A famous quote from the Viet­nam War, alleged to have been made by a U.S. pilot but actu­ally uttered by jour­nal­ist Peter Arnett, was: “…it became nec­es­sary to destroy the town to save it.” I was reminded of it when Bill O’Reilly on Fri­day May 8th destroyed Churchill in order to save him.

Intent on dis­prov­ing Barack Obama’s non-quote of Churchill (“We don’t tor­ture”; see “Obama, Churchill and Tor­ture”), the Fox News Chan­nel com­men­ta­tor, con­ducted an “inves­ti­ga­tion,” which turned out to be a phone call to a pro­fes­sor at Boston Uni­ver­sity, whose name I for­get. Well, said the aca­d­e­mic, Churchill wanted to use poi­son gas on the Ger­mans in World War II, so….

The con­nec­tion was not pre­cise but the impli­ca­tion was clear: If Churchill was will­ing to gas the Wehrma­cht, he would not have balked over water­board­ing the odd ter­ror­ist. (O’Reilly did men­tion the British wartime “Lon­don Cage” deten­tion facil­ity, noted last week on this and about 100 other websites.)

Churchill pub­lished and archived 15 mil­lion words, and very occa­sion­ally even he chose the wrong one. Like many of his gen­er­a­tion, he often said “poi­son gas” when he meant any one of a vari­ety of gasses, some con­sid­er­ably less fatal than poison.

On 12 May 1919, faced with rebel­lious tribes­men in Iraq, Churchill wrote from the War Office:

I do not under­stand this squea­mish­ness about the use of gas. We have def­i­nitely adopted the  posi­tion at the Peace Con­fer­ence of argu­ing in favour of the reten­tion of gas as a per­ma­nent method of war­fare. It is sheer affec­ta­tion to lac­er­ate a man with the poi­so­nous frag­ment of a burst­ing shell and to bog­gle at mak­ing his eyes water by means of lachry­ma­tory gas.

“Lachry­ma­tory gas” is of course tear gas, but crit­ics usu­ally edit Churchill’s last sen­tence out, along with this later sen­tence in the same memo:

It is not nec­es­sary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great incon­ve­nience and would spread a lively ter­ror and yet would leave no seri­ous per­ma­nent effects on most of those affected.

Like­wise in World War II (1943) Churchill min­uted his mil­i­tary chiefs:

I should be pre­pared to do any­thing that might hit the Ger­mans in a mur­der­ous place. I may cer­tainly have to ask you to sup­port me in using poi­son gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Ger­many in such a way that most of the pop­u­la­tion would
be requir­ing con­stant med­ical atten­tion. We could stop all work at the flying-bomb start­ing points. 

Sir Mar­tin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life explains what the Prime Min­is­ter was talk­ing about:

What he had in mind in this memo was mus­tard gas, “from which nearly every­one recov­ers.” He would use it only if “it was life or death for us” or if it would “shorten the war by a year.” To this end it might even be used on the Nor­mandy beach-head. “It is absurd to con­sider moral­ity on this topic,” he wrote, “when every­body used it in the last war with­out a word of com­plaint from the moral­ists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bomb­ing of open cities was regarded as for­bid­den. Now every­body does it as a mat­ter of course.”

It would be sev­eral weeks or even months, Churchill added, “before I
shall ask you to drench Ger­many with poi­son gas.” In the mean­time he
wanted the mat­ter stud­ied, he wrote, “in cold blood by sen­si­ble people,
and not by that par­tic­u­lar set of psalm-singing uni­formed defeatists
which one runs across, now here, now there.” The enquiries were made.
It emerged that the Air Staff had already made plans for one-fifth of
Britain’s bomber effort to be employed on drop­ping gas, if such a form
of war­fare were decided on. But the mil­i­tary experts to whom Churchill
remitted the ques­tion doubted whether gas, of the essen­tially non-lethal
kind envis­aged by Churchill, could have a deci­sive effect, and no gas
raids were made.

I note in Sir Martin’s next para­graph a poignant reminder of just who the real killers were at that time, and their gas of choice was Zyklon-B:

News had just reached Lon­don of the mass mur­der in specially-designed
gas cham­bers of more than two and a half mil­lion Jews at Auschwitz,
which had hith­erto been iden­ti­fied only as a slave-labour camp.

Now mus­tard gas is pretty rough stuff, as a reader reminded me. Accord­ing to Wikipedia,

…vic­tims expe­ri­ence intense itch­ing and skin irri­ta­tion which grad­u­ally turns into large blis­ters filled with yel­low fluid wher­ever the mus­tard agent con­tacted the skin. These are chem­i­cal burns and they are very debil­i­tat­ing. If the victim’s eyes were exposed then they become sore, start­ing with con­junc­tivi­tis, after which the eye­lids swell, result­ing in tem­po­rary blindness.

But Churchill was right when he wrote that this par­tic­u­lar “poi­son gas” is one from which “nearly every­one recov­ers.” Of 164,612 British mus­tard gas casu­al­ties on the West­ern front, only 4,086 or 2.5% died. Chlo­rine in its later “per­fected stage” killed nearly 20%.

Churchill had an abhor­rence of tor­ture for torture’s sake. Larry Kryske reminded me of Churchill’s remark about World War I in The World Cri­sis, vol. 1, page 11: “When all was over, Tor­ture and Can­ni­bal­ism were the only two expe­di­ents that the civ­i­lized, sci­en­tific, Chris­t­ian States had been able to deny them­selves: and these were of doubt­ful utility.”

In World War II, with Lon­don bombed by pilot­less missles and the inva­sion of Europe an inevitable neces­sity, things evi­dently looked grimmer. “He would have done any­thing to win the war,” his daugh­ter told me, “and I dare­say he had to do some pretty rough things—but they didn’t unman him.”

Churchill said, “I like a man who grins when he fights.” O’Reilly grins, and some of his issues are worth con­sid­er­ing. I do wish he would stop abbre­vi­at­ing his ver­bose book title as “Bold Fresh.” (Did Mar­garet Mitchell ever refer to her Civil War clas­sic as “Gone With”?) 

But please, Messrs. Obama and O’Reilly: if you’re going to quote Churchill or rep­re­sent his thought, do a lit­tle research first.

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