for Churchill
INTERNET SERVICES
Website: www.winstonchurchill.org
Website committee: David A. Turrell, Chairman
Paul Brubaker • Ian W. D. Langworth • John David Olsen
Todd A. Ronnei • Daniel N. Myers, Webmaster.
Listserv: http://groups.google.com/group/ChurchillChat
Moderator: Jonah Triebwasser
THE CHURCHILL CENTRE SUPPORTS AND
WORKS WITH THE FOLLOWING
FRATERNAL INSTITUTIONS
Chartwell, Westerham, Kent
Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
Churchill Memorial Trust, UK and Australia
Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, London
Harrow School, Harrow-on-the Hill, Middlesex
Winston Churchill Memorial & Library, Fulton, Missouri
ACADEMIC ADVISERS
Prof. James W. Muller, Chairman
University of Alaska, Anchorage
2410 Galewood Street, Anchorage AK 99508
Tel. (907) 786-4740 • Fax (907) 786-4647
Email: afjwm@uaa.alaska.edu
Prof. John A. Ramsden, Vice Chairman
Queen Mary College, University of London
Prof. Paul K. Alkon, University of Southern California
Sir Martin Gilbert CBE, Merton College, Oxford
Col. David Jablonsky, U.S. Army War College
Prof. Warren F. Kimball, Rutgers University
Prof. John Maurer, U.S. Naval War College
Prof. David Reynolds, Christ’s College, Cambridge
Dr. Jeffrey Wallin, American Academy of Liberal Education
COLLEGE OF FELLOWS
Dr. Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College
Dr. Geoffrey Best, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford
Dr. Piers Brendon, Churchill College, Cambridge
Kirk R. Emmert, Kenyon College
Dr. Barry Gough, Wilfrid Laurier University
Steven F. Hayward, American Enterprise Institute
Prof. Cameron Hazlehurst, Australian National University
Prof. Patrick J.C. Powers, Magdalen College
Prof. Paul A. Rahe, University of Tulsa
Prof. David Stafford, University of Edinburgh
Dr. Manfred Weidhorn, Yeshiva University
LEADERSHIP & SUPPORT
NUMBER TEN CLUB
Contributors of $10,000 annually to the work of the Centre:
Laurence S. Geller • J. Willis Johnson
Michael D. Rose • Michael J. Scully
CHURCHILL CENTRE ASSOCIATES
Associates are contributors to The Churchill Endowment,
which offers three levels: $10,000, $25,000 and $50,000+,
inclusive of bequests. Endowment earnings support the work
of The Churchill Centre.
Winston Churchill Associates
The Annenberg Foundation • David & Diane Boler
Colin D. Clark • Fred Farrow • Mr. & Mrs. Parker H. Lee III
Michael & Carol McMenamin • David & Carole Noss
Ray & Patricia Orban • Wendy Russell Reves
Elizabeth Churchill Snell • Mr. & Mrs. Matthew B. Wills
Alex M. Worth Jr.
Clementine Churchill Associates
Ronald D. Abramson • Winston S. Churchill
Marcus & Molly Frost • Jeanette & Angelo Gabriel
Craig & Lorraine Horn • James F. Lane
Barbara & Richard Langworth • John & Susan Mather
Linda & Charles Platt • Amb. & Mrs. Paul H. Robinson Jr.
James R. & Lucille I. Thomas
Mary Soames Associates
Dr. & Mrs. John V. Banta • Solveig & Randy Barber
Gary J. Bonine • Susan & Daniel Borinsky
Nancy Bowers • Lois Brown • Carolyn & Paul Brubaker
Nancy H. Canary • Dona & Bob Dales
Jeffrey & Karen De Haan • Sam & Judith Dodson
Gary Garrison • Ruth & Laurence Geller
Frederick & Martha Hardman • Leo Hindery, Jr.
Bill & Virginia Ives • J. Willis Johnson
Mr. & Mrs. Gerald Drake Kambestad • Elaine Kendall
David M. & Barbara A. Kirr • Phillip & Susan Larson
Ruth J. Lavine • Mr. & Mrs. Richard A. Leahy
Philip & Carole Lyons • Richard & Susan Mastio
Cyril & Harriet Mazansky • Michael W. Michelson
Mr. & Mrs. James W. Muller • Wendell & Martina Musser
Bond Nichols • Earl & Charlotte Nicholson
Bob & Sandy Odell • Dr. & Mrs. Malcolm Page
Ruth & John Plumpton • Hon. Douglas S. Russell
Daniel & Suzanne Sigman • Shanin Specter
Robert M. Stephenson • Richard & Jenny Streiff
Peter J. Travers • Gabriel Urwitz • Damon Wells Jr.
Jacqueline Dean Witter
ALLIES
INTL. CHURCHILL SOCIETY (UNITED KINGDOM)
Nigel Knocker OBE, Chairman:
PO Box 1257, Melksham, Wilts. SN12 6GQ
Tel. & Fax (01380) 828609
Email: nigel.knocker@btinternet.com
TRUSTEES
The Hon. Celia Sandys, Chairman
The Duke of Marlborough JP DL
David Boler • David Porter • Geoffrey Wheeler
COMMITTEE
Nigel Knocker OBE, Chairman
Paul H. Courtenay, Vice Chairman & Hon. Secretary
Anthony Woodhead CBE FCA, Hon. Treasurer
Smith Benson • Eric Bingham • Robin Brodhurst
Randolph S. Churchill • Robert Courts
Geoffrey Fletcher • Derek Greenwell
Rafal Heydel-Mankoo • Michael Kelion
Amanda Laurence • Michael Moody • Brian Singleton
____________________________________________
INTL. CHURCHILL SOCIETY OF CANADA
Ambassador Kenneth W. Taylor, Honorary Chairman
Randy Barber, President
14 Honeybourne Crescent, Markham ON L3P 1P3
Tel. (905) 201-6687
Email: randybarber@sympatico.ca
Jeanette Webber, Membership Secretary
RR4, 14 Carter Road, Lion’s Head ON N0H 1W0
Tel. (519) 592-3082 • Email: jeanette.webber@sympatico.ca
Charles Anderson, Treasurer
489 Stanfield Drive, Oakville ON L6L 3R2
Tel. (905) 827-0819 • Email: cwga@sympatico.ca
___________________________________________
INTL. CHURCHILL SOCIETY OF PORTUGAL
João Carlos Espada, President
Instituto de Estudos Políticos
Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Palma de Cima 1649-023, Lisbon
Tel. (351) 21 7214129 • Email: jespada@iep.ucp.pt
___________________________________________
CHURCHILL CENTRE AUSTRALIA
Neil Kenworthy, Vice President
Unit 2, 3 Martha St., Donvale, Victoria 3111
Tel. 61-3-9841-8170
Email: neilken@bigpond.net.au
_____________________________________________
THE RT. HON. SIR WINSTON SPENCER
CHURCHILL SOCIETY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Christopher Hebb, President
1806-1111 W. Georgia St., Vancouver BC V6E 4M3
Tel. (604) 209-6400 • Email: cavell_capital@telus.net
_____________________________________________
THE RT. HON. SIR WINSTON SPENCER
CHURCHILL SOCIETY OF CALGARY
Dr. Francis LeBlanc, President
126 Pinetree Dr. SW, Calgary AB T3Z 3K4
Tel. (403) 685-5836 • Email: neuron@platinum.ca
_____________________________________________
THE RT. HON. SIR WINSTON SPENCER
CHURCHILL SOCIETY OF EDMONTON
Dr. Edward Hutson, President
98 Rehwinkel Road, Edmonton AB T6R 1Z8
Tel. (780) 430-7178 • Email: jehutson@shaw.ca
_____________________________________________
THE RT. HON. SIR WINSTON SPENCER
CHURCHILL SOCIETY OF VANCOUVER ISLAND
Barry Gough, President
3000 Dean Ave., P.O. Box 5037, Victoria, BC V8R 6N3
Tel. (250) 592-0800 • Email: bgough@wlu.ca
Member of Parliament
for Dundee, 1908
SUMMER 2007
NUMBER 135
THE JOURNAL OF
WINSTON CHURCHILL
14 The Commando Memorial, 21 May 1948 • A Speech by Winston S. Churchill
16 Troubled Triumvirate: The Big Three at the Summit • by Hugh Lunghi
“Applied Churchill”
24 “Behind the Distant Mountains Is the Promise of the Sun” • The Editors
25 “Let Us Preach What We Practise”: The Fulton Speech and Today’s War • by Christopher C. Harmon
32 The Protracted Conflict: Failing in Baghdad: The British Did It First • by Toby Dodge
34 But Did Britain Fail? • by David Freeman
35 Correspondence on Iraq, 1922 • by Winston S. Churchill and David Lloyd George
37 The Protracted Conflict (2): Churchill and Lloyd George 1936-1945 • by James Lancaster
40 Myth and Reality: What Did Churchill Really Think About the Jews? • by Sir Martin Gilbert CBE
42 Churchill and the Tank (1): Present at the Creation • by David Fletcher
45 Churchill and the Tank (2): In for the Duration • by Marcus Frost
50 The Queen and Mr. Churchill • by David Dilks
60 Interview: Churchill’s Lessons of Leadership • Sir Martin Gilbert with Peter Mansbridge
54 BOOKS, ARTS & CURIOSITIES
Sinking Stones and Rising Waves among the avalanche of new Churchilliana ... Robert Courts and David Hatter stumble over the sinkers,
while Paul Courtenay finds worthy company, and Christopher Sterling finds two winners and only one loser ... Sir Martin Gilbert goes
“One on One” with Peter Mansfield ... James Lancaster taxes our brainpower ... Punch recalls the Good and the Great.
Despatch Box 4 • Editor’s Essay 7 • Datelines 8 • Around & About 13 • Poems Churchill Loved 15 • Riddles, Mysteries, Enigmas 23
Wit & Wisdom 39 • Churchill Quiz 62 • “Action This Day” and “Inside the Journals” will return next issue.
Cover: Portrait of Churchill in Privy Counsellor uniform, painted for the National Liberal Club in 1915 by Ernest Townsend. It was ready for presentation on 20
December 1915, but no opportunity was found for Churchill to unveil it. Later, when he was no longer persona grata with the Club, it was placed in storage.
During World War II it was re-hung, but almost immediately damaged by bomb blast. After being restored, it was unveiled by Churchill himself in 1941. WSC
was a member of the Club from 1906 until 1924, being a Liberal MP for nearly all of this period. (Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol . III, 708 note 1.)
Copyright © the Trustees of the National Liberal Club, published by kind permssion. Photography by Terry Moore.
D E S PAT C H B O X
Number 135 • Summer 2007
ISSN 0882-3715
www.winstonchurchill.org
____________________________
Barbara F. Langworth, Publisher
(blangworth@adelphia.net)
Richard M. Langworth CBE, Editor
(malakand@langworth.name)
Post Office Box 740
Moultonborough, NH 03254 USA
Tel. (603) 253-8900
December-March Tel. (242) 335-0615
___________________________
Deputy Editor:
Robert A. Courts
Senior Editors:
Paul H. Courtenay
James Lancaster
James W. Muller
Ron Cynewulf Robbins
News Editor:
John Frost
Contributors
Alfred James, Australia;
Terry Reardon, Canada;
Inder Dan Ratnu, India;
Paul Addison, Winston S. Churchill,
Sir Martin Gilbert CBE,
Allen Packwood, United Kingdom;
David Freeman, Ted Hutchinson
Warren F. Kimball,
Michael McMenamin, Don Pieper,
Christopher Sterling,
Manfred Weidhorn, United States
___________________________
k Address changes: Help us keep your copies
coming! Please update your membership office
when you move. All offices for The Churchill
Centre, its Allies and Affiliates are listed on the
inside front cover.
__________________________________
Finest Hour is made possible in part through
the generous support of members of The
Churchill Centre and Societies, the particular
assistance of the Number Ten Club, and an
endowment created by the Churchill Centre
Associates (listed on page 2).
___________________________________
Published quarterly by The Churchill Centre,
which offers various levels of subscription in
various currencies. Membership applications
may be obtained from the appropriate offices
on page 2, or may be downloaded from our
website. Permission to mail at non-profit rates
in USA granted by the United States Postal
Service, Concord, NH, permit no. 1524.
Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.
Produced by Dragonwyck Publishing Inc.
JUNO BEACH CENTRE
To the Prime Minister, Ottawa:
As one of the original members of
the fund-raising team that solicited $8
million to open the Juno Beach Centre, I
send my sincere thanks to you and your
government for the recent commitment
of additional funding. As President of the
International Churchill Society, Canada, I
attended a tour of the Normandy beaches
with Sir Winston’s daughter Lady Soames
(née Mary Churchill), in October 2004. I
was never so proud to be a Canadian as
when this multinational group toured this
“piece of Canada.” Like many, I had a
father and grandfather who fought there.
Everyone in our party was complimentary
on the content and focus of Canada’s
wartime contribution as depicted in the
Juno Beach Centre. Please know that
there are many Canadians who applaud
your initiative.
RANDY BARBER, MARKHAM, ONT.
EVEREST REMEMBERED
How enjoyable was Geoffrey
Fletcher’s two-part article, “Spencer
Churchill (p) at Harrow” (FH 133-34).
Having visited the school on the wonderful Churchill tour organized by The
Churchill Centre last year, I could much
more easily envision the scenes he recreated and appreciate the environment he
describes. The part about Mrs. Everest is
particularly touching, and so like
Churchill. The tour party visited Mrs.
Everest’s grave last year, and laid a wreath
on it—very appropriate.
EARL M. BAKER, WAYNE, PENNA.
• I’m glad you enjoyed my piece. Some
years ago ICS (UK) held our AGM at the
school and I met fellow Churchillians from
the United States who were in England and
were welcome guests. The conversation
turned to the public (private) school system
in the UK which for many years produced
most senior politicians and civil servants.
Churchill had four Old Harrovians in his
1940 Cabinet: L.S. Amery, J.T.C. MooreBrabazon, D. Margesson and G. Lloyd.
This gave me the idea for the article.
Churchill’s schooldays in my opinion forged
his character, particularly between 1888
and 1892, but have not been fully
researched. I am not an Old Harrovian but
I was at a similar school; times had not
FINEST HOUR 135 / 4
changed very much in my time! —GJF
NOT “DEAD DRUNK”
An author’s note to “Like Goldfish
in a Bowl” (FH 134: 33) quotes me as
saying I helped a “dead drunk” Churchill
and Eden home after a long dinner with
the Russians at Teheran. Let me please
correct that: to me “dead drunk” means
horizontal. Sir Winston was not so far
along as that. He was still walking,
just...so much that I put my arm within
his to hold him steady and had a corporal
do the same to Mr. Eden. Thus they were
able to walk straight and upright to the
British Consulate. Indeed they need not
have walked, because a limousine had
been provided, but they decided to do so
because it was a fine, clear night.
“Inside the Journals” on the next
page accurately describes Stalin’s custom
of multiple toasts, which he always performed while remaining firmly sober
himself. WSC and Eden were thus affected on that occasion, but were yet able to
walk home in true British fashion after a
heavy night, talking loudly but not
singing, and living to fight another day!
DANNY MANDER, LOS GATOS, CALIF.
• Mr. Mander’s adventures, written
through an interview by Susan Kidder, are
coming up in a future issue. —Ed.
LORD CHARLES BERESFORD
On the back cover of FH 134, the
seaman in the pool with his telescope on
Churchill is more likely Admiral Lord
Charles Beresford, who at the time was
retired from the Navy and serving as
Conservative MP for Portsmouth. He was
a frequent critic in Parliament of Liberal
naval administration under Churchill. (A
drawing in Punch for 1 November 1911
depicts Haldane, the outgoing First Lord
of the Admiralty, saying to his successor:
“And you can handle Beresford,”
acknowledging his thorn-in-the-side status.) The drawing may have been influenced by the 1912 Olympic games in
Stockholm, which ran 5 May to 22 July.
JOHN S. McCLEOD, JR., MILFORD, CONN.
• See corrections on this issue’s back
cover. Photos of Beresford and Bridgeman
suggest that either would fit the cartoon, but
we believe you are correct, in that all the
other figures are political, and Bridgeman
was not. I probably put two and two together
and made five when I assumed that a
uniformed admiral was the First Sea
Lord. Many thanks for the context: the
concurrent Olympics was undoubtedly the
inspiration for the cartoon. —PHC
ISSUES OVER
“ISSUES”
by newspeak like “issues”? After all,
we’ve witnessed the breakdown of the
family, the withering of liberal-arts
education, the constriction of economic freedom, the corrosion of aesthetic
standards, soaring crime rates, drug
addiction and the collapse of music—
and you’re worried by the
rotting of the language? One
thing at a time!
your best stuff, reminding me of the
night in the Lochober’s Restaurant in
Boston, when we had “issues” with a
bottle of corked wine, and the waiter
responded that we had “not ordered
the best stuff.” Please speed this piece
to the website so that it reaches a larger
audience than the privileged few thousand of Finest Hour. It deserves more.
PARKER H. LEE III, LYNCHBURG, VA.
JAMES MACK, FAIRFIELD, OHIO
I have the deepest
respect for the editor for his
singular contribution to The
Churchill Centre and exemplary editorship of Finest
Hour. But as a “secular
humanist” I must disagree
with the blame he spreads
on us for problems that really originate in the far left
I liked and agreed with your
two rants in 133, on “political agitators” (p. 4) and our lovely language
(46). Even though you’re full of old
prunes on the Baltics and our boy, your
rants are spot on.
PROF. WARREN KIMBALL, JOHN ISLAND, S.C.
• Prof. Kimball refers to the editor’s
article, “Churchill and the Baltics,” FH
53 and 54 (see http://xrl.us/wqqu). He
has a long memory. —Ed.
Your essay on page 46 was beautiful. Everyone over 15 should be
required to read it. “Issues” isn’t the
only silly substitute for “problems.”
There is also “challenges,” which drives
me particularly mad....
ROBERT DISQUE, MILFORD, CONN.
Delighted to read your gripe
about “issues.” It’s been bugging me for
years and I thought I was alone. Well,
now there are at least two of us.
Perhaps we can make an issue of it?
wing.
I would agree that many so-called
secular humanists are indeed leftists,
and
with whom I have disagreements. But
the essence of the secular humanist’s
worldview is scientific naturalism,
along with the notion that moral
and ethical codes can be based on reason and logic as opposed to the supernatural (e.g., be good or you will rot
in Hell).
It is important to keep a distinction between politics and world view.
Just as there is no direct equivalence
between “conservative” and “evangelical
Christian,” there is none between “secular humanist” and “liberal.”
Michelle Phillips’ Londonistan discusses the appalling failure of the
Labour government of Tony Blair and
the Church of England to contain the
threat of Muslim extremism in the UK.
This is not a failure of secular humanism, but a failure of political liberalism.
Aside from this “issue” I heartily
agree with the rest of the essay.
GREGORY B. SMITH, SONOMA, CALIF.
PROF. DAVID STAFFORD, UNIV. OF EDINBURGH
I have read with approval your
essay on the subject of “Issues.”
PROF. DAVID DILKS, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
Why should you be so exercised
• If I had it to write it again, Greg,
I would drop the label “secular humanist”
which, like all labels, can be misconstrued, and misapplied. —Ed.
The piece on “Issues” was some of
FINEST HOUR 135 / 5
Let me join any line forming to
shake your hand and offer praise for
that editorial. It needed to be said and
was said well. I do think the occasional
infinitive needs to be split, but this is a
subject on which people of good will
may differ.
TERRY McGARRY, ENCINO, CALIF.
I have had issues with “issues” for
some time now. The horrible misuse
of language today is a problem for me.
Your views on what Churchill meant
by “Christian civilization,” and on “we”
vs. “they,” PC filters and split infinitives, were insightful, enjoyable and
reassuring. Until reading it I had quite
a sense of isolation on these matters.
JOHN B. TUCKER, NEW LONDON, N.H.
FORMER SPEAKER, NEW HAMPSHIRE HOUSE
You succinctly reflect my sentiments on this overused, misapplied and
increasingly irrelevant word. Its use,
together with the flood of revisionist
notions parading as historical fact, are a
constant, deplorable presence in today’s
world. Thank you for your thoughtful
and entertaining piece.
ROBIN BATES, MESA, ARIZ.
My attention was grabbed by the
juxtaposition of quotes from Churchill
and Bill O’Reilly. Clearly this was an
essay demanding to be read. You propose that “the campaign to eradicate
the traditional values and mores of
Western Civilization is ceaseless.” Who
are conspiring in this “campaign”? The
“secular humanists.” Who are they?
Those “who would have us believe that
the Western democracies are no better
than Nazis, Soviets, or Islamofascists.”
This is a conspicuous example of
the fallacy of the straw man, a tactic
much practiced by Mr. O’Reilly: Take
DESPATCH BOX
the most extreme loonies on the left
and then hold them up as representative of all who may have liberal >>
sympathies. Whether it reflects cynical
strategy or intellectual lassitude, it does
a disservice to all who strive to understand and respect one another.
I know personally a number of
secular humanists. None of them
“would have us believe” anything of the
sort. To the contrary, they cherish their
country and its founding principles
and actually take great delight in its
history and know it quite well, indeed
better than most. They are also proud
of the artistic and scientific achievements its freedoms have fostered and
the beneficent effect it has had on the
world at large.
But they also recognize that its
history is not spotless. Especially of
late. And for that reason, they find it
more creditable to direct their energies
toward making it better rather than
crowing about it. Besides that, they’re
uncomfortable flaunting their happy
circumstances before a world where few
are as fortunate as they.
Although secular humanists may
have trouble distinguishing religious
belief from superstition, that does not
mean they do not esteem the traditions
of their culture nor embrace its ethics.
They see themselves very much in step
with the “Man of the 20th Century,”
who, as Paul Addison wrote, “substituted a secular belief in historical
progress...[f ]or orthodox religion.”
They also tend to think that the
bugaboo of “P.C. filters” has done considerably less violence to the language
and to the culture’s traditions and history than national leaders who show a
complacent ignorance of that language
and that history. And they are puzzled
why any devotee of the profoundly
intellectual, knowledgeable and hardworking Churchill would expend
precious stores of outrage on vague
“campaigns” rather than on incurious
and disengaged leaders who continue
to wield actual power in a manner so
destructive of “the traditional values
and mores of Western Civilization.”
Finally, while it may be easy for a
Christian to accept that the term
“Christian civilisation” is “not mean[t]
to exclude Jews or Buddhists or
Muslims,” I’m not so sure they can
expect Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims to
feel the same. In any event, it seems a
point of common courtesy more than
anything else.
I suppose it’s a good thing every
now and then for all of us to get something off our chests. But sometimes,
given the emotional rather than rational origins of the urge, the act ends up
revealing more about our mood at the
moment than our considered ideas.
“As God gives us to see the Right:
Edward Hanniford, Pittsburgh PostGazette, 12 Febraury 1945.
Thanks for a great publication on the
greatest man.
DOUG PEINE, ST. PAUL, MINN.
• Thanks for the kind words about
Finest Hour. And please let me apologize
unreservedly if I tarred any traditionloving secular humanist. But “national
leaders who show a complacent ignorance
of that language and that history” were
not my point. Yes, Churchill was a secularist, who forsook the “superstitions” of
orthodox religion. That didn’t prevent
him from deploying orthodox Christianity
—which, come to think of it, encompasses
the same “common courtesy” you cite.
Why can’t we expect Jews, Buddhists
and Muslims to accept Churchill’s application of Christian principles to world
affairs? Most of them did in 1940. What
a shame that it takes looming extinction
for people to grasp the broader interpretation of Churchill’s frequent references to
“Christian civilization.”
The “issue” with “common courtesy”
is that courtesy is no longer common. Not
FINEST HOUR 135 / 6
when you have elected, presumably sane
leaders comparing a President or Pri
me Minister with Hitler, or their opponents labeling them “surrender monkeys.”
Not to mention what imams are saying
about our stained history in the mosques
our tolerant societies allow in our midst.
“Queen. House of Commons. If you
accept it, you are a part of it. If you don’t
accept it, you have to fix a target.” That’s
what those moderate voices directing their
energies to making the world better are
saying in civilized, easy-going Derby,
England. Or at the mosque in
Birmingham, praised by Tony Blair for
its contribution to tolerance, on the death
of a British soldier in Afghanistan: “The
hero of Islam is the one who separated his
head from his shoulders.”
Our children are being taught to
“understand and respect” such voices, who
are not a problem but an “issue”; after
all, “they” are entitled to their opinion,
our own history is not spotless, and “we”
should devote our energy to making it
better, not crowing about it. But
Churchill believed crowing was indispensable, offering those “less fortunate than
us” to glimpse the possibilities:
“We must never cease to proclaim in
fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the
joint inheritance of the English-speaking
world and which, through Magna Carta,
the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus,
trial by jury, and the English common
law, find their most famous expression in
the American Declaration of Independence.” Let us do more crowing. While
we still can. —Ed.
• “The worst difficulties from
which we suffer do not come from
without. They come from within. They
come from a peculiar type of brainy
people always found in our country,
who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our
difficulties come from the mood of
unwarrantable self-abasement into
which we have been cast by a powerful
section of our own intellectuals. They
come from the acceptance of defeatist
doctrines by a large proportion of our
politicians....Nothing can save England
if she will not save herself. If we lose
faith in ourselves, in our capacity to
E D I T O R ’ S E S S AY
History on the Cheap
GENERATIONAL CHAUVINISM? MAJOR CROUTONS IN THE CHURCHILL SOUP
A
n outbreak of pernicious pronouncements on Churchill and his times by a number of authors raises the
question: will history join the lost arts? We are not at “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama famously
suggested, before 9/11 proved him wrong. But could we be approaching the end of good history?
Examples abound in this issue: a pronouncement that Churchill didn’t read serious books and borrowed his ideas from H.G. Wells (page 10); an assertion that Churchill was a closet anti-Semite (page 40);
and three new books making further fallacious pronouncements unleavened by rival facts and opinions (page 54).
Tom Hickman’s Churchill’s Bodyguard (FH 133) was so packed with errors as to cast doubt on his basic
Churchill knowledge. Charles Higham’s book, Dark Lady, suffers from similar errors, while adding “a soup bowl of
scandals” and a “forest of family trees.” From Churchill’s War Rooms is a book that has virtually nothing to do with
Churchill; adding him to the title was done to boost sales. Gordon Corrigan’s Blood, Sweat and Arrogance, like some
books before it, sets out with preconceived notions and considers only the facts that support them. With perfect hindsight, Corrigan assures us that sinking the French fleet at Oran in 1940 was unnecessary, and that Churchill himself
lacked intellectual curiosity—so ridiculous a theory that one wonders if he read any serious biography.
Such writers share a penchant for selective research and “Generational Chauvinism”: a phrase coined by
William Manchester to describe the judging of past events by modern standards or hindsight. Faith in the French Army of 1940 was “idiocy,” Corrigan writes, forgetting that everyone at the time (except the Germans) thought the French unbeatable. Higham dwells on the
social inequities of the Edwardian era as if he has just discovered them. Richard Toye dubs
Churchill an anti-Semite on the basis of a draft someone else wrote, ignoring WSC’s massive
pro-Semitic record. Higham doesn’t like Lord Randolph, so he assures us that Queen
Victoria “detested” him, which may be true but does not define Lord Randolph. Churchill
didn’t readily warm to strangers, so Corrigan concludes that he was an introvert. Withal they
are irritatingly smug, constantly asserting their superiority over predecessors who navigated
the same waters with perhaps more judgment and balance.
Cheap history is encouraged by the Internet, our electronic Hyde Park Corner: a
William Manchester
double-edged sword of opinion from sublime to preposterous; and by the expansion of news
1922-2004
outlets to a 24/7 cacophony. In such a soup, it is much easier to become a Major Crouton
by proclaiming Churchill an anti-Semite than by acknowledging his lifelong Zionism.
A new book by Geoffrey Roberts claims that in 1948, Stalin told somebody in the U.S. State Department that
he hoped to “do business” with America—that if he had been born American he would have been a businessman.
Could this be another isolated fact that some may seize upon to argue that Stalin was really a benign, misunderstood
uncle? I have not read the book and do not presume to judge it. A scholar friend assures me that Roberts’ writing is
not the same breed of silliness as these others: “Were we wrong about Uncle Joe? Wrong (or not wrong) when? There
is absolutely no doubt that FDR and WSC were frequently wrong about Uncle Joe. But is that a universal? That they
were wrong about the degree of his power over his advisers is, I think, not irrelevant. Or were they correct?”
In those few lines a professional historian offers the alternative to cheap history. There are always practical possibilities, new avenues of thought or inquiry, which might change our view of What Really Happened. But these are
not explored with out-of-context quotations or pre-fab conclusions designed to fit a mind-set.
“No one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a
part of history,” Churchill said in 1940. “But at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review....In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been
wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different
setting….History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive
its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”
I hope history will continue to flicker on the trail of the past, and not become a discipline practiced by
Politically Correct closed minds who have already decided (or have been told) what they must believe. —RML
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 7
DATELINES
Quotation of the Season
HANDING BACK THE FIRE HOSE
Great Britain
completed her last $80 million installment on
World War II debt to the United States, paid
back with interest. When your neighbor’s house
is on fire, Franklin Roosevelt said in 1940, it is
appropriate to lend him your hose. Well, the
UK never forgot those loans, and paid them off
with honor. —JL
LONDON, DECEMBER 29TH—
SUPPORTING ACTOR
LOS ANGELES, FEBRUARY 25TH— When
Helen Mirren won the Academy
Award for best actress in “The
Queen,” we remembered a telling line
in the motion picture, as Her Majesty
informs Tony Blair that Winston
Churchill “sat right in that spot” when
she was new to the throne. Returning
home from that excellent film, we
tuned in to an older one, “An
American in Paris.” There is a scene
where Gene Kelly is walking among
the French painters; overlooking the
sea is a robust older gentleman with a
cigar, dabbing at a canvas. Kelly does a
double-take: it is obviously Churchill,
perennial bit player in films old and
new! —EARL BAKER
“L
ike many others, I often summon up in my
memory the impression of those July
days....The old world in its sunset was fair
to see. But there was a strange temper in the air.
Unsatisfied by material prosperity, the nations
turned restlessly towards strife internal or external.
National passions, unduly exalted in the decline of
religion, burned beneath the surface of nearly every
land with fierce, if shrouded, fires. Almost one might
think the world wished to suffer.”
Gleeson has built a reputation for
playing a variety of Irish criminals and
“wide-boys,” such as Bunny Kelly in “I
Went Down” and Walter McGinn in
“Gangs of New York.” Said Teri
Hayden, the actor’s agent: “The idea of
an Irishman playing Churchill is fascinating.” (Why, exactly? —Ed.)
Gleeson abandoned teaching for
acting at the age of 34. After a couple
of bit parts, his breakthrough role was
in “Braveheart,” playing Mel Gibson’s
right-hand man, Hamish. He has since
worked with Steven Spielberg, Martin
Scorsese and Anthony Minghella;
starred opposite Nicole Kidman and
Renée Zellweger in “Cold Mountain”;
and had parts in “Mission Impossible
II,” “Troy,” and “Artificial
Intelligence.”
—WSC, the world crisis, VOL. 1, CH. 8, 1923
and Clementine in the years leading
up to the Second World War. Robert
Hardy made the role famous in
1981’s mini-series, “Winston
Churchill: The Wilderness Years,” as
did Richard Burton before him in
1974’s “The Gathering Storm.” The
most recent portrayal of Churchill was
by Scottish actor Mel Smith in
“Allegiance,” a play by Mary Kenny
that imagines what passed between
Churchill and Michael Collins, the
Irish rebel leader, when they met in
London. Ironically, Gleeson also portrayed Collins on screen, in a 1991
television movie, “The Treaty.”
“It will probably annoy a few
people,” said the film critic Dave
Fanning of Gleeson’s casting in the
role. “Brendan knows how to be
GLEESON TO PLAY WSC
LONDON, NOVEMBER 26TH— Dubliner
Brendan Gleeson, best known for his
portrayal of Ireland’s most notorious
criminal, is to play Winston Churchill
(proclaimed Britain’s chief criminal by
Nazi propagandists) in a sequel to
Ridley Scott’s “The Gathering Storm.”
The star of “The General” will take on
his new role in “Churchill at War,”
which will be made by HBO, the
American network behind “The
Sopranos” and “Band of Brothers.”
The story centres on Churchill’s leadership during the Second World War,
but no British actor was deemed suitable for the role. Gleeson, 51, will
deliver some of the Prime Minister’s
most famous orations, which gave
inspiration to the nation.
WINSTONIAN: Brendan Gleeson (shown here as Professor “Mad-Eye”Moody in the
Harry Potter films) will make a passable WSC in “Churchill at War.”
