The funeral quandary

President Franklin Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 and his funeral ceremonies began two days later. A reader asks why Churchill was absent: “A number of sources, some reputable historians, say he purposely skipped the funeral out of strategy or personal feelings. Is there any truth to these assertions?”

There is conjecture that Churchill missed the funeral for political reasons, or envy at FDR’s position as de facto Allied leader. There is also considerable evidence to the contrary. Defenders argue that his absence was owed to circumstances during a critical time. There may be a broader lesson here, on the difficult choices facing statesmen in fraught times.

Reasons of strategy?

Warren Kimball, editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence and erudite works on their wartime relationship, suggests that Churchill’s absence was a political strategy:

Churchill’s decision not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral was an attempt to bring the mountain to Mohammed—subtly to shift the focus of the Anglo-American relationship from Washington to London. “I was tempted during the day to go over for the funeral and begin relations with the new man,” he wrote to the King, but “I should be failing in my duty if I left the House of Commons without my close personal attention….”

This is plausible, considering how Churchill’s presence might have actually drawn attention away from the solemnities. Consider also how little Churchill might have accomplished with Truman during the preoccupying events of the funeral. The new President was facing sudden, enormous challenges. Could they prepare for substantive talks in a day? Churchill’s two 1941 meetings with FDR had been preceded by long sea voyages, full of lengthy planning sessions with his staff.

Artifice and affection?

Jon Meacham, author of the dual study Franklin and Winston (2003) had the impression “that the decision was partly political and partly emotional, the product of a prideful moment in which Churchill, after playing the suitor to Roosevelt, wanted to himself be courted….. Was Churchill, tired of dancing to another man’s tune, relieved Roosevelt was dead? Had it all been an act? No—like so many human relationships, Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s was a mix of the selfish and the unselfish, of artifice and affection.”

One might expect those around the PM, such as Jock Colville or Lord Moran, to mention this possibility in their memoirs. But if there was evidence of Churchill being “tired of the dance.” No intimates suggest it. All we have on record are Churchill’s deep sense of loss, also recorded by Meacham, to Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins and Parliament.

A fit of pique?

Less charitable than Kimball or Meacham was the late Christopher Hitchens. He declared that Churchill skipped the funeral in “pique at Roosevelt’s repeated refusals to visit Britain during the war.” Three years later, Richard Holmes adopted a similar line in Footsteps of Churchill (2005):

It is not unreasonable to wonder whether FDR’s death…did not strike Winston as robbing him of the timely finale to which he himself aspired. Nothing he said to those closest to him at the time or wrote later offers a clue to why he chose not to pay his last respects to the man with whom his fate had been so closely bound, and to spurn an invitation to confer with Harry Truman…. Such a flagrant departure from Winston’s normal standards of behaviour, and such a lapse in his duty as prime minister of a nation that needed U.S. good will more than ever, argues that some irrational factor was at work.

First, in April 1945, Churchill was not anticipating his finale. Second, what he said to those closest to him does offer clues to his decision, and these are not irrational. So let us consider the case most likely. It comes, as most sound interpretations do, from the official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert.

First impulse

Washington ceremonies were set for 14 April, interment at Hyde Park the next day, Sir Martin wrote. “No sooner did he hear the news than Churchill made immediate plans to fly to Hyde Park….

He would leave on 8.30 on the evening of April 13. Everything ready for his departure, but by 7.45 he was unsure. “PM said he would decide at aerodrome,” noted [Alexander] Cadogan in his diary. At the last moment Churchill decided not to go, explaining to the King that with so many Cabinet Ministers already overseas, with Eden on his way to Washington, and with the need for a Parliamentary tribute to Roosevelt, “which clearly it is my business to deliver.” he ought to remain in Britain.

Churchill’s reasoning was confirmed by Anthony Eden, his Foreign Minister, in his own memoirs. Eden was due in America for the United Nations conference—another factor influencing Churchill’s decision.

What we know

 There is more evidence backing Gilbert’s and Eden’s scenario, as Paul Courtenay summarized in reviewing Holmes’s book:

Churchill told his wife: “I decided not to fly to Roosevelt’s funeral on account of much that was going on here” (per Mary Soames). He wrote to Harry Hopkins: “…everyone here thought my duty next week lay at home, at a time when so many Ministers are out of the country” (per Martin Gilbert). And: “P.M. of course wanted to go. A[nthony Eden] thought they oughtn’t both to be away together…. P.M. says he’ll go and A. can stay. I told A. that, if P.M. goes, he must…. Churchill deeply regretted in after years that he allowed himself to be persuaded not to go at once to Washington” (per Alexander Cadogan).*

There is no doubt that Churchill faced one of the statesman’s painful decisions. There was, after all, a World War going on, but the Allies were closing on Berlin. The end might come any day. Yet there is no doubt about his bereavement. “I feel a very painful personal loss, quite apart from the ties of public action,” he telegraphed to Harry Hopkins. “I had a true affection for Franklin.”

The reader may decide if there was more to it than that. Was there a subtle, underlying vein of strategy or regret? Even then, Churchill’s decision was not irrational. It is not hard to believe that, with victory approaching, he would wish to be close at hand.

___________

* Paul H. Courtenay, “Greatness Flawed,” in Finest Hour 128, Autumn 2005, 37. Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves (1998), 526. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, Road to Victory 1942-1945 (2013), 1294. David Dilks, ed. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M. 1938-1945 (1971), 727.

Churchill’s tribute

Two days after Franklin Roosevelt was interred at Hyde Park, Winston Churchill addressed Parliament:

I conceived an admiration for him as a statesman, a man of affairs, and a war leader. I felt the utmost confidence in his upright, inspiring character and outlook, and a personal regard—affection I must say—for him beyond my power to express today….

In the days of peace he had broadened and stabilized the foundations of American life and union. In war he had raised the strength, might and glory of the Great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history.… But all this was no more than worldly power and grandeur, had it not been that the causes of human freedom and of social justice, to which so much of his life had been given, added a lustre to this power and pomp and warlike might, a lustre which will long be discernible among men.…

For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.

And to quote again my old friend Professor David Dilks: “If you will allow the remark in parenthesis, ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the summit of our public life who can think and write at that level?”

…Churchill was howled down in Parliament, pleading for more time for Edward VIII to decide on his future. What a reversal in fortune! Only five years later on the same date, he knew the war was won.” —J.G., Rye, New York

A: He had his downs and ups…

[December 7th, 1936, House of Commons:] May I ask my Rt. Hon. Friend [Prime Minister Baldwin] whether he could give us an assurance that no irrevocable step… [Hon. Members: “No!”] …that no irrevocable step will be taken before the House has received a full statement, not only upon the personal but upon the constitutional issues involved. May I ask him to bear in mind that these issues are not merely personal to the present occupant of the Throne, but that they affect the entire Constitution.” [Hon. Members: “Speech,” and “Sit down!”]

At that moment Churchill temporarily lost all his recently-built political capital by rising to defend Edward VIII. The King was facing abdication over his insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson. His colleagues shouted down the Member for Epping. Ruled out of order for making a speech during Question Time, he stormed from the House. “I am finished,” he muttered.

Five years later, a lot had happened

December 7th 1941, Chequers: Churchill was at the Prime Minister’s country residence, dining with U.S. Ambassador John Gilbert Winant and FDR’s emissary Averell Harriman, when he received news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They immediately put in a call to the President.

In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” he replied. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now”…. I got on again and said, “This certainly simplifies things. God be with you,’ or words to that effect.” Churchill wrote nine years later:

“No American…

…will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.

So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk, after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s-breadth; after 17 months of lonely fighting and 19 months of my responsibility in dire stress.

We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious…. Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

1940: His most important letter to FDR

London, December 7th, 1940 (sent on 8th), to President Roosevelt: The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies…. Moreover, I do not believe that the Government and people of the United States would find it in accordance with the principles which guide them, to confine the help which they have so generously promised only to such munitions of war and commodities as could be immediately paid for. You may be certain that we shall prove ourselves ready to suffer and sacrifice to the utmost for the Cause, and that we glory in being its champions.

According to Richard Lamb (Churchill as War Leader, 77), WSC considered this his most important letter to Roosevelt: “It gave a full statement of Britain’s hopeless financial position…. Straightaway Roosevelt stated at a press conference that he would ‘lease’ material to Britain, get rid of the ‘dollar sign’…. These words had immense significance and raised the curtain on the historic Lend Lease arrangement.”

December 7th in other years

London, December 7th, 1923: “My dear Churchill: Your defeat stamps this election and covers Leicester with shame, but I rejoice to see you stick to your platform of opposition to extremes on either side of politics.” —Sir William Tyrrell. (By 32 votes, WSC had lost his attempt to return to Parliament for West Leicester.)

New Delhi, December 7th, 1935: “Dear Mr. Churchill: May I send you the greeting of the season and good wishes for the New Year. May the New Year bring more happiness and better opportunities for advancing a better understanding between the two countries. I showed your cable to Gandhiji who was very pleased.” —Ganshayam Das Birla

Constantinople, December 7th, 1943: “Do you know what happened to me today, the Turkish President kissed me. The truth is I’m irresistible. But don’t tell Anthony [Eden], he’s jealous.” —WSC to his daughter Sarah.

London, December 7th 1947: “Halifax’s virtues have done more harm in the world than the vices of hundreds of other people. And yet when I meet him, I can’t help having friendly talk.” —WSC to his doctor, Lord Moran

Bermuda, December 7th, 1953: “I cannot make it out…. t seems that everything is left to Dulles. It appears that the President is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll…. This fellow preaches like a Methodist Minister, and his bloody text is always the same: That nothing but evil can come out of meeting with Malenkov. Dulles is a terrible handicap. Ten years ago I could have dealt with him…. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —WSC to Lord Moran

Further reading

“Dinner at Chequers on the Night That Changed Everything,” 2021.

For more versions of the Cheques conversations see “Canada First to Declare War,” 2017.

Quotations from Churchill By Himself: In His Own Words (Kindle edition, 2016).

I am  completing an English assignment which looks at the speeches of Winston Churchill and would like to read press conferences or interviews Churchill gave during the Second World War. So far, I have been able to find only speeches. Please could you advise me whether any such interviews are in existence? —E.L.

Washington, 1941

Churchill rarely gave interviews—only two that I know of as a young man, and those reluctantly. Speeches (live) were his preference. However, on his 1941 visit to Washington, Franklin Roosevelt ushered him into his first press conference. It was just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the press had some fairly urgent questions. Churchill acquitted himself well.

It was the afternoon of December 23rd. Together, Churchill and Roosevelt met about 200 journalists and broadcasters in the President’s executive office. Churchill, seated in the back of the room, could not be seen very well by the crowd of reporters. When the President introduced him, he suggested that the Prime Minister stand to give his audience a better view. When Churchill climbed on his chair to be seen better, “loud and spontaneous cheers and applause rang through the room.”

Although Churchill had some difficulty hearing, his wit charmed everyone. Asked how long he thought it would take to win the war, he quipped, “If we manage it well, it will only take half as long as if we manage it badly.”

