The Greeks are still not laughing about their mid-1940s civil war, so levity may be inappropriate. Nor was at the time was Winston Churchill. “There is a lot of ruin in any nation,” he once mused. In Athens, 1944, Britain was “responsible for building up the nest of cockatrices for EAM [communist partisans] in Greece.” (His vocabulary was broad: A cockatrice is a mythical, two-legged dragon or serpent-like creature with a cock’s head.)

Nevertheless, the peace deal Churchill brokered between warring Greeks in 1944 had so many hilarious moments that, 75 years later, we may be permitted to indulge in lighter aspects. The previous post (“Antithesis of Democracy,” Athens, 1944) drew much comment and several asked about these episodes. So here we go.

Moscow, October 1944: the “Naughty Paper”

Well-known is the background to Churchill’s Greek excursion. It began with what he in his war memoirs called the “Naughty Paper.” This was the “percentages agreement” with Stalin in their Moscow talks (the Tolstoy Conference,  9-19 October 1944). The deal was to grant Britain preponderant influence in Allied-occupied Greece, a scheme Stalin honored, for awhile. (Stalin began meddling in Greece after Churchill was out of office.) The Soviets made no move to interfere when Churchill flew to Athens to broker a truce between communist and royalist insurgents. Churchill recalled in his memoirs:

The moment was apt for business, so I said, “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans…. How would it do for you to have 90% predominance in Roumania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?” While this was being translated I wrote [it] out on a half-sheet of paper…. I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation….

We were only dealing with immediate war-time arrangements. All larger questions were reserved on both sides for what we then hoped would be a peace table when the war was won. After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table. At length I said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.” “No, you keep it,” said Stalin.

Athens, December 1944: “Missed again”

Churchill was much criticized over the “Naughty Paper.” It was said (omitting the context) that he and Stalin were dividing the Balkans between them. From the record it is clear he was only trying to avoid conflicts between occupying forces. Confident, therefore, in Stalin’s approval of Britain’s “90% of the say,” he sent troops to “hold and dominate Athens…with bloodshed if necessary.” Then on Christmas 1944, forsaking family holiday celebrations, he personally flew there to mediate.

Churchill stationed himself in HMS Ajax, anchored in strife-torn Piraeus, the harbor for Athens. (Ajax was famous for her part in pursuit and scuttling of the Graf Spee in 1939.) The Piraeus was ringed with smoke and gunfire. Churchill, as usual, was disdainful of danger. A secretary recalled him chortling “Missed again!” when rebel gunners sent shells hurtling toward the ship.

Ajax‘s Captain John Cuthbert said, “I hope, sir, that while you are with us we shan’t have to open fire.” Churchill was only amused. “Pray remember, Captain, that I come here as a cooing dove of peace, bearing a sprig of mistletoe in my beak—but far be it from me to stand in the way of military necessity.”

Risky encounters

Churchill drove in an armored car to meet the opposing sides. Bullets were flying, and he asked his private secretary Jock Colville if he had a pistol. “I certainly had my own.” At the British Embassy a young officer, Robert Mathew, greeted him amidst rifle fire. Mathew shoved him inside and they landed in heap.

“Do you normally push prime ministers around?” Churchill asked.

“Sir, I’d rather have an angry prime minister than a dead one.”

WSC: “What did you say your name was?”

“Mathew, sir.”

“Any relation to General Charles?”

“My father, sir.”

Churchill softened: “We charged together at Omdurman.” Robert was later Member of Parliament for Honiton, 1955-66.*

He parleyed in an unheated room lit by hurricane lamps, reminding both sides of Greece’s fame and majesty. “Whether Greece is a monarchy or a republic is a matter for Greeks and Greeks alone to decide,” he told them. “All we wish you is good, and good for all.” Somehow, for the time being, he pulled it off. Both sides drew back, accepting Archbishop Damaskinos as Regent of Greece.

“Man of God or scheming prelate?”

