The reader will ask: why am I plugging to a Churchill audience a set of essays by a political columnist? Answer: because many are not political, yet reflect Churchillian thought. Moreover, Dr. Krauthammer’s essay about Churchill is one of the best summaries of the man I’ve ever read. By anybody. Anywhere.

Significantly, in a book of over nearly ninety columns and essays, the Churchill article ranks second—in Part I (entitled “Personal”)—after a piece on the author’s beloved brother, Marcel, who also died young after an heroic struggle. Churchill was a very personal topic of Charles Krauthammer’s. He frequently quoted Sir Winston, always accurately.

Krauthammer’s Slant

Meg Greenfield, longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post, called the Krauthammer’s column “independent and hard to peg politically. It’s a very tough column. There’s no ‘trendy’ in it. You never know what is going to happen next.” This reminds me of Churchill. So much does. They both “crossed the aisle.” Dr. Krauthammer was once Walter Mondale’s speechwriter. Churchill ended up a Tory, “CK” a conservative. Yet it’s risky to label either of them. Perhaps we might better define them both as classical liberals.

Krauthammer’s words make everyone listen, and sometimes reconsider. For instance, he recently convinced me to abandon tradition and support a name change for the Washington Redskins: “It is simple decency to stop using a slur.” Like me, he rooted for underdogs. We were baseball fanatics who back the Washington Nationals. Being Nationals fans is no easy task. If you want easy, root for the Yankees.

Of course if you’re going to read Krauthammer’s columns, it helps if you agree with him. (Whenever I don’t have an answer to some current question I say that I have to read him first so I’ll know what to think.) But look: I have very liberal friends who also read and admire him. His death occasioned statements of respect from all areas of opinion, except the fever swamps. Don’t succumb to labels. He had his heroes, left and right. Buy the book to enjoy elegant writing, the precise layering of facts and logic, by a deeply caring man who applied serious brainpower to contemplating everything from “Borat” to the Cosmos.

Churchillian Parallels

But why spend money on a 388-page book less than 1% of which is specifically Churchill? Because there’s a lot of other material that touches his saga: the Middle East, wars in Asia, bioethics, serious enquiries into the nature of man and the universe. (Churchill covered that in Thoughts and Adventures.)

Churchill-related columns include insults (“In Defense of the F-Word”), the “Joy of Losing” (something Sir Winston knew about), how to define democracy (Churchill laid out precepts, Krauthammer laid out Albania), the Holocaust, Zionism, Language, Leadership, the question of Germany’s “collective guilt.” There’s plenty here to interest Churchillians.

* * *

“Things That Matter”—to the author as to Churchill—include: “the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space…the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, fashions and follies…manners and habits, curiosities and conundrums social and ethical. Is a doctor ever permitted to kill a patient wishing to die? Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase ‘women and children’?”

Churchill read H.G. Wells and wrote a piece asking, “Are There Men on the Moon?” Krauthammer studied Fermi and wondered: “With so many habitable planets out there, why in God’s name have we never heard a word from a single one of them?” Fermi’s answer, as CK explained, is disquieting. These are subjects, in Krauthammer’s words, that “fill my days, some trouble my nights.”

Unlike many pundits, Dr. Krauthammer laughed at himself and cultivated a sense of humor. He read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time “as a public service—to reassure my readers that this most unread bestseller is indeed as inscrutable as they thought.” Speaking of the attempts to contact alien life forms (Voyagers 1 and 2), he mentions that the greetings they carry, on behalf of all mankind, are from the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, a Nazi. “Makes you wish that we’d immediately sent out a Voyager 3 beeping frantically: Please disregard all previous messages.”

Indispensable Man

Do you to know what CK wrote about Winston Churchill? He spoke of him frequently on the air, but this essay is from the run-up to Time magazine’s “Person of the Century” sweepstakes in 1999. I’ve quoted it so often that I’ve almost memorized it. In Krauthammer’s view, Churchill was the only possible Person of the 20th Century. Einstein (Time’s pick) was “the best mind” of the century, true. But if he hadn’t invented all those theories, somebody else would have. Churchill, on the other hand, was indispensable. CK wrote:

* * *

Take away Churchill in 1940…and Britain would have settled with Hitler—or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.”