A southern reporter if he considered United States entry into the Second World War one of its “great climacterics.” Churchill grinned and answered in his best Texan drawl: “I sho’ do.” Newsweek reported that the “lusty cheers” were the first in the annals of presidential press conferences.

The transcript of this press meeting exists in Newsweek for 5 January 1942, page 23. See also the Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 18, No. 794, 23 December 1941 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), pp. 382-92.

Quebec, 1942

Churchill easily adapted to the concept of press conferences, which seem to have been an American invention.  Another press conference was held in Quebec, after the 1944 conference. A Canadian reporter asked a tricky leading question: “What do you think of the United States?” Churchill responded: “Toilet paper too thin, newspapers too fat.” (Churchill by Himself, page 116.)

Washington, 1952

After the war he got into another press conference when visiting Washington in January 1952. On arrival, a woman who managed to corner him asked: “Doesn’t it thrill you to know that every time you make a speech the hall is packed to overflowing?” Churchill responded: “It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that if instead of making a political speech I were being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.” (Churchill by Himself, 552.)

It would be fair to conclude that on the rare occasions when he found himself surrounded by reporters, he would resort to humor, rather than make any weighty pronouncements.

That one lies with Cordell Hull

It was Franklin Roosevelt‘s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, not Churchill. I have a slight variation of it in the “Red Herrings” appendix of  Churchill by Himself, page 576: “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.”  Although commonly ascribed to Churchill (who would have said “trousers,” not “breeches”), this is definitely down to Hull. See Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1948), I, 220.

From Wikipedia: Cordell Hull (1871-1955) was an American politician from Tennessee. He is best known as the longest-serving Secretary of State, holding the position for eleven years (1933–1944) in the administration of President Roosevelt during much of World War II. Hull received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for his role in establishing the United Nations, and was referred to by Roosevelt as the “Father of the UN.”

Hull resigned as Secretary of State in November 1944 because of failing health. Roosevelt described Hull, upon his departure, as “the one person in all the world who has done his most to make this great plan for peace (the United Nations) an effective fact.” He died on 23 July 1955 at age 83, at his home in Washington, D.C., and is buried in Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea in the Washington National Cathedral.

Winston Churchill on Lies and Lying

As a practicing politician Winston Churchill had a passing acquaintance with lies. It seems he had more affection for them than Cordell Hull. “In wartime,” he famously told Stalin at Teheran in 1943, “Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Stalin, who relied on lies regularly, found this uproariously funny.

Less known but more along Hull’s line is a 1906 Churchill crack—but he didn’t originate it. “There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world. And the worst of it is that half of them are true.” (Sounds like Yogi Berra!) That also made my “Red Herrings” appendix. While Churchill used the words, he quickly credited them to a “witty Irishman.”

One original we safely ascribe to Churchill ran in the Daily Telegraph in 1994, from Vice-Admiral Sir William Crawford (1907-2003). It is a line all politicians should subscribe to, but few ever admit they do. On a visit to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1941, Churchill boarded HMS Rodney. Its officers lined up on the deck to receive him. One asked: “Prime Minister, is everything you tell us true?”

“Young man,” said Churchill, “I have told many lies for the good of my country. I will tell many more.”

War aim or by-product?

Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. (The story of Witold Pilecki.) New York: HarperCollins, 2019, $28.99, Amazon $20.49, Kindle $13.99.

By 1 August 1946 the world knew the full truth of the Holocaust. Churchill said: “I had no idea, when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres which had occurred.” Though he had reports from 1942 to 1944, his statement was broadly true. He did not realize the full magnitude and number of death camps until they were all liberated. Even then, it took time to reconstruct much evidence destroyed by the Nazis. Throughout the war,  many civil servants and ministries insisted that saving the Jews was not a war aim. but a by-product of victory.

“Show us the proof”

In the event, to save Jews, it was necessary to show proof of Nazi genocide. The evidential mountain was harder to scale given attitude of officialdom. Churchill knew and resented the broad anti-Semitism in his and Allied governments. The Jews, some officials said, exaggerated their mistreatment and were “prone to wailing.”

Similar arguments surfaced against Jewish immigration to the West at the Evian and Bermuda refugee conferences (1938, 1943). They added weight to Hitler’s assertions that nobody in the world wanted Jews among them. In Britain the Mandate of Palestine added another complication. Large numbers of Jewish refugees there, it was said, risked provoking the Arab population.

A problem with History as an intellectual discipline is that it is too easy after the fact. During the Second World War, nobody knew for a long time who would prevail. By the time they did, it was too late for hundreds of thousands. During the war, industrial genocide on the scale actually being practised was unknown to human beings, unimaginable to many. They learned too late.

Witold Pilecki: “Were we all…people?”

…was an ordinary person who did extraordinary things. In September 1940, he walked into a Nazi roundup of Poles with the object of being sent to Auschwitz. In 1940-41, Auschwitz mainly contained Poles. By 1942, however, Jews were the main component, and a grim change occurred. Poles had been persecuted; Jews were murdered. Pilecki reported the changing events, the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria. Eloquently, he contrasted the placid scene in the world beyond the fences:

When marching along the grey road towards the tannery in a column raising clouds of dust, one saw the beautiful red light of the dawn shining on the white flowers in the orchards and on the trees by the roadside, or on the return journey we would encounter young couples out walking, breathing in the beauty of springtime, or women peacefully pushing their children in prams. Then the thought uncomfortably bouncing around one’s brain would arise…. swirling around, stubbornly seeking some solution to the insoluble question: Were we all…people?”

After three years Pilecki escaped. He lived to survive the Nazis, only to fall to Poland’s next abusers, the Communists. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising in August-October 1944, and remained loyal to the government-in-exile after the Communist takeover. In 1947, he was arrested by the secret police and executed after a show trial. Fairweather’s Pilecki account is not altogether new. It was first told in Fighting Auschwitz (1975) by the Polish historian Józef Garliński, himself a former Auschwitz inmate.

Passing word to London

Pilecki reported to Underground leader Stefan Rowecki in October. Already Poles were asking that, “for the love of God,” Auschwitz should be leveled. It might be a suicide mission and cause panic, Pilecki opined, but some prisoners might escape. Rowecki send reports to Wladyslaw Sikorski, premier of the exiled government in London. Pilecki reported installation of the first gas chamber in mid-1942.

Sikorski had a problem. Many British hosts thought of Poles as “unruly foreigners with hard-to-pronounce names. ‘Sozzle-something,’ Churchill is reported to have called the senior Polish commander Kazimierz Sosnkowski.” The British knew of German concentration camps being used to corral enemy soldiers. They were reluctant to accept Polish reports of atrocities.

Then there was the mechanics of an attack. Britain was  struggling to keep its bombers airborne, let alone hit targets as far east as Poland. Too often, “bombing” consisted of opening the bomb bays after having flown for “about the right amount of time”! Sometimes the enemy had no idea what they were aiming at.

Portal, Prime Minister and Pope

Fairweather says Churchill’s schedule was too full to hear them, which contradicts the evidence (see Addendum below). Pilecki’s appeals reached the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal. His response was curt. Bombing Auschwitz was a diversion, he said, given the need to concentrate on German industrial plants. The “weight of bombs” at this distance with the limited force available [was] very unlikely to cause enough damage to enable prisoners to escape.”

In November The New York Times published the first reports of exterminations at Auschwitz in western media. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress brought a report mentioning Auschwitz to Roosevelt. FDR said he was aware, but did nothing. “Roosevelt didn’t reveal his concerns about stoking anti-Semitism at home by focusing on Jewish suffering.” Fairweather makes a powerful case that Anglo-American governments were chary about provoking more anti-Semitism.

Fairweather reports that the Foreign Office “repeatedly told the Poles, reprisals are such are ruled out…. The Poles are being very irritating over this.” He does not report that Churchill himself discussed bombing reprisals as early as December 1942. (See addendum.)

Pilecki’s “Polishness”

In fairness, Fairweather notes that Pilecki never saw the Holocaust “as the defining act of World War II.” His essence was “his Polishness or his sense of national struggle.”

We asked Esther, Lady Gilbert, a Holocaust historian like her late husband Sir Martin, for her view of The Volunteer. Its story, she believes, is “of the Polish experience, horrible as that was. But if by ‘Holocaust’ we specifically mean the intention to wipe out every last Jew and Jewish community, it is not a Holocaust story. The Polish Underground split between the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army, and the Armia Ludowa, the Polish Communists. If better organised and working together, he might have made more impact.”

One good effect of Pilecki’s reports, Lady Gilbert continues, was the Allied War Declaration of December 1942. It was plain, and stark: “German authorities, not content with denying [Jews] the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.”

The Auschwitz Protocols

Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz in April 1943. Reports that Auschwitz was exterminating masses of Jews came with eye-witness escapees’ reports (the Auschwitz Protocols) between December 1943 and April 1944. These prompted Churchill’s famous command: “Get everything out of the air force you can, and invoke me if necessary.” As in 1941, the plenary authorities considered, and again said no, mainly for the same reasons. The full account is in Sir Martin Gilbert’s definitive book, Auschwitz and the Allies.

Fairweather says bombing the camp would have “alerted the world” to what was going on. Perhaps not. The Allied Declaration had alerted the world, with little reaction. The Germans were adept at covering up. Even when presented with Auschwitz Protocols, Allied officials found reasons not to send bombers. Some distrusted Polish underground sources. Military priorities motivated others. Well into 1943, just holding their own was a challenge. Then there was the question of Jewish objections to bombing the inmates—a widely shared view.

Fairweather says the decision not to bomb was “unconscionable.” In hindsight, it certainly seems so. At the time? Thoughtful people may differ over that. History stumbles along the trail of the past, Churchill said, trying to “kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

A place among the Righteous

Fairweather believes Pilecki and his compatriots do not receive the credit they deserve. Getting himself shipped to Auschwitz was a breath-taking act of bravery. History will value Pilecki’s eloquent story of the victims of Nazi, and later Communist, crimes against humanity.

We searched for the name of Witold Pilecki on the website “Righteous Among the Nations,” part of the Yad Vashem Memorial site in Jerusalem. Lady Gilbert explains the reasons in her comment below.

Addendum by Richard Langworth

In 1940, Fairweather has Churchill “on the roof of his secure accommodation” watching the Blitz. Rooftops in the Blitz were not secure. Staffers talked the PM down for his own safety. Churchill did not sit there contentedly watching the fires.

More serious is the assertion that the Poles couldn’t get Churchill’s attention because his schedule was too busy. A cursory reading of The Churchill Documents would show he made time for much less serious things than this. He had a capacity for detail that put many to shame. And the record shows that he made time for the Poles.

