The Hitler Essays:

“The Truth About Hitler,” The Strand Magazine, November 1935, Cohen C481.
“Hitler and His Choice,” Great Contemporaries (London and New York, 1937), Cohen A105.
“This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” News of the World, 10 October 1937, Cohen C535.7.

“Did Churchill ever admire Hitler?”

The question, perplexing on its face, is nevertheless sometimes asked. Critics have long quoted selectively from Churchill to show he was “for Hitler before he was against him.”

For Bavarian politician Franz Joseph Strauss, the proof was Churchill’s writing: “We may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”

Historian Robert Rhodes James said Churchill “sympathetically” described Hitler’s “long, wearying battle for the German heart.” In fact Churchill’s word was “wearing” not “wearying,” which was rather less sympathetic.

The subject of those essays didn’t think Churchill was sympathetic at all. After reading “The Truth About Hitler” in 1935, an infuriated Führer instructed his ambassador in London “to lodge a strong protest against ‘the personal attack on the head of the German state.’”

Hitler as “Great Contemporary”

“The Truth About Hitler,” first of the Hitler essays, appeared in late 1935. Deciding to republish it in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, Churchill courteously submitted his text to Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office. This was a careful choice, since Vansittart had been somewhat supportive of Churchill’s demands for rearmament.

But Vansittart was on holiday, so Churchill’s draft was read by Clifford Norton, who recommended it not appear at all:

[I]t is hardly to be thought that this article would be at all palatable to the powers that be in Germany. In the present rather delicate state of our relations with that country, when one does not know which way the cat will jump, it might therefore be questioned whether republication just now was advisable.

Churchill agreed to certain deletions which would “take the sting out of the article,” but said he “would cut out nothing” that he wouldn’t say “on public platforms.” This did not prevent him from restoring some of his deletions in another newspaper article. (Read on.)

It has been questioned why Churchill made room in his book for Hitler. Was he more optimistic than he should have been about the Führer?  Perhaps—or as Martin Gilbert often quipped, “perhaps not.” Hitler was a popular subject for writers in the mid-1930s. Germany’s rearmament and intentions were mounting concerns. Yet, like all three of his Hitler essays, Churchill had little to say that was positive.

Churchill’s textual changes

What part of his 1935 article did Churchill alter in Great Contemporaries? What did the Foreign Office persuade him to “soften”? Bibliogarapher Ronald Cohen came to my aid with a line-by-line digital comparison of the “The Truth About Hitler” and the Great Contemporaries chapter. A Word document containing the 1935 text, showing 1937 deletions in strike-throughs and highlights, is available to readers via email.

This exercise was worth the trouble because it answered many questions. It shows that Churchill barely changed his sentiments between 1935 and 1937. His deletions mainly involve events well known in 1935 that were old news in 1937. His view of the Führer remained consistent.

Minor alterations

There was only one significant deletion in the early part of the Great Contemporaries chapter. That was Churchill’s 1935 assertion that history would “determine whether [Hitler] will rank in Valhalla with Pericles, with Augustus and with Washington, or welter in the inferno of human scorn with Attila and Tamerlane.”

It is not clear what if anything the Foreign Office saw wrong with that. Churchill may have pulled it as a gesture of compliance. Or maybe, by 1937, he had decided that Hitler wouldn’t rank with Washington….

Nor were those words gone for long. On 10 October 1937, six days after publishing Great Contemporaries, they reappeared. This was in Churchill’s third Hitler article, “This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” for News of the World. For good measure, he wrote of Hitler’s “guilt of blood” and “wicked” methods.

Was this third essay a defiance of the Foreign Office? ​Or was it simply written because Churchill was too good a writer to omit a memorable line? Whatever the reason, it does not materially change ​his opinion of Hitler.

Other early changes to the 1935 text were almost all for readability or currency. A minor deletion was his reference to Heinrich Brüning, the anti-Hitler Chancellor of Weimer Germany in 1930-32. In his original Strand article, Churchill wrote that the Nazis “even drove the patriotic Brüning, under threat of murder, from German soil.”

Safe in America, Brüning became a professor of government at Harvard, where he continued to warn of German and Soviet expansionism. In 1937 Churchill asked him to proofread his Great Contemporaries Hitler chapter. Brüning’s only comment was, “I admire very much your description of the feelings of the German people in these fourteen years after the War and the characteristics of the British policy at that time.”

The major deletion

Not apparent until Ronald Cohen’s textual comparison was a long passage at the end of the 1935 Strand article removed from Great Contemporaries. It described the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Hitler purged Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA). This appears in no edition of the book, nor the Churchill Collected Essays. 

This passage did not appear in Churchill’s third article, “Government of Great Dictators.”  It may well have been considered provocative by the Foreign Office, albeit dated. Readers must judge for themselves. Since it is otherwise inaccessible, we reproduced it in full on the Churchill Project website. Here are excerpts.

From “Government of Great Dictators”

[On 30 June 1934] many hundreds of men and some women were put to death in Germany without law, without accusation, without trial. These persons represented many varieties of life and thought of Germany. There were Nazis and anti-Nazis. There were Generals and Communists; there were Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Some were rich and some were poor; some were young and some were old; some were famous and some were humble. But all had one thing in common, namely, that they were deemed to be obnoxious or obstructive to the Hitler regime. Therefore, they were blotted out.

The history of the world is full of gruesome, squalid episodes of this kind, from the butcheries of ancient Rome and the numberless massacres which have stained the history of Asia down to the “smellings out” of the Zulu and Hottentot witch doctors. But in all its ups and downs mankind has always recoiled in horror from such events…

Adolf Hitler took upon himself the full responsibility…. But the astounding thing is that the great German people, educated, scientific, philosophical, romantic, the people of the Christmas tree, the people of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Beethoven, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant and a hundred other great names, have not only not resented this horrible blood-bath, but have endorsed it and acclaimed its author with the honours not only of a sovereign but almost of a god….

Can we really believe that a hierarchy and society built upon such deeds can be entrusted with the possession of the most prodigious military machinery yet planned among men? Can we believe that by such powers the world may regain “the joy, the peace and glory of mankind”? The answer, if answer there be, other than the most appalling negative, is contained in that mystery called HITLER.

The Hitler essays in retrospect

Churchill’s views plainly underwent no significant change during the two years spanning his three Hitler essays. If his original description of the Röhm purge disappeared, it did not affect the tenor of what he left in.

There is something about those excised passages that arrests the eye today. Because on 7 October 2023, much the same thing happened in Israel.

“All manner of people” were killed by murderers who “caught them in the streets, shot them in their beds, shot the wife who threw herself before her husband…. Sinister volleys succeeded each other through a long morning, afternoon and night.”

And again mankind recoiled in horror. The only difference seems to be that in 1934 Germany, “relations who ventured to inquire for the missing father, brother or son received, after a considerable interval, a small urn containing cremated ashes.” In 2023, the barbarians didn’t bother to do that.

Further reading

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Did Hitler Authorize the Flight of Rudolf Hess?” 2023.

“Hitler’s Sputtering Austrian Anschluss: Opportunity Missed?” 2020.

“The Myth that Churchill Admired Hitler,” 2017.

It is argued, strongly in John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory, that Churchill’s singleminded obsession with Hitler blinded him to the longterm implications for Britain. He had the opportunity to back away from the Hitler war, goes the argument. But alliance with the Soviets after Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941 led to the end of Empire and Britain’s decline. What do you think? —R.H., Plano, Texas

A: “You’re only saying that to be provocative…”

The peace option in 1940 is a long-running debate. Professor Charmley’s was one of the best defenses of it. Hitler was certainly Churchill’s obsession. Was it a good obsession to have? Given the situation at the time, there is a good argument that it was.

A recollection by Churchill’s last private secretary, the late Sir Anthony Montague Browne, contains what may have been his best response to this question. I first heard it when Sir Anthony addressed our Churchill dinner at the Hotel Savoy in 1985. It later appeared in his book, Long Sunset, 1995:

In the autumn of 1955, I dined alone with [WSC] for 17 evenings. Those evenings alone with an octogenarian were utterly fascinating. All sorts of curious pieces of information came out…. Concerning 1940, I played the Devil’s Advocate. Leaving aside the appalling issue of the extermination camps, which was then not evident, would it have been better if we had joined the New Order, as a substantial part of France was then inclined to do?

Would the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism have been brought to an end? Hitler most certainly would have attacked Russia and, unharassed in the West, almost certainly would have won. Would the equally monstrous tyranny of the Nazi regime have been mitigated or abbreviated by British influence? Hitler had always respected Britain. Would we have kept our Empire and our financial strength?

***

Churchill’s reply was brief:

You’re only saying that to be provocative. You know very well we couldn’t have made peace on the heels of a terrible defeat. The country wouldn’t have stood for it. And what makes you think that we could have trusted Hitler’s word—particularly as he could have had Russian resources behind him? At best we would have been a German client state, and there’s not much in that.

Incidentally, this is also a good reply to historians who insist that Churchill always placed Britain’s interests first. In 1940, he clearly acted in the interests of the world, and of civilization. (See “Churchill: What We Mean by Civilization.”)  

Of course, as some thoughtful historians would say, Churchill was as willing to trust Stalin’s word at Teheran and Yalta as, say, Chamberlain was to trust Hitler’s word at Godesberg and Munich. But that is another and more complicated story.

When did Churchill  first read Mein Kampf, and did he have any early reaction to it?” Of Mein Kampf in his war memoirs, he wroe:

…there was no book which deserved more careful study from the rulers, political and military, of the Allied Powers. All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.[1]

“But he writes nothing about it before this.

A: 1935, if not sooner

The answer is undetermined, but we can narrow down the time frame. I looked for this in my Hitler chapter of Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality. I searched his correspondence for mentions of Mein Kampf from 1925, when it was first published. Churchill did not read German and there is no indication that he saw the German editions at that time.

There is no evidence that Churchill read Mein Kampf until at least 1933[2]. Most likely, Martin Gilbert reports, he read it in 1935 (see below). But he was aware of Hitler earlier. His friend Sir Ian Hamilton furnished the first reference to Hitler in Churchill’s official biography. In October 1930. In the September federal elections, Hitler’s National Socialists soared from 12 to 107 seats, second highest in the Reichstag. The ruling Social Democrats fell slightly to 143, the German Communist Party tripled its seats with 77.

