From the Book of Maccabees

On 19 May 1940, Churchill made his first broadcast as Prime Minister, a speech which lifted the hearts even of former critics:

A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders. The Germans, by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks, have broken through the French defences north of the Maginot Line, and strong columns of their armoured vehicles are ravaging the open country, which for the first day or two was without defenders. They have penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their track. Behind them there are now appearing infantry in lorries, and behind them, again, the large masses are moving forward.[11]

In assuring his listeners that Britain would fight on, Churchill chose a majestic but obscure Biblical allusion. It was his first and only use of it. It proved to be exactly right for the occasion:

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the Outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.[12]

Origins: “Men of Valour”

Even some Biblical scholars were uncertain about the origins of this phrase, and with good reason. It is from the First Book of the Maccabees, a text missing in many Bibles. Also, Churchill altered the quotation. He either remembered badly, or the writer in him could not resist an editorial improvement. The original words were:

 58. And Judas said, Arm yourselves, and be valiant men, and see that ye be in readiness against the morning, that ye may fight with these nations, that are assembled together against us to destroy us and our sanctuary: 59. For it is better for us to die in battle, than to behold the calamities of our people and our sanctuary. 60. Nevertheless, as the will of God is in heaven, so let him do.[13]

There are two Books of the Maccabees, also spelled “Machabbes,” neither of which is in the Hebrew Bible but both of which appear in some manuscripts of the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, since they are canonical to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. They are also included in the King James Apocrypha, which is where Churchill read them.

“Imperishable resolve.”

Churchill’s first broadcast as Prime Minister caught the imagination of millions. Sir Martin Gilbert has collected some of those reactions that very evening, Trinity Sunday, 19 May, 1940,

Anthony Eden wrote: “You have never done anything as good or as great. Thank you, and thank God for you.” Lord Halifax, who nine days later would urge approaching the Germans for an armistice, was momentarily bowled over: “It was worth a lot,” he wrote from the Foreign Office, “and we owe you much for that, as for a great deal else, in these dark days.” The Evening Standard declared the broadcast a speech of “imperishable resolve.”[14]

The most unexpected was a note from Churchill’s old chief and sometime nemesis Stanley Baldwin, who had done more than any other British leader to put the country in so perilous a state of readiness, but who on 19 May was moved more perhaps than any other:

My dear PM, I listened to your well known voice last night and I should have liked to have shaken your hand for a brief moment and to tell you that from the bottom of my heart I wish you all that is good—health and strength of mind and body—for the intolerable burden that now lies on you. Yours always sincerely, SB [15]

Q: Did Churchill conduct business in bed?

“I am a criminologist currently researching my next book and I need to know something about Churchill briefing colleagues from his bed. Is this true?  Did Churchill work from his bed? I rather get the impression that he did, but why was this not seen as odd behaviour, the bedroom being private?” —D.W., England

A: True if odd

Churchill occasionally received visitors in bed, more at Downing Street than at Chartwell, where he had better control of visitor timing. The following is from Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary, by Anthony Montague Browne (1995), 114. “Toby” is described below.

During the morning, Ministers (or those he knew well enough) were received at his bed. R.A. Butler (“Rab”), the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had a large bald head that Toby* found particularly attractive as a perch, with inevitable avian consequences. Butler mopped his head with a spotless silk handkerchief and sighed patiently: “The things I do for England.”

Ministers who sought to call on WSC were not always welcome, particularly if he was working on a speech. On these he lavished more concentration and more anxiety than any other business. On my way up to WSC’s bedroom on one such morning, I was intercepted by Butler and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, who had just come in unexpectedly. “We must speak to Winston urgently,” said Eden….

They stopped outside the open bedroom door while I went in. “The Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor are here and say they must see you urgently,” I announced portentously. WSC looked up irritably: “Tell them to go and bugger themselves,” he ordered and returned to his speech notes.

I retreated, pondering on a suitable paraphrase. (“The Prime Minister hopes that you will forgive him for the moment as he has reached a crucial point in his speech,” perhaps.) A shout followed me from the bed: “There is no need for them to carry out that instruction literally!” From the faces in the corridor it was all too clear that they had heard both messages.”

*Toby: Sir Winston’s airborne assistant

Toby was a budgerigar (parakeet) presented to WSC in 1954 by Dido Cairns, sister of Christopher Soames, his parliamentary private secretary. See The Churchill Documents, vol. 23, Never Flinch, Never Weary, November 1951- February 1965 (Hillsdale College Press 2019).

Toby quickly insinuated himself into Churchill’s affections and traveled everywhere with him. He learned to drink, and WSC once had to fish him out of a brandy glass. He perched on visitors’ heads, leaving tokens of esteem—“hoping to be remembered,” according to Churchill.

The bird often nibbled at books and manuscripts, Piers Brendon wrote, “thus indicating, in his master’s view, that he had read them. A secretary showed Churchill a set of nibbled page proofs: ‘Oh! Yes, that’s all right,” said WSC—”give him the next chapter.’”

In 1960, to Churchill’s great distress, Toby flew out of a Monte Carlo hotel window. An urgent search failed to recover him. A replacement could not match Toby’s personality. (See Churchill’s Bestiary, 54.)

Further reading

For more on Winston Churchill’s daily routine and animal companions:

Cole Feix, “Churchill’s Character: A Rigid Daily Schedule,” 2019.

Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill’s Daily Routine (Or: ‘You Can’t Get Good Help Anymore’),” 2020.

Review: “The Brendon Bestiary: Churchill’s Animals as Friends and Analogies,” 2019.

On 27 June 1954, Churchill was quoted as saying “jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” (William H. Lawrence, “Churchill urges Patience in Coping with Red Dangers,” The New York Times, page 1; and Walter Trohan, “‘Vigilance and Time’ Asked by Churchill,” Chicago Daily Tribune, page 1. Did Churchill say this? —M.D.

No. From my Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, page 37:

“Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” —1954 Commonly misquoted as ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,’ an expression coined four years later by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, on a visit to Australia.

I verified this from Sir Martin Gilbert who referred to his official biography, Volume 8, Never Despair, (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), page 1004: “Churchill then told the American legislators…that conferences of this kind were vitally important, that meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.”*

* footnote 1: “On 30 January 1958 Harold Macmillan, speaking in Canberra, echoed Churchill’s words with the phrase (frequently but wrongly attributed to Churchill himself), ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.’” Also page 1005 footnote 1: “’Notes on remarks by the President and the Prime Minister at the Congressional Luncheon at the White House, Saturday afternoon, June 26, 1954’: Eisenhower papers.”

Several newspaper accounts appeared at the time, quoting Churchill as saying “jaw-jaw…” etc.. Clearly, the newspapers inaccurately quoted Churchill before Macmillan used the phrase “jaw-jaw” (which may explain where Macmillan picked it up).

The Lawrence report again (2021):

The jaw-jaw business continues to resurface. Another reader writes:

William H. Lawrence was not a cub journalist, but The New York Times Senior Washington Correspondent when he wrote the subhead the day after WSC’s meeting with Congress: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” He went on, quoting congressional sources: “Turning to the Far East the Prime Minister volunteered that he was a strong supporter of ‘peaceful co-existence with China.’ ‘I know” he said, “that some think this is almost heresy. Nevertheless Eden’s two words are pretty good words—to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Other newspapers reported somewhat differently but Lawrence had the stature of reliable sources to get this quote in its richness from the “no press” meeting. It wasn’t just the front page subhead but the detailed  follow-on that lends credibility.

Now compare this detail to your recitation and acceptance of Gilbert’s contrary quotation—almost a throwaway line. Did he get it from a copy of speech notes that might have been changed— did he hear it— did someone tell him? We don’t know because he cited no source. Even Gilbert is challengeable, given a detailed quote from a respected senior journalist—versus his unattributed throwaway line. Macmillan’s use of the quote attributing it to WSC later reinforces it. He certainly had time to verify it before using it, rather than simply taking it from a newspaper headline.

Either not verbatim, nor not 1954:

This argument is unpersuasive and doesn’t challenge Martin Gilbert’s conclusions. 1) Lawrence has Churchill referring to “Eden’s two words,” but so far as we know, Anthony Eden never voiced them. 2) Sir Martin did offer a source (Official Biography VIII, 1004.): “Notes on remarks by the President and the Prime Minister at the Congressional Luncheon at the White House, Saturday afternoon, June 26, 1954, Eisenhower Papers.” 3) Stature as a journalist doesn’t preclude someone from making a mistake. 4) Even if Lawrence was reporting what he thought Churchill said, that is not dispositive. A transcript or official summary, such as the Eisenhower Papers, is not a “throwaway line.”

In April 1995 Johnson, then a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, deplored the £12.5 million purchase of Churchill Papers for the nation. The lottery-supported National Heritage Memorial Fund, said Johnson, was frittering away money on pointless projects and benefiting Tory grandees. Johnson added: “…seldom in the field of human avarice was so much spent by so many on so little …”

The Memorial Fund replied the Churchill Papers were a national heirloom under threat of being sold outside the country. Johnson snorted that they had simply “run out of sporting and artistic projects to endow.” His “unsentimental approach to Churchill’s records may seem surprising given that in 2014 he published a eulogistic biography of the former Conservative premier,” wrote The Guardian. 

I remember the Great Churchill Papers Flap very well, having published articles about it back then. It is the same tempest in a teapot today that it was in 1995. Except that nowadays, Churchill and his memory are fair game to grunting mobs and virtue-signaling nannies. So the whole business is again somehow newsworthy.

A threat to Britain’s heritage

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s foremost biographer, called the Churchill Papers “the largest single private repository of recent British history.” Their acquisition, he said, was “an imaginative stroke of national policy.” Among other triumphs, the Papers inform thirty-one volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the longest biography on the planet.

Scholars have long mined these fifteen tons of documents. Many individual items have been reproduced. It was the possibility that they might be sold to an overseas buyer, Gilbert explained, that focused concern on their physical future:

The first alarm involved certain specific documents, such as Churchill’s wartime speeches, which clearly constitute part of the national heritage. Photocopies and reproductions are all very well, but the actual pieces of paper are what matters. The originals alone convey the full sense of historical drama.

The idea that Churchill’s final draft of “we will fight on the beaches” would end up in a library overlooking a beach in the Pacific, or some other distant shore, was not attractive. As a result of the decision to use National Lottery money to secure the Churchill Papers, it is not only letters written by Churchill that are to be preserved in this country and guarded, as hitherto, in the specially designed archives of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Sir Martin explained that “Churchill’s Papers” are very much more than his own notes and monographs. Of course they include handwritten or typed manuscripts of books and speeches, if not copies of his own letters. He also kept every letter that he received. “These letters, written to him, constitute the real historical value of this collection.”

A great glory saved

Churchill’s original letters reside in 500 libraries and archives around the world. The Churchill Papers, however, represent the whole range British history. Sir Martin offered examples:

Here we have letters from David Lloyd George, setting out the most radical proposals for social reform before the First World War. Here we have Lord Kitchener’s letters during the early months of the First World War, including the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition. We see here the Irish leaders on both sides struggling for a compromise to end the civil war. Here, too are Labour leaders negotiating with Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to resolve the 1926 coal strike. Secretly, they visited him at a house in London to work out a compromise.

Throughout the 1930s the Churchill Papers abound in letters from civil servants, airmen and members of the intelligence community. They sent secret information, much of it from Nazi Germany, enabling Churchill to wage his campaign for greater rearmament. While his own letters consist in the main of carbon copies, it is the originals from other people that are the great glory of the papers saved for the nation.