Gleeson is following a line of
venerable, and more obvious,
Churchillian portraitists: Albert Finney
won an Emmy and a Golden Globe
for his depiction in 2002’s “The
Gathering Storm,” a look at Churchill
FINEST HOUR 135 / 8
sloppy and gruff and Churchill was a
bit of an awkward bloke. He’d be the
right build and he could certainly
slouch properly with the right coats on
him. Ridley Scott wouldn’t care that
much about being 100% true to how
the guy looks, as long as the feel of the
movie is right. I think he’ll be great.”
“Churchill at War” is being made
by the same production team as
Finney’s —Scott Free Productions, and
is a follow-on. Rainmark Films, a
London-based company, is a co-producer on the film, which will be shot
in England and France this summer.
—JAN BATTLES, THE SUNDAY TIMES
HOLOCAUST OFF LIMITS
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history
lessons to avoid offending Muslim
pupils, a Government-backed study has
revealed. It found some teachers are
reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear
of upsetting students whose beliefs
include Holocaust denial.
There is also resistance to tackling
the 11th century Crusades, where
Christians fought Muslim armies for
control of Jerusalem, because lessons
often contradict what is taught in local
mosques. The findings have prompted
claims that some schools are using history “as a vehicle for promoting
Political Correctness.”
LONDON, APRIL 2ND—
—LAURA CLARK, DAILY MAIL
sprinkled with amusing anecdotes of
bizarre episodes in far-flung libraries
and archives. The evening was a
tremendous success and it was good to
see that even those who are not quite
so devoted to the Great Man were able
to appreciate the importance of Mr.
Cohen’s achievement.
It is clear that we can now divide
Churchill bibliography into two eras:
B.C. and C.E.: “Before Cohen” and
“Cohen Era.” We hope that readers
who are unable to purchase their own
copy will request that their library, particularly college and university libraries,
acquire one.
—RAFAL HEYDEL-MANKOO
JENNIE REMEMBERED
BATH, SOMERSET, APRIL
• Churchillian comment: “All this
is but a part of a tremendous educating
process. But it is an education which
passes in at one ear and out at the
other. It is an education at once universal and superficial. It produces enormous numbers of standardized citizens,
all equipped with regulation opinons,
prejudices and sentiments, according to
their class or party.”
—WSC, “MASS EFFECTS IN MODERN
LIFE,”THOUGHTS AND ADVENTURES, 1932
BIBLIOGRAPHY NIGHT
LONDON, FEBRUARY 27TH— Canada
House,
the elegant building on the west side of
Trafalgar Square, was the scene last
night for an enjoyable reception hosted
by the High Commissioner for
Canada, in celebration of Ronald
Cohen’s tremendous and exhaustive
Bibliography of the Writings of Sir
Winston Churchill. (See FH 133: 41.
Speech will appear in FH 136.)
Sir Martin Gilbert (who introduced the author) and Randolph
Churchill, Sir Winston’s great-grandson, were among the large number of
attendees, a broad group reflecting the
author’s wide circle of contacts:
archivists, historians, diplomats, book
dealers and lawyers, with the occasional
field marshal, peer and former
Canadian prime minister thrown in.
Cohen provided an entertaining
and inspiring account of his long and
challenging bibliographic journey,
A new exhibition on Sir Winston’s
mother, Lady
Randolph Churchill,
opened at the
American Museum.
A newspaper article refers to its title,
“The Dollar Princess,” repeating all the
old canards about how many men she
slept with, and how Lord Randolph
died of syphilis (refuted long ago in FH
94). “She was the first woman of significance in British parliamentary politics,” wrote Cassandra Jardine in the
Daily Telegraph. This is too broad; at a
time when women were not permitted
to vote, let alone to be MPs, it is difficult to describe her as a force in parliamentary politics.
Jennie was well read and politically sophisticated, and as Winston’s life
opened to him she proved adept at
helping him get assignments he
desired. While she did not influence
policy, she certainly did influence at
least one election. In 1885, when Lord
Randolph was appointed to his first
office, Secretary of State for India, convention compelled new ministerial
appointees to resign as a Member of
Parliament and stand for reelection.
Jennie and her sister-in-law did all his
campaigning personally, an unusual
occurrence. It is doubtful that any
women had done this before, let alone
done it better.
Jardine claims that Jennie wrote
1ST—
FINEST HOUR 135 / 9
Lord Randolph’s speeches and helped
evolve his theme of Tory Democracy,
assertions not verified by his biographers, including their son Winston.
She did write her own speeches during
the 1885 campaign, and received letters
of congratulations from many, including the Prince of Wales.
Jennie wrote perceptively in her
1908 memoirs: “In England, the
American woman was looked upon as a
strange and abnormal creature with
habits and manner something between
a red Indian and a Gaiety Girl....If she
talked, dressed and conducted herself
as any well-bred woman would...she
was usually saluted with the tactful
remark, ‘I should never have thought
you were an American,’ which was
intended as a compliment.”
Lady Randolph was a great
woman whose example of drive and
enterprise, from the Boer War hospital
ship to the Anglo-Saxon Review, made
her a commanding figure in her time.
She was, on balance, an admirable
mother. Winston and Jack always
looked at her with pride and affection.
The American Museum at Bath is a
grand institution; we hope that their
exhibit portrays Jennie for what she
was, and not as the virago of popular
myth and sensationalist biographers.
continued overleaf >>
ERRATA, Fh 133
• Page 11, column 1, line 8: The selling price of the Churchill painting “View
of Tinerhir” (prematurely stated as
£350,000 against the previous auction
record of £344,000) was underestimated;
it was sold by Sotheby’s for £612,800.
• Page 32, column 1, line 29:
Churchill’s Attorney-General was Donald
Somervell, the son of Robert Somervell
(not the son of H.O.D. Davidson).
• Page 33, column 2, line 27:
Milbanke, a cavalryman, commanded
the Sherwood Rangers, a yeomanry regiment (not a battalion of the Sherwood
Foresters, who were infantry). Also, the
picture of the school on this page is incorrect. It is of the Lower School of John
Lyon, which was established in the 19th
century, and the building was first occupied in 1876.
DATELINES
TORONTO STATUE UPDATE
TORONTO, MARCH 25TH—
Finest Hour 117
included a report on a
fund-raising drive to
improve the area
around the statue in
City Hall Square, on
the 25th anniversary
of its unveiling, by the
present Winston
Churchill, on 31
October 1977. The
goal was $25,000 and,
as noted in FH 123, $28,000 was
raised from donors in six provinces.
After the installation of four plaques
recounting Churchill’s life and achievements, eight park benches and trees,
the site was rededicated by Mayor
David Miller on 6 June 2004, the 60th
anniversary of D-Day.
Last year Toronto announced a
$40 million design competition to revitalize the Square. Competition guidelines stated that the Henry Moore
sculpture “The Archer” could not be
touched, but the Churchill statue was
“relocatable,” either in the square or in
some other part of Toronto.
The International Churchill
Society of Canada promoted retaining
the Churchill statue in the Square, and
this included radio and newspaper
comments. In December a Toronto Sun
columnist questioned why a statue of
non-Torontonian should be there.
Another columnist, Joe Warmington,
replied that without Churchill
“Toronto as we know it today might
not even exist.” He added: “It was a
man named Churchill who was the
beacon, and it was Churchill who sent
the message that we would ‘never surrender.’ That should be enough; but go
over to the memorial and read some of
the passages, and tell me you don’t get
goose-bumps.”
On 8 March the winning design
was picked from forty-eight entries and
we are delighted to advise that the statue is to remain in City Hall Square, in
an improved location. Our next task is
to ensure that the four plaques are
moved with the statue—and, we trust,
the park benches.
—TERRY REARDON
ALEX HENSHAW
LONDON, FEBRUARY 24TH— Alex
Henshaw,
who died on 24 February at the age of
94, was the principal test pilot for
Spitfires and Lancasters, and a famous
daredevil. Once he was asked to put on
a show for the Lord Mayor of
Birmingham’s Spitfire Fund by flying
at high speed above the city’s main
street. Civic dignitaries were not happy
when he flew the plane upside down
below the level of the Council House!
Often, Henshaw would be called upon
to demonstrate a Spitfire to groups of
visiting VIPs. After one virtuoso performance, Churchill was so enthralled
that he kept a special train waiting
while he and Alex talked alone.
Henshaw for his part considered
Churchill “the greatest Englishman
of all time, the man who saved the
—THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
world.”
BORROWED FROM WELLS?
LONDON, NOVEMBER 28TH— Churchill was
a closet science fiction fan who borrowed the lines for one of his “most
famous speeches” from H.G. Wells,
said Dr. Richard Toye, who claimed
that the phrase, “The Gathering
Storm” (the title of WSC’s first volume
of war memoirs) was written by Wells
years earlier in The War of the Worlds.
“It’s a bit like Tony Blair borrowing phrases from Star Trek or Doctor
Who,” Dr. Toye said. “People look at
politicians in the 20th century and presume their influences were big theorists
and philosophers. What we forget is
that Churchill and others were probably not interested in reading that stuff
when they got home after a hard day in
the House of Commons. Churchill was
definitely a closet science-fiction fan. In
fact, one of his criticisms of Wells’ A
Modern Utopia (1905) was that there
was too much thought-provoking stuff
and not enough action.”
In 1901, Wells wrote a book of
predictions, Anticipations, calling for a
scientifically organised “new republic,”
with state support for citizens. Winston
Churchill wrote to Wells: “I read everything you write,” adding that he agreed
with many of his ideas. Two days later
Churchill gave an address to the
FINEST HOUR 135 / 10
Scottish Liberal Council in Glasgow, in
which he said the state should support
its “left out millions.”
In 1931, Churchill admitted that
he knew Wells’s work so well he could
pass an exam in it. “We need to
remember that there was a time when
Churchill was a radical Liberal who
believed these things,” Toye explained.
“Wells is often seen as a socialist, but
he also saw himself as a Liberal, and he
saw Churchill as someone whose views
were moving in the right direction.”
Wells advocated the idea of selective breeding, arguing that people
should only be able to have children if
they met certain conditions such as
physical fitness and financial independence. Churchill told Wells he admired
“the skill and courage with which the
questions of marriage and population
were discussed.”
Wells predicted the political unification of “the English-speaking states”
into “a great federation of white
English-speaking peoples.” Churchill
often argued for the “fraternal association” of those nations, and even wrote
a four-volume History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples.
—SARAH CASSIDY, THE TIMES
Churchillian comment:
In January Dr. Toye represented
somebody else’s words as Churchill’s
own. Here he states that Churchill’s
words were not his. WSC thus managed to commit opposite sins with
equanimity. What a man!
The notion that Churchill was
too busy to do serious reading and preferred to indulge in science fiction
when he “got home after a hard day in
the House of Commons” (hilarious to
anyone steeped in WSC’s routine), is
simply dumb. Anyone consulting the
books Churchill read in his youth, for
example, know that his tastes ran from
Aristotle to Shakespeare, Darwin to
Wynwood Reade. Certainly he read science fiction—even Henty novels. And
his photographic memory stored his
favorite phrases. That doesn’t mean he
picked up his essential philosophy from
some novelist.
At the time he wrote to Wells
about the welfare state, Churchill >>
GILBERT AT FULTON
Sir Martin
Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer
and author of seventy-seven books, was
hosted at a dinner by the Board of the
Winston Churchill Memorial and
Library at Westminster College. Gilbert
also held a book signing, and a collection of Churchill photos by Richard J.
Mahoney was on display. The next
afternoon Gilbert delivered the annual
Kemper Lecture on Churchill.
Last year, in the midst of the 60th
anniversary of the Fulton “Iron Curtain”
speech, Chris Campbell, editor of the
student newspaper, was quoted in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch as questioning
whether his school name-dropped
Churchill too much and whether it
should move on to a new claim to
fame. The day the story ran, Campbell
was told by the school’s college relations
director that he could not get a press
pass to the weekend’s anniversary events
if he planned to speak to other media
outlets. Campbell did not want to pay
what it would have cost to go to the
events, so he acquiesced to the school’s
wishes. But, he complained: “I thought
it was unfair what they did. I feel like
they were trying to stop me from speaking.” The school said it was not trying
to suppress Campbell’s views.
We think Westminster College
should continue name-dropping
Churchill, particularly his good
English, discouraging sentences like “I
thought it was unfair what they did.”
FULTON, MO, MARCH 24TH—
ICONOGRAPHY: Perhaps, heeding Dr. Richard Toye, Britain should put H.G. Wells (left)
on the Twenty and Sir Winston in the Plagiarism Pen for “Gathering Storm.” But here is
a prototype we like a great deal. (Photoshop® work by Barbara Langworth)
was reading Progress and Poverty, by the
American economist Henry George,
who proposed taxing private ownership
of basic elements like land instead of
wealth or income. In 1911, WSC
reached his radical crescendo, fighting
for prison reform, old age pensions and
abandoning the House of Lords. Then
war clouds captured his attention. But
clearly, Churchill derived his radical
politics from economists and philosophers, not science fiction writers.
“The Gathering Storm” dates as
far back asThe Federalist, but Toye’s
claim is specifically refuted by the official biography. In volume VIII, published nearly twenty years ago, Sir
Martin Gilbert noted that it was literary agent Emery Reves who suggested
the title. Churchill merely approved of
it (pages 394-95):
A final telegram from Emery Reves
[January 1948] was decisive in an
area of utmost importance, the title
of the first volume. Churchill had
chosen ‘Downward Path’ as the
theme of the years 1931 to 1939.
This title, Reves telegraphed,
‘sounds somewhat discouraging.’
The American and other publishers
would prefer a ‘more challenging
title indicating crescendo events.’
Reves suggested ‘Gathering
Clouds,’ ‘The Gathering Storm’ or
‘The Brooding Storm.’ The title
Churchill chose was ‘The Gathering Storm.’
Of course one could say, “Right,
it was Emery Reves who read ‘The
Gathering Storm’ in The War of the
Worlds and handed it to Churchill.”
But that’s really being silly, isn’t it?
WINSTON ON THE £20?
War veterans
stormed back into battle to support a
campaign by The Daily Mirror to get
Sir Winston Churchill put on the new
£20 note. They are furious that 18th
century economist Adam Smith had
been picked to replace the face of Sir
Edward Elgar, saying that Smith was
obscure by comparison.
Ricky Clitheroe, 72, an ex-Para
from Catford, South-East London,
said: “We agree with the Mirror. We
want Sir Winston on our £20. He
saved this country. We don’t want a
Scot, we don’t even know who he is.”
Wealth of Nations author Smith is
due to appear on Britain’s 1.2 billion
£20 notes from this spring. War vets
set up a stall under the Churchill statue
in Parliament Square to collect petition
signatures backing WSC. They took
the petition to the Cenotaph on
Remembrance Sunday and eventually
handed it in to Downing Street.
Yet another campaign group had
pushed for composer Elgar to remain
on the notes until after his 150th birthday next year. MPs from Herefordshire
and Worcestershire, joined by the Elgar
Foundation, have called for the delay.
The Bank of England replied that “a
great majority of £20 notes in circulation will still have Sir Edward Elgar on
them and will continue to circulate
alongside the Adam Smith £20 notes
for several years after that.”
Meanwhile, The Fabian Society
has called for a black face to be put on
£20s to reflect Britain’s changing social
make-up.
LONDON, NOVEMBER 3RD—
—VANESSA ALLEN, DAILY MIRROR
FINEST HOUR 135 / 11
MALAKAND:
Y’ALL COME, HEAR?
BATKHELA, PAKISTAN, DECEMBER 1ST— The
battlefield of a far-off imperial war that
once gripped the imagination of the
British public is to be opened up for
the first time to tourism. It is
“Churchill’s Picket,” where the young
Winston fought with the 1897
Malakand Field Force, the subject of
his first book, published 1898.
The Malakand battlefield area has
been under tight military control since
Winston Churchill’s eyewitness accounts
of the campaign were published in The
Daily Telegraph in 1897. The government has now decided to grant access >>
DATELINES
MALAKAND...
to historic sites such as Malakand Fort,
where 1,000 Sikh infantry under British
command fended off 10,000 Pathan
tribesmen led by the “Mad Mullah.” He
had roused the tribes against British
dominion and said the Prophet had
ordained that they eject the foreigners
from India. (Plus ça change... —Ed.)
“We are seeking funding for the
project from foreign governments,”
said an official from Pakistan’s tourism
ministry. “It is hoped that we can use
some of the finance to restore some of
the historic buildings.” The hill-crested
bowl of Malakand is home to British
India’s northernmost church, which is
currently situated inside a Pakistani
military base, and a hilltop fortification
called Churchill’s Picket, near where
the young Winston was almost killed
in a skirmish.
Malakand borders the tribal
agency of Bajaur, where al-Qaeda operatives are believed to be based. As in
Churchill’s day, the local Pashtuns are
often in the thrall of charismatic mullahs. Maulana Muhammad Alam, a
leader of the banned Tehreek-e-Nifaz-eShariat Mohammadi, from Batkhela, is
an ideological descendant of the “Mad
Mullah.” His group sent 10,000 men
to fight alongside the Taliban in
Afghanistan in 2001. “President
Musharraf has gone in one direction
[with America], but we have gone in
another,” he said.
Churchill volunteered to fight on
the frontier amid comparable unrest.
He was 23 and a lieutenant of the
Fourth Hussars in India when mullahs
began to foment trouble. He joined the
Malakand Field Force. “Like most
young fools,” he wrote in My Early
Life, “I was looking for trouble.”
Foreign visitors today are not
entirely unwelcome. Tribal elders fondly
remembered British officers who left at
Partition in 1947. “The Mad Mullah
was a man of exceptional qualities. These
new mullahs are just out for personal
gain,” said Rehamatullah Khan, 90.
—ISAMBARD WILKINSON, DAILY TELEGRAPH
Churchillian comment: If this
sounds weird in a world where avoiding offence to Muslims is an article of
political faith, it must sound stranger
yet in Pakistan. It is no surprise that a
church in these parts survives because
it is inside a military base. Officials say
the plans to open up the area will go
ahead despite increasing security concerns after a suicide attack near the site
this month that killed forty-two army
recruits. But a trip to the battlefield site
planned by a British group was cancelled in November because of fears of
possible attacks by Islamic militants.
Winston Churchill, who visited
Churchill Picket a few years before
9/11, told us that it could only be seen
with a military escort. It is ironic that
Pakistan seeks to create this Disneyland
with foreign support.
Old Datelines
From the collection of John Frost
THE PM’S TWO HATS
LONDON, JUNE 3RD, 1953— Many
of those
who saw the Coronation procession
twice noticed that Sir Winston
Churchill did not leave the Abbey in
the hat in which he drove to it. The
explanation is that he went to the
Abbey in the uniform and cocked hat
of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
On arrival he put on over the uniform
the mantle of the Order of the Garter
lent to him by the Earl Marshal. As he
was wearing this mantle when he left
the Abbey he naturally assumed the
ostrich-plumed hat of the Garter also.
This was lent to him by Lord
Clarendon. —The Times
GRANDPAPA DRESSES UP, 3JUN53: WSC
departed Downing Street as Lord Warden
of the Cinque Ports, emerged from
Westminster Abbey as Knight of the
Garter. His grandchildren, Nicholas and
Emma Soames (above) had been invited
to watch the ceremony in Whitehall. With
him in court dress (below) are his son
Randolph and grandson Winston. The latter was a page to his grandfather.
POOR, DEAR RANDOLPH
“In reply to a
request from the Prime Minister, the
Home Secretary sent a list of 150
‘prominent people’ whom he had
arrested. Of the first three on the list,
two, Lady Mosley and Geoffrey PittRivers, were cousins of the Churchills
—a fact which piqued Winston and
caused much merriment among his
children. Winston went to bed shortly
after 1am and I resisted Randolph’s
attempt to make me sit up with him
and discuss the Fifth Column (which
incidentally Winston thinks a much
less serious menace than had been supposed). Randolph was in a horrible
LONDON, JUNE 29TH, 1940—
FINEST HOUR 135 / 12
state...and yet W said, when he asked
to be allowed some more active part in
the war, that if R were killed he would
not be able to carry on his work.”
—JOHN COLVILLE DIARY
VC “TOO POSITIVE”
Amid the deaths
and the grim struggle bravely borne by
Britain’s forces in southern Iraq, one
tale of heroism stands out: Private
Johnson Beharry, whose courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol, and
then saving his vehicle’s crew despite
his own terrible injuries, earned him a
Victoria Cross: the decoration young
Churchill had most desired.
For the BBC, however, his story
was “too positive.” The corporation
cancelled the 90-minute drama about
Britain’s youngest surviving VC hero
because it feared it would alienate listeners opposed to the war in Iraq. The
BBC’s retreat from the project, which
had the working title “Victoria Cross,”
will reignite the debate about the broadcaster’s patriotism. “The BBC has
behaved in a cowardly fashion by
pulling the plug on the project altogether,” said a source close to the project. “It began to have second thoughts
last year as the war in Iraq deteriorated.
It felt it couldn’t show anything with a
degree of positivity about the conflict.
“It needed to tell stories about
Iraq which reflected the fact that some
members of the audience didn’t approve of what was going on. Obviously
a story about Johnson Beharry could
never do that. You couldn’t have a
scene where he suddenly turned around
and denounced the war because he just
wouldn’t do that. The film is now on
hold and it will only make it to the
screen if another broadcaster picks it
up.” The company developing the project is believed to have taken the script
to ITV.
The Ministry of Defence recently
expressed concern about Channel 4’s
“The Mark of Cain,” which showed
British troops brutalising Iraqi
detainees. That programme was temporarily pulled from the schedules after
Iran detained fifteen British troops. A
spokesman for the BBC admitted that
it had abandoned the VC project but
refused to elaborate.
BBC’s decision to pull out will
only confirm the fears of critics that
television drama is only interested in
telling bad news stories.
LONDON, APRIL 7TH—
—CHRIS HASTINGS, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
AROUND & ABOUT
Antoine Capet, Professor of British Civilization,
University of Rouen, told us of “Torn Asunder,” by
Ruaridh Nicollthe, an article on the Union of
Britain in The Observer (London) on January 7th:
“Churchill famously left Scots as a rearguard at Dunkirk
because nobody would be too upset.” This is an example of mischiefmaking. The Prime Minister would have had no knowledge of which
units were left on the beaches during the heroic evacuation at Dunkirk.
That was decided by those on the spot. As it happens, the units which
suffered most were those ordered to defend Calais to the last: the King’s
Royal Rifle Corps and the Rifle Brigade. The word “famously” suggests
that the reference was confused with St. Valéry—a long way southwest
of Dunkirk. Here the 51st Highland Division, which had been behind the
Somme and not involved in the evacuation, was obliged to surrender
after a tough fight, having been cut off and surrounded on 12 June—
eight days after the end of the Dunkirk operation. To say that the P.M.
chose to sacrifice this Division is absurd. —PHC
RRR
Richard Littlejohn writes in the Daily Mail that Chancellor of the
Exchequer and presumptive new Prime Minister Gordon Brown “has
been comparing himself to Churchill (as well as Gandhi). I look forward
to his first prime ministerial broadcast. ‘We shall tax on the beaches, we
shall tax on the landing grounds, we shall tax in the fields and in the
streets....Never in the field of human taxation, has so much been owed
by so many.....I have nothing to offer but tax, tax and more tax.’”
RRR
Addendum to Warren Kimball’s “The Alcohol Quotient” (FH 134), from
Sir Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (1994, 226-27): In January
1942, as Japanese forces advanced into Burma, Anthony Eden reported Churchill’s desire to fly to India to meet with Indian leaders to work
out a constitution for India after the war. Sir Alexander Cadogan called
WSC’s plan “brilliantly imaginative and bold.” Eden told his private secretary, Oliver Harvey, that Churchill had “confessed that he did feel his
heart a bit...he had tried to dance a little the other night but quickly lost
his breath.” Harvey commented: “What a decision to take, and how gallant of the old boy himself. But his age and especially his way of life
must begin to tell on him. He had a beer, three ports and three brandies
for lunch today, and has done it for years.” In the event Churchill did not
go to India, feeling he must be in London at a critical time.
RRR
Scott Johnson in “The Limits of Churchill’s Magnanimity,” http://powerlineblog.com/ May 19th, refers favorably to Finest Hour 101 regarding
Churchill’s uncharacteristic remark about Stanley Baldwin in 1946 (“it
would have been much better had he never lived”). Johnson provided a
link to our website, which has produced at least one new member. He
also included another Churchill quotation but it was not quite as stated,
and did not apply to Baldwin: “As the man whose mother-in-law had died
in Brazil replied, when asked how the remains should be disposed of,
‘Embalm, cremate and bury. Take no risks!’” This was actually from
Churchill’s article, “Britain’s Deficiencies in Aircraft Manufacture,” Daily
Telegraph, London, 28 April 1938, reprinted in Step by Step (London:
,
Butterworth, 1939), 226.
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 13
DATELINES: 21 MAY 1948
The Commando Memorial
“NOTHING OF WHICH we have any knowledge or record has ever been done by
mortal men which surpasses the splendour and daring of their feats of arms.”
BY WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
N
early six decades ago in the
cloisters of Westminster, the
Leader of the Opposition, Winston S. Churchill, unveiled a
memorial to those who had
died in the then-recent World War on service in submarines and with commando
and airborne forces: three groups who had
knowingly faced even more dangers than
those which confronted fighting men as a
matter of course. His speech was fully reported in the following day’s Times, but
the early biographers seem to have missed
it. It bears reprinting for the light it throws
both on the men Churchill commemorated
and on his own beliefs.
Over forty years ago, when preparing
the official history of the Special Operations
Executive in France (reissued in 2004), I
conjectured that, as he spoke, Churchill
had in mind—as well as the feats he
praised—the then still inadmissible deeds
of special agents for sabotage, subversion
and escape who had set out on their missions by parachute or by submarine.
A distinguished audience was assembled to hear the wartime Prime Minister
that day. Among those present were A.V.
Alexander, Minister of Defence and
wartime First Lord of the Admiralty; Admiral of the Fleet the Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, wartime First Sea
Lord; Field Marshal the Earl Wavell, former Commander-in-Chief Middle East
and later Viceroy of India; Major General
Sir Robert Laycock, who had been Chief of
Combined Operations; Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, who had
been commander of Airborne Forces; Lieutenant Colonel A.C. Newman, who had
won his Victoria Cross at St. Nazaire; and
several other VC holders. The Dean of
Westminster, the Very Reverend A.C. Don,
held a brief service. Churchill concluded
with the last two verses of an old Masonic
poem, familiar in those days to many of
the dignitaries present.
—PROFESSOR M.R.D. FOOT
PHOTOGRAPH BY TERRY MOORE BY KIND PERMISSION OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY
T
oday we unveil a memorial
to the brave who gave their
lives for what we believe future generations of the
world will pronounce a
righteous and noble cause. In this ancient Abbey, so deeply wrought into the
record, the life and the message of the
British race and nation—here where
every inch of space is devoted to the
monuments of the past and to the inspiration of the future—there will remain
this cloister now consecrated to those
who gave their lives in what they hoped
would be a final war against the grosser
forms of tyranny. These symbolic images of heroes, set up by their fellowcountrymen in honour and remembrance, will proclaim, as long as faithful
testimony endures, the sacrifices of
youth resolutely made at the call of duty
and for the love of our Island home and
all it stands for among men.
Published by kind permission of the copyright holder, Curtis Brown Ltd., on behalf of
the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, copyright © Winston S. Churchill.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 14
This memorial, with all its grace
and distinction, does not claim any monopoly of prowess or devotion for those
to whom it is dedicated. We all know
the innumerable varieties of dauntless
service which were performed by His
Majesty’s soldiers and servants at home
and abroad, in the prolonged ordeals of
the Second World War for right and
freedom. Those whose memory is here
saluted would have been the first to repulse any exclusive priority in the Roll
of Honour.
It is in all humility which matches
their grandeur that we here today testify
to the valour and devotion of the Submarine Service of the Royal Navy in
both wars, to the Commandos, the Airborne Forces and the Special Air Service.
All were volunteers. Most were highlyskilled and intensely-trained. Losses
were heavy and constant. But great
numbers pressed forward to fill the gaps.
Selection could be most strict where
the task was forlorn. No units were so
easy to recruit as those over which
Death ruled with daily attention. We
think of the forty British submarines—
more than half our total submarine
losses—sunk amid the Mediterranean
minefields alone, of the heroic deaths
of the submarine commanders and
crews who vanished for ever in the
North Sea or in the Atlantic Approaches
to our nearly-strangled island. We think
of the Commandos, as they came to be
called—a Boer word become ever-glorious in the annals of Britian and her Empire—and of their gleaming deeds
under every sky and clime. We think of
the Airborne Forces and Special Air
Service men who hurled themselves unflinching into the void—when we recall
all this, we may feel sure that nothing of
which we have any knowledge or record
has ever been done by mortal men
which surpasses the splendour and daring of their feats of arms.
Truly we may say of them, as of the
Light Brigade at Balaclava, “When shall
their glory fade?” But there were characteristics in the exploits of the submarines, the Commandos and the Airborne Forces which, in different degrees,
distinguished their work from any single
episode, however famous and romantic.
First there was the quality of precision and the exact discharge of delicate
and complex functions which required
the utmost coolness of mind and steadiness of hand and eye. The excitement
and hot gallop of a cavalry charge did
not demand the ice-cold efficiency in
mortal peril of the submarine crews and,
on many occasions, of the Airborne
Forces and the Commandos.
There was also that constant repetition, time after time, of desperate adventures which marked the work of the
Commandos, as of the submarines, requiring not only hearts of fire but nerves
of tempered steel.
To say this is not to dim the lustre
of the past but to enhance, by modern
lights, the deeds of their successors,
whom we honour here today. The
solemn and beautiful service in which
we are taking part uplifts our hearts and
gives balm and comfort to those living
people, and there are many here, who
have suffered immeasurable loss. Sorrow
may be assuaged even at the moment
when the dearest memories are revived
and brightened. Above all, we have our
faith that the universe is ruled by a
Supreme Being and in fulfilment of a
sublime and moral purpose, according
to which all our actions are judged.
This faith enshrines, not only in
bronze but for ever, the impulse of these
young men, when they gave all they
had, in order that Britain’s honour
might still shine forth and that justice
and decency might dwell among men in
this troubled world. Of them and in
presence of their memorial we may repeat as their requiem as it was their
theme, and as the spur for those who
follow in their footsteps the well-known
lines:
...heard are the voices—
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages.
“Choose well; your choice is
Brief and yet endless;
Here eyes do regard you
In eternity’s stillness;
Here is all fullness,
Ye brave, to reward you.
Work, and despair not.”
Poems
Churchill Loved
With his usual impressive memory,
Churchill was quoting the “Masonic
Poem” of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832), which he must have read
years before or recalled from Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations, which he essen-
F
tially memorized. The poem is found on
http://xrl.us/wevb, which notes: “To
English-speaking Masons, Goethe’s best
known Masonic work is the short poem
‘Masonic Lodge.’ It can be found in any
collection of Goethe’s works, and in
Volume Twenty of the Little Masonic
Library. It is given in full here, not only
for purposes of short discussion, but because, by some unaccountable and distressing error, the first ten lines, which
are the keynote of the whole poem
[which Churchill did not quote] are
omitted in the (1929) Clegg edition of
Mackey’s Encyclopedia.”
The Masons’s ways are
A Type of Existence
And his persistence
Is as the days are
Of men in this world.
The future hides it
Gladness and Sorrow,
We press still thorow,
Naught that abides in it
Daunting us—onward.
And Solemn before us
Veiled, the dark portal,
Goal of all mortal;
Stars are silent o’er us
Graves under us silent.
While earnest thou gazest
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.
But heard are the voices—
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages;
“Choose well; your choice is
Brief and yet endless;
Here eyes do regard you
In eternity’s stillness;
Here is all fullness,
Ye have to reward you,
Work, and despair not.”
,
iinest Hour thanks Professor Foot for his suggestion that we republish the Commando Memorial speech. Reading it,
shortly after the United States’ Memorial Day, we were struck by how much has changed in contemporary tributes to the
military. Churchill unabashedly told us what these brave people did, hurling themselves against the enemy, “unflinchingly
into the void.” Today when we honor those who serve, we do so almost in the abstract. Apparently, describing what they actually do is considered somehow too delicate, and might be found objectionable by this or that segment of society. Churchill
was often quite specific about what brave individuals did for their country—but Churchill was also convinced not only of
the justice of his cause, but of the unity of his nation. That too, sadly, has changed. —Ed.