Hamilton and Cuno

Churchill was anxious to know what this election foretold. Hamilton passed him the views of the German shipping magnate and onetime chancellor, Wilhelm Cuno. What Hamilton described as Hitler’s “scoop” was, according to Cuno, natural and hopeful:

He said that out of the 32 million people in Germany there were 29 million who were finding life just about intolerable and they were absolutely fed up with it. In their minds they had resolved to sweep away the whole of the existing system of compromise, makeshift and trying to win their way back by slow degrees on the old lines.

They were jolly well going to have a try at something entirely new and the whole question, for people like himself who had something to say with the steering of the ship of State, was whether the change would be to the right or to the left. If to the right it would be an accentuation of nationalism: if to the left it would be internationalism. They had got their swing to the right and he hoped that the responsibility of power would make this new Government more moderate in action than it had been in words.[3]

Cuno was however likely to put a favorable spin on the Nazi surge. Two years later he would join Wilhelm Keppler as a financial advisor to Hitler. His death in 1933 spared him whatever ignominy that might have attached to him through further association. The worst that can be said of Churchill over this early intelligence from Germany was that he too hoped for moderation. Like many others, he misgauged the depth of Hitler’s prejudice and hate. But it didn’t take him as long as most others to realize the truth.

Mein Kampf in 1935

The first known Churchill encounter with Mein Kampf was five years later—two years after Hitler took power and the first English edition was published. By then, as Martin Gilbert tells us, he was fully up to speed:

Churchill was also well informed about the internal situation in Germany. Three months earlier, on 10 December 1935, at Churchill’s own request, L.G. Montefiore had sent him a full translation not only of the Nuremberg Laws, under which the Jews of Germany had been deprived of their basic rights as citizens, but also of the detailed administrative regulations, whereby those Laws were to be put into force. On March 10 the Duchess of Atholl sent him two copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the original German edition and the English translation.[4]

Katharine Stewart-Murray, 8th Duchess Atholl was determined that Churchill should know the truth. The English translation of Mein Kampf sent to the London publisher was watered down to soothe British nerves. Atholl sent Churchill

copies of those passages which had been expurgated in the translation. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “the warlike character of the original is concealed by mistranslating.” In one of the expurgated passages Hitler advocated a German alliance with Italy and Britain, in order to isolate France. In another he described France as “our bitterest enemy.” And in a third he declared: “the life of a people will be secured not by national grace, but by the strength of a victorious sword.” The Duchess of Atholl also sent Churchill extracts from Hitler’s speeches with copies of those more extreme paragraphs which had not been circulated to the foreign press.[5]

The Duchess of Atholl…

…is one of the forgotten heroines in Churchill’s battle against appeasement. Lynne Olson’s Troublesome Young Men finely describes this feisty Scotswoman, the first Conservative woman Member of Parliament to hold ministerial office:

For Kitty Atholl, Mein Kampf served as a call to battle. No longer the docile backbencher who wanted to “smooth matters over,” she became an outspoken foe of appeasement. She again joined forces with Churchill, this time in his campaign to awaken Britain to the dangers posed by Hitler and the need for rearmament. Like Churchill, she received confidential information from knowledgeable sources about the rapid pace and size of German rearmament, which she passed on to him and to officials in the Foreign Office…. Many Tories in her constituency, which contained more than its share of aristocrats, landed gentry, and retired military officers, were outraged.[6]

By the time of the Munich accord, the Duchess was thoroughly repulsed by Chamberlain’s actions. She made speeches denouncing the agreement, and published a pamphlet about it. For this the Conservative whip was withdrawn and Chamberlain sent surrogates to oppose her in a by-election. She lost her seat in November 1938, and a few months later Chamberlain himself came to defend his policies in Scotland.

Churchill was furious. On a visit to the Highlands, another friend told him Chamberlain was coming and asked where she should set up the podium. “It doesn’t matter where you put it,” Churchill replied, “as long as he has the sun in his eyes and the wind in his teeth.” His famous lisp often surfaced strongly at times of great emotion. So this came out: “shun in hish eyesh and the wind in hish teeth.”[7]

Endnotes

 1. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 42.

2. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols., (Berlin: Eher Verlaf, 1925-26). An abridged English edition was first published by Hurst & Blackett, London, on 13 October 1933, though excerpts appeared in The Times during July.

3. Ian Hamilton to Churchill, 24 October 1930 (Churchill Papers: 8/269), in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 208-09.

4. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, Prophet of Truth 1922-1939 (Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 704.

5. Ibid.

6. Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 167.

7. Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 23.

Mr. McKinstry is right to regret that Chamberlain has been roughly handled by history. “The reality is that in the late 1930s Chamberlain’s approach was a rational one,” he writes. It was “dictated by military strength and the mood of the nation. It is impossible to imagine him making such an expensive hash of the [Covid] testing regime as the present government has done.”

Covid testing is a bit outside my area of expertise. But Mr. McKinstry is right to insist on fair play for Chamberlain. It seems, however, that Churchill’s Munich prescriptions have been somewhat overlooked in the process. Accordingly I republish a 2014 piece that may shed light on that subject.

Berlin, September 1938

A motorized division rolled through the city’s street just at dusk… The hour was undoubtedly chosen to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence…. The Führer was on his balcony reviewing the troops…and there weren’t 200 people. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside…. What I’ve seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. They are dead set against war.” —William L. Shirer

Chamberlain met Hitler two days later in Munich. Churchill was certain that now was the time to resist. Yet we are regularly told that the Munich agreement was necessary and wise. Obviously, it gave Britain more time to arm. But it also gave Germany more time to arm—and to neutralize a potential enemy in the Soviet Union. Hitler also reaped a military bonanza in Czechoslovakia. In the 1940 invasion of France, three of the ten Panzer divisions were of Czech manufacture.

Obviously, goes the refrain, Britain and France could not have defended landlocked Czechoslovakia. There was more to its defense than that, Churchill wrote: “It surely did not take much thought…that the British Navy and the French Army could not be deployed on the Bohemian mountain front.” [1]

If resisting Hitler in 1938 was a faulty concept, why was it preferable to fight him in 1939-40? That sawa the eradication of Poland in three weeks, the Low Countries in sixteen days, France in six weeks.

If not then, when?

Churchill, in his memoirs had only the scholarship of 1948: Nuremberg testimony, recovered Nazi documents, private contacts, some from inside Germany. From Munich onward, he argued that the time to take on Hitler had been 1938. Was he wrong? How has his theory stood the test of time and modern scholarship? The answer is: no so badly. Reading the literature, it is arguable, that Chamberlain indeed “missed the bus” at Munich.

This is no attempt to pillory Neville Chamberlain, an easy target for generations of second-guessers. Without his rearmament programs and support of his successor, Churchill could not have successfully fought the Battle of Britain. Chamberlain was wrong about Hitler, but he had as Churchill said the “benevolent instincts of the human heart…even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour,” striving “to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle.” [2]

Williamson Murray analyzed the strategic issues affecting the Czech crisis in The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939. (See especially chapters 6, 7, and 8.) He closely compares the balance of military forces and political circumstances between 1938 and 1939. Some of his revelations were new and startling; some were common sense. Michael McMenamin (“Regime Change 1938“) has written cogently on the plot against Hitler. This was real and credible, he says, but it stopped cold after Hitler’s Munich triumph. Murray’s and McMenamin’s arguments are summarized in Finest Hour 162, Spring 2014.

Point and counterpoint

Remember, though, that history is a constant process of revision. Contrary arguments exist, and qualified counter-arguments must be considered. Take for example, the case for inertia, which drove Chamberlain. This was nicely defined by the late Churchill scholar Paul Courtenay:

Whatever the relative strengths between UK/France and Nazi Germany in 1938, World War I was so recent in the national memories that public opinion (and Parliament) would never have been in favour of any pre-emptive ultimatum or strike at Hitler. It took two more Nazi outrages—the absorption of Czechoslovakia and the attack on Poland—to persuade everyone that enough was enough.

​This insightful observation has been made before. But again, we rarely hear the parallel: that the Germans too had had a bellyful of war and its disastrous aftermath. Rapturous crowds, believing he brought peace, greeted Chamberlain in Germany. Berliners, watching as Hitler reviewed a motorized column in September, were sparse and sullen. William Shirer said it was “the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen.” Hitler turned away in disgust, remarking to Goebbels, “I can’t lead a war with such people.” [3]

British wishes as he saw them registered with Chamberlain at Munich, as they had with his predecessor. In 1936, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin restrained the French after Hitler occupied the Rhineland. When French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin appealed for Britain to mobilize, Baldwin replied that he knew the British people, and they wanted peace. Flandin knew that France would not act without Britain. Now he was told that Britain would do nothing. [4]

The path of duty

Churchill snorted at Baldwin’s interpretation of his duty. The responsibility of a leader is to lead, he insisted. The leader’s primary concern is the safety of the nation—whatever the consequences:

I would endure with patience the roar of exultation that would go up when I was proved wrong, because it would lift a load off my heart and off the hearts of many Members. What does it matter who gets exposed or discomfited? If the country is safe, who cares for individual politicians, in or out of office? [5]

Churchill made that ringing declaration in 1936. Two years later Hitler absorbed Austria, an almost catastrophic display of German  military bungling. Heedless of that, he was now after Czechoslovakia. Self-evidently, the British were by then less pacifist. Many were outraged. Lord Halifax, so often portrayed as an abject appeaser, led a “cabinet revolt,” saying Hitler could never be trusted. He telegraphed Chamberlain: “Great mass of public opinion seems to be hardening in sense of feeling that we have gone to the limit of concession.” [6]

Churchill’s reply to the notion that Britons would not fight was given in an interview three months after Munich:

In this country at any rate the people can readily be convinced that it is necessary to make sacrifices, and they will willingly undertake them if the situation is put clearly and fairly before them. No one can doubt that it was within the power of the National Government at any time within the last seven years to rearm the country at any pace required without resistance from the mass of the people. The difficulty was that the leaders failed to appreciate the need and to warn the people, or were afraid to do their duty, not that the democratic system formed an impediment. [7]

“Thus far and no farther”

There are of course incalculables. We cannot know the military outcome or the result of the coup attempt. How would the British public have reacted if the Anglo-French had resisted? In 1939, Britons largely supported declaring war over Poland, which was much less defensible than Czechoslovakia. Properly alerted to the realities, would the people have backed resistance in 1938? Churchill believed so:

The pace is set by the potential aggressor, and, failing collective action by the rest of the world to resist him, the alternatives are an arms race or surrender. War is very terrible, but stirs a proud people. There have been periods in our history when we have given way for a long time, but a new and formidable mood arises. [8]

Churchill’s interviewer interrupted: “A bellicose mood?” No, said Churchill:

A mood of “Thus far, and no farther.” It is only by the spirit of resistance that man has learnt to stand upright, and instead of walking on all fours to assume an erect posture. War is horrible, but slavery is worse, and you may be sure that the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude. [9]

By derivation Churchill would also say, as indeed his whole life proved, that if a leader can’t carry the people, then he goes: “…who cares for individual politicians, in or out of office?”