In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th century man parachuted into the 20th. But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper—to save the 20th century from itself…. The originality of the 20th surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity.

And the 20th is a single story because history saw fit to lodge the entire episode in a single century. Totalitarianism turned out to be a cul-de-sac. It came and went. It has a beginning and an end, 1917 and 1991, a run of 75 years neatly nestled into this century. That is our story.

* * *

I’m not going to spoil it by leaking any more. Here is the keynote: it comes at the end. We are asked: who are the heroes of the last century? “Who slew the dragon?” CK provides a list, from the Greatest Generation to FDR, de Gaulle, Truman, John Paul, Reagan…. “But above all victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.”

One more, very Churchillian thing: there’s no self-absorption here. Churchill was thrown out in 1915 and 1945. He simply ignored it, rebuilt his life and career. A third of the way into Krauthammer’s life, young Charles dove into a swimming pool and banged his head. He spent the last forty-four years of his life in a wheelchair. He also became a psychiatrist, a syndicated columnist, a writer, a husband and father, a TV personality, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Now that’s a Churchilllian performance.

________

This review is updated from the original in The Churchillian, a publication of the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library, Fulton, Missouri, Winter 2013. To hear Dr. Krauthammer himself on his book at Politics and Prose Bookshop, click here.

In four essays in his 1932 book Thoughts and Adventures (taken from earlier writings), Churchill contemplated the future. He identified future trends which would affect the evolution of democracy, constitutional government, and the evolution of society. Those essays were remarkably prescient. Moreover, they offer reflections upon issues as prominent today as they were eight decades ago. Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read the complete article click here.

“The relevance of the life of Winston Churchill to our time is apparent in the newspaper any day,” writes Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn. “It is not so much that the great world wars and the Cold War shaped the future, although they did. The problem of rule, say the old philosophers, is fundamental. If this is our problem, then Churchill is a man to study.”

“Mass Effects in Modern Life,” 1931

Many an advance in science, technology and communication, Churchill argued, “suppresses the individual achievement.” He deplored the rise of the collective at the expense of the individual.

The newspapers do a lot of thinking for us, Churchill wrote. Substitute “media” for “newspapers” and he could be speaking today. He worried about superficiality. True, media provides “a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial.” Such a process, taken to its ultimate ends, would produce “standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party.”

“Consistency in Politics,” 1927

Here Churchill discusses political conduct—something that concerns, or should concern, us today. Consistency is a virtue, he declared—but the key to consistency amid changing circumstances “is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.” In part here, as John Grigg wrote, Churchill was “explaining away his own falls from grace. [He] had learned from bitter experience that there are limits beyond which no minister, however talented, energetic, or masterful, dare ignore his officials’ advice.”

This essay illustrates the differences between principle and action. Examples abound today. There is energy production, Putin’s Russia, the economic challenge of Asia, the European Union’s attempt to replace traditional nation-states, trade relationships amidst subsidized or nationalized industries, the growing role of the State in the economy. Say an official comes out for tariffs, but later exempts certain countries out of friendship or negotiation. If he maintains the same dominating purpose—in this case free and fair trade—he is, or may be, adapting to circumstances.

Churchill could have been thinking of opinion polls when he added: “The stimulus of a vast concentration of public support is almost irresistible in its potency.” Are not ideas that contribute to the growth of the collective dangerous to liberal democracy?

A statesman, he concluded, “should always try to do what he believes is best in the long view for his country, and he should not be dissuaded from so acting by having to divorce himself from a great body of doctrine to which he formerly sincerely adhered.”

“Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” 1924

This essay forecasts the hope and danger of a future nuclear age. Written fifteen years before Einstein sent his famous letter to Roosevelt, warning of implications of splitting the atom, Churchill’s message thunders to us across the years. We face the specter of nuclear weapons in the hands of people we think might actually use them:

May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?