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 15
GLIMPSES
Troubled Triumvirate:
The Big Three at the Summit
NO ONE HAD A BETTER VIEW OF CHURCHILL, STALIN, ROOSEVELT AND TRUMAN AT THE
CONFERENCES THAT REMADE THE WORLD THAN THE INTERPRETERS.
BY HUGH LUNGHI
H
ugh Lunghi was born August 1920 and read Greats (Classics) at Oxford. In June 1943, then a Captain in the Royal Artillery,
he was appointed aide-de-camp (ADC) and Russian language interpreter to the Head of the British Military Mission in
Moscow, Lt. Gen. Sir Gifford Le Q. Martel. After the war he served as a diplomat and interpreter. He had the unusual experience
of interpreting at meetings with the first two Soviet dictators following Lenin: Stalin and Khrushchev. He is one of the few, if any,
survivors of those present at most of the plenary sessions of the wartime conferences in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. There he was
Russian language interpreter for the British Chiefs of Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke (later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke),
Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. He interpreted for Prime
Ministers Churchill and Attlee and Foreign Secretaries Eden and Bevin. Joining the BBC in 1954,
Mr. Lunghi was editor of broadcasts to central Europe and chief commentator covering the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—the first contemporary international subject commented upon
by Finest Hour. On retiring from the BBC in 1980 he was appointed Director of the Writers’ and
Scholars’ Educational Trust and editor of its magazine Index on Censorship. Subsequently he was elected Vice Chairman of Common Cause UK. He has lectured widely on Soviet and East European
affairs. His text is from his remarks at the Annual General Meeting, International Churchill Society
(UK), 29 April 2006.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 16
L
et me preface my remarks with some thoughts
about the Americans. They are friends. The
United States in its public and private giving,
is the most generous nation in the whole of history, and perhaps the most idealistic in the causes of
human rights and freedom. Yet this generosity seems to
bring about the perverse result that the U.S. is
denounced widely. I have often to remind my young
listeners that it was the U.S. which put Europe back on
its feet when it was struggling to recover from the
devastation of World War II. Having served alongside
Americans in wartime and after, I’ve found them
among the most helpful and brightest of colleagues
and friends. I feel constrained to put this on record
because my account of those distant wartime events
might seem to lean in a contrary direction. But to
put a dark gloss on those historic events is far from
my intention.
My first sight of any of the Big Three was, of course,
of Winston Churchill, from the Public Gallery in the
House of Commons a couple of years or so before the
outbreak of war. Out of office, Churchill was yet again
castigating his government’s and party’s appalling record
of failure to meet the Nazi rearmament threat. In my
schoolboy ignorance I thought his gadfly antics were
simply letting his own side down. After that Churchill
faded from my mind until he became Prime Minister in
1940. We had been at war for nine months. By then
even Oxford students began to take notice of his stirring
speeches on the wireless.
Not many months after being posted from my
artillery regiment to our military mission in Moscow in
1943, its chief, General Martel, said I was to accompany
him to Teheran at the end of November. There, with no
previous warning, I was ordered to interpret for the
Chiefs of Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, Admiral
Andrew Cunningham and Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal
at what turned out to be the first of the so-called “Big
Three” conferences.
Among the three heads of government, Churchill
was the eldest, celebrating his 69th birthday; he had
already met Stalin and Roosevelt, the latter seven times.
Stalin was five years younger, Roosevelt the youngest at
61. Churchill was the only one of the three who had
experience of commanding troops on the battlefield—
did that make him a worse strategist than the other two
or a better one? By 1943, an outsider might think that
all the allies were working more or less closely towards
the defeat of the enemy.
As we now know from innumerable accounts, this
was far from the reality. Aside from almost non-existent
military cooperation, we met with antagonism and
obstruction from Soviet officialdom: spiteful, even
incomprehensible behaviour. Their closely censored
media were generally hostile at the failure of the Anglo-
Americans to open a so-called “Second Front” in
Western Europe. They scoffed at our military operations
in the Middle East, Italy, the Atlantic, and our bombing
offensive, which did constitute, however limited, a second, third, fourth and fifth front. We were grateful for
the real Russian hospitality and friendliness of Soviet
citizens brave enough to talk to foreigners. In Moscow,
our food and accommodation were on the level of the
privileged class, Communist Party officials: quite comfortable, thank you.
Teheran
Churchill and Roosevelt flew to Teheran from
Cairo, where they had disagreed bitterly over strategic
priorities. Roosevelt had declined even to talk about a
common approach to Stalin. To add to his discomfort,
the Prime Minister had a throat infection, losing his
greatest weapon: his voice. He looked worried and irritable as he arrived at the British Legation. It was the second time I had seen him in my life. Yet just seeing him,
we suddenly felt the code-word for the conference,
“Eureka,” was well-chosen.
As I gathered from bits of Chiefs of Staff conversations, the President was again refusing his lunch invitation or even to talk before they both met that awkward
customer, Stalin. Even if he was determined to beard
Stalin himself, why would Roosevelt not want the observations of Churchill, who had already met and negotiated
with the Soviet chief? The latter, meanwhile, made his
Foreign Minister, Molotov, concoct a cock-and-bull story
of an assassination plot by enemy agents in Teheran. It
successfully caused a not reluctant Roosevelt to move
two-odd miles from the U.S. Legation into a bugged
house in the grounds of the Soviet Embassy, just a step
across a narrow road from the British Legation. [That
FDR and Churchill knew they were being bugged is now
accepted: see Warren Kimball, “Listening in on Roosevelt
and Churchill,” FH 131: 20. –Ed.]
Today, as we know from contemporary accounts,
Roosevelt sought to ingratiate himself with Stalin by
mocking his British ally. He did tell Churchill he was
going to make a few jokes at his expense, “just to put
Stalin at his ease.” During the conference sessions and
social occasions, I observed FDR assuming a jocular air
about Churchill’s cigars and “imperialist” outlook.
The plenary sessions at Teheran were held in the
Soviet Embassy. The first seemed somewhat disorganized. The President had not wanted an agenda; he had
“not come all these miles to discuss details.” Roosevelt
looked confident and pleased to be asked, as the only
Head of State, to chair the sessions. Churchill, lighting
up his cigar, looked fit, and at first seemed not unduly
embarrassed by the fairly heated arguments between the
Americans and British over strategic priorities now >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 17
TROUBLED TRIUMVIRATE...
being played out in front of Stalin.
As the debate developed, the Prime
Minister increasingly appeared on
the defensive, still arguing strongly
for his vision of the military
options. To me, Stalin seemed puzzled at first over the disunity
between the Americans and British.
He allowed his normally
inscrutable face a rare smile.
Down the years I’ve been
asked what it was like to watch
Churchill, at this momentous juncture in his life, making friends with
the ally we simply couldn’t do
without: Josef Stalin, the biggest
mass-murderer of all time, with the
possible exception of Mao Tsetung. I have vivid memories.
Stalin always spoke softly,
briefly, and to the point, completely in command of facts and
statistics, hardly ever looking at a
note, asking pertinent, awkward
questions. At times we could
hardly make out his words, with
their marked Georgian accent.
Away from the table he was not the
THE WORLD OF TEHERAN: The Red Army had not yet penetrated any eastern European
countries, but the portents for 1944 were obvious. (Map from Newsweek, 6 December
great heroic leader of the Red
Square icons. Short, even in his
attacked Finland in 1939. When Stalin saw the imporbuilt-up, square-toed shoes, peeping under door-keepertance Roosevelt attached to the project, the Soviet
like trousers with a broad stripe down each side, at first
media, following Stalin’s line of course, ostentatiously
glance he looked unimpressive. His Marshal’s tunic with
began to support it.
a plain Russian upright collar was decorated only with
Teheran was, I believe, the most important of the
the Hero of the Soviet Union gold star. At close range,
Big Three Conferences, more significant than Yalta. A
he looked like a humble, kindly uncle. But I was struck
persistent historical misconception has it that Eastern
by the yellow whites to his greenish brown, cat-like eyes,
Europe was “betrayed” at Yalta. Not so. That happened,
which hardly ever met yours if you were a stranger, a
and I believe it did happen, in Moscow in October
foreigner. His own staff was often brought to order with
1943, before Teheran, at a meeting of foreign ministers:
a fearsome glare. You could see them freeze, almost literMolotov, Eden and Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s thenally tremble in their boots.
Secretary of State, who seemed to know little and care
Apart from questions of military strategy and timless about the countries of Eastern Europe. From the
ing, Poland’s postwar frontiers, and how to secure a
little I saw of him I found him rather frosty. Eden’s
democratic government, were the major battlegrounds
attempt to involve the others in discussing the future of
for Churchill. An early and firm date for the launch of
east and central Europe was smothered by Molotov,
the Second Front in Northern France was Stalin’s main
with the help of Hull’s cushion of indifference.
aim. Roosevelt’s was to get Russia into the war against
Roosevelt at Teheran reinforced that impression, saying
Japan. He was also determined to get Stalin to support
he intended to withdraw his troops from Europe within
his dream of an international peace-keeping body
a year after the end of hostilities there. Stalin, I feel in
policed by the Soviet Union, the USA, Britain and
retrospect, couldn’t have believed his luck. At the time,
China (at that time Chiang Kai-shek’s China, of course).
of course, we interpreters, even when briefed for a parAt first Stalin was evidently not at all keen on a single
ticular session, could only guess at the strategic dreams
body, doubtless thinking of the League of Nations, from
of the principals.
which the Soviet Union had been kicked out when it
FINEST HOUR 135 / 18
Stalin was visibly moved. After quietly uttering a few words Stalin
passed the sword to Voroshilov,
who promptly let it slip from the
scabbard onto his toes. Stalin’s face
darkened, his fists clenched.
As we dispersed after the ceremony, Churchill led our way out. I
heard, or felt, a tug at my sleeve. It
was Voroshilov. I had been interpreting for him that morning at the
Chiefs of Staff meeting. Sheepishly
he asked my help. As we caught up
with the PM, Voroshilov, pinkfaced, stammered an apology for
his gaffe, and at the same time
wished Churchill a happy birthday,
which was in fact the following
day. As we walked away the PM
growled: “A bit premature—must
be angling for an
invitation…couldn’t even play a
straight bat.”
At Churchill’s 69th birthday
dinner, in the British Legation the
next evening, we witnessed another
little drama unfold. Bear with me if
you’ve already heard or read about
SWORD OF STALINGRAD: Stalin kissed it, Voroshilov dropped it, then apologized to WSC
it—this is how I saw it.
and invited himself to dinner. (illustrated london News and www.ushistoricalarchive.com.)
A Persian waiter in white cotton gloves and red and blue livery,
Here I should explain that Churchill’s principal
making (I suspected) his first entrance, brings in the
interpreter was Major Arthur Birse, a peacetime banker,
magnificent dessert, a splendid ice cream pyramid with a
also from our Moscow Military Mission, born and edukind of night-light under it. Stalin is making a bit of a
cated in 19th century St. Petersburg, more than twice my
speech. The waiter, wanting to serve Stalin first, stands
age, a good friend and mentor, by far the most outstandbehind him, then moves towards Molotov’s chair. Mouth
ing, the most brilliant of all the Allied interpreters. The
agape at sight of the assembled magnificoes, the waiter
Prime Minister didn’t like to be interrupted by his internervously lets the dish tip slightly. It’s hot in the room
preter until he had finished his train of thought, which
and the inevitable happens. As I look on, fascinated, the
sometimes went on a bit, with many a stirring phrase,
beautiful creation accelerates off the salver. It misses
making it the more difficult for us. He was demanding,
Stalin, the waiter staggers further sideways, and it
but at the same time generous and encouraging.
descends onto the shoulder of Vladimir Pavlov, Stalin’s
My own test came before the second plenary sesinterpreter, and all down his pristine Russian diplomatic
sion on 29th November. The Prime Minister was to
dress uniform.
present a Sword of Honour on behalf of King George VI
A voice is heard just in front of me, Air Chief
to mark the heroic defence of Stalingrad. Representing
Marshal Sir Charles Portal (Peter Portal to his colthe Red Army—the only senior soldier Stalin had
leagues), sotto voce: “Missed the target.”
brought along, “hoping he would do,” as Stalin put it—
I watch the Prime Minister, but either he has not
was Marshal Voroshilov, once Stalin’s companion in
noticed or has chosen not to. A true professional, Pavlov
arms, baby-faced, murderous and cruel. Voroshilov was
continues calmly interpreting. Pavlov, by the way, was
in command of several “Army Fronts” when Hitler
virtually always Stalin’s interpreter—in English and
invaded Russia. He proved so hopeless he had to be
German. At the Yalta Conference, some fourteen
sacked. Survivors of Stalin’s inner circle tell us that often
months after Teheran, Pavlov was rewarded by Churchill
he shouted at him, “Shut up, you imbecile.”
with the CBE—not, of course, for his heroism under ice
The Prime Minister proudly presented the sword.
cream fire. >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 19
TROUBLED TRIUMVIRATE...
Moscow
After Teheran my next close encounter with Mr.
Churchill was almost a year later in October 1944, his
second and final visit to Moscow (codenamed “Tolstoy”),
where he was accompanied by Eden. Talks with Stalin
and Molotov mainly concerned Eastern Europe, the “percentage” agreement over Soviet and British influence in
various countries, and Poland. Representatives of the
London Polish Government in exile in London were also
invited. The mischievous “percentages” more or less evaporated and did not figure formally again in any tripartite
or even bilateral talks, though you’d not know it from the
attention devoted to them by modern historians and
Churchill himself. Our Military Mission officers, including myself, were on duty looking after the Prime
Minister and Foreign Secretary in the Soviet hospitality
town house in Ostrovskiy Street (formerly and today the
Austrian Embassy).
Yalta
The following February, I watched Churchill’s aircraft land, after its seven-hour flight from Malta, at the
Crimean airport of Saki, where I had been working for
much of the past fortnight. It touched down shortly
after Roosevelt’s aircraft. The President, waxen cheeked,
looked ghastly, his familiar black naval cloak over his
shoulders, hat-brim turned up in front, being helped
into a jeep which Churchill solicitously followed on foot
as they inspected the Guard of Honour together.
We had a five-hour drive to our respective destinations. Ours was the slightly odd Moorish-Scottish baronial style Vorontsov Palace/Villa overlooking the Black
Sea at Alupka. Twelve miles away just outside Yalta was
the last Czar’s Palace, Livadia, the American quarters and
venue of the plenary sessions. Stalin, the generous host,
was in between, in the Yusupov Villa in Koreis, six miles
from Livadia. It was there in Stalin’s headquarters that
we held the Chiefs of Staff military meetings.
The opening session of the Yalta Conference was
one of the most dramatic and fateful. It was there that
Dresden’s destiny was sealed. Among many omissions
and misrepresentations put about by revisionist historians and others in recent years is that either Churchill or
Air Marshal Harris or the RAF in general were directly
and personally responsible for the deliberate annihilation
of Dresden’s population and its art treasures. This is how
I witnessed the matter at that first session.
Among other requests and questions of military
liaison, Stalin, with his Deputy Chief of Staff, General
Antonov—I watched and heard them both—asked us
and the Americans to bomb lines of communication—
roads and railways. They wanted to stop Hitler transferring divisions from the west to reinforce his troops in
Silesia who were blocking the Russian advance on
Berlin. We ourselves had passed intelligence about the
troop movements to the Russians. They claimed they
had it from their own sources.
The road and rail network, against which contingency plans had already been discussed by the RAF
months previously, was the target—not the city, and not
civilians as such. One of the intended consequences
would be the jamming of road and rail communications
by refugees. Together with other towns, Antonov stressed
the importance of Dresden as a rail junction.
The following day at the Chiefs of Staff meeting in
Stalin’s Yusupov Villa, which our Chief of Staff, by then
Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, was asked to chair, the
question of liaison for “bomb lines” was discussed.
Antonov again pressed the subject of lines of communication and entrainment, specifically via Berlin, Leipzig
and Dresden. The latter he again referred to as an
important rail junction. The Soviet Air Marshal
Khudyakov added his expertise to the same requests. I
interpreted our assent. The USAAF Major-General
Kuter also agreed. The bombing mission by the RAF
and the U.S. Army Air Corps was a military success, but
tragically inflicted great loss of civilian refugee life which
Churchill later deeply deplored.*
Here in the Crimea, Stalin looked exultant, we
thought—after all, he held the trump cards. His armies
were already in occupation of most of Eastern Europe.
The myth that it was carved up at Yalta is patently inaccurate. There was no need: the Red Army already held
it. After the war one of Stalin’s favourite jokes suggested
he deserved the whole bear, and he got it!
As I saw him, Roosevelt displayed indifference to
Eastern Europe. I thought the President—and he was
not the only one—hopelessly misperceived the realities
of the Soviet Union, completely misjudging Stalin, as to
an extent did Churchill and Eden. It was “a pleasure to
work with Stalin...there is nothing devious about him,”
Churchill said. Because of his paranoia, I believe Stalin
*At the Fifth Churchill Lecture, in Washington in 2005, Sir
Martin Gilbert stated that the first Soviet request on Dresden
arrived before Yalta, and that at Yalta, Stalin and Antonov
asked Churchill why it hadn’t already been bombed. Churchill,
perplexed, cabled Attlee in London, who responded that the
attack had been ordered. This was actually confirmed by Gen.
Antonov’s deputy, who was among the audience when Gilbert
lectured on the subject in Moscow. It was undoubtedly this
conversation which Mr. Lunghi observed. Sir Martin writes:
“It is curious that when the request came…Churchill and Air
Marshal Portal were in flight on their way to the Yalta conference. So the request was dealt with by Churchill’s excellent
deputy Clement Attlee, later the Labour Prime Minister, and
by the deputy chiefs of staff and approved. It was the 16th or
17th item of the things that they had to approve that day.”
FINEST HOUR 135 / 20
PARTNERS?: At Teheran, both Roosevelt (right) and Churchill
thought they could trust Stalin (left). The map below, which
appeared in time as the Red Army drove across Poland
toward the Reich, forecast the post-Yalta endgame, although
time proved wrong about Yugoslavia and, later, Austria.
did not trust those he thought were trying to curry
favour with him. Stalin at one point told Churchill he
felt more at home with frank and even tough negotiators
and open enemies. The P.M., though wilier in this
respect than Roosevelt, also thought he could win Stalin
over by compromise and concession. By the way, unbelievably, he also said he liked the Deputy Commissar for
Foreign Affairs Andrey Vyshinsky—a more despicable
and treacherous character I could not imagine.
It was not until years after the Yalta Conference
that one of its most tragic outcomes—one of the
blackest pages in British history—was revealed. The last
formal act was Eden’s signature to the secret agreement
on repatriation, in other words the return to Stalin’s
merciless hands of Soviet prisoners of war. Many, forced
into auxiliary service in the German army, had fallen
into our hands. The Foreign Office agreed to Soviet
demands that even non-Soviet Russian civilians who had
lived in Eastern Europe before the war should be handed
over: an unnecessary and dishonourable act which
Churchill at one point tried to stop.
Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close adviser, whom
Churchill admired, hailed Yalta as “the dawn of a new
age.” Hopkins, for whom I interpreted briefly, was
unhappily a chronically ill man, and he seems to have
provided some dodgy advice to the President about
Stalin, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In his
recently published book, Sergo Beria, son of Stalin’s
secret police chief, claims Hopkins was “blindly proSoviet even before he met Stalin.”
What stays in my memory is the doggedness, the
toughness—not without old-world courtesy and magnanimity—with which Churchill fought not just for
Britain, but for Poland and France and for smaller
nations too. His private secretary Jock Colville once
remarked that the difference between WSC and de
Gaulle was that “de Gaulle’s loyalty was to France alone;
Churchill’s was merely to Britain first.”
By contrast the xenophobe Stalin and the stolid
Molotov, taking the cue from Roosevelt, poured vitriol
on the French: “rotten to the core and should be punished,” was one expression I heard. Churchill stuck up
for France not just out of love—Britain would need her
as the main ally on the continent. But Churchill also
stood up for fair play for the German people, as distinct
from the Nazis. Stalin taunted him: “You are proGerman,” adding to his censure the Argentinians,
Brazilians and Swiss, calling them “swine,” the Swedes
even worse, the Finns “stone-obstinate.”
Potsdam
By the time the leaders met again in July 1945 at
“Terminal,” the last of the Big Three gatherings at
Potsdam, Truman had replaced Roosevelt, who had >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 21
LAYING THE CORNERSTONE, 1943: The British cartoonist
Illingworth produced this optimistic drawing after the Teheran
Conference. (The workers appear to be Foreign Minister
Molotov, Secretary of State Hull and Foreign Secretary Eden.) It
is not clear on whom or what the stone is being dropped.
TROUBLED TRIUMVIRATE...
died in April. We saw Churchill still battling on behalf
of postwar Poland and France. The meetings were badtempered, relieved by social occasions, banquets with
music at the Neues Palast: on one occasion we heard
Stalin applaud Truman’s impromptu and near-professional rendering of Chopin. Hailing Truman as a musician and Churchill as a painter, Stalin, fishing for compliments, lamented that he alone was “without talent.”
Some understatement, that.
Rightly or wrongly, the new President seemed to us
a much warmer, more approachable, more sincere chief
than his predecessor. Halfway through the conference
there was a general election in Britain. Winston
Churchill, “the greatest modern British statesman”
according to the New American Desk Encyclopedia, “the
greatest Englishman” according to a recent UK public
opinion poll, was dismissed by his country.
Retrospective
Having pondered the question over many decades
and, most importantly, discussed it with Arthur Birse, I
have become convinced that Churchill’s magnanimous
judgment of Stalin was crucially formed during that têteà-tête midnight meal in August 1942 in Stalin’s own
Kremlin quarters, waited upon by his daughter Svetlana.
It was, I think, that close, very personal encounter, in
the face of a still mortally dangerous foe, which forged
what in Churchill’s perception had perhaps become a
bond between warrior leaders.
What amazed those of us, British and Americans,
living and working in Moscow, experiencing the realities
of life there, was the extraordinary ignorance, as it
seemed, displayed by our principals and their advisers.
Most astounding and puzzling was why Roosevelt and
Churchill, the State Department and the Foreign Office,
could for a moment believe that Stalin would allow free
elections, let alone the inevitable concomitant of a free
press, in liberated Europe, when those very freedoms
were denied to the peoples of the Soviet Union. It was
all on a par with Roosevelt’s silly remark to Stalin that he
knew the Baltic peoples would happily vote to rejoin the
Soviet Union if only Stalin allowed them free elections.
True, Stalin later did graciously permit such things in
Finland and Austria, but these were Stalin’s little showpiece states to help his “popular fronts” in Europe. “It
doesn’t matter what you do,” as Lady Randolph
Churchill is alleged to have said, “as long as you don’t do
it in the street and frighten the horses.”
At that time the people were very ready to turn a
blind eye to the monstrous and bloody Stalinist regime.
The U.S. and British press and radio were brimming
over with goodwill for the gallant Red Army and its
leader. Churchill, we saw, was fed up after Yalta. We
heard him say “That’s done with and out of the way,”
and make various rude remarks about the final communiqué. Notwithstanding his partiality for what some saw
as mad-cap military adventures, Churchill, with his
political experience and historical perspective, saw further ahead than anyone, especially to the postwar perils
facing central Europe.
It is not just his vision we have to respect and
admire. His courage and energy, often barely recovering
from serious illness, making the arduous, dangerous
wartime pilgrimages to meet the two other Allied
leaders, were almost superhuman. At the time, most of
us could not know of the enormous physical, let alone
mental, strain he must have been under.
In the years that followed Potsdam I saw and interpreted with Stalin face to face on several occasions, but
sadly not with Churchill. My last tenuous connection
with our wartime leader, almost exactly twenty years
after the Yalta Conference, was in 1965, on the occasion
of his state funeral, when it was my privilege in the BBC
World Service to organize its coverage for our Czech and
Slovak broadcasts. Churchill had outlived Roosevelt by
two decades and Stalin by twelve years. The Triumvirate
departed this world in inverse order to their ages, and to,
one hopes, varied destinations.
General Charles de Gaulle was the chief foreign
statesman at Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral. For the
very reason that their relationship during the war, as
everyone knew, had not been the easiest, his epitaph, it
seemed to me, was the most fitting of all. You may
remember, in his letter to the Queen, President de
Gaulle paid this tribute, the more striking for its brevity:
“Dans ce grand drame, il fut le plus grand.”
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 22
RIDDLES, MYSTERIES, ENIGMAS
Basic English
Q
: We have an enquiry about a book or pamphlet by Churchill
about “Plain English.” Is he thinking of something by Ogden?
—Linne Omissi, Senior Librarian,
Jersey Library, St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands, UK
A:
Right you are! Basic (not “Plain”)
English, the invention of C.K.
Ogden (1889-1957), attracted
Churchill’s attention during WW2. It
was intended not for English speakers,
but for foreigners, whom Churchill
thought (rather presciently, as it turned
out) would benefit from being able to
“get by” in what he saw as the up-andcoming world language. He discussed it
during his speech on Anglo-American
Unity at Harvard University in 1943.
Churchill wrote no pamphlet or essay,
but if you click on our website search
feature and enter “Basic English,” you
will find many references to the subject.
The first is an abstract of a piece about
Ogden, Churchill and the concept.
Roosevelt took a dim view of Basic
English. When WSC recommended
printing the Atlantic Charter agreement
in B.E. as well as its original form, FDR
replied: “I wonder what the course of
history would have been if in May
1940 you had been able to offer the
British people only blood, work, eye
water and face water, which I understand is the best that Basic English can
do with the five famous words?”
Q:
A:
Did Churchill have a tattoo of
anxanchor on his left forearm?
We hear rumors, but find no evidence. The closest to any skin
marking is his reference to having given
skin for a grafting of a fellow soldier,
Dick Molyneux, in Cairo. John Seigal
had an opportunity of raising the question with Lady Soames at the 2006 ICS
(UK) Churchill birthday reception.
Somewhat bemused, she recalled the
scar, but no tattoo.
Q:
At the Cabinet War Rooms in
London, close to Churchill’s bedroom, is a room with the name plate
“Stenhouse.” Who was this person?
—D.A. Bailey (dapadailey@comcast.net)
A:
Margaret Stenhouse worked in
Churchill’s secretarial pool at 10
Downing Street. One of Churchill’s private secretaries, Sir John Martin, wrote
in his memoirs: “I was given a kind and
reassuring welcome by the Principal
Private Secretary, Eric Seal, and ‘Mags’
Stenhouse, the head of the permanent
staff of assistants in the Prime Minister’s
office (to whose expert knowledge, wisdom and splendid leadership of ‘the
Girls’ so much was due in the coming
years), and spent my first day at No. 10
being introduced to my new colleagues
and my duties.” (John Martin: Downing Street: The War Years, London:
Bloomsbury, 1991, 3-4.) Another Private Secretary wrote of “the admirable
Miss Stenhouse who had been on the
scene almost as long as Miss Watson
[another secretary].” (John Colville,
The Churchillians, London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1981, 52.)
Q:
A:
aWould anyone recall the name aof
Churchill’s pet bulldog?
a Churchill bought a bulldog for
a£10 in September 1891 when
he was at Harrow. It was a bitch of
good pedigree, called “Dods,” nicknamed “Dodo.” His idea was to get
whelps from her which he could sell for
30/- each. See Randolph Churchill,
Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume I, 274-77; and Richard Hough,
Winston and Clementine (London: Bantam Press, 1990) 45.
Q:
Churchilltrivia Questions 481
aand 733, posted on your website,
seem to credit two different people with
inspiring Churchill’s interest in painting:
Gwendeline Churchill and Lady Lavery.
Which is it? —Neil Scott
A:
Both answers are correct. Both
aGwendeline, (Churchill’s sisterin-law, aka “Goonie”), and Lady Lavery
FINEST HOUR 135 / 23
Send your questions to the editor
can be credited with encouraging Churchill to
paint. In June 1915 WSC
went to Hoe Farm to get
away from the misery of loss
of office. On 19 June he
wrote to his brother Jack: “It
really is a delightful valley &
the garden gleams with summer
jewelry. We live vy simply—but with
all the essentials of life well understood
& well provided for—hot baths, cold
champagne, new peas & old brandy.”
On Sunday 20 June, Gwendeline
lent Winston her son’s watercolour
paints because she thought this would
cheer him up. Churchill soon found
out that concentrating on the art of
transferring subjects to a canvas, in the
words of his private secretary Edward
Marsh, “was a distraction and a sedative
that brought a measure of ease to his
frustrated spirit.”
On Friday 25 June WSC bought
himself an easel, plus all the paraphernalia for painting in oils. A week later
on 2 July, still at Hoe Farm, he experimented with oils for the first time.
What happened next was memorably
described by Churchill in an article
published in The Strand in December
1921, subsequently reprinted in
Thoughts and Adventures and later as a
book, Painting as a Pastime (1948):
So very gingerly I mixed a little blue
paint on the palette with a very smallbrush, and then with infinite precaution
made a mark about as big as a bean
upon the affronted snow-white shield.
... At that moment the loud approaching sound of a motor-car was heard in
the drive. From this chariot there
stepped swiftly and lightly none other
than the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery.
‘Painting! But what are you hesitating
about? Let me have a brush—the big
one.’ Splash into the turpentine, wallop
into the blue and the white, frantic
flourish on the palette—clean no longer
—and then several large, fierce strokes
and slashes of blue on the absolutely
cowering canvas. Anyone could see that
it could not hit back. No evil fate
avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas
grinned in helplessness before me. The
spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions
rolled away. I seized the largest brush
and fell upon my victim with Berserk
fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since. —JL
,
“Behind the Distant Mountains
Is the Promise of the Sun”
A VALUABLE ASPECT OF CHURCHILL STUDIES:
REFLECTIONS UPON HIS EXPERIENCES WHICH BEAR UPON OUR WORLD TODAY
F
inest Hour’s 2007 mandate to publish “all Churchill, all the time” (FH 134: 5) offers us opportunities for more expansive treatment of Winston Churchill’s relevance today: not what he would
do if he were here alongside us (and he would be alongside us); but what his experience and
reflections suggest might be done, or the warnings he offers of dangers and challenges similar to
those he met, fought and overcame.
Speaking at our Chicago conference on the most critical mission of The Churchill Centre,
Laurence Geller described our responsibility to convey Churchill’s experience and insight to freedomloving peoples: “Our task is about keeping the lessons Churchill taught us alive. They are today never
more vital in the endless fight against genocidal maniacs, racism, fundamentalism, hatred and bigotry. His
example emboldens us to combat the wickedness of myriad self-serving fanatics. We are stronger when
armed with Churchillian lessons. We can make our society better. We should and we must.”
As our President, Laurence has now attended many meetings, at the board, chapter and national
level, in America and in Britain, of this and other organizaitons, to reach out and elaborate on his idea:
kind of “Think Tank” to promote the development of Churchillian responses to today’s challenges. The
message, he unceasingly reiterates, “is never more relevant than it is today. To fail to apply his experience
—to engage simply in nostalgia for old glories and battles won—would be less than Churchillian.”
Call it “Applied Churchill,” or whatever you like. Repeatedly Sir Winston implored us to “study
history.” Certainly he would want us to derive the lessons history offers. As he said nearly 100 years ago
in 1908: “What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world
a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious
relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal?”
With that charge in mind, Christopher Harmon, insurgency and terrorism expert and
Churchillian, offers a new interpretation on what we should learn from Churchill’s Cold War posture that
may apply to today’s wars. Professor Harmon does not mention Iraq, except in passing—his is a different
Churchillian message.
Yet we cannot forget Iraq—how could we these days? So two other scholars, Professors Toby
Dodge and David Freeman, turn to that dilemma in collegial debate—the kind of which we think
Winston Churchill would approve. They consider not whether we should go or stay; but rather what, if
anything, we can learn from Churchill’s and Britain’s experience in Iraq 85 years ago. Much, they conclude, has changed. And much remains the same.
We hope readers will welcome our reemphasis on this aspect of Churchill Studies. Our aim is simple: to encourage fresh thinking among Great Democracies he believed were “the hope of years to come.”
As he concluded in 1908: “And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will
not be cast down. We are going on—swinging bravely forward along the grand high road—and already
behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.” —THE EDITORS
FINEST HOUR 135 / 24
“Let Us Preach What We
Practise”: The Fulton Speech
and Today’s War
IT IS TIME TO ADJUST OUR DIRECTION
TOWARD THE RHETORICAL PATH THAT IS
CENTRAL TO INFLUENCING WORLD OPINION
nounced: “Mr. Churchill came with a message of such
interest and importance to our country, to his, and to the
world at large that he converted his presence at Fulton
into a historic event.”2
BY CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON
The Fulton Address
V
ery early in 1946, Winston Churchill arrived in
America for two months of rest and a speaking
tour. Although he was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, he carefully
disavowed any official role. He came to America
as a “counselor and compatriot.”1 At the dock in New
York City, after the liner Queen Elizabeth had pulled in,
Winston and Clementine descended into a crowd peppered with reporters.