Munich in retrospect

Thanks to Messrs. Murray and McMenamin, we know much about Munich that was previously obscure. There were choices. Of course we were not there in 1938. We don’t know the mood of the people, or the politicians. Churchill never met the formidable Führer face to face. We will never know the outcome as Chamberlain described it, of “a quarrel in a far-away country between a people of whom we know nothing.” [10]

But we do know what happened in September 1939, and in May-June 1940. And we are obliged to consider Churchill’s position—which was, characteristically, far from baseless:

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature. I see that a speaker at the week-end said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture. [11]

Endnotes

[1] Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 214.

[2] Churchill, House of Commons, 12 November 1940, quoted in Richard M. Langworth, Churchill in His Own Words, hereinafter CIHOW (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 331.

[3] William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002, reprint), 142-43. Hjalmar Schacht, Account Settled (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949), 124.

[4]  Churchill, The Gathering Storm, 154

[5] Churchill, House of Commons, 20 July 1936, CIHOW, 493.

[6] Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) 112-22; John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 347. Roberts did add that by “great mass of public opinion,” Halifax “really meant his own opinion, together with that of whichever friends he had spoken to and newspapers he had read.”

[7] Winston S. Churchill, interview by Kingsley Martin, editor, The New Statesman, 7 January 1939, republished 7 January 2014.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Neville Chamberlain, broadcast of 27 September 1938, in Anthony Eden, Facing the Dictators (London: Cassell, 1962), 8.

[11] Churchill, House of Commons, 30 September 1941, CIHOW, 492.

Further reading

Richard M. Langworth, “Last Chance at Munich,” Chapter 5 in Winston Churchill and the Avoidable War: Could World War II have been Prevented?, 2015.

Justin D. Lyons, Review of Winston Churchill and the Avoidable War, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, December 2015.

Richard M. Langworth, “Robert Harris on Air Power, Munich, and Chamberlain’s ‘Finest Hour,'” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, October 2017.

Question

“Is this quotation is attributed to Winston Churchill?: ‘The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists.’ There does not seem to be credible information on the internet linking those words to him, but I would appreciate your input.”

A case of Churchillian Drift

Manufacturing Churchill quotes is a parlor game. Nigel Rees, host of the BBC program Quote…Unquote, described what he called “Churchillian Drift.” It’s a process whereby a quote’s originator “is elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure said.” Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.—they are all victims.

Churchill never said anything like this, according to the Churchill Project’s digital resource of 80 million published words by and about him. Churchill accounts for about 20 million (books, articles, speeches, letters, papers), including  The Churchill Documents. We also track 60 million words of biography, specialized studies, related works and memoirs by Churchill’s associates.

The fascists quotation is certainly in vogue. It’s a popular impulse to call someone with authoritarian tendencies a fascist. Attaching it to Churchill gives it credibility. Some Churchill quotation books and websites contain it—but never with solid attribution. Nearly 150 fictitious quotes are listed on this blogsite—with notes as to their origins.

Fascists and anti-fascists

Aside from the digital evidence, such a remark would be entirely out of character. Churchill didn’t use “fascist” in the generic sense—or as a pejorative against political opponents. When he did use the word, he referred to specific fascist movements. Examples: the pre-World War II Yugoslav Anti-fascist Coalition, or the postwar Italian Anti-fascist Council.

For Churchill to label a political opponent a fascist would be inconceivable. Some might think he would have said it about Clement Attlee, his socialist opposite and successor as Prime Minister in 1945. But Churchill would never think of it.

One of the striking things about The Churchill Documents, volume 22 (1945-51) is the civility of discourse. In debate, Churchill criticized Attlee fiercely and often, and these criticisms are in the volume. Several times in the House of Commons, he called Attlee’s competence into question. Yet they worked to keep channels open with each other, especially concerning the nation’s interest. Churchill would brook no generic criticism of Attlee, despite Attlee’s authoritarian impulses. On the floor they went at it hammers and tongs. Off the floor there was mutual respect.

“The Creeds of the Devil”

There is a third reason why Churchill would not have said this popular phrase. To speak in sweeping terms about “fascists” doesn’t even sound like him. It’s too pat, too simple; unnatural, unrealistic. Churchill’s views on tyrannical government were specific. They occur in a beautiful 1937 essay, “The Infernal Twins.” In it he compares Nazism with Communism, then takes pains to distinguish Italian fascism.

Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites. They are at each other’s throats wherever they exist all over the world. They actually breed each other; for the reaction against Communism is Nazism, and beneath Nazism or Fascism Communism stirs convulsively.

Yet they are similar in all essentials. First of all, their simplicity is remarkable. You leave out God and put in the Devil; you leave out love and put in hate; and everything thereafter works quite straightforwardly and logically.

I am reminded of the North Pole and South Pole. They are at opposite ends of the earth, but if you woke up at either Pole tomorrow morning you could not tell which one it was. Perhaps there might be more penguins at one, or more Polar bears at the other; but all around would be ice and snow and the blast of a biting wind.

“Fertile fields of freedom”

Extending his geographic analogies, Churchill contrasts these totalitarian forms of government with his own and those of the great democracies:

I have made up my mind, however far I may travel, whatever countries I may see, I will not go to the Arctic or to the Antarctic regions. Give me London, give me Paris, give me New York, give me some of the beautiful capitals of the British Dominions.

Let us go somewhere where our breath is not frozen on our lips because of the Secret Police…somewhere where there are green pastures and the shade of venerable trees. Let us not wander away from the broad fertile fields of freedom into these gaunt, grim, dim, gloomy abstractions of morbid and sterile thought.

Next Churchill explains specific differences, applying the word “fascist” only to Mussolini:

There are, of course, differences between the dictatorships. Yet they are largely discounted by one significant fact. It is easy to imagine Mussolini or Hitler as head of a Communist State or Stalin as Fascist Duce or Führer. Nothing in Communism or Fascism, as we know them, or in the characters and records of these three men, makes such a situation incredible.”

It is fair to conclude Churchill took pains not to use the generic term “fascists” as an offhand dismissal of those with totalitarian ideas. He always carefully specified which fascists he meant. Of he regarded both those of the Left and the Right as equally repugnant in their denial of liberty.

Further reading

“The Creeds of the Devil” appeared in The Sunday Chronicle, London, 27 June 1937, followed by a sequel, “A Better Way,” on 4 July. The two essays combined as “The Infernal Twins” in Collier’s (USA) on 3 July 1937. Republished in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols., (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), II, 394-97. At the moment, only “The Creeds of the Devil” is available in digital form. Please contact me for a copy.

Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective. “Low-energy Jeb” torpedoed Governor Bush‘s 2016 presidential campaign better than any debate gaffe. “Mini-Mike” didn’t help Mayor Bloomberg‘s in 2020. But except in extreme cases like Hitler, Churchill’s name-calling was more effective and less wounding. Especially when he rather admired certain qualities in opponents. (He called Lloyd George a “cad” in his youth, but ever after praised the “Welsh Wizard.”)

* Asterisks indicate nicknames not used in a public setting. Churchill, after all, had some discretion. But I leave them in for fun. 

Nicknames: Admiral Row-Back to Can’t Tellopolus

Admiral Row-Back: Admiral Sir John Roebuck (1862-1928), Royal Navy officer. Commanded the initial Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915. Having nearly succeeded, he turned back after losses to mines, incurring Churchill’s permanent loathing and censure and an appropriate nickname.

*Block: Herbert H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal Prime Minister, 1908-16. He let Churchill dangle in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli debacle, which sent WSC packing as First Lord of the Admiralty. This was a private nickname between Churchill and his wife. It may refer to Asquith’s frequent role as a block to Churchill’s proposals.

Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German Chancellor and Führer, 1933-45. First publicly declared in a broadcast after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. It wasn’t the first Churchillian jab, nor by any means the last.. There is no shortage of insulting nicknames in Hitler’s case; but this is as good an example as any. (See also “Corporal Schicklgrüber,” in comments below.)

Boneless Wonder: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929-35. A devastating comparison to a circus attraction, applied in 1931. Churchill was ridiculing Ramsay Mac’s lack of principle and wavering domestic policies. In private he considered MacDonald a servant of Crown and Parliament. But only in private.

Canting Bus Driver: Frank Pick (1878-1941), headed London Passenger Transport Board 1933-40. “Never let me see that-that-that canting bus driver again.” Churchill wrote this in red ink on a memorandum from Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper when Pick resigned.

*Can’t Tellopolus: Panagiotis Kannelopoulos (1902-1986), Minister of Defense, Greek exile government in Cairo, 1942-45. Churchill was impatient with his indecision about Greek resistance to the occupying Germans. Alexander Cadogan, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, heard these “mutterings from Churchill’s bathroom, between the splashings and gurgles.”

Chattering Cad – Green-Eyed Radical

*Chattering Little Cad: David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Liberal Prime Minister 1916-22. Said in 1901, when Churchill was still a Conservative. After he switched to the Liberals in 1904, his attitude changed. He rarely spoke ill of Lloyd George afterward, despite many provocations. WSC’s wife regarded LG as treacherous. He duly refused to join the Churchill coalition in 1940.

*Coroner: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). Conservative Prime Minister, 1937-40. Originally coined by Brendan Bracken (also “Ironmonger” for Baldwin), this remained in the family lexicon. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper introduced young Martin Gilbert to Randolph Churchill by saying “he hates the Coroner.” (A bit strong—he surely didn’t hate Chamberlain).

*Dull, Duller, Dulles: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, 1952-60. After Stalin’s death, Churchill argued for a “settlement” of the Cold War, but Dulles (and Eisenhower) were obdurate. “Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —Churchill at the Bermuda Conference, December 1953.