Eight days after the December 1942 Allied Declaration, Sikorski described the “mass expulsion of the Polish population, slaughter and mass executions” in five Polish districts. He did not mention Jews. The Chiefs of Staff Committee met on 31 December. There, Churchill asked Portal about bombing “certain targets in Poland” as a reprisal—as the Poles had asked. Portal replied January 3rd:

…the carrying out of air attacks as  reprisals…would be an explicit admission that we were bombing civilians as such and might well invite brutal vengeance on our air crews. [The Polish request is] more strictly a political warfare matter and relates to the Jews. [Hitler] has so often stressed that this is a war by the Jews to exterminate Germany that it might well be, therefore, that a raid, avowedly conducted on account of the Jews, would be an asset to enemy propaganda.

* * *

Three days later Portal amplified his reasoning. Fairweather notes that the Polish 303 Squadron shot down more Germans in the Battle of Britain than any other unit. Portal’s words show that he too appreciated the Poles’ brave contribution. From Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 222:

It would be “very unprofitable [Portal wrote] to divert our best bombers to Polish targets and to keep them waiting for long periods for the moonlight and good weather without which they could not locate such distant objectives.” In addition, “the small scale of attack” which Britain could produce at such a distance “would not be impressive as a reprisal.” It would be more effective, Portal wrote, after a successful air-raid over Germany, to emphasise “to the world” the part played in such a raid by the Polish Air Force.”

It seems so simple in retrospect: bomb Auschwitz, stop the killing. Our knowledge of the horror overwhelms contemporary factors. Portal added that a reprisal, however ineffective would overwhelm the RAF “with requests from all other Allies that we should also redress their grievances in the same way.” The result would be nothing but “token reprisals which would not only be completely ineffective as deterrents but would also destroy the last shred of the cloak of legality which at present covers our operations.” —RML

Garfield’s gripping novel: fictional biography?

The late, prolific Brian Garfield wrote this book four decades ago, yet I am still asked about it—and whether it could be true.

The story Mr. Garfield tells seems impossible—fantastic. An eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Creighton leaps a garden wall in Kent one day. He finds himself face to face with the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament. He will later know the great man by the code-name “Tigger.” It is 1935.

Christopher, who continues to invade Chartwell, impresses Churchill with his audacity and pluck. Four years later, aged fifteen, he is recruited into the British Secret Service by a pair of spy-masters known as “Owl” and “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

Christopher’s climacterics

Garfield’s young warrior then accomplishes a succession of what Churchill might call “climacterics.” He warns that Belgium plans to surrender to Hitler. (One book reviewer said “without a fight.”) Advance knowledge of the Belgian collapse enables the British to pull off a fighting retreat, saving 338,000 French and English soldiers at Dunkirk.

But Christopher is just getting warmed up. Next, he finds secret U-boat pens in Ireland and blows the Germans’ most strategic cover for Atlantic warfare. Then he sabotages a friendly Dutch submarine and sends its crew to the bottom after it reports the Japanese battle fleet en route to Pearl Harbor. Churchill has concluded the Americans must not be warned—lest it enable them to avoid war. Back in London, Christopher finishes the job by murdering the only cipher clerk who has read the Dutch sub’s message. And she turns out to be one of his lady friends.

He engineers the assassination of Vichy’s treacherous Admiral Darlan, and tips off the Nazis to the Dieppe raid so they will meet it in force, convincing the Americans that it is too soon for a cross-channel invasion. Finally, when the D-Day invasion really is on, he steers the Germans into defending Calais and not Normandy. By which time Christopher Creighton is a good deal older, wiser, sadder and bloodier. But war is a dirty business!

Counter-factuals

The Belgian scenario is quite contrary to history. The Belgians fought bravely against overwhelming odds for several weeks in May 1940. Also, King Leopold issued warnings of his impending surrender in advance. The Germans never had secret U-boat pens in Ireland. (See for example Warren Kimball’s article, “That Neutral Island.” Dieppe was a disaster, but not by plan: Terry Reardon has carefully catalogued the many errors in its planning and execution. (All three of these articles are published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.)

Numerous conspiracy theories attend Pearl Harbor. One says Roosevelt knew and let it happen to get Congress to declare war. Another says Churchill knew, and kept the news from Roosevelt, so the Americans would be dragged in. This is simply silly. No American president, especially a lover of the Navy, would allow his country’s military to be so badly damaged. No British prime minister would withhold advance warning. Surely, an alerted American fleet and aircraft would have engaged the Japanese, and war would have happened anyway.

Read for entertainment, however….

But Brian Garfield spun a great yarn. Although the imagination strains over many conspiracies engineered by a boy, The Paladin is gripping, well-written and plausible. The Churchill Garfield describes tallies closely with the best accounts of his contemporaries. The vivid scenes at the “hole in the ground” (Cabinet War Rooms) are painted with authority. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Belgians and French, the British and German agents, are entirely believable. Brian Garfield is as plausible than Len Deighton, as exciting as Ian Fleming. His novel is splendid entertainment, and you should definitely add a copy to your library of tall tales.

Garfield set tongues wagging back in 1980, when promoting his new book. “The hero is a real person,” he wrote. “He is now in his fifties. His name is not Christopher Creighton.”

I’ve often thought that the Churchill novels of Michael Dobbs are so well scripted, so faithful to the real-life characters in them—and that we would not be surprised to see Dobbs’s scenes described as truth  by some careless future writer. Well, Brian Garfield had a twenty-year head start on Dobbs, and did him one better. In the 1990s, someone named “Christopher Creighton” surfaced, with a book about a secret raid on Berlin. We report, you decide.

Shakespeare’s Henry: Parallels and Inspirations

Above all and first, the importance of Henry V is what it teaches about leadership. “True leadership,” writes Andrew Roberts, “stirs us in a way that is deeply embedded in our genes and psyche.…If the underlying factors of leadership have remained the same for centuries, cannot these lessons be learned and applied in situations far removed from ancient times?”

Churchill’s war speeches are—what shall we say—inspired by, remindful of, analogous to Shakespeare’s works in ancient times. First example: the enemy’s overconfidence. At Agincourt, before any fighting takes place, as the French prepare to rout the English, the Duke of Orleans opines:

Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear
and have their heads crushed like rotten apples.
You may as well say that’s a valiant flea
that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion….
It is now two o’clock: but, let me see, by ten
We shall have each, a hundred Englishmen.

Animal analogies are things Churchill deployed, but that is not the connection here. That passage smacks of his 1941 speech to the Canadian Parliament about the French generals in 1940. Remember how he quoted them? “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” And his response: “Some chicken!. . .Some neck!”

1415…

At the siege of Harfleur, before Agincourt, Churchill writes in his History that the British were badly outnumbered, yet “foremost in prowess.” And Shakespeare quotes King Henry:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead …
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips …
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

This is echoed in Churchill’s war memoirs, where he writes: “Once again we must fight for life and honour against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined, and ruthless German race. Once again. So be it.”

…1940

And in his peroration to his outer cabinet on 28 May 1940—the speech that ensured Britain would not seek an armistice with Hitler: “We shall fight on, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Hugh Dalton remembered: Churchill’s ministers stood shouting, slapping him on the back, while tears poured down his cheeks, and theirs. A.P. Herbert wrote:

Mr. Chamberlain, after all, was tough enough, and since the war began, had been heart and soul with Mr. Churchill. But when he said the fine true thing it was like a faint air played on a pipe and lost on the wind at once. When Mr. Churchill said it, it was like an organ filling the church, and we all went out refreshed and resolute to do or die.

“A Little Touch of Harry in the Night”

On the night before Agincourt, King Henry tours the English camp incognito, to gauge morale. The scene recalls Churchill’s 1899 account of the night before the Battle of Omdurman. Or Churchill’s visits with the troops in North Africa, before D-Day, and in France. But the closest analogy, I think, is in 1941. That was when President Roosevelt sent his confidant, Harry Hopkins, to Britain, to tell him if the UK was still worth backing.

Hopkins traveled up and down the land, devastated by the bomb damage he saw. Everywhere he went, he observed grit and determination, and faith in final victory. Hopkins had no doubts. In Glasgow, introduced by Churchill, he famously quoted the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go,” and he added, “even to the end.” Churchill wept.

We few…

Back in London, Lord Beaverbrook hosted Hopkins and the press at Claridge’s. “We wondered,” a Beaverbrook reporter said, “as our cars advanced cautiously through the blackout toward Claridge’s, what Hopkins would have to say. [He went round] the table, pulling up a chair alongside the editors and managers…and talking to them individually. He astonished us all, Right, Left and Centre, by his grasp of our own separate policies and problems. We went away content. And we were happy men all.”

We few, we happy few…

To many who heard or read his words—FDR, Beaverbrook, Robert Sherwood, even J. Edgar Hoover, who had FBI agents present—Hopkins reminded them of Henry V, touring the camp before Agincourt:

With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty,
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.

1415 and 1940

William F. Buckley Jr. said, “It was not the significance of victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. It is the roar that we hear when we pronounce his name…. The Battle Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the Battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of men and women who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln.”

I think that might be true. It is the words, not the battles, that make the blood run faster in times to come. On the eve of Overlord in June 1944, General Ismay was reminded of Henry’s words at Agincourt:

He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.

Ismay heard one parachute commander say as he entered his aircraft:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed,
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

Of course that was a time, as I’ve said, when almost every Briton knew Shakespeare. And it was also a time, as Churchill added, “when it was equally good to live or die.”

Old Men Forget

In the same act, Henry tells his soldiers:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages,
What feats he did that day….

In early 1943, writes Lewis Lehrman, “Churchill paraphrased those words to soldiers of the Eighth Army, who had defeated Rommel: ‘After the war, when a man is asked what he did, it will be quite sufficient for him to say, ‘I marched and fought with the Desert Army.’”

Churchill wrote in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples: When one of Henry’s officers “deplored the fact that they had ‘but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day,’ the King rebuked him and revived his spirits in a speech to which Shakespeare has given an immortal form:

If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

Compare that to May 28th again, or to Churchill’s greatest speech, 18 June 1940: “if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

“Collective Consciousness”

It was no coincidence, Jon Meacham writes, that

he tied the trials of the present to the collective consciousness of the world to come. Men will still say was a call to arms reminiscent of Henry V with the image of how the tale would be told from generation to generation. This story shall the good man teach his son [became] “Be brave now, and the future will cherish your memory and praise your name”—an impressive, if risky, means of leadership, for under stress not all of us are like Bedford and Exeter.

Churchill’s history records the King’s actual quoted words: “‘Wot you not,’ he said, ‘that the Lord with these few can overthrow the pride of the French?’ He and the few lay for the night.” On 20 August 1940, Churchill spoke of another small, outnumbered band, the RAF fighter pilots: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed, by so many, to so few.”

Crispin’s Day

Remarkably, Churchill in his speeches or History never quoted from Henry V’s grand climacteric, the Crispin’s Day speech. In fact, writes Geoffrey Best, “he made far fewer historical and literary references than a more commonplace performer might have done. But the effect was to reproduce the congratulations addressed by Shakespeare’s hero to the Englishmen lucky enough to be with him at Agincourt.”

