Excerpted from “What’s Not Trite is Not True,” a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original article with endnotes and addenda, click here. To subscribe to weekly articles from Hillsdale-Churchill, click here, scroll to bottom, enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” We never disclose or sell your email address which remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Oh no, not again!

Churchill was dragged protesting into D-Day (Operation Overlord) by his U.S. and Russian allies, says Scottish writer Graeme Bowman. Right to the last, Churchill preferred the “soft underbelly” route to Germany through Italy. This is not a new charge. What is rather new is the argument that he was motivated by ignoble interests: securing the Mediterranean, Suez and Britain’s eastern empire.  

In the words of Arthur Balfour, Empire First offers “some things that are trite and some things that are true, but what is true is trite and what is not trite is not true.”

Of course Churchill’s instincts were to cross to Italy after the Allies had taken North Africa. He also saw the strategic need to “shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible.” That does not mean he doggedly opposed Overlord. In fact, without Churchill, the invasion would have been harder.

Here’s the windup

Chapter 1, “Jolly Little Wars Against Barbarous Peoples” starts with the race card. It’s a Churchill quote from 1952: “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings, it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking. When I was a subaltern, the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man.”

Churchill said that fifty years after he’d been a subaltern! Worse, his words are trimmed to distort their meaning. His preceding words were: “When I was in Lloyd George’s Government I wanted to bring in radical reforms in Egypt, to tax the Pashas and make life worthwhile for the fellaheen. When you think….” etc. Clearly, “you” refers to opponents of reform, not himself. 

And don’t expect to find Churchill’s 1944 remark to War Cabinet colleague Sir Ramaswamy Mudaliar: “The old notion that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must disappear…. We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” That wouldn’t fit the narrative of this breathless condemnation. 

In the Army young Winston lives a life of “indolence and indulgence punctuated by intense bursts of soldiering.” Amidst all that indolence he managed to serve in four wars on three continents, publish five books before age twenty-five, and earn a small fortune lecturing. 

Now for the pitch 

If you have had enough of this, and believe me I have, consider the main thrust of Empire First: That Churchill opposed D-Day almost up to the Normandy landings. “We are often only shown one side of Churchill, his good qualities,” Dr. Bowman told the Greenock Telegraph. “He did do the right thing in 1940, but his mistakes such as his opposition to D-Day have been completely ignored.”

The only thing wrong with this is that it’s completely untrue. Churchill’s hesitations over D-Day are documented since the issue arose in 1942—and with far greater effect than this book. Consider please the Churchill Bibliography.  

In The Second Front and Mr. Churchill (1942) the Communist MP Willie Gallacher echoed Stalin’s demand for an immediate invasion of France. Next, Mr. Churchill’s Anden [Other] Front (1947), by another Communist, Kai Moltke, argued that Churchill never wanted Overlord. In Ruzvel’t, Cherchill: Vtorol Front (1965) Soviet author Iskander Undasynov made the argument again. Yet this book is represented as a wholly new critique. 

Complaints were not only from Bolsheviks. In Winston Churchill and the Second Front (1957) the distinguished military historian Trumbull Higgins argued that Churchill’s concentration on the Mediterranean was the result of “colonial” thinking. In Keith Sainsbury’s Churchill and Roosevelt at War (1994), a scholarly “reinterpretation” of the two leaders explained how Churchill through D-Day assured the end of British greatness. (Rather the opposite of the author’s thesis). 

Heart of the argument 

“Churchill wanted to put the British Empire first,” Bowman told the Greenock Telegraph. WSC “had to be pressured into D-Day by the Soviets and the Germans. [He] wanted to pursue a west allied operation [sic; he must mean Western allies] in the Mediterranean, Italy and the Balkans, and controlling the Eastern Mediterranean and Suez. Churchill was pursuing a Brexit military strategy, putting the British Empire before the liberation of Europe. He had a parochial view of the world…. You could say that Churchill was the first Brexiteer.”

