Paris Peace Conference Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia: A Conjunction of Two Bright Stars

12 September 2020 Comments 1 Comment

Excerpted from “Great Contemporaries: T.E. Lawrence,” written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text and more illustrations, please click here.

Churchill and Lawrence

If the Almighty dabbles in the creation of individuals, He must have chortled when He conjured up Lawrence of Arabia. For here was the ideal adviser, foil and friend of Winston Spencer Churchill. To paraphrase WSC’s apocryphal quip, Lawrence possessed none of the virtues Churchill despised, an all the vices he admired.

He was “untrammeled by convention,” Churchill wrote, “independent of the ordinary currents of human action.”…

Churchill and the White Russians: The Russian Civil War, 1919

8 December 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Extracted from “Churchill: A Million Allied Soldiers to Fight for the White Russians?” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, November 2019. For the original text click here.

A reader refers us to The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia 1918-1919 (2019). It repeats a misunderstanding about Churchill’s role in aiding the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. By the spring of 1919 in Russia, we read:

…the cat was out of the bag: whether its allies—English, French, White Russians—liked it nor not, the U.S. was pulling out. On March 4, the British War Cabinet decided to follow suit, ignoring the arguments of the virulently anti-Bolshevik Winston Churchill, who as secretary of war had proposed increasing the Allied commitment in Russia to one million men.…