Portent: 1737

Over 200 years before the Battle of Britain, the poet Thomas Gray, famed for his Churchyard Elegy, wrote a remarkable, predictive verse. It was brought to my attention by Richard Cohen, founder of the excellent Facebook forum Winston Churchill. Translated from the Latin from Luna Habitabilis (The Habitable Moon), 1737.

The time will come when thou shall lift thine eyes

To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies

While aged peasants too amazed for words

Stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.

England so long mistress of the sea

Where winds and waves caress her sovereignty

Her ancient triumphs yet on high shall bear

And reign the sovereign of the conquered air.

20 August 2010

Seven decades to the day after Winston Churchill’s inspiring salute to the Royal Air Force as the Battle of Britain was reaching its height, Timothy Robert Hardy, the greatest actor ever to portray Churchill, delivered portions of his 1940 speech containing the famous tribute: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

The original speech was a long overview of the war situation, covering many events beside “the great air battle” raging over Britain. In deference to the occasion, Robert Hardy deftly provided Churchill’s tribute to the airmen, and other excerpts from the full speech delivered in the House of Commons 70 years before. (Available via email.)

Battle: The Greatest Actor

In 2010 Robert Hardy was approaching his 85th birthday—though it was impossible to visualize him as much more than 70. (He left us at 91 in 2017.) His Churchill roles began with the marvelous television series “The Wilderness Years” and extended through numerous film performances and even a stage play. He often said Churchill led us through 1940 with the force of his speeches, courage and charisma. We say in reply that Robert Hardy’s work expressed all the Churchillian qualities. Through his skill the true Churchill emerged for new generations.

At the end of his August 1940 speech Churchill expressed his optimism for a coming alliance of English-speaking peoples. Free nations everywhere will understand those words. If or when we are faced by such a peril again, pray that we find such a leader.

Churchill was referring to President Roosevelt’s interest American military facilities in Newfoundland and the West Indies when he concluded:

The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.

(Updated from 2016). Home to Secretaries of State for War Lord Haldane, Lord Kitchener, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, it was a key venue in two global conflicts. But in 2016 the old War Office building was sold to developers of a five-star hotel and residential apartments. That work is expected to finish in 2022, and residents are being sought.

Built in 1906 for £1.2, million, the Grade II-listed property changed hands for £300 million. The buyers were the Hinduja Group, in partnership with a Obrascon Huarte Lain Desarrollos (OHLD), a Spanish industrial company.

The demise of the old War Office was unavoidable. At 580,000 square feet, it had become a costly white elephant, fiscally unsustainable. Declarations of war are out of fashion. We don’t even have War Ministries or War Departments. Nowadays, their functions are performed by a “nicer icon” like the Ministry of Defence or the Department of Homeland Security. At any rate, the need for a building this big in the 21st century is past. Unless of course all hell breaks loose, in which case it won’t matter.

Preservation, of sorts

Full marks, then, to the British government, which granted a 250-year lease providing that “the heritage and security of the building is well managed.” And to the Hinduja Group, which “reached out” to the past by declaring: “We will make every effort to honour the heritage and restoration of this national monument, elevate its status and reconnect it with the public.” (The building had long been closed to the public.) The company has worked with a team of experts including Historic England and Museum of London Archaeology.

Nowadays, everything is “iconic,” a word greatly abused. Along with “issues” (the Politically Correct substitute for “problems”) and “reaching out,” (which replaces “contacting” in the Age of Niceness). See: “Some Issues with ‘Issues.’” But if anything is iconic, this grand building qualifies.

So does another, not far away, though rather more modest….

Icon of valor: St. George’s RAF Chapel

In 2016 the fate of this monument in Kent was uncertain. The Daily Mail reported:

With its magnificent stained-glass windows, it stands as a fitting memorial to the Battle of Britain pilots who gave their lives to save the nation from Nazi invasion. But the ornately furnished chapel Sir Winston Churchill insisted should remain a “permanent shrine to the glorious Few” may be closed down and boarded up. Defying the wartime leader’s express wishes, defence chiefs have decreed that the £50,000-a-year cost of running St. George’s Chapel of Remembrance is an ‘inappropriate’ use of resources.