Q. Will you comment on the socialist program of the
Labour Party?
A. I never criticize the government of my country
abroad. I very rarely leave off criticizing it at home.
Q. Do you expect to eat much in America?
A. After rationing I hope to make up for lost time.
Q. What is your reaction to the fact that you will be
[staying] in Florida near Al Capone?
A. You refer to the former distinguished resident of
Chicago. I had not addressed myself to the problem.
The Churchills received many invitations they
could not accept—such as one to visit Dwight Eisenhower’s hometown in Kansas, and to fish with Ernest
Hemingway in Cuba. Bookings on the statesman’s schedule did include addresses in Miami, Fulton, Williamsburg, the Pentagon and New York City. All the speeches
were covered by the press, but it was the one in Missouri
that made the largest headlines. The New York Times proThrough June 2007, Dr. Harmon was Kim T. Adamson Chairman of
Insurgency and Terrorism, Marine Corps University. In September he
takes up a new position as Professor of Counter Terrorism at the
George C. Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany. The second edition of his book, Terrorism Today, appears this October from
Routledge. This article is derived from his remarks to the Washington
Society for Churchill, a Churchill Centre affiliate, at the Old Ebbitt
Grill in Washington on March 4th.
At Westminster College on March 5th, President
Harry Truman introduced the great Englishman, who
paid generous tribute to his hosts. But Churchill’s mind
was troubled by the rise of Soviet power vis-à-vis Europe
and America.
He had closely watched the USSR as it made, first,
an amazing comeback after 1941, and then remarkable
territorial gains in the heart of Europe. A Soviet state of
180 millions, dominated by one man, now also dominated the ancient capitals of Eastern Europe: Prague, Berlin,
Vienna, Riga, Warsaw, Tallinn, Budapest, Bucharest,
Vilnius, Sofia.
Historians quarrel even now over how the Cold War
began, but Churchill felt he knew. He had brooded on the
matter for several years by the time of his visit to Missouri.
He was a historian; more to the point, he had made, and
lived through, the relevant history.
Taking the long view, Churchill knew the wartime
Big Three collusion had been somewhat unnatural, for he
understood Bolshevism. He had witnessed Soviet misbehavior during war, and his memoranda and state papers
display particular anger at Moscow’s violence towards the
Poles, the people over whom Britain had entered war.
Suppose Churchill had been able to forget that in
1939 the Soviets had invaded eastern Poland almost as
hastily as the Nazis had taken western Poland. In 1943,
his doubts would have stirred, or even surfaced, when
Germans removed the soil over mass graves at Katyn; the
Soviet NKVD had murdered and buried 8000 Polish officers on that spot near Smolensk. Then, the next year,
came the appalling immobility of the Red Army when
Polish citizens rose up, hoping to liberate Warsaw from
the Germans. The Russians seemingly preferred to see the
brave destroyed. Nineteen forty-five brought the disappearance into Soviet jails of sixteen Polish emissaries who
in March had ventured from London to Moscow at >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 25
FULTON AND TODAY’S WAR...
Stalin’s invitation, a shock to all British
statesmen.
There had been a slow and disturbing change in Soviet rhetoric. Spokesmen
of the Kremlin were recurring to the old
communist notion that World War II
began in capitalist combinations against
the innocent; they were now suggesting
that similar combinations could lead to
World War III. An ugly moment came on
9 February 1946, when Joseph Stalin
made it clear in a speech that the good
will engendered during the war was gone,
and that the future held dark prospects
for “another imperialist war.”3
All these signs of chill preceded the
Fulton address. There was as yet no
NATO. There was no Truman Doctrine
for protecting Turkey and Greece from
communist expansion. There was the WESTMINSTER COLLEGE, 1946: Businessman Eugene Donnelly, Winston
Churchill, President Truman and Westminster College President Franc L. McCluer.
“Long Telegram” from American diplo- At Fulton Churchill spoke of the Soviet threat, but also dwelled on the prospects
mat George Kennan in Moscow to the for understanding and optimism, and revived his prewar theme of collective securiState Department, discussing the eerie
changes in Moscow and calling for “conOn record was his public support in the 1920s for
tainment.” But it had not yet been published: the followthe League of Nations; his effort for collective security in
ing year, as an article by “X” in Foreign Affairs, it would
the 1930s. It does not go too far to say that his Fulton text
cause a stir.
might shock conservative readers today, with its positive
In the language Churchill used at Fulton there is no
views on the nascent UN. Churchill even argued for a
more ominous phrase than “Iron Curtain.” The Soviets
standing military force of components contributed by
hated the hard ring of that metaphor, and the Soviet
member states, at the ready for international peacenewspaper Pravda rankled when Churchill did not attribkeeping. The United Nations has always had a small
ute the term to its originator, which, it said angrily, was
Military Staff Committee for just such work, even though
first used by Josef Goebbels in February 1945. In keeping
the Cold War flash-froze it in embryo form.7
with long tradition, Pravda was wrong. In fact, the phrase
Churchill never felt that a world organization prewent back long before that.4
cluded regional security arrangements among individual
Churchill himself had used the term in a letter to
partners. He always said, as in Washington in May 1943,8
President Truman on 12 May 1945, nearly a year before
that beneath the umbrella of the “world organization”
Fulton, when it already had the grim connotations later
there should be strong, inward-looking regional arrangebroadly understood. The Prime Minister’s letter spoke of
ments to deal with normal security concerns. These,
the melting away of the American and British armies, the
together with the UN superstructure, would constitute
Canadians’ inevitable departure from Europe, and the dif“the Sinews of Peace” in the postwar world.
ficulty of working with the French. He vividly described
For Churchill the first of these was the British
“this enormous Muscovite advance into the centre of
Commonwealth, which he still spoke of as the British
Europe,” adding, “An iron curtain is drawn down upon
Empire. A close second was the Anglo-American alliance.
their front. We do not know what is going on behind.”5
At Fulton he spoke with his usual richness and warmth on
Some criticized the Fulton speech as militaristic, but
this topic, calling for “fraternal association” and using the
there are many sunny aspects of the address. The archephrase “special relationship.” Here was a foreigner who
typal old Tory spoke up for the United Nations, the new
openly regarded American power as good for the world.
“world organization”—as the planned entity was known
He thought it a very good thing that the atom bomb was
during war years.6 I don’t think this was a pained genustill a monopoly of the United States, that it would be
flection to American internationalists, to the foundationcriminal to let that change in the short term.
al meetings at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, or to
The Associated Press suggested in its wire story from
Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy. Churchill’s praise for collecFulton that Churchill had proposed a military alliance
tive security was consistent with his life-long teaching.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 26
“I
spoke earlier of the Temple of Peace.
Workmen from all countries must
build that temple....Indeed they must do
so or else the temple may not be built, or,
being built, it may collapse, and we shall
all be proved again unteachable and have
to go and try to learn again for a third
time in a school of war, incomparably
more rigorous than that from which we
have just been released. The dark ages
may return, the Stone Age may return on
the gleaming wings of science, and what
might now shower immeasurable material
blessings upon mankind, may even bring
about its total destruction.”
—WSC, Fulton, 1946
between London and Washington. He did not say that,
but he certainly came close. The press knew where his
heart was. Transatlantic bilateral rapport was central to his
view of world security—and British self-interest. Consider the remarkable praise he had heaped upon American
military power—memorably at the Albert Hall on
American Thanksgiving Day, 1944. A few days after
Fulton came his speech at the Pentagon, praising U.S.
military performance in World War II, delivered to a glittering array of officers including Generals Eisenhower,
Bradley and Spaatz and Admirals Leahy and Nimitz. The
Englishman’s conviction was that the American military
partnership must anchor the postwar era.
Churchill did not cultivate these linkages in the
expectation of war. He believed in the power of deterrence. Most of his talk on his 1946 American tour was of
constructing peace. Even at Fulton he told the audience
explicitly that he did not think the Soviets wanted war.
The broader message was: mankind has the power and the
opportunity to save its future. In a metaphor Churchill
ascribed to an author he’d been reading on his trip, he
spoke of a “Temple of Peace. Workmen from all countries
must build that temple [with] ‘faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future and some charity toward
each other’s shortcomings.’”
Today’s Long War
Churchill’s emphasis on allies remains sound policy
today. Good alliances are a requisite for what has rightly
been called a “global war on terrorism.” The fight is
unusual, and without true precedent. It bears many
aspects unlike either World War II or the Cold War.
Deterrence and negotiation with al Qaeda is hardly
possible. Our enemies are not just without uniforms; they
are usually unseen. Most do not work for a state; many are
stateless, even fugitives. The Taliban, al Qaeda, Jemaah
Islamia, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat,
and their ilk live and fight well below the governmental
level—they are what political scientists call (in a phrase
Churchill might have detested) “sub-state actors.”
Churchill had experiences with “terrorists,” but he spoke
of terrorism on relatively few occasions.
Ours is a new generation facing a somewhat new
generation of conflict, a product of devolution, not evolution, in moral and martial terms. Terrorism is housed in
the basement of barbarity, and Churchill, who hoped to
construct a Temple of Peace, would be appalled to know
how many terrorists there are today.
He also, I feel sure, would not accept terrorism as a
new norm, or apologize for it, as many do now. We must
fight the enemy, accept the unwanted challenges.
They come without crisp tactical remedies from the
old captains of war. Churchill, I might guess, would have
considered the war of 9/11 as profoundly real, protracted
and complex. In it, his prudence as a statesman might
have helped him more than his mastery of European military history.
While no one can say what Churchill would have
done, we do know we have on our hands an unwanted
war. So, how are we doing, and, what do we need to do?
The opening campaign was a military one of the
greatest boldness. The Americans, British and other allies
went into the Afghan lairs of the guerrillas and rousted
them out. Bin Laden did not expect this. Neither did
many of us. A maker of coalitions himself, Churchill
might have admired the way our coalition linked up with
Afghans to smash the Taliban, up until then the 21st century’s leading state sponsor of international terrorism.
Efforts by the Taliban today to climb back up the southern skirts of Afghan territory are significant, but take little away from the effectiveness of that quick campaign at
the end of 2001. In Afghanistan, even a few years of peace
is impressive.
There have followed other, lesser martial efforts,
especially in the Philippines. In the southern islands, al
Qaeda’s ally Abu Sayyaf has been battered and beaten by
Filipinos enjoying American intelligence and advice, the
latest chapter in a long association between Manila and
Washington. Abu Sayyaf is on about its fourth leader
now—they keep dying of lead poisoning. Most observers
think this organisation has lost whatever religious and
political credibility it had.
In the Horn of Africa, we are similarly involved.
Our armed forces contribute in varying ways to allied
indigenous forces fighting Somali warlords, the North >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 27
“W
ould a special relationship between the United States and the British
Commonwealth be inconsistent with our overriding loyalties to the World
Organisation? I reply that, on the contrary, it is probably the only means by which that
organisation will achieve its full stature and strength. There are already the special United
States relations with Canada which I have just mentioned, and there are the special relations between the United States and the South American Republics. We British have our
twenty years Treaty of Collaboration and Mutual Assistance with Soviet Russia. I agree
with Mr. Bevin, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, that it might well be a fifty years
Treaty so far as we are concerned. We aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration. The British have an alliance with Portugal unbroken since 1384, and which produced fruitful results at critical moments in the late war. None of these clash with the general interest of a world agreement, or a world organisation; on the contrary they help it. ‘In
—WSC, Fulton, 1946
my father’s house are many mansions.’”
FULTON AND TODAY’S WAR...
African terrorists, and al Qaeda agents. Our few uniformed men and women in that theater are engaged in
civic action more than direct action; they do not often
pull triggers. But every day their corpsmen do shoot vaccines into children, and antibiotics into sickly domestic
animals. Wells are dug, schools are built. This part of the
battle Churchill would have recognized from the old
forms of “hearts and minds” campaigns that the British
army waged in places like Oman and Malaya.
As this aid work suggests, kinetics is but one part of
the grand strategy in the global war on terrorism. And,
despite what critics may say, I think there is a grand strategy, and that it has been articulated. The problems come
in execution, in the challenges of gaining foreign support,
and in the task of meeting the concerns of the citizenry
…and if all that were not enough, we have Iraq.
Within our grand strategy for what we must call the
Long War, economic elements of national power may be
too focused upon—and too drained by—resuscitating
Iraq. The war has many costs and they mount up in other
theaters. Elsewhere we have aid programs, but there are
sticks as well as carrots: the sanctions regimes begun under
President Clinton and redoubled under President Bush
are difficult to torque down, but they do constrict some
of the financial lifelines in transnational terrorism. The
United Nations is actually engaged in financial counterterrorism: a new UN treaty took effect in 2002, and even
though many states will not or cannot obey it, the convention does help the U.S. Treasury and State Departments, and foreign partners, who work to freeze
enemy assets.
In the field of intelligence our record is mixed. We
have made progress at the Central Intelligence Agency
and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and yet both still
have their difficulties—such as an out-flow of experienced
people worn down by the past five years, and the challenges of properly training new personnel. Reorganization, too, comes with new challenges. Churchill’s war
lasted six years; he would have faced similar drains had it
continued as long as this war might.
There is a mammoth new bureaucracy—the Department of Homeland Security—which does not yet seem to
produce intelligence but always clamors for it from others.
It is a cliché to say that intelligence is overwhelmingly
important in counterterrorism, but it is a cliché because it
is so true. For one thing, intelligence is a product of, and a
key to, policing; at this stage of the Long War, police are
perhaps even more important than soldiers.
In diplomacy, the U.S. was swiftly supported by its
NATO allies after 9/11. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked its Article 5 for the first time in a half
century of history, declaring that an attack on one is an
attack on all. Countries such as Germany and Britain have
done a great deal, actually and symbolically. I am disappointed over Canada; I have a very smart Canadian graduate student in class and her disappointment in Canada’s
role outruns mine. But for such ills there are tonics.
Australia has been a most vigorous and impressive ally. Al
Qaeda knows it, too, which explains the overt threats,
multiple bombings of holiday spots in Bali, and the other
plots within Australian cities more recently.
There are certainly some diplomatic problems as
well—including stalemate in the Middle East, and decline
in international support for global terror war. These problems merge into the realm of “public diplomacy.”
A dimension of our power that is under-used and
badly used is the public effort to “tell our story abroad.”9
FINEST HOUR 135 / 28
When it comes to reaching out to potential friends, we’re
doing very, very badly. I will waste no time enunciating
something that has been talked of in this town for years.
We have a problem, and we must face it, belatedly,
in this sixth year of war. Churchill would not want us to
come here to Old Ebbitt’s just to drink and chatter and
complain. He would want us to discuss solutions to the
problem…while we are drinking. In that spirit, here are a
few considered ideas to improve things a little in
American information operations and public diplomacy. I
chose to focus here, at the expense of other issues in grand
strategy. Call these rubrics “The Four R’s.”
“The Four R’s”
1) Recreate the Bureaucracy of Public Diplomacy
During the Cold War we had an entity—the United
States Information Agency—that specialized at reaching
over the Iron Curtain, over the heads of despots, to subject populations. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and
like programs were deemed by people like Alexander
Solzhenitsyn to be powerful. But after the Berlin Wall
came down, so did the architecture of USIA. It was folded into the State Department in much smaller form. Now
we have a small office for public diplomacy which has
been frequently vacant and often badly staffed. I will not
name any of the incumbents of that office. But when I
puzzle on why this part of government has done so little
for so many years—years the locusts have eaten—I recall
an acidic remark incorrectly attributed to Churchill: “an
empty car drew up and Clement Attlee got out.”
There is inadequate leadership at State on this issue,
and the same is true on the National Security Council—
even though one of its six directorships is titled “global outreach.” Our best diplomats are schooled to cultivate foreign
diplomats, not foreign populations and news editors. We
need a separate bureaucracy with its own culture and the
special function of public diplomacy. Before 9/11, we didn’t know we needed this; we should have created it in 2002;
we will be suffering for it when 2007 merges into 2008.
2) Resource the Effort
The State Department has been under-funded. If
need be I’d take $10 or $15 billion from Defense and reallocate it to State.10 In the present crisis, instead of doing
much more to reach out overseas, we’ve constricted some
operations. There are consulates that closed in the 1990s,
and so too did some embassy and consulate libraries—yet
they are exactly the kind of place that students and other
curious people can come to learn about the USA and its
policies and its people.
We have set up a TV station that beams in Arabic
language to the Middle East—al-Hurrah. The concept is
good. It will need better supervision, and it will need
resources. So do other radio services which are being
cropped back for 2007 or 2008. Our government is
apparently eliminating VOA broadcasting in Uzbek,
Croatian, and Georgian, reducing VOA and RFE/RL
services in the Ukraine and former Portuguese Africa, and
reducing broadcasts in Kazakh.11 And then there is this:
we are now eliminating VOA broadcasting in the English
language. Is this because using English abroad is considered imperialist? Or is it that we are too foolish to see that
broadcasting news and healthy entertainment in English
is a friendly way to teach other peoples about ourselves?
As a congressional staffer, I observed how quick we
are to trim away public diplomacy programs. When cuts
were proposed in the National Endowment for Democracy, then receiving a mere $17 million, George Will
referred to this as “slaying the butterfly of democracy.”
Some critics think our approach to the Long War is too
military. Let them speak up! Words are cheaper than
weapons, and often more effective.
3) Restore the Moral Impulse and Argument to Diplomacy
In 2002-03 in the war on terrorists, we were too
quiet on the moral front. We felt quelled by Abu Ghareb.
Now many of our leaders say little or nothing at all, on
most occasions, about the moral obscenity of terrorism.
Democracy, the rule of law, and moderation are the
best and the obvious alternatives to politics driven by terrorism. That is evident in sad places such as Lebanon, Sri
Lanka, the Congo. We should quit apologizing for who
we are and make overtly the robust defense that democracy and freedom deserve. No one should defend Abu
Ghareb. Nor should we apologize for fighting people who
write manuals advising how to torture and how to kill
innocents.12 It is time to adjust our direction and proceed
with some confidence on the rhetorical path that is central to reaching public opinion in the world. Right action
is vital, but we need the right arguments too.
Do public spokesmen know how to make the arguments against terrorism? Do they at least remember the
ones that used to be made by Jean François Revel and
Ronald Reagan? Do our social scientists teaching here in
America recall what they were taught in civics class? I harbor doubts. As a student in graduate school in the late
1970s, I heard a foreign-born student ask our Poly Sci
professor for a definition of democracy. He balked, and
then asked me, because he knew I was taking a course in
political philosophy. “Self-rule under law” is a wonderful,
short, powerful definition of democracy.
Churchill wrote and spoke to this question so often.
Two years before his Fulton speech, for example, in
August 1944, he was asked how he would judge whether
the new Italian government was a true democracy.
Churchill described what he called “simple and practical
tests” by which democratic freedom can be measured:
Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day? >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 29
FULTON AND TODAY’S WAR...
Have the people the right to turn out a Government of
which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent? Are
their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive
and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political Parties? Will these courts
administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of
decency and justice? Will there be fair play for poor as
well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government
officials? Will the rights of the individual, subject to his
duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted? Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning
a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family,
free from the fear that some grim police organization
under the control of a single Party, like the Gestapo,
started by the Nazi and Fascist Parties, will tap him on
the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial
to bondage or ill-treatment? These simple, practical tests
are some of the title-deeds on which a new Italy could be
founded.13
A few months later, in October 1944, he said a similar thing in simpler form. In the House of Commons,
celebrated over hundreds of years for high-flown ideals
and soaring speeches, Churchill declared: “At the bottom
of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man,
walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making
a little cross on a little bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly palliate the
overwhelming importance of that point.”14
The tests and procedures Sir Winston recommended are political virtues for all peoples in all times. They are
not “ethno-centric.” They can exist quite independently
of Britain or the USA. The virtues of moderate politics,
democracy and the rule of law can and should “sell”
abroad, not because we invented them; not because they
need to sell; but because they are desirable—at least to
many people—for their own reasons and on their own
terms. Democracy worked in ancient Greece; it works
today in Bangladesh and Taiwan and the Republic of
South Africa. It might even work in a generation or two
in North Korea. After all, look how far it has come in a
generation in South Korea.
4) Renew the Rhetorical Fight
If Churchill constantly reminds us of anything, I
suppose, it is to attend to rhetoric. Good, bad, or indifferent, rhetoric is a centerpiece of policy. So I submit to your
judgment five arguments15 which we should be using.
Most have been ignored by our leaders—especially key
people in the public eye who have the opportunity to talk
through VOA and al-Hurrah and the International Herald
Tribune and the global diplomatic circuit.
These are points we need added to our public diplomacy. You may have your own, which I would welcome;
you may wish to strike out one or two of mine, which is
fine with me. The point is that the times demand fresh
elements in the world’s discussions. We must begin to
move people’s minds—fortify our friends and allies.
(1) Al Qaeda’s leaders are not clerics. Most are not
even deeply schooled in the subtleties of Islam. Thus they
have no credibility when publishing “fatwas.” It is
astounding that a civil engineer (Bin Laden) or a surgeon
(al Zawahiri) should pretend to tell Muslims how to be
holy, or whom to kill between rounds of prayers.
Washington, correctly, does not try to explain the Koran;
but Washington should deprecate these terrorists’ impudence and posturing as religious interpreters.
(2) Most attacks by “Muslim” zealots have killed or
injured Muslims—from Egypt’s Anwar Sadat to the lowliest soul buying vegetables in a bazaar, or seated with
friends at a pizzeria. Apparently the U.S. government
declines even to count the Muslims murdered by selfdescribed holy Muslims.16 The tally would be a compelling argument against terrorism—especially for those
abroad who imagine that counterterrorism is nothing but
Western concern. By the way, any newspaper could make
the same count—with the same concentration they now
apply to counts of the American war dead.
(3) Innumerable terror attacks have been by Shia
against Sunni, or vice-versa. These are unseemly invitations to a war within a civilization. Eventually, a Sunni
terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, stated openly his strategy for war upon all Shia in Iraq. Such declarations should
be held up to the cold light of shame, and mentioned frequently in explanation of other but similar attacks by
other Zarqawis of the world. I have seen social scientists
wax indignant when imagining that the U.S. is waging a
war of religious civilizations. How many of these same
observers speak up against terrorists who actually do try to
set off a war between Muslim factions?
(4) Purportedly aiming at “Jews and American
Crusaders,” Islamic terrorists have bombed or shot or
burnt alive scores of non-Americans in other countries. In
Eastern Africa in 1998, U.S. embassies were targeted but,
overwhelmingly, the human damage was to Kenyans and
Tanzanians. In Bali, Australian tourists were the target,
but many Indonesians and a mix of foreigners died from
the Jemaah Islamiya/al Qaeda double-bombing. How can
terrorists justify such murders? Their own writings point
to their vulnerability on this issue.
(5) Some legitimate Muslim clerics have spoken up.
The Islamic Commission of Spain, representing some 200
Sunni mosques in that country, roundly condemned Bin
Laden and al Qaeda for terrorism, publishing a fatwa
against them in 2005. That same year, the Muslim
Council of Britain condemned the indiscriminate terrorism of London by bomb plots. The clerics went so far >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 30
“H
ow could we bear to be treated
like schoolboys...to be turned
out on parade by tens of thousands to
march and cheer for this slogan or for
that; to be forced every hour to conceal the
natural workings of the human intellect
and the pulsations of the human heart?
Why, I say that rather than submit to
such oppression, there is no length we
would not go to....We are in the midst of
dangers so great and increasing, we are the
guardians of causes so precious to the
world that we must, as the Bible says, ‘Lay
aside every impediment’ and prepare ourselves night and day to be worthy of the
Faith that is in us.” —WSC, Paris, 1936
as to call upon the faithful in Britain to “unite in helping
the police to capture these murderers.” But the bravery of
such moderates was barely noted by the Western press,
and hardly mentioned in Washington. It should have
been detailed in a White House press conference on developments in foreign affairs.
Conclusion
“Let us preach what we practice,” as Churchill said
at Fulton, and begin to compete seriously in the struggle
for public opinion. No student of Winston Churchill
should ever forego the art of rhetoric in the ways we have
in these last five years.
We will defeat this latest scourge of militant Muslim
terrorism. It is a fierce and ugly ideology. But the same
was true of international anarchism, Soviet bolshevism,
and Nazi fascism, and all those have been defeated. All
violent ideologies, from wherever they come, are by their
natures less worthy than democracy.
And so on this anniversary of Fulton, which marked
the commencement of a war of ideas more than a standoff of armies, let us reenergize our convictions. As
Winston Churchill said to an ally in a speech entitled
“Collective Security” in 1936: all aggressive action must
be judged, not from the standpoint of Right and Left, but
of “right and wrong….We are in the midst of dangers so
great and increasing, we are the guardians of causes so precious to the world, that we must, as the Bible says, ‘lay
aside every impediment,’ and prepare ourselves night and
day to be worthy of the Faith that is in us.”17
Endnotes
1. Pilpel, Robert H., Churchill in America: 1895-1961: An
Affectionate Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976),
section title. The press conference notes quoted are on pp. 214-15.
2. Ibid., 223.
3. Taubman, William, Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to
Détente to Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 133.
4. Pravda, Moscow, 1 August 1946, as reported in the same
day’s Associated Press. Robert Pilpel traced the phrase “iron curtain”
to a 1942 usage by a German finance minister. Sir Martin Gilbert
traced it yet farther back, to the Russian émigré philosopher Vasily
Rozanov in Apocalypse of Our Time (1918): “With a rumble and a
roar, an iron curtain is descending on Russian History.”
5. “Prime Minister to President Truman,” T. 895/5, on 12
May 1945, CHAR 20/218, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
University. I appreciate the aid of the Archives, and the support of
the Marine Corps University Foundation which made those visits
possible.
6. Churchill usually restricted his doubts about the United
Nations to private discussions with advisers. He did write a caustic
passage against the organization as peopled with so many small states
as to be a “Babel” at times, but that prose came later, when writing
the final volume of his war memoirs.
7. The Military Staff Committee is mentioned in the UN
Charter, articles 26 and 47. The committee meets regularly. Yet it is
so obscure that when I asked one speaker who had just lectured on
UN peacekeeping operations about it, he balked, asked me to repeat
the question, and then had no reply. Books on containment and the
postwar world also forget the committee. Dr. Janeen Klinger of the
Army War College believes that the onset of Cold War made military
activity by the UN so unlikely that its military staff committee
immediately proved moribund. She points the reader to Eric Grove,
“UN Armed Forces and the Military Staff Committee: A Look
Back,” International Security, vol. 17, no. 4, Spring 1993, 172-82.
8. A critical meeting between U.S. and British officials took
place at the British Embassy in Washington on 22 May 1943. Those
present included Vice President Henry Wallace and Sumner Welles, a
State Department appeaser before the war and a bitter critic of
Churchill’s; in 1946 he would say kind things about the Fulton
speech.
9. “Telling America’s Story Abroad” is the official objective of
the Voice of America.
10. While the entire budget for the Department of State and
our foreign aid program is less than $35 billion, that of the
Department of Defense is nearing $500 billion.
11. “Voice of America: Cuts at a Glance,” Associated Press, 23
February 2007.
12. There are several of these, including Military Studies in the
Jihad Against the Tyrants, c. 1994, discovered in Manchester, England,
some years later.
13. 28 August 1944; see Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill
vol. 7, Road to Victory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 918.
14. Ibid., 1046, speech of 31 October 1944.
15. Harmon, Christopher C., Terrorism Today, 2nd. ed.
(Abingdon, Oxford, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2007), ch. 5.
16. It is encouraging that the latest White House national
strategy for counterterrorism does make a passing mention of this
incredibly important pattern in terrorism.
17. Gilbert, Martin, Winston S. Churchill vol. 5, Prophet of
Truth 1922-1929 (London: Heinemann, 1976), 788. Paraphrase and
quotations, 24 September 1936, Theatre des Ambassadeurs, Paris. ,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 31
THE PROTRACTED CONFLICT
Failing in Baghdad:
The British Did It First
HERE IS WHAT BRITAIN’S HISTORY of failure at building a democratic state in Iraq in the
1920s and 1930s tells George W. Bush and his successors: If, like Gen. Maude, they fail to
deliver on the promises of a better future for the Iraqi people, then Iraq will continue as a
font of violent instability long after those who made the promises have been buried.
BY TOBY DODGE
A
t the center of Baghdad’s
in an ignominious surrender to the
neglected North Gate
Turks in April 1916.
War Cemetery, near the
Having rallied from that loss
edge of the old city walls,
and finally reached Baghdad, Maude
stands an imposing grave.
tried to create common cause
Sheltered from the weather by a
between the British army and the
grandiose red sandstone cupola, it is
city’s residents, whom he saw as havthe final resting place of a man from
ing been oppressed by 400 years of
whom George W. Bush could have
Ottoman rule. “Your lands have
learned a great deal about the perils
been subject to tyranny,” he declared
of intervening in Iraq.
in his proclamation, and “your
Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Stanley
wealth has been stripped from you
Maude was head of the British army
by unjust men and squandered.” He
in Mesopotamia when he marched
promised that it was not “the wish
MESOPOTAMIA,
into Baghdad on a hot, dusty day in
of the British Government to impose
THEN AND NOW:
March 1917. Soon thereafter, he
upon you alien institutions.” Instead,
The boundaries
issued Britain’s “Proclamation to the
he called on residents to manage
remain as Winston
Churchill laid
People of Baghdad,” which eerily
their own civil affairs “in collaborathem out at the
foreshadowed sentiments that Bush
tion with the political representatives
1921 Cairo conference. Lt. Gen. Sir
and his administration would
of Great Britain.”
Frederick Maude
express eighty-six years later: British
Maude did not live to see the
(left) arrived and
forces, Maude declared, had entered
failure
of his efforts to rally the peodied in 1917.
(Photo
from
www.firstworldwar.com)
the city not as conquerors, but as
ple of Iraq to the British occupation.
liberators.
He died eight months later, having
Maude had arrived in Baghdad after a long and
contracted cholera from a glass of milk.
arduous military campaign. British forces had been
After his death, British policy toward Iraq changed
fighting the Ottoman army for 2 1/2 years and had sufrepeatedly as the army attempted to dominate the counfered one of the worst defeats of World War I in the sixtry and suppress the population, while the government
month siege of the eastern city of Kut, which had ended
strove to adjust to Britain’s diminished role in the international system after World War I. Initially, the aim was
simply to annex the territory and make it part of the
Toby Dodge (t.dodge@qmul.ac.uk) is author of Inventing Iraq: The
Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (Columbia University
Empire, run in a fashion similar to India. But Woodrow
Press). He is associate professor of international politics at the
Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech in January 1918 did in
University of London and a senior fellow at the International Institute
that idea. In setting out America’s vision for the postwar
for Strategic Studies. This article, first published in Washington Post
world, Wilson expressly attacked the duplicitous diploOutlook, 25 February 2007, is reprinted by kind permission of the
author and The Washington Post.
macy of European imperialism, which he blamed for
FINEST HOUR 135 / 32
dragging the world into prolonged military conflict.
This meant that a modern, self-determining state
was now to be built in Iraq. Britain was to take the lead,
but its effort was to be continually scrutinized by the
League of Nations, which had been set up under
Wilson’s watchful eye at the Paris Peace Conference at
the end of the war.
In an echo of what is happening under the U.S.
occupation, hopes for a joint Anglo-Iraqi pact to rebuild
the country were dashed by a violent uprising. On 2 July
1920, a revolt, or thawra, broke out along the lower
Euphrates, fueled by popular resentment of Britain’s
heavy-handed behavior in Iraq. The British army had set
about taxing the population to pay for the building of
the Iraqi state, while British civil servants running the
administration refused to consult Iraqi politicians, judging them too inexperienced to play a role in the new
government.
The rebellion quickly spread across the south and
center of the country. Faced with as many as 131,000
could. After defeating wartime coalition Prime Minister
David Lloyd George, whose Colonial Secretary, Winston
Churchill, had engineered the organization of Iraq, the
victorious Bonar Law pledged that “at the earliest possible moment, consistent with statesmanship and honour,
the next government will reduce our commitments in
Mesopotamia.”
U.S. presidential candidates campaigning to seize
the White House in 2008 should be forewarned, however: it took Britain ten more years to jettison its financial
and military commitments to Iraq. During that period, a
number of governments struggled to reduce the size of
the forces deployed, and the amount of money being
spent. They strove for a decade to stabilize the country
and meet Britain’s pledges to the international community while trying to placate domestic opinion. The tensions involved in this exercise—building a state from
scratch with a hostile population, under severe budgetary
constraints and in the face of rising domestic anger—
ultimately led to the failure of the whole exercise.