I have this from a reliable source, the late Bill Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review. Bill passed it along from Henry Anatole Grunwald, later editor-in-chief of Time and U.S. Ambassador to his native Austria. In 1965, Grunwald edited one of the finest tributes to Sir Winston, Churchill: The Life Triumphant. 

Grunwald learned the story from a reporter in Athens, 1944. It’s double hearsay, of course, but likely reliable. Churchill was welcomed in Greece by Lt. Gen. Sir Ronald Scobie, the British officer commanding. The PM had never met the Archbishop, and was curious about him, asking:

“Who is this Damaskinos? Is he a man of God, or a scheming prelate more interested in the combinations of temporal power than in the life hereafter?”

Scobie replied: “I think the latter, Prime Minister.”

Churchill said: “Good, that’s our man.”

The Funny Party

At 7pm on Christmas Day Damaskinos was piped aboard Ajax to meet Churchill. Six feet tall, he wore  a headdress that raised him nearly another foot.  Churchill’s naval aide Cdr. Tommy Thompson then recalled “a dramatic and entirely unforeseen development.” To his horror he saw advancing towards them the ship’s “Funny Party.”

A Christmas-time custom in the Royal Navy is a group of sailors careering about in extravagant fancy dress. They make rounds of the ship, occasionally throwing a one of their number overboard. The first of these Damaskinos met was a man in a curly-brimmed bowler, a large white hunting stock, a tiepin in the shape of a gold fox, and a false nose. He had a glass of gin in each hand and was leading others similarly attired. Thompson recalled:

There they stood—a hula-hula “girl” with a grass skirt and a brassiere with winking red and green lights on either side; the clown Coco; Charlie Chaplin; and three other equally bizarre characters with grotesquely blackened faces…. When they caught sight of Archbishop Damaskinos they concluded with grudging admiration that the Commander…had produced someone far funnier than they were—a rival one-man Funny Party. They gaped unbelievingly at the Archbishop with his immense black beard, his tall hat, and his long robes. Then they howled with laughter.

The sailors advanced upon what they beheld as a fellow celebrant, with every intention of tossing him over the side. They were dissuaded with difficulty, and the cleric in ruffled dignity went on to his meeting with Churchill. “From the look of utter incredulity on his face it was quite clear that the Archbishop thought he was imprisoned in a gathering of lunatics.”

His Beatitude and “Plaster-arse”

After the meeting Damaskinos went to his stateroom for a rest. Between Churchill and the Funny Party, he probably needed it. Someone remarked that he secured himself from interruption by hanging a notice on his door: “His Beatitude is at prayer.”

Churchill said: “I’d like to try that at Downing Street, but I’m afraid no one would believe it.”

After the deal with Damaskinos, Greek King George II reluctantly approved his Regency. The contentious prime minister Georgios Papandreou resigned in favor of General Nikolaos Plastiras and a ceasefire ended the fighting. Churchill left Athens satisfied that he had saved the peace and kept Greece non-communist. Typically, however, the Prime Minister couldn’t get his tongue around foreign pronunciations. The General’s name is pronounced “Plah-steer’-as,” but Churchill, impeded by his lisp, couldn’t manage it. He finally settled for a more congenial and easy-to-pronounce moniker: “General Plaster-arse.”

* N.B.

Robert Mathew’s story was told by his son David to Bruce Anderson, who related it in The Spectator, 12 December 2020, p. 162.

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.”

Question:

A r eader writes: “Rather late in the day, I have been reading The Spectator (UK) Christmas Special dated 15/21/29 December 2018. Page 28 refers to one Ronnie Boyd, who had been a teenage Ordinary Seaman aboard HMS Ajax in December 1944, when Winston Churchill arrived in Athens to try to end the ongoing civil war.

 “British forces ‘helped put down, with considerable force of arms, a perceived partisan/communist uprising—the so-called Battle of Athens, or the Dekemvriana in Greece,’ the article states. There follows the extraordinary statement ‘Not Winston Churchill’s Finest Hour, it has to be said.’ It is accompanied by a mini-cartoon showing WSC on the bridge of HMS Ajax making this announcement. What is it all about?”

