Edward Halifax Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Munich Reflections: Peace for “a” Time & the Case for Resistance

15 November 2020

Journalist Leo McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee is a deft analysis of a political odd couple who led Britain’s Second World War coalition government. Now, eighty years since the death of Neville Chamberlain, he has published an excellent appraisal in The Spectator. Churchill’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Chamberlain negotiated the 1938 Munich agreement. “Peace for our time,” he famously referred to it. In the end, he bought the world peace for a time.

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.…

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Churchill and the Baltic States: From WW2 to Liberation

25 January 2018

EXCERPT ONLY: For the complete text of “Churchill and the Baltic” with endnotes, please go to this page on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

“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…

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“I don’t want [my views] disturbed by any bloody Indian”: Was it Churchill?

5 January 2018

“I am quite satisfied with my views of India. I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indian.” Thus Winston Churchill said (or is alleged to have said) to Lord Halifax née Lord Irwin née Edward Wood, in 1929.

“Bludgeon of choice”

A historian friend says the Indian Bengal Famine (1943) “is on its way to surpassing the Dardanelles (1915) as the bludgeon of choice for Churchill’s detractors.” He was commenting on the latest outburst of Bengal Famine nonsense—contested by a thoughtful Indian, as well as myself: scroll to comments.

“Bloody Indian” tracks to Ben Pimlott, editor, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-45 (Jonathan Cape 1986), 126.…

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“Darkest Hour,” the movie: an interview with The Australian

28 December 2017

For The Australian …

Troy Bramston of The Australian newspaper had pertinent questions about the new movie Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. With the thought that Troy’s queries might be of interest, I append the text of the interview.

The Australian : Of all the things Winston Churchill is purported to have said and done, the myths and misconceptions, which are the most prevalent and frustrating for scholars? None of these appear in the film, but there are three things that rankle: 1) The lies—that he was anxious to use poison gas; that he firebombed Dresden in revenge for Coventry; that he exacerbated the Bengal famine, etc.…

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“Never Surrender,” by John Kelly

17 November 2015

Never Surrender: Winston Churchill and Britain’s Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940, by John Kelly. Scribner, 2015, 370 pp., $19.88, Kindle $14.99.

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May 1940: Lord Halifax “sounded like a nervous solicitor reading from a half-thought-out brief….When Churchill spoke of fighting on alone, the mantle of history—Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Armada—sang through his sentences.”

Here is a well-written and organized review of mainly well-known events, retold with dramatic prose and crisp analysis. It’s an ideal book for young people unfamiliar with the scope of Churchill’s achievement in 1940, and, indeed, for anyone who wants a good account of the events that saved Western civilization.…

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