“T
he policy failure leads to increasingly desperate attempts to stay the course, to pour
in ever greater numbers of troops, gambling on a resurrection of the initial policy.
This middle stage comes to an end with the decision to disengage. Interestingly, this
choice—admitting defeat and going home—is usually taken by a new government.”
insurgents armed with 17,000 modern rifles left over
from the war, the British army needed eight months to
regain full control of Iraq; 2,000 British troops were
killed, wounded or taken prisoner and 8,450 Iraqis were
killed. To make matters worse, the British government
was forced to pour troops back into Iraq, long after the
end of the war, to stabilize the situation.
The revolt forced Britain to devolve real power to
Iraqi politicians. At the head of this new administration
the British placed a newly created king, Faisal ibn
Hussein, famous for his association with Lawrence of
Arabia during the war. But the revolt had as much influence in Britain as it did in Iraq itself. The “blood and
treasure” expended in putting down the violence made
the continued occupation extremely unpopular. The
public’s discontent reached its peak in the general election campaign of November 1922. The leader of the
opposition, Conservative Andrew Bonar Law, captured
the national mood when he declared: “We cannot alone
act as the policeman of the world.”
Newspapers and candidates organized their electioneering around the “bag and baggage” campaign
demanding that Britain withdraw from Iraq as soon as it
Like Maude’s before him, Bush’s policy in Iraq has
resulted in a series of unintended outcomes. In the face
of ever-increasing violence, the stirring rhetoric about
Iraq becoming a beacon of democracy in the Middle
East has been quietly dropped. Instead, the operation in
Iraq has been placed on the frontline of the global fight
against terrorism: It is better to battle terrorists on the
streets of Baghdad than in Brooklyn or Houston, the
mantra goes.
Where does this leave U.S. policy toward Iraq?
Historical studies often divide military interventions into
three general phases. The first phase, the initial decision
to invade, is shaped by common misperceptions that the
conflict will be short and that military force can be used
to achieve political objectives. World War I began with
an assumption that British troops would be home by
Christmas; Bush declared the “mission accomplished”
after three weeks.
The second phase is marked by a slow realization
that both these assumptions are wrong. The policy failure
leads to increasingly desperate attempts to stay the course,
to pour in ever greater numbers of troops, gambling on a
resurrection of the initial policy. This middle stage >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 33
FAILING IN BAGHDAD...
comes to an end with the decision to disengage.
Interestingly, this choice—admitting defeat and going
home—is usually taken by a new government.
The 1920 revolt, followed by the change of government in London in 1922, led to a prolonged but
largely unsuccessful attempt to do nation-building on
the cheap. The final transformation of policy was
marked by another change of government. The election
of May 1929 resulted in a Labour administration. The
new foreign policy team found it easier to identify the
contradictions at the heart of Britain’s relations with Iraq
and find ways to overcome them. It recommended Iraq
for unconditional membership to the League of Nations
in 1932, unceremoniously dumping Britain’s commitment to building a democratic and stable state.
Iraq became a fully independent state that same
year. But it was unable to defend itself against its neighbors, or to impose order without assistance. The government was ultimately dependent on the Royal Air Force
to guarantee its survival.
Eighty years later, after failing to stabilize Iraq, the
U.S. government has come face to face with the high
costs of the new “forward-leaning” foreign policy of the
Bush doctrine. Comparisons with other military interventions suggest that Bush will continue to pursue a
largely unvarying policy in Iraq, deploying all the troops
and resources at his disposal in an attempt to correct the
mistakes that have been made. The result, as the president himself has recognized, will be to push the difficult
decisions about the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq
onto his successor.
History, however, has two final disturbing lessons
for the next president. The governing elite nurtured by
the British to take their place—the Iraqi royal family
and their associates brought to the country in 1921—
proved unfit for the purpose and were swept aside by a
military coup in 1941. The British army was forced to
reinvade and restore them to power. Yet even this second
invasion was not enough. The violent instability that
engulfed Iraq and resulted in the rise of Saddam Hussein
was triggered by the murder of the royal family by Iraqi
army officers in July 1958. The crime was committed in
the name of Arab nationalism, as a strike against British
interference in a sovereign Arab nation.
Here is what Britain’s history of failure at building
a democratic state in Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s tells
George W. Bush and his successors: If, like Gen. Maude,
they fail to deliver on the promises of a better future for
the Iraqi people, then Iraq will continue as a font of violent instability long after those who made the promises
have been buried.
,
But Did
Britain Fail?
WHAT BRITAIN’S EXPERIENCE may teach us
is that superpowers can only fail voluntarily.
BY DAVID FREEMAN
P
rofessor Dodge is broadly correct in his outline of the history of Iraq, and his case is
compelling for what may happen if promises
of a better future for Iraqis are not kept.
Our chief concern here—the role of Winston
Churchill in the British Iraq Mandate—is limited,
because his involvement, if not his policies, ended with
the fall of the Lloyd George coalition in November
1922. The description of what happened from that
point on is accurate. Yet it can be argued that Britain’s
venture in Iraq was not a failure—for reasons which
have little to do with prospects there today.
I disagree with the characterization of Britain’s initial goals for Iraq in the 1920s, and would challenge the
suggestion that what is being attempted now is the same
as what was attempted then. There are several important
points that should be considered:
1. What was Britain trying to accomplish by establishing Iraq in 1922? First, to fulfill residual obligations
from the war (which Professor Dodge does not mention;
but see the accompanying correspondence between
Churchill and Lloyd George, particularly the comments
of the latter). Second, to establish a stable government
broadly friendly to British interests, the most important
of which was preserving the link to India. If the British
had indeed been trying to build a nation founded on
democratic self-determination, they would not have
arrested and deported the leader of just such a movement and imposed the alien Hashemite monarchy. In
other words, the British were simply trying to keep a lid
on things, given their own diminishing resources. They
did not consider Iraq a high priority. Churchill made it
clear that he was prepared to order a unilateral withdrawal of British forces from the region if the desired
Professor Freeman (dafreeman@fullerton.edu) is a regular contributor
to Finest Hour and his last article was “Midwife to an Ungrateful
Volcano: Churchill and the Making of Iraq” in FH 132, Autumn
2006. He teaches History at California State University, Fullerton.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 34
low-cost settlement could not be achieved.
2. British policy was in fact successful in achieving its
goal. Relying on support from air power, a relatively stable government friendly to British interests was maintained in Iraq for as long as Britain needed it. If not by
Indian independence in 1947, then certainly following
the Suez episode of 1956, Britain no longer had either
the need or the inclination to sustain the Hashemite
government. It had served its purpose, and the British
could justly claim that thirty-five years was quite long
enough to expect the Hashemites to have established
themselves or face the consequences. The Hashemite
monarchy established at the same time in neighboring
Jordan, after all, survives to this day.
3. The 1920 Iraq uprising came as Britain was in the
process of reducing its troop commitments. Professor
Dodge correctly notes that it was a troop increase that
ended the rebellion, but frames this in a negative context. Surely the troop “surge” is what gave Britain the
opportunity to establish its low-cost solution? (The additional troops, by the way, came from India.)
4. Bonar Law’s statement about reducing commitments in Mesopotamia can be misinterpreted. The settlement worked out by Churchill—with the support of
Bonar Law’s Conservatives, who made up the majority of
Lloyd George’s Coalition government—enabled the
reduction of British troops stationed in Iraq. This was
already in place when Bonar Law made his remarks. He
was simply pledging to carry out the policy.
5. League of Nations scrutiny of Britain’s policies was
intended, but the United States never joined the League.
The Mandate under which Britain governed Iraq was
supervised by the League Council, made up of Britain,
France and other imperial powers holding Mandates. In
short: the Mandate holders were policing themselves.
Churchill’s solution met the obligations Britain had
acquired during and after the First World War and continued to work for as long as it was needed, after which
time it was abandoned. Realpolitik? Perhaps, but it
worked, and that is the point at issue here. Most likely
the only real similarity between the situation in Iraq then
and now is the unchanged nature of the populace.
,
Correspondence on Iraq, 1922
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL AND DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
WSC to DLG (Churchill papers: 17/27)
1 September 1922
I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you
have given me is becoming really impossible. Our forces
are reduced now to very slender proportions. The
Turkish menace has got worse; Feisal is playing the fool,
if not the knave; his incompetent Arab officials are disturbing some of the provinces and failing to collect the
revenue; we overpaid £200,000 on last year’s account
which it is almost certain Iraq will not be able to pay
this year, thus entailing a Supplementary Estimate in
regard to a matter never sanctioned by Parliament; a further deficit, in spite of large economies, is nearly certain
this year on the civil expenses owing to the drop in the
revenue. I have had to maintain British troops at Mosul
all through the year in consequence of the Angora quarrel: this has upset the programme of reliefs and will cerReprinted by kind permission from the official biography, Winston S.
Churchill, Companion Volume IV, Part 3, starting at page 1975.
“Wee Free” may refer to the Asquith Liberals, who were “free” of the
Lloyd George Coalition. An August 1920 letter along the same lines
(“There is something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian
entanglement”) was written but not sent; see Companion Volume IV,
Part 2 (Heinemann, 1977), 1199. In 1921 Churchill became Colonial
Secretary and went to Cairo to settle Middle East boundaries.
tainly lead to further expenditure beyond the provision. I
cannot at this moment withdraw these troops without
practically inviting the Turks to come in. The small column which is operating in the Rania district inside our
border against the Turkish raiders and Kurdish sympathisers is a source of constant anxiety to me.
I do not see what political strength there is to face a
disaster of any kind, and certainly I cannot believe that in
any circumstances any large reinforcements would be sent
from here or from India. There is scarcely a single newspaper—Tory, Liberal or Labour—which is not consistently hostile to our remaining in this country. The enormous
reductions which have been effected have brought no
goodwill, and any alternative Government that might be
formed here—Labour, Die-hard or Wee Free—would
gain popularity by ordering instant evacuation. Moreover
in my heart I do not see what we are getting out of it.
Owing to the difficulties with America, no progress has
been made in developing the oil. Altogether I am getting
to the end of my resources.
I think we should now put definitely, not only to
Feisal but to the Constituent Assembly, the position that
unless they beg us to stay and to stay on our own terms
in regard to efficient control, we shall actually evacuate
before the close of the financial year. I would put this >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 35
issue in the most brutal way, and if they are not prepared
to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I
would actually clear out. That at any rate would be a
solution. Whether we should clear out of the country
altogether or hold on to a portion of the Basra vilayet is
a minor issue requiring a special study.
It is quite possible, however, that face to face with
this ultimatum the King, and still more the Constituent
Assembly, will implore us to remain. If they do, shall we
not be obliged to remain? If we remain, shall we not be
answerable for defending their frontier? How are we to
do this if the Turk comes in? We have no force whatever
that can resist any serious inroad. The War Office, of
course, have played for safety throughout and are ready
to say “I told you so” at the first misfortune.
Surveying all the above, I think I must ask you for
definite guidance at this stage as to what you wish and
what you are prepared to do. The victories of the Turks
will increase our difficulties throughout the
Mohammedan world. At present we are paying eight
millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to
get anything worth having.
DLG to WSC (Churchill papers: 17/27)
10 Downing Street, 5 September 1922
My dear Colonial Secretary,
I agree that the situation in Iraq requires most
careful consideration, and think you should put your
views before the Cabinet on Thursday.
The whole problem has arisen out of the decision
to attack the Turks in Mesopotamia. Strategically, I think
that decision was faulty. To be effective we had to leave
our base on the sea for hundreds of miles in a torrid
country utterly unfit for white fighting. We ought to
have concentrated on Gallipoli and Palestine or
Alexandretta. The Taurus was then unpierced. The decision was taken when I was hardly on the fringe of the
War Cabinet. You were in it. Having provoked war with
the Turk we had to fight him somewhere, but the
swamps of the Tigris were a badly chosen battle-ground.
Whatever, however, the merits or demerits of the
original decision to fight in Mesopotamia, it certainly is
responsible for our difficulties now; and tracing the story
back to that decision, I do not see how any of our subsequent troubles could have been avoided.
It was quite clear to me when I became Prime
Minister that we could not afford to relax our campaign
against the Turks in that region. Such a decision, after
the withdrawal from Gallipoli, and the surrender of a
British army at Kut, would have weakened our position
throughout the Mahomedan world.
Having beaten the Turk both in Iraq and in
Palestine, we could not at the Armistice have repudiated
all our undertakings towards the Arabs. We were respon-
sible for liberating them from Turkish sovereignty, and
we were absolutely bound to assist them in setting up
Arab governments, if we were not prepared to govern
them ourselves.
As to the present position, it is very disappointing
that Feisal has responded so badly to your excellent
efforts to make him self-supporting with a minimum of
British protection; but I do not think that an effective
case can be made against us on that score, if we stand
together and meet criticism courageously.
If we have failed in Iraq, it is because we have
taken no effective steps during our years of occupation
to prospect the possibilities of the country. As you know,
I was anxious that the Anglo-Persian [Oil Company]
should bore to ascertain the value of the oil deposits. We
have, however, done practically nothing in that respect.
If we leave, we may find a year or two after we have
departed that we have handed over to the French and
the Americans some of the richest oil fields in the
world—just to purchase a derisive shout from our enemies. On general principles, I am against a policy of
scuttle, in Iraq as elsewhere, and should like you to put
all the alternatives, as you see them, before the Cabinet
on Thursday.
Retrospect
C
hurchill’s warnings about Iraq are today
quoted frequently, but the situation in
1920-22 had its own characteristics. Britain
was quarreling with Turkey (Lloyd George
was anti-Turk) and oil was not a major factor, except as a way Britain’s Iraq Mandate might “pay its
own way.” America was then the main oil producer, the
vast Arabian oil fields were still undiscovered, and
Britain’s oil supply was assured via the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company in Iran. Oil was suspected to be plentiful in
Iraq, and Lloyd George regretted that no effort had been
made to confirm this and exploit it.
In his unsent 1920 letter to Lloyd George,
Churchill declared that the Arabs had “laid aside the
blood feuds they have nursed for centuries and that the
Suni and Shiah [sic] tribes are working together.” Was he
right? Perhaps not, but apparently today the opposite situation exists. The Iraqi leader who could get the Sunni,
Kurds and Shia to work together would be heralded as a
wizard of Bismarckian proportions.
The British decision to hold Iraq by air power,
bucking up the Hashemite King Feisal while withdrawing troops, was taken in Cabinet. Iraq obtained nominal
independence in 1932. The thirty-five-year Hashemite
dynasty, after several coup attempts and revolts, finally
fell in the revolution of 1958, which led to the Ba’athists
and, ultimately, to Saddam Hussein. —Ed.
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 36
THE PROTRACTED CONFLICT (2)
Churchill and
Lloyd George
POLITICAL MYOPIA, 1936-1945:
HOPING YOUR COUNTRY WILL LOSE
BY JAMES LANCASTER
T
here is one conspicuous absentee in the famous
David Low cartoon of 14 May 1940, “All
behind you Winston,” where Churchill and his
cabinet colleagues stride forward purposefully,
their sleeves rolled up, four days after WSC
became Prime Minister.
The absentee is David Lloyd George, Churchill’s
former mentor and Prime Minister for much of World
War I. He is not in the cartoon because he was not in
the Government—of his own choice. Lloyd George
refused to join the War Cabinet three times, on 13 May,
28 May and 6 June. He also refused Churchill’s offer, on
10 December 1940, to go to Washington as
Ambassador, following the death of Lord Lothian.
During the first six months of Churchill’s premiership, friends and colleagues of all parties tried to persuade Lloyd George to support Churchill and join the
government. His secretary and mistress, Frances
Stevenson, tried as hard as anyone, admitting, “I knew
that LG’s iron will was set against working with
Churchill.”1 Stevenson recorded this on 20 June 1940.
By October she had come round to Lloyd George’s plan,
writing to him: “Your time will surely come, and the
great thing is to keep fit until that time arrives.”2
Why did Churchill want Lloyd George, someone
he had, early in his career, referred to as “a chattering
little cad,”3 in his coalition government? The principal
reason was his belief that in a wartime coalition “The
sense of duty dominates all else, and personal claims
recede.”4 Although Churchill had become increasingly
disillusioned with his old chief in the interwar years, he
wanted his government to represent all parties, including
that much diminished Liberal faction led by Lloyd
George. He also wanted to muzzle the “Welsh Wizard,”
and with good reason. Lloyd George had proclaimed on
many occasions his admiration for Hitler, following their
two meetings in 1936. He had consistently attacked the
government for incompetence, and had spoken in favour
of discussing peace terms with Hitler. With his prestige
still intact, his emergence as a British Pétain needed to
be guarded against one way or another. Churchill cer-
“ALMOST ALL BEHIND YOU, WINSTON”: Low would have
caused a stir had he added a ghostly Lloyd George, pondering
his options in May 1940. (LG image from a cartoon in the tatler
of 26 Apri 1911.) Can readers name all the complete faces depicted by Low? Photoshop® modifications by Barbara Langworth.
tainly thought LG could do more good on the team
than opposing it from the outside.
Why for his part did Lloyd George, who resented
being successively spurned by Premiers Macdonald,
Baldwin and Chamberlain, refuse to “fall in” behind
Churchill? Where was his “sense of duty”? Why did he
not bury his “personal claims”? To decline four invitations from your Prime Minister to serve your country in
the hour of her peril reveals, at the very least, extraordinary disloyalty. It was also unpatriotic. Worse, it sent the
wrong message to the enemy. Many of Lloyd George’s
articles were so defeatist that many people thought he
should be locked up. Duff Cooper replied to one of his
harangues in the House in September 1939 saying that
it “would be received with delight in Germany, where it
would be said that the man who claimed to have won
the last war was already admitting defeat in this one.”5
One reason for Lloyd George’s refusals was his profound pessimism, his feeling that the situation was militarily hopeless. Only a few weeks after the outbreak of
war, Harold Nicolson and Robert Boothby met him at
Thames House. In his diary entry for 20 September
1939 Nicolson wrote: “He [Lloyd George] says that he is
frankly terrified and does not see how we can possibly
win the war.”6 The Welshman even constructed at a cost
of £6000 an air-raid shelter sixty feet underground at
Churt, his country estate. His secretary, Arthur Sylvester,
said it was like Piccadilly underground station.
Lloyd George’s only formal explanation for not
joining the Government was his 29 May letter to
Churchill, saying he could not join a War Cabinet containing Chamberlain. When he refused Churchill’s final
offer, to become Ambassador in Washington in
December 1940, he said that his doctor (Lord Dawson >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 37
CHURCHILL AND LLOYD GEORGE...
whom Brendan Bracken called “the undertaker’s friend”)
advised against it. Dawson had actually given him a
clean bill of health. In reality, as he confided to Frances
Stevenson, he had no intention of accepting the offer.
Lloyd George had every reason to want to stay in
Britain at this time. Despite his defeatist leanings he had
frequently been canvassed as the only man who could
save the country, not only before Churchill became
Prime Minister but in the months following. It is significant that when he turned down the post as Ambassador
in Washington, the Sunday Pictorial was in the middle of
a campaign supporting him as the alternative prime
minister.7 He was convinced that, one way or another,
he would be called to save the country. He had thus
been called in 1916; why not a second time? “I shall
wait until Winston is bust,” he told Arthur Sylvester.8
Not content with waiting for Churchill to make
one blunder too many, Lloyd George led the attack on
the Prime Minister in the Vote of Confidence on 7 May
1941. He accused Churchill of surrounding himself with
“yes-men.” He said it was fatuous to suppose that
Britain could ever invade mainland Europe, that it was
more important to have manpower in agriculture than in
the army, and that the War Cabinet should be sacked. In
his reply, Churchill turned on Lloyd George with the
remark: “It was the sort of speech with which, I imagine,
the illustrious Marshal Pétain [WSC always pronounced
Pétain as “peatayne”] might well have enlivened the closing days of M. Reynaud’s Cabinet.”9 The vote was carried 447-3, Lloyd George, as usual, abstaining.
Although most dissident Tories by then supported
Churchill, Lloyd George continued to attack the government whenever the war news was bad. Behind this
defeatist attitude lay the continuing hope that his hour
was still to come. He listened every night to German
propaganda from Berlin, hoping that a stalemate situation would force a peace accommodation. He felt sure
he would be the man the country would choose to parley with Hitler. Yet, while continuing to attack the government, at no time did Lloyd George spell out, privately or in a public forum, what peace terms he would propose or accept. Nor did he ever question his own ability
to do business with Hitler.
Fortunately Lloyd George’s opportunity to negotiate an undefined peace, with a man who never respected
any agreed terms or conditions, never came. Churchill
had not met Hitler, but he had the measure of him.
“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough,
the crocodile will eat him last,” WSC had said of the
neutral nations in January 1940. His old mentor
thought he knew better. In his meetings with Hitler in
1936 Lloyd George had been very impressed (as was
Halifax in 1937, and Chamberlain in 1938). He had
been deeply touched by Hitler telling him that the Allied
victory in the World War I was owed to one great statesman—LG himself. This “one great statesman,” had he
been given the opportunity, would, in the best case, have
failed to reach an agreement with Hitler. In the worst
case, he would have been party to nothing less than
German hegemony in Europe, and to Britain’s defeat.
Lloyd George died on 26 March 1945. In his tribute on 28 March, Churchill concentrated on the
deceased’s achievements in the days of social reform
before 1914, and on his premiership in the critical years
1916-18: “Although unacquainted with the military arts,
although by public repute a pugnacious pacifist, when
the life of our country was in peril he rallied to the war
effort and cast aside all other thoughts and aims.”10
Churchill was referring to the First World War. In the
Second, Lloyd George conspicuously chose not to “rally
to the war effort” nor to “cast aside all other thoughts
and aims.” In his tribute, Churchill, magnanimously,
chose not to say anything about Lloyd George during
the years 1936-45.
Were Churchill’s war policies compromised in any
way by the contrary behaviour of his “old friend”? No—
never at any time. Lloyd George had been sidelined
when he failed to bring the government down in the
Vote of Confidence. Prior to that debate Churchill did
not move one iota to meet LG’s stated conditions under
which he might serve: removing Chamberlain from the
War Cabinet and reorganising the Cabinet along the
lines of the War Directorate which LG set up in 1916.
Following that Vote of Confidence, in a letter to
his son Randolph on 8 June 1941, Churchill considered
Lloyd George as one of the “small fry” who “do their
best to abuse us whenever the war news gives them an
opportunity, but there is not the slightest sign that the
House as a whole, or still less the country, will swerve
from their purpose.”11
Churchill had concluded his closing speech in that
critical debate by dismissing the naysayers’ defiance:
“When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves through which
the gallant ship has driven, when I remember what has
gone wrong, and remember also what has gone right, I
feel sure we have no need to feel the tempest. Let it roar,
and let it rage. We shall come through.”12
Endnotes
1. The Autobiography of Frances Lloyd George (London:
Hutchinson, 1967), 264.
2. Taylor, A.J.P., ed., The Letters of Lloyd George and Frances
Stevenson: 1913-1941 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 241.
3. Gilbert, Sir Martin, Churchill: A Life (London:
BCA/Heinemann, 1992), 147.
4. Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War, vol. 2, Their
Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 8.
5. Duff Cooper, Alfred, Old Men Forget (London: Rupert
Hart-Davis, 1953), 267.
>>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 38
CHURCHILL AND LLOYD GEORGE...
6. Nicolson, Nigel, editor, Harold Nicolson, The War Years
1939-1945, Diaries and Letters (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 35.
7. Lysaght, Charles, Brendan Bracken (London: Allen Lane,
1980), 179.
8. Cross, Colin, editor, Life with Lloyd George: The Diary of
A.J. Sylvester (London: Macmillan, 1975), 281.
9. Churchill, Winston S., The Unrelenting Struggle (London:
Cassell, 1943), 120.
10. Churchill, Winston S., Victory (London: Cassell, 1946), 89.
11. Gilbert, Sir Martin, Winston S. Churchill vol. 6, Finest
Hour 1939-1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), 1105.
12. Churchill, Winston S., The Unrelenting Struggle, op. cit.,
133.
,
WSC on Taxation
Wit &
Wisdom
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD TAX,”
Churchill is alleged to have said. But did he say it?
I am doing research for my assignment: Taxation, and various taxes used to
raise money. Could you let me know
where Churchill says, “There is no such
thing as a good tax”? —Nicole
T
here is no occurrence of that
statement, or any part of it, in
Churchill’s 15 million published words of speeches, articles, letters and books. However, there is one that is close:
“Taxes are an evil—a necessary evil,
but still an evil, and the fewer we have
of them the better.”
—HOUSE OF COMMONS, 12 FEBRUARY 1906
Churchill, who favored Free Trade,
was here attacking protective tariffs. He
added: “...every arrangement between
protectionist States which takes the
form of a reduction in the tariff barriers
of the world is a distinct advantage.”
Using the search feature on our
website, enter the word “taxes,” and this
will lead you to useful articles on
Churchill’s views of taxation. Especially
read the article “Opportunity Lost?” at
http://xrl.us/wsac.
Churchill thought hard about taxation, and his early beliefs were largely
formed on the basis of Progress and
Poverty, a book by the American economist Henry George. Following George’s
ideas, Churchill argued that people
have the right to possess what they produce, or receive in exchange for their
work—but there is no congruent right
to private ownership of the elements
upon which all depend: air, water, sunshine and land.
Henry George held
that if private ownership of basic elements is
permitted, suppression and exploitation
of one class by another is inevitable.
Churchill wanted to shift taxation
from production to land. In 1909 he
said: “You can tax wealth or you can tax
wages—that is the whole choice....Taxation should not only have regard to the
volume of wealth, but, so far as possible, to the character of the processes of
its origin.”
Churchill believed in this tax because he observed the high prices even
then demanded for commercial land.
Such land, he said, was created not by
any individual but by the existence and
work of the entire community.
The article explains why the idea
did not work out. Henry George’s theories are little known today—but in his
early career, they were central to Winston Churchill’s thinking about taxation. Your writing about this will probably astonish and impress your teacher.
More Churchill on Taxes
“The great principle which this
House ought to guard and cherish is
that, when the tax collector comes to
the private citizen and takes from him
of his wealth for the service of the public, the whole of that money taken shall
go for the purposes for which it is intended, and that no private interests,
however powerfully they may be organized and however eloquently advocated,
shall thrust their dirty fingers into the
pie and take the profit for themselves.”
—HOUSE OF COMMONS, 8 JUNE 1908
FINEST HOUR 135 / 39
“...the taxes on incomes over
£3,000 a year, upon estates at death, on
motor cars before they cause death,
upon tobacco, upon spirits, upon
liquor licences, which really belong to
the State and ought never to have been
filched away; and, above all, taxes upon
the unearned increment in land are
necessary, legitimate and fair; and that
without any evil consequences to the
refinement or the richness of our national life, still less any injury to the
sources of its economic productivity,
they will yield revenue sufficient in this
year and in the years to come to meet
the growing needs of Imperial defence
and of social reform.”
—MANCHESTER, 23 MAY 1909
“This refusal to treat all forms of
wealth with equal deference, no matter
what may have been the process by
which it was acquired, is a strenuous assertion in a practical form that there
ought to be a constant relation between
acquired wealth and useful service previously rendered, and that where no
service, but rather disservice, is proved,
then, whenever possible, the State
should make a sensible difference in the
taxes it is bound to impose.”
—NORWICH, 26 JULY 1909
“The idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest
delusions which has ever fuddled the
human mind.”
—ROYAL ALBERT HALL, 21 APRIL 1948 ,
MYTH AND REALITY
What Did Churchill
Really Think About the Jews?
SOMEONE ELSE’S OPINIONS, IN AN UNPUBLISHED ARTICLE WHICH NEVER APPEARED IN
PRINT UNDER CHURCHILL’S NAME, CANNOT BE LAID AT CHURCHILL’S DOOR.
BY SIR MARTIN GILBERT CBE
I
n a press release announcing a book by Richard
Toye on Churchill and Lloyd George, Cambridge
University Press put its main emphasis on the discovery of a previously unknown article written by
Winston Churchill in 1937, containing considerable anti-Semitic imagery.
The 1937 article, “How the Jews Can Combat
Persecution,” was “unearthed by Dr. Richard Toye, a
Cambridge University historian,” according to The
Independent. “Written three years before Churchill
became Prime Minister, the article has apparently lain
unnoticed in the Churchill Archives at Cambridge since
the early months of the Second World War.
“Churchill criticised the ‘aloofness’ of Jewish people
from wider society and urged them to make the effort to
integrate themselves....Churchill says: ‘The central fact
which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that
the Jew is “different.” He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background.’ He
then criticises Jewish moneylenders: ‘Every Jewish moneylender recalls Shylock and the idea of the Jews as usurers.
And you cannot reasonably expect a struggling clerk or
shopkeeper, paying 40 or 50 per cent interest on borrowed
money to a “Hebrew Bloodsucker,” to reflect that almost
every other way of life was closed to the Jewish people.’ ”
In fact, this article has not “lain unnoticed,” and not
one word of it was written by Churchill. Nor did the article ever appear in print, either under his name or that of
any other. The article was written in its entirety by a
British journalist, Adam Marshall Diston (1893-1956).
Professor Gilbert is official biographer of Winston Churchill, a
CC honorary member, and a contributor to Finest Hour. His book,
Churchill and the Jews, was published in Britain in June by Simon and
Schuster, and will be published in the USA by Holt in October.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We trust that readers will appreciate that
the painful quotations from this article are neither ours nor Sir
Martin Gilbert’s, but come from press reports and releases.
Reflecting on his four decades as official biographer in Finest
Hour 65, Sir Martin said something we should never forget about
Churchill: “I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I
disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me
to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’” No. Never. RML
This fact was unknown to Dr. Toye, in whose new
book on Churchill and Lloyd George the article appears
as if written by Churchill. After the press release, I
pointed out to Dr. Toye that not a single word of the article was by Churchill, and gave him Diston’s name. He
replied: “Thank you for drawing my attention to what I
hadn’t been aware of about the article.”
It is astonishing that a professional historian should
not be aware of the name of the actual author, a name that
first appeared in the relevant volume of the Churchill
biography, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V,
Part 3, The Coming of War: Documents 1936-1939
(London: Heinemann, 1982), page 670, which showed
that the article was written in full by Diston.
Churchill, who was then writing on average an article a week, paid Diston—a journalist, a member of Sir
Oswald Mosley’s New Party in its pre-fascist days, and a
would-be Labour Party parliamentary candidate in
1935—to draft certain articles. Some of Diston’s other
drafts were amended by Churchill and published with his
amendments; a few were published unamended.
The article in question, “How the Jews Can
Combat Persecution,” was however not published at all.
This was fortunate, as it was offered for publication three
times: twice in 1937, shortly after Diston wrote it, and
once in 1940. Some have claimed the act of offering it to
a publisher means that Churchill approved of it—but this
was not the way his articles were offered.
In 1937, Churchill himself would not have offered
the article personally. His private office did that, and was
always most efficient. It is not clear that Churchill even
read either the original or the retyped Diston article:
neither have any markings on them by him, which
suggests that he had not, since other Diston drafts are
copiously red-penned.
In 1940, the then-editor of his war speeches,
Charles Eade, unearthed the article and suggested he publish it. But Churchill, alerted to its anti-Semitic overtones
by secretary Kathleen Hill, would not permit publication.
Someone else’s opinions, in an unpublished article,
which never appeared in print under Churchill’s name,
cannot be laid at Churchill’s door.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 40
W
hat were Churchill’s actual views on the Jews?
In 1982 I published Churchill’s written instructions to Marshall Diston on what the article should cover. Churchill wrote: “Obviously
there are four things. The first is to be a good
citizen of the country to which he belongs. The second is
to avoid too exclusive an association in ordinary matters
of business and daily life, and to mingle as much as possible with non-Jews everywhere, apart from race and religion. The third is to keep the Jewish movement free from
Communism. The fourth is a perfectly legitimate use by
the Jews of their influence throughout the world to bring
pressure, economic and financial, to bear upon the
Governments which persecute them.”*
Churchill had always urged the Jews to be good citizens, while retaining their faith and culture. His advice to
his Manchester Jewish constituents in 1907 was: “Be good
Jews.” He explained that he did not believe a Jew could be
“a good Englishmen unless he is a good Jew.”
A year later, at the first public meeting he attended
with his wife Clementine, a few weeks after their marriage, he told those gathered to open a new wing of the
Manchester Jewish Hospital that he was “very glad to have
the experience of watching the life and work of the Jewish
community in England; there was a high sense of the corporate responsibility in the community; there was a great
sense of duty that was fostered on every possible occasion
by their leaders.”
Avoiding “too exclusive” an all-Jewish association
was another consistent theme. Churchill welcomed Jews
as part of the wider British community, and was impressed by how many accepted that challenge. His friend
Rufus Isaacs became (as Lord Reading) both Viceroy of
India and Foreign Secretary. But he was worried when
Lloyd George wanted to include three Jewish Cabinet
Ministers among the seven Liberals in his 1918 administration, writing to the Prime Minister: “There is a point
about Jews which occurs to me—you must not have too
many of them. Three Jews among only seven Liberal
Cabinet Ministers might I fear give rise to comment.”
Keeping “the Jewish movement” free of
Communism was another consistent theme. The prominence of individual Jews in senior positions in the
Communist revolutions in Russia, Bavaria and Hungary
had alarmed Churchill since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Writing about this in 1920 he urged the Jews to
abandon Communism, and either enter into the national
life of their own countries, as in Britain—“while adhering
faithfully to their own religion”—or opt for Zionism.
* Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part
3, The Coming of War: Documents 1936-1939, London: Heinemann,
1982; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983, 654. See also Gilbert’s notes
on the Diston draft of “King George VI,” page 519.
Churchill regarded Zionism as “a very great ideal,”
writing in 1920: “If as may well happen, there should be
created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a
Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown,
which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an
event would have occurred in the history of the world
which would, from every point of view, be beneficial.”
Churchill’s 1922 White Paper established that the
Jews were in Palestine “of right, and not on sufferance.”
During the Second World War he suggested appointing
the Zionist leader, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, as British High
Commissioner for Palestine (in 1910, as Home Secretary,
Churchill had signed Weizmann’s naturalization papers).
Fighting persecution was also Churchill’s consistent
advice to the Jews, at a time when he himself was being
abused by Nazi newspapers in Germany for his outspoken
criticism of Nazi racial policy. Some of his most powerful
words in the House of Commons after Hitler came to
power were denunciations of the cruelty of Nazi antiSemitic policies.
Anti-Semitism was anathema to Churchill. In a
letter to his mother he described the French anti-Semitic
campaign against Dreyfus as “a monstrous conspiracy.”
His main criticism of the Conservative Government’s
Aliens Bill in 1904 was that the proposed immigration
controls could be abused by an “anti-Semitic Home
Secretary.”
When, in the House of Commons in 1921,
Churchill spoke in favour of Jewish land purchase in
Palestine, a fellow Member of Parliament warned him
that, as a result of his advocacy, he would find himself up
“against the hereditary antipathy which exists all over the
world to the Jewish race.” This was indeed so: in 1940 a
senior Conservative gave as one reason for Churchill’s
unsuitability to be Prime Minister his “pro-Zionist”
stance in Cabinet, protesting against the Chamberlain
government’s restrictions on Jewish land purchase.
During the Second World War, Churchill suggested
the removal of “anti-Semitic officers” from high positions
in the Middle East. This led one of those officers, his
friend General Sir Edward Spears, a Liberal MP, to warn
this writer that “Churchill was too fond of Jews.”
Following the King David Hotel Jewish terrorist
bombing in 1946, at a time of strong anti-Jewish feeling
in Britain, Churchill told the House of Commons: “I am
against preventing Jews from doing anything which other
people are allowed to do. I am against that, and I have the
strongest abhorrence of the idea of anti-Semitic lines of
prejudice.”
These were Churchill’s consistent, and persistent
beliefs. As he remarked when his criticisms of Jewish
terrorism in Palestine were being discussed: “The Jewish
people know well enough that I am their friend.”
This was indeed so.
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 41
Churchill and the Tank (1):
Present at the Creation
BY DAVID FLETCHER
“In the first place the Commission desire to record their view that it was primarily due
to the receptivity, courage and driving force of the Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill
that the general idea of the use of such an instrument of warfare as the ‘Tank’ was converted
into a practical shape. Mr. Winston Churchill has very properly taken the view
that all his thought and time belonged to the State and that he was not entitled
to make any claim for an award, even had he wished to do so. But it seems proper
that the above view should be recorded by way of tribute to Mr. Winston Churchill.”
—Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors, in summing up claims in respect of “Invention of Tanks”
“MOTHER”: Members of the Landships Committee and its designers with “Mother,” the first rhomboid-shaped tank,
during an early demonstration at Burton Park, Lincoln in 1916. Winston Churchill was not present on this occasion.
T
he Inspiration/Perspiration Ratio is well known
where inventions are concerned, and it should
be recognised that Churchill’s contribution
falls directly into the former category—but
even then it did not spring from nowhere. His
duties to the Fleet and the Royal Naval Air Service
notwithstanding, the First Lord of the Admiralty was
always looking for an opportunity to gain a toehold in a
war zone.
It came sooner than he thought when that piratical
Mr. Fletcher is author of War Cars (1987) and The British Tank 19151919 (2001). Photographs were supplied by the author by kind courtesy of the Tank Museum Collection, Bovington Camp, Dorset.
RNAS officer, Charles Rumney Samson (who in earlier
times was one of those who taught Churchill to fly),
took his squadron to Dunkirk in 1914. Within weeks,
whenever the weather prevented flying, these men were
tearing around Flanders in home-made armoured cars,
shooting up the German cavalry and having the time of
their lives. Grasping the opportunity, Churchill encouraged expansion of this armoured car force with newly
made vehicles from Britain and before long anyone with
a sense of adventure was anxious to join in; among them
the legendary “Bendor,” the Duke of Westminster.
But it didn’t last, and couldn’t last. Trenches
appeared, often dug across the roads: barbed wire likewise. Shell fire began to turn the ground into a quagmire
FINEST HOUR 135 / 42
and the movement of armoured cars was restricted. After
all, even the best of them were no more than conventional cars with about four tons of armour bolted on,
even if many were Rolls-Royces. Most were handed over
to the Army while the men dispersed. Some went back
to sea. The Duke took his armoured cars to Egypt but
others, fired up with the potential of armoured warfare
on land, returned to London and thought up new ideas.
Among them was a chap named Tom
Hetherington, who somehow managed to retain commissions in the Army and the Navy at the same time.
He dreamed up the idea of a huge machine, something
one might associate with H. G. Wells, which would roll
into Germany on 40-foot-diameter wheels, wade across
the Rhine and bring the war to an end in weeks.
Hetherington and Churchill came together at a
dinner, hosted by Westminster, and there is little doubt
that the young officer’s impossible design reignited the
First Lord’s interest. Churchill himself was, above all, a
realist, who dealt best with what he could see and understand. Commodore Murray Sueter, Director of the Air
Department at the Admiralty, remembers Churchill
storming around his office saying, “We must crush the
trenches, D.A.D.: It is the only way; it must be done.”1
Churchill’s first effort along these lines was
abortive. Two municipal steam rollers were acquired,
linked up side by side and then driven like mad at a
trench parapet, only to get stuck in the soft mud and sit
there, belching smoke, rollers spinning, going nowhere.
On a more practical level the First Lord ordained
an Admiralty Landships Committee,2 which met (for
the first time in the First Lord’s rooms at the Admiralty
since he had the flu) under the chairmanship of Eustace
Tennyson D’Eyncourt, Director of Naval Construction,
in February 1915. This committee, and the driving force
behind it, was Churchill’s greatest contribution to the
evolution of the tank.
The Landships Committee’s first problem was to
decide upon the respective merits of wheels or
Caterpillar tracks. Hetherington’s huge wheeled design
was simply too big, and even a half-scale version,
designed by William Foster and Company in Lincoln,
was rejected at an early stage. That left tracks. But
tracks, as a means of crossing rough ground, were hardly
known in Britain and early prototypes mostly had to be
imported from the USA. Murray Sueter educated
Churchill on the properties of tracks by inviting him
down to Horse Guards to push a small tracked truck
around. Soon the Landships Committee had experiments going on everywhere and Churchill attended one
with Lloyd George, as the following article notes, at a
testing ground near Wormwood Scrubs.
Even so, Churchill was better with men than
machines. and his last great contribution to this saga was
to appoint a pushy young merchant banker, one Albert
Stern, as secretary to D’Eyncourt’s Committee.
Commissioned as a Lieutenant in the RNAS, Stern went
at it like mad, with no respect for rank or station. Stern
didn’t tread on toes—he leapt on them, and managed to
make himself very unpopular. But he got things done. A
prototype machine, first known as “Little Willie,” was
running by the summer of 1915. Its successor—“Big
Willie” or “Mother”—the true prototype of all British
World War I tanks—was completed the following
December and a matter of months later, production
began. As Marcus Frost relates next, tanks went into
action for the first time on 15 September 1916. In the
circumstances, it was an amazing feat to imagine, invent,
design and produce a brand new weapons system in so
short a time.
Churchill, by then, was out of the picture.
Reaction to the Dardanelles reverse, his resignation from
the government and subsequent return to uniform, kept
him away from developments in Britain. Yet it did not
leave his mind, and from the trenches he sent Sir John
French a document entitled “Variants of the Offensive,”3
which proved to be very influential. It was not simply a
plea for the tank, but a broad-based look at the prob- >>
ORIGINS: Tommy Hetherington, above, drives the Killen-Strait
tractor through barbed wire entanglements at Wormwood
Scrubs. Albert Stern strides at left; Lloyd George and Churchill,
though present, are not in the photo. A Pedrail one-ton truck,
below, of the type Churchill pushed around on Horse Guards
Parade as an example of a track-laying vehicle.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 43
CHURCHILL AND THE TANK (1)...
lem and various solutions. Try something, try anything!
was its basic cry. Even so, Churchill devoted a good deal
of the manuscript to “Caterpillars,” as most people
called them at the time. In the document he revealed to
French that such machines were already being built in
Britain and would soon be ready for service—jumping
the gun a bit since Fosters of Lincoln were still playing
around with the prototype.
What makes this appeal interesting is the fact that
Churchill, now that he was an Army officer, was soliciting the Commander-in-Chief ’s support. Months earlier
he got very upset when one of the Landships Committee
revealed the project to General Smith-Dorrien since, at
that time, the First Lord wished his Landships to be a
naval responsibility.
Douglas Haig saw Churchill’s paper when he
replaced Lord French as commander of the British
Expeditionary Force in December 1915. A far more
responsive officer, despite his undeserved reputation as
an unimaginative “blunderer and butcher,” Haig sent
one of his officers to see Churchill and then proceeded
to England to witness a prototype demonstration. This
officer, Colonel Hugh Elles, Royal Engineers, would take
command of the Tank Corps for the duration of the war
Churchill missed the first demonstration of a tank,
which took place in the grounds of Hatfield Park,
Hertfordshire at the end of January 1916; he was in
France. He also missed the second demonstration on
February 2nd, which was laid on especially for the
Minister of War, Lord Kitchener, but at least Churchill
was spared hearing Kitchener refer disparagingly to a
“pretty mechanical toy” as he strode off, halfway through
the performance.
C
hurchill returned to the government fold in
the summer of 1917, as Minister of Munitions
under Lloyd George. By this time the tank
programme was in full swing and there was no
need for him to become involved. In any case
there was more than enough to do; the supply of steel
alone was getting beyond the critical state and, with the
United States as the main source, there was conflict with
the French.
That first tank attack was not a great success, but
at least it was sufficient to convince Field Marshal Haig
of the tank’s efficacy and cause him to order 1000 more.
Basking in a certain amount of reflected glory, Churchill
wrote a paper on “The Greater Application of
Mechanical Power to the Prosecution of an Offensive on
Land,” at the behest of the Prime Minister, for the
Committee of Imperial Defence and the War Cabinet.
As Mr. Frost explains, 1917 was a bad year for
tanks, notably during the summer offensive when they
often floundered in the Flanders mud. Thus it is interesting to note that in a memo to the War Cabinet on the
munitions programme for 1918, written in October
1917, Churchill places tanks fifth in a list of six desirable
factors, with artillery at the top and even transportation
(road and rail) above tanks. The irony is that just a
month later, on 20 November 1917 at Cambrai, the
tanks turned in a performance that changed virtually
every mind.
Not that it was all plain sailing at home. In his
new position, Churchill came under increasing pressure,
particularly from senior officers, to get rid of Stern, who
had trodden on far too many toes. In an acrimonious
interview in August 1917, a transcript of which has survived, Churchill gave Stern the dressing down of his life.
Stern stood accused of wasting public money on useless
tanks, of failing to anticipate future requirements and
technical developments and failing to create an experimental department to work on new tanks.
None of this really stands up to close investigation,
but Churchill’s anger matched the mood of the time and
it was enough to see Stern kicked out of his post, albeit
with the promise of a knighthood and a new position as
chairman of an Anglo-American tank committee.
Churchill’s demand for an experimental department
seems to have sparked new thoughts and, about a month
later, in a paper entitled “Special Tanks,” he suggested
amphibious and mine-clearing tanks. This reveals
remarkable prescience, and work on such projects was
actually in progress when the war came to an end. It
came into its own twenty-seven years later when adapted
tanks, referred to as “specialised armour,” cleared the
way off the Normandy beaches.
Tanks made a major contribution to British success
in the Great War, more than justifying Winston
Churchill’s initial leap of faith. Yet that was not the end
of Churchill’s association with tanks. As Chancellor of
the Exchequer in the interwar years, Churchill made a
point of being photographed at significant demonstrations and, of course, his involvement in World War II
resulted in the famous Churchill Tank; but that is another story.
Endnotes
1. Broad, Lewis, Winston Churchill (London: Hutchinson,
1941), 163.
2. Churchill, Winston, The World Crisis, vol. 2, 1915
(London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), 77.
3. Ibid., 86.
4. Churchill, Winston, The World Crisis, vol. 3, part II, 19161918 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), 302.
See also Glanfield, John, The Devil’s Chariots (London: Sutton
Publishing, 2001); Fletcher, David, War Cars (London: HMSO,
1987; and The British Tank 1915-1919 (London: Crowood Press
2001).
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 44
Churchill and the Tank (2):
In for the Duration
BY MARCUS FROST
By 1915, the bloodbath of World War I seemed endless. The Central Powers,
Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, were pitted against Britain,
France, Italy and Russia, and the slaughter among their soldiers
was intense. The battle lines were frozen on every
front and no advances were being made by
pressing chests against bullets.
But Winston Churchill had an idea.
BRITISH TRIBUTE TO A WORLD WAR I ALLY: A British Mark IV tank at Caterpillar, Inc. in Peoria, Illinois, presented “in appreciation
of the great service rendered Great Britain by the Holt Manufacturing Company during the war.” (Caterpillar, Inc.)
I
n these solemn days we mourn every life lost in
battle, but perhaps we have lost sight of what it
was like for our forbears. Ninety years ago in the
age of static trench warfare, men were mowed
down by machine guns if they rose from their
parapets and tried to advance. Each side pummeled the
other with deadly artillery fire; shrapnel shredded bodies
on both sides. In the battles of Verdun and the Somme
between July and November 1916, almost a million were
killed, an average of 6600 per day, 277 per hour, five per
Mr. Frost, of Mexia, Texas, is a Churchill Centre Governor, Trustee
and Associate (the only individual who is all three). He is active in
both our Dallas and San Antonio affiliates, and sponsored the recent
teacher seminar in March at Baylor University.
minute. By war’s end Germany and Russia would lose
1.75 million men each, France and Austria-Hungary
about 1.4 million each, Britain 750,000, Italy 615,000.1
A 42-year-old doctor, John M. McCrae of the Royal
Canadian Army Medical Corps, wrote the most frequently quoted English-language poems of the war after
days of being surrounded by the human wreckage:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.2
Could anything be done to stop the death and carnage? In London, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith
received a suggestion from a colleague: “It would be >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 45
CHURCHILL AND THE TANK (2)...
quite easy in a short time to fit up a number of steam
tractors with small armoured shelters, in which men and
machine guns could be placed, which would be bulletproof. Used at night, they would not be affected by
artillery fire to any extent. The caterpillar system would
enable trenches to be crossed quite easily, and the weight
of the machine would destroy all barbed-wire entanglements.”3
The writer was Winston Churchill. His letter
marked the first step toward the practical evolution of
the tank in World War I.
The caterpillar track was invented in 1770 by
Richard Edgeworth, an Englishman. During the
Crimean War (1853-56) his countryman, James Boydell,
constructed a few steam-powered tractors based on this
design, which unfortunately were not ready in time for
the Crimea, though there were plans to use them. The
development of the tank remained dormant until the
arrival of the internal combustion engine, first developed
in Germany by Gottlieb Daimler in 1885.4
In 1904, Benjamin Holt of Stockton, California,
became convinced that a steam traction engine with
extended wheels was not practical in farming. Holt had
begun to develop and produce steam-powered wheeltype tractors in the mid 1880s. He had turned to the
possibility of using a track to replace the wheels because
of its superior weight-bearing surface. Holt had gone to
England in 1903 to investigate developments in crawler
tractors. He had also sent some of his own company
officials to view a track-laying design by Alvin O.
Lombard of Waterville, Maine, who had developed a
tracked log hauler on skids for use in the winter. After
gathering as much information as possible, Holt began
to perfect his own design on track-laying tractors.5
On Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1904, Holt
successfully tested his first track-type tractor close to the
Stockton site of Holt Manufacturing Company. The test
tractor had a refitted steam traction engine. The wheels
had been replaced with two track frames 30 inches high,
42 inches wide and nine feet long. The tracks fitted to
each frame were constructed of 3x4-inch wooden slats.
This first crawler was able to operate on ground too soft
for men and horses, because of its greater weight bearing
surface area. After numerous tests, regular production
models of the Holt track-layer were introduced in 1906,
priced at $5500 each.6
Although successful in bearing weight in soft
ground, these early track layers were cumbersome and
expensive to operate, and depended on horses to bring
water and fuel to feed the boilers and fire boxes. In 1908
Holt brought out a gasoline-powered crawler which in
motion had the appearance of a caterpillar. The famous
Caterpillar trademark was born through Holt’s efforts.7
Across the Atlantic in 1901, British inventor
Frederick Simms had produced a design of what he
called a motor-war car,
with a Daimler engine, a
bulletproof shell and two
maxim guns on revolving
turrets. The British War
Office rejected Simm’s
design and showed no
interest in similar
schemes.
By the outbreak of
the First World War, a
Wisconsin company produced the Killen-Strait
Armoured Tractor. Its
tracks consisted of a continuous series of steel
PROGENITOR: A Talbot armored car
links, joined together with
of the Royal Naval Air Service on
steel pins. In June 1915 a
standby during Churchill’s visit to
Killen-Strait with a British
Ostend in 1914 (Tank Museum)
armored car body plonked
on top was tested at Wormwood Scrubs before Winston
Churchill and David Lloyd George, who watched it cut
through barbed wire entanglements. (See photo, previous
article.) Churchill had just fallen from power, having
been relieved as First Lord of the Admiralty on 28 May
over the Dardanelles operation. It is possible that the
Dardanelles, itself conceived as an alternative to trench
warfare, weighed on Churchill’s mind as he observed
another possible solution to the slaughter in Europe.8
Holt’s Caterpillar tractor had by then become
famous among both warring sides for its design and
workability, and a Holt Agency had been established in
Austria by a Hungarian, Leo Steiner. In 1912 the
Austrian military was attracted to Holt’s design when it
proved superior in hauling heavy artillery. In 1913
Steiner was ordered to procure as many Holt tractors as
possible but when war broke out with England in 1914,
the pro-British Holt refused to fill the orders.9
When the British military became interested in the
possibilities of crawler traction on the battlefield, they
too turned to Holt. As early as September 1914, Holt
engineers were sent to England, while the British War
Department sent an officer to Holt’s newly opened East
Peoria, Illinois factory. One Briton greatly influenced by
Holt’s Caterpillar was Col. Ernest Swinton, who had the
idea to build an armed and armored machine gun
destroyer.10 With the help of Col. Maurice Hankey,
then Secretary of the War Cabinet, Churchill at the
Admiralty was persuaded to set up a “Landships Committee” to look at the possibilities of building a new war
machine.11 (Refer to David Fletcher’s preceding article.)
The Admiralty Landships Committee ultimately commissioned Lt. W.G. Wilson of the Naval Air Service and
FINEST HOUR 135 / 46
William Tritton of William Foster & Co. Ltd. of
Lincoln to produce a small “landship.” Built in secrecy,
the machine was given the code-name and referred to as
a “water tank for Mesopotamia”—partly because of its
appearance, partly to keep its true nature secret. Thus
the name “tank.”12
Holt did not build tanks for Britain; those eventually produced were of British production. But it was the
Holt design and track laying caterpillar system, according
to Swinton, that sparked the development of British
tanks.13
On 20 January 1916 the first British tank began its
trials. More than a year earlier, Churchill had encouraged the inventors and technical experts to work out an
effective design; when the War Office showed no interest, Churchill had found Admiralty money to fund the
experiments. He had also encouraged those who
believed, as he did, that the tank could effectively end
trench warfare, substantially lessening the casualties in
France and Flanders.14
Tanks were used for the first time in battle on the
Somme, where a dramatic turn in the Entente (Allied)
fortunes took place on 15 September 1916. Forty-nine
tanks took part in the attack, moving forward on a wide
front. Ten were hit by German artillery fire, nine broke
down with mechanical difficulties, and five failed to
advance. The rest advanced more than 2000 yards, capturing the long-sought High-Wood, and three villages,
Flers, Martinpuich, and Courcelette. But a disappointed
Churchill wrote to Admiral Fisher, both of them now
out of power: “My poor ‘land battleships’ have been let
off prematurely and on a petty scale. In that idea resided
one real victory.”15
Churchill had wanted to produce tanks in large
numbers, and only deploy them when as many as 1000
were available. Recognizing the potential of the new
weapon, British Commander General Haig asked the
War Office for a thousand. The Germans, fortunately,
were far behind in their own tank experiments.
As the tanks helped the British advance, Raymond
Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, was shot through the
chest and died. Also wounded that day was the future
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who lived out his life
with bullet fragments embedded in his pelvis, which
gave him a “shuffling walk.” During the day he was
wounded, Macmillan recalled seeing a tank, one of
“these strange objects,” bogged down in a shell-hole.16
The tank quickly proved its worth, even in small
numbers. Eleven days after its first use, an attack by thirteen tanks captured the village of Thiepval, which had
held out since the first day of the Somme offensive. That
same day, Combles fell to an infantry attack supported
by two tanks, while at Gueudecourt, where tanks were
assisted by air reconnaissance, 500 Germans were taken
prisoner with only five British casualties.
T
he new invention was not without its problems. In muddy conditions tanks became
stuck and almost completely useless.
Deployment methods and tank use in the
military arts had not evolved very far, and to use them in
the wrong way would actually hinder a battle. The
French used tanks for the first time on 17 April 1917,
when Gen. Nivelle planned to advance six miles using
twenty divisions along a 25-mile front along the river
Aisne. The attack was a disaster; his men halted after
only six hundred yards. Expecting 15,000 casualties,
Nivelle wound up with 100,000. Of the 128 tanks used
in the battle, thirty-two were knocked out on the first
day. Two villages in the battle zone, Nauroy and
Moronvillers were totally destroyed.17
Far to the south and east in Palestine, meanwhile,
the British launched their second attempt to capture
Gaza. Despite eight tanks, the use of gas shells, and a
two-to-one troop preponderance, this attack was a failure, but Gaza fell to Allenby’s troops on 1 November
1917, the tanks doing everything that was expected of
them despite harsh desert conditions.
By mid-May 1917, Haig’s troops had made greater
advances than at any time since the start of trench warfare two and a half years earlier: 61 square miles of
German-held territory, over 20,000 prisoners of war, and
252 heavy guns were taken in just over a month. The
tank had become an integral part of British infantry, and
the results were telling. The first German tank trial was
held only that month, on 14 May at Mainz, two days
before the renewed Battle of Arras ended. The Germans
had finally learned to appreciate this new weapon.
On 10 August 1917, the British renewed the Ypres
offensive, but the advance was impeded four days later
by heavy rain. On the 16th the village of Langemarck
was taken, but a German counter-attack recovered much
of the gains. The initiative lay, however, with the British,
who were helped in capturing the fortified German pillboxes by the use of tanks, and also by a ferocious French
diversionary attack on the German lines at Verdun,
when more than 5,000 Germans were taken prisoner.
On 23 October along the Aisne, the French
launched a limited but sustained attack on German positions defending the Chemin des Dames, assisted by
eighty French tanks. They advanced two miles across the
pulverized terrain, taking 10,000 prisoners and depriving
the enemy of an important observation point at Laffaux.
Among the places captured by the French was the Fort de
la Malmaison, a former fortress which had been sold
before the war to a private builder, for use as a stone
quarry. Known as the Battle of the Quarries, the victory
was what one historian has called “neat and compact and
satisfying as a gift package; indeed a gift to cheer a tired
and discouraged country.” The Germans, unwilling to >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 47
CHURCHILL AND THE TANK (2)...
face a protracted battle (and also because of the presence
of the tanks), withdrew from the Chemin des Dames to a
lower position two miles farther north.18
The British launched their third 1917 offensive on
20 November, aimed at Cambrai and beyond. A quarter
of a million British troops faced similar numbers of
Germans along a six-mile front. Here for the first time
in the history of warfare, the main thrust of the attack
was carried out by tanks: 324 took part in the opening
attack. Their appearance in such numbers was effective.
They crashed through barbed wire defenses and within
hours had made a break in the German line. “The triple
belts of wire were crossed—as if they had been beds of
nettles,” Captain D.G. Browne recalled, “and 350 pathways were sheared through them for the infantry. The
defenders of the front trench, scrambling out of dugouts and shelters to meet the crash and flame of the barrage, saw the leading tanks almost upon them.” The
appearance of these metallic creatures, wrote Browne,
was “grotesque and terrifying.” The initial success was
somewhat dampened because of a design flaw whereby
the tank tracks broke down after a short time in action.
But the first day at Cambrai marked a decisive success
for the new device to breach the enemy front line. The
German defences had been broken, five miles gained,
and more than 4000 soldiers taken prisoner. The British
newspapers trumpeted: “Greatest British Victory of the
War....A Surprise for the Germans.”19
On 5 March 1918 Churchill, now Minister of
Munitions, assured Lloyd George that he would produce
4000 tanks by April 1919. Victory, WSC said, could
only be certain when Britain and France had stronger
and better armies than Germany: “That is the foundation on which everything rests, and there is no reason
why we should not have it in 1919.”20
The first tank-to-tank battle between German and
British machines was on 24 April 1918 on the Western
Front. German troops, assisted by thirteen tanks, took
Villers-Bretonneux; a British heavy tank knocked out its
first adversary, but the others turned and fled. Seven
British tanks pushed forward into the German infantry
positions “and did great execution,” General Rawlinson
noted in his diary. “They claim 400 killed at least.”
On the Western Front, the French were seeking to
reverse the German victories of early 1918. On 30 June,
south of Ambleny, the French attacked with a new type
of 5 1/2-ton tank, adopting the earlier German tactic of
advancing rapidly to their objective on one flank before
turning back to capture the troops in the center. Only
then did they search for German soldiers hiding in caves,
taking a thousand prisoners.
A million American troops and military personnel
were in France by the beginning of July 1918, but the
month before the influenza that had begun in India and
Britain reached the Western Front. Over 62,000
Americans were to die of influenza in France against
48,909 from enemy action.21
German attacks continued along the Western
Front. On 17 July, when the Germans reached NanteuilPourcy, Italian troops drove them off. The atmosphere at
German headquarters was very different from the confidence they had held back in March. “Fairly depressed
mood,” noted Col. Mertz von Quirnheim of the
Operations section, and he added: “Difficult question—
what is to happen from now on?” The answer came from
the Allied side on the following day, 18 July, when the
supreme Allied commander, Marshal Foch, launched a
counter-attack along a 27-mile front. More than 200
tanks took part in the offensive. The German line gave
way, driven in to a depth of 4 1/2 miles. Twenty thousand German prisoners and 400 heavy guns were captured. Jaulgonne, where the Germans had crossed the
Marne six weeks earlier, was retaken by the Americans,
who with the French began a northward march to
Fereen-Tardenois.
On 10 August, Churchill told Lloyd George that
the Tank Corps would need 100,000 men by June 1919.
Allied plans for the coming year were gaining momentum. A tank factory had already been built at
Chateauroux, France. Churchill, representing Britain on
the Inter-Allied Munitions Council, likened the activity
surrounding the production of war munitions to that of
bees: “At the Ministry of Munitions we were the bees of
Hell, and we stored our hives with the pure essence of
slaughter. It astonishes me to read in these after years the
diabolical schemes for killing men on a vast scale by
machinery or chemistry to which we passionately devoted ourselves.”22
By August 1918 the tide of the war was turning in
favor of the Allies. German morale was low, the Kaiser
in a state of deep depression, as the Allies advanced farther and faster with the help of the tank. Gen. Haig had
already pictured in his mind how he wished to fight the
remainder of the war. On 10 September 1918 he asked
the War Office in London for mounted men, and all
forms of munitions designed to increase mobility, for a
“war of movement.” The tank would certainly be
involved in this type of warfare.23
The Great War came to an end with a sudden
German collapse, ending with an armistice, on the
eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh
month, 1918. The tank had firmly established itself as a
necessary weapon for use in modern warfare. From the
invention of the tracked steam tractor by Benjamin Holt
to Colonel Swinton’s idea of placing an armored, bulletproof cab with machine guns on a track-type tractor, the
tank was developed into a formidable fighting machine
that saved lives and helped armies to advance into
enemy lines.24 Its development had drastically changed
FINEST HOUR 135 / 48
CELEBRANTS: Maj. Gen. Ernest Swinton
salutes Benjamin Holt on the factory
grounds at Stockton, California, 18 April
1918. A mock baby tank (right), powered by
a motorcycle engine had been built for the
occasion, attended by 2500 cheering Holt
employees. (Caterpillar Inc.)
methods of battle by
eliminating deadly
trench warfare.
After the war,
museums were opened
and relics of
Armageddon became
part of many monuments. In England, in
1924, a Tank Museum
was established at
Bovington, Dorset at
which the very first
tank, known variously
to the troops as “Big
Willie,” “His Majesty’s
Landship Centipede”
and “Mother,” was on
display. Alas in 1940,
when the call went out
for scrap metal to feed
the munitions factories, “Big Willie” was
sent to the scrap heap,
to become a part of
shells and shrapnel of a new war.25
Unfortunately also, tank tactics and design in the
interwar years gradually became the preoccupation of the
Germans—with disastrous results for the French in the
debacle of May 1940. Churchill saw this coming too. In
1936 he sadly exclaimed in Parliament:
The tank was a British invention. This idea, which has
revolutionized the conditions of modern war, was a British
idea forced on the War Office by outsiders. Let me say
they would have just as hard work today to force a new
idea on it. I speak from what I know. During the war we
had almost a monopoly, let alone the leadership, in tank
warfare, and for several years afterwards we held the foremost place. To England all eyes were turned. All that has
gone now. Nothing has been done in “the years that the
locust hath eaten” to equip the tank Corps with new machines.26
On 22 April 1918, Ernest Swinton, now a general,
journeyed to the United States, to thank Benjamin Holt
and the employees of his California plant for their contributions. The people of Stockton held a huge parade in
honor of his visit. Though usually referred to as the
“father of the tank,” Swinton remarked that “it was the
‘Caterpillar’ track-type tractor” which inspired his idea
and helped change the course of the war.27 He would
never have achieved his goal had it not been for the
vision and drive of Winston Churchill. Defending the
tank as a weapon that saved rather than squandered
lives, Churchill deplored the disarmament conventions
that declared tanks offensive weapons:
The tank was invented to overcome the fire of the machine-guns with which the Germans were maintaining
themselves in France, and it saved a lot of lives in the
process of eventually clearing the soil of the invader. Now,
apparently, the machine-gun, which was the German
weapon for holding on to thirteen provinces of France, is
to be the virtuous, defensive machine-gun, and the tank,
which was the means by which these lives were saved, is
to be placed under the censure and obloquy of all just
and righteous men.28
Endnotes
1. Gilbert, Martin, The First World War (New York: Henry
Holt & Co., 1994), 541. References to specific tank engagements are
from this outstanding work by Churchill’s official biographer.
2. McRae, John Lt. Col., “In Flanders Fields,” first published
in Punch, London, 7 December 1915. Written on 3 May 1915, the
day after McRae witnessed the gruesome death of his friend Lt.
Alexis Helmer. The full poem is in Finest Hour 121:6.
3. Gilbert, op. cit., 124.
4. Erickson, Erling A., “Origins of the Cat” in Benjamin Holt,
The Story of the Caterpillar Tractor (Stockton, Calif.: University of the
Pacific, 1982), 33-34.
5. Ibid., 35-36.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Orlemann, Eric C., The Caterpillar Century (St. Paul, Minn.:
MBI Publishing Co., 2003), 14-15. Letourneau, P.A. (ed.), Holt
Tractors Photo Archive (Minneapolis, Minn.: Iconografix, 1993), 9.