Answer:

Well, Athens 1944 was not his foremost finest hour—since, as he wrote, “Nothing surpasses 1940.” But in any list of his finest hours, it’s right up there.

It wasn’t a “perceived partisan/communist uprising.” It was the real McCoy, by ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army. Fortunately, in Moscow a few weeks earlier, Churchill had had the foresight to work out an agreement with Stalin to keep Soviet hands off Greece. To his credit, our benevolent “Uncle Joe” did so—for the time being. Some consider the “Percentages Agreement”, handing Stalin dominance over eastern Europe less Greece, another of Churchill’s Not-So-Finest-Hours. But the Greeks seemed all right with it.

Sarajevo, 1992 – Athens, 1944

I wrote this news article in 1993:

A reporter named Burns was talking the other night about the United Nations’ “inspection mission” to Sarajevo in 1992, during the Bosnian War. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and company arrived at the airport, were driven through the streets in bullet-proof limousines. They enjoyed an elaborate lunch while blocks away people were starving. They drove back to the airport, where guards protected their luxury jet. Then they flew home, to abhor the ongoing horror but do nothing.

Which reminds me of Churchill, Greece and December 1944.

Similar situation: civil war had made Athens a killing field. Churchill sent troops, telling his generals to “hold and dominate Athens…with bloodshed if necessary.” Then he flew in personally, stationing himself in HMS Ajax moored in the Piraeus, the harbor for Athens.

He chortled “Missed again!” when ELAS gunners sent shells hurtling toward the ship. He drove into the fighting zone to meet the opposing sides with bullets flying. He asked his private secretary, Jock Colville if he had a pistol: “I certainly had my own.” He parleyed in an unheated room lit by hurricane lamps, reminding both sides of Greece’s fame and majesty. Peace followed in his wake.

Further Reading

Read more about Churchill’s intervention in Athens in December 1944 in Hillsdale College’s The Churchill Documents, Volume 20, Normandy and Beyond, May-December 1944.

For a photo of Churchill signing autographs for HMS Ajax sailors, see previous post.

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.

“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.”

Peck: “I beg your pardon?”

Gault: “Seriously, we’ve got a press message here which says quite clearly that it’s all over. If so, nobody has told the General and he thought you would be the most likely to know at your end.”

Peck: “Well, if it has ended, nobody has told the Prime Minister either.”

Gault: “Do you think we had better carry on?”

Peck: “Yes, I think so.” [John then went back to sleep, and the war went on.]

Joys of The Churchill Documents

It is a privilege to help edit and proof Hillsdale College‘s final document volumes in the Churchill official biography. We fall over so many gems. Here is one.

This document may be a “reject”—we can’t publish everything. It was culled by Sir Martin Gilbert for Document Volume 21. That volume will release in 2018, covering the period from January to July 1945 and the end of Churchill’s premiership. (After that, we have only two more volumes to go.)

The exchange quoted above is by former Churchill Private Secretary John Peck to Dr. Robert Price of Lexington, Massachusetts, 18 July 1981. They had met at a commemorative ceremony at Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms in London. Price had sent Peck an article on the exchanges between Churchill and Truman, via Admiral Leahy, at the end of war in Europe (VE Day). Peck’s reply is an amusing insight, a thing we would never know otherwise. It shows us the richness of the Churchill Documents (Admiral William Leahy was Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman from 1942 to 1949.)

John Peck writes:

I happen to have been the Private Secretary concerned in the Leahy/Churchill exchanges on the secret telephone on May 7th, 1945…. My recollection of events, admittedly written many years later without the benefit of official records, runs as follows:

The instrument of total unconditional surrender was signed in the small hours of 7 May 1945 and all hostilities were to cease the following midnight. Evidently, as Leahy records, Churchill had sent a telegram to President Truman, the substance of which was that he wanted to declare VE Day on 8 May. There was evidence that the President felt the same way. However, from Leahy’s telephone conversation with Churchill, it was evident that the President felt obliged to go along with Stalin‘s wishes [to delay] perhaps until 9 May….