How Brexit compares here is obscure. Brexit was about regaining sovereignty from a federal Europe, not regaining the British Empire.  

Non-smoking gun 

One example will suffice of this book’s many misinterpretations. Bowman quotes Churchill on 19 April 1944, to Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan. (The brackets are his): “[Overlord] has been forced upon us by the Russians and by the United States military authorities.” The quote is truncated and out of context; and, by “forced upon us,” Churchill was likely not even referring to Overlord.  

Four days earlier, Cadogan had asked Churchill to clarify publicly what was meant by “Unconditional Surrender.” President Roosevelt had announced this policy to the press at the 1943 Casablanca Conference. Loyally, Churchill “backed him up,” as he wrote Cadogan on April 19th. But “this matter is on the President.” 

In replying to Cadogan, Churchill spends four paragraphs on “Unconditional Surrender,” not D-Day. In the fifth paragraph Churchill thinks it “wrong for the Generals to start shivering before the battle.” 

What battle? Bowman inserts “Overlord” in brackets. It is more likely that Churchill referred the upcoming campaign across France. Especially when he adds (in words not quoted by Bowman): “We have gone in [to the invasion] wholeheartedly.” In a final paragraph, Churchill returns to “Unconditional Surrender.” There is nothing here to suggest any opposition to Overlord. 

(For more of this, see addenda correspondence between WSC and Cadogan in the Hillsdale review.)

Churchill on D-Day, 1941 

The record is full of evidence proving that Churchill had wanted a “lodgment on the continent” since 1941. His reluctance to invade prematurely was based on his recollection of the Gallipoli disaster in 1915. “War was war but not folly,” he told Stalin, “and it would be folly to invite a disaster which would help nobody.” That did not mean Churchill opposed invading France. Here is some of the evidence:

[Floating harbours, later called Mulberries] must float up and down with the tide. The ships must have a side-flap cut in them, and a drawbridge long enough to overreach the moorings of the piers. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.

You [Mountbatten] will take charge of the commandos. You will continue the commando raids to keep the Germans on their toes—but above all so you may learn the technique of getting a lodgment back on the continent. And you will devise the appliances, the appurtenances and the techniques necessary to get back onto the continent…. All our headquarters are thinking defensively, except yours. Yours will think only offensively. You will go ahead and plan the invasion of Germany and you will let me know as soon as may be convenient when you will be ready to invade.

1942-43 

It seems to me that it would be a most grievous decision to abandon Round-up [original code name for Overlord]. Torch [the invasion of North Africa] is no substitute for Round-up…. 

There is of course no question of abandoning ‘Overlord’ which will remain our principal operation for 1944…. retention of landing-craft in the Mediterranean in order not to lose the battle of Rome may cause a slight delay…. The delay would however mean that the blow when struck would be with somewhat heavier forces.

“Impulse and authority” 

A more valid conclusion about his attitude toward D-Day is evident from such documents. In his war memoirs, Churchill summarized his case: 

In view of the many accounts which are extant and multiplying of my supposed aversion from any kind of large-scale opposed-landing, such as took place in Normandy in 1944, it may be convenient if I make it clear that from the very beginning I provided a great deal of the impulse and authority for creating the immense apparatus and armada for the landing of armour on beaches, without which it is now universally recognised that all such major operations would have been impossible.

Dr. Bowman is from Greenock, which played a noble part in Britain’s war effort. Perhaps its historians might now busy themselves with a travelogue. They could tell of an old man’s courageous journeys from Greenock into U-boat-infested seas in pursuit of victory in a global war. Or they could describe the ships and munitions built in Greenock to support the “lodgment on the continent” the old man had supported since 1941. They might even mention the Mulberry Harbours, the old man’s conception that made possible a successful D-Day. 

More on Churchill and D-Day

“D-Day: Rough Men Stand Ready, A Shared Sentiment,” 2023

“Lectures at Sea (1): Churchill and the Myths of D-Day,” 2019.

“Netflix on Operation Mincemeat: Did They Get It Right,” 2022.