In 1914, the Great War arrives, and fables about Churchill multiply. A popular one, kept alive by pundits and historians, alike, is that Churchill led the warmonger party into World War I. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from Part 3...

Patrick J. Buchanan is an affable tory who wrote speeches for Nixon and ran quixotic campaigns for President of the U.S. three times in 1992-2000. (I voted for him once!) He’s an effective contrarian, and his debating skills are renowned. I assisted Pat researching facts (as opposed to fiction) for his book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. He has a real tick about Sir Winston, and I knew his book would be critical. But he’s such a charming gent that it was fun to correspond. We became friends, disagreeing utterly. We exchanged books with little digs at each other in the inscriptions.

I too wrote a book about the coming of World War II, Churchill and the Avoidable War. Of course I sent one to Pat, saying I marshaled more facts in 94 pages than he did in 546. As Churchill said of Stanley Baldwin, “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Pat’s case was that World War II would have been unnecessary if nobody listened to Churchill—ever. Heck, even World War I might have been dodged (and Nazism and communism with it), if Churchill wasn’t around to play the warmonger in 1914.

Warmonger Winston

Here is the partial quote used  to label Churchill a warmonger. It’s from a letter to his wife on 4 August 1914: “Everything tends towards catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared-up & happy….”

But the rest of that paragraph (which Pat omits) casts an entirely different light:

…Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity. Yet I would do my best for peace, and nothing would induce me wrongfully to strike the blow.

The historian Max Hastings, in his comprehensive account, Catastrophe 1914, is sadly on Buchanan’s side. And Hastings adds another red herring. “Churchill,” he writes, “adopted a shamelessly cynical view….‘if war was inevitable this was by far the most favourable opportunity and the only one that would bring France, Russia and ourselves together….’”

But that remark is not from 1914. It’s from a 1925 letter from Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, commenting on Beaverbrook’s war memoirs—and Hastings omits the rest of it:

I should not like that put in a way that would suggest I wished for war and was glad when the decisive steps were taken. I was only glad that they were taken in circumstances so favourable.

Deleting this casts Churchill in a very different position than the one he actually took.

Not Warmonger but Peacemaker

In reality Churchill tried to save the peace. He did two things. First, in 1912, he proposed a “Holiday” in British and German battleship construction. This was greeted with derision by Kaiser Wilhelm and his naval chief, Admiral von Tirpitz, who were bent on challenging the Royal Navy.

The second was his last-ditch proposal for what could have been the world’s first summit conference. “I wondered,” he wrote his wife in late July,

whether those stupid Kings and Emperors could not assemble together and revivify kingship by saving the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance. As if it was somebody else’s operation!

He proposed this in cabinet and the idea actually reached Berlin. The Germans rejected it, saying it would amount to “a court of arbitration.”

Yet we still have these skewed pictures of Churchill in 1914, spread by everyone from pundits to seasoned historians. The truth is that Churchill strove longer and harder than any British statesman to prevent war, which he hated and feared all his life.

N.B.: Time prevented complete documentation of Churchill’s efforts to preserve the peace in this speech. They may be read and considered in full, with extensive endnotes, in Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality.

Between the Wars…

More Churchill fables pile up between the wars. Churchill was an alcoholic. He flip-flopped over Bolshevism. All Jews, he wrote, were communists. He hated Gandhi. A closet fascist, he fancied Mussolini. But no tall tale is quite so pernicious as the idea, maintained now for two decades, that Churchill admired Hitler.

Continued in Part 5… Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality is now available in paperback, with a lower price for the Kindle edition.  Click here.

David Franco, reviewing the film Churchill, starring Brian Cox, raises questions he says everyone should be asking. “Isn’t the ability to accept one’s mistakes part of what makes a man a good leader? …. To what extent should we rely [on] past experiences in order to minimize mistakes in the future? These are the questions that make a bad movie like Churchill worth seeing.”

Well, I won’t be seeing this bad movie. Described as “perverse fantasy” by historian Andrew Roberts, it joins a recent spate of sloppy Churchill bio-pics that favor skewed caricatures over historical fact.

Revisionism: A Thriving Industry

Makers of movies might think it novel to criticize Churchill, but this is far from the case. Attacks on his leadership began early after World War II and have continued ever since. There’s a thriving mini-industry in “Churchill revisionism.” But it started with books, not movies.

In 1963, R.W. Thompson’s The Yankee Marlborough portrayed Churchill as a man of flesh and blood, who made mistakes, like anybody else. In his 1970 study, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939, Robert Rhodes James focused on Churchill’s political gaffes, such as his dogged support of King Edward VIII in the 1936 Abdication crisis. Edward, later Duke of Windsor, gave up the throne to marry an American divorcee. The Duke’s tepid admiration of Hitler, and dismal performance as Governor of the Bahamas, caused Churchill to reflect: “I’m glad I was wrong.”

In 1993, John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory rocked Churchill’s supporters by claiming that he should have backed away from the Hitler war to preserve Britain’s wealth, power, and empire. More recently, Max Hastings criticized Churchill’s war leadership on multiple issues in both World Wars: Catastrophe 1914, on the opening months of WW1, and Winston’s War, 1940-45.