Churchill very reluctantly acquiesced, but much later he suddenly said to me, “Go and ring the President and tell him that I have got to announce the end of the war tomorrow (the 8th) as we originally intended, as the crowds know of the German surrender.” (Or words to that effect.)

I duly put through the call, thinking it highly improbable that I should speak to President Truman himself. Indeed, the call was naturally taken by Admiral Leahy. Although it is not verbatim, the following is a pretty accurate account of our brief dialogue:

Peck: “The Prime Minister wants to announce the end of the war tomorrow. The Russians want to go on until the 9th. On balance he is inclined to go ahead and end it on the 8th.”

Leahy: “We want to end it too.”

Peck: “Right, so we will both end it tomorrow.”

Leahy: “Yes, fine, okay.”

To the best of my knowledge no record of any of these conversations was kept at the London end.

Is the War Over?

John Peck’s letter continues:

I seem to have specialised in odd telephone calls around that time. You may be amused by the following extract from an autobiographical work I once wrote recording another telephone conversation, on an open telephone line , on the night of Sunday, 29 April 1945…. [After this] I ceased to be surprised at anything.

During the weekend of 27-30 April 1945 I was on duty at Chequers [the PM’s official country residence]. On the Sunday night we had finally got the PM off to bed at 3.00 am. I had just fallen into a deep sleep when my bedside telephone rang. An apologetic telephonist put through an even more apologetic Colonel Gault, the Military Assistant to General Eisenhower, speaking from his headquarters in Reims.

Gault: “John, is that you? Sorry to bother you at this hour, but the General told me to ask you if the war is over.”

Peck: “I beg your pardon?”

Gault: “Seriously, we’ve got a press message here which says quite clearly that it’s all over. If so, nobody has told the General and he thought you would be the most likely to know at your end.”

Peck: “Well if it has ended, nobody has told the Prime Minister either.”

Gault: “Do you think we had better carry on?”

Peck: “Yes, I think so. I’ll let you know if there are any developments here.”

Gault: “Many thanks. So I can tell the General to go on with the war?”

Peck: “Yes.”

Gault: “Goodnight. Sorry to bother you.”

Peck: “Not a bit. Goodnight.”

So it was that Private Secretary John Peck, on his own recognizance, bid World War II continue. Neither Churchill, nor Truman, nor Stalin were consulted, Peck writes: “I went back to sleep, and the war went on.”

Ivan Maisky: “The greatest sin of modern statesman is vacillation and ambiguity of thought and action.”

Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 634 pages, $28.80, Kindle $19.99, audiobook $36.32.

Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read in full, click here.

____________________________

A striking work of scholarship (actually an abridgement of a three-volume complete work coming in 2016), this book will inspire fresh scholarship on Churchill, Russia and World War II. Ivan Maisky was a penetrating observer of 1932-43 Britain, and Gabriel Gorodetsky connects every long gap in his diaries with informed accounts of what was happening. The book links nicely with Hillsdale’s Churchill Documents, volume 18, offering vast new primary source material on the World War II “grand alliance.”

Gorodetsky’s interview with Geraldine Doogue of ABC (Australia) is worth hearing for his description of Maisky, who met with everyone, socially or officially, including press and opposition, and wrote with keen perception. In the late 1930s he said the British government was “infected to the core with the poison of compromise and balance of power politics.” As early as March 1936, he forecast that “a terrible storm is approaching at full speed!” (68).

Wasn’t it dangerous in the age of Stalin to keep a diary? “It was like signing your death sentence,” Professor Gorodetsky says. “Despite the danger, he could not stop himself. But [perhaps for self-preservation] there are long moments of silence. It was my job to fill in the context.” He does so masterfully.