8. Tank Development, National Archives Learning Curve.
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWtank development.htm
9. Caterpillar, Inc., The Caterpillar Story (Peoria, Ill.:
Caterpillar Inc., 1984), 24.
10. Ibid., 25.
11. Tank Development, op. ct.
12. Caterpillar, Inc., op. cit., 25.
13. Humphreys, Leonard A., “Caterpillar Goes to War,” in
Benjamin Holt, op. cit., 70-71.
14. Gilbert, op. cit., 229-30.
15. Ibid., 286.
16. Ibid., 286.
17. Ibid., 320-23.
18. Ibid., 331-69.
19. Ibid., 379.
20. Ibid., 402.
21. Ibid., 418-37.
22. Ibid., 442-52.
23. Ibid., 457.
24. Caterpillar, Inc., op. cit., 25.
25. Gilbert, op. cit., 533.
26. Churchill, Winston S., Arms and the Covenant (London:
Harrap, 1938), 379. Speech of 12 November 1936.
27. Caterpillar, Inc., op. cit., 24.
28. Churchill, op. cit., 22. Speech of 13 May 1932.
The author acknowledges with appreciation the important
information in “Benjamin Holt & Caterpillar: Tracks & Combines,”
American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1984, supplied by
Howard D. Hicks, Vice President Marketing, Holt Cat Inc., San
Antonio, Texas.
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 49
The Queen and
Mr. Churchill
When Churchill, still Prime Minister and nearing the age of eighty, looked upon the
Queen’s picture in a newspaper, he murmured
“The country is so lucky.” Exactly so; we
should be less shy of acknowledging the fact.
BY DAVID DILKS
I
N my innocence I had not realized how pervasive
is the influence of the Royal Society of St. George;
for I see on the wall before me the portrait of the
Queen early in her reign by Denis Fildes, and
behind me a study of the elderly Churchill by
Egerton Cooper. Thus I find myself in the position
described by A.E. Housman, who is said to have
remarked just before his translation from the University
of London to Trinity College: “Cambridge has seen
many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and
Porson sober. It is now destined to see a better scholar
than Worsdworth and a better poet than Porson, betwixt
and between.”1
To speak to you about the Queen and Mr.
Churchill (as he still was when she came to the throne)
is to dwell simultaneously upon several planes. There is
the personal relationship between a monarch coming
unexpectedly to the throne in her mid-twenties and a
Prime Minister of vast age and experience, less tempestuous and mercurial than he had once been. Then there is
a much longer perspective, for as Churchill liked to
recall, he had many a time enjoyed drinking the health
of the Queen’s great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria,
when he was a young officer, determined to live as near
as humanly possible to the eye of the storm and then to
write about his experiences.
Beyond that lay something ancestral and subconscious, for Churchill was an historian in more senses
than one. He had made history, and written a great deal
The recent visit of the Queen to America, and subsequent gratuitous
references to the quaintness of monarchy by the U.S. media, prompt
publication of this address to the Royal Society of St. George, City of
London Branch, 6 February 2007. Professor Dilks is the former ViceChancellor of the University of Hull, author of The Great Dominion:
Winston Churchill in Canada 1900-1954 (reviewed FH 129), and the
biographer of Neville Chamberlain. He memorialized Bill Deakin in
Finest Hour 131. We are honored to publish such fine writing. —Ed.
^ ENCHANTMENT: Churchill’s favourite photograph of the
Queen. Colville recalled him staring at the picture, musing:
“Lovely, inspiring. All the film people in the world, if they had
scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to
the part.” (Photograph by Charles Dawson, time Magazine.)
> FAREWELL: 4 April 1955 after a dinner at Number Ten. On
his last night as Prime Minister, Sir Winston bade adieu.
of it; he had devoted no fewer than four volumes to his
distinguished ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough,
and from that process learned—to the eventual profit of
this country and many others—of the perils and frustrations of coalition warfare.
In the two years before his return to office in
September 1939, he had given himself to what eventually became A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and
with a serious purpose beyond the immediate task of
making enough money to pay for his handsome style of
life at Chartwell; for he believed the fate of mankind
would rest largely in the hands of those peoples, and that
despite crises, misjudgments, blunders and reverses, the
British had behaved well towards the rest of the world.
He was not ashamed to refer to the “grand old
British race, which had done so much for mankind and
which had still so much more to give.”2 In sum, for
Churchill the monarchy represented not only the apex of
our society and constitutional arrangements, but a focus
for the loyalty and aspirations of many millions; and
with a startling suddenness, the role of that monarchy
had to be reinterpreted in the present Queen’s reign to
embrace a world-wide Commonwealth.
Churchill had revered Queen Victoria from afar;
FINEST HOUR 135 / 50
“T
here is no one here at all except
the Family, the Household &
Queen [sic; Princess] Elizabeth—aged 2.
The last is a character. She has an air of
authority & reflectiveness astonishing in
an infant.”
—WSC to his wife, from Balmoral, 25 September
1928 (Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves, 328).
he had enjoyed, without always approving entirely, the
company of King Edward VII; he respected highly the
gruff probity of King George V; he had—to his credit,
for it was evident that nothing but political damage
could result—placed a high premium upon his loyalty to
King Edward VIII. Later, musing upon that monarch’s
unsuitability for the heavy duties of the throne,
Churchill once said “morning glory,” thinking of those
flowers which flourish and fade in the forenoon. To King
George VI and his Queen he had drawn very close during the war, and his admiration for the two of them
knew few bounds. “Your Majesties,” Churchill wrote to
the King, “are more beloved by all classes and conditions
than any of the princes of the past.”3
Amidst all the austerities and bleak hardships of
Britain in the early years after the war, Churchill
received with joy the news of Princess Elizabeth’s forthcoming marriage. “One touch of nature makes the
whole world kin,” he remarked, echoing Shakespeare,
“and millions will welcome this joyous event as a flash of
colour on the hard road we have to travel.”4
And then there were horses. Churchill had taken to
racing late in life, under the inspiration of his son-in-law
Christopher Soames, whereas the taste seems to have
been acquired by the present Queen in her early youth.
A few months before Churchill came back to office as
Prime Minister for the last time, she invited him to
lunch with her at Hurst Park. In the same race were running a horse in the Royal colours, appropriately and
indeed unexceptionably named Above Board, and
Churchill’s horse, known with a tinge of political incorrectitude as Colonist II.
By a small margin, Colonist II won. To a less adroit
correspondent, this triumph might have provided slight
embarrassment in the composition of a letter of thanks
for the luncheon. Not a bit of it in Churchill’s case. “I
wish indeed that we could both have been victorious,” he
wrote to Princess Elizabeth, “but that would be no foundation for the excitements and liveliness of the Turf.”5
When she and her husband left for a prolonged
tour of Canada and the United States in 1951, Mr.
Attlee was still Prime Minister; by the time of their
return, Churchill had come back to 10 Downing Street.
He had a wonderful gift of magnification, of capturing
the unexpected word or phrase, of putting events into a
broad context. To the Princess he said at Guildhall upon
her return, “Madam, the whole nation is grateful to you
for what you have done for us and to Providence for
having endowed you with the gifts and personality
which are not only precious to the British Commonwealth and Empire and its island home, but will play
their part in cheering and in mellowing the forward
march of human society all the world over.”6
The Chairman mentioned a few minutes ago that I
had the honour to work for Sir Anthony Eden, who told
me that one morning early in 1952 Churchill had rung
him up with the words, “Anthony, imagine the worst
thing that could possibly happen.” This was the Prime
Minister’s way of breaking the news of King George VI’s
death. In bed at Downing Street, Churchill sat alone in
tears, looking straight ahead and reading neither his official documents nor the newspapers.
It happened that the Prime Minister’s Private
Secretary, who described this scene, had previously held
the same office with Princess Elizabeth. “I had not >>
FINEST HOUR 135 / 51
SADNESS: The
Queen returns
home after the
death of her
father, George
VI, Feburary
1952. At the
foot of the
stairs (r-l) are
the Prime
Minister,
Oppostion
Leader Attlee,
and Foreign
Secretary Eden.
“T
he monarchy signified for him
something of infinite value, at
once numinous and luminous; and if you
will allow the remark in parenthesis,
ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the summit of
our public life who can think and write
at that level?”
realized how much the King meant to him,” we find in
Sir John Colville’s diary. “I tried to cheer him up by saying how well he would get on with the new Queen, but
all he could say was that he did not know her and that
she was only a child.”7
This was merely a momentary expression, uttered
at a moment of profound sadness, and not one by which
Churchill would have wished to stand once his spirit was
less troubled.
It is a measure of his longevity in politics that
when he proposed the motion for addresses of sympathy,
he could remind the House of Commons that he had
been an MP whenever such a motion had been moved
in the past, in 1901, in 1910, and in 1936. It now fell to
Churchill to describe Queen Elizabeth as a fair and
youthful figure, Princess, wife and mother, “heir to all
our traditions and glories, never greater than in her
father’s days, and to all our perplexities and dangers,
never greater in peacetime than now. She is also heir to
all our united strength and loyalty.”8
The new monarch was ascending the throne, he
remarked, at a moment when tormented mankind stood
poised uncertainly between worldwide catastrophe on
the one side and a golden age on the other. In speaking
of catastrophe, he had in mind the enmity between the
west and Russia, and the awful prospects opened up in
the age of nuclear warfare; whereas if only a true and
lasting peace could be achieved and if “the nations will
only let each other alone,” undreamed-of prosperity,
with culture and leisure ever more widely spread, might
come to the masses of the people everywhere.9
Churchill adored the Queen. You will perhaps
think the language unsuitable or even a little disrespectful; but no lesser expression will do. Gazing at a photograph in 1953, the one which shows her in a white dress
and with long white gloves, displaying that enchanting
smile which lights up her face as if a blind had suddenly
been raised, the Prime Minister mused, “Lovely, she is a
pet. I fear they may ask her to do too much. She is
doing so well.”10
And again a week or two later, as he contemplated
the same photograph, “Lovely, inspiring. All the film
people in the world, if they had scoured the globe, could
not have found anyone so suited to the part.”11 Thereupon he immediately began to sing from the hymn, “Yet
nightly pitch my moving tent/A day’s march nearer
home.” (If you object that this piece of information
seems scarcely relevant to my theme, I merely rejoin that
historians are sticklers for completeness and love going
off at a tangent.)
The Queen wished to confer the Order of the
Garter, which he had declined when offered in 1945,
upon Churchill. He had then felt that it would be inappropriate to receive such a distinction upon the morrow
of his rejection at the General Election; whereas in the
summer of the Coronation, the moment seemed more
propitious. Her Private Secretary broached the matter
with the Prime Minister in persuasive terms. This time,
Churchill capitulated without much resistance but with
a good deal of emotion. Then he said with a grin, “Now
Clemmie will have to be a lady at last.”12
Churchill travelled far less than he had done during the war and when Parliament was sitting would normally wait upon Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace
each week. Her Private Secretary remained in an anteroom, unable to hear the conversation but catching peals
of laughter. “Winston generally came out wiping his
eyes,” Sir Alan Lascelles once recorded. “‘She is en grande
beauté ce soir,’ he said one evening in his schoolboy
French.”13
In those final years of office, Churchill had combined rearmament and the strengthening of NATO with
a prolonged effort to build some kind of bridge to
Russia. He repeatedly postponed resignation and
endured some sharp passages with his colleagues in consequence. By the spring of 1955, he knew it was time to
go. A few days after his departure, the Queen wrote in
her own hand from Windsor to say that while her confidence in Anthony Eden was complete, “it would be useless to pretend that either he or any of those successors
who may one day follow him in office will ever, for me,
be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister, to
FINEST HOUR 135 / 52
whom both my husband and I owe so much and for
whose wise guidance during the early years of my reign I
shall always be so profoundly grateful.”14
We may think of Churchill as an amiable or even
reverent agnostic, who conceived of himself not as a pillar of the church but perhaps as a flying buttress. He did
not invoke the Deity casually or cynically, a fact which
confers its own interest upon his touching and heartfelt
reply to the Queen:
the Queen’s identification of herself and the monarchy
with the Commonwealth over a span of sixty years, for
the coming generation in the Royal Family.
When Churchill, nearing the age of eighty, looked
upon the Queen’s picture in a newspaper, he murmured
“The country is so lucky.”16 Exactly so; we should be less
shy of acknowledging the fact.
Our Island no longer holds the same authority or power
that it did in the days of Queen Victoria. A vast world
towers up around it and after all our victories we could
not claim the rank we hold were it not for the respect for
our character and good sense and the general admiration
not untinged by envy for our institutions and way of life.
All this has already grown stronger and more solidly
founded during the opening years of the present Reign,
and I regard it as the most direct mark of God’s favour we
have ever received in my long life that the whole structure
of our new-formed Commonwealth has been linked and
illuminated by a sparkling presence at its summit.15
e have failed in knowledge, by
which I mean that we have
been far too ready to accept one-sided
accounts of our relations with countries
in every part of the Commonwealth; and
we have failed in self-belief, for if we
cannot be troubled to defend ourselves
against assertions that Empire was nothing more than a cloak for greed and
extortion, we should scarcely be surprised
if others multiply such allegations, sometimes on the most grotesque scale.”
The monarchy signified for him something of infinite value, at once numinous and luminous; and if you
will allow the remark in parenthesis, ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the
summit of our public life who can think and write at
that level?
Sir Winston was not mistaken in drawing attention
to the Queen’s role within the Commonwealth. He
could not have foreseen how quickly governments in this
country, as distinct from many millions of individual citizens, would cease to feel any serious interest in the
Commonwealth. Indeed, it is not clear that the association could have survived in a recognisable form but for
the Queen’s unfeigned commitment to it.
We have failed in knowledge, by which I mean
that we have been far too ready to accept one-sided
accounts of our relations with countries in every part of
the Commonwealth; and we have failed in self-belief, for
if we cannot be troubled to defend ourselves against
assertions that Empire was nothing more than a cloak
for greed and extortion, we should scarcely be surprised
if others multiply such allegations, sometimes on the
most grotesque scale. Now we need an exercise of constructive imagination, to realize what Commonwealth
connections can do, not only for us but for a much
wider community. Though much has been lost beyond
retrieval, a good deal remains. To give fresh life to those
connections, to promote better understanding between
countries and friendship between races, is of supreme
importance. Perhaps that fact is now a little more apparent than it was, say, ten or twenty years ago. It is a task
in part for politicians, but also for all of us; and, given
“W
Endnotes
1. There are many versions of this story in print, but the most reliable is in Chambers, R.W., Man’s Unconquerable Mind (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1939), 380-81.
2. On the resignation of Anthony Eden as foreign secretary, 20
February 1938. Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War, vol. 2,
Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 201.
3. WSC to the King, 5 January 1941, ibid., 554.
4. Churchill’s capacious memory produced this quotation of
Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida, iii. 3) in the House of Commons, 22
October 1947. Churchill, Europe Unite (London: Cassell, 1950), 168.
5. WSC to Princess Elizabeth, 20 May 1951. Gilbert, op. cit., 613.
6. House of Commons, 19 November 1951. Churchill, Stemming the Tide (London: Cassell, 1953), 194.
7. Colville, John R.,The Fringes of Power (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1985), 640.
8. House of Commons, 11 February 1952. Stemming the Tide,
op. cit., 244.
9. Ibid., 245.
10. WSC to Lord Moran, 3 February 1953. Moran, Charles,
Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (London: Constable, 1966), 427.
11. Ibid., 429.
12. Hart-Davis, D. (ed.), King’s Counsellor (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 2006), 344.
13. Ibid., 340.
14. The Queen to WSC, 11 April 1955. Gilbert, op. cit., 1126.
15. WSC to the Queen, from Sicily, 8 April 1955, ibid., 1128.
16. WSC to Lord Moran, 4 November 1953. Moran, The Struggle for Survival, op. cit., 528.
,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 53
Books, Arts
&
Sinking Stone
ROBERT A. COURTS
Blood, Sweat and
Arrogance and the
Myths of
Churchill’s War,
by Gordon Corrigan. Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 496
pages, hardbound
£20, member
price $45.
T
his book
might be
subtitled, “What does an iconoclast do
when the icons are broken?” Corrigan
built his reputation with his previous
Mud, Blood and Poppycock, a strident
but generally well-received attack on
the World War I generals. Now the exGurkha major turns his gaze upon
Churchill, with a professional soldier’s
contempt for politicians, but certainly
not a historian’s professionalism.
Corrigan, who lists “pricking the
pompous” among his hobbies in the
credits, is unable to understand that in
total war, politics cannot be totally ignored. For example, he blithely asserts
that Churchill’s “demands to sink the
French fleet [at Oran in 1940 were] unnecessary, for…the French would have
come to an agreement without the
threat of force.” He has the luxury of
such assumptions today; Churchill in
1940 could not take the risk. And he
ignores the dynamic political effect of
Britain’s action in the USA, where it
was seen as proof that Britain would
never surrender.
Anyone is free to hold Churchill in
contempt, but to do so requires learn-
ing something about him. Significantly,
Corrigan’s bibliography lists four books
by David Irving but only one by Martin Gilbert—and that one not about
Churchill. Yet, despite his title, Corrigan actually spends little time on
Churchill, and almost none in analysis.
His critical comments are rarely
sourced, never explained, and overtly
glib (“in view of his later treatment of
Bomber Command”)—which avoids
the tiresome evidential business of
proving what one means.
Corrigan calls Churchill “a man
who found it difficult to look beyond
what he knew and was familiar with,” a
statement that would not be made by
anyone who has seriously studied the
astonishingly prescient and innovative
Prime Minister (tanks, Mulberry harbours, naval aviation, SOE, commandos, ad infinitum).
Another criticism cites Churchill as
overruling the Chiefs of Staff, despite
the well-known fact that he did nothing
of the kind on a military issue, no matter how much he might have pressed
them, much to his credit. And
Churchill did meet serious resistance,
not least from the iron-willed Brooke,
whom Corrigan astonishingly refers to
as “Churchill’s creature.”
The tone throughout is irritatingly
smug, at times unworthy of a serious
writer: “There is no question that
Churchill was personally brave and
completely unafraid of death. The trouble was that he was not afraid of anyone
else’s death either.” (This is a bizarre
comment to anyone who has read of
Churchill’s anguish over Gallipoli, or
his concern, expressed to Marshall, that
a premature invasion of Europe would
result in “a sea full of corpses.”)
And the book is often factually
wrong. For example: “…originally desFINEST HOUR 135 / 54
Churchill Centre Book Club
Managed for the Centre by Chartwell
Booksellers (www.churchill-books.com),
which offers member discounts up to
25%. To order contact Chartwell Booksellers, 55 East 52nd Street, New York,
New York 10055, email bscb@dti.net,
telephone (212) 308-0643,
facsimile (212) 838-7423.
tined for the infantry, [Churchill] chose
instead to join an expensive and gorgeously caparisoned cavalry regiment.”
Actually Churchill was never “destined”
for the infantry.
Where he is not wrong, Corrigan is
selective: he praises Britain for inventing the tank, but does not mention
Churchill’s role in that enterprise. Nor
does he give WSC credit for making
the most of the few resources he had in
1940. Whatever “damage” Churchill
may or may not have inflicted on the
war effort, without him there would
have been no war effort at all.
When Corrigan does stumble upon
a valid historical controversy, he deals
with it little better than he does
Churchill. To one of the most hotly debated topics of the postwar years, the
strategic bombing of Germany, he devotes three paragraphs, reaching the
heights of analysis: “Dresden was just
one more raid in a long war and was totally justified.” Worse, he does not seem
to know whether he supports the policy
or not, for when Churchill is involved,
he is castigated for being “quick to
evade the blame for his own policy.”
On the attempt to forestall Hitler
in Norway, Churchill is seriously vulnerable to critical analysis; but Corrigan
fails to provide it. He offers only his
trademark snide remarks (“the great
strategist himself…the great man”) and
inappropriate language (WSC replaces
a naval commander with a “chum.”)
Corrigan fails the basic requirement of a historian: to judge decisions
made at the time by the facts known at
the time. He criticises Churchill’s belief
in the French Army as being “idiocy”
that was to prove “utterly and completely erroneous in such a short space
of time.” But he ignores the fact that
everyone in Europe thought “la Grand
Armée” unbeatable, and its swift defeat
in 1940 was a shock for all Europe.
Proper historians, moreover, do not describe actions or events with such simplistic phrases as “crassly idiotic,” nor
describe those who disagree with them
as “the Churchill faction.”
Corrigan holds that Churchill
“was…the man who by his political
actions between 1919 and 1929
contributed in very large measure to
Britain being unready,” for the Second
World War—as if there was no difference between Weimar Germany and
the Third Reich. Churchill’s change
of view on rearmament in the 1930s
was owed, he says, to being “out of
office, and increasingly unlikely to regain it…Churchill underwent a conversion that makes the Black Death
look like a minor outbreak of the
sniffles.” Such language is worse than
mere silliness; it is, er, “crassly idiotic.”
The coverage of military aspects of
the war is acceptable, but sadly, to use a
Corriganism, the sound of grinding
axes drowns out sensible narrative. Corrigan prefers the quick judgement and
the glib throwaway, not a sustained and
detailed analysis of difficult and controversial times. If you want reasoned criticism, you must turn to far better books,
by such authors as Lamb, Charmley,
Roskill, R.W. Thompson, and the Alanbrooke Diaries.
In proving his case that Churchill
“was very nearly responsible for losing
[the war],” Corrigan can only be judged
to have failed. When ripples of such
weird accusations subside (as they already have) the biggest stones sink
fastest. In the great pool of Churchill
literature, this book is destined to sink
without trace.
,
Heroes of the Air: Archibald
Sinclair and Hugh Dowding
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
Winston &
Archie: The
Letters of Sir
Archibald
Sinclair and
Winston S.
Churchill 19151960, edited by
Ian Hunter.
London:
Politico’s, 530
pages, hardbound, £30, member price $36.
“W
inston” needs no introduction
but “Archie” may not be familiar to FH readers. Sir Archibald
Henry MacDonald Sinclair (18901970) was the leader of the fading Liberal Party from 1935 to 1945, and
served as Air Minister in Churchill’s
wartime coalition government. The two
men had been introduced long before
—by American Maxine Elliott—and
despite a sixteen-year difference in age,
they became good friends. Both had
American mothers. As with all upper
class Britons (Sinclair was a Scot), they
wrote reams of letters, often long and
detailed. Luckily for us, many of those
letters were saved despite occasional
notes at the end of one or another that
because of its content it should be destroyed after being read.
Ian Hunter, a longtime Churchill
Centre member and London-based author of three earlier books on business
management, as well as articles in The
Journal of Liberal History, has painstakingly pulled most of the surviving letters together and annotated them to describe people and events mentioned.
Many of the letters (the originals are
either in the National Archive at Kew,
or the Churchill Archives Centre in
Cambridge) have not appeared in print
before. Alas, others by Sinclair are sadly
lost, thanks to the wartime bombing
of the Liberal headquarters, and a postwar fire at his home at Thurso. Over
several periods, we have only Winston’s
letters. What does survive, however,
FINEST HOUR 135 / 55
is both fascinating and insightful.
Hunter has arranged the letters and
events in five parts. The first concerns
World War I, both before and after
Churchill’s service on the Western
Front, following his departure from the
Admiralty in the crisis over Dardanelles
policy. In August 1915, we see Sinclair
—an officer until invalided out in
1917—urging WSC not to come to the
fighting front as he would rapidly become frustrated with military policy
that he could not affect. He would be
more useful in London, Sinclair said,
even in his depleted political state (19).
After Churchill left the war planning group in November, however, his
tone and that of Sinclair changed. Sinclair was seconded (at Churchill’s request) to serve under WSC in 1916 for
the several months that WSC was in active service, commanding a unit of
Scots. Their letters back and forth
when one or the other was on leave in
London provide a peek at front-line life
and lore, along with their assessments
of political warfare at home.
The second part focuses on the
brief, bitter war against the Russian
Bolsheviks after World War I, when
Sinclair served as principal military secretary to Churchill, who was Secretary
of State for War. The scattered missives
(much has been lost) are nearly all annotated for context, and some show the
pressures Churchill was under with demobilization of Britain’s conscript army
on the one hand, and trying to shore
up the White Russians on the other. Included is Churchill’s controversial (even
acerbic) memo on the possible use of
gas against insurgents in India and
Afghanistan (64). Many of these letters
(really inter-office memos) are more
formal in tone, given the roles of the
two men in the same ministry—and
mostly from Sinclair to Churchill.
The third section centers on the
fifteen years from 1924 to 1939, when
both men saw varied roles, Sinclair entering Parliament and becoming a political figure in his own right. They remained close friends, and eventually
political allies with their mutual concern over Nazi Germany by the late
1930s. This period, marked by brief
and scattered memos, includes >>
WINSTON & ARCHIE...
Churchill’s wilderness years (1929-39),
the early part of which saw Sinclair in
the National Government. The Liberal
decline is evident in each succeeding
election, until Sinclair takes over the severely depleted party in 1935.
The longest part of Hunter’s collection, and perhaps the one of primary
interest, concerns the air war from
1940 to 1945. As Secretary of State for
Air, Sinclair was the senior civilian official to whom all RAF marshals at least
nominally reported. He was such a
staunch supporter of their recommendations and campaigns, however, that
many saw him more as a representative
of their views rather than as the RAF’s
political master. The letters and memos
(more selective than in other sections
given the huge amount of material)
show occasional heat as wartime pressure built on both men.
There is a scattering of “Action
This Day” notes and more than a few
expressions of asperity on Churchill’s
part. There is constant reference to the
friction between Lord Beaverbrook, at
the Ministry of Aircraft Production,
and Sinclair’s Air Ministry. Two factors
jump out in many of the memos exchanged—Churchill’s well-known detailed interest in the war effort, and the
role that statistics played in monitoring
operations and in policymaking. Also
evident—as Hunter makes clear in his
useful editorial insertions—Sinclair
played a stronger role in developing air
policy than Churchill would give him
credit for after the war.
A final brief section covers the last
fourteen years of the relationship, from
1946 to 1960, five years before
Churchill’s death and a decade before
Sinclair’s. Having lost his 1945 bid to
retain his seat in the House of Commons, and another attempt five years
later, Sinclair became a member of the
House of Lords as Viscount Thurso in
1952, part of the first Honours List of
Churchill’s postwar government. He
suffered a stroke that year (he was 62)
and would not actually sit in the Lords
until 1954. Four years later another
stroke sadly ended his active career and
left him an invalid for the remainder of
his life.
Collections of letters are hugely
valuable windows into both the correspondents and their era. Edited as well
as this one, with careful editorial guidance as to what we are reading and
about whom, they are fascinating as
well. We can only hope that more
“Churchill and...” correspondence will
appear covering other Churchillian
friends and colleagues.
A Summer
Bright and Terrible: Winston
Churchill, Lord
Dowding,
Radar, and the
Impossible
Triumph of
the Battle of
Britain, by
David E. Fisher.
New York:
Shoemaker & Howard, 304 pages,
hardbound $26, member price $20.80.
A
n engaging if sometimes odd work
bbegins with a piled-up title,
which tries to push every sales button
all at once. In fact it is mainly devoted
to the dour and enigmatic Air Chief
Marshal Sir Hugh “Stuffy” Dowding.
Despite suggesting that the story has
not been told, Fisher covers ground
others have trod more successfully because they didn’t try to stretch their
coverage as far as Fisher does.
Divided into four chapters or parts,
one for each season of 1940, the bulk
of it covers the Battle of Britain in the
summer and early autumn of that year.
But Fisher also provides background—
the just-in-time development of radar
(a later American term for radio direction finding) and the Spitfire fighter
aircraft. The two protagonists,
Churchill and Dowding, face off in
June 1940. The former wants to send
more British fighter aircraft to help the
crumbling French; Dowding warns that
England will be defenseless if he does.
Unlike most who went up against the
new Prime Minister, Dowding carried
the day in an unusual appeal directly to
the War Cabinet—and was proved
right when the Luftwaffe attacked
Britain after the fall of France.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 56
In November, after the worst of the
German onslaught seemed past, Dowding was relieved by the Air Ministry.
Churchill, who had earlier backed him
strongly, apparently made no move to
save him. Granted, Dowding had
planned retirement and had reached retirement age, but the Air Ministry (Air
Minister Sinclair and chief of staff Portal, among others) did seem rather cavalier, given all he’d done to meld radar,
radio, and telephone networks into a
Fighter Command that probably saved
Britain by controlling the air.
Fisher is an experienced writer with
an eye for narrative. There are parts of
this volume that take one back to the
English countryside on a warm, dry
September day, looking up at the crossing contrails of German and British
fighters, dueling while Luftwaffe
bombers plod toward London and
other targets. Or one could be on an
RAF airfield, as fighters are scrambled
to meet the latest onslaught—or
cramped in one of the control buildings
of the new radar system, trying to
gauge how many German aircraft are
coming and where they are headed.
Fisher is excellent at describing the
many facets of Dowding’s personality,
including (and here many earlier accounts have been silent) his belief in the
supernatural, which at times appeared
to give him strength to persevere. He
went so far as to “speak” with some of
his lost pilots (his “chicks” as he referred to them), as well as with his deceased wife. It is to the author’s credit
that Dowding comes across in these
scenes as understandably exhausted and
concerned, rather than as a mere flake.
Fisher also describes and defines
Dowding’s two chief lieutenants, Air
Vice Marshals Trafford Leigh-Mallory
(backer of the “big wing” notion of
massing defending fighters) and Keith
Park (who agreed with Dowding’s “bits
and pieces” use of defending aircraft).
Flying hero Douglas Bader (who flew
with artificial legs owing to a prewar
flying accident) served under LeighMallory; thus we get a pilot’s-eye as well
as command view of the conflict.
Though the Dowding/Park tactics
succeeded, Leigh-Mallory replaced
Park, while Air Vice Marshal Sholto >>
BRIGHT AND TERRIBLE...
Douglas, a critic of Dowding’s approach, took over Dowding’s post in
what seemed to some as a coup. The issues and personalities involved in these
changes in command have been debated by historians ever since. Fisher
clearly is sympathetic with the embattled if cold and “stuffy” Dowding.
A nuclear chemist and professor of
“cosmochemistry” and environmental
science at the University of Miami,
Fisher has authored a number of earlier
popular science histories with his son:
notably Tube, a history of television.
His scientific background combines
with an ability to make technical topics
like radar and aeronautics easier to
grasp. There are many past and present
accounts of these gripping events and
players. But Fisher offers a readable
melding of them, especially for those
unfamiliar with the story.
Dowding, after two other postings
which did not work out, retired in mid1942 and was later raised to the peerage
as Lord Dowding, his first Battle of
Britain command post, Bentley Priory,
being his territorial designation. He is
the unappreciated hero of Fisher’s tale. ,
Vital Insights to a Key Colleague
PAUL H. COURTENAY
Churchill’s
Man of
Mystery:
Desmond
Morton and
the World of
Intelligence,
by Gill Bennett. London,
Routledge
372 pages,
hardbound,
£49.95. Not
available
from Churchill Centre Book Club. We
suggest Amazon UK.
F
rom 1995 till 2005 Gill Bennett
was Chief Historian of the Foreign
& Commonwealth Office, and this
book is the latest in the Government
Official History series; series authors
are afforded free access to all relevant
material in the official archives (which
remain closed to the public).
Thus Bennett has found as much
as is ever likely to be known about the
official life of Desmond Morton. Her
quest for information has been frustrated because of Morton’s extreme
sense of privacy: he was unmarried and
destroyed all his private papers. Despite
this handicap, the author has unearthed
as much as possible from other sources,
though these remain scanty.
Morton was born in 1891 and was
severely wounded in 1917, a bullet
lodging so near his heart that it was too
dangerous ever to remove; he nevertheless lived to be 79. Lady Soames tells a
delightful story of observing him playing tennis at Chartwell. Her father, fascinated by Morton’s permanent bullet,
had informed her that “he could keel
over at any moment,” and she could
not help but watch in fearful anticipation for this possibility!
Morton first met Churchill in
1916, when he provided 6th Battalion,
the Royal Scots Fusiliers with artillery
support at Ploegsteert, Belgium. After
recovering (to some extent) from his
wound, Morton became aide-de-camp
to Field Marshal Haig, C-in-C of the
British Expeditionary Force. In this capacity he frequently escorted important
visitors. One of these, Churchill as
Minister of Munitions, remembered
him from their Ploegsteert encounter.
Their early relationship centred on
technical matters but developed into
friendship, WSC later writing: “I
formed a great regard and friendship for
this brilliant and gallant officer.”