In his History, Churchill offers lines that are not Shakespeare’s: “The King himself, dismounted…and shortly after eleven o’clock on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, he gave the order, ‘In the name of Almighty God and Avaunt Banner in the best time of the year, and Saint George this day be thine help.’ The archers kissed the soil in reconciliation to God, and, crying loudly, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Saint George and Merrie England!’”

Since he’d written those words already, who can say that Churchill didn’t remember them in his 19 May 1940 speech, “Be Ye Men of Valour?” There he said: “Our task is not only to win the battle but to win the War…for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means.” More modern language—but the sentiments are the same.

Constables of France

In the 1944 movie the Constable of France (Leo Genn) is not an empathetic figure. He is arrogant, imperturbable, impassive and phlegmatic—and supremely confident of victory. Then with the battle almost lost, he insists on returning to the fray and dying in combat.

I think Churchill recalled this character when he wrote about Charles de Gaulle, during the fall of France in June 1940. Churchill tells us how, among the defeatist French, he came across this “impassive, imperturbable…tall, phlegmatic man.” On the last of those meetings before France surrendered, prompted I think by a recollection of the strongest French character in Henry V, he said of de Gaulle: “This is the Constable of France.” And so he was.

Acts of Union

Toward the end of the play, after wooing Katherine, Henry promises they will sire, out of Saint Denis and Saint George, celestial patrons, one of France and the other of England,

a boy, half French, half English,
who will go to Constantinople
and take the Grand Turk by the beard!

Marthe Bibesco, the Rumanian princess, in a good little 1950s book on Churchill, noticed this comparison: “And here we have,” she wrote, “in defiance of chronology, already predicted, the day after Agincourt, the Dardanelles expedition, which, in 1915 during the alliance between France and England will be so near to Churchill’s heart.”

She then cites words of the priest at the altar, Ye shall be two in the one flesh. “All those who know him,” she wrote, “would be prepared to swear that Churchill had this whole scene of Shakespeare’s in mind when he undertook that nuptial flight on 11 June 1940… The man who came that evening to ask for the hand of France in marriage offered her people dual nationality, with two passports, the right to vote in both countries, the pooling of the armed forces, in a word a true wedding!”

That’s a bit of a stretch—Churchill did make that offer, the Act of Union. But he little expected that it would be accepted, or have much effect, and it didn’t.

For Them Both, “It was Always England”

As Churchill goes on to write, Henry V’s French union was not to last. Churchill in old age likewise lamented that he had accomplished much, only to accomplish nothing in the end. And yet, what a self-description he offers us, writing of the King in 1938, not published until 1956. Henry V, he wrote:

was no feudal sovereign of the old type with a class interest which overrode social and territorial barriers. He was entirely national in his outlook: he was the first king to use the English language in his letters and his messages home from the front; his triumphs were gained by English troops; his policy was sustained by a Parliament that could claim to speak for the English people. For it was the union of the country [that gave Britain her] character and a destiny.

Is that not a description of Churchill himself? I think, if only subconsciously, he meant it to be.

His old friend Desmond Morton surmised that

for Churchill, it was always England…And thus Churchill was its man. He had never moved away from such a world…it had caught up with him from behind, a back slip in time. This was Henry V and all the great music of Shakespeare in the tribal soul….he saw himself mirrored in the pool of England. And England in him.

A: There are several candidates and variations. Taking them as a group, Churchill had from six to 100 ideas daily, of which between one and six were good. In order of the most likely. But it could be one of those all-purpose cracks applied to many people.

Roosevelt: fifty to 100 ideas, three or four good.

President Roosevelt is the most likely to have said this, since he’s quoted more than anyone else. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, heard the line from Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. In his alleged diaries, Moran was with WSC in Marrakesh in December 1947. “When I told him that Frances Perkins had quoted the President as saying that Winston had a hundred ideas a day and that four of them were good, he blew up: ‘It is impertinent of Roosevelt to say this. It comes badly from a man who hadn’t any ideas at all.'” That was an unusually rough dismissal of FDR—but possible. WSC was then writing his early war memoirs.

The journalist Colin Coote, longtime friend of Churchill and secretary of The Other Club, might have had this from Moran, but he published it before Moran did. Coote wrote the chapter, “Churchill the Journalist,” in Charles Eade’s excellent compilation, Churchill by His Contemporaries (1953). Churchill, Coote wrote, had “a prodigious memory and a mental activity like a dynamo. ‘He has,’ said the late President Roosevelt, ‘a hundred ideas a day, of which at least four are good.’ Moreover, he does not forget what he has read; and since he has now read a lot he is a walking reference library.”

In 1988 William Manchester repeated the FDR line but changed a number in The Last Lion, volume 2: “Franklin Roosevelt later said: ‘Winston has fifty ideas a day, and three or four are good.'”  He provides no footnote. Since he wasn’t always pinpoint accurate, he might have got the “fifty” wrong.

Alanbrooke: Ten ideas, one good.

Andrew Roberts in Hitler and Churchill offered a dual credit. Of Churchill he wrote: “He had an astonishingly fertile mind: ‘Winston had ten ideas every day,’ his Chief of the Imperial General Staff Lord Alanbrooke used to say of him, ‘only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was.'” But then Roberts adds that “Roosevelt made a very similar remark, saying that the Prime Minister had a hundred ideas a day of which six were good (a much larger number if an even lower percentage).” Fine historian that he is, Roberts expanded on the theme:

Nothing was too minute a detail to escape Churchill’s notice. He laid down the precise number of apes that should occupy the Rock of Gibraltar (twenty-four), tried to find out whether captured First World War trophy weapons could be reconditioned for use, worried about the animals in London Zoo during the bombing, and made sure that beer rations went to the fighting men at the front before those behind the lines. He even tried to discover whether wax might be used to protect the hearing of soldiers during bombardments.

Duke of Kent: Six ideas, zero to six good.

In Menzies and Churchill at War, the critic David Day writes that Prince George Duke of Kent told Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies that Churchill “has six ideas a day; they can’t all be right!” Day adds: “For such an ardent Royalist as Menzies, this apparent Royal displeasure with Churchill must have weighed heavily.” Menzies later became more critical of Churchill.

Lloyd George: Ten ideas, one good.

Another critic, Keith Sainsbury, wrote in Churchill and Roosevelt at War: “Roosevelt’s intelligence was not, perhaps, primarily a creative one, but to compensate for this he was extremely receptive to new ideas and would take them from as wide a range of sources as possible…. Churchill, however, was inordinately fertile in ideas, which flowed from him in a steady stream, but less sure in judgment. His early mentor, Lloyd George, had remarked of him, ‘There’s Winston, now. He has ten ideas a day, but he does not know which is the right one.'”

Verdict: FDR

It seems most likely that crack about Churchill was uttered by Roosevelt. Whether Lloyd George preceded him is a good question, and possible—LG had a pretty good wit. The others might have heard the FDR remark and kept it in readiness for their own version. Or, some gnomologist (see “Churchillian Drift” for the definition) may reveal that all these are variations on an ancient witticism dating much farther back!

Red Herrings: Quotes not by Churchill (or things he said quoting someone else), continued from Part 2.  Compiled for the next expanded edition of Churchill by Himself.

A reader suggests that the list of “Red Herring” fake Churchill quotes be subdivided. We should separate quotes he actually said, but borrowed from someone else, from quotes simply invented out of whole cloth. Not sure we have much to learn from that. First, while I try to name the originator of a quotation not by Sir Winston, I don’t always succeed. Second, my brief extends only to disproving that the words originated with Churchill. If you have reliable attribution identifying the true author of any quotes here, please let me know.

In 1686 the Oxford English Dictionary described “red herring” as a metaphor to draw pursuers off a track, as “the trailing or dragging of a dead Cat or Fox (and in case of necessity a Red-Herring) three or four miles…and then laying the Dogs on the scent…to attempt to divert attention from the real question.” That is what these misquotes all have in common: they distract or divert us from what Churchill really did originate. Chapter references are to Churchill by Himself, with over 4000 genuine, attributed quotations in thirty-four chapters or categories. The next edition will contain over 5000. Anyway, that’s my pitch and I’m sticking with it.

Lies – Looking Ahead

Lies: There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

• Churchill used these words on 22 February 1906, but quickly explained that they were the remark of a “witty Irishman.”

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.

• Among quotes commonly ascribed to Churchill (who would have said “trousers,” not “breeches”), this was actually written by Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull (Memoirs I, 220).

Living and Life: You make a living by what you get; you make a life by what you give.

• Sometimes expressed using “we” instead of “you.” Often heard in tv ads. An old saying, origin unknown. One of thosse quotes put in Churchill’s mouth to make it more interesting.

Living Dog, Dead Lion: A living dog is better than a dead lion.

• Originally Ecclesiastes 9:4: “But for him who is joined to all the living there is hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” In HESP II, 95, WSC quotes it from John Dudley, First Duke of Northumberland, before being executed by Mary Tudor in 1553.

Looking Ahead: It is always wise to look ahead—but difficult to look further than you can see. • No attribution.

Looking Backward – MacDonald

Looking Backward: The further backward you look, the further forward you can see. [Or: The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.]

• Circa 1944, commonly ascribed to WSC, even by HM The Queen (Christmas Message, 1999). What Churchill actually said was “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” See Chapter 2, Maxims.

MacDonald, Ramsay: After the usual compliments, the Prime Minister [MacDonald] said [to Lloyd George]: “We have never been colleagues, we have never been friends—at least, not what you would call holiday friends—but we have both been Prime Minister, and dog doesn’t eat dog. Just look at this monstrous Bill the trade unions and our wild fellows have foisted on me. Do me a service, and I will never forget it. Take it upstairs and cut its dirty throat.”

• 28 January 1931 in Halle, Irrepressible Churchill, 114. According to Kay Halle, this was “an imaginary conversation dreamed by WSC between Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George, directed at MacDonald because of the debate on the Trades Disputes Act.” Halle’s version begins with “We have never been colleagues” and substitutes “the monstrous Bill” for “this monstrous Bill.” No other attribution.

Martinis – Metaphors

Martinis: I like to observe the vermouth from across the room whilst I drink my Martini.

• No attribution. Pure invention, since WSC did not like cocktails. He particularly eschewed Martinis with liberal infusions of vermouth, mixed by President Roosevelt. He was once observed dumping one in a nearby flowerpot.

Marx Brothers: You are my sixth favourite actor. The first five are the Marx Brothers.

• Reported in at least one Churchill quotes book, but no sign of this comment appears in the literature. WSC enjoyed the Marx Brothers; for what he did say about them, see Chapter 32, Tastes and Favourites, Marx Brothers.

Metaphors: How infinite is the debt owed to metaphors by politicians who want to speak strongly but are not sure what they are going to say.

• Stated by the Sunday Times, 22 October 2022. No attribution.

“Mettle” – Mussolini

“Mettle”: [A junior MP: “What is the greatest quality in a leader?”] WSC: “Mettle.”

• Supposedly a one-word response to a perennial question. Although “mettle” was a favorite word, this is unsubstantiated. It was credited without attribution to Nigel Nicolson, editor of Harold Nicolson’s diaries, but it does not appear in those volumes.