The loss of St. George’s Chapel would have been tragic. Biggin Hill is an “icon,” from where the Royal Air Force sallied forth to beat the “Hun raiders” (as Churchill called them) out of the daylight air and to win the Battle of Britain. Fortunately, it was saved by a charity, the Friends of St. George’s RAF Chapel. Working with Bromley Council and the Ministry of Defence, the Friends care for the beautiful building and its Garden of Remembrance. Regular and special services occur, and visitors are most welcome. Services run Sundays at 9:30am. A special service with retiring Archdeacon Paul Wright occurs at 10:30am on November 14th.

The work of the Friends is extraordinary. Aside from services and special events, they offer pickups to residents within five miles of Biggin Hill who cannot get to services themselves. “Members of the Committee also visit, meet and offer support, to our members who are older or infirm, lonely or temporarily incapacitated.” Membership costs only £15 or the equivalent per year. Donations are welcome. Send to FSGC Treasurer, 39 Jail Lane, Biggin Hill, Westerham, Kent TN16 3SE. By email, please contact the secretary, margaret.wilmot207mw@gmail.com.

A worthy development

My personal association with Biggin Hill during the Battle of Britain lives in my mind. As a nation we have short memories and it is well that Memorials such as this should bring to our remembrance the cost of victory in the days when one of our fighter pilots had to be worth ten. They died without seeing the reward of their efforts; we live to hold their reward inviolate and unfading. —Winston S. Churchill, quoted on the Chapel website

I wore the uniform when we didn’t often hear “thank-you for your service.” So I suppose we have matured  in our appreciation of those who served. Efforts like those of the Friends of St. George’s Chapel are compelling. The fliers of the RAF, who rose to confront a seemingly invincible enemy in 1940, saved Britain, and much else besides. They “held the fort alone,” as Churchill put it—”till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.”

Some things on the web live a long time. “How Winston Churchill Stopped the Nazis” by Klaus Wiegrefe was published ten years ago, but we still get queries about it. This review is therefore republished for your amusement or forgiveness.

This nine-part article is oddly remindful  of “The Compleat Wrks of Wilm Shkspr (Abridged).” In that work, three actors critique all of Shakespeare’s works in a couple of hours.

There’s nothing particularly novel or new in Der Spiegel‘s series. Attempts to cast Churchill as demoniac have been going on long before 2021—as bad as today’s stuff is. Wiegrefe does admit that Churchill “Saved Europe.” But one would do better reading about World War II on Wikipedia—or, if you have time, one of the good specialty studies, like Geoffrey Best’s Churchill and War—or, if you really want to know what Churchill thought, his own abridged war memoirs.

“Putzi” and Hitler’s dinner date

The early partss dwell on sagas of Churchill and Hitler starting in 1932. The story then skips ahead to the bombing of Germany. (Wiegrefe says this killed mostly civilians, and Churchill was “strangely ambivalent” about it.) There follows the postwar division of Europe. Much is oversimplified and fails to consider the contemporary reality of fighting for survival—which, after all, is what Churchill and Co. were doing. You make a lot of mistakes doing that.

Part 1 recounts the timeworn story of the stillborn Hitler-Churchill meeting. Hitler’s pro-British foreign press chief, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, attempted to arrange this in Munich in 1932.  The account (based on Hanfstaengl’s 1957 memoirs) is reasonably accurate. But Wiegrefe concludes that  Churchill felt “regret” that the meeting did not take place.

Not so. What Churchill wrote was: “Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me. Later on, when he was all-powerful, I was to receive several invitations from him. But by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself.” (Gathering Storm, 66). This hardly sounds like regret.

(Putzi himself had regrets. He barely escaped with his life later on, when Goebbels & Co. decided he was a deplorable. Safe in America, he advised Roosevelt about Nazi psychology.)

Functioning prone?

In World War II, Wiegrefe continues, Britain’s premier “conducted a significant portion of government affairs from a horizontal position. Dressed in his red dressing gown, he would lie on his four-poster bed, chewing a cigar and sipping ice-cold soda water, and dictate memos…often titled ‘Action This Day.’”