Mankind, Churchill continues,

has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination….Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now—for one occasion only—his Master.

 “Fifty Years Hence,” 1931

Churchill anticipated the effects of science and communication—biotechnology, cell phones, television, air travel, the digital age of instant information. They were “projects undreamed of by past generations.” They represented “forces terrific and devastating…comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures.” Juxtaposed with them is the unchanging nature of man:

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. Under sufficient stress—starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy—the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up.

Can humans change their nature sufficiently to prosper in a future world where pleasures and dangers crowd in upon them? Governments, Churchill writes, in lines that seem apposite now,

drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Never was there less continuity or design in their affairs, and yet towards them are coming swiftly changes which will revolutionize for good or ill not only the whole economic structure of the world but the social habits and moral outlook of every family.

Thoughts for today

Again this is remindful of a later time. Critics say we are replacing the moral compass of religion with a kind of secular humanism. Vague internationalism, an urge simply to do right, is weak without a moral underpinning. Churchill fears such developments. It was vital, he writes, “that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions.” It would be better, in his view, even to call a halt to material progress, “than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs.”

Today’s challenges are not the same as those of Churchill’s era. It is foolish, wrote Professor Paul Alkon, to believe our times are simply a replay of his. Churchill’s lasting value lies in his approach. Not precisely to what he did, but to the broad principles that motivated him. He lived by these concepts: liberty, individuality, courage, magnanimity. They are precepts of his country and its relatives across the seas. Combined, he saw them as a force for good.

Further Reading

“Three Aspects of Modern Life That Kept Winston Churchill Up at Night,” by Bre Payton in The Federalist. This is review of the latest installment of Dr. Arnn’s “Winston Churchill and Statesmanship” course, which you may take free online: click here.

Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government, by Dr. Larry P. Arnn, is a scholarly exposition of these and other Churchill thoughts on the future of constitutional democracy.

Thoughts and Adventures by Winston S. Churchill. “It is like being invited to dinner at Chartwell… The soup was limpid, the champagne flowed, the pudding had a theme, and Churchill held forth in vivid conversation.”

Mr. Stern himself offers only one Churchill quote and gets it right: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” (Colliers, 28 December 1935.)

Bingo! That’s an obscure one. Forgive him for vastly exaggerating Churchill’s alcohol intake. (WSC’s “six whisky sodas” were described by his private secretary as “scotch-flavored mouthwash.”)

A Stern list…

The list of Presidential tweets quoting Churchill, as provided by Mr. Stern, suggests a middling score on the accuracy meter. Many fall into the category of “Churchillian Drift.”

These are pure fiction: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life” … “If you’re going through hell, keep going” … “Socialists think profits are a vice. I consider losses the real vice” … “Success is not final, failure is not fatal” … “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” … “However beautiful the strategy you should occasionally look at the results” … “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference” … “Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.”

So who coined those? Who knows?  As a wise man once said: “If you don’t know the author of a choice quote, credit it to Churchill, Einstein, Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. Everybody will be impressed, and they all said so much that nobody knows the difference.” But Churchill rarely indulged in gratuitous flatulence and preaching.

* * *

Some of the President’s Churchill tweets are close, but Churchill’s exact words are better: “Each one [of the neutral nations] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last” (20 January 1940) … “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary” (7 March 1916) … “The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion” (21 September 1938) …“…never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense” (29 October 1941).

The President’s versions of these were minor deviations, but he did get one exactly right: “The price of greatness is responsibility.” (Harvard, 6 September 1943). We all of us might ponder that one.

A popular weekly half hour podcast, Revisionist History takes aim at shibboleths, real and imagined. This episode is Churchill’s turn in the barrel.

Scientific Nemesis

The villain, aside from Sir Winston, is his scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann,  later Lord Cherwell, aka “The Prof.” You’ve probably never heard of him, says narrator Malcolm Gladwell. You should have. It was Lindemann who made Churchill bomb innocent German civilians and starve the Bengalis.

Ironically, the program begins with an ad for its sponsor, Chanel Perfume. After World War II Coco Chanel—“fierce, precious, sovereign,” the ad says—was spared from prosecution as a Nazi collaborator. Churchill, renowned for his loyalty to friends, rescued her. I doubt Mme. Chanel would have sponsored this program.

Accompanied by background music, uplifting or ominous as required, Mr. Gladwell unfolds his case. He claims to have read six books on Lord Cherwell (whose title he mispronounces). But his only two quoted sources are the British scientist C.P. Snow¹ (very selectively; Snow admired Churchill); and Madhusree Mukerjee, author of a widely criticized book on the Bengal Famine.² There are no contrary opinions or evidence.

The Prof: Facts and Fantasies

Lindemann met Churchill in 1921; they became fast friends. Prof had the knack of being able to reduce complicated scientific theories to a form anyone could understand. Churchill relied on his insights during Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s. In World War II, Lindemann played a key role in development of Britain’s “wizard weapons.” One of these was “H2S,” a surface mapping radar, one version of which enabled aircraft to locate surfaced submarines. He was a crack tennis player, a dazzling conversationalist, a formidable debater, a brilliant scholar. Colleagues compared him to Isaac Newton.

But Gladwell, often quoting Snow, sees Lindemann in the worst light. He cites unprovable mental attitudes—“ill at ease in the presence of black people,” for example. (We could equally ask: was Snow envious of Lindemann? Who knows?)

Snow describes Lindemann as tall, thin, pallid, Germanic, “quite un-English.” He dined on cheese, whites of eggs, rice and olive oil, and drank only at Churchill’s table. He carried with him “an atmosphere of indefinable malaise.” He was “venomous, harsh-tongued, malicious, with a sadistic sense of humour. He made a novelist’s fingers itch.” The Prof is described as “lacking in the bond of human sympathy for every chance person who was not brought into a personal relationship with him.” This, Gladwell says, was “the crucial fact about him.” It would seem a crucial fact about many people.

Was Lindemann Anti-Semitic?

Lindemann, Gladwell notes, once even tried to upstage Albert Einstein—“he didn’t like Jews very much.” He asserts this without evidence. We don’t know the truth of it. But here is a counterpoint: Lindemann booked Einstein’s lectures in England and, after Hitler came to power helped Einstein rescue Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany.³  Surely this must be considered in evaluating Lindemann’s attitude toward Jews. There is more on this, in Lindemann’s official life by the second Lord Birkenhead:

Lindemann’s dislike of Jews and the sneers which he sometimes directed against the Jewish people [was] an unworthy prejudice which was never more than skin deep. In Berlin he had come into contact with many brilliant Jews whom he had admired, and when the Hitler persecution began he went to Germany and persuaded some of the greatest Jewish physicists in Europe to join him at the Clarendon Laboratory. With all these men…he remained on terms of admiration and affection, and Professor [Sir Francis] Simon in particular became a lifelong friend.”⁴

Lindemann’s Influence

That’s the wind-up; here’s the pitch: We are asked why a leader like Churchill could promote such a flawed adviser. Why Lindemann had the power to overrule everyone, even to dictate policy? C.P. Snow: “If you are going to have a scientist in a position of absolute power, the only scientist among non-scientists, it is dangerous whoever he is.”

But Mr. Gladwell is misled. Churchill did not give Lindemann absolute power. Nor was he Churchill’s only scientific adviser. Gladwell makes the error of many revisionists before him: attributing to a single crony far more influence than he had.

Lindemann and Bombing Policy

Snow deplored Lindemann’s influence on Britain’s bombing of Germany.⁵ “The Prime Minister and the Prof” says Lindemann’s support for bombing civilian over military targets was accepted without qualm. This, we are told, led to the devastation of “innocent people” in German cities. According to Gladwell, Peter Blackett, another scientific adviser, believed that “the war could have been won six or twelve months earlier had bombers been used more intelligently.”