 Achievement is not last, disappointment is not deadly: It is the mettle to proceed with that matters.

• Posted as a Churchill quotation by Quotefancy.com. As close as we come to the “mettle” response above, but no attribution can be found, either for the full phrase or any components of it.

Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard: In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable. [Or: Indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victory.]

• Widely bruited about, but not in Churchill’s canon. Likely conjured up lately from “Indomitable in victory, insufferable in defeat,” by American football coach Woody Hayes. For a number of genuine remarks see Chapter 20, People, Montgomery.

The Field Marshal lived up to the finest tradition of Englishmen. He sold his life dearly.

• WSC allegedly said this in 1958 when advised that Monty’s memoirs were earning more than his History of the English Speaking Peoples. It seems unlike Churchill. “Sold his life dearly” comes up only once in the canon, when Alanbrooke opined that Churchill would have done so if ever backed up against a wall by invading Germans.

Muslims: When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights. When they are in the majority there are no minority rights. No attribution.

Mussolini’s Consolation: [Son-in-law Duncan Sandys: “Hitler and Mussolini have an even greater burden to bear, because everything is going wrong for them.”] Ah! But Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law!

• Refers to the execution by firing squad of Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944). This non-quote originated in newspaper proprietor Cecil King’s war memoir,With Malice Toward None (1970). But King said it was “obviously concocted by some wag.” Another version involves WSC’s son-in-law Vic Oliver, whom he disliked, asking which war leader Churchill most admired.

Naval Tradition – Nuisenza

Naval tradition: Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, buggery [sometimes “sodomy”] and the lash.

• In 1955 WSC denied this, but Harold Nicolson quotes him on 17 August 1950: “Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.” However, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists “Rum, bum, and bacca” and “Ashore it’s wine women and song, aboard it’s rum, bum and concertina” as 19th century naval catchphrases. Verdict: not original to Churchill.

Never Give In [Three-word speech. Also sometimes: “Never give up.”]

• Harrow School, 29 October 1941. Often represented as a three-word speech which Churchill allegedly made, and then sat down. This is incorrect. The complete quotation is in Chapter 2, Maxims, Perseverance.

Never quit: Never, never, never quit! [Also sometimes quoted as “Never, never, never give up!”

• Misquotations of “Never give in – never, never, never, never, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

Nuisenza: It is a nuisenza to have the fluenza.

• Dated 25 October 1943 in WW2 V, 279. Represented in places as a Churchillism, this was actually Roosevelt writing to Churchill.

Oats and Sage – Organ grinder

Oats and Sage: The young sow wild oats, the old grow sage.

• Constantly ascribed to Churchill, it is not among his published words. Henry James Byron (1835–84) in “An Adage” wrote: “The gardener’s rule applies to youth and age; When young ‘sow wild oats,” but when old, grow sage.”

Opportunity: To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.

• Commonly attributed, but neither the quotation nor parts of it can be found. That it is manufactured is suggested by its use of “finest hour” from WSC’s famous speech of 18 June 1940, which he would have been unlikely to repeat in so offhand a context. Verdict: apocryphal Churchill.

Organ grinder and monkey: Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

• Badly garbled from what Churchill said about Hitler and Mussolini: “The organ grinder still has hold of the monkey’s collar.” See Chapter 20, People, Mussolini.

Palestinians – People

Palestinians: It is crazy to help the [Palestinian] Arabs, because they are a backward people who ate nothing but camel dung.

• Reported only by Michael Makovsky, in Churchill’s Promised Land, pp. 168-69 as a remark to Malcolm MacDonald in re the 1939 Palestine White Paper. Makovsky added, “these might not have been Churchill’s exact words.” Verdict: insufficiently established. (Churchill’s one verified reference to “camel dung” is an amusing story. See Part 2 Comments.)

Past, forgetting the: A nation that forgets the past has no future. • No attribution.

Past, remembering the: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

• Famous among quotes by George Santayana (1863-1952) in The Age of Reason (1905). Churchill shared the sentiments, but never repeated the exact words.

People Will Put You Out: [Lord Shawcross: “We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.”] Oh no you’re not. The people put you there and the people will put you out again.

• Supposedly 1946 with the Labour Party newly in power. Shawcross is often misquoted as saying, “We are the masters now.” He maintained that he spoke as above, but Churchill’s retort is not established and likely apocryphal.

Perfection – Pessimist

Perfection is the enemy of progress.  • No attribution.

Persistence: Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.

• No attribution. Reported August 2008 in Investor’s Business Daily.

Pessimist and Optimist: A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

• No attribution. For what he did say about them, see Chapter 5, Anecdotes and Stories…Optimists and Pessimists.

Planning – Poison

Planning: Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential. • No attribution.

Plan to fail: People who fail to plan, plan to fail.

• No attribution. For what he did say, see “Planning” in Chapter 21, Political Theory and Practice and Chapter 22, Politics: The Home Front.

Poison in Your Coffee: [Nancy Astor: “If I were married to you, I’d put poison in your coffee.”] If I were married to you, I’d drink it.

• Blenheim Palace, circa 1912, Balsan, 162; Sykes, 127. Martin Gilbert (In Search of Churchill, 232) concluded that the author was F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, “a much heavier drinker than Churchill, and a notorious acerbic wit”. But Fred Shapiro (Yale Book of Quotations) says the riposte dates back even farther, to a joke line in the Chicago Tribune of 3 January 1900: “‘If I had a husband like you,’ she said with concentrated scorn, ‘I’d give him poison!’ ‘Mad’m,’ he rejoined, looking her over with a feeble sort of smile, ‘If I had a wife like you I’d take it.’” Verdict: F. E. Smith, giving new life to an old wisecrack.

Politics – Prepositions

Politics: Politics is the art of inclusion, not exclusion.

           •  No attribution. He did say, “Politics is the art of looking forward…” See Chapter 2, Maxims…Politics.

Positive Thinker: The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible. • No attribution.

Power: Power is a drug. Who tried it at least once is poisoned forever. • Reported by tribuneindia.com, 2020. No attribution.

Prepositions, Ending Sentences in: This is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put. [Sometimes rendered as “tedious nonsense” or “offensive impertinence.”]

• Per Benjamin Zimmer, originally attributed to WSC by The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, 28 February 1944. Fred Shapiro (Yale Book of Quotations) writes: “The Times…made one change that seems to undercut Churchill’s humor completely: they ‘fixed’ the quote so that there are no fronted prepositions. The Wall Street Journal, 30 September 1942, quotes an undated article in Strand Magazine: When a memorandum passed round a certain Government department, one young pedant scribbled a postscript drawing attention to the fact that the sentence ended with a preposition, which caused the original writer to reply that the anonymous postscript was ‘offensive impertinence, up with which I will not put.’”

Principle – Public Schools

Principle: Never stand so high upon a principle that you cannot lower it to suit the circumstances. • An all-purpose bon mot put in WSC’s mouth to make it more interesting; no attribution.

Prisoner of War: A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him. • No attribution.

Profits and Losses: Socialists think profits are a vice. I consider losses the real vice. • No attribution.

Public [Private] Schools: A public school education equips a boy for life and damns him for eternity.

• No attribution. (In Britain, a public school is a private prep school.)

Rich and Poor – Sex

Reputation: The most important man in the world, when he dies, leaves as lasting an impression as a fist withdrawn from a bucket of water. • No attribution.

Rich and Poor: You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. • No attribution.

Risk, Care and Dream: Risk more than others think is safe. Care more than others think is wise. Dream more than others think is practical. Expect more than others think is possible.

• No attribution. Quoteworld.org credits Claude Thomas Bissell (1916–2000), Canadian author and educator.

Rough men stand ready: See “Defenders of the peace,” Part 2.

Saving: Saving is a very good thing, especially if your parents have done it for you. • No attribution.

Saying and Doing: I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what they do. Behaviour never lies. • No attribution.

Schooldays: At Harrow they taught us not to piss on our hands. • No attribution.

Sex: It gives me great pleasure.

• At The Other Club, a member drawn at random would chalk a word on a blackboard. A second member, chosen by lot, had to make an impromptu speech about it. This is supposedly Churchill’s speech on the word “sex.” No attribution is found.

Concluded in Part 4…

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.

So far as I can learn, the Quixote – Panza analogy for Roosevelt and Churchill (also FDR and his devoted adviser Harry Hopkins) occurred only during the 1943 Casablanca Conference (SYMBOL). Roosevelt proposed those code names, and I rather think Churchill had different image of them than FDR. (Oxford English Dictionary: “Quixote: Enthusiastic visionary, pursuer of lofty but impracticable ideals.”) Of course we can’t be sure. We must put this on our list of questions when we get to meet Sir Winston in the Afterlife.

Quixote and Sancho

The derisory term was rife in Parliament between the World Wars. It was applied to Bonar Law and Beaverbrook, Allenby and Wavell, Winterton and Shinwell, Churchill and Bracken, Chamberlain and Kingsley Wood. When Germany invaded the Low Countries in May 1940, General Alan Brooke presciently called French General Henri Giraud a Don Quixote who “would have ridden gallantly at any windmill regardless of consequences.” (Bryant, Turn of the Tide, 61)

In 1905 young Winston acquired an elaborate four-volume edition of Miguel Cervantes’ classic novel. Three decades later, Don Quixote was his twelfth and final installment in “The World’s Great Stories.” (News of the World, 26 March 1933; Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, IV, 246-56.)

The tale lodged in Churchill’s photographic memory. He used the analogy with rapier effectiveness when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald returned with his foreign secretary, John Simon, after seeking war debt relief: “We have got our modern Don Quixote home again, with Sancho Panza at his tail, bearing with them these somewhat dubious trophies which they have collected amid the nervous titterings of Europe.” (23 March 1933, in Churchill, Arms and the Covenant, 73.)

Roosevelt’s idea

Nigel Hamilton in his Roosevelt book, Commander in Chief, is wrong when he writes… “[FDR] had chosen as his nom de plume Admiral Q, in prior secret communications with Churchill—a humorous reference to his Spanish literary hero, Don Quixote. (Hopkins was ‘Mr. P.’ for Sancho Panza.)”  John Grigg explains that

Roosevelt was given the code name ‘Admiral Q,’ proposed by Churchill in a cable in which he also suggested that he himself should go by the name of ‘Mr P.’ (This enabled him to add: ‘We must mind our P’s and Q’s.’) But in fact the name given to him was ‘Air Commodore Frankland’ and he arrived at the conference wearing an air commodore’s uniform. (Grigg, 1943: The Victory That Never Was, 60)

It was Roosevelt who had suggested the Cervantes characters for Casablanca code names, rather pointedly emphasizing Britain’s diminished importance: “The aliases from this end will be a) Don Quixote and b) Sancho Panza.” (R-252, in Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence II, 2 January 1943.)

“Admiral Q and Mr. P”

Churchill’s counter-proposal can be interpreted to read that he well understood the inflexion Roosevelt had intended. “However did you think of such an impenetrable disguise?”