Whatever we make of their assessments, these historians were qualified critics whose thoroughly researched theses merit consideration. Alas, we cannot say the same about the recent round of Churchill movies.

Movies Faithful to Reality

Churchill movies started off well and were honest for decades. Young Winston (1972), starring Simon Ward as WSC and Anne Bancroft as his mother, was a vivid presentation based on Churchill’s own account of his first twenty-five years. Its inaccuracies stemmed from Churchill himself in his autobiography. (In it, Anthony Hopkins played David Lloyd George. Lady Randolph says: “He has the most disconcerting way of looking at women.”)

In 1974, Lee Remick brilliantly reprised the role of Lady Randolph the television series Jennie: as accurate a portrayal as ever existed. We Churchlllians gave her an award for it—the dying Lee’s last public appearance. It was attended by Gregory Peck, who co-starred with her in The Omen, who praised her “depth of womanliness.”

That same year, Richard Burton played a believable Churchill in The Gathering Storm, about the years leading up to World War II. Again, it didn’t deviate from fact, although Burton spoiled the effect by denouncing Churchill for fictitious acts against Welsh miners, including Burton’s father. Privately, Burton had expressed his admiration for “the old boy”.…but later, the cameras were on.

The 1981 TV series Churchill: The Wilderness Years, remains the model Churchill bio-pic. Herein Robert Hardy showed us both Churchill’s human frailties and his greatness. Hardy and his writers partnered with Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert to portray the anxious politician of the 1930s, out of power, vainly warning of the Nazi menace. Brilliantly cast, the result was a masterpiece.

More Recently…

Albert Finney was a solid Churchill in the second Gathering Storm (2002), a 90-minute film for television. As skillfully cast as The Wilderness Years, it featured Vanessa Redgrave in a bavura performance as Clementine Churchill. The story line, while not uncritical, did not deviate from fact. Even in the cynical, anti-heroic 21st century, it seemed, filmmakers could still tell his story without reducing Churchill to a flawed burlesque or godlike caricature. Then came “Into the Storm,” a 2009 television drama broadcast by the BBC and HBO. Here in a series set in 1945 with 1940 flashbacks, Brendan Gleeson gave us the most accurate Churchill since Robert Hardy. Things were looking good.

Or so I thought. Alas, in the last couple of years, we’ve had three films which can only be described as “fake history,” and a one-dimensional documentary that fails to tell the full story.

A Turn to the Worse

The Crown, a 2016 Netflix series covering the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II, was well acted. But John Lithgow portrayed a senile prime minister who hides his 1953 stroke from the Queen and repeatedly paints his goldfish pond in a muddle of depression. Factually, the Queen knew of Churchill’s stroke three days after it happened—and he was never so dotty as to make repeated paintings of his fish pond. The Duke of Windsor resurfaces here, promising that he will get the new Queen to move into Buckingham Palace if Churchill restores his royal allowance. Where do they think of this stuff?

Viceroy’s House has not been seen yet in the US, and we’re missing nothing. A visually elaborate production, it covers the end of British rule in India, under the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, whitewashing the latter at Churchill’s expense. Mountbatten’s insistence that Britain leave before the India-Pakistan boundaries were settled led to violent strife and the massacre of millions. Somehow, the film manages to blame this on Churchill, who was not even in power at the time.

* * *

Churchill starring Brian Cox is built around the myth that Churchill opposed D-Day virtually to the moment of the Normandy landings. In reality, Churchill had sought “a lodgment on the continent” since the British were thrown out of Dunkirk in 1940. His concept of floating “Mulberry Harbors” for landing tanks and equipment dated back to 1917. This hasn’t prevented Mr. Cox from flaunting his ignorance in interviews repeating a host of canards, including the notion that Churchill wanted to invade Germany over the Alps.

I held my breath when the film Dunkirk appeared, hoping it would not be another dose of lame propaganda. Churchill doesn’t appear in it. But his absence, along with other heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation, reduces the film to a one-dimensional portrait. It’s war on a beach, with moving scenes of heroism and survival. Who was the enemy? A viewer has no idea why Churchill said after Dunkirk, “We shall never surrender”—though his words are read movingly by a soldier in the final scenes.

Hope Ahead? We’ll See

There’s no question that fictitious scenes and conversations are legitimate devices in bio-pics. But they must not depart from what we know. And thanks to historians like Martin Gilbert and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, we know a lot.

There is cause for hope. This autumn, Gary Oldman will star as Churchill in another bio-pic, Darkest Hour, about facing Hitler’s armies in 1940. Promisingly, Oldman has consulted with qualified historians, striving to find “a way in” to the real Churchill. Colleagues who’ve seen previews say he has Churchill down perfectly. But his script contains some bizarre counterfactuals.

One can only wish him success. Perhaps this film will answer David Franco’s questions. Yes, accepting one’s mistakes does make a person a good leader. Yes, Churchill did learn from his mistakes. He was a man of quality—a good guide for our troubled decade. And after a long lapse, he deserves a film that does him justice.