But hold on: another scientific adviser? Was Lindemann not the only one?

Not mentioned by Gladwell is a pantheon of scientific advisers—including Sir Henry Tizard, Solly Zuckerman and J.D. Bernall—who declared Lindemann’s estimates of civilian bomb damage 500% too high. Ironically, Lindemann had brought all of them to Churchill’s attention. For a loner so disdainful of others, Prof had an odd knack of recruiting brilliant people who disagreed with him.

* * *

Also contrary to Revisionist History, Churchill maintained independence of thought. His private secretary, Jock Colville, wrote: “Many people made the mistake of thinking that somebody—it might be General Ismay or Professor Lindemann—for whom the Prime Minister had the utmost respect and affection—would be able to ‘get something through,’ [but] unless the Prime Minister was himself impressed by the argument, pressure by others seldom had any effect….he was never persuaded by the fact that those who argued a certain course were people whom he liked and respected.”⁶ We do not get this impression from “The Prime Minister and the Prof.”

Actually, Churchill’s ultimate decision on bombing completely pleased neither Lindemann nor his opposition. To understand this, we need to know something about the argument—which the podcast doesn’t cover.

Britain’s Air Staff formuated its area bombing strategy during ​late 1941.​ The War Cabinet approved it in February 1942, before ​Arthur “​Bomber​”​​Harris’s appointment to Bomber Command. ​While Lindemann had a hand in the decision​, his​ famous 30 March ​memo arguing for prioritizing bombing cities ​and made no difference to the policy already agreed, though it reinforced the case. The scientists did not argue over area bombing—which had already been decided—but over ​Lindemann’s statistics.

Bomber Allocations

The real argument was over allocation of new bomber production, and bombers sent by the USA to the skies over Germany (under Bomber Command) or the U-boat menace to the Western Approaches (Coastal Command). Although Lindemann favored the former. Bomber Harris questioned his figures,  saying, “Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide-rules?”⁷ Professor Antoine Capet, in a recent study of Lindemann’s role, explains what really happened:

It was a wonderful row by serious people, all devoted to Churchill and the war but pulling in opposite directions…. Blackett, for instance, was known for his principled opposition to bombing civilians (and, it must be mentioned, his profound dislike of Lindemann)…. Tizard, who also disliked Lindemann, was a great believer in attacking the U-boats…. Zuckerman and Bernal agreed.

Bomber Command had a slight priority, if only to placate Stalin, who was loudly denouncing Britain’s lack of enthusiasm for a Second Front. Bombing Germany was the only “front” Churchill could offer. Likewise, the British public demanded retaliation after German air raids. Nevertheless, planes allocated to Coastal Command were sufficient to rid the Western Approaches of U-boats by the end of 1943.⁸

Thus, contrary to Revisionist History, Lindemann did not get everything he wanted. Churchill, as usual, made up his own mind. Paradoxically, Professor Capet adds, Lindemann’s role in the development of H2S enabled bombers to sink U-boats in vast numbers. “The postwar official history apportioned praise: ‘Cherwell did for Bomber Command what Tizard did for Fighter Command—he gave it the scientific means of becoming an effective instrument of war.’”⁹

The Bengal Famine

Mr. Gladwell next turns to the Bengal Famine, which broke out in autumn 1943. “Pleas for grain to relieve the famine went to Lindemann,” we are told, and “Lindemann said no.” Interviewed, Madhusree Mukerjee says Australian ships loaded with wheat sailed “right past India.” Churchill “was adamant that England could not help India.”