Green-eyed Antipodean Radical: David Low (1891-1963), New Zealand cartoonist. Churchill had a certain affinity for the left-wing cartoonist whose attacks he admired. He called Low the greatest of modern cartoonists. There was mutual respect despite political differences, and Low drew a beautiful cartoon tribute on WSC’s 80th birthday.

Half-Naked Fakir – Llama

Half-Naked Fakir: Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948, Indian independence leader. The worst sobriquet attached to the Great Mahatma, when Churchill thought Gandhi an upperclass Brahman posing as a champion of the downtrodden. Yet they both nursed a private respect for each other and, in the end, were more forgiving. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi” herein.

Holy Fox: Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax (1881-1959, Foreign Minister, 1938-40, Ambassador to Washington, 1940-46. Verified by Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts, who writes: “It was a Churchill family nickname, of course a reference to his High Church beliefs as well as his love of hunting. And a certain amount of political foxiness….”

*Home Sweet Home: Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995), British Prime Minister 1963-64. Neville Chamberlain’s “eyes and ears” in Parliament, he always maintained that the Munich deal had saved Britain by giving it an extra year to prepare for war, ignoring the fact that it also gave Hitler an extra year, and he prepared far more rapidly. (His name was pronounced “Hume,” but that didn’t stop Churchill.)

*Llama: Charles de Gaulle ( 1890-1970 ), French General and President. Lord Moran wrote: “Was it true, [Lady Limerick] asked, that he had likened de Gaulle to a female llama who had been surprised in her bath? Winston pouted, smiled and shook his head. But his way of disavowing the remark convinced me that he was in fact responsible for this indiscretion…”

Limpet to Prince Palsy

Lion-hearted Limpet Leader: Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Labour Prime Minister 1945-51. Many disparaging cracks about Attlee (arriving in an “empty taxi”) are apocryphal. But this was an April 1951 jibe at Attlee and Labour MPs clinging to power. Churchill and the Conservatives turned them out in a general election the following October.

Minister of Disease: Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Minister of Health 1945-51, founder of the National Health Service. One of the rougher nicknames, applied in the Commons, 1948. “…is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form?” Churchill asked. He also called Bevan a “squalid nuisance.”

Old Grey Tabby: Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Conservative Prime Ministers, 1902-05. After he succeeded Churchill at the Admiralty in 1915, WSC feared the “Old Grey Tabby” would dissolve the Royal Naval Division. (Balfour did resemble a tabby cat in old age, but Churchill continued to admire him, and memorialized him in Great Contemporaries.)

Pink Pansies: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and his friends. Member of Parliament, 1935-45. I am aware this violates P.C. decorum and will no doubt be added to Churchill’s “sins.” True, Nicolson was bisexual, but a) Churchill was emphatically not homophobic, and b), the reference (Parliament, late 1945) was to non-combative young Tory MPs.

Prince Palsy: Paul of Yugoslavia (1893-1976), Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 1934-41. His palsied hand signed a treaty with Hitler. This  assured German occupation, the end of his Regency, and Churchill’s disdain. Exiled in Kenya, he appealed for refuge in Britain, but Churchill considered him a traitor and war criminal.

Scheming Prelate to Turnip

Scheming Prelate: Damaskinos Papandreou (1891-1949), Archbishop of Athens, 1945-49. Churchill, mediating the Greek civil war in late 1944, allegedly asked if he was “a man of God or a scheming Mediterranean prelate?” Assured that he was the latter, Churchill supposedly said, “Good, he’s just our man.” (Not verified)

Snub-nosed Radical: Liberal heckler, 1887. Aged only twelve, young Winston was attending a pantomime where he heard a man hissing a portrait of his father. He burst into tears, then turned on the perpetrator: “Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical!” This may be Churchill’s first political zinger.

Spurlos Versenkt (Sunk without a Trace): Sir Benjamin Smith (1879-1964), Labour Minister of Food, 1944-46. After he resigned from Parliament, Churchill searched “for the burly ‘and engaging form of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has departed ‘spurlos versenkt,’ as the German expression says—sunk without leaving a trace behind.”

Turnip: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), Conservative Prime Minister, 1925-29, 1935-37. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor in 1925, but later kept him out of the Cabinet. After his final resignation, “S.B.” appeared in the House of Commons smoking room. Churchill quipped, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

Useless Percy to Wuthering Height

*Useless Percy: Eustace Percy, First Baron of Newcastle (1887-1958). Board of Education President, 1924-29. At the Exchequer 1924-29, Churchill tried to lower the defense budget. Percy and Minister of Health Chamberlain  were opposed. “Neville is costing £2 millions more and Lord Useless Percy the same,” WSC wrote his wife on 30 September 1927.  “…these civil departments browse onwards like a horde of injurious locusts.”

Whipped Jackal: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Italian Prime Minister, 1922-43, Duce of Fascism, 1943-45. Churchill praised him briefly before the war, but after joining Hitler he became a “whipped jackal… frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph!”

Wincing Marquess: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), House of Lords, 1886-1927. Churchill, 1909: “he claimed no right…to mince the Budget, [only] the right to wince when swallowing it. Well, that is a much more modest claim…. If his Party are satisfied with the Wincing Marquess, we have no reason to protest.”

*Wuthering Height: John Charles Walsham, 1st Baron Reith (1889-1971),  BBC Director General, 1923-38. The towering Reith was briefly in the wartime Coalition Cabinet. But he’d kept Churchill off the air in the 1930s, and no love was lost between them. WSC rejoiced to have seen “the last of that Wuthering Height” around 1940.

In our electronic Speaker’s Corner (the Internet), Winston Churchill is beset by haters. Their knee-jerk spouts are laced with out-of-context quotes and preconceived notions. Call it Churchill Derangement Syndrome. Where is the truth? Perhaps we need a Derangement Index. Click on “A” for Aryan Supremacy, “B” for the Bengal Famine, etc. A handy reference to every derangement you can access with a couple of clicks.

An e-zine called This is Local London, describing its offerings as “quality local journalism,” is a standard example. Well, maybe not so standard. “The Problem with Glorying Winston Churchill” was written not by a historian or researcher, but a student at Wallington County Grammar School. If this what they’re teaching in British grammar schools, the Prime Minister has a bigger problem than Brexit.

It’s a tongue-lashing for the ages. “Blind worship and romanticisation [sic] of Churchill…is dangerous to our understandings of race and understanding” [sic]. Especially given “the harrowing reality.” What is that? Why, you doofus, it’s Churchill’s “virulent racism, sympathy for fascist and extremist ideology.” Yet—can you believe it?—we still airbrush his “horrible actions and distasteful racist, xenophobic venom.” Why do we glorify “this self-identified white supremacist as a figure worthy of acclaim?”

Derangement Primer

Herein we encapsulate this episode of Churchill Derangement in alphabetical order. Young Reporter’s accusations are in italics. Incorrect, unsourced, inaccurate or otherwise false quotes are marked with curly brackets {like this}. They are not worthy of quotemarks.

“A” is for Aryans

Churchill’s conviction of the {superiority of the Aryan race} “is starkly reminiscent of Hitler’s.” Churchill said whites were ‘a stronger race, a higher grade race.’ ” Churchill’s “almost Nazi belief that ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’…compelled him to engage in a number of imperial conquests.”

First, question: What imperial conquests?  Churchill said “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph” in 1901 when he was 27, the Empire long established. He spoke of “a higher grade race” to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937. Hardly reminiscent of Hitler and his plan for genocide. (N.B.: Unfortunately for him 100 years later, Churchill often said “race” when he meant “nation.” Just as he said “poison gas” when he meant tear gas—in retrospect, a bad gaffe.)

In “today’s political climate” such words sound bad. But saying “everybody thought that way in 1901 or 1937” is a poor defense of Churchill. The real defense does exist.  Anybody can read it. Perhaps “Young Reporter” should read it:

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist…. You can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense. The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights. Therefore to say that Winston Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

“B” is for Bengal Famine

“Churchill orchestrated the Bengal famine, exporting grain and being responsible for the unnecessary deaths of four million Indians.”

This vicious, tired, and hackneyed accusation has been a routine derangement since an ill-researched book made the claim a decade ago. That book was reviewed by the distinguished Gandhi biographer Arthur Herman: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine would have been Worse.” How so? All you have to do is read.

“D” is for Dung Eaters

Churchill also likened the Palestinians to {barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung}, Young Reporter writes..

This derangement is based on hearsay, though I wouldn’t dispute the context. Michael Makovsky, in his excellent work Churchill’s Promised Land, credited Malcolm MacDonald, then colonial secretary: “He told me I was crazy to help the Arabs, because they were a backward people who ate nothing but camel dung.” Makovsky wrote: “While these might not have been Churchill’s exact words the gist of the comment jibed with what he had thought of the Palestinian Arabs at least since encountering them in the early 1920s.” So Churchill had his prejudices—which didn’t stop him from urging fair treatment of Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

“E” is for Eugenics

Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races and warned the Prime Minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin, not to appoint him to Cabinet as his views on race and eugenics were so thoroughly antiquated and morally reprehensible.

Not much derangement here. Yes, circa 1912, young Churchill had a fling with Eugenics. He abandoned it within two years. Deciding it was an affront to civil liberties, he never spoke of it again. Churchill never warned Baldwin not to appoint him—from the mid-1930s he desperately wanted to be appointed. Baldwin excluded Churchill for his incessant rearmament demands. My book, Churchill and the Avoidable War, spends several chapters on all this. I would be happy to make a gift of it to Young Reporter—provided he promised to read it. By all accounts Baldwin was more of a white supremacist than Churchill.

 “G” is for Gallipoli

“Churchill was also at the helm of the diabolical Gallipoli campaign during World War II, in which tens of thousands of British civilians died unnecessarily as a result of Churchill’s needless competence.”

Yes, Young Reporter did say “World War II” and “needless competence.” He means World War I and needless incompetence. But Churchill’s diabolical helmsmanship was over the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli. He neither planned nor directed the disastrous Gallipoli landings. Also, he learned from his mistakes. After World War II he wrote of the Dardanelles: “…a supreme enterprise was cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and cardinal operation of war from a subordinate position. Men are ill-advised to try such ventures. This lesson had sunk into my nature.” Some derangement.

“H” is for Hitler

Churchill’s “sympathy for fascist ideology” begins with Hitler. In 1935, he wrote: “If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

Churchill wrote that in the Evening Standard on 17 September 1937, after he had been attacked by the Nazi press as an enemy of Germany. He said he’d been wronged, mentioning all his overtures to Germany after World War I. These included shipping food to blockaded Hamburg, repatriating prisoners, opposing France’s invasion of the Ruhr, and so on.

Before the sentence quoted, he wrote: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement.” At the time, Churchill was walking on eggs. His article had to clear the Foreign Office, anxious not to insult dear old Adolf. Even so, there is nothing that suggests “sympathy for fascist ideology.” In fact, Churchill had Hitler’s number from the get-go. You can look it up.

“I” is for Indians

“Churchill openly admitted his visceral hatred of Indians, referring to them as ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion,’ and that it was their fault for dying in the famine because they ‘bred like rabbits’ and because they were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans….’ Leo Amery, British Secretary of State for India, said Churchill ‘didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s’ {regarding race and eugenics}. “But, whilst there is mostly a general consensus that Hitler is a white supremacist, authoritarian mass murdering [expletive deleted], this tag is similarly applicable to Churchill.”

Churchill Derangement has a feast of words here. WSC did make those outbursts, frustrated with disputatious demands from Delhi in the midst of all-out war. William F. Buckley put them in context: “I don’t doubt that the famous gleam came to his eyes when he said this, with mischievous glee—an offense, in modem convention, of genocidal magnitude.” Indeed so.

Amery did say that to Churchill, “which annoyed him no little.” It was Amery’s job to plead India’s case—and Churchill’s to set priorities in a war to the death. Yet in the end, Arthur Herman explained: “Even Amery admitted…the ‘unassailable’ case against diverting vital war shipping to India.” Churchill’s appointment of Field Marshal Wavell as Viceroy ultimately eased India’s famine. “Far from a racist conspiracy to break the country, the Viceroy noted that ‘all the Dominion Governments are doing their best to help.’”

This is the same Churchill who wrote of the 2.5 million-volunteer Indian Army: “the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.” Was that derangement?

“K” is for Kurds

Churchill “was a man who advocated gassing the Kurds and who declared himself ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.’”

This Golden Oldie has been around longer even than the Bengal famine nonsense. The quote is easy trap for the gullible—if they don’t read the surrounding words…

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. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. 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. [Italics mine.]

For those of you in Rio Linda, or Wallington County Grammar School, “lachrymatory gas” is tear gas. 

“L” is for Landslide (1945)

“It is telling that as soon as those incredibly brave soldiers returned home, they helped to vote Winston Churchill out of office in large numbers, in what was a landslide victory for the most radically left-wing Labour government in history.”

It is telling, but not in that way. In 1945, Britons voted massively for the Labour opposition (hardly the most radical in history). Not because of Churchill, who was handily reelected. Voters rejected the Conservative Party, which who had brought them a decade of appeasement and war. And for Labour, which promised a grand future. “I wouldn’t call it [ingratitude],” Churchill said. “They have had a very hard time.”

“M” is for Mussolini 

Churchill was “a raving supporter of Mussolini.” He said {fascism has rendered a service to the entire world}. And: “If I were Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”

My book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, devotes a chapter to “Mussolini, Law-Giver and Jackal.” Churchill did praise Musso twice. The first time (correctly quoted above), was in 1927, when WSC was Chancellor of the Exchequer. His aim was to get Il Duce to cough up the Italian war debt. (He did get some of it.) The second was in 1940 when he tossed a few bouquets at the Italian, hoping he wouldn’t join the war with Hitler. He failed. For Churchill, Mussolini then became the “whipped jackal” yelping at the side of “the German tiger.” Early on, of course, lots of people who feared Leninism were praising Mussolini. But Churchill and the Italians delivered the final verdict. They must have suffered from Mussolini Derangement.

“N” is for Nuking the Soviets

“Churchill wanted to inflict nuclear holocaust on Soviet Union in peacetime,” Young Reporter breathlessly asserts.

The truth is less spectacular. Shortly after the war, Churchill speculated privately about taking out the Soviets in a nuclear strike. He said as much to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges. Often he voiced apocalyptic scenarios to visitors to gauge their reaction. He never formally proposed to bomb Moscow to American presidents or ambassadors.

Churchill’s formal statements took a different tack, as Graham Farmelo correctly wrote: “He soon softened his line. In the House of Commons he went no further than the words he used after British relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated again, in January 1948: the best chance of avoiding war was ‘to bring matters to a head with the Soviet Government…to arrive at a lasting settlement.’” He sought that settlement through 1955. When it continued to elude him, he retired as prime minister.

“O” is for Ordinary People

“Churchill just didn’t have the interests of ordinary working classes, or indeed anyone, other than a narrow circle of middle-class straight white men at heart.”

Granted, it was pretty hard to spot non-white folks in 1904 Britain, when Churchill began being called a “traitor to his class.” (Speaking of derangement.) Why? Because Churchill, and Lloyd George, instituted the most sweeping anti-poverty legislation in British history. Taxation, old age pensions, unemployment benefits, widows and orphans support—all initiatives of the great reforming Liberal governments. Churchill was in the vanguard. He shared an understanding of the actual causes of poverty, wrote Malcolm Hill: He did not believe the state should take all responsibility for retirement, education, health and welfare. But he showed “unusual stature” in his efforts to mitigate poverty.

Ordinary people? Churchill said in 1944: “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 diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.” Game, set and match.

“P” is for Prejudice

“Churchill’s rampant racial prejudice was considered backwards [sic], even by Victorian standards,” writes Young Reporter. “Indeed, even at the time, Churchill was seen as extremist in his ideology and at the most brutal and racist end of the British imperialist spectrum.”

By whom? Is this the same Winston Churchill who in 1899 argued with his Boer jailer in Pretoria about equal rights for black Africans? Or the Churchill remembered kindly by Gandhi for his efforts to ease inequalities for Indians in South Africa? The Churchill who, during WW2, said Americans could segregate their black soldiers if they liked, but not the British. Read the evidence. If you still want to call Churchill a racist, by all means do. But first “dig a little deeper.”

“S” is for Savages

Churchill referred to also Egyptians as “degraded savages.” He believed Pakistanis were “deranged jihadists” whose violence was explained by a {strong aboriginal propensity to kill}.

Ah, the wonders of the partial quote. By “degraded savages” Churchill was referring to a Cairo crowd which attacked the BOAC offices in January 1952. (Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 214.) In The Story of the Malakand Field Force Churchill wrote (3): “The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour.” So… Some Egyptians are savages, but not all savages are Egyptians. Some Pakistanis have an aboriginal propensity to kill, but not all killers are Pakistanis. Do I have this right? Duh!

“T” is for Tonypandy

“Churchill sent soldiers to brutally crush the strikes of hundreds of innocent, oppressed Welsh miners in Tonypandy protesting for better rights, saying, and these were his own words: {If the Welsh are striking over hunger, then we must fill their bellies with lead.}”

This derangement has been around for 100 years. Neither the quote nor the assertion are correct. Churchill specifically forbade the use of troops unless demanded by police. The last Welsh strike leader alive, Will Mainwaring, spoke to the BBC in 1960: “We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.”

“W” is for White Supremacy

In the 1955 general election, Churchill wanted the Conservatives to promote white supremacy: “The Tories should campaign on a platform of preventing {degenerate} ‘coloured’ immigration from the West Indies, along with his suggested campaign slogan for the Tories’ 1955 General election, ‘Keep England White.’”

Right in the narrow sense, wrong in the broad. Here is the reality. “Keep England White” is hearsay. It was a diary entry by Harold Macmillan after January 1955 cabinet meeting, Macmillan wrote: “The P.M. thinks ‘Keep England White’ a good campaign slogan!”

Macmillan was not given to exaggeration, but the context matters. “The P.M. thinks…” is not a quote, nor did the words ever appear in public. Macmillan followed it with an exclamation mark, which could mean that Churchill was wise-cracking. Ask yourself: Would any astute politician, even then, seriously propose “Keep England White” as a campaign slogan?

Out of context, the words seem stark. In context, Churchill was arguing for limits on Caribbean immigration. He did not discuss other black or brown people. Is this racist? We report, you decide.

“X” is for X-Rated (No attribution or off the wall)

“Churchill claimed that China was a {barbaric nation that required British partition} to bring it into civilization.” There is no attribution for this statement in his published canon.

“This was a man, who let’s not forget… force-fed the suffragettes.” Churchill force-fed nobody, opposed female suffrage only once in Parliament (when he thought more women would vote Conservative). The rest of the time he was pro-suffrage.

Truth at last!

Churchill said of Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” In the end, happily, Young Reporter stumbles over the truth:

“It would be reductive to merely credit [defeating the Nazis] to Churchill and not the role of ordinary British citizens, our allies, the 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians who died during that war, the Americans, the French Resistance and how their blood, strength, tears and sacrifice was pivotal….”

End of unreality, welcome to reality. Churchill himself said it was the British people around the world who had the lion heart. “I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” Or as Charles Krauthammer put it:

Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies [and] the great leaders: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

Young Reporter is an earnest fellow and, like many older practitioners, convinced he’s right. He “firmly rejects” Churchill’s “overstated role,” but not his overstated sins, like “the deaths of millions” in Gallipoli. But hey, he’s very young.  Perhaps by the time he reaches A-levels he’ll have developed the curiosity, and integrity, to read a bit more widely.

Judging Hitler

It is important to understand just how right Churchill was about Hitler. In May 1935 the Führer wrote a revealing letter to the British newspaper magnate Esmond Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, one of his promoters. Hitler declared he was for Anglo-German understanding. He’d worked for it for fifteen years. Their mutual enemy was Bolshevism.

An Anglo-German alliance, Hitler wrote, would combine “the unique colonial ability and sea-power of England” with “one of the greatest soldier-races of the world.” Together, Britain and Germany could ensure generations of peace—a brotherhood of man. Except for references to Aryan supremacy, the Pope might have been writing this screed.

Rothermere enthusiastically forwarded the Hitler note to Churchill—whose reply was definitive. If Hitler was suggesting Britain agree to Germany dominating the continent, Churchill replied, it would be counter to history. Britain had always been on the side of Europe’s second strongest power: “Thus Elizabeth resisted Philip II of Spain. Thus William III and Marlborough resisted Louis XIV. Thus Pitt resisted Napoleon, and thus we all resisted William II of Germany.”