Morton joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1919 and specialised in longer term intelligence
gathering on Soviet Russia, to which he
was dedicated. He later expanded his
interest to the whole field of industrial
intelligence, studying the economies of
potential enemies in order to assess
FINEST HOUR 135 / 57
their sustainable military capabilities.
He was the driving spirit for the study
of industrial intelligence in Britain, and
for its contribution to defence, rearmament and economic planning in the
years leading up to World War II. He
also bought a house only three miles
from Chartwell one year after WSC’s
purchase; from that time he became a
frequent visitor and the two men often
held long discussions together.
Morton was involved in the 1924
saga of the Zinoviev Letter, addressed
to the Communist Party of Great
Britain by the President of the Comintern’s executive committee, urging the
party to rouse the proletariat in preparation for armed insurrection and class
warfare. Copies were distributed (possibly by SIS) to those with vested interests, and the first Labour government
(under Ramsay Macdonald) was severely embarrassed. It has never been
proved whether or not the Zinoviev was
a forgery. Gill Bennett gives several examples of obfuscation by Morton when
things went wrong; he thus protected
SIS and his own situation.
In 1931 Morton was appointed
Chairman of the Industrial Intelligence
Centre, and this became his main activity. Between 1934 and 1937 his correspondence with Churchill became
more frequent and less restrained, WSC
being free actively to campaign in order
to arouse the government to the dangers ahead. There is no hard documentary evidence to suggest that Morton
supplied anything which Churchill was
not entitled to know—indeed the evidence points in the other direction.
Morton’s chief value was checking and
correcting information supplied from
other sources; he even received valuable
information from WSC himself. It is
interesting to read some of Morton’s
facetious letters and reports, which were
often not appreciated by the traditional
Civil Service.
Much of Desmond Morton’s time
in the years leading up to World War II
was devoted to developing plans for a
Ministry of Economic Warfare to be established in the event of war; by the
time of Munich this planning was complete, Morton continuing with his intelligence work and maintaining his >>
“Morton himself wrote that he could not imagine a better epitaph than: “Desmond Morton might
have been a greater figure in the affairs of his country had he been less of a gentleman...”
VITAL INSIGHTS...
links with Churchill. When the war
began he developed a role for himself as
liaison between covert and overt spheres
of decision and action, with Churchill
as Prime Minister setting a high value
on this activity.
From the outset of WSC’s premiership Morton doubled the role of intelligence interface with that of liaison with
the Allied governments-in-exile, and
was consulted by Churchill on a wide
range of other issues, yet had no official
position other than as a member of the
Prime Minister’s personal staff. An advantage of this arrangement was that he
could access government at any level
without bothering about subverting the
chain of command; this was a vital resource when the PM wanted a rapid,
flexible response on any topic, or if he
preferred to send messages other than
through official channels. Morton was
the PM’s eyes and ears in quarters WSC
did not have time to inspect personally
and became the personal embodiment
of WSC’s will to make things happen.
As a “gatekeeper” he took the blame if
things went wrong, for example if
someone failed to secure an interview
with the PM or received an unfavourable response to a message. By
late 1941, as Churchill’s control of government machinery became more solid,
Morton’s involvement and influence
lessened; but he stayed with WSC till
the end of the war.
In addition to the official files,
much of the author’s research has been
facilitated through the voluminous correspondence between Morton and the
writer R.W. Thompson, author of The
Yankee Marlborough, an early critical
work (FH 27). Morton felt that
Thompson had been over-critical of
Churchill and corrected much of what
he had drafted. Nevertheless, in
Churchill and Morton (FH 51), published after Morton’s death, Thompson
revealed that in later life, Morton had
become bitter and disillusioned by his
loss of close contact with Churchill.
Still, Morton had told Thompson that
later historians would be bound to
write WSC’s name in Valhalla, “even
though it may be more difficult to find
it in Heaven.” The truth was that
events and time brought a gradual end
to a friendship that was always based
more on shared interests than on shared
psychology.
Morton himself wrote to Thompson that he could not imagine a better
epitaph than: “Desmond Morton
might have been a greater figure in the
affairs of his country had he been less of
a gentleman”; such an aspiration by
Churchill, according to Gill Bennett,
would have been an irrelevance.
This book is much more than a biography of Desmond Morton; it is also
a textbook on the history of the SIS, including many tedious details of internal
jealousies. So, together with its high
cost, it is unlikely to achieve major
sales. But as a piece of detective work
uncovering information about an intensely private man, it will be required
reading for those who want to know
everything possible about an important
figure at Churchill’s elbow.
,
Hack Work
may have been a page limitation, too,
with the result that we have a breathless
presentation, almost telegraphic in
style, and often confusing. The book
and the story seem rushed. Higham
jerks the reader from topic to topic,
with little sense of flow or connection.
Subjects jump about with nary a transition—we are reading about Jennie,
then suddenly about one of her friends,
or her son Winston. Specific source
notes are not offered.
There are the (now sadly usual)
signs of inadequate editing—double
words, misspellings, and the like. Sometimes the editing is unwittingly funny,
as when we read: “whether or not [Jennie] had been his mistress as Prince of
Wales, she was deeply fond of him,”
which suggests a sex-change operation.
(196). The facts get more than a bit
hazy—are readers aware that around
1911, Churchill “used 50,000 troops to
crush a railway strike” (199)? The jacket
on the British edition has a picture of
Jack Churchill labeled as Winston!
Higham, author of “secret lives” of
Howard Hughes and the Duchess of
Windsor, seems as interested in the
seamy social history of the 19th century
elite. We get lots of asides about the
sharp economic and social divides of
the gilded age, and the sexual peccadilloes of the rich, interspersed with details of Jennie’s life. Indeed, we dwell
more on her roguish father Leonard
(with almost nothing on her mother)
during the first two decades of Jennie’s
life. Some of this commentary almost
seems like filler to flesh out a relatively
brief book, in spite of the rushed character of other sections. Broad comments carry no support or commentary.
such as the notion that Jennie loved
Jack more than Winston while having
more in common with the latter (213).
While the text appears to have
been researched through a long list of
archives, how could the author fail to
mention Ralph Martin’s two-volume,
900-page biography in his listing of
published sources, even though he >>
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
Dark Lady:
Winston
Churchill’s
Mother and
Her World,
by Charles
Higham. New
York: Carroll &
Graf 250 pp.,
hardbound,
$25.95, member price
$20.75.
T
his is a disappointing, perplexing
and decidedly odd book. It appears
to have been written with, on the one
hand, a listing of people and events to
include and, on the other, a soup bowl
of scandals to be detailed and a forest of
family trees to wend through. There
FINEST HOUR 135 / 58
makes text references to it? Martin
barked up some of the same seamy trees
(his book was withdrawn in England
for falsely alleging that Jack was not
Lord Randolph’s son). Higham implies
that he corrects his predecessors, but
there are no real notes and only informal documentation; we are told simply
that earlier biographers (usually unnamed) have erred in one way or another, and here is the true story.
Too many asides are unexplained or
have nothing to do with Jennie. Queen
Victoria allegedly “detested” Lord Randolph (41), but we are not told why.
And it gets almost numbing trying to
keep up with the bed-hopping. Perhaps
there should have been a family tree as a
guide to who was sleeping with whom.
Does Higham add to our knowledge of Lady Randolph Churchill? No.
There are hardly any aspects of her life
here that have not covered more thoroughly in previous biographies and
Jennie’s memoirs.
Higham does mention an unusual
1914 lawsuit filed by Jennie against
Jack and Winston (over, of course,
money, specifically the terms of Randolph’s will). Her lawyer was her son’s
good friend F. E. Smith, and Jennie
won. Having produced this case, which
he says no previous biographer has
mentioned, Higham gives it all of one
page, based apparently on a single press
account (206-07). At virtually the same
time, Higham tells us that Jack supported his mother in her divorce proceedings from second husband George
Cornwallis-West, and that all the family
summered together.
Something is odd about this story.
Take the bit about the Lusitania sinking
(214), which had nothing to do with
Jennie; the tragedy is Winston’s fault
and all but described as the reason he
was forced from the Admiralty. Gallipoli is mentioned, but with little detail. We are told incorrectly that the
Cabinet prevented WSC serving on the
front after he left the government.
Higham’s entire analysis of Lady
Randolph, in wrapping up his tale,
consists of three paragraphs added as a
“postscript.” Readers, please save your
money for something more useful. This
seems little better than hack work. ,
No Churchill, None of the Time
DAVID HATTER
From Churchill’s
War Rooms: Letters of a Secretary
1943-45, by
Joanna Moody.
Stroud, Glos.
Tempus, 256
pages, hardbound
$50, member
price $40.
T
he disappointments begin with this
book’s misleading and potentially
deceptive title. The implication is that
it’s about Churchill; or has some connection to him—or someone who at
least dealt with him, who remembered
witticisms we hadn’t heard before. Any
connection would do, in fact, other
than that the person merely worked in
the Cabinet War Rooms.
Yes, they were “Churchill’s War
Rooms,” but it’s difficult to recall their
ever being so described. Apart from this
rather tenuous connection, you are left
wondering why Churchill’s name is in
the title. It really is the publisher’s responsibility to ensure that a title reflects
a book’s content. Churchill’s name is so
valuable that in this case, the publisher
used it to maximize appeal. Readers will
be let down by the discrepancy between
the title and the content.
The subject of the book is the delightful Olive Margerison, who appeared on a television news programme
last December. She is 92 and looks and
sounds 29: sharp, vivacious, altogether
engaging. Her story is, however, not
particularly remarkable. She worked for
General Leslie Hollis1 (Secretary,
Chiefs of Staff Committee). She went
on some of the official wartime journeys with Hollis (and, ipso facto,
Churchill). Then Olive Christopher,
she was engaged to Neil Margerison,
who was away serving with the forces.
The first part of the book deals
with Olive’s life through 1943. It is an
Mr. Hatter, of Ongar, Essex, is a Chartwell
guide, who wrote about the Chartwell Visitors
Book in Finest Hour 131.
FINEST HOUR 135 / 59
everyday story of wartime folk and,
apart from what looks like a mix-up on
page 47 over the dates when Dudley
Pound2 and Andrew Cunningham3
served as First Sea Lords, it tells yet
again an unexceptionable story about
life in the Thirties and about the shortages of lavatories in the War Rooms.
The second part covers Olive’s correspondence with her fiancé and contains protestations of affection, which
engender a feeling of sympathy for the
separated sweethearts but are remarkably mundane otherwise. There are a
few howlers, such as the reference to
HMS Renown and HMS Penelope as
“battleships.” All in all, it was a relief to
reach the end. The book is fundamentally a personal record and, while it will
evoke memories of the way things were
during the Second World War, it really
adds nothing to our knowledge of
Churchill. The main body of readers
will comprise enthusiasts who default
to buying anything with the Great
Man’s name in the title. I am left with
the feeling that if I had really wanted to
read another book about what life was
like during the war, I could have written it myself.
Endnotes
1. General Sir Leslie Chasemore [Jo]
Hollis KCB, KBE (1897–1963). Secretary,
Chiefs of Staff Committee, travelled a with
Ismay and Churchill, and is mentioned in
WSC’s The Second World War; but the context
is usually that of carrying out routine tasks.
He is not mentioned in Gilbert’s Churchill: A
Life, or in the Macmillan Dictionary of the Second World War.
2. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Dudley
Pickman Rogers Pound RN (1877-1943).
First Sea Lord, June 1939-September 1943.
3. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew
Browne Cunningham, First Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope KT GCB OM DSO
(1882-1963). Succeeded Pound as First Sea
Lord. A member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Cunningham was responsible for
strategic direction of the navy for the remainder of the war. He attended the conferences at
Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, Yalta and Potsdam.
Cunningham served as First Sea Lord until his
retirement in 1946.
,
INTERVIEW
Churchill’s Lessons of Leadership
SIR MARTIN GILBERT “ONE ON ONE” WITH PETER MANSBRIDGE
P
eter Mansbridge is a British-born
Canadian journalist, for twenty
years the chief correspondent and
anchor of The National, CBC Television’s premier nightly newscast. This November 2006 interview is published by
kind permission of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Peter Mansbridge and
Sir Martin Gilbert. Finest Hour thanks
Mike Campbell in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
for arranging permission with the CBC.
Mr. Mansbridge began by saying that
although he would like to talk about all
of Sir Martin’s thirty books on Sir Winston Churchill, the show was unfortunately only a half hour long. He then
asked Sir Martin what defines leadership
and great leaders.
SIR MARTIN GILBERT: I think a
great leader has to have a sense of moral
purpose, he has to know exactly where
he stands on the crucial issues of the
day, and, if he is going to be a leader of
a western democracy, he must have a
real sense that democracy matters, that
it has to be defended; a real conviction
in his beliefs, and, of course, an ability
to transmit his convictions. There are
many people who have intense and
good convictions but, for one reason or
another, do not have the means to
transmit them, to get them across—to
you and me.
PETER MANSBRIDGE: So, it’s that
combination of knowing where you
want to go, being convinced that it’s
right, and having the ability, not only
to attract others to follow you, but to
help you get there?
MG: Absolutely. You have to reflect
public opinion, but you also have to be
able to lead it—perhaps in directions it
is a little reluctant to go. It is a complicated balancing act.
PM: How do you judge a leader, and
do you have to wait and look back on
what they did?
MG: Churchill’s case
is interesting, in that
he judged himself a
failure because during
the Thirties, during
the great appeasement
debate, when he was in
opposition and so few
were listening to him,
he felt he had failed to
produce acceptance for
his views that war could
be averted by armaments,
by alliances, by faith in
one’s own ideological, democratic positions. Being called in, as it were, to pick
up the mess—to make good the neglect
of his advocacy—he did not see as a
great achievement: he saw it as a failure
that he had been unable to convince
the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments to take measures that he—
Churchill—believed could prevent war.
Of course, for us, his coming to power
was a great achievement. One has always to think, what would have happened if he had not had the full confidence of his convictions? What would
have happened, when the Blitz was at
its height, if he had said to himself, “I
don’t think I can go ahead with this”?
He came near to that—very near to losing, not his nerve, but to feeling that
the power of the enemy was too strong
to overcome.
PM: Is leadership different in wartime?
MG: I think so. I think it is much
harder also to get to the bottom of what
wartime leadership is. So much of wartime leadership—even, indeed especially Churchill’s —is working with a
large group of people, drawing on their
expertise, allowing fighting men and
women get on with the job, encouraging effort and achievement, and not
necessarily being a micro-manager.
Churchill was not primarily a
micromanager, despite his incredible
fascination for and grasp of detail. His
FINEST HOUR 135 / 60
leadership was that of an inspiring presence, rather then a finger in the pie. In
times of peace, perhaps, a leader has to
be more pro-active.
PM: Has television changed leadership?
MG: Probably. People often ask me,
“Would Churchill have been any good
on television?” We do not know. In his
prime he would probably have been
magical on television, as he was on
public platforms.
PM: He became Prime Minister in his
mid-Sixties. Was that his prime?
MG: I think some of his greatest days
were in the five or six years before the
First World War, when he spearheaded
the great social revolution in Britain,
creating the social system in Britain
under which we still live. Then there
was the greatness of his struggle against
appeasement—such an up-hill and dedicated struggle. But yes, certainly his
prime was in those first months of the
Second World War. In May 1940,
when everything seemed hopeless, he
also feared that Britain might be defeated. He confided to Anthony Eden
six months later, “I awoke every morning with dread in my heart.” Yet he was
able to go out and about into the
bombed areas and show defiance, and
people said, “He does not think we’re
beaten.” Even the “V for Victory” sign
was “cocking a snook” at the prospect
of utter disaster.
In June 1940 Churchill was going
into the back door of 10 Downing
Street—the door on the Horse Guards
Parade—fumbling with his key. A
group of men around the nearby statue
of Kitchener, putting up scaffolding so
it would not be hit by shrapnel (which
in fact it was a year later; the marks can
be seen to this day), started cheering,
“Good Old Winnie!” The Private Secretary with Churchill was puzzled that he
kept fumbling with his key to open the
door—normally he would go and chat
with them or wave to them. So the Private Secretary tugged at him and said,
“Prime Minister, the men on the scaffolding...” Suddenly he saw the tears
streaming down Churchill’s face. At
that moment, with France having capitulated, and German invasion barges
gathering in the North Sea and Channel ports, he must have thought the situation was hopeless. But he did not
want the men to feel his doubt; to see
him without his grin, his defiance, his
cigar, his V-sign.
Churchill’s emotions often surprised those who knew him best. General Sir Hastings (later Lord) Ismay, the
head of his Defence Secretariat, has
recorded in his memoirs accompanying
Churchill to the London docks immediately after the first heavy attack of the
Blitz. “Our first stop,” Ismay writes,
“was at an air-raid shelter in which
about forty persons had been killed and
many more wounded by a direct hit,
and we found a big crowd, male and female, young and old, but all very poor.
“One might have expected them
to be resentful against the authorities
responsible for their protection; but,
as Churchill got out of his car, they
literally mobbed him. ‘Good old Winnie,’ they cried. ‘We thought you’d
come and see us. We can take it. Give
it ’em back.’
“Churchill broke down, and as I
was struggling to get to him through
the crowd, I heard an old woman say,
‘You see, he really cares; he’s crying.’”
PM: I interrupted you over Churchill’s
ability to continue his leadership in the
television age...
MG: Churchill was a very adaptable
person. In his enormously long life—
his time in Parliament spanned sixtytwo years—he had to adapt to all sorts
of aspects of politics. Where he was
very good—and this was unexpected
for his contemporaries—was on the
radio in its early days. I was astonished
to discover that when the BBC wanted
in 1926 to have someone make the
Christmas appeal for the blind, they
chose him. It was a wonderful appeal,
because he spoke with wit as well as oratory, with light touches as well as
heavy touches. So, he adapted to the
radio, as we now know with the famous
Second World War speeches.
asked a friend, “Do you think I spent
too much energy on the German question and not enough on the Soviet
question?” I would ask if he thought
that he had not done enough, or all
that he could have done, in dealing
with Stalin in 1944.
PM: A question about political
hangers-on....
PM: What was Churchill’s greatest contribution in helping us to define leadership?
MG: Churchill did not use imagemakers, but I came across a fascinating
case where he recommended one.
When General de Gaulle arrived in
London in 1940—the one hope really
of maintaining a fighting France in
exile—Churchill was impressed that
this man wanted to go on fighting the
Germans. I found a note that he wrote
to the Cabinet Office the theme of
which was that General de Gaulle is our
man but he has such a poor personality
and presentation that government
money should be used to get a leading
PR firm to boost his image. So a considerable sum of money was paid to a
PR agency, which trained de Gaulle for
a month before he made his first great
speech from London to the French people. Although Churchill did not have a
“PR man” per se, he did have an excellent literary agent, Emery Reves, who
arranged for his articles to be published
around the world between 1937 and
the outbreak of war in 1939.
PM: After thirty books and having
gone through fifteen tons of material
during your research, if he were alive
today, what would be the one question
you would ask?
MG: It would be a question he himself
asked, and I would like to know what
his answer would be. While the Second
World War was in its final stages, he
FINEST HOUR 135 / 61
PM: What do you think his answer
would be?
MG: I would like to feel that it would
be “no,” that he would say that he had
done all that could be done, that he did
his best. But he was a very self-critical
person, so he might feel that that he did
fail in that regard.
MG: I think it was a combination of
drawing on his vast experience, and his
perseverance. So often knocked down,
so often marginalized, so often out of
power, out of office, he never gave up.
On one occasion, when he came to
Canada in 1929, he thought perhaps he
should give up politics altogether, buy a
ranch in Alberta, and become a Canadian rancher!
PM: Really?
MG: He wrote to his wife from Banff
in 1929, “I am greatly attracted to this
country....I have made up my mind
that if Neville Chamberlain is made
leader of the Conservative Party or anyone else of that kind, I clear out of politics and see if I cannot make you and
the kittens a little more comfortable before I die.”* But by the time he had
completed his holiday, he was back in
the cut and thrust of British politics.
PM: Lucky; who knows what would
have happened to us if he hadn’t been
here?
MG (laughing): Perhaps he’d have become a great Oil Baron!
*Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Companion Volume V, Part 2, The Wilderness Years
1929-1935 (London: Heinemann, 1981), 62. ,
JAMES LANCASTER’S
CHURCHILL QUIZ
3. The British government distanced itself from one of Churchill’s 1946
speeches and the U.S. government declined to endorse it. Which was it? (S)
4. Whom did Churchill marry? (C)
5. Who was the aloof Frenchman
whom Churchill befriended in the Second World War? (C)
6. Name five kinds of animals and pets
Churchill kept at Chartwell. (P)
7. What are the titles of Churchill’s two
major biographies? (L)
8. Which country did Churchill call
“The Great Republic”? (M)
Level 3:
9. Why did Churchill visit the Blenheim
battlefield in September 1932? (L)
10. When did Churchill visit Canada
for the first time? (S)
11. When and why did Churchill order
church bells to be rung for the first
time during World War II? (W)
15. In which Canadian city did WSC
and Roosevelt meet twice? (C)
Level 2:
16. Of whom did Churchill write when
he was in Bangalore in 1897: “She left
no stone unturned, she left no cutlet
uncooked”? (M)
17. What was the name of Churchill’s
most successful thoroughbred? (M)
18. For what was Clementine Churchill
awarded the CBE in 1918? (P)
19. How did Churchill sum up Admiral Jellicoe’s three lost opportunities to
destroy the German fleet at Jutland in
May 1916? (W)
20. Who described Churchill’s The
World Crisis as “Winston’s brilliant autobiography disguised as a history of
the universe”? (L)
Level 1:
21. In which constituency was
Churchill de-selected? (S)
22. Who was the first American President Churchill met? (P)
23. The Fates looked after Churchill
because he was only once wounded in
combat. When was this? (W)
24. When did Churchill speak of
Britain as “This great country nosing
from door to door like a cow that has
lost its calf, mooing dolefully now in
FINEST HOUR 135 / 62
PARRISH, CHICAGO
TRIBUNE, 1945
Answers
(1) The Second World War. (2) The Dardanelles campaign. (3) The Fulton
speech in March 1946. (4) Clementine
Hozier. (5) Charles de Gaulle. (6)
Dogs, cats, sheep, cows, horses, black
swans, budgerigars, golden orfe, birds,
butterflies, pigs, geese, tropical fish. (7)
Lord Randolph Churchill and Marlborough: His Life and Times. (8) America.
2. What went really terribly wrong for
Churchill in World War I? (W)
14. In December 1900 Churchill told
reporters, “I am not here to marry anybody.” Where was he? (P)
(9) To get material for his biography of
the first Duke of Marlborough. (10)
December 1900. (11) On 15 November 1942, to celebrate victory at El
Alamein. (12) Yalta in the Crimea. (13)
Lord Birkenhead (F.E. Smith). In his
obituary Churchill wrote, “He was the
most loyal, faithful, valiant friend any
man could have, and a wise, learned,
delightful companion.” (14) New York,
on board the Lucania. The Duke of
Manchester had just married the
Cincinnati heiress Helena Zimmermann. (15) Quebec City.
Level 4:
1. Which is Churchill’s best-selling
book? (L)
13. Which of Churchill’s greatest
friends died on 30 October 1929? (C)
(16) His mother. (17) Colonist II,
known to punters and bookies as
Colonist. (18) For setting up and organising hundreds of canteens for munitions workers and other civilians in
the years 1915-18. (19) “Three times is
a lot.” (20) The former Prime Minister
Arthur J. Balfour.
E
ach quiz includes four questions in each of six categories:
Churchill contemporaries (C),
literary matters (L), miscellaneous (M), personal details
(P), statesmanship (S) and war (W).
Questions are graded into four levels
for difficulty, the hardest being Level 1.
How far can you get before you miss
one?
12. In 1945 Churchill told Harry Hopkins, “If we had spent ten years on research we could not have found a worse
place in the world [for the next Big
Three Meeting].” Where was it? (M)
(21) Oldham in 1906 over his stance
on Free Trade. (22) William McKinley,
in Washington on 14 December 1900.
(23) 15 November 1899, hit in the
hand by a bullet splinter just before he
surrendered. His hand was later dressed
by a Boer medical officer on the way to
prison in Pretoria. (24) At a Focus
Group luncheon on 1 March 1938.
Mr. Lancaster welcomes
reader input and comments:
jimlancaster@wanadoo.fr
Berlin and now in Rome—when all the
time the tiger and the alligator wait for
its undoing”? (S)
Churchill Centre Regional and Local Contacts
Local Affairs Coordinator:
Gary Garrison (ccsgary@bellsouth.net)
2364 Beechwood Drive, Marietta GA 30062
tel. (770) 378-8389; fax (770) 565-5925
Deputy Coordinator:
Paul Courtenay (ndege@tiscali.co.uk)
Park Lane Lodge, Quarley, Andover, Hants.
SP11 8QB UK; tel. (01264) 889627
AFFILIATES ARE IN BOLD FACE
(National organizations on inside front cover)
Rt. Hon. Sir Winston S. Churchill
Society of Alaska
Judith & Jim Muller (afjwm@uaa.alaska.edu)
2410 Galewood St., Anchorage AK 99508
tel. (907) 786-4740; fax (907) 786-4647
Churchill Centre Arizona
Larry Pike (lvpike@Chartwellgrp.com)
4927 E. Crestview Dr.,
Paradise Valley AZ 85253
bus. tel. (602) 445-7719; cell (602) 622-0566
California: Churchillians of the Desert
David Ramsay (rambo85@aol.com)
74857 S. Cove Drive, Indian Wells CA 92210
tel. (760) 837-1095
Churchillians by the Bay
Richard Mastio (rcmastio@earthlink.net)
2996 Franciscan Way, Carmel CA 93923-9216
tel. (831) 625-6164
Churchillians of Southern California
Leon J. Waszak (leonwaszak@aol.com)
235 South Ave. #66, Los Angeles CA 90042
tel. (323) 257-9279
bus. tel. (818) 240-1000 x5844
England: ICS (UK) Northern Branch
Derek Greenwell, “Farriers Cottage”
Station Road, Goldsborough
Knaresborough, North Yorkshire HG5 8NT
tel. (01432) 863225
South Carolina: Bernard Baruch Chapter
Kenneth Childs (kchilds@childs-halligan.net)
P.O. Box 11367, Columbia SC 29111-1367
tel. (803) 254-4035
Churchill Centre North Florida
Richard Streiff (streiffr@bellsouth.net)
81 N.W. 44th Street, Gainesville FL 32607
tel. (352) 378-8985
Tennessee: Vanderbilt University
Young Churchill Club; Prof. John English
(john.h.english@vanderbilt.edu)
Box 1616, Station B, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville TN 37235
Winston Churchill Society of Georgia
William L. Fisher (fish1947@bellsouth.net)
5299 Brooke Farm Rd., Dunwoody GA 30338
tel. (770) 399-9774
North Texas: Emery Reves Churchillians
Jeff Weesner (jweesner@centurytel.net)
2101 Knoll Ridge Court, Corinth TX 76210
tel. (940) 321-0757; cell (940) 300-6237
Winston Churchill Society of Michigan:
Michael P. Malley (michael@malleylaw.com)
3135 South State St., Ste. 203,
Ann Arbor MI 48108
tel. (734) 996-1083; fax (734) 327-2973
Churchill Centre South Texas
James T. Slattery (slattery@fed-med.com)
2803 Red River Creek
San Antonio TX 78259-3542
cell (210) 601-2143; fax (210) 497-0904
Churchill Round Table of Nebraska
John Meeks (jmeeks@wrldhstry.com)
7720 Howard Street #3, Omaha NE 68114
tel. (402) 968-2773
Washington Society for Churchill
Dr. John H. Mather, Pres.
(Johnmather@aol.com)
PO Box 73, Vienna VA 22182-0073
tel. (240) 353-6782
New England Churchillians
Joseph L. Hern (jhern@fhmboston.com)
340 Beale Street, Quincy MA 02170
tel. (617) 773-1907; bus. tel. (617) 248-1919
Churchill Society of New Orleans
Edward F. Martin (tmartin@joneswalker.com)
2328 Coliseum St., New Orleans LA 70130
tel. (504) 582-8152
Churchill Society of Greater New York City
Gregg Berman (gberman@fulbright.com)
c/o Fulbright & Jaworski, 666 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10103 • tel. (212) 318-3388
Churchill Friends of Greater Chicago
Phil & Susan Larson (parker-fox@msn.com)
22 Scottdale Road, LaGrange IL 60526
tel. (708) 352-6825
North Carolina Churchillians
A. Wendell Musser MD (amusser@nc.rr.com)
1214 Champions Pointe Drive
Durham NC 27712; tel. (919) 417-1325
Colorado: Rocky Mountain Churchillians
Lew House, President
(lhouse2cti@earthlink.net)
2034 Eisenhower Drive, Louisville CO 80027
tel. (303) 661-9856; fax (303) 661-0589
Churchill Centre Northern Ohio
Michael McMenamin (mtm@walterhav.com)
1301 East 9th St. #3500, Cleveland OH 44114
tel. (216) 781-1212
England: ICS (UK) Woodford/Epping Branch
Tony Woodhead, Old Orchard,
32 Albion Hill, Loughton, Essex 1G10 4RD
tel. (0208) 508-4562
Churchill Society of Philadelphia
Bernard Wojciechowski
(bwojciechowski@borough.ambler.pa.us)
1966 Lafayette Rd., Lansdale PA 19446
tel. (323) 661-9856
FINEST HOUR 135 / 63
THE RT HON
SIR WINSTON S.
CHURCHILL SOCIETY, CANADA
Calgary: Dr. Francis LeBlanc, Pres.
(neuron@platinum.ca)
126 Pinetree Dr. SW, Calgary AB T3Z 3K4
tel. (403) 685-5836; fax (403) 217-5632
Edmonton: Dr. Edward Hutson, Pres.
(jehutson@shaw.ca)
98 Rehwinkel Road, Edmonton AB T6R 1Z8
tel. (780) 430-7178
British Columbia: Christopher Hebb, Pres.
(cavell_capital@telus.net)
1806-1111 W. Georgia Street, Vancouver BC
V6E 4M3; tel. (604) 209-6400
Vancouver Island: Barry Gough, Pres.
(bgough@wlu.ca)
3000 Dean Ave., P.O. Box 5037,
Victoria, B.C. V8R 6N3; tel. (250) 592-0800
,
“ T H E O LY M P I A N S AT P L AY, ” 1 9 1 2 : P O S T C R I P T
LORD CHARLES BERESFORD GCB GCVO
W
E like to get things right on our back cover!
Per John McLeod’s letter on page 4, the swimming Admiral in the Punch cartoon on FH 134’s back cover is, we now believe, Lord Charles Beresford, longtime
Churchill critic (thus the telescope trained on WSC). By 1912 Beresford had retired from the Navy and was serving
as Conservative MP for Plymouth. On 20 December 1912, Churchill would deliver a devastating blow in response
to a Beresford speech in the House of Commons: “He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, ‘Before they
get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down, they do not know what they have said.’ ”
LEWIS VERNON HARCOURT, VISCOUNT HARCOURT PC
P
aul Courtenay is now fairly certain that the bald-headed gentleman standing behind and
between the two javelin throwers (Prime Minister Asquith) and Leader of the Opposition
Andrew Bonar Law) is Lewis Vernon Venables, First Viscount Harcourt (1863-1922), who
served as Liberal MP for Rossendale, Lancashire from 1904 to 1916. At the time of the cartoon, Harcourt was Secretary of State for the Colonies. Port Harcourt, Nigeria, was named
after him in 1913, when the Governor-General of Nigeria, Sir Frederick Lugard, wrote to
Harcourt, with the somehow rather cutting request: “In the absence of any convenient local
name, I would respectfully ask your permission to call this Port Harcourt.”
HERBERT SAMUEL GCB OM GBE PC
T
he character with the telephones above,
and coddling Andrew Bonar Law at left, is
Herbert Samuel (1870-1963), the first practising Jew appointed to a British Cabinet. In
1915 Samuel proposed a British Protectorate
over Palestine, which led to the Balfour
Declaration on a Jewish National Home. He
became the first High Commissioner of the
Palestine Mandate in 1920. He served as
Asquith’s Postmaster General and Home
Secretary, sided with Asquith in the 1916 split
with Lloyd George, and lost his seat in 1918.
(He was an MP again, 1929-35). Churchill,
left, is patting Ulster Unionist Edward Carson
(shown wrestling with Home Ruler John
Redmond above), who had come out in favor
of appropriations for more submarines.
“How are the mighty fallen, and the
weapons of battle perished...” —2 Samuel 1:27
,
“Essence of Parliament” by Frederick Townsend in Punch, or The London Charivari, 28 February 1917 • John Frost Collection