High-Bourgeois Bolshy

While Maisky was prone to repeat the Bolshevik line about communism’s ultimate triumph, his tastes were high-bourgeois. He enjoyed fine food and wine, luxury travel and aristocratic company (though intensely loyal to his plain and Bolshy wife). An English country house weekend was his delight. He reminds me of an apparently apocryphal remark by Leonid Brezhnev’s mother who, on a visit from the country, is shown around her son’s palatial Kremlin accommodations: “But Leonie,” she asks, “what will you do when the communists come?”

Maisky’s observations of the good and the great (and the not so good) are revealing. During the 1938 Czech crisis he found Neville Chamberlain “almost weeping, his voice trembled, and he couldn’t reconcile himself to the thought that war could begin any moment now. That’s bad. A speech like that augurs ill….the PM considers himself a ‘man of destiny’! He was born into this world to perform a ‘sacred mission.’ A dangerous state of mind…” (139-41, 161). On Stanley Baldwin’s search for a defense minister he quoted Churchill: “Baldwin is looking for a man smaller than himself….such a man is not easy to find” (70).

Sir Thomas Inskip, Baldwin’s eventual choice, had Maisky “in hysterics with…his inability to grasp military terminology: ‘What is a division?…in every division there is a different number of men….How many vessels are there in a flotilla? I’m completely lost in all these terms’” (147). Sir Samuel Hoare, Chamberlain’s Home Secretary, was “dry, elegant and quite short. His face is sharp, intelligent and guardedly attentive. He is very courteous and considerate, but cautious….He is a novice, he underestimates the difficulties, and is prone to experimentation” (50-51). Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to London, was “a coarse, dull-witted maniac, with the outlook and manners of a Prussian N.C.O. It has always remained a mystery to me how Hitler could have made such a dolt his chief adviser on foreign affairs” (75).

Maisky was fascinated with Churchill, no doubt relaying his remarks to Stalin: “We would be complete idiots were we to deny help to the Soviet Union at present out of a hypothetical danger of socialism” (April 1936). “We need a strong Russia….[We must] stick together. Otherwise we are ruined” (November 1937). From early 1935 (apparently with Stalin’s approval), Maisky worked for an Anglo-French-Soviet understanding. During the Munich crisis he promised Chamberlain that the USSR would join the Anglo-French and threaten war if Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia (122). But was Stalin testing their intentions, or just hoping to entangle them in a war with Germany? Maisky wondered (privately).

Maisky, War, and the Alliance

As early as April 1939, Maisky and the Soviet ambassador in Berlin warned Stalin that eventually, Hitler would turn on and invade Russia. But they also argued for short-term rapprochement: “…as long as [Germany] was preoccupied with France and Poland the neutrality of the Soviet Union was indispensable” (179). Thus the infamous Russo-German non-aggression pact, which freed Hitler to attack Poland in September 1939, and Stalin to share the spoils.

After Russia joined the “Grand Alliance,” President Roosevelt worried that Stalin might bolt and do his own deal with Hitler. On 9 February 1943 Eden showed Churchill and Maisky an exchange of messages after FDR offered send 100 bombers to ​Vladivostok. Stalin had sarcastically replied: Where they were needed was on the German front. ​Churchill, whom many consider the pig-headed third of the alliance, played the diplomat: “Roosevelt was enraged by Stalin’s message and wanted to send an abusive reply. But I managed to talk him out of it. I told him: listen, who is really fighting today? Stalin alone!…If Stalin came to Casablanca, the first thing he would have asked [Eden] and me would have been: ‘How many Germans did you kill in 1942? And how many do you intend to kill in 1943?’ And what would the two of us have been able to say? We ourselves are not sure what we are going to do in 1943.”

Much second front controversy, and the long-postponed Operation Overlord (invasion of France) surrounds the interesting things Maisky has Churchill saying. On 9 February 1943 the PM exclaimed: “Right now the Americans have only one division here! They have sent nothing since November.” How many more were coming? Maisky asked. Churchill: “I wish I knew. When I was in Moscow, I proceeded from the assumption that by spring 1943 the Americans would have dispatched twenty-seven divisions to England, just as they had promised….Now [they] promise to send only four or five divisions by August.” When Maisky asked what would happen if the Americans did not deliver the promised divisions, Churchill replied: “I’ll carry out this operation whatever happens.”