A letter from his good friend Val Fleming (father of Ian) describes the slaughter on the Western Front. There is a letter from his brother Jack describing the first awful moments of the Dardanelles campaign. Letters from his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, are full of the political gossip of 1916. There are letters from Admiral “Jackie” Fisher urging Churchill to return from the trenches and break the government. Churchill did return, but his efforts to harm the government in debate were a dismal failure.

A rich seam of historical gold

“The Papers represent every twist and turn of British political debate,” Sir Martin continued. Every file contains gems. “Having read and edited them all, I can only conclude that the Churchill archive will provide in the future, as it is already doing, a rich seam of historical gold.”  It is the richest seam outside the Government’s own National Archives, which house Churchill’s voluminous war papers, and those of his four-year peacetime premiership.

Every VE-Day, the Churchill Papers are there to prompt remembrance of heroic times. A letter on VE-Day itself was sent to WSC from Anthony Eden: “All my thoughts are with you on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.”

And among the hundreds of letters from Churchill’s children is one from his daughter Mary, written when he was an old man long parted from power or influence: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does, Liberty itself.” For this reason alone, Sir Martin concluded, “the assurance that the Churchill Papers are to remain in Britain is to be welcomed.”

Controversy and rebuttal

Remarkably in view their importance, some historians and media were outraged that one-fourth of the Churchill Papers’ value inured to private parties. They should have been donated, they said. On which, a few observations:

1) In later years, Churchill considered how he could provide for his family. Almost his only property of significant value was his papers. A typical Victorian, he willed them to his male heirs. However, as his daughter Mary told me, “all his dependents were provided for, and all were appreciative of what he did for them.”

2) Appraisals of the papers were £40 and £32.5 million respectively. The government took the lower estimate, subtracted £10 million for anything official and £10 million for tax. That left £12.5 million. J. Paul Getty II generously put up £1 million and the Heritage Lottery Fund £11.5 million—a fraction of their value on the open market.

3) Taxpayers did not provide the £11.5 million. Lottery profits go to various sports, arts, charities and Heritage materials. Almost always, Heritage items are in private hands, so their acquisition often benefits private parties.

4) Comparisons to the post-1945 papers left to Churchill College are irrelevant. Lady Churchill bequeathed them late in life, knowing her children had been provided for. Had she been younger she could have sold them, and would have had every right to do so.

5) While the copyright was retained (to documents originated by WSC), this should be kept in perspective. Until Hillsdale College took them on, no publisher would underwrite the final document volumes. Academic publications, non-profit institutions, even hostile biographers, have used the material without charge.

Why the uproar?

The reason for the flap has nothing to do with the rights of ownership, and everything to do with making political hay and sowing scorn. Such activities have vastly multiplied in the last quarter century. The biographer William Manchester was well aware of this when he memorably wrote The Times in 1995:

The controversy over the sale of the Churchill Papers to the British nation, with proceeds going to members of his family, is bewildering. One British historian in a U.S. newspaper labeled the transaction “just tacky.” One wonders why it is even newsworthy.

When out of office, Churchill, a professional writer, supported his household with his pen. His literary estate was his property. He had every reason, both moral and legal, to expect that title to it would pass on to his survivors through the trust fund which he established before his death. The sum of £12.5 million, however raised, seems hardly excessive. The collection would sell for far more than that in the United States. But that would have raised a genuine storm, which would have been justifiable.

Some critics believe that the Papers should have been donated to the country. That has a familiar ring. Authors are forever being told that they should give their work to society—that to expect money in return is, well, tacky. The origin of this presumption lies in a misapprehension of the word “gifted.” Many believe that talent is literally a gift, which the writer should pass along. The fact is that writing is very hard work, and that here, as elsewhere, the laborer is worthy of his hire. Surely any working person should be able to understand that.

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.

Egyptians and all that

Good afternoon, I’ve emailed you before. If it’s not too much trouble could you please verify whether Sir Winston actually said this? “If we have any more of [Egyptian] cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged.”

* * *

[Churchill] made a tremendous attack on the Egyptians late at night when A.E. was talking about the troubles with them. Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, “Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.” He then sank back, exhausted, into his chair. None of this seemed very helpful, but it was most amusing. He talked at great length about the war and about his trips to the Middle East at that time–fascinating reminiscences which obviously interest him more than today’s problems.

Background

King Farouk was widely condemned for his corrupt and ineffectual governance after the Second World War. Egyptians chafed under the British presence in the Suez Canal, and their army’s failure in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Public discontent against Farouk rose to new levels. In December 1951, many Egyptians left the Canal Zone and the British began importing labour to replace them. It was the beginning of the end for Farouk, deposed in July 1952. Four years later came the Suez Crisis.

Like most of Churchill’s cracks about foreign peoples, this was made in private, and had nothing to do with policy. No one contemplated “setting the Jews” on Egypt over discontented Egyptians. (It took nationalizing the Suez Canal to do that: Israel joined the Anglo-French in armed intervention, withdrawing in the face of U.S. opposition.)

Churchill’s line is easy to quote out of context to label him anti-Egyptian (though in this case at least, not anti-Semitic). The spin the writers put on it is varies accordingly. Stephen Ambrose in his Eisenhower biography, says Churchill was “giving advice.” Lawrence James says WSC was “beside himself with rage.” Ponting, who despised Churchill, says it showed “his usual contempt for the Egyptians.” Makovsky says Churchill “often denigrated native peoples fighting imperial British control.” (Ponting and Makovsky apparently never read Churchill’s praise of native peoples fighting outside control from his earliest books to his Second World War memoirs.)

So, A.M., it is appropriate is to accept the diarist’s version. Shuckburgh describes it as a brief outburst from a not-very-interested PM. I think that might be true! Of course, diarists also tend to make revisions in their diaries—especially when publishing them years after the fact.

In the splintering crash of this vast battle the quiet conversations we had had in Downing Street faded or fell back in one’s mind. However, I remember being told that Mr. Chamberlain had gone, or was going, to see the King, and this was naturally to be expected. Presently a message arrived summoning me to the Palace at six o’clock. It only takes two minutes to drive there from the Admiralty along the Mall. Although I suppose the evening newspapers must have been full of the terrific news from the Continent, nothing had been mentioned about the Cabinet crisis. The public had not had time to take in what was happening either abroad or at home, and there was no crowd about the Palace gates.

I was taken immediately to the King. His Majesty received me most graciously and bade me sit down. He looked at me searchingly and quizzically for some moments, and then said, “I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?” Adopting his mood, I replied, “Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.” He laughed and said, “I want to ask you to form a Government.” I said I would certainly do so. —Winston S. Churchill, “The Gathering Storm,” 1948

Churchill explained that his commission did not extend to creating a national government. But in the crash of events, and Germany’s invasion in the West, he believed a coalition was essential. He had always favored coalitions in grave times. Now he would call upon members of all parties to “stand by the country in the hour of peril.”

The Grand Coalition

The Labour Party leader Clement Attlee shortly arrived, with Arthur Greenwood. Would they join a coalition under his leadership? They would. Both entered the Cabinet, Attlee as Lord Privy Seal. Churchill received a similar commitment from Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Party, who became Air Minister. Magnanimity prevailed. Defying criticism from Chamberlain friends-turned-enemies—he made Chamberlain Lord President of the Council.

It was a remarkable collection of talent and former critics. Chamberlain’s stalwart ally Lord Halifax remained Foreign Secretary. Anthony Eden went to the War Office, A.V. Alexander to the Admiralty. It was probably the easiest task Churchill would have for many months. He reflected that in the recent past, he had come “far more often into collision with the Conservative and National Governments than with the Labour and Liberal Oppositions.” Churchill himself remembered his chief past failure, over the Dardanelles. Then he had attempted to direct “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority. Not this time: “I assumed the office of Minister of Defence, without however attempting to define its scope and powers.” Churchill continued:

Thus, then, on the night of the 10th of May, at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.

Honor to them all, heroic figures from “all parties and all points of view,” who came together and, eventually, prevailed. On this night of the 10th of May, raise a glass to Old Excellence.

Comments

Any thoughts from readers will be posted here. An old friend, escaped from the Nazis to Belgium, got out in time to America, had a distinguished academic career, and  is still going strong…

I still vividly remember waking up on this day 80 years ago in Antwerp and hearing thunder but seeing no clouds. My mother told me that war had begun, and I felt joy about not having to go to school. Only later did I learn that this day was important for Mr. Churchill as well. A truly unforgettable day, almost a century ago. All through the years I always felt relief that things had gotten better than that day. For the first time now, I lack that confidence. -M.W.

My grandfather was a housemaster at Winchester College in 1940. Then as today, Winchester has no central dining. Boys eat in their boarding houses. One day in the summer term of 1940 Phil, a small boy in my grandfather’s house was walking back to his house, late for lunch. Phil loved my grandfather dearly, and told me this story at least twice. As he walked, he was behind two elderly housemasters. Both had fought in World War I and one had been a POW. Neither knew he was behind them. One said, “I really don’t see any choice. We are going to have to surrender. There’s no possibility of our surviving otherwise.” The second agreed. After lunch the worried Phil asked my grandfather: “Is it really true Sir? Are we going to have to surrender?” My grandfather didn’t pause: “Of course we are going to win!” Phil replied, “But Sir, how do you know?” My grandfather said: “Churchill says so, and that’s good enough for me!”  From that moment Phil never doubted that we would win the war. -R.B.

Alistair Cooke addressed this question over thirty years ago. I’ve quoted his words repeatedly over the years. A recent comment (reprised below), encouraged this revision from 2011. Mr. Cooke’s full speech is available by email. RML

Back in the 1930s, who all denounced and criticized Churchill for his beliefs in the radical Nazi Germany? Who specifically mocked him? Obviously Churchill was right about Hitler and his plans but who in the political, intellectual, or entertainment arenas vilified him? —A.H.

The answer to your question, I think, is “just about everybody,” from the Royal Family to ordinary citizens, most of the media, his own party, the Labour and Liberal parties, and certainly most intellectuals and entertainment personalities.

The chief reason was World War I, which had massacred a generation. It was still so near in memory that no one wished to contemplate another war. Interestingly, most of Churchill’s few supporters had seen war up close. Two members of the Chamberlain cabinet—Anthony Eden and Alfred Duff Cooper—were among them.

Alistair Cooke

A memorable Churchill Conference occurred at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1988. Our guest of honor, Mr. Cooke delivered his firsthand observations of Churchill between the two World Wars. His explanation of how Churchill was regarded in his “Wilderness Years” were the most sensitive and understanding I have heard:

Those years, especially, have been over-dramatized. Our knowledge of the tremendous drama to come makes us see Churchill as a rejected giant, a lonely, stubborn hero, who in the end was right. Most of us would like to think that had we been in Britain then, we should have been on Churchill’s side. We’d have said, “Yes, it’s true about the German air force.” In fact I don’t think most of us would have backed him. To many he was a ranting nuisance. Out of power, he had two obsessions: India and Hitler.

“Against War and Fascism”

When he got up to speak, he would rant about India as the “Jewel in the Crown.” Or about the imminent peril of Hitler. We must remember that even by the 1930s the country was exhausted still from the enormous slaughter of the First World War. There were two slogans going around: “Peace at any Price” and “Against War and Fascism.” Surely these were two of the silliest slogans. One might as well be “Against Hospitals and Diseases.” But these contradictory slogans were accepted. Because at that time most people in Britain felt they would do anything to get rid of Hitler—except fight him. And that was what they perceived Churchill wanted to do.

I remember it so well. Alistair Cooke then looked out at an audience of 400 committed Churchillians and fixed them with a steely eye. “And ladies and gentlemen: If you had been alive and sentient and British then, not one in ten of you would have been with him.”