Whereas Lindemann played a key role in bombing policy, there is little to connect him with decisions on the Bengal Famine. Those involved the War Cabinet, the Ministers of Food and Transport, the fighting departments, and the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery. Lindemann is not prominent in War Cabinet discussions of India. Churchill, however, frequently expressed his sympathy for the suffering. A sample from the small mountain of evidence:

1943

• Churchill to the new Viceroy, Field Marshall Wavell, 8Oct43: Churchill enumerates Wavell’s duties: 1) defense of India from Japanese invasion and 2) “material and cultural conditions of the many peoples of India.” Churchill implores Wavell “to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good.”¹⁰

• Leo Amery, House of Commons, 12Oct43: Shipping was provided for “substantial imports of grain to India in order to meet prospects of serious shortage.” Despite a good spring harvest, another shortfall occurred. Britain is making “every effort to provide shipping, and considerable quantities of food grains are now arriving or are due to arrive before the end of the year.”¹¹

• Churchill to Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 4Nov43: Churchill thanks King for offering 100,000 tons of Canadian wheat, but this would compromise King’s shipments of Canadian timber and Chilean nitrate for the war effort. Canadian wheat would take “at least two months” to reach India. From Australia it would take only “three to four weeks.” So the War Cabinet is shipping wheat from Australia, adding the 100,000 extra tons.¹²

1944

• War Cabinet Conclusions, 14Feb44: Churchill is “most anxious that we should do everything possible to ease the Viceroy’s position.” But the Minister of War Transport says he cannot continue 50,000 tons a month of imported wheat. Instead he proposes sending Iraqi barley, “cutting the United Kingdom import programme.…”¹³ (Alas Indians refused to consume barley.)

• War Cabinet Conclusions, 24Apr44: India’s needs have grown to 724,000 tons, far beyond the latest shipment of 200,000, due to unseasonable weather and the loss of 45,000 tons in a Bombay explosion. Given the danger, “we should now apprise the United States of the seriousness of the position.” Churchill says the government will replace the 45,000 tons, but can provide further relief only “at the cost of incurring grave difficulties in other directions.” At the same time “his sympathy was great for the sufferings of the people of India.”¹⁴

Appeal to FDR

• Churchill to President Roosevelt, Personal Telegram, 29Apr44: “Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died…. I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more. I’ve had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India…. I am no longer justified in not asking for your help.”

Roosevelt replied that while the appeal had his “utmost sympathy,” the Joint Chiefs were unable to divert the necessary shipping.¹⁵

These are a few of the statements, letters, minutes and telegrams attesting to Churchill’s and the War Cabinet’s effort to ease the Bengal Famine. Together they provide overwhelming evidence. The Cabinet tried everything possible, in the midst of a war for survival. And it accomplished a great deal. Without that aid, the famine would have been worse.

What Churchill Believed  

“In wartime,” Revisionist History correctly states, “countries operate right at the brink.” There is scant evidence that Mr. Gladwell comprehends this. Ms. Mukerjee quotes Churchill in his war memoirs: India was “carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.” It is more illuminating to consider the rest of Churchill’s statement:

But all this is only the background upon which the glorious heroism and martial qualities of the Indian troops who fought in the Middle East, who defended Egypt, who liberated Abyssinia, who played a grand part in Italy, and who, side by side with their British comrades, expelled the Japanese from Burma….

The loyalty of the Indian Army to the King-Emperor, the proud fidelity to their treaties of the Indian Princes, the unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war….upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces, and by 1942 an Indian Army of one million was in being, and volunteers were coming in at the monthly rate of fifty thousand….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.”¹⁶

Let us consider those fine words before labeling Churchill an unrepentant racist who hated Indians and was content to let them starve.

From Counterfactuals to Howlers

Revisionist History commits a number schoolboy howlers: “Throughout his life Churchill lost huge amounts on investments.” (No, he mainly lost in the Depression, like everybody else.) “There was no order to Churchill’s life.” (How could a life without order produce fifty books, 2000 articles, 5000 speeches, a Nobel Prize, and high office for half a century?) Churchill’s champagne cost “the modern equivalent of $62,000” in 1935. (Yes, but as a politician he entertained lavishly; it was part of his overhead.)