Maisky and Churchill

In his Australian interview Gorodetsky drew an odd conclusion. One of Maisky’s faults, he said, was his admiration of Churchill: “He failed to see that Churchill had different objectives than defeating the Nazis.” His object to preserve the British Empire caused him to flirt over-long with Mediterranean strategies that delayed the invasion of France. Launched earlier, it “could have prevented the Cold War.” Given the postwar bankruptcy of Britain and the Empire, which Churchill had sacrificed in his single-minded determination to defeat Hitler, this is debatable. The invasion was postponed for sound military reasons. But this is a side issue, which does not detract from the brilliance and importance of this book.

The greatest sin of modern statesman, Maisky ruminated in 1936. “is vacillation and ambiguity of thought and action. This is the weakness which before long may land us into war” (67). His words can still be applied to certain modern statesmen.

Was Maisky really a committed communist? It doesn’t seem so from these pages. He did write, at least for the record, that state socialism was on the rise. But even Eden believed that. In 1938 Eden told him the capitalist system had had its day. Maisky told Anthony Eden, “…the USSR represents the rising sun, and the USA the setting sun, a fact which does not exclude the possibility of the relatively lengthy continued existence of the USA as a mighty capitalist power.” Eden asked where the British fit in. Maisky: “You, as always, are trying to find a middle course of compromise between two extremes. Will you find it? I don’t know. That is your concern” (497). He was wrong about the rising sun—and, we trust, about the setting sun.

Maisky was fortunate. Though recalled from London in mid-1943 and retired in 1945, he did not suffer the fate of so many Soviet diplomats. He arrested in 1953, and Stalin’s death may have saved his life. He was released from prison in 1955, and died in 1975 aged 91. He wrote five volumes of memoirs, discreet and judicious, of course. Now thanks to Gabriel Gorodetsky he gets full vindication: his every thought is revealed. Serious scholars of World War II will find this book hard to put down.

Read complete review.

The campaign to Leave is heating up. Take Grassroots Out, a “combined operation” supporting Brexit—the campaign for Great Britain to exit the European Union. G-O fielded a broad spectrum of speakers in London February 19th. Along with UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage were Conservative Sir William Cash, Labour’s Kate Hoey, economist Ruth Lea, and a London cab driver.

The most unexpected Leave speaker was the far-left former Labour MP and head of the socialist Respect Party. Mr. George Galloway was immediately queried about his new colleagues.

“We are not pals,” Galloway replied. “We are allies in one cause. Like Churchill and Stalin.” He did not say which was which. We report, you decide.

Leave colleagues? Mr. Farage offered Churchillian collegiality. “I don’t suspect there’s a single domestic policy, in many cases foreign policy, of which George Galloway and I would agree. But, look, sometimes in life an issue comes along which is bigger than traditional difference.” (See “The New Happy Warrior.”)

Boris = Lord Randolph?

The Leave campaign received more support February 21st. London’s then-mayor and Churchill biographer Boris Johnson announced he would campaign for Brexit, invoking his admiration for Sir Winston.

Anti-Leave Conservative MP Sir Keith Simpson retorted that Johnson’s decision was “more reminiscent of [Lord] Randolph [Churchill] than Winston. “Randolph was a more extrovert character. [He] made the political weather then catastrophically offered his resignation when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. [It] was accepted by the then-Prime Minister Lord Salisbury.”

Lord Randolph more extroverted than Winston? YGTBK, as they say on Twitter.

Johnson’s principled decision to support Brexit, defying his prime minister, is far more reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s resignation from the shadow cabinet in 1931. Churchill left over differences on the India Act. That cost Churchill eight years in the political wilderness. This might be Johnson’s fate if Prime Minister Cameron survives the June 23 referendum.