Britain has left the European Union. “It was a transcendental night,” Andrew Roberts writes of January 31st. Read his excellent piece on Brexit and the UK’s regained sovereignty in the Daily Telegraph: “Britain has become an adult once again, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions. [It] has boldly stepped out on its own, taking a risk, certainly. But then which great historic national action has not involved some element of risk?…

By stating that no foreign law shall henceforth have jurisdiction over British law, we have thrown away the jurisprudence comfort blanket and become an adult, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions again…. “Where, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles,” starts the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, “it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world”…. Crucially, the word “empire” in that context merely meant a self-governing state, and had nothing to do with the later British Empire that spread across the globe in the following half-millennium.

For years Britons were told that the 2016 vote to leave was a nostalgia-trip back to the glory days of Empire. Not so. Absent Churchill, perhaps only Roberts could liken 2020’s sovereignty to 1533’s Restraint of Appeals. It’s not the 19th century they’re returning to—it’s the 16th!

“Quiet pride”

There are enough words of mine on Brexit and the EU, to the extent that a foreigner has a right of comment. It is more appropriate to reflect on Winston Churchill’s words. Not for the sovereignty decision (he could never imagine) but for encouragement. They underline his respect for Europe, and his “sense of the British moment.”

“Trust the people,” Lord Randolph Churchill declared, as his son reminded the U.S. Congress: “I used to see him cheered at meetings and in the streets by crowds of working men way back in those aristocratic Victorian days when, as Disraeli said, the world was for the few, and for the very few.” Britain today has a broader electorate, but Lord Randolph’s words still apply.

There’s another aspect to last night that will impress thoughtful people. “In jam-packed Parliament Square,” Robert Hardman wrote, “no one was exactly swinging from the chandeliers. There were no hysterics, no tears—and no pyrotechnics, either. Just quiet pride. After all the polarised nastiness of the past three years, Britain’s departure from the European Union was for the most part good-natured and magnanimous, if tinged with a sense of weariness.”

Is there a lesson there for America—which has also spent three weary years in polarized nastiness? We can but hope.

Churchill on Britain and Europe:

“Our country has a very important part to play in Europe, but it is not so large a part as we have been attempting to play, and I advocate for us in future a more modest role than many of our peace-preservers and peace-lovers have sought to impose upon us.” —House of Commons, 13 April 1933

“[Our] worst difficulties…come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. [And] from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.… Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.” —Albert Hall, 24 April 1933

“We see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonality. But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it…linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old, ‘Wouldest thou be spoken for to the king, or the captain of the host?,’ we should reply, with the Shunammite woman: ‘I dwell among mine own people.’” —News of the World, 9 May 1938

In War: “Freedom is their life-blood”

“We may remember the words of old John Bright, after the American Civil War was over, when he said to an audience of English working folk: ‘At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished and was gone forever. ‘” —Broadcast, London, 1 October 1939

“[After the war] there would be a United States of Europe, and this Island would be the link connecting this Federation with the new world and able to hold the balance between the two.” —Colville Papers, 10 August 1940

“We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges. I say ‘trying to build’ because of all races in the world our people would be the last to consent to be governed by a bureaucracy. Freedom is their life-blood.” —Broadcast, London, 21 March 1943

In Peace: “The larger hopes of humanity”

“I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.” —Zürich, 19 September 1946

“We hope to reach again a Europe purged of the slavery of ancient days in which men will be as proud to say ‘I am a European’ as once they were to say ‘Civis Romanus sum.’ We hope to see a Europe where men of every country will think as much of being a European as of belonging to their native land. —Albert Hall, 14 May 1947 [Quoted “in defiance” by EU diehard Guy Verhofstadt, yet perfectly consistent. I am happily a North American, at home in all its countries. But consider Churchill’s first fourteen words… As Mr. Verhofstadt honorably reminded colleagues, this is a nation that twice shed its blood to liberate Europe.]

“A high and a solemn responsibility rests upon us here this afternoon in this Congress of a Europe striving to be reborn.… If we all pull together and pool the luck and the comradeship…and grimly grasp the larger hopes of humanity, then it may be that we shall move into a happier sunlit age…. heirs of all the treasures of the past and the masters of all the science, the abundance and the glories of the future.” —The Hague, 7 May 1948

In his second Premiership: “Ally and friend”

“Our attitude towards further economic developments on the Schuman lines resembles that which we adopt about the European Army. We help, we dedicate, we play a part. But we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or commonwealth character. Our first object is the unity and consolidation of the British Commonwealth….Our second, “the fraternal association” of the English-speaking world; and third, United Europe, to which we are a separate closely- and specially-related ally and friend.” —Cabinet Memo, 29 November 1951

“You know my views about the particular kind of European Army into which the French are trying to force us. We must consider very carefully together how to deal with the certainly unfavourable reaction in American opinion. They would like us to fall into the general line of European pensioners which we have no intention of doing.” —To Anthony Eden, 13 December 1951

“I do not myself conceive that federalism is immediately possible within the Commonwealth. I have never been in favour of it in Europe.” —To Woodrow Wyatt MP, 8 July 1952

“We are not members of the EDC, nor do we intend to be merged in a federal European system. We feel we have a special relationship to both.” —Commons, 11 May 1953

“I care above all for the brotherhood of the English-speaking world. But there could be no true brotherhood without independence founded as it can only be on solvency. We do not want to live upon others and be kept by them, but faithfully and resolutely to earn our own living, without fear or favour, by the sweat of our brow, by the skill of our craftsmanship and the use of our brains.” —Margate, 10 October 1953

Back to the future

Andrew Roberts puts January 31st in context. “I’ve heard many things described as ‘historic’—football matches, TV programmes, even a speech by Theresa May. But, as an historian, I can certify for you that Brexit night truly is historic.” We may also take heart from Churchill’s words, thinking of history: “At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished, and was gone for ever.”

But sovereignty conveys its own challenges. Sovereignty means what happens now is very much up to Britons. There is no need to cower from that. Two great wars, Churchill said, “have made the British nation master in its own house.” Sovereignty conveys mastery. “The treasures of the past. The toil of the centuries, the long-built-up conceptions of decent government and fair play. The tolerance which comes from the free working of Parliamentary and electoral institutions…. All these constitute parts of this inheritance.”

And this is no Little England. Britain owns the world’s sixth largest economy, produced by 60 million skillful people. “There is no need to fear the future,” Churchill said in another time. “I could not stop it if I wished…. Let it roll! Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”

“No Cutlet Uncooked”

He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he still stirs today, in media he never dreamed of. And he would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. The vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me,” he said in 1952. (Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.) Most of all, Winston Churchill would love this noble book. It peers into every aspect of a career six decades long, and not, as he once quipped, “entirely without incident.”

In 1960 General Lord Ismay, the devoted “Pug,” said an objective biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts was able to access sources only recently available. Not least of these are The Churchill Documents—invaluable papers in print through World War II. Roberts researched the Royal Archives at Windsor, the private papers of Churchill’s family. He quotes diarists like Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to Britain. With his gift for separating wheat from chaff, this accomplished historian boils the saga down to digestible size.

* * *

Full disclosure: This writer labored for over a year as one of Roberts’ readers, sifting every word of his manuscript. Our emails, as he kindly notes, reached four figures. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we tackled every question. We ran down facts and factoids, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.”  These are documents, clippings and letters, compiled by Sir Martin, for almost every day of Churchill’s life.

Mr. Roberts, to quote his subject, “left no cutlet uncooked.” This is the first biography I’ve proofed since Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of Horatius at the Gate, like Manchester did. Roberts is far more illuminating, accurate and up to date. Walking with Destiny is a masterpiece—the finest single Churchill volume you can hope to read. To paraphrase Simon Schama on Gilbert’s volumes, it is a “Churchilliad,” and Andrew Roberts is its Bard.

Seeing the Whole Man

Roberts captures the essence of his subject, beginning with courage. How many 40-year-olds, sacked from their job, go off to fight in a world war? “You must not let this fret you in the least,” Churchill nonchalantly assured his wife. Fret she did: “…you seem to me as far away as the stars, lost among a million khaki figures.” He left the trenches in 1916, Roberts notes. “He had written over 100 letters to her, which allows us to peer into his psychology better than at any other period of his life.”

Clementine Churchill never begrudged his predilections, from battle to politics, where somehow he managed to remain friends with opponents. He even socialized with them, in a club he invented for the purpose: “With Churchill there was very often a political angle to friendship. An extraordinarily large contingent of Other Club members came together to help make Churchill prime minister in several different ways, and then to serve in his wartime Government…. Churchill had built something that by 1940 was to make a very real contribution…”

The great man’s courage vied with his emotion, Roberts writes: “Lady Diana Cooper left a charming account of [a wartime] weekend at Ditchley…. ‘We had two lovely films after dinner…. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.’ She told him that night that the greatest thing he had done was to give the British people courage. ‘I never gave them courage,’ he replied. ‘I was able to focus theirs.’” Exactly.

Canards fall like matchsticks…

 … as Roberts methodically writes them off. It was not true, as Lord Mountbatten said, that young Winston left Cuba in 1895 with a liking for siestas and cigars. He already smoked cigars, did not start his afternoon nap until 1914. Regarding his overblown spells of the blues: “Churchill was not a depressive at all, let alone a manic one.” More likely he was a hypochondriac, “a man who took his own temperature daily and believed he had a sensitive cuticle.” His references to his “Black Dog” were part of “the sheer exaggeration to which he was prone. (Amateur diagnoses of him being bipolar can be even more easily dismissed.)”

At Omdurman in 1898, “within shot of an advancing army,” Churchill exclaimed, “Where will you beat this!” Such outbursts gained him “the undeserved reputation for being a lover of war, even though he was at constant pains to point out that the warfare he was describing was a world away from the industrialized horrors of the First World War.” His exuberance as WW1 began is frequently excoriated. “But it was the exuberance of someone who had not wanted the war to break out, had offered Germany the most generous and comprehensive plan to prevent it, had nonetheless planned meticulously what his department would do if it did, and who commanded the weapon that he believed could end it.”

* * *

Another myth is that Churchill always overemphasized the interests of whichever department he headed. Yet in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deeper naval cuts than he’d budgeted: “Any other realistic alternative chancellor—Neville or Austen Chamberlain and certainly any Labour or Liberal one—would have been much tougher on the Admiralty…Overall, the naval budget increased during Churchill’s chancellorship.” (Italics mine.)

In World War II, Roberts explodes the myth that Churchill opposed a Second Front: “The very phrase Second Front was itself a term of Soviet propaganda, because Britain had already been fighting Germany on at least five fronts before the Soviets were forced by invasion to drop their pro-German neutrality; in Northern France, the air, the Atlantic, North Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“I want to see a great shining India…”

On India Churchill was partly influenced by diehards, like Beverley Nichols, author of Verdict on India. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission,” Churchill reported to Clementine.

But then his prescience surfaced: “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up…. still more about what will happen if [Britain’s connection] is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing abuse and criticism of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply.” (And this long before the Internet!) Uniquely, Churchill saw and predicted India’s division: “…only a Muslim-majority state in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent would protect Muslim minority rights if and when the British left.”

* * *

He was right about that—and consistent. In July 1944 he told Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, India’s representative on the War Cabinet: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, [that India produced] this vast and improvident efflorescence of humanity…. Your people must practise birth control.” Then he added (and we will never see this quoted by his Indian haters) that the old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go. Specifically he said: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” ** There is the true Winston Churchill.

** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.

Roberts Insights

Churchill famously “ratted” on the Conservatives over Free Trade—but was that his only objection? No, says Roberts: “Years later Churchill admitted that such was his reaction against the party at the time, over the harsh treatment of the defeated Boers, Army reform and the way the 1900 election victory was being exploited, that ‘when the Protection issue was raised I was already disposed to view all their actions in the most critical light.’ Churchill was spoiling for a fight with his own party.” This is fresh, excellent analysis. I have never heard his change of parties so comprehensively explained.

Had the 9th Duke of Marlborough died without an heir in 1934, Churchill would have become Duke, losing his Commons seat and any chance at the premiership, Roberts notes wryly: “He could survive a school stabbing, a 30-foot-fall, pneumonia, [nearly drowning in] a Swiss lake, Cuban bullets, Pathan tribesmen, Dervish spears, Boer artillery and sentries, tsetse flies, a Bristol suffragette, plane crashes, German high explosive shells and snipers, and latterly a New York motorist, but such was the British constitution that he also required the fecundity of a duke and duchess to allow him to be in the right place to save Britain in 1940.”

* * *

Saved by fecundity, he went on to warn the country in the 1930s. “It was a fascinating dichotomy,” Roberts writes, “that the leading appeasers had not seen action in the Great War…. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Kingsley Wood, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax did not serve in the front line or see death up close.” But the anti-appeasers, “Churchill, Anthony Eden MC, Harold Macmillan MC, Alfred Duff Cooper DSO, Roger Keyes KCB, DSO, Edward Spears MC and George Lloyd DSO all had.”

Another deft comparison: In India and the Sudan, young Winston had encountered Islamic fundamentalism, “a form of religious fanaticism that in many key features was not unlike the Nazism that he was to encounter forty years later. None of the three prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—had seen true fanaticism in their personal lives, and they were slow to discern it in Nazi Germany. [Churchill] had fought against it in his youth and recognized its salient features earlier than anyone else.”

“Never Surrender”

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia is often warped by his critics. Roberts sorts it out. “He started with profound enmity of the Bolsheviks, then by the late 1930s advocated an alliance with them. Then in 1939-40 he supported Finland in its war against them, then in 1941 he allied Britain with them overnight. In 1946 he denounced them, only in the 1950s to seek détente with them.” His view of Russia changed five times. “Yet the explanation was not in any inherent lack of consistency, as is often alleged, but what was in the ‘historic life-interests’ of Britain.”

Deftly Roberts explains the peace chatter of late May 1940. With Britain’s back to the wall, Lord Halifax clamored for an armistice brokered by Mussolini. Halifax was “the only one who understood,” nodded French Premier Reynaud’s Anglophobic aide Lt-Col. Paul de Villelume. Churchill was “prisoner of the swashbuckling attitude he always takes in front of his ministers.”

Halifax first thought Churchill welcomed a deal which preserved Britain’s independence. Then he protested that the PM believed in nothing save a fight to the finish. “This was in fact always Churchill’s line,” Roberts explains. It’s quite clear “if all five days’ discussions are read in context.”

* * *

Six weeks before D-Day Churchill was cautious. “We can now say, not only with hope but with reason, that we shall reach the end of our journey in good order. [The] tragedy will not come to pass. When the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe.”

Roberts juxtaposes two reactions. “This was the speech of an old man,” said the King’s private secretary. “Someone who clearly did not think so was Anne Frank, the Jewish Dutch teenager, who wrote in her diary from her secret attic in Amsterdam, ‘A speech by our beloved Winston Churchill is quite perfect.’”

General Sir Alan Brooke’s late night fuming about Churchill is often held to show the PM’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them. But Roberts shows us a different Brooke. Take when the boss arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible. I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [had said] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Part of Churchill’s admiration for Admiral Nelson, Roberts suggests, “was for his glorious death at the moment of victory.”

Readers: Buy This Book

Space is running out and I haven’t told you the half of it. There are 78 illustrations, most of them unique even to jaded Churchillians. Roberts did his best to avoid “old chestnuts.” There are sixteen pages of clear maps. The 1950s Reader’s Union map of Churchill’s wartime journeys is worked nicely into the endpapers. The book weighs 3 1/2 pounds—don’t drop it on your foot. The page stock is thin, but well chosen to minimize bleed-through. The bibliography, attesting to its thoroughness, runs to 23 pages, the author’s notes to 37, the index to 60. Amazon offers an attractive 40% discount and a Kindle version. This is little to pay for the education you’ll receive.

Andrew Roberts has been book-touring Britain (as he soon will be in North America). His has encouraging news for all who “labor in the vineyard,” as dear Martin Gilbert always described it. “There’s an explosion of love of Churchill among ordinary people away from the London metropolitan bubble,” Roberts writes. “It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. We sell out constantly. Very heartening. Sometimes one can feel down over the Internet attacks and the statue smearings. But out in rural England he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

A great joy of reading The Churchill Documents is their trove of historical sidelights. Volume 22 (August 1945—September 1951, due late 2018) covers the early Cold War: the “Iron Curtain,” the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift and Korean War. It reminds us of the political battles swirling around the Anglo-American “special relationship.” The issues seem very clear in hindsight. Seven decades ago, the future was unknowable. Take Governor Dewey and the question of America’s commitment to world security.

The Dewey Lament

In late 1950, Churchill received a letter from twice-unsuccessful presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. The New York governor took issue with his fellow Republican, former President Herbert Hoover:

I have hesitated for a long time about burdening you with this [but] I am taking the liberty of imposing upon you…. Mr. Hoover made a speech night before last, the implications of which are appalling to me. The press reports today it has had wide and unhappy repercussions in Great Britain and on the Continent.

I am still not quite sure why I ran again [for president in 1948] but in any event, having no ambitions or expectations of having any other office I am free to proselyte to the limit of my capacity for the point of view expressed in my speech and intend to do so. [Churchill, a lover of concise English, must have blanched at that.]

If you find any spot on the horizon more cheerful than I do, I should appreciate hearing of it. The world is filled with gloom and almost in extremis.¹

Not “another man or dollar…”

Probably a lot of people beside Dewey wondered why he had run again (he had lost to FDR in 1944).  But to me, the surprise was to find Dewey, a former Republican nominee, taking issue with Hoover the last Republican president. They certainly didn’t like each other. Hoover reportedly said Dewey had “no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to draw for his thinking…. A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind.”

I asked Professor George Nash, Hoover’s biographer, what Dewey was referring to. Dr. Nash referred us to Hoover’s broadcast of 20 December 1950, the text of which he sent. He also helped us compose a footnote to Dewey’s note to Churchill:

On December 20, Hoover gave a speech to advocate a Western-hemisphere-oriented “Gibraltar” geopolitical strategy, a buildup of American air and naval forces, but not of its army, focused on defending the Western Hemisphere and the free island nations on the Pacific and Atlantic rims, like Taiwan and the UK “if she wishes to cooperate.” Hoover would also refuse to send “another man or dollar” to continental Europe for its defense until​ the non-​communist nations there strengthened their own military forces. His advice (denounced by his critics as isolationist) differed from President Truman’s plan, announced just the day before, to send more U.S. troops to western Europe to assist in NATO’s defense preparations.²

“Some great common bond…”

As World War II had wound down, America’s attitude toward the postwar defense of Europe was a major concern of Churchill’s. The Churchill Documents contain many examples of this. ³ Churchill’s worries continued after Roosevelt’s death. What would be the attitude of the new president? In May 1945 Churchill wrote Truman, asking for a “standstill order” on the movements of U.S. forces. Truman replied, “I must not have any avoidable interference with the redeployment of American forces to the Pacific.”⁴

To Churchill’s relief, Truman adopted a robust attitude toward Soviet aggression. The President tacitly (though not publicly) approved of Churchill’s forceful 1946 message about the Iron Curtin. He responded vigorously to communist challenges in Greece and Turkey. When the Russians seemed to hesitate in withdrawing troops from Iran, Truman sent a naval task force led by the battleship Missouri into Sea of Marmara.⁶

In 1948, Stalin threatened to cut off Allied access to Berlin. Truman and Prime Minister Attlee defied him with the Berlin Airlift. In the House of Commons, a jubilant Churchill congratulated Labour with gusto.⁷ He even hoped for “some great common bond of union, like we had in 1940.”⁸ It was typical of Churchill’s lifelong preference for coalitions at times of crisis.

“We cannot buy [Europe] with money…”

Hoover was not proposing American isolation. He wanted America armed to the teeth, able to repulse any challenge. Like Churchill, he voiced “the need to preserve Western Civilization on the Continent of Europe [and] our cultural and religious ties to it.”⁹

They diverged in two critical areas. The first was the atomic bomb, which the Soviets had by then acquired. Hoover said the bomb was “a far less dominant weapon than it was once thought to be.”¹⁰ Churchill differed profoundly. “It may well be,” he had declared in 1946, “that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread, and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.”¹¹

Hoover also balked at helping a Europe that refused to help itself. “The test is whether they have the spiritual force, the will, and acceptance of unity among them by their own volition. America cannot create their spiritual forces; we cannot buy them with money.” Churchill was doing his best to create unity of purpose and collaboration, but this view was anathema to him. With the best spiritual will and unity, he declared again and again in those years, Europe could not defend itself. It was America’s obligation to do everything to help.

Otherwise, however, the Hoover and Churchill theses run parallel. Hoover like Churchill favored peace through strength. He advocated a joint naval and air strategy, a unity of minds between the United States and the British Empire and Commonwealth. That is what Churchill had worked for most of his life.

“I would denounce such a plan scathingly”

Churchill’s 1950 reply to Dewey was brief: “It is a comfort to me that you felt Hoover’s speech was ‘appalling.’ I think that your own declarations are of far more consequence.”¹² But two years later Eisenhower was elected. And Eisenhower, like Hoover, seemed betimes to regard the atomic bomb as just another weapon.

Oddly or ironically, Dewey now proposed a defense posture much like Hoover’s. He and Churchill met in New York in January 1953, before Eisenhower took office. They were joined by John Foster Dulles, about to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

The details of that meeting will appear in the final volume 23 of The Churchill Documents. We already know much of it from Never Despair 1945-1965, Martin Gilbert’s final Churchill biographic volume. On 7 January Churchill cabled his Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A. Butler:

Dewey proposed a scheme for a Pacific Treaty between all Pacific powers including the Philippines, Formosa [Taiwan], and the like, excluding (repeat excluding) Great Britain. I said I would denounce such a plan scathingly. Dulles then gave a long account of the negotiations leading up to the Anzus Treaty, and how the Labour Government had made no objection to it at all.

I explained our point of view. Dewey, who is thoroughly friendly, then said that if I objected so strongly, he would let his baby, i.e. the Pacific Treaty, die. In fact I could consider it dead. On the spur of the moment he said that an alternative plan might be for the United Kingdom and the United States to make a joint declaration (comparable to our guarantee to Poland in 1939) that if Communist China attempted to occupy Indo-China, Burma or any other countries in the Pacific Area, we and the Americans would declare war.¹³

“Great Slab of a Face”

Jock Colville and Christopher Soames, respectively Churchill’s private and parliamentary private secretaries, were present during this chilly interview. Dewey suggested that Churchill “could cast a spell on all American statesmen and that if he were directly associated with the economic talks, the fears of the people and of Congress would be aroused to such an extent that the success of the talks would be endangered.” Colville continued:

Winston took this very reasonable statement ill, but Christopher and I both took pains to assure Dulles afterwards that we thought he was absolutely right. Irritated by this, Winston let fly at Dewey after dinner and worked himself into a fury over certain Pacific Ocean questions. Christopher and I again applied soft soap subsequently. We told Dewey that a sharp debate was the PM’s idea of a pleasant evening…. But…Winston was really worked up and, as he went to bed, said some very harsh things about the Republican Party in general and Dulles in particular…. He said he would have no more to do with Dulles whose “great slab of a face” he disliked and distrusted.¹⁴

So it was that Thomas Dewey reversed himself, but Churchill’s views remained consistent. He went away with grave doubts about Foster Dulles, who would confirm his misgivings by his attitude toward a Soviet summit at the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower the following December.