Counterfactuals abound: “Churchill hated Gandhi.” (At times perhaps, but they ended with mutual respect.¹⁷) Churchill becomes prime minister “just after the war breaks out.” (Nine months later.) “There should have been a proper debate about strategic bombing in the British War Cabinet.” (There was: see above.) “To an Englishman of that generation, the only living creature you’re allowed to show affection for is your dog.” (Churchill alone contradicts that.)

“Bombing innocent people,” an appalling practice, began with the Luftwaffe over Warsaw and Rotterdam. Most of the adults among those innocent people put Hitler in power. Most loved what he said about Jews and other Untermenschen, and sustained him to the end. The worst of them then claimed they were just following orders, or didn’t know what was going on. Give us, please, broader examples of innocent people.

“He sweetened English life”

Mr. Gladwell quotes C.P. Snow so liberally to condemn Churchill that it is necessary to correct the record.“Brilliant, but without judgment” was the common description of Churchill before the war. But judgment, Snow says, has two meanings:

The bad thing is the ability to sense what everyone else is thinking and think like them. This Churchill never had, and would have despised himself for having. But the good thing in “judgment” is the ability to think of many matters at once, in their interdependence, their relative importance and their consequences….Not many men in conservative Britain had such insight. He had. That was why he could keep us going when it came to war and we were alone. Where it mattered most, there he was right. And that is why we shall never deny our gratitude.¹⁸

Writing after Churchill’s death, Snow penned words “The Prime Minister and the Prof” doesn’t include. I warmly recommend them to its sponsors and producers, and to anyone whose lack of understanding leads them far afield:

It was Churchill’s own high-hearted behaviour that became the substance of his myth. People wanted something to admire that seemed to be slipping out of the grit of everyday. Whatever could be said against him, he had virtues, graces, style. Courage, magnanimity, loyalty, wit, gallantry—these were not often held up for admiration in our literature, or indeed depicted at all. He really had them. I believe that it was deep intuition which made people feel that his existence had after all sweetened English life.¹⁹

Endnotes

1. C.P. Snow (1905-1990), novelist and civil servant, technical director in the Ministry of Labour in WW2. At Harvard in 1960, Snow heavily criticized Lindemann in his wartime arguments over strategic bombing with Sir Henry Tizard.
2. See for example Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, India’s 1943 Famine Would Have Been Worse,” (review of Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War), in Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11, 50-51.
3. See Klaus Larres, “Churchill and Einstein: Overlapping Mindsets,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 22 November 2016.
4. Lord Birkenhead, The Prof in Two Worlds (London: Collins, 1961), 24.
5. “A Point of View: Beware of Experts,” BBC News Magazine, 9 December 2011.
6. Sir John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955. 2 vols. Sevenoaks, Kent: Sceptre Publishing, 1986-87, I 145.
7. R.V. Jones, “Churchill and Science,” in Robert Blake & Wm. Roger Lewis, Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 437.
8. Antoine Capet, “Scientific Weaponry: How Churchill Encouraged the ‘Boffins’ and Defied the ‘Blimps,’ in The Churchillian, National Churchill Museum, Winter 2013, 13.
9. Ibid.
10. Martin Gilbert & Larry P. Arnn, The Churchill Documents, vol.19, Fateful Questions September 1943 to April 1944 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2017), 421.
11. Hansard, the Parliamentary Debates, ibid., 474-45
12. Churchill Papers 20/123, ibid., 784-85.
13. Cabinet Papers, 65/41. ibid., 1740-42.
14. Cabinet Papers, 65/42, ibid. 2553-54.
15. Churchill Papers, 20/163, ibid., 2587. Roosevelt to Churchill, 1 June 1944 in The Churchill Documents, vol. 20 (Hillsdale College Press: forthcoming).
16. Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1950, 181-82)
17. Richard M. Langworth, “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi,” The Weekly Standard, 21 July 2014.
18. C.P. Snow, “We Must Never Deny Our Gratitude,” Reader’s Digest, 26 February 1963, 67-71.
19. C.P. Snow, A Variety of Men (London: Macmillan, 1967), 129-30.