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.

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

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

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

“The Russian danger…”

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

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

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

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

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

“The Ireland of Russia”

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Baltic “Ostland”

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

The March of Fate

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

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

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

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

What we can learn

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

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

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

The 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.

But fame and likability don’t a Churchill scholar make. And in that department, Boris Johnson needs some help.

His remarks are quoted from a November 14th speech at the Yale Club in New York City.

Boris Fact-checks

1) Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s World War II “loan” of $50 billion worth of war materiel to the Allies, “screwed” the British.

I queried Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers University, editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence and several books on World War II, who wrote:

The U.S. did not construct Lend-Lease to take advantage of Britain. FDR and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau rejected suggestions that America take ownership of British possessions. The initial agreement committed Britain to so-called “free” trade, aimed primarily at the Empire. This angered the British (including Keynes), but turned out to be meaningless.

Britain received 60% of Lend-Lease—$31.4 billion (nearly half a trillion today). Churchill regarded Lend-Lease “without question as the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history.” (Churchill By Himself, 131)

Destroyers or Bathtubs?

2) Roosevelt’s “Destroyers for Bases” deal (September 1940, six months before Lend-Lease) was “heavily biased against Britain.” The fifty aged destroyers Britain received (in exchange for American bases on British possessions) were “useless bathtubs.”

This is both wrong and beside the point. Churchill said the Americans had “turned a large part of their gigantic industry to making munitions which we need. They have even given us or lent us valuable weapons of their own.” (Churchill By Himself, 129) Naval historian Christopher Bell, Dalhousie University, Halifax, author of Churchill and Sea Power, writes:

Churchill was eager for the old destroyers, knowing full well that they were WW1 vintage. They nevertheless helped fill a gap at a critical time. A measure of Churchill’s determination to obtain them was his willingness (mentioned in my book) to trade one of Britain’s new battleships for them—an idea the Admiralty quickly shot down.

Professor Kimball adds the major point Mayor Johnson misses:

What mattered, as any thoughtful person knew and should know, is that Destroyers-for-Bases was a remarkable commitment by FDR and America to Britain’s aid—if it could hold on. It was seen, and was intended to be seen, as a morale builder in the UK, at a time when morale was crucial.

FDR’s Funeral

3) Churchill did not go to Roosevelt’s funeral in 1945 because he was “miffed” at the President.

Facts: Germany was nearing surrender, in a war that had taxed Churchill and Britain for six years. Would you go? Yet Churchill’s first impulse was to go. I owe these references to my colleague Paul Courtenay:

“At the last moment I decided not to fly to Roosevelt’s funeral on account of much that was going on here.” (Churchill to his wife in Mary Soames, Personal Letters, 526). “Everyone here thought my duty next week lay at home.” (Churchill to FDR confidant Harry Hopkins in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill VII: 1294.) “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 regretted in after years that he allowed himself to be persuaded not to go.” (Diaries of Alexander Cadogan, 727.)

4) Remembering Churchill’s “snub” of the Roosevelt funeral, President Johnson took revenge by not attending Churchill’s funeral in 1965.

No: The President was suffering from a bad case of the flu. He sent Chief Justice Earl Warren and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. President Eisenhower joined them and gave a moving eulogy on the BBC. President Johnson said: “When there was darkness in the world…a generous Providence gave us Winston Churchill…. He is history’s child, and what he said and what he did will never die.”

Misquotes

Boris repeated several alleged Churchill quotations on which “I ‘eard different” from eye-witnesses.

“I’ll kiss him on both cheeks—or all four if you prefer.” The object of that crack was De Gaulle, not the Americans. “Proud to be British” involved an old man making improper advances to a young lady, not the way Johnson spins it. Of course Churchill, who often stored and retreaded favorite wisecracks, might have said the same thing at different times.

On the big issues, though, it would be a nice thing if Boris would run his statements past a scholar, lest they add to the cacophony of Churchill tall stories that pollute the Internet.