“I tell you all this,” Churchill concluded in his cable to Eden and Butler, “to show you the rough weather that may well lie ahead in dealing with the Republican Party who have been twenty years out of office; and I feel very sure we should not expect early favourable results. Much patience will be needed.”¹⁵

And that indeed is another story—one that The Churchill Documents 1951-1965 shall relate.

Endnotes

¹ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 22, August 1945-October 1951 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming).

² See Herbert Hoover, “Our National Policies in This Crisis,” Broadcast on 20 December 1950, in Addresses Upon the American Road 1950-1955 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955), 3-10. Online at http://bit.ly/2NQXOs2.

³ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, The Shadows of Victory, January-July 1945 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming, October 2018.)

⁴ WSC to Truman, 12 May 1945; Truman to WSC, 21 May 1945, ibid.

N.B. Material referred to in footnote 5 is omitted in this excerpt.

⁶ Churchill to Attlee and Bevin, 7 March 1946, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁷ Winston S. Churchill, “Foreign Affairs,” House of Commons, 10 December 1948, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁸ Churchill, speech at Leeds, 4 February 1950, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁹ Hoover, “Our National Policies,” 4.

¹⁰ Hoover, ibid., 5.

¹¹ Winston S. Churchill, Zurich, 19 September 1946, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill By Himself (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 315.

¹² Churchill to Thomas Dewey, 30 January 1951, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

¹³ Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 791.

¹⁴ John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955, 2 vols. Sevenoaks, Kent: Sceptre Publishing, 1986-87, II 320. Note: It is widely reported, but without attribution, that Churchill also said Dulles was “the only bull who carries his china shop with him.”

¹⁵ Gilbert, Never Despair, 791.

“No doubt where the right lay”: 1940-95

Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky was a “Bollinger Bolshevik” who mixed support for Communism with a love of Western luxury. Friendly to Churchill, he knew the Englishman hoped to separate Hitler and Stalin, even after World War II had started.

But Maisky tended to see what he wished to see. In December he recorded: “The British Government announces its readiness to recognize ‘de facto’ the changes in the Baltics so as to settle ‘de jure’ the whole issue later, probably after the war.” There was no such announcement.

“The Russian danger…”

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Churchill broadcast: “the Russian danger is therefore our danger.”  Why then not recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia? The question came now, not only from soft-liners like Cripps and Halifax, but from close Churchill associates like Eden and Beaverbrook. But de jure recognition was one thing Stalin would never get get.

When Eden, now foreign minister, visited Moscow in December 1941, he implored Churchill to modify his stance. It was Eden’s first major foreign policy assignment. Temperament, ambition, anxiety for victory impelled him. American opinion influenced Churchill too, and the USA at that time remained opposed to recognizing a Soviet Baltic.

While Eden was in Moscow, Churchill was in America. Eden urged him and Roosevelt to recognize immediately the Soviet Baltic. “Stark realism” demanded it. The Anglo-Americans could not stop the Russians from getting their way.

Churchill still demurred. The 1941 Soviet conquests, he replied,

were acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic States to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause….there must be no mistake about the opinion of any British Government of which I am the head, namely, that it adheres to those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter.

“The Ireland of Russia”

In February 1942 the War Cabinet discussed alternatives to outright recognition. Eden proposed agreeing to Russia’s Baltic military bases. Halifax proposed quasi-independence, with Russian control of Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian defense and foreign policy. Churchill opposed both.  In Washington, Halifax mentioned recognition to Roosevelt. The President was interested, but Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles told FDR it would epitomize “the worst phase of the spirit of Munich.” In another thrust, Beaverbrook asked: “How can it be argued now that territory occupied then by the Russians—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—is not the native soil of the Russians?” Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians could offer some arguments.

The pressure of events wore on the Prime Minister. The Russians were holding down 185 German divisions on a thousand-mile front. On 7 March 1942, Churchill sent a feeler to Roosevelt:

The increasing gravity of the war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her. This was the basis on which Russia acceded to the Charter, and I expect that a severe process of liquidating hostile elements in the Baltic States, etc. was employed by the Russians when they took those regions at the beginning of the war.

* * *

Churchill’s suspicions were correct. Latvia’s President Karlis Ulmanis had been arrested and deported; he died in 1942. Konstantin Päts of Estonia spent years in prisons or “psychiatric hospitals,” finally dying in 1956. Lithuania’s Antanas Smetona, the first Baltic president to institute an authoritarian regime (1926), fled, ultimately to the USA, where he died in 1944. From June 1940, politicians, teachers and intelligentsia—anyone who seemed a threat to the Soviet rule—was deported.

On 8 April 1942, the War Cabinet approved British recognition of the 1941 Soviet borders. But now Roosevelt objected. The United States, he said through Secretary of State Hull, “would not remain silent if territorial clauses were included in the [Anglo-Soviet] treaty.” Eden conveyed this to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov who, surprisingly, accepted.  Thus it was that American, not British diplomacy that forestalled de jure recognition of the Soviet Baltic in 1942. But Martin Gilbert maintained that this was actually “to Churchill’s relief.” Alexander Cadogan, a Foreign Office official who shared Churchill’s views on the Baltic, wrote, “We must remember that [recognition] is a bad thing. We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.”

Baltic “Ostland”

There matters rested while the Germans, first hailed as liberators, conducted another violent ethnic clensing. Over 300,000 Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians—one out of ten—were executed. They slaughtered Jews in hastily-built death camps. The Gestapo and a few quislilngs ruled the Nazi colony “Ostland.” With the Red Army’s return in 1944 came a third holocaust. An Estonian remembered: “The Germans were brutal, the Russians worse.” Clearances of Baltic citizens continued under Stalin’s successors. Ethnic Russians moved in while natives were shuttled out. To this day, native Latvians form barely a majority in their country.

At the Teheran conference in late 1943, Roosevelt abandoned his non-recognition policy—but not openly. With remarkable cynicism, he explained to Stalin that he did not wish to lose the votes of the six or seven million Polish-Americans, or of the smaller, though not negligible, number of voters of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian origin.

How easily Roosevelt surrendered the liberties he had so strongly defended a year earlier. “Moral postures in the harsh world of power politics may acquire a certain nobility in their very futility,” wrote David Kirby. “But when tainted by a history of compromise and failed bargains, they tend to appear somewhat shabby.”

* * *

But Teheran also left Churchill with a softer attitude toward Stalin. His feelings had changed, he wrote Eden, tempered by hard reality on the ground:

The tremendous victories of the Russian armies, the deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian State and Government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin—these have all had their effect. Most of all is the fact that the Russians may very soon be in physical possession of these territories, and it is absolutely certain that we should never attempt to turn them out.

Churchill was a politician depending on the support of a majority, and no politician could remain blind to that reality. But in judging Churchill, must consider his complete record. And for him, the subject remained.

To his War Cabinet in late January Churchill said the “ideal position would be to postpone any decision about frontiers until after the war, and then to consider all frontier questions together.” Nevertheless, the Red Army was  “advancing into Poland.” Churchill knew he was caught in a shocking compromise of proclaimed principle. What were they to say to Parliament and the nation, he asked Eden, about the idealistic principles declared in the Atlantic Charter?

The March of Fate

As the Red Army swarmed west in 1944, surviving Balts had the unpalatable choice of siding with one barbarian or the other. More fought with the Germans than the Russians. Stalin expended half a million men vainly trying to storm the “Courland Pocket,” declaring that the imperialist West would try to prevent reestablishment of Soviet authority. But the West had no such intentions. Instead, Balts faced tanks bearing American white stars. They were U.S. Shermans, thrown into battle without their new red stars. But the Baltic fighters gave up only with the German surrender.

In 1950, Churchill sadly summarized the tragedy of the Baltic States:

Hitler had cast them away like pawns in 1939. There had been a severe Russian and Communist purge. All the dominant personalities had been liquidated in one way or another. The life of these strong peoples was henceforward underground. Presently Hitler came back with a Nazi counter-purge. Finally, in the general victory the Soviets had control again. Thus the deadly comb ran back and forth, and back again, through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. There was no doubt however where the right lay. The Baltic States should be sovereign independent peoples.

In the end, the United States, along with Britain, Australia, Canada and a few other countries, never recognized the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Baltic gold remained safe in London, and their embassies continued to function. But Balts fortunate enough to escape, and their children, have long memories. They did not look kindly on Roosevelt, nor, one has to say, on Churchill.

What we can learn

It is useful to study Churchill and the Baltic for what it can teach us today about powerful aggressors and the fate of small nations. In wartime negotiations, the Soviets were consistent. They made the most extreme demands, offering little in exchange. Meet their demands and more followed. Whenever the other side said they would not agree, an eleventh-hour shift by Moscow would result. Even this was not a defeat, since the democracies were often so grateful for evidence of good will that they would struggle to meet the next round of Soviet demands. The perceptive Churchill once told Eden, “do not be disappointed if you are not able to bring home a joint public declaration.”

Churchill frequently repeated the Boer expression, “All will come right.” By 1992, when I made my first visit, the Baltic was free. In 1995 with three friends, I bicycled the Latvian coast from Lithuania to Estonia, and presented a Latvian translation of Churchill’s The Dream to President Guntis Ulmanis.

The British ambassador had arranged for us to meet local officials along the way. I will never forget the words of Teodors Eniņš, Mayor of Liepaja. He raised the question of why the Anglo-Americans hadn’t fought Russia to free Eastern Europe in 1945. We said the American and British public would have never countenanced it. “You should have done it anyway,” Mayor Eniņš replied. “Think of how much trouble you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.”

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has published two articles on Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s loyal ally and friend for four decades. The first begins with a memoir by the late Ron Robbins, a Canadian journalist who early on covered the House of Commons, where he met Bracken. The postscript is by me, followed by reviews of the two Bracken books by George Gale and A.J.P. Taylor.  A second feature—Bracken’s defense of Churchill’s frequent visits to war fronts—is also published.

Excerpts follow. For the full articles click on “Great Contemporaries:  Brendan Bracken” and “Necessary Risk: Churchill at the Front.”

Bracken Observed

There was no more enigmatic figure in Churchill’s life than Brendan Bracken, who cloaked his birth and upbringing with mystery while hinting broadly that he was the great man’s illegitimate son. Close friendship, not errant fatherhood, encompassed their relationship. But Churchill, with characteristic impishness, apparently never gave the direct lie to Bracken’s implied claim. This annoyed Churchill’s wife and peeved his son, Randolph, who spoke satirically of  “my brother, the bastard.” To quell the noisome rumor Churchill quipped: “I have looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”

By the time I encountered him, he was a formidable figure in corridors of power and London financial circles. The Labour Party came to power in July 1945. Bracken’s arch opponent was the Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, a fiery Welshman. Bevan was steering the National Health Bill, the first large-scale national heath service, through morning committee meetings. I wrote “running reports.” A copy boy would come in every five minutes or so, collect what I had written, and phone it to the agency.

* * *

Bracken would thrust at Bevan, jolting him in a tough fight over every clause in the Bill. Bracken always attacked in time to catch new editions of the evening papers. This ensured him headlines, especially in the Evening Standard, owned by Lord Beaverbrook, an intimate friend of his and Churchill’s.