Of course he dictated correspondence (sitting up) in bed of a morning. It helped him squeeze a day and a half out of every day. He did not conduct the war from his mattress. It’s trivial, but “Action This Day” was a label not a title. He pinned it to notes on which he wanted fast responses. Churchill never drank iced soda water. What he drank was a kind of “scotch-flavored mouthwash.” I thought everybody knew this by the turn of the last century.

Herr Wiegrefe seems confused over the likelihood of a 1940 German invasion of Britain. First he says it was never planned, then that Hitler was ready to launch it if the Royal Air Force “could be put out of commission first.” Next: “The Germans felt they stood a better chance of succeeding in May 1941….” (When they were about to invade the Soviet Union?) The imminence of invasion seemed real enough when the Battle of Britain hung by a thread.

Gas, bombs and razzmatazz

Some authors will never get over the idea that Churchill contemplated using “poison gas,” whether tear gas (Iraq, 1922) or the real stuff. Why, he “even toyed with the idea of dropping poison gas on German cities, but his generals objected.” Any source for that? (We know he was willing to use it in battle—if the enemy used it first. To their credit, they didn’t.)

Understandably, Germans felt the horror of the air bombardment of Germany more than anyone else. Wiegrefe claims that 600,000 died. A scholarly study claims 410,000. Either way, it was tragic. We are told that Churchill admitted that the bombings were “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction.” But this is too brief a condensation of Churchill’s views. Dresden, he wrote to his Chiefs of Staff Committee, “remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests rather than that of the enemy…rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive” (Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory, 1257).

Whose ethnic cleansing?

Oversimplification is rampant in Part 9, “Churchill’s Role in the Expulsion of Germans from Easter[n] Europe.” Wiegrefe accuses him of “ethnic cleansing” in moving Poland west at the expense of German Silesia, to accommodate Stalin’s westerly ambitions. The shift of territory required giving resident Germans “a brief amount of time to gather the bare necessities and leave.”

Like the Jews of Germany, perhaps? Leaving to one side how much personal responsibility Churchill bore for the maltreatment of deportees—which often appalled him, whoever was  maltreated—one’s heart doesn’t exactly bleed.

A searcher for the truth should contemplate Churchill’s 1942 comment:  “The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others.” And then his visit to Berlin in 1945: “My hate had died with their surrender and I was much moved by their demonstrations, and also by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.” These two sentiments are not too common among politicians.

Sniffing at the trivial

There is no attempt throughout these articles to consider the reality and complexities of fighting a resolute and formidable enemy. Let alone with an ally, the Soviet Union, that might flip or flop various ways depending on its interests. Or play off the Anglo-Americans against each other—which Stalin freely did.

Eighty years on, we have the luxury to sniff at Churchill’s representing the fate of Silesian Germans with matchsticks. Or suggesting “spheres of influence” in Eastern Europe (which saved Greece). War is hell, as General Sherman said. And Churchill’s daughter Mary often remarked, “nobody knew at the time who would win.”

At the end of the war, “the only decision remaining for the Allies was to determine what to do with Hitler and the Germans once they were defeated.” (No worries about the role of the United Nations, decolonization, Stalin, nuclear technology, or European recovery?) “Churchill vacillated between extremes, between a Carthaginian peace and chivalrous generosity. In the end, Stalin’s and Roosevelt’s ideas prevailed.”

“Perhaps he was simply tipsy”

We search for examples of the Carthaginian peace toward which Churchill vacillated. Did he not walk out at Teheran, when Stalin proposed mass executions? And reject the Morgenthau Plan of reducing Germany to an agrarian state, stripped of industry? Did he not endorse the postwar Berlin Airlift? Certainly he urged rapprochement between France and Germany. Was he not the champion of Adenauer, and as good a friend abroad as postwar Germany ever had?

“Before the Holocaust,” Herr Wiegrefe writes, “Churchill toyed with the idea of banishing Hitler and other top Nazis to an isolated island, just as Napoleon had once been banished to Elba. Or perhaps he was simply tipsy when he voiced this idea.”

Perhaps the author was simply tipsy when he wrote these articles. What we have here is a rough capsule history of the war, along with several clangers and exaggerations. But in the main this account is, as Churchill once said about Britain and the Axis ganging up against Russia: “Too easy to be good.”