* * *

In 1935, Churchill published an article on Hitler, later reprinted in part in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries. Out of courtesy to the government (courtesy existed among politicians in those days), Churchill submitted his draft to the Foreign Office. They thought it too harsh. Churchill toned it down. They still didn’t like it. (“Don’t Let’s be Beastly to the Germans,” as Noël Coward later sang.)

In his 1935 article, WSC wrote: “…history will pronounce Hitler either a monster or a hero…whether he will rank in Valhalla with Pericles, with Augustus and with Washington, or welter in the inferno of human scorn with Attila and Tamerlane.”

These words were removed from his Great Contemporaries essay, though they reappeared shortly after the book was published in “This Age of Government by Great Dictators (News of the World, 10 October 1937. None of his words materially alters Churchill’s view of the Führer.

“A Champion as Indomitable…”

Ah, replied Pat Buchanan, but what about this: “If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

Without context, “a champion as indomitable” almost seems like a testimonial. But Churchill had preceded that by saying: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement.” And Buchanan leaves out the rest:

I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. Everyone would rejoice to see in Hitler acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor….let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.

Churchill insisted he was no enemy of Germany. But he said what he thought the people should hear. So he declared that Britain would reject the “brutal intolerances of Nazidom” and “the paganism on which they are based.”

As a politician, Churchill obviously appreciated Hitler’s skill and nerve. With his innate optimism, he hoped briefly that Hitler might mellow. But in his fundamental understanding, Churchill never wavered. He was right all along. Dead right.

World War II: Firebombing Dresden

Next: World War II is the largest source of myths. An actor delivered his broadcasts. Churchill opposed the Second Front in France. He exacerbated the Bengal famine and destroyed Monte Cassino abbey. He refused to bomb Auschwitz or to feed the oppressed in occupied Europe. Well, no. But no World War II canard is more persistent than the story that Churchill firebombed Dresden in hatred and revenge for the bombing of Coventry. Continued in Part 6…

Chapter 1. Germany Arming, 1933-34

“Revisionists” claim Churchill was “for Hitler before he was against him.” To say he admired Hitler is true in one abstract sense: he admired the Führer’s political skill, his ability to dominate and to lead. With his innate optimism, he even hoped briefly that Hitler might “mellow.” In appraising Hitler, Churchill knew the truth well before most of his contemporaries.

Notable in this chapter is a pleading letter Hitler wrote to Churchill’s friend Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere. If you ignore Hitler’s references to Aryan supremacy, one might almost think it was written by the Pope.

Strife with Britain was so avoidable, Hitler wrote All his life he has worked for peace and understanding between the two dominant white races. Germany and “England” had lost the flower of a generation in World War I, and for what?

Rothermere bought Hitler’s plaints—hook, line and sinker. He sent a copy to Churchill. Churchill’s reaction to it was couched in noble words of appreciation for the British democracy and Britain’s historic role of opposing continental tyrants. It was exactly what we would expect. It helps to show that in his broad understanding of Hitler, Churchill was right all along: dead right.

Chapter 2. Germany Armed, 1935-36

It is often said that Churchill supported Hitler because of a remark which, taken out of context, makes him sound like a fan: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

This chapter provides Churchill’s surrounding words, which give a very different picture. The British statesman had only loathing for what Hitler’s policies led to. The chapter also examines Churchill’s famous and contentious essay, “Hitler and His Choice,” in the Strand Magazine, 1935, later reprinted in Great Contemporaries—and Churchill’s consistent warnings of the perils of disarmament in 1934-35.

Chapter 3. Rhineland: “Act to win,” 1936

Years later, Churchill wrote that Hitler could have been stopped when he marched into the Rhineland in 1936. On the evidence, this is true. The French army was overwhelmingly superior. Indeed Hitler had ordered his troops to turn around should they encounter French opposition. At the time, however, Churchill failed to press the issue. He met and encouraged French foreign minister Pierre Flandin, who came to London pleading for British support in a showdown with the Germans.

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin turned Flandin down flat. He didn’t know much about the Germans, Baldwin declared, but he knew his own. And the British people did not want war. Hoping for office under Baldwin, who had become prime minister with a large majority just four months earlier, Churchill chose not to buck his leader. Knowing that France was under no such constraints, Churchill clung to a hope Flandin would return and encourage French action. But the Paris cabinet was divided, and would not move without British support. There are legitimate criticisms of Churchill’s inconsistency in this episode, which belong in the history of a missed chance.

Chapter 4. Derelict State: Anschluss, 1938

In March 1938, Hitler proclaimed an Anschluss, or union with Austria. Churchill did not see this coming, though he had warned of the probability. He was also wrong in believing that the majority of Austrians were against it. I quote reliable sources showing that they were behind it by large majorities.

Ironically, to quote Manfred Weidhorn’s review of Churchill and the Avoidable War, “the performance of the Wehrmacht in the Anschluss was out of a Viennese operetta.” Mechanical breakdowns were 30%. Officers and men arrived late and untrained. VII Army Corps described its motorized vehicle situation as nahezu katastrophal (almost catastrophic). I quote one account: “Like some great malfunctioning clockwork, the Wehrmacht lurched and shuddered towards the Austrian capital. Only a few parts of it finally grated to a halt in the suburbs of Vienna one week later.”

His generals reminded an infuriated Hitler that they had warned him Germany was not ready for a major conflict. Yet, as with the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive thirty years later, operational disaster did not equate to propaganda disaster. The Nazi propaganda machine successfully convinced the world that Germany had enjoyed a glorious success. British Intelligence must have had reports of the truth. Yet the facts seemed almost to be a state secret.

Chapter 5: Munich: Mortal Folly

The Munich agreement entrenched Hitler in power. It gave him the fat prize of Czechoslovakia with its outstanding armaments industry. In the invasion of France in 1940, three of the ten panzer divisions were Czech-built. It was a classic example of wishful thinking and fatal compromise.

Yet over Munich, a curious narrative has evolved: that the agreement was actually wise, since it gave the Allies another year to arm. Less often remarked is that it also gave Germany another year to arm. Even German sources agree the Nazis were less formidable in 1938 than they were in 1939-40. What was there about fighting them a year later that made this preferable?

Well, goes the argument, Britain and France could not have defended landlocked Czechoslovakia. This is a bit silly. “It surely did not take much thought,” Churchill wrote, “that the British Navy and the French Army could not be deployed on the Bohemian mountain front.” There were other avenues open: a blockade of Germany by the mobilized Royal Navy; French action in the Rhineland. This chapter also examines the credible 1938 plot to overthrow Hitler. After Munich the plotters despaired. Later most were executed.

Chapter 6. “Favourable Reference to the Devil”: Russia, 1938-39

Munich sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate. On 14 March 1939, Catholic fascists proclaimed an independent, pro-Nazi republic of Slovakia. The next day Ruthenia seceded, only to be occupied by Hitler’s ally Hungary. Summoned to Berlin, Czech President Emil Hácha agreed to German occupation of the rest of his country. It became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—an arrangement which “in its unctuous mendacity was remarkable even for the Nazis.”

Churchill and the Avoidable War herein examines Churchill’s evaluation of the Soviet danger versus the Nazi danger; his conclusion that the latter was the greater threat; his urgent efforts, particularly with Soviet Ambassador to Britain Ivan Maisky, to encourage an understanding with Stalin; and the rebuff his prescriptions received by the British (and to some extent the Soviet) government. Sadly, while Prime Minister Chamberlain was sending low-level diplomats to negotiate with Moscow, Hitler was sending his foreign minister. Thus the surprise announcement of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which left Hitler free to attack Poland.

Chapter 7. Lost Best Hope: America, 1918-41

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917…. There would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe….”

Google this alleged 1936 statement and you’ll find a half dozen citations ascribing it to Churchill. That’s a striking reversal of his off-stated view that America was indispensable to winning World War I. As World War II approached, these alleged words resurfaced. Churchill sued the perpetrator and won.

An opportunity to welcome American support of Britain and France arrived on 11 January 1938, when President Roosevelt sent Chamberlain a message offering to mediate an easement of tensions after consulting with the British government. A golden opportunity? Chamberlain rebuffed it. Privately he complained that the Americans “are incredibly slow and have missed innumerable busses….I do wish the Japs would beat up an American or two!” His wish is fulfilled four years later at Pearl Harbor.

Chamberlain’s rebuff ended the last frail chance to save the world from catastrophe. Churchill’s memoirs were censorious:

That Mr. Chamberlain, with his limited outlook and inexperience of the European scene, should have possessed the self-sufficiency to wave away the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic leaves one, even at this date, breathless with amazement.

The lack of all sense of proportion, and even of self-preservation, which this episode reveals in an upright, competent, well-meaning man, charged with the destinies of our country and all who depended upon it, is appalling. One cannot today even reconstruct the state of mind which would render such gestures possible.

Chapter 8. Was World War II Avoidable?

This summary chapter contrasts British, French and German rearmament between Munich and the outbreak of war, and Churchill’s failed efforts to promote collective security with Russia and the United States. It examines the lost year when Chamberlain rebuffed overtures by Stalin and Roosevelt, and Hitler secured his eastern flank with a Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

Was the war really avoidable? Yes, it was—at Munich in particular—but with great difficulty. No one can underestimate the problems in the way. And yet, tantalizing opportunities existed.

“Appeasement” is not in Churchill and the Avoidable War. It is far over-used, and broadly misunderstood. It is not popular, Churchill wrote, “but appeasement has its place in all policy….

Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong. It is a terrible thing for a famous nation like Britain to do it the wrong way round…. Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances…from weakness and fear [it] is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.

There are lessons in Churchill’s Avoidable War that serve us well today. Will we listen? We rarely have.

“The Art of the Microphone”

An excellent piece on this subject was by Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965), the BBC’s first war correspondent and later its leading TV news commentator. His “Churchill the Broadcaster” is in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953). Old as it is, the book remains a comprehensive set of essays of the many specialized attributes of WSC.

Dimbleby offers four areas of discussion: the technical background, the drama of World War II, the factual material, and Churchill’s methods of delivery.

Dimbleby provides detail about how the BBC handled the wartime broadcast, which originated in vastly different places, from commodious Chequers (the PM’s official country residence) to the cramped confines of the underground Cabinet War Rooms.

“Be Quiet—Churchill’s Broadcasting”

“Churchill had a ready-made, keen, sympathetic audience,” Dimbleby wrote:

He had created enormous national confidence in himself. The great majority of the people—there were, of course, his opponents—trusted him, supported him and were avid for anything he had to say, even if his major promises were of “blood, toil tears and sweat.” Here, they felt, was a man who would say what had to be said, however unpleasant it was, and who would always hold out some hope of better things.