One morning as I hurried to the committee, Bracken caught up with me and complimented me on my coverage. No journalist worth his salt likes to feel exploited, particularly by a politician. So I said: “You have a great knack of talking in headlines just in time to catch every edition.” He roared with laughter and produced a pocket diary. He flaunted a page on which he had written the edition times of all the London papers. Smiling ruefully, I said: “I didn’t imagine that you were relying solely on chance.” “No,” he replied, “it’s a trick I learned early on from Churchill.”

Bracken died of cancer in 1958 at the age of 57. Churchill reacted sorrowfully to the news of his death. Churchill mourned for him with a father’s grief. —Ron Cynewulf Robbins

Bracken postscript

We have a memorable glimpse of Brendan Bracken on 11 May 1940, Churchill’s first full day in office. One of the first axes fell on Chamberlain’s toady Sir Horace Wilson, a civil servant promoted far above his station. He was an arch appeaser, both indirectly (as an adviser) and directly (as an emissary to Hitler).

With his usual courtesy, Churchill told Wilson he would obliged if Sir Horace left Ten Downing Street by 1pm. Wilson characteristically took this as a “negotiable demand” and toddled off to lunch. Returning, he found Bracken and Randolph Churchill seated on his office sofa, smoking huge cigars and glaring at him. They exchanged no words. Wilson turned and fled. Later he sent for his effects. He never appeared at Number Ten again.

During the war, Bracken enabled Evelyn Waugh to obtain leave so that he could write Brideshead Revisited. Waugh unkindly wrote Bracken into the story as Rex Motram, a boorish, money-grubbing exploiter of the colonies. That was typical of Waugh, but undeserved. As Lord Beaverbrook said: “To know Bracken was to like him; those who didn’t know him did not like him.”

Bracken in biography

The Bracken biographies may be viewed in similar light. (Click here and scroll to “Further reading.”) Boyle’s Poor Dear Brendan is the more showy and brash, Lysaght’s Brendan Bracken the deeper and more revealing. “Above all,” wrote Charles Lysaght,

Bracken was great fun. He found appropriate names for everyone. Baldwin was “the ironmonger,” Neville Chamberlain“the coroner.” Eden was “Robert Taylor,” or “the film star at the Foreign Office.” He described Harrow, Churchill’s old school, as “that bloody old Borstal of yours.” Only Churchill himself was exempt from Bracken’s darts. His description of Aneurin Bevan, enjoying Beaverbrook’s champagne, is of classic quality: “You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin! Look at you swilling Max’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist.” Bevan listened to this tirade with delight.

After the war Bracken seemed to burn out like a fallen meteor, contemplating a future with, alas, all too accurate a vision. He said of Keynes: “He will be best remembered as the man who made inflation respectable.” He said of himself: “I shall die young and be forgotten.” History will not forget him. —RML

Necessary risk: Bracken’s defense

During World War II, Churchill’s frequent excursions to various fronts caused critics to complain that he was taking unnecessary risk. Criticism mounted when Churchill hied to France only six days after D-Day.  He revisited the front several times through March 1945.

Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid DFC (1895-1977) was a distinguished flying ace in World War I. In 1922-45 he served periodically as a Conservative Member of Parliament. Peppery and contentious, he engaged in numerous arguments, which in 1943 resulted in fisticuffs with another MP. Both apologized the next day, but in America the Los Angeles Times headlined, “England Grins as Members of Commons Trade Punches.”

Churchill went to France in mid-June 1944. Cunningham-Reid complained: “The Prime Minister should not risk his life unnecessarily…. Was there ever such a good target as the one presented by our not inconspicuous Prime Minister perched up high on a Jeep? Nobody could have mistaken or missed that massive figure, complete with cigar to identify him…. Subsequently, the Prime Minister, General Montgomery, Field-Marshal Smuts, General Sir Alan Brooke, and, in all probability, the Supreme Commander [Eisenhower] and other key men got into a huddle…. The Minister of Information will, no doubt, correct me if that is not so.”

* * *

The Minister of Information was Brendan Bracken, who did indeed respond. In a brilliant few minutes, Bracken delivered a superb defense of Churchill’s visits to the front. Because it has not been published, even in The Churchill Documents, we thought it worth bringing to the attention of readers. Here is an extract:

I think it is a good thing for prime ministers that they should go into the front line and see the troops, and the soldiers, who matter most, like to see them. I daresay some hon. Members of this House remember that, in the last war, some suggestions were made by timid French Ministers to M. Clemenceau that, owing to the Germans having a big gun that shelled Paris, they should leave that city for a safer place. They discovered for the first time that the old Tiger was amenable. He said, “Yes, let the Government leave Paris. Let it go to the front.” It was a very sound piece of advice. If men like Clemenceau lived in this generation, France would not be in its present predicament.

Click here for Bracken’s complete speech.

“Churchill’s Secret“: good film portrayal of how Bracken and two other Press Barons dekated the news about Churchill’s 1953 stroke.

Fateful Questions, September 1943-April 1944, nineteenth of a projected twenty-three document volumes in the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, is reviewed by historian Andrew Roberts in Commentary. 

These volumes comprise “every important document of any kind that concerns Churchill.” The present volume sets the size record. Fateful Questions is 2,752 pages long, representing an average of more than eleven pages per day. Yet at $60, it is a tremendous bargain. Order your copy from the Hillsdale College Bookstore.

Here is an excerpt from my account, “Fresh History,” which can be read in its entirety at the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Questions: Science

A criticism frequently leveled at Churchill is that he was so fixed on defeating Hitler that he never looked ahead—to the problems of the peace as well as the likelihood of a powerful, proselytizing Soviet Union. Proof that Churchill recognized the Soviet danger is well documented in this book; he also looked toward the years of peace, and the potential of science for good or ill. (Professor A.V. Hill, who married a sister of John Maynard Keynes, was Independent MP for Cambridge University, 1940-45.)

30 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Professor A. V. Hill. (Churchill papers, 20/94).

Dear Professor Hill, I am very glad to have the opportunity to send through you my greetings and good wishes to Indian men of science and especially to the six Indian Fellows of the Royal Society, of which I am honoured to be myself a Fellow.

It is the great tragedy of our time that the fruits of science should by a monstrous perversion have been turned on so vast a scale to evil ends. But that is no fault of science. Science has given to this generation the means of unlimited disaster or of unlimited progress. When this war is won we shall have averted disaster. There will remain the greater task of directing knowledge lastingly towards the purposes of peace and human good. In this task the scientists of the world, united by the bond of a single purpose which overrides all bounds of race and language, can play a leading and inspiring part.

Questions: Recrimination vs. Magnanimity

Churchill famously deplored blaming British and French leaders for mistakes in the years leading up to the Second World War: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present,” he declared after France fell in June 1940,“we shall find that we have lost the future.” He made good that magnanimous philosophy on many occasions—as these excerpts suggest, concerning Prime Minister Chamberlain and French General Georges. (Brendan Bracken was Minister of Information.)

4 October 1945. Winston S. Churchill to Brendan Bracken: Prime Minister’s Personal Minute M.638/3  (Churchill papers, 20/104)

In the film “The Nazis Strike” I must ask that the section showing Mr. Chamberlain’s arrival at Heston Airfield after Munich, and also the shot of his going fishing with a reference to the “tired old man of Munich” should be cut out, otherwise I could not be associated with the series. The story would run quite well from the signature at Munich to the meeting in Birmingham where Mr. Chamberlain made his declaration that we would support Poland, &c.

*****

19 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Alfred Duff Cooper: excerpt.  (Churchill papers, 20/94)

Personal and Secret: With regard to General Georges. In my opinion he is a very fine, honourable Frenchman. For him I feel a sentiment of friendship which started to grow when we made our tour of the Rhine front together a month before the War. I do not think he was to blame for the catastrophe, except that he ought to have been very much stronger in demanding the retirement of Gamelin at the outbreak of war. Much of his strength and energy was expended in opposing Gamelin, but the inherent rottenness of the French fighting machine and Government would have denied victory to any General.

Moreover, Georges is crippled from wounds received both in the late War and the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. I do not forget, though this is a point which should not be mentioned to the French, that when Petain and Weygand at Briand in May 1940 were clamouring for our last reserves and resources, including the last Fighter Squadrons, well knowing that the battle was lost and that they meant to give in, it was Georges who informed our Military Liaison Officer that the French Government would ask for an armistice and that we should take our steps accordingly.

Questions: The Second Front

The greatest Anglo-American-Soviet strategy questions were over how much to throttle back the campaign in Italy (which had begun in September 1943) in support of “Operation Overlord,” the invasion of France, which all three allies agreed was the most direct route to Berlin and must go forward in 1944. Though this subject dominates our volume, these documents frame the debate. Among other things, they  illustrate that Churchill was not the only British leader who fumed over lost opportunities in Italy.

25 October 1943. General Sir Alan Brooke: diary. (“War Diaries, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,” page 56)

It is becoming more and more evident that our operations in Italy are coming to a standstill and that owing to lack of resources we shall not only come to a standstill, but also find ourselves in a very dangerous position unless the Russians go on from one success to another. Our build up in Italy is much slower than the German, and far slower than I had expected. We shall have an almighty row with the Americans who have put us in this position with their insistence to abandon the Mediterranean operations for the very problematical cross Channel operations. We are now beginning to see the full beauty of the Marshall strategy! It is quite heartbreaking when we see what we might have done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans.

*****

26 October 1943. Lord Moran: diary. (“Winston Churchill, the Struggle for Survival,” pages 130–31)

The PM is already beginning to have his own doubts and hesitations….His face was glum, his jaw set, misgivings filled his mind. “Stalin seems obsessed by this bloody Second Front,” he muttered angrily. “I can be obstinate too.” He jumped out of bed and began pacing up and down. “Damn the fellow,” he said under his breath. And then he rang for a secretary. When he began dictating a telegram to the Foreign Secretary I got up to leave the room. “No, Charles, don’t go. This,” grumbled the PM, “is what comes of a lawyer’s agreement to attack on a fixed date without regard to the ever-changing fortunes of war.”

Alex’s [Field Marshal Alexander] fears had upset the PM. His mind was now made up. He turned to the secretary, who held her pencil ready. “I will not allow the great and fruitful campaign in Italy to be cast away and end in a frightful disaster, for the sake of crossing the Channel in May. The battle must be nourished and fought out until it is won. Molotov must be warned,” the PM continued striding to the door and back, “that the assurances I gave to Stalin about ‘Overlord’ in May are subject to the exigencies of the battle in Italy. Eisenhower and Alex must have what they need to win the battle, no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations. Stalin ought to be told bluntly that ‘Overlord’ might have to be postponed.”

*****

29 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Anthony Eden. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.1764/3 (Churchill papers, 20/122)

Most Immediate. Most Secret and Personal. There is of course no question of abandoning “Overlord” which will remain our principal operation for 1944. The retention of landing-craft in the Mediterranean in order not to lose the battle of Rome may cause a slight delay, perhaps till July, as the smaller class of landing-craft cannot cross the Bay of Biscay in the winter months and would have to make the passage in the Spring. The delay would however mean that the blow when struck would be with somewhat heavier forces, and also that the full bombing effort on Germany would not be damped down so soon. We are also ready at any time to push across and profit by a German collapse. These arguments may be of use to you in discussion.

 *****

30 November 1943. Winston S. Churchill and Josef Stalin: notes of a conversation, Soviet Embassy, Teheran (Cabinet papers, 120/113)

Most Secret. The Prime Minister said that he was half American and he had a great affection for the American people. What he was going to say was not to be understood as anything disparaging of the Americans and he would be perfectly loyal towards them, but there were things which it was better to say between two persons.