Lord Randolph’s 1886 resignation, by contrast, was thought to be less decisive. He quit over a trivial issue, expecting to be asked back with more power. Lord Salisbury made no such offer, destroying him politically. “Have you ever heard of a man who, having had a carbuncle removed from his neck, asking that it be put back?” Salisbury quipped.

Leave Pied Piper: The True Churchillian

… in this kerfuffle is Mr. Farage—not for representing Churchill’s view of European unity (a complicated subject), but for expressing Churchill’s attitude toward political opponents. (See also: “What Would Winston Do?“)

Mr. Farage invited Mr. Galloway to speak. He introduced Galloway as “one of the greatest orators in this country…a towering figure on the left,”  adding that they would work together in the Brexit battle:

On that night, yes, the Respect Party was on the platform, so was the Conservative Party [and the Labour Party]. The point about Grassroots Out is, we’re bringing people together from across the spectrum….[Mr. Galloway] said some very disabling things about me but, look, sometimes…etc.

Farage was displaying Churchill’s famous collegiality—a rare commodity among politicians today. Churchill based this on his belief that everyone in public office deserved respect for serving the country, regardless of how violently he disagreed with their politics.

Churchill and Bevan

Instead of Churchill and Stalin, Mr. Galloway might like to compare Mr. Farage and himself to Churchill and Bevan.

Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), socialist MP for Ebbw Vale, was a Welsh firebrand with whom Churchill frequently clashed. Bevan would label Churchill a servant of plutocrat oppressors of the workers. Churchill would call Bevan, founder of the National Health Service, “the Minister of Disease.”

Hearing that Bevan had died, Churchill launched into a soliloquy: “A great man, the founder of the National Health Service, a tremendous advocate for socialism and his party….”

Then he paused in mid-sentence. “Er, are you sure he’s dead?”*

_________

* Quotation from Churchill by Himself, 326.

Churchill and the Avoidable War

Preface

This book examines Churchill’s theory that “timely action” could have forced Hitler to recoil, and a devastating catastrophe avoided. We consider his proposals, and the degree to which he pursued them. Churchill was both right and wrong. He was right that Hitler could have been stopped. He was wrong in not doing all he could to stop him. The result is a corrective to traditional arguments, both of Churchill’s critics and defenders. Whether the war was avoidable hangs on these issues.

Chapter 1. Germany Arming:  Encountering Hitler, 1930-34

“There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples….But never will you have friendship with the present German Government. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power….That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.” —Churchill, 1934

Some claim Churchill was “for Hitler before he was against him.” To say he admired Hitler is true in one abstract sense. He admired the Führer’s political skill, his ability to dominate and to lead. With his innate optimism he even hoped briefly that Hitler might “mellow.” But in his broad understanding of Hitler, Churchill was right all along: dead right.

Chapter 2. Germany Armed: “Hitler and His Choice,” 1935-36

Recently [Hitler] has offered many words of reassurance, eagerly lapped up by those who have been so tragically wrong about Germany in the past.  —Churchill, 1935

It is widely stated that Churchill admired Hitler, to the point of suggesting that if Britain had been defeated it could have benefitted from someone like him. Herein we examine Churchill’s contentious essay, “Hitler and His Choice,” in the Strand Magazine, 1935. We also evaluate Churchill’s mid-1930s warnings of the perils of disarmament.

Chapter 3. The Rhineland :“They had only to act to win,” 1936

“Mr. Baldwin explained [to French Foreign Minister Flandin] that although he knew little of foreign affairs he was able to interpret accurately the feelings of the British people. And they wanted peace. M. Flandin says that he rejoined that the only way to ensure this was to stop Hitlerite aggression while such action was still possible.” —Churchill, 1948

Churchill later stated that Hitler could have been stopped when he marched into the Rhineland in 1936. This on the evidence is true. At the time, though, Churchill failed to press the issue. Hoping for office under Baldwin, who had become prime minister once again, he chose not to buck his party’s leader, clinging to a hope that the French would act alone; but they would not move without tacit British support.