Of course the man himself was deeply conscious of this waiting audience, of the fact that he was speaking with authority, with a full private knowledge of the truth….

It was not only in Britain or the countries of her allies that people hung on Churchill’s words. I was told recently by a German broadcasting official who worked at Hamburg during the war that he walked into the offices one night and found normal work at a standstill. Even William Joyce, then in the full foul flood of his radio oratory as “Haw Haw,” was away from his desk. Asking what was up, the official was told to be quiet—“Churchill’s broadcasting.”

Broadcast Consistency

Churchill’s “magic of word and phrase, the forceful delivery, the mastery of language that made each of his great wartime broadcasts a pageant,” Dimbleby continued. Ironically, Churchill’s transgressions of the rules were what made him so good:

…he breaks every accepted rule of broadcasting….He drops his voice where he should raise it, he alters the recognised system of punctuation to suit himself (some of his scripts were virtually unintelligible to anyone else), he speaks much of the time with anything but clarity. Yet such is his power as an orator, and such his feeling of the public pulse, that during the war years he was sure of a silent and appreciative audience of millions, following every word and phrase with relish.

Churchill was also consistent over the years. His patterns of speech never changed. During a lecture, Dimbleby played Churchill’s very first 1909 published recording, on the Liberal Government’s budget:

There was no need for me to announce the speaker, for the first half-dozen words established his identity. The passage of nearly half a century has made virtually no difference to the voice, except to deepen and thicken it slightly. The same faint sing-song is there and the same lilting cadences, though there is never a cadence where you might expect it, at the end of a sentence. Generally the voice goes up, leaving the listener with the feeling that the sentence has not really ended at all.

These techniques were features of the special talent Churchill laid on his palimpsest of oratory. What was the real key? Dimbleby said it was “mastery of the English language.” Churchill loved words, especially in broadcasts, when he was not there to be seen to gesture or to grimace to aid his delivery. It was all based on words alone:

“Purblind Worldlings”

The historian will not fail to note that description of Mussolini as “this whipped jackal, frisking at the side of the German tiger…..” Von Ribbentrop was “that prodigious contortionist.” Those who dared to ask what Britain was fighting for were “thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings.”

The actions of Russia in October 1939, as they seemed Churchill, were “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But there was no puzzlement about the character of “Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption.” Then there were the neutral States, each one of which “hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” The crocodile was seen in another form when it turned upon Russia in June 1941…. “Now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanised armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.”

Those were fighting words, Dimbleby continued: words that made men and women in the midst of all-out war chuckle, knowing they were “exactly what they themselves would have liked to say”:

And when Britain stood alone after the fall of France, how magnificent was that sentence, “Faith is given to us, to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny.”

This was surely the art of the microphone, or the art of the orator adapted to the microphone, at a level higher than had ever been reached before or has ever been attained since.

Whatever have been Churchill’s fate in the years after the war, Dimbleby concluded—whatever public utterances he might yet make— “he will always be remembered by the people of Britain for the way in which he spoke to them in their homes when death was very near.”

Bibliography of Recordings

The first-ever bibliography of Churchill’s recordings (which include speeches and readings from his war memoirs) has been posted by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, compiled by Ronald Cohen, author of the seminal Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill.

Mr. Cohen’s new list includes the 1909 Budget speech Dimbleby alluded to, which was published in the then-new flat disc format that, in the 1920s, replaced the roller form of recording. That was, of course, a speech, not a broadcast. Broadcasting in Britain began in June 1920.

Churchill’s first broadcast, his hilarious speech about “St. George and the Dragon,” for St. George’s Day 1933, may be the earliest speech to be broadcast and recorded. Part of his remarks can be heard online: click here. I can’t help reflecting how relevant they seem, with relation to the recent nuclear deal with Iran.

Excerpt

Winston Churchill is in the news, as is often the case.  On February 11th, Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders had words of praise for Churchill’s war leadership. Vox Media has criticized him and Churchill in sharp language.  Are the criticisms of Churchill true?

During the Democrat debate on 11 February 2-16, candidates were asked to name two leaders, one American and one foreign, who would influence their policy decisions.  Senator Bernie Sanders chose Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Fair enough, we thought; they saved western civilization.

But Churchill? Of course he mounted the effort to defeat Hitler, Vox said, but Sen. Sanders put his credibility on the line. He praised “a chemical weapons enthusiast and unreconstructed racist who cut a swath of suffering and death….” Churchill’s fight against tyranny in Europe “doesn’t look quite as principled when contrasted with his commitment to maintaining it elsewhere.”

Vox Mythology

Vox offers a familiar litany of Churchill mythology, citing alleged sins which have long since been refuted by reputable historians.

1. Bengal Famine, 1943: In fact, without Churchill’s intervention, the famine would have been worse.
2. Chemical warfare, 1918-20: What Churchill referred to as “poisoned gas” was “lachrymatory gas” (tear gas). There is no evidence that he was an “enthusiast” of chemical weapons, in fact quite the contrary.
3. Black and Tans, Ireland, 1920-22: Churchill did not personally propose the Black and Tans, though he stubbornly defended them despite atrocities that exceeded their remit. Against that, credit him with a leading role in forging Ireland’s independence­.
4. Mau Mau, Kenya, 1950s: The Mau Mau uprising had as many or more native opponents as it had supporters. Both it and the colonial government indulged in atrocities. Examination of the Gilbert Papers yields only two instances where Churchill mentioned the matter in Cabinet; in one he warned against “mass executions.” Jomo Kenyatta, the father of modern Kenya, said : “Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.”

See full article.

——————————————————

“In High Places”: Munich, 1932

In “The Wilderness Years,” Robert Hardy faithfully captures Martin Gilbert’s image of Churchill in the Thirties: politically frustrated, less than effective as a father and a husband, worried over ominous developments in Germany—yet also enjoying his most productive decade as a writer and historian.

This defining excerpt is set in Munich on 30 August 1932, before Hitler gains power, as Churchill comes as close as he ever will to meeting Hitler face to face—amid sobering scenes of marching, chanting brownshirts singing Die Horst Wessel Lied.

Churchill has been touring the Danubian battlefields of the First Duke of Marlborough, whose biography he is writing. He is accompanied by his wife Clementine (Sian Phillips), their son Randolph (Nigel Havers), their daughter Sarah (Chloe Salaman), his close friend Frederick Lindemann, “The Prof” (played by David Swift). With them are Brigadier Packenham-Walsh who is drafting maps for Marlborough, and his wife (known to Churchill as “Mrs. P-W”).

At the hotel they are met by Randolph’s acquaintance and Hitler’s foreign press secretary, Harvard-educated Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl (played very accurately by Roger Bizley). Putzi hopes to introduce Churchill to his boss.

Writer-director Ferdinand Fairfax takes liberties to shorten and dramatize what actually happened. Hitler (a very grim-looking Gunter Meisner) is shown in evening dress, apparently ready to sit down with the Churchills. But first he watches furtively from a distance, and then balefully gazes through the restaurant window, catching the eye of the ever-curious Prof, who signals Hanfstaengl. Putzi tries to fetch Hitler, but is furiously turned away.

Here is what really happened. Hanfstaengl left the restaurant in mid-meal in search of the Fuhrer, who he found near his Munich apartment. “Herr Hitler,” he said, “don’t you realise the Churchills are sitting in the restaurant?…They are expecting you for coffee and will think this a deliberate insult.” Hitler said he was unshaven and had too much to do. “What on earth would I talk to him about?,” he added. “They say he is a rabid Francophile. What part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.” Hanfstaengl replied: “People say the same about you.”

Fairfax neatly gets around all this with the brief, dramatic scene we see here. True to fact, Churchill makes his famous declaration about the pitfalls of anti-Semitism, not to Hitler, but to his press secretary.

Putzi Hanfstaengl is considered reliable. Suave and westernized, he tried to exert a moderating influence, but fell out of favor in 1936. Suspecting he was marked for assassination by Goebbels, he left Germany in 1937 and wound up in the United States, where he advised Roosevelt on the Nazi regime. The anecdote is based on his 1957 book, Hitler: The Missing Years, and corroborates Churchill’s The Gathering Storm.

“Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me,” Churchill cutely wrote. In the film he says he would be glad to meet Hitler in London, but alas the Fuhrer—er—never quite got there. “Later on, when he was all-powerful,” Churchill added, “I was to receive several invitations from him. But by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself.”

This episode begins with a poignant scene between Winston and Clementine which neatly defines their marriage—one of deep mutual devotion, but needing periods of separation from time to time, lest the high-strung Clemmie collapse from the pressure. Winston longs for a closer relationship; Clementine says he should have married Goonie (Lady Gwendolyne Bertie, his sister-in-law). She wishes he would be content with things as they are.

Churchill’s critics sometimes quote sentences which they think came from his original Hitler article or Great Contemporaries, among which this is the most common:

One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.

In fact this passage is from Churchill’s article in the Evening Standard, 17 September 1937: “Friendship with Germany” (Cohen C548), subsequently reprinted in Churchill’s book of foreign affairs essays, Step by Step (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939, Cohen A111).

Churchill wrote: “I find myself pilloried by Dr. Goebbels’ Press as an enemy of Germany. That description is quite untrue.” He had made many efforts on Germany’s behalf in recent years, Churchill continued, but it was his duty to warn against German rearmament: “I can quite understand that this action of mine would not be popular in Germany. Indeed, it was not popular anywhere. I was told I was making ill-will between the two countries.”

Then Churchill adds something that is perhaps relevant to present-day situations:

I drew attention to a serious danger to Anglo-German relations which arises out of the organisation of German residents in Britain into a closely-knit, strictly disciplined body. We could never allow foreign visitors to pursue their national feuds in the bosom of our country, still less to be organised in such a way as to effect our military security. The Germans would not tolerate it for a moment in their country, nor should they take it amiss because we do not like it in ours.

Concluded in Part 3…

Part 1: “Government by Dictators”

The Hitler chapter in Churchill’s book Great Contemporaries, like the rest of the volume, was derived from a previous article. In this case the original was “The Truth about Hitler,” in The Strand Magazine of November 1935 (Cohen C481). Ronald Cohen notes in his Bibliography that Strand editor Reeves Shaw, who paid WSC £250 for the article, wanted Churchill to make it “as outspoken as you possibly can…absolutely frank in your judgment of [Hitler’s] methods.” It was.

Two years later, when Churchill was preparing his Hitler essay for Great Contemporaries, he characteristically submitted it to the Foreign Office, which asked that he tone it down. Preferring that he not publish it at all, they were somewhat mollified by the result. (See Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, London: Heinemann, 1991, 580-81). As a result of his “toning down”, the belief has persisted that Churchill wrote approvingly of Hitler, in either his book or his article—or in other writings for the British press.

On 10 October 1937, six days after publication of Great Contemporaries, Churchill published an article, “This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” his seventh installment in the series “Great Events of Our Time” for News of the World (Cohen C535.7). Here he traced the evolution of the British democracy from the feudal ages, the destruction of continental monarchies during the Great War, and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Fascists and Nazis. His Hitler paragraphs in this piece are mainly—but not wholly—from his Great Contemporaries text.

In his opening about Hitler, Churchill retreaded language from his 1935 Strand article which he had combed out of Great Contemporaries. He wrote of Hitler’s “guilt of blood” and “wicked” methods. He also inserted two sentences from the Strand which are omitted from his book:

It is on this mystery of the future that history will pronounce Hitler either a monster or a hero. It is this which will determine whether he will rank in Valhalla with Pericles, with Augustus and with Washington, or welter in the inferno of human scorn with Attila and Tamerlane.

Were those words from his Strand article retained in defiance of the Foreign Office’s wishes? Or were they there because Churchill was too good a writer not to re-use lines carefully composed two years earlier? Whatever the reason, they do not materially change Churchill’s view of Hitler—and his considerable doubt that history would come to regard Hitler in a positive light.

Continued in Part 2…

Better yet, join 60,000 readers of Hillsdale essays by the world’s best Churchill historians by subscribing. You will receive regular notices (“Weekly Winstons”) of new articles as published. Simply visit https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/, scroll to bottom, and fill in your email in the box entitled “Stay in touch with us.” Your email remains strictly private and is never sold to purveyors, salespersons, auction houses, or Things that go Bump in the Night.

Austria and the Reich

“Don’t believe that anyone in the world will hinder me in my decisions! Italy? I am quite clear with Mussolini…. England? England will not lift a finger for Austria. —Adolf Hitler to Kurt von Schuschnigg, 12 February 1938, a month before Anschluss.

* * *

Versailles dismembered the vast sprawl of Austria-Hungary. The Allies placed priority on breaking up the Hapsburg Empire. To have merged Austria with Germany would have left a larger, more populous nation than in the Kaiser’s time, Churchill never denied Germany’s grievances over penalizing clauses in the Versailles Treaty, but he misunderstood how Austrians felt. There is little doubt that most wanted Anschluss—union with Germany—from the time of Versailles on. Churchill did not accept this, and he was wrong. He was not wrong, however, about the option of resistance.

Toward Anschluss

On 23 March 1931, without informing the League of Nations, Austria and Weimar Germany concluded a customs union, causing protests, but no action, by France and Britain.

In May 1935 Hitler declared that he had no evil intent toward anyone. The Reich had guaranteed French borders, he said, including Alsace-Lorraine. Germany “neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.” The Times editor Geoffrey Dawson called Hitler’s speech “reasonable, straightforward and comprehensive…. [It] may fairly constitute the basis of a complete settlement with Germany.” As he wrote, Nazi street gangs were again active in Vienna. Ten months later Hitler marched into the Rhineland.

German approaches to Churchill

In early 1937, with Hitler’s approval, his ambassador to Britain von Ribbentrop invited Churchill to the German Embassy. He said he wanted to explain why the Reich was no threat to Britain. It is a mystery why Hitler approved his meeting with the Englishman he had refused to see in 1932, who was still politically powerless. But British hard-liners had begun to crystallize around Churchill, so muting him was worth a try.

Leading Churchill to a large wall map, Ribbentrop showed him Hitler’s desiderata. Adding Poland, Ukraine and Byelorussia, a “Greater German Reich” would span 760,000 square miles. (Germany was then 182,000, Britain 89,000.) In exchange for British acquiescence, “Germany would stand guard for the British Empire in all its greatness and extent.”

Had Churchill been the diehard imperialist as portrayed by modern media, one might expect he’d have gone along. Instead he said Britain would “never disinterest herself in the fortunes of the Continent.” Ribbentrop “turned abruptly away.” He then said, “In that case, war is inevitable. There is no way out. The Führer is resolved. Nothing will stop him and nothing will stop us….” Churchill with his vast memory recalled his reply:

When you talk of war, you must not underrate England. She is a curious country, and few foreigners can understand her mind. Do not judge by the attitude of the present Administration. Once a great cause is presented to the people, all kinds of unexpected actions might be taken by this very Government and by the British nation… If you plunge us all into another Great War she will bring the whole world against you, like last time.

Case Otto 

Hitler’s preparations for Anschluss, “Case Otto,” were completed by 1938. On February 12th, Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg  was summoned to Berchtesgaden. Hitler gretted him with threats of immediate invasion.

Schuschnigg was no democrat. As head of the right-wing Fatherland Front he ruled by decree, with anti-Semitic leanings similar to Hitler’s. Still, he was determined to preserve Austrian independence. Defying Hitler, he scheduled a plebiscite on March 13th, hoping to get a “no” vote by legalizing the outlawed socialists. Believing Austrian youth to be pro-Nazi, he raised the voting age to 24.

He was not given the chance. Austrian Nazis seized control of the government on March 11th, cancelling the referendum.

Annexation

Nazi troops entered the country and Hitler formally annexed Austria on March 12th. In a plebiscite a month later, 99.7% supposedly voted “Ja.”

Churchill argued that most Austrians opposed the Anschluss. His cousin, Unity Mitford, told him that the only Austrians against union were aristocrats: “Anschluss with the Reich was the great wish of the entire German population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, long before the war and long before Hitler was even born, though the English press would make one believe that it was the Führer who invented the idea.”

Mitford was a Hitler sycophant, but in this case she was right. Yet from the standpoint of realpolitik, it mattered not what the Austrians wanted. The Anschluss was a clear violation of the Versailles Treaty. Resistance might have precluded much that followed.

Churchill’s Prescriptions

At the plenary level, the Anglo-French muted their reaction to the Anschluss. Mussolini, as Hitler predicted, said nothing. In Parliament Churchill recognized the implications:

Vienna is the center of all the communications of all the countries which formed the old Austro-Hungarian Empire…. A long stretch of the Danube is now in German hands. This mastery of Vienna gives to Nazi Germany military and economic control of the whole of the communications of south-eastern Europe, by road, by river, and by rail….the three countries of the Little Entente may be called Powers of the second rank, but they are very vigorous States, and united they are a Great Power…. Rumania has the oil; Yugoslavia has the minerals and raw materials. Both have large armies; both are mainly supplied with munitions from Czechoslovakia.

Only months later, Neville Chamberlain would refer to Czechoslovakia as “a far-away country…of whom we know nothing.” Churchill knew something. The Czech army was three times the size of Britain’s and the Czechs were major munitions producers. They were “a virile people; they have their treaty rights, they have a line of fortresses, and they have a strongly manifested will to live freely.”

Churchill did not propose military action. What he wanted was to confront Hitler with a union of powers: “What is there ridiculous about collective security? The only thing that is ridiculous about it is that we have not got it.”

“Nothing that France or we could do…”

But to Chamberlain, the idea was ridiculous:

…the plan of the “Grand Alliance,” as Winston calls it, had occurred to me long before he mentioned it…. It is a very attractive idea [but] you have only to look at the map to see that nothing that France or we could do could possibly save Czechoslovakia from being overrun by the Germans, if they wanted to do it…. I have therefore abandoned any idea of giving guarantees to Czechoslovakia, or the French in connection with her obligations to that country.

Basing so momentous decision on geography alone is incomprehensible. A mobilized Royal Navy and French Army, together with either Austria’s eighteen divisions and the Czech army dug in their border, might have given pause even to Hitler.

“Nahezu katastrophal”

Another reason favored resistance to Anschluss: the Wehrmacht was experiencing a mechanical breakdown rate of up to 30%. This was not its only problem, as Alexander Lassner wrote:

Officers and men arrived late to their posts…mis-assigned or simply untrained for their duties. Wagons and motorized vehicles were frequently missing, inadequate for their tasks or unusable. Indeed, the German VII Army Corps alone described its supplementary motorized vehicle situation as “nahezu katastrophal” (almost catastrophic), with approximately 2800 motorized vehicles which were either missing or unusable…. Poor discipline, lack of training, and outright incompetence worsened matters, as did mechanical breakdowns and lack of fuel…

Like some great malfunctioning clockwork, the Wehrmacht lurched and shuddered towards the Austrian capital. Only a few parts of it finally grated to a halt in the suburbs of Vienna one week later. Even this dismal performance was only possible due to vital and essential assistance rendered to the Wehrmacht by Austrian gas stations, and shipping and rail services. Without this help, Hitler’s victory parade on the Ringstraße would have been conspicuously devoid of German troops and armor.

Nevertheless, as with the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive thirty years later, operational disaster does not equal military disaster. The Nazi propaganda machine, parts of which were busy running down German soldiers in their rush to get to Vienna on 12 and 13 March, would prove as successful as it had ever been. (Alexander N. Lassner, “The Invasion of Austria in March 1938: Blitzkrieg or Pfusch?” in Günter Bishof & Anton Pelinka, eds., Contemporary Austrian Studies (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publications, 2000), 447-87.)

Hitler’s “Tet Offensive”

Lassner’s likening of the invasion to the Tet Offensive is a striking comparison. Just as in 1968, the invaders’ unreadiness and lack of preparation went unseen. Just as ironically, German propaganda papered over the catastrophe. Like Tet, failure became triumph. Even Churchill did not comment at the time on this extraordinary display of military incompetence. Later Churchill understood, and he wrote:

A triumphal entry into Vienna had been the Austrian Corporal’s dream. Hitler himself, motoring through Linz, saw the traffic jam, and was infuriated…. He rated his generals, and they answered back. They reminded him of his refusal to listen to Fritsch and his warnings that Germany was not in a position to undertake the risk of a major conflict.”

The day before the Austrian Anschluss, Hermann Goering received the Czech Ambassador in Berlin: “I give you my word of honour,” he said affably, “that Czechoslovakia has nothing to fear from the Reich.”