We had a preponderance of troops over the Americans in the Mediterranean. There were three to four times more British troops than American there. That is why he was anxious that the troops in the Mediterranean should not be hamstrung if it could be avoided, and he wanted to use them all the time. In Italy there were some 13 to 14 divisions of which 9 or 10 were British. There were two armies, the 5th Anglo-American Army, and the 8th Army, which was entirely British. The choice had been represented as keeping to the date of “Overlord” or pressing on with the operations in the Mediterranean. But that was not the whole story.

*

The Americans wanted him to attack, to undertake an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal against the Japanese in March. He was not keen about it. If we had in the Mediterranean the landing craft needed for the Bay of Bengal, we would have enough to do all we wanted in the Mediterranean and still be able to keep to an early date for “Overlord.”

It was not a choice between the Mediterranean and the date of “Overlord,” but between the Bay of Bengal and the date of “Overlord.” He thought we would have all we wanted in the way of landing craft. However, the Americans had pinned us down to a date for “Overlord” and operations in the Mediterranean had suffered in the last two months. Our army was somewhat disheartened by the removal of the 7 divisions. We had sent home our 3 divisions and the Americans were sending theirs, all in preparation for “Overlord.” That was the reason for not taking full advantage with the Italian collapse. But it also proved the earnestness of our preparations for “Overlord.”

 

Questions: Bombing Civilians

Churchill’s questioning of Allied “carpet bombing” is well established in this volume. Churchill was concerned over bombing civilians in the forthcoming invasion of France. Here he voices his worries to the Supreme Commander; in the event, Eisenhower convinced him that certain French casualties would have to be expected.

3 April 1944. Winston S. Churchill to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Churchill papers, 20/137)

Top Secret. Personal and Private. My dear General, The Cabinet today took rather a grave and on the whole an adverse view of the proposal to bomb so many French railway centres, in view of the fact that scores of thousands of French civilians, men, women, and children, would lose their lives or be injured. Considering that they are all our friends, this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces. It was decided that the Defence Committee should consider the matter during this week, and that thereafter the Foreign Office should address the State Department and I should myself send a personal telegram to the President.

The argument for concentration on these particular targets is very nicely balanced on military grounds. I myself have not heard the arguments which have led to the present proposal. The advantage to enemy propaganda seem to me to be very great, especially as this would not be in the heat of battle but a long time before. Would it not also be necessary to consult General de Gaulle and the French National Committee of Liberation? There were many other arguments that were mentioned, and I thought I ought to let you know at this stage how the proposal was viewed.

Questions in the House

Despite his burdens, Churchill routinely faced Questions in the House of Commons. He did so with relish and skill. From many questions and answers, this exchange on “Basic English” provides an example.

Willie Gallacher, a frequent critic, was Communist MP for West Fife, Scotland. Henry Wedderburn, Conservative MP for Renfrew, was jibing Churchill over one of his invented words, “triphibian,” referring to British prowess on land, on sea and in the air. The Prime Minister responded with one of his favorite archaic words, “purblind”….

4 November 1943. House of Commons: Questions

Sir Leonard Lyle asked the Prime Minister when the Committee of Ministers set up to study and report upon Basic English are expected to reach their conclusion?

The Prime Minister: I hope to receive the recommendations of this Committee before very long.

Sir Lonard Lyle: When we do get this Report will the BBC be asked to adopt it, or will they still continue to use Basic BBC?

The Prime Minister: Basic English is not intended for use among English-speaking people but to enable a much larger body of people who do not have the good fortune to know the English language to participate more easily in our society.

Mr. Gallacher: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider introducing Basic Scottish?

Mr. Wedderburn: Does Basic English include the word “triphibious”?

The Prime Minister: I have tried to explain that people are quite purblind who discuss this matter as if Basic English were a substitute for the English language.

 

Questions: Will he die when it’s over?

Little escaped the wide net of Sir Martin Gilbert, who assembled a virtual day-by-day record of Churchill’s life. From here the Hillsdale team has assembled them in readable form, attaching a host of footnotes and cross references. Occasionally we include published recollections. Here is one by Lady Diana Cooper: a startling and grim prediction she heard from Clementine Churchill. Fortuitously, in this case, Clementine was wrong.

 12 January 1944. Mary Soames: recollection. (‘Clementine Churchill’, page 350)

Diana Cooper recounted a “curious calm and sad conversation” with Clementine, after a dinner in Marrakesh:

“I was talking about postwar days and proposed that instead of a grateful country building Winston another Blenheim, they should give him an endowed manor house with acres for a farm and gardens to build and paint in. Clemmie very calmly said: “I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over.”

She said this so objectively that I could not bring myself to say the usual “What nonsense!” but tried something about it was no use relying on death; people lived to ninety or might easily, in our lives, die that day…. But she seemed quite certain and quite resigned to his not surviving long into peace. “You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”  It was touching and noble.

Fateful Questions: September 1943 to April 1944, latest volume in The Churchill Documents, is available from Hillsdale College Bookstore. To order click here.

Andrew Roberts writes:

After the surrender of Italy to the Allies in September 1943, the Italian Fleet was apportioned between the Allied powers and absorbed into their navies. Although the Axis had by then been cleared out of the Mediterranean, the ships played a significant part in the rest of the war.

Negotiations regarding the apportioning of the Italian Fleet, in volume 19 of Hillsdale’s Churchill Documents, provide a fascinating backdrop and insight into relations between Britain, America and Russia leading up to the November 1943 Teheran Conference and its aftermath. For although Soviet Russia had played no part in the Mediterranean victory, it nonetheless demanded a third of the Italian Fleet—not least as a tribute paid to its continuing enormous losses on the Eastern Front. In the new volume, Churchill and Roosevelt emerge as generally willing to indulge Joseph Stalin’s demands for part of the Italian Fleet, though not to quite the extent of one-third of it.

Soviet Demands

Churchill told the his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden: “Assuming we get the Italian Fleet, we gain not only that fleet but the British fleet which has hitherto contained it. This very heavy addition to our Naval power should be used at the earliest possible moment to intensify the war against Japan.” Churchill hoped that no fewer than ten aircraft carriers, suitably supplemented by the Italian Littorio class battleships and smaller craft, might be able to take part in action in the Far East, and also, possibly in Operation Overlord, the invasion of France in June 1944.

By 7 October 1943, however, the Russians had indicated an interest in taking over about one-third of the Italian Fleet. Although the British Chiefs of Staff weren’t opposed to this in principle, they did feel that “handing over of the ships would, however, give rise to a great many difficulties which would need very careful examination.” The ships were not conditioned for Arctic weather; that the Free French, Greeks and Yugoslavs might also make demands for Italian vessels; handing any to Russia might “discourage Italian co-operation.”  

At Teheran on 1 December, Stalin, Molotov, Roosevelt and Churchill thrashed out the issue of the Italian Fleet. “A large number of merchant ships and a smaller number of warships could be used by the three nations during the war and then could be distributed,” suggested Roosevelt. “It would be best until then for those to use these ships who could use them best.”  Churchill magnanimously said “this was a very small thing after all the efforts that Russia was making or had made.” He added that “The matter would have to be so arranged that there would be no mutiny in the Italian Fleet and no scuttling of ships.”

British Objections

By the end of December the Combined Chiefs of Staff did not want to hand anything over to the Russians in the short term, for fear of scuttling, mutiny, destruction and non-cooperation by the Italians. To that end, on 3 January 1944, Churchill told Roosevelt that the Royal Navy would hand over eight of its own destroyers instead of the Italian ones, indeed some of the same destroyers that it received from America in the destroyer-for bases deal of September 1940. Since Britain had no free submarines, he asked Roosevelt to supply them “until we can get the Italian craft.” The Anglo-Americans went even further, and as Churchill told the War Cabinet: “We had undertaken to loan a battleship, the Royal Sovereign, and 20,000 tons of merchant shipping; the U.S. had agreed to hand over a cruiser and 20,000 tons of merchant shipping.”

Italian Fleet Decisions

It was a stark sign of quite how far both Churchill and Roosevelt were willing to go to appease Stalin in early 1944, before Operation Overlord and whilst the huge preponderance of battlefield combat was being undertaken on the Eastern Front—which ultimately was where four out of every five German soldiers died in combat during World War II. Overall, Britain lent no fewer than thirteen of the fourteen vessels Russia demanded, namely a battleship, eight destroyers and four submarines, while the Americans donated a cruiser. But when the Russians continued to demand one-third of the Italian Fleet on top of the American and British ships they were being loaned till the end of the war, Churchill balked. On 7 March he told Roosevelt: “I have never agreed nor have you ever asked me to agree to a division of the Italian Fleet into three shares.”

Churchill said Britain deserved compensation for having carried almost the whole burden of the naval war against Italy. Between 1940 and 1943, he wrote, that war had cost the Royal Navy the staggering total of a battleship, two aircraft carriers, a monitor, fourteen cruisers, forty-eight destroyers, thirteen escorts, three fast minelayers, two depot ships and forty submarines, along with 129 merchant vessels of 780,000 gross tonnage. He added: “We certainly feel that we are entitled to have our claims for replacements duly considered by our closest Ally.”

Stalin Insists

Roosevelt agreed, but on 17 March, Stalin wrote saying that the issue of the Italian Fleet “is, of course, entirely beyond dispute, and the Italian Government should be given so to understand in the particular case of the Italian ships which are liable to be handed over to the Soviet Union.” Here was a direct impasse—and a dangerous one, considering that British and American troops were now less than three months from undertaking Operation Overlord.

As The Churchill Documents, volume 19 closes, we find the Russians on one side of yet another thorny question, and Churchill and Roosevelt on the other. As the documents in this book make clear, the Italian Fleet issue saw the two Western leaders doing everything they reasonably could to accommodate a fundamentally unreasonable and pathologically ungrateful and suspicious Stalin. It was not for the first time, and would certainly not be for the last.

Ivan Maisky: “The greatest sin of modern statesman is vacillation and ambiguity of thought and action.”

Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 634 pages, $28.80, Kindle $19.99, audiobook $36.32.

Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read in full, click here.

____________________________

A striking work of scholarship (actually an abridgement of a three-volume complete work coming in 2016), this book will inspire fresh scholarship on Churchill, Russia and World War II. Ivan Maisky was a penetrating observer of 1932-43 Britain, and Gabriel Gorodetsky connects every long gap in his diaries with informed accounts of what was happening. The book links nicely with Hillsdale’s Churchill Documents, volume 18, offering vast new primary source material on the World War II “grand alliance.”

Gorodetsky’s interview with Geraldine Doogue of ABC (Australia) is worth hearing for his description of Maisky, who met with everyone, socially or officially, including press and opposition, and wrote with keen perception. In the late 1930s he said the British government was “infected to the core with the poison of compromise and balance of power politics.” As early as March 1936, he forecast that “a terrible storm is approaching at full speed!” (68).

Wasn’t it dangerous in the age of Stalin to keep a diary? “It was like signing your death sentence,” Professor Gorodetsky says. “Despite the danger, he could not stop himself. But [perhaps for self-preservation] there are long moments of silence. It was my job to fill in the context.” He does so masterfully.

High-Bourgeois Bolshy

While Maisky was prone to repeat the Bolshevik line about communism’s ultimate triumph, his tastes were high-bourgeois. He enjoyed fine food and wine, luxury travel and aristocratic company (though intensely loyal to his plain and Bolshy wife). An English country house weekend was his delight. He reminds me of an apparently apocryphal remark by Leonid Brezhnev’s mother who, on a visit from the country, is shown around her son’s palatial Kremlin accommodations: “But Leonie,” she asks, “what will you do when the communists come?”