Churchill quickly added: “In order to make it even harder for the enemy and to discourage irreverent guesswork, propose Admiral Q and Mr. P.” (3Jan43, in Churchill, Hinge of Fate, 601.) Historian Warren Kimball suggests Churchill said this believing that FDR’s code names might make the meeting seem “quixotic” to people. (Forged in War, 183.)

But the public would not generally be aware of code names. I suspect Churchill’s idea was as Grigg wrote, allowing him to use the “P’s and Q’s” quip—and because he was uncomfortable thinking of himself as FDR’s Sancho Panza.

That the Private Office used the term “Don Q” before Casablanca suggests that for Churchill’s inner circle, FDR really was a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills in quest of impossible dreams.Who knows how often he referred to FDR as DQ in private asides?

In any case, Cervantes’ tale was certainly on Churchill’s mind at Casablanca. There he told Roosevelt they couldn’t tell British from American troops in the North Africa landings… “In the night all cats are grey.” (Don Quixote, Part 2, Ch. 33; Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 62).

Sancho’s burro…

Ten months later at Teheran, Britain’s dwindling influence was more readily apparent to Churchill. His thoughts might well have traced back to Cervantes and, if not to Sancho Panza, to Sancho’s burro:

There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one, the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.

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

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

“Mass Effects in Modern Life,” 1931

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

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

“Consistency in Politics,” 1927

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

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

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

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

“Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” 1924

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

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

Mankind, Churchill continues,

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

 “Fifty Years Hence,” 1931

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

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

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

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

Thoughts for today

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

Walter Henry Thompson 

…was Winston Churchill’s protection officer and detective, on and off between 1921 and 1945. They had many adventures together, and Thompson wrote four books about his experiences. The first, Guard from the Yard (1938, now very rare) involved Churchill and others whom Thompson protected.

After World War II, Thompson published I Was Churchill’s Shadow (1951), Sixty Minutes with Winston Churchill (1953), and Assignment: Churchill (1956). He promoted them enthusiastically, with many book signings. As a Churchill bookseller, I used to describe a pristine copy of Sixty Minutes as “the rare unsigned edition.”

In 2005, Sixty Minutes was recently republished as Beside the Bulldog. Simultaneously there appeared Churchill’s Bodyguard: The Authorised Biography, which intersperses some new material with a large number of factual errors. The earlier works are pure Thompson and therefore worth seeking out.

Thompson’s Epic 

Thompson’s first Churchill assignment was the statesman’s Cairo Conference of 1921. Around the same time he was seconded to Churchill during negotiation of the Irish Treaty. When Churchill set out on a North American lecture tour in December 1931, Thompson was again assigned. The detective was resting after twenty-six-hours’ duty on December 13th, when Churchill was struck and nearly killed by a car on Fifth Avenue. Thompson always regretted that he had not been present, and perhaps able to prevent the accident.

Walter Thompson’s tall, angular features are frequently seen on Churchill photos during World War II. From 1939, when recalled to guard duty, he was rarely absent on the Prime Minister’s travels. Along the way, he accidentally shot himself while cleaning a weapon, and lost son in the RAF. He did however romance and later marry Mary Shearburn, one of the PM’s secretaries.

The Bodyguard Mini-series

I approached this production with doubt. The Authorised Biography contained so many howlers that I feared they would reappear in the video. But the episodes avoid this—and any hindsight moralizing, thought so necessary by producers today. It is, in the main, straight reporting from Thompson’s memoirs. Though I disliked Thompson’s steady references to the boss as “Winston,” I found no serious errors. Please advise if the episodes I didn’t watch contain some awful clanger!

The series does speculate in places. One such involves the actor Leslie Howard, “Ashley Wilkes” in one of Churchill’s favorite films, Gone with the Wind. The story goes that Howard and his bodyguard—shot down by the Luftwaffe in the belief they were Churchill and Thompson—were intentional decoys. This is of course nonsense.

The great strength of Churchill’s Bodyguard is its visuals. Some photos aren’t chronologically accurate, but most are little-known and fascinating. The producers cleverly applied the right poses to go with the dialogue, presenting what is almost a motion picture.

The synopses suggest that Thompson saved Churchill’s life in every episode. But I have no doubt that many potential threats did preoccupy him. And to his credit, he disregarded no possibility.

Churchill’s Bodyguard Synopsis (IMdb)

Sadly, all but three of these videos have been deleted from YouTube. Links to the other three (below) were still active in mid-2019.

Introductions. Here we learn how two very different characters met, and how Thompson, born in the East End, saves his boss from an IRA assassination attempt. Ten years earlier, they had both been present, unknowingly, at the Siege of Sidney Street.

Middle East, 1921. Walter Thompson gets the challenge of keeping his boss alive during a visit to the Middle East. A leading British politician is the natural target for assassins, and on several critical occasions, Thompson is helped by the enigmatic Lawrence of Arabia.

The 1920s; travels in the New World 1929-32. Churchill buys cars and a house. In 1929 ceases to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and Thompson’s duties end. Within two years, Churchill’s outspoken views gain him new and deadly enemies, and Thompson is recalled.

North American Lecture Tour 1932. Thompson keeps Churchill safe during his lecture tour, but then leaves the police force. It seems that Churchill’s career is over, too. But a sinister new force is rising which sees him as an implacable enemy. Threats to his life bring the two men together again.

* * *

From Wilderness to War 1932-40. Despite being out of office, Churchill’s enemies prove dangerous. With war imminent, French Intelligence hears of a German assassination plot. Thompson returns from retirement. Britain goes to war in September 1939, and Churchill is back at the Admiralty.

Dangerous Travels and the Fall of France 1940. Sent to the Admiralty in September 1939, Churchill becomes Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, as Hitler invades the Low Countries. He embarks on a campaign of personal diplomacy, with travels including six trips to France. To Thompson’s concern, they are often within range of Luftwaffe fighters.

Surviving the Blitz, 1940-41. The early days of the war prove difficult and dangerous. The Luftwaffe bombs London. The Prime Minister walks the streets among the people, watches air raids from rooftops, and visits anti-aircraft batteries. Often only Thompson is with him.

Meetings with FDR, 1941-42. Running a gauntlet of U-boats in the North Atlantic, Churchill sets out for meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt. On one return journey, as the PM prepares to board a flying boat for the trip home, a gunman lurks nearby.

* * *

Turning Point, 1942-43. A precarious trip to Moscow to visit Stalin is followed by victory for the Eighth Army in North Africa. Aware that Churchill is traveling, the Germans at least twice try to shoot down his plane.

Teheran, 1943. After two Atlantic crossings and two trips across the Mediterranean, Churchill grows increasingly frustrated with Allied planners and suspicious of Stalin. When the Big Three meet in Tehran in 1943, the Germans launch Operation Longjump, in which commandoes plan to parachute into the city.

The Kiss of Life, 1943. Returning from the Tehran Conference, a sick and exhausted Churchill survives a dangerous illness, Thompson keeping vigil at his bedside.

Athens, 1944. Flying to Greece to forestall a civil war, Churchill plans to stay at a hotel where communist guerrillas had placed dynamite. He changes quarters to HMS Ajax in Piraeus harbor, while guerrillas fire at the ship.

Victory in Europe, 1945. Churchill and Thompson make several journeys through jubilant crowds. Churchill wants to walk among them. Instead Thompson pulls him onto the roof of his car,  accidentally breaking a woman’s arm in the process.

Frederick N. Rasmussen of the Baltimore Sun, an admirer of Sir Winston, told a story years ago, which has just floated back. Rasmussen wrote:

Experts in the field of spectral phenomena claim that Maryland and Washington are rich in sightings…. A ghost story dating to the Civil War that has persisted through the years is that of repeated appearances of Abraham Lincoln, who has been seen standing in a window of the Executive Mansion staring toward Virginia, as he had done often during the war. Even Churchill, who thought nothing of taking on Hitler and Mussolini, was not happy when assigned to the Lincoln Bedroom. Quite often, he was found in a vacant bedroom across the hall the next morning.

There are endless Lincoln ghost stories. Churchill’s encounter would have occurred during one of his stays in the White House during the Second World War.

Naked encounter?

Lincoln Bedroom

Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Churchill to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was “the favorite of most male guests,” recalled J.B. West, the chief usher. But upon his arrival on 22 December [1941], the Prime Minister rejected the bed, so he wandered the second floor, “tried out all the beds and finally selected the Rose Suite,” where SDR [Sara Delano Roosevelt] and the Queen [Elizabeth the Queen Mother]  had resided.  —Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume III, 409.

***

Mrs. Roosevelt had arranged for [Churchill] to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, then located off the West Hall, the favorite of most male guests. However, he didn’t like the bed, so he tried out all the beds and finally selected the Rose Suite at the end of the second floor.  —J. B. West & Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies.

***

When Eleanor showed Churchill to the Lincoln Bedroom (not then as famous as it was to become during the Clintons’ occupancy of the White House), he turned it down, claiming the bed did not suit him. Making himself at home from the start, Churchill then looked over the other available rooms. Alert as ever to opportunities, he chose a bedroom across the hall from Harry Hopkins’ almost permanent rooms, the Rose Room on the second floor, where Queen Elizabeth had slept on her on her 1939 visit with King George VI. —Cita Stelzer, Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table.

Reality

“It is true,” writes Mr. Lehrman,

that Harry Hopkins had been occupying the so-called Lincoln Suite.  Mr. Churchill was happy with the Rose Suite, as it was directly across the hall from Hopkins. It would seem that the powers that be thought Mr. Churchill very important they showed him the Lincoln Bedroom out of deference, Hopkins notwithstanding. Fortunately, it seems Mr. Churchill did not like the bed, thus no cause for disturbing Hopkins. Churchill was more than satisfied with the Rose Suite, immediately across the hall from Hopkins, primarily because it gave him immediate access to Hopkins, with whom he already had a very special relationship.

So, unless the ghost of Mr. Lincoln was in the habit of switching rooms, he is unlikely to have appeared in Churchill’s bedroom. Even less likely did the apparition appear as Churchill was emerging from his bath. By the way, his baths though frequent did not occur late at night. The Lincoln Bedroom wasn’t so named until 1929. Before then it was the “Blue Suite.” Lincoln used it as a study, not a bedroom. According to the White House Museum the bedroom furniture was moved in by President Truman in 1945.

“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.”

“We think we are wholly superior people,” said the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. The 50th and 75th Anniversaries of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg were poignant, inspiring moments. The words spoken of those occasions give cause to wonder. In the welter of emotions, have we forgotten what we need to remember?

“We may be given to meet again…”

Shelby Foote:

We think we are wholly superior people. If we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we’d never have fought that Civil War. But since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times. And our generals were the greatest generals of all time. It’s very American to do that.

“Who knows,” Berry Benson, a Gettysburg veteran asked, as his narrative drew towards its close, “Who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again hastily to don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the Long Roll summons us to battle.

“Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise. All will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well. And there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?”

The Civil War “is not ‘was,’ it’s ‘is.'”

