London Cage

Poison gas cylinders released in World War I (Wikipedia Commons)

Poison gas attack in World War I (Wikipedia Commons)

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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In his press conference of 29 April, in response to a question on the disclosure of top secret memos on the use of “enhanced interrogation methods,” Mr. Obama said:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when the entire British—all of the British people—were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat….the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation is unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured by British interrogators during World War II.

The word “torture” appears 156 times in my digital transcript of Churchill’s 15 million published words (books, articles, speeches, papers) and 35 million words about him—but not once in relation to interrogating enemy combatants. Similarly, key phrases like “character of a country” or “erodes the character” do not track.

Obama seems to have been misled by Andrew Sullivan’s recent article in The Atlantic, “Churchill vs. Cheney,” which calmly urges that Vice President Cheney be prosecuted. The British, Sullivan wrote,

captured over 500 enemy spies operating in Britain and elsewhere. Most went through Camp 020, a Victorian pile crammed with interrogators. As Britain’s very survival hung in the balance, as women and children were being killed on a daily basis and London turned into rubble, Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting….

“Churchill nonetheless knew” appears suddenly and with no evidence to back it up. Sullivan makes no other reference to Churchill, or to how he divined Churchill’s views on torture.

Sullivan likely picked this up in a three-year-old article about Camp 020’s chief interrogator, Col. Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens. In “The Truth that Tin Eye Saw,” by Ben Macintyre (London Times Online, 10 February 2006), Stephens is identified as an MI5 officer who extracted confessions out of Nazis: “a bristling, xenophobic martinet; in appearance, with his glinting monocle and cigarette holder, he looked exactly like the caricature Gestapo interrogator.” Stephens was terrifying, Macintyre wrote:

Suspects often left the interrogation cells legless with fear after an all-night grilling….he deployed threats, drugs, drink and deceit. But he never once resorted to violence….This was no squishy liberal: the eye was made of tin, and the rest of him out of tungsten. (Indeed, he was disappointed that only sixteen spies were executed during the war.) His motives were strictly practical. “Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.”

Nowhere does Macintyre mention or quote Churchill. Incidentally, Stephens was cleared of a charge of “disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind” and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former employers at MI5.

The CIA argues that “enhanced interrogation” works, John McCain says it does not. Whoever is right, the “Tin Eye” Stephens story is not the whole story. According to recent research the British did use such methods: in the “London Cage,” a POW camp in the heart of London, “where SS and Gestapo captives were subject to beatings, sleep deprivation and starvation.”*

Churchill spoke frequently about torture, mostly enemy treatment of civilians. I thank Larry Kryske for this example, from Churchill’s World War I memoir, 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.” (His general sentiment is clear enough, though combined with “cannibalism,” this seems likely to refer to practices of invading armies.)

In World War II, when he had plenary authority, it is hard to imagine Churchill being unaware of activities at places like the “London Cage.” His daughter once told me, “He would have done anything to win the war, and I daresay he had to do some pretty rough things—but they didn’t unman him.”

If Churchill is on record specifically about “enhanced interrogation,” his words have yet to surface. The nearest I could come to his sentiments on torture technique refers not to terrorists or enemy combatants but to prison inmates. In 1938, responding to a constituent who urged him to help end the use of the “cat o’nine tails” in prisons, Churchill wrote: “the use of instruments of torture can never be regarded by any decent person as synonymous with justice.”**

If that line appeals to Mr. Obama, he can certainly use it with confidence.

Endnotes

* Ian Corbain, “The Secrets of the London Cage,” The Guardian, 12 November 2005. The Cage was kept secret, Corbain, wrote, though a censored account appeared in the memoirs of its commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland. Corbain does not mention Churchill, but to believe Churchill wasn’t aware of this activity would be asking a lot.

** Martin Gilbert, editor, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 3: Documents: The Coming of War 1936-1939. London, Heinemann: 1982, 1292. n.2.

Grateful acknowledgement to Larry Kryske for the World Crisis reference; to Alex Spillius, “Obama Likes Winston Churchill After All,” Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2009; and to Telegraph readers responding to his article.

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