Maisky’s observations of the good and the great (and the not so good) are revealing. During the 1938 Czech crisis he found Neville Chamberlain “almost weeping, his voice trembled, and he couldn’t reconcile himself to the thought that war could begin any moment now. That’s bad. A speech like that augurs ill….the PM considers himself a ‘man of destiny’! He was born into this world to perform a ‘sacred mission.’ A dangerous state of mind…” (139-41, 161). On Stanley Baldwin’s search for a defense minister he quoted Churchill: “Baldwin is looking for a man smaller than himself….such a man is not easy to find” (70).

Sir Thomas Inskip, Baldwin’s eventual choice, had Maisky “in hysterics with…his inability to grasp military terminology: ‘What is a division?…in every division there is a different number of men….How many vessels are there in a flotilla? I’m completely lost in all these terms’” (147). Sir Samuel Hoare, Chamberlain’s Home Secretary, was “dry, elegant and quite short. His face is sharp, intelligent and guardedly attentive. He is very courteous and considerate, but cautious….He is a novice, he underestimates the difficulties, and is prone to experimentation” (50-51). Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to London, was “a coarse, dull-witted maniac, with the outlook and manners of a Prussian N.C.O. It has always remained a mystery to me how Hitler could have made such a dolt his chief adviser on foreign affairs” (75).

Maisky was fascinated with Churchill, no doubt relaying his remarks to Stalin: “We would be complete idiots were we to deny help to the Soviet Union at present out of a hypothetical danger of socialism” (April 1936). “We need a strong Russia….[We must] stick together. Otherwise we are ruined” (November 1937). From early 1935 (apparently with Stalin’s approval), Maisky worked for an Anglo-French-Soviet understanding. During the Munich crisis he promised Chamberlain that the USSR would join the Anglo-French and threaten war if Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia (122). But was Stalin testing their intentions, or just hoping to entangle them in a war with Germany? Maisky wondered (privately).

Maisky, War, and the Alliance

As early as April 1939, Maisky and the Soviet ambassador in Berlin warned Stalin that eventually, Hitler would turn on and invade Russia. But they also argued for short-term rapprochement: “…as long as [Germany] was preoccupied with France and Poland the neutrality of the Soviet Union was indispensable” (179). Thus the infamous Russo-German non-aggression pact, which freed Hitler to attack Poland in September 1939, and Stalin to share the spoils.

After Russia joined the “Grand Alliance,” President Roosevelt worried that Stalin might bolt and do his own deal with Hitler. On 9 February 1943 Eden showed Churchill and Maisky an exchange of messages after FDR offered send 100 bombers to ​Vladivostok. Stalin had sarcastically replied: Where they were needed was on the German front. ​Churchill, whom many consider the pig-headed third of the alliance, played the diplomat: “Roosevelt was enraged by Stalin’s message and wanted to send an abusive reply. But I managed to talk him out of it. I told him: listen, who is really fighting today? Stalin alone!…If Stalin came to Casablanca, the first thing he would have asked [Eden] and me would have been: ‘How many Germans did you kill in 1942? And how many do you intend to kill in 1943?’ And what would the two of us have been able to say? We ourselves are not sure what we are going to do in 1943.”

Much second front controversy, and the long-postponed Operation Overlord (invasion of France) surrounds the interesting things Maisky has Churchill saying. On 9 February 1943 the PM exclaimed: “Right now the Americans have only one division here! They have sent nothing since November.” How many more were coming? Maisky asked. Churchill: “I wish I knew. When I was in Moscow, I proceeded from the assumption that by spring 1943 the Americans would have dispatched twenty-seven divisions to England, just as they had promised….Now [they] promise to send only four or five divisions by August.” When Maisky asked what would happen if the Americans did not deliver the promised divisions, Churchill replied: “I’ll carry out this operation whatever happens.”

Maisky and Churchill

In his Australian interview Gorodetsky drew an odd conclusion. One of Maisky’s faults, he said, was his admiration of Churchill: “He failed to see that Churchill had different objectives than defeating the Nazis.” His object to preserve the British Empire caused him to flirt over-long with Mediterranean strategies that delayed the invasion of France. Launched earlier, it “could have prevented the Cold War.” Given the postwar bankruptcy of Britain and the Empire, which Churchill had sacrificed in his single-minded determination to defeat Hitler, this is debatable. The invasion was postponed for sound military reasons. But this is a side issue, which does not detract from the brilliance and importance of this book.

The greatest sin of modern statesman, Maisky ruminated in 1936. “is vacillation and ambiguity of thought and action. This is the weakness which before long may land us into war” (67). His words can still be applied to certain modern statesmen.

Was Maisky really a committed communist? It doesn’t seem so from these pages. He did write, at least for the record, that state socialism was on the rise. But even Eden believed that. In 1938 Eden told him the capitalist system had had its day. Maisky told Anthony Eden, “…the USSR represents the rising sun, and the USA the setting sun, a fact which does not exclude the possibility of the relatively lengthy continued existence of the USA as a mighty capitalist power.” Eden asked where the British fit in. Maisky: “You, as always, are trying to find a middle course of compromise between two extremes. Will you find it? I don’t know. That is your concern” (497). He was wrong about the rising sun—and, we trust, about the setting sun.

Maisky was fortunate. Though recalled from London in mid-1943 and retired in 1945, he did not suffer the fate of so many Soviet diplomats. He arrested in 1953, and Stalin’s death may have saved his life. He was released from prison in 1955, and died in 1975 aged 91. He wrote five volumes of memoirs, discreet and judicious, of course. Now thanks to Gabriel Gorodetsky he gets full vindication: his every thought is revealed. Serious scholars of World War II will find this book hard to put down.

Read complete review.

There are many current anniversaries (Dardanelles 1915, VE-Day 1945, funeral 1965; Atlantic Charter and Pearl Harbor next year). So one-man Churchill plays are multiplying. I saw one recently in New Hampshire—and left grumbling. I will not criticize the actor, who made a passable attempt at impersonation. But his play script left much to be desired.

Who writes these scripts? Do they do any research? Typically, this one vacuums every famous quote it can cram into 90 minutes and gets so many wrong that one loses count. This is not new. Why meddle with Churchill’s immortal words—which are famous for way he expressed them? Why do writers, actors and politicians insist on misquoting him?

Mangled quotations mount up fast. The great speeches—Munich, Holiday Time in America (1939), Blood Toil Tears and Sweat, Fight on the Beaches—are sometimes convincingly delivered. But every one is spoiled by detail edits that occur willy-nilly. Example: it was “victory in spite of all terror,” not “all hardship.” Churchill was too good a writer to use “hardship” when he meant terror.

Setting’s Off

This presentation is set in the Cabinet War Rooms in April 1955. Churchill has gone there to ponder his decision to resign. But Churchill despised the War Rooms, spent only a few nights there during the Blitz. He left them, never to return, in 1945. Why not stick to the facts, and set the scene at Downing Street? Moreover, the date should be February or March, since he had long made his decision to resign by April—and did so on April 5th.

Churchill did not hesitate to go because of doubt about his successor, as the play suggests (though he later wondered privately whether Anthony Eden would succeed). He decided to leave after failing to engineer a summit conference with Eisenhower and the Russians. Curiously, one of the Russians mentioned is Gorbachev—who was 24 and just graduating from university in 1955.

As in many one-man plays, Sir Winston reviews his life, which in this play was nicely paced but full of errors. Lord Randolph Churchill did not die of syphilis. Nanny Everest was three years dead when Winston’s first book appeared. Omdurman was not the final charge of British cavalry. He became prime minister on May 10th not May 4th 1940, thirty not thirty-five years after 1910, and so on.

The play correctly suggests that Churchill held Prime Minister Baldwin, not Chamberlain, chiefly responsible for Britain’s insufficient rearmament in the 1930s, and repeats WSC’s private reflection that it would have been better had Baldwin never lived. But it misattributes Churchill’s 1938 remark “embalm, cremate and bury”—which referred to avoiding risks in national defense, not to Mr. Baldwin.

More Misquotes

More lines he never uttered: “if you’re going through hell, keep going”; “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”; and the famous exchange with G.B. Shaw over Shaw’s play (“Bring a friend, if you have one….I’ll come the second night, if there is one”). To be fair, it was only recently learned that Shaw and Churchill both denied that exchange. But it’s long established that Lady Astor threatened to poison F.E. Smith’s coffee, not Churchill’s. The famous Bessie Braddock encounter (“tomorrow I’ll be sober”) and the Attlee urinal crack likely did occur, but are so edited as to deprive them of their rapier impact.

There is no record that Churchill ever said God created France for its beauty and Frenchmen to balance it, or that Roosevelt told Churchill he used a cigarette holder to stay away from cigarettes. It is nowhere believed that the United States was “pro-Nazi” before Pearl Harbor. It is untrue that in 1955 Churchill was fretting over the costs of Chartwell (it was purchased by his friends for the National Trust in 1946, providing he could live out his life there); or that Churchill planned his own funeral.

What we watched in New Hampshire was a reasonably convincing portrayal, bringing out many of Churchill’s admirable characteristics, including magnanimity and appreciation for political opponents. But the counterfactuals and misquotes, together with the impossible setting, spoil this presentation for anyone with a little knowledge of the story.

It’s too bad, because the facts are broadly known, and a writer has only to run his screed past any one of a score of Churchill institutions or scholars, who would probably be happy to vet it for free. Get it right!

Reference to Churchill and abuse of alcohol. When my father and I had lunch with Churchill at the House of Commons in 1952, I certainly did not see Churchill drink any more than the usual lunch time glass of wine. My father never mentioned his excessive use of alcohol in any form.—R.W.

He had an impressive capacity but you’re right. Except for a bodyguard who helped him and Eden totter home after a night of toasts with the Russians at Teheran, no one close ever saw him the worse for drink. (Well, Alanbrooke sometimes wrote in his diary that the boss was inebriated. But he wrote a lot of things in his diary late at night when he was exhausted from arguing over strategy.)

Churchill’s intake was exaggerated, not least by himself, and hence the myth. Whatever the amount, it was not enough to affect him. He learned to “purify” drinking water with a dribble of whisky in South Africa. He would nurse a drink like that for hours. One of his private secretaries referred to it as “scotch-flavoured mouthwash.”

The perils of drinking alcohol neat

In Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill, vol. VI, 828-29, is an amusing account from autumn 1940, when George Harvie-Watt, Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary during World War II, was commanding an anti-aircraft unit during a visit by Churchill and General Frederick Pile, which helps explain why why Churchill was able apparently to imbibe so many whiskies—he always drank them well-diluted.

As the party arrived, Pile told Harvie-Watt that  Churchill was “frozen and in a bad temper” and suggested that the Prime Minister be brought “a strong  whisky and soda.” Harvie-Watt sent a despatch rider to find one. “Meanwhile,” he later recalled, “everything was going from bad to worse. The field was almost waterlogged and the rain poured down. Everything I tried to show the Prime Minister he had seen before.” The searchlight control radar set, which had worked on the previous night, failed to function, and so on.

“At this moment the despatch rider arrived with the whisky, and Harvie-Watt poured one for the freezing Prime Minister. Churchill swallowed a half tumbler, then cried out at the taste of the neat whisky: ‘You have poisoned me.'”

Churchill had an impressive capacity, but drank most of his alcohol with meals; he did not nurse a bottle, as an alcoholic would. He had good advice for those who took it neat. “You are not likely to live a long life if you drink it like that.”