Chapter 4. Derelict State: The Austrian Anschluss, 1938

            “Europe is confronted with a programme of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage, and there is only one choice open, not only to us, but to other countries who are unfortunately concerned—either to submit, like Austria, or else to take effective measures while time remains….” —Churchill, 1938

In 1935 Hitler assured Austria of her independence. In February 1938 he summoned the Austrian Chancellor in February 1938, demanding appointment of a Nazi Interior and Security Minister. In London, The Times stated that “no one but a fanatic” would believe this meant a “Nazified Austria.” A month later, Hitler proclaimed an Anschluss, or union with Austria. Churchill did not see this coming, though he had warned in a general sense, and his prescience was justified. Czechoslovakia, he predicted, would Hitler’s next conquest.

Chapter 5. Munich’s Mortal Follies, October 1938

            “Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness….I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost….but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.” —Churchill, 1938

The Munich agreement, which entrenched Hitler in power and gave him Czechoslovakia with its military factories, is held today the classic example of fatal appeasement. Yet a curious narrative has evolved that Munich was actually wise, since it gave the Allies another year to arm. Less often remarked is that it also gave Germany another year, and even German sources agree the Nazis were less formidable in 1938. What was there about fighting them in 1939-40 that made it preferable? Was it Hitler’s eradication of Poland in three weeks, the Low Countries in sixteen days, France in six weeks? This chapter also examines the credible 1938 plot to overthrow Hitler. After Munich the plotters despaired. Most were later executed.

Chapter 6. “Favourable Reference to the Devil”:

The Russian Enigma, 1938-39

            “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. —Churchill, 1939

As Churchill predicted, Munich sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate. In mid-March 1939, Czech President Emil Hácha, threatened with the bombing of Prague, agreed to German occupation of the rest of his country, which was renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—an arrangement which “in its unctuous mendacity was remarkable even for the Nazis.” This chapter examines Churchill’s evaluation of the Soviet versus Nazi danger; his conclusion that the latter was the greater threat; his urgent efforts to encourage an understanding with the Russians; and the rebuff his prescriptions received by the British (and to some extent the Soviet) government.

 Chapter 7. Lost Best Hope: The America Factor, 1918-41

            “America should have minded her own business….If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917….there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany.”

Google this alleged 1936 quotation and you’ll find a half dozen citations unquestioningly attributing it to Churchill—a striking reversal of his off-stated view that America could not avoid “world responsibility.” As World War II approached these alleged words resurfaced. Churchill sued the perpetrator and won. How he handled this peculiar case illustrates his consistent belief that the United States could not isolate itself—and that with American support the war could have been prevented.

Chapter 8. Was World War II Preventable?

“Embalm, cremate and bury—take no risks!”

“Here is a line of milestones to disaster. Here is a catalogue of surrenders, at first when all was easy and later when things were harder, to the ever-growing German power. But now at last was the end of British and French submission. Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.” —Churchill, 1948

This chapter contrasts British, French and German rearmament between Munich and the outbreak of war. It also looks at Churchill’s failed efforts to promote collective security with Russia and the United States. It examines the lost year when Prime Minister Chamberlain rebuffed overtures by Stalin and Roosevelt. Meanwhile, Hitler secured his eastern flank with a Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

 Summary: What Churchill Teaches Us Today

            “The word ‘appeasement’ is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy. Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong. It is a terrible thing for a famous nation like Britain to do it the wrong way round…. Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.” —Churchill, 1952

            To her father’s admirers the late Lady Soames would always offer a commandment: “Thou shalt not say what my father would do today.” Modern situations are vastly different. The threat today is diffuse; in its totality it is by no means comparable to that embodied by Nazi Germany.

Was Churchill right that World War II was preventable? The answer is probably “yes—but with great difficulty.” Was he right that it is foolish to put off unpleasant reality “until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong”? Undoubtedly. The problem for leaders today is to judge when discretion should take priority over action, when diplomacy is yet a feasible option—and when and how to deploy a bluff.