Barbara Fields:

William Faulkner said once that history is not “was,” it’s “is.” And what we need to remember is that the Civil War “is” in the present, as well as the past.

The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future also established a standard that will not mean anything until we finish the work.

“Under One Flag Now”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gettysburg, 3 July 1938:

On behalf of the people of the United States I accept this monument in the spirit of brotherhood and peace.

Immortal deeds and immortal words have created here at Gettysburg a shrine of American patriotism. We encompass “The last full measure of devotion” of many men and by the words in which Abraham Lincoln expressed the simple faith for which they died.

It seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another. A statesman deals with concrete difficulties—with things which must be done from day to day. Not often can he frame conscious patterns for the far off future.

* * *

But the fullness of the stature of Lincoln’s nature and the fundamental conflict which events forced upon his Presidency invite us ever to turn to him for help.

For the issue which he restated here at Gettysburg seventy five years ago will be the continuing issue before this Nation so long as we cling to the purposes for which the Nation was founded—to preserve under the changing conditions of each generation a people’s government for the people’s good.

The task assumes different shapes at different times. Sometimes the threat to popular government comes from political interests, sometimes from economic interests, sometimes we have to beat off all of them together.

But the challenge is always the same—whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.

Lincoln spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field; and the years have laid their balm upon their wounds. Men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray are here together, a fragment spared by time. They come here by the memories of old divided loyalties, but they meet here in united loyalty to a united cause which the unfolding years have made it easier to see.

All of. them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now….

* * *

That is why Lincoln—commander of a people as well as of an army—asked that his battle end “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

To the hurt of those who came after him, Lincoln’s plea was long denied. A generation passed before the new unity became accepted fact.

In later years new needs arose. And with them new tasks, worldwide in their perplexities, their bitterness and their modes of strife. Here in our land we give thanks that, avoiding war, we seek our ends through the peaceful processes of popular government under the Constitution.

We are near to winning this battle. In its winning and through the years may we live by the wisdom and the humanity of the heart of Abraham Lincoln.

_________

See also “Lehrman on Churchill and Lincoln.”

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

Scientific Nemesis

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

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

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

The Prof: Facts and Fantasies

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

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

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

Was Lindemann Anti-Semitic?

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

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

Lindemann’s Influence

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

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

Lindemann and Bombing Policy

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Bomber Allocations

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

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

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

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

The Bengal Famine

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

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

1943

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

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

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

1944

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

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

Appeal to FDR

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

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

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

What Churchill Believed  

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

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

The loyalty of the Indian Army to the King-Emperor, the proud fidelity to their treaties of the Indian Princes, the unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war….upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces, and by 1942 an Indian Army of one million was in being, and volunteers were coming in at the monthly rate of fifty thousand….the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.”¹⁶

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

From Counterfactuals to Howlers

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

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

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

“He sweetened English life”

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

Click here for clear audio of the 50-minute speech.

Presidents never attend speeches to Congress by foreign heads of state or government. Part of this is certainly courtesy, so as not to steal focus from the guest. In a deeper sense, it is an assertion of the separation of powers between Congress and the Executive. A similar tradition in Britain is when the House of Commons slams the door on Black Rod, when he summons Members to the House of Lords to hear the Queen’s Speech. He then bangs the door again, three times. Members of Commons walk out, talking loudly, and troop to the Lords to hear the speech. The ritual emphasizes Commons’ independence.

Not a P.C. Congress

Churchill and his party, he said,

have not travelled all this way simply to concern themselves about improving the health and happiness of the Mikado of Japan. I thought it would be good that all concerned in this theatre should meet together and thrash out in friendly candour, heart to heart, all the points that arise; and there are many.

Anywhere war industry was concentrated was fair game, Churchill told Congress. If there were populations around it, they would be well advised to leave:

If they do not like what is coming to them, let them disperse beforehand on their own. This process will continue ceaselessly with ever-increasing weight and intensity until the German and Italian peoples abandon or destroy the monstrous tyrannies which they have incubated and reared in their midst….

It is the duty of those who are charged with the direction of the war to overcome at the earliest moment the military, geographical, and political difficulties, and begin the process, so necessary and desirable, of laying the cities and other munitions centres of Japan in ashes, for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world.

Dear oh dear, how terribly bullying. How arrogant, insensitive and warlike! But those sentiments were not heard. Members of Congress and American audiences reacted with cheers. The New York Times headlined, “Churchill Predicts Huge Allied Drive in 1943.”

It was, of course, another age. This was the last war in history declared by Congress. And Churchill knew, as he wrote in his memoirs, that “the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death…. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals.”

How times have changed

Having located and listened to the online audio, I had an odd sensation. It wasn’t over the classic Churchill peroration. Most of all I was struck by the announcer. He reminded me how much has changed.

The announcer is full of hyperbole, patriotism and praise, totally unquestioning of the speaker. It is so different from how one expects a speech like that would be covered today. One can imagine the media talking heads at the end of it: “Finally we switch to Berlin for Herr Goebbels’ response…..”​

My friend in England quips: “The BBC would give out a hotline number for counseling to those disturbed by what they have heard.” Certainly many groups would be “offended.”

In another wartime speech, in Canada, Churchill declared: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”

Let us hope that is still true.

“There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away…people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.” —Winston S. Churchill, 1950

On the last day of January, 1942, the British blew up Singapore’s central causeway to the mainland in a vain attempt to stop the onrushing Japanese. At nearby Raffles College, the Principal heard the bang. “What was that?” he asked a student, Lee Kuan Yew (later Singapore’s first prime minister). “That,” Lee claimed to have replied, “was the end of the British Empire.”

It certainly seemed so. Seventy-five years ago on February 15th, the surrender of 80,000 British to an smaller force of Japanese shocked the nation. The “impregnable fortress” had guns trained at the sea, but Japan had marched down the Malay Peninsula. Churchill—who had questioned Singapore’s gun defenses in the 1920s—called its surrender “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”

What Singapore Teaches

Modern leaders might consider the lessons offered by Churchill’s reaction to Singapore. Unlike certain recent assurances—the end of combat in Iraq, the draw-down in Afghanistan, the ISIS “JV team,” the outcome in Mosul—Churchill never failed to admit how serious things were.

“Tell the truth to the British people,” he exclaimed in 1932. “They may be a bit offended at the moment, but if you have told them exactly what is going on, you have insured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are very unpleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion.” Singapore was indeed very bad; but there was a flip side.

Two certainties, Churchill wrote, emerged from Japan’s December 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor and British East Asia. First, “a measureless array of disasters approached us in the onslaught of Japan.” Second, with America joining the Allies (“up to the neck and in to the death”) the Axis would inevitably be “ground to powder.”

With America in the fight, Churchill continued, Britons were free to think of something beside survival. Now every critic, “friendly or malevolent,” was “free to point out the many errors that had been made”—for war is, after all, “mainly a catalogue of blunders.” The combination of Allied doubts, the media’s “well-informed and airily detached criticism” and the “shrewd and constant girding” of politicians gave him the sense “of an embarrassed, unhappy, baffled public opinion, albeit superficial….”

“Embarrassed, unhappy and baffled, albeit superficial” is an apt description of today’s public mood as well. Modern threats, fortunately, are less frightening than those of 1942. But Churchill offers two simple strategies that today’s leaders might consider: Tell the truth, and cede no authority.

Tell the Truth

On 15 February 1942, Churchill broadcast “in the darkest terms…of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat….Other dangers gather about us out there, and none of the dangers which we have hitherto successfully withstood at home and in the East are in any way diminished.”

Bluntly he described “the gravity and efficiency of the Japanese war machine. Whether in the air or upon the sea, or man to man on land, they have already proved themselves to be formidable, deadly, and, I am sorry to say, barbarous antagonists.

“You know that I have never prophesied to you or promised smooth and easy things…many misfortunes, severe torturing losses, remorseless and gnawing anxieties lie before us.” This was a moment for the nation to show its quality and genius—to “draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory…Let us move forward steadfastly together into the storm and through the storm.”

Churchill was equally frank with his allies. He shared the bad news with Roosevelt, who advised him to ignore “back-seat drivers.”

He wrote to Stalin of the implications for Burma, India, Australia and Russia in Asia.

Cede No Authority

Having received the confidence of his people with his candor, Churchill called for a vote of confidence by Parliament. Few other countries, he said, “have institutions strong enough to sustain such a thing while they are fighting for their lives.” In the American system Mr. Trump doesn’t have quite that option. But he might well appeal for public support after some stark decision of grave consequence. (He may have to take one of those soon.)

Some parliamentary colleagues had urged Churchill to appoint more managers, to be less personally involved in running the war. He refused. If critics believed the public interest required breaking up the government, so be it.

For himself, he would “stand by my original programme, blood, toil, tears and sweat, which is all I have ever offered, to which I added, five months later, ‘many shortcomings, mistakes and disappointments’…I offer no apologies, I offer no excuses, I make no promises…but at the same time I avow my confidence, never stronger than at this moment, that we shall bring this conflict to an end in a manner agreeable to the welfare of the world.”

Churchill won his vote of confidence, 464 to 1.

The volumes comprise “every important document of any kind that concerns Churchill, and the present volume is 2,752 pages long, representing an average of more than eleven pages per day.” 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.

Fateful Questions: Excerpts

Fastidiously compiled by the late Sir Martin Gilbert and edited by Dr. Larry Arnn, this volume offers a fresh contribution of documents crucial to our understanding of Churchill in World War II. It is a vast new contribution to Churchill scholarship.

Fateful Questions takes us from the Allied invasion of Italy to the first Big Three conference at Teheran; Russian successes on the Eastern Front; fraught arguments over tactics and strategy as the Allies begin closing in on Nazi Germany, and on to the eve of D-Day: the invasion of France in June 1944.

The majority of these documents have never before been seen in print. They illustrate the sheer volume and variety of subjects Churchill dealt with, leading Britain in the war while presiding of myriad mechanics of government.

In Fateful Questions, Churchill is called upon to alleviate, in the midst of war, a severe famine in Bengal, India. Almost simultaneously, he is confronted with Italy’s surrender, and the question of who will lead that nation after Mussolini. From America come constant requests, prods and proposals—and the growing realization that by comparison to the USA, Britain will soon play a greatly diminished role.

Militarily, Churchill has to consider siphoning resources from the Italian campaign to support the coming invasion of France. He must cope with belligerent notes from Stalin, often demanding the impossible; strained dialogue within the War Cabinet; difficulties in setting Big Three meetings; Parliamentary business; Japan and the Pacific; communications with the citizenry; appointments to fill; vacancies and losses; postwar planning—page after page, copiously footnoted by Hillsdale’s team of student associates and practiced historians.

Even now, in the digital age, Churchill’s workload in 1943-44 would be enormous for several persons, let alone one man pushing seventy. His output was extraordinary, his prescriptions understandable and wise. If he lost his temper on occasion, it is fully understandable. This is not to suggest—as the documents testify—that Churchill was right on every subject. But the average of his decisions was certainly not bad.

A sampling from Fateful Questions illustrates both the complexity of Churchill’s problems and their wide variety and the depths of detail into which he entered—and, in some cases, some rather astonishing facts which, until this book were confined to archives, or not known at all.

Palestine

Churchill’s steady support of a national home for the Jews continued during World War II, and Fateful Questions contains many evidences. In 1942-44 Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, was Resident Minister of State in Cairo, responsible for the Middle East, including Mandatory Palestine, and Africa. He was a lifetime friend of the Churchills. His assassination by Zionist extremists in November 1944 stunned Churchill. “If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols, and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany,” he declared sadly, “many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past.”

27 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Sir Edward Bridges. Prime Minister’s Personal Minute C.41/3 (Churchill papers, 20/106)

It must be more than three months since the War Cabinet decided that a special committee should be set up to watch over the Jewish question and Palestine generally. How many times has this Committee met? At the present moment Lord Moyne is over here. I said at least a month ago that he should be invited to lay his views before this Committee. He has been made a member, but there has been no meeting. A meeting should be held this week, and Lord Moyne should have every opportunity of stating his full case, in which I am greatly interested. The matter might be discussed further at the Cabinet next week or the week after. Pray report to me the action that will be taken.

Destroyers for Bases 

In the Destroyers for Bases Agreement on 2 September 1940, fifty mothballed U.S. Navy destroyers were transferred to the Royal Navy in exchange for land rights to build American bases on British possessions. No one maintained that this was a fair exchange, but Fateful Questions reveals that Churchill downplayed this issue: “When you have got a thing where you want it, it is a good thing to leave it where it is.” To President Roosevelt’s advisor, Harry Hopkins, he admitted that the value of the trade was unequal—but that, to Britain, American security overrode considerations of an equable “business deal.” This was astonishing admission, characteristic of Churchill, and his loyalty to an ally. 

14 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Harry Hopkins. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.1614/3  (Churchill papers, 20/121)

Personal and Most Secret. I am most grateful for the comments which the President made at his Press conference but there are several other important allegations which we think should be answered. I therefore propose to publish from 10 Downing Street on my authority something like the [following]…Statement begins…..

“Complaints are made about the bases lent by Britain to the United States in the West Indies in 1940 in return for the fifty destroyers. These fifty destroyers, although very old, were most helpful at that critical time to us who were fighting alone against Germany and Italy, but no human being could pretend that the destroyers were in any way an equivalent for the immense strategic advantages conceded in seven islands vital to the United States. I never defended the transaction as a business deal. I proclaimed to Parliament, and still proclaim, that the safety of the United States is involved in these bases, and that the military security of the United States must be considered a prime British interest….”

 

Famine in Bengal

Since publication of a book on the 1943-44 Bengal famine a few years ago—and a chorus of condemnations from those who read little else—Churchill and his War Cabinet have been accused near-genocidal behavior over aid to the victims. The Viceroy, Lord Wavell, and Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, are frequently represented as Churchill’s critics. Before he died, Sir Martin Gilbert told me that the relevant documents, which he had exhaustively compiled, would be revealed in the appropriate document volume. They would, he said, completely exonerate Churchill.

That time has now come with publication of Fateful Questions. Reading it, no one could consider that Churchill and his Cabinet, in the midst of a war for survival, did not do everything they could for the plight of the starving, and for the Indian people in general. Only a few excerpts are possible here. They barely scratch the surface.

8 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to the War Cabinet. (Churchill papers, 23/11), 10 Downing Street

DIRECTIVE TO THE VICEROY DESIGNATE (WAVELL)

1. Your first duty is the defence of India from Japanese menace and invasion. Owing to the favourable turn which the affairs of The King-Emperor have taken this duty can best be discharged by ensuring that India is a safe and fertile base from which the British and American offensive can be launched in 1944. Peace, order and a high condition of war-time well-being among the masses of the people constitute the essential foundation of the forward thrust against the enemy.
2. The material and cultural conditions of the many peoples of India will naturally engage your earnest attention. The hard pressures of world-war have for the first time for many years brought conditions of scarcity, verging in some localities into actual famine, upon India. Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages. But besides this the prevention of the hoarding of grain for a better market and the fair distribution of foodstuffs between town and country are of the utmost consequence. The contrast between wealth and poverty in India, the incidence of corrective taxation and the relations prevailing between land-owner and tenant or labourer, or between factory-owner and employee, require searching re-examination.
3. Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good. No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand…. [emphasis mine]

12 October 1943. House of Commons: Oral Answers

INDIA (FOOD SITUATION)

Secretary of State for India (Mr. Amery): At the beginning of the year His Majesty’s Government provided the necessary shipping for substantial imports of grain to India in order to meet prospects of serious shortage which were subsequently relieved by an excellent spring harvest in Northern India. Since the recrudescence of the shortage in an acute form we have made every effort to provide shipping, and considerable quantities of food grains are now arriving or are due to arrive before the end of the year. We have also been able to help in the supply of milk food for children. The problem so far as help from here is concerned is entirely one of shipping, and has to be judged in the light of all the other urgent needs of the United Nations.

Canadian & Australian Aid

4 November 1943. Winston S. Churchill to William Mackenzie King (Prime Minister, Canada). PM’s Personal Telegram T.1842/3 (Churchill papers, 20/123)

1. I have seen the telegrams exchanged by you and the Viceroy offering 100,000 tons of wheat to India and I gratefully acknowledge the spirit which prompts Canada to make this generous gesture.
2. Your offer is contingent however on shipment from the Pacific Coast which I regret is impossible. The only ships available to us on the Pacific Coast are the Canadian new buildings which you place at our disposal. These are already proving inadequate to fulfil our existing high priority commitments from that area which include important timber requirements for aeroplane manufacture in the United Kingdom and quantities of nitrate from Chile to the Middle East which we return for foodstuffs for our Forces and for export to neighbouring territories, including Ceylon.
3. Even if you could make the wheat available in Eastern Canada, I should still be faced with a serious shipping question. If our strategic plans are not to suffer undue interference we must continue to scrutinise all demands for shipping with the utmost rigour. India’s need for imported wheat must be met from the nearest source, i.e. from Australia. Wheat from Canada would take at least two months to reach India whereas it could be carried from Australia in 3 to 4 weeks. Thus apart from the delay in arrival, the cost of shipping is more than doubled by shipment from Canada instead of from Australia. In existing circumstance this uneconomical use of shipping would be indefensible….

11 November 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Mackenzie King. PM’s Personal Telegram T.1942/3 (Churchill papers, 20/124)

…The War Cabinet has again considered the question of further shipments of Australian wheat and has decided to ship up to another 100,000 tons, part of which will arrive earlier than the proposed cargo from Canada….

“We should do everything possible…”

14 February 1944. War Cabinet: Conclusions. (War Cabinet papers, 65/41) 10 Downing Street

INDIAN FOOD GRAIN REQUIREMENTS

The Prime Minister informed the War Cabinet that…there had been a further communication from the Viceroy urging in the strongest terms the seriousness of the situation as he foresaw it….he was most anxious that we should do everything possible to ease the Viceroy’s position. No doubt the Viceroy felt that if this corner could be turned, the position next year would be better….

The Minister of War Transport said that it would be out of the question for him to find shipping to maintain the import of wheat to India at a monthly rate of 50,000 tons for an additional two months. The best that he could do was represented by the proposed import of Iraqi barley. If, when the final figures of the rice crop were available, the Government of India’s anticipation of an acute shortage proved to be justified he would then have tonnage in a position to carry to India about 25,000 tons a month. But even this help would be at the expense of cutting the United Kingdom import programme in 1944 below 24 million tons, this being the latest estimate in the light of increasing operational requirements. In the circumstances it was clearly quite impossible to provide shipping to meet the full demand of 1½ million tons made by the Government of India.

24 April 1944. War Cabinet: Conclusions. (Cabinet papers, 65/42) 10 Downing Street

Secret. The War Cabinet had before them a Memorandum by the Secretary of State for India (WP (44) 216) reviewing the latest position as regards the Indian food grain situation. The result was a net worsening of 550,000 tons and the Viceroy, in addition to the 200,000 tons already promised, now required 724,000 tons of wheat if the minimum needs of the civil population were to be met and the Army were also to receive their requirements.

The Secretary of State for India said that the position had been worsened by unseasonable weather, and by the disaster at Bombay, in which 45,000 tons of badly-needed foodstuffs and 11 ships had been lost. He was satisfied that everything possible had been done by the Authorities in India to meet the situation. Given the threat to operations which any breakdown in India’s economic life involved, he felt that we should now apprise the United States of the seriousness of the position. It must be for the War Cabinet to decide how far we should ask for their actual assistance….

The Prime Minister said that it was clear that His Majesty’s Government could only provide further relief for the Indian situation at the cost of incurring grave difficulties in other directions. At the same time, there was a strong obligation on us to replace the grain which had perished in the Bombay explosion. He was sceptical as to any help being forthcoming from America, save at the cost of operations of the United Kingdom import programme. At the same time his sympathy was great for the sufferings of the people of India.

Appeal to Roosevelt

29 April 1944. Winston S. Churchill to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. PM’s Personal Telegram T.996/4. (Churchill papers, 20/163)

No.665. I am seriously concerned about the food situation in India and its possible reactions on our joint operations. Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died. This year there is a good crop of rice, but we are faced with an acute shortage of wheat, aggravated by unprecedented storms which have inflicted serious damage on the Indian spring crops. India’s shortage cannot be overcome by any possible surplus of rice even if such a surplus could be extracted from the peasants. Our recent losses in the Bombay explosion have accentuated the problem.

Wavell is exceedingly anxious about our position and has given me the gravest warnings. His present estimate is that he will require imports of about one million tons this year if he is to hold the situation, and to meet the needs of the United States and British and Indian troops and of the civil population especially in the great cities. I have just heard from Mountbatten that he considers the situation so serious that, unless arrangements are made promptly to import wheat requirements, he will be compelled to release military cargo space of SEAC in favour of wheat and formally to advise Stillwell that it will also be necessary for him to arrange to curtail American military demands for this purpose.

By cutting down military shipments and other means, I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more.

I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India from Australia without reducing the assistance you are now providing for us, who are at a positive minimum if war efficiency is to be maintained. We have the wheat (in Australia) but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but I believe that, with this recent misfortune to the wheat harvest and in the light of Mountbatten’s representations, I am no longer justified in not asking for your help. Wavell is doing all he can by special measures in India. If, however, he should find it possible to revise his estimate of his needs, I would let you know immediately.

Without Churchill…

Fateful Questions, in these documents and others included, has put paid to the outrageous allegations that Churchill, full of racist hatred for the people of India, was responsible for exacerbating the Bengal famine in 1943-44.

The historian Arthur Herman noted two facts which Churchill’s critics have thus far studiously ignored.  (1) Had the famine occurred in peacetime, without a war for survival, it would have been dealt with competently, as famines had been dealt with before by the British Raj. (2) Without Churchill, the Bengal famine would have been worse.