Q: Who coined the a half-breed insult?

Didn’t one or more of Churchill’s detractors use this slur to criticize him? Google is no help. Surely you know? —S.B., Cleveland

A: Rab Butler

My colleague Michael McMenamin summarizes the answer to your question:

In his controversial book, A Republic, Not an Empire, American news commentator Pat Buchanan joined with England’s John Charmley to argue that it would have been better for Britain to make an honorable peace with Germany in 1940….

Charmley…attributes it to Churchill’s rhetorical skills and concludes with negative references to WSC’s “theatricality” [by Alexander Cadogan] and his “disorderly mind” [by Lord Halifax]. He repeats “Rab” Butler’s view of Churchill as “the greatest adventurer of modern political history,” Lord Hankey’s description of him as “a rogue elephant,” and John Colville’s memorable “half-breed American.”

“Winston and his rabble”

John Colville was quoting Richard Austin “Rab” Butler, then on the Foreign Policy Committee. He initially shared Butler’s doubts. His view on 10 May 1940 is worth quoting in full, since many elite Conservatives shared it:

7.15 PM: Alec [Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass] and I went over to the Foreign Office to explain the position to Rab, and there, with Chips [Channon] we drank in champagne the health of “The King Over the Water” (not King Leopold, but Mr. Chamberlain).

Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed.

He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the “pass had been sold” by Mr. C[hamberlain], Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type, American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.

A civil servant, Colville was then assigned to the new prime minister, though three days later his opinion hadn’t changed: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”

Some opinion changed

Yet even then, Colville was beginning to soften. “It must be admitted,” he wrote in his diary, “that Winston’s administration, with all its faults, has drive; and men like Duff Cooper, Eden, Lord Lloyd and Herbert Morrison should be able to get things done.”

Churchill made Butler President of the Board of Education, his first cabinet-level position, on 20 July 1941—only to wax apoplectic when he found Butler had been in touch with the Swedes about a possible truce with Hitler. Historian Andrew Roberts believes it was Butler who kept Lord Halifax open to a compromise peace long after the Cabinet had backed Churchill’s determination to fight on. Yet he kept Butler on until 1945.

Churchill insiders tended to look upon Butler as an opportunist with no particular loyalties. Speaking in 1985, WSC’s last private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was typical. Relating Butler’s “half-breed” comment, he referred to Rab as someone “who was later to achieve great prominence in this country, but in my view no true fame.”

“The Respectable Tendency”

Michael McMenamin, in his and Curt Zoller’s seminal book on Churchill and Bourke Cockran, reflected again on Churchill’s reputation among what Andrew Roberts called “the Respectable Tendency” of the Conservative Party. The Tories who disdained Churchill were similar to those American aristocrats who disparaged Theodore Roosevelt:

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, explaining why her father disliked Churchill, takes on added significance: “Because they were so alike.” Which indeed they were: well-known writers before they were politicians, impulsive risk takers, soldiers and accomplished speakers. One was called a “cowboy” by his detractors, the other a “half-breed American.” Both eventually held their country’s highest office and each was a Nobel Prize winner—giants of their time.

“Mettle”

The historian Graham Stewart summarizes the High Tory attitude toward Churchill as he replaced Chamberlain—just in time, as it happened—in May 1940. Commenting on Butler, Dunglass and Channon drinking the health of the deposed Chamberlain, Stewart writes:

The cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had a better claim to being aristocratic than many of those who affected to look down on him. Dunglass would inherit an earldom, but Butler was primarily wealthy because he had married into the Courtauld family, the same path that Channon—a half-breed American—had taken into the Guinness family.

So it went for a few weeks after Churchill took over. The more fair-minded among the Respectable Tendency eventually changed their minds. Some of the others never quite did. The former saw in Churchill a quality he himself cited when asked for the most important characteristic of a statesman: “Mettle.”

Related reading

“The Respectable Tendency and the New PM, 1940-2019,” 2019.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Churchill’s Consistency: ‘Politics before Country,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2021.

“Barbara Leaming’s Churchill Defiant: Still the Best on Churchill Postwar,” 2022.

Churchill at War

A four-part Netflix documentary starring Christian McKay as Winston Churchill, premiered December 4th.

From Gaza to Ukraine, United Nations to United Europe, our legacy is the war that made us what we are. Winston Churchill had much to do with it, and Netflix now offers its version of his story. It is a one-dimensional portrait of a politician—not of  the humanitarian who thought profoundly about governance, life and liberty. Yet the warrior emerges approximately as he was.

There’s a way to derive a mostly correct picture of the man from this show: ignore Part 1. The other three parts also suffer from occasional forays into fiction. But they are far more accurate, with honest dialogue, well-chosen quotations and spectacular footage, much of it freshly colorized.

A creaky wind-up

Part 1, alas, is a palimpsest of counterfactuals. Were it not for Andrew Roberts, and several other scholars who have actually spent time studying Churchill, this introduction to him is light, frothy and tendentious. It bids fair to mislead the unwary viewer.

Sprinkling in celebrities and the odd hostile biographer doesn’t help. (The more hostile they are, the more they indulge in the familiarity “Winston.”) Among the celebrities is George W. Bush, who says Churchill grew up in a “dysfunctional family.” By Victorian standards it was more functional than the Bushes. Why Bush? Or Boris Johnson? Ask most politicians about Churchill and what you get are generalities: blood, toil, tears and sweat. But Netflix also consults more serious commentators, who commit greater errors….

• Churchill’s father’s career-ending 1886 resignation ​​comes when “his budget was rejected.” No, it was over a minor Army appropriation. Okay, no biggie.

​• In South Africa in 1899, young Churchill “takes over defense” of the famous armored train from ​Boer attackers. ​Poor Alymer Haldane, who actually defended it, spent half a century lamenting that “Winston got all the credit.” And now Netflix bites Aylmer again.

• We skid past Churchill’s climb to fame and Parliament, informed that he changed parties twice—not over principle, but as an opportunistic power​-grab. Not so. After his 1904 switch he waited two years to get power. The second time​, in 1924, he was handed power before he switched. Where do people get such stuff? Have they read anything?

Escaped scapegoat

Churchill’s vital efforts to prepare the fleet for war in 1914 are ignored as Netflix homes in on the Dardanelles operation, whose failure temporarily ruined him. Aside from confusing naval operations with the Gallipoli landings, which he had nothing to do with, the account is reasonably accurate. ​They assert incorrectly that he quit the Admiralty in 1915 in order to go fight in the trenches, but his service​ there (later) is ​accurately represented.

We witness his deep depression over Gallipoli, but Christian McKay, impersonating WSC, gets the diction wrong and looks more like his son-in-law Christopher Soames. By straining hard, we can just visualize McKay in the role. But he’s no match for Robert Hardy​ (The Wilderness Years) or Gary Oldman​ (Darkest Hour), who spent months studying their character “to find a way in.”

Part 1 ends as Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940. The accuracy improves as 1940 approaches. Despite earlier errors,  this is a fair presentation compared to popular mythology like Brian Cox in Churchill, but hardly rates a cigar, given the banal content.

Jon Meacham, who should know better, says WSC “got lots wrong, but among what he got right, WW2 ranks pretty high.” Duh! That’s as profound as we get, though to his credit, Meacham is more poignant later on. But after laboring through Part 1, I was beginning to think: “The things we do for England.”

A better pitch

The weakness of using celebrities or “historians” who are anything but Churchill specialists is still evident in the last three parts, but less disconcerting. Let’s get over the quibbles first.

• It’s true that the first bombing of London (August 1940) was accidental, prompting British retaliation on Berlin, leading to the London Blitz. But Netflix says Hitler and Churchill “egged each other on,” not acknowledging that bombing open cities had been the German practice since they leveled Warsaw in 1939.

• In July 1940 Churchill “sank the French navy.” (It wasn’t the whole navy.) In August 1941, he pleads with Roosevelt to declare war, and is instructed about the U.S. Constitution. (That never happened—he knew the Constitution as well as FDR.) U.S. entry into the war in December is dramatically portrayed, omitting that Hitler locked-in the “Germany first” strategy when he declared war four days after Pearl Harbor.

• The 1943-44 Bengal Famine is misrepresented by Kehinde Andrews. Churchill caused it—well, he refused to send Canadian grain. (Actually he sent more grain, via Australia.) Andrews claims Churchill saw his “main task” as “defending the Empire.” No, he saw his main task as defeating Hitler, and doing that helped lose the Empire. Mr. Andrews offers several other red herrings. (“I like the martial and commanding air with which the Rt. Hon. Gentleman treats facts,” Churchill once quipped. “He stands no nonsense from them.”)

• Churchill is condemned for the 1944 “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin. We are not told that he saw this as a wartime expedient, not a permanent arrangement—or that it saved Greece from communism.

Netflix gets lots right…

…about the war. It covers the quandary over bombing Auschwitz; concerns over invading Europe; D-Day (if nothing about how Churchill made D-Day possible). Here the dialogue is accurate, the war footage admirable, the commentary balanced.

They can’t help editing some great speeches, even though deleted words would use up only a second or two. They make up for this by getting many right (unlike the British Post Office on a recent commemorative stamp: “You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory.”)

Key quotations are deployed effectively, like Churchill’s warning to FDR of where the U.S. will be if Britain goes under. His classic speech at Harrow, clean and unedited, includes its often-ignored proviso: “Never give in—except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is all to the good. Every time a faux expert muddies facts, Roberts or another solid historian—Meacham, Allen Packwood, Catherine Gale Katz—makes up for it with truths. Even David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Minister, is thoughtful and doesn’t succumb to populist virtue-signaling. “The British people,” Lammy says, “saw in Churchill the image of themselves.”

After Part 1 I was expecting the worst, but on balance it’s a good show, and the finale is well done. Kudos to Lord Roberts and others for keeping it on track, and for his eloquent finale:

Physically brave, morally brave, full of insights and foresight, humorous to the point that he can still make people laugh sixty years after his death, Winston Churchill represented a resolute spirit that is very, very rarely seen in human history.

More film reviews

Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years: Forty Years On and Still Number One, 2019.

”Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour: Then Out Spake Brave Horatius,” 2018.

“Darkest Hour Myth-Making: Don’t Mess with Marcus Peters,” 2018.

“Brian Cox as Churchill: An Interview with Charlie Rose,” 2017.

“Churchill Bio-Pics: The Trouble with the Movies,” 2017.

I‘m working on an article and need to know: (1) Into how many languages were Churchill’s Second World War memoirs translated? (2) Into how many languages was his 1959 abridged one-volume edition translated? —G.A., Bilbao, Spain

(Updated from 2012.) According to Ronald I. Cohen’s Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Continuum, 2006, 3 vols., I: 729-30), The Second World War was translated into nineteen languages: Czech, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Not all of these comprised the complete six volumes. The Turkish edition contained only the first two volumes. Wendy Reves, wife of Churchill’s literary agent, Emery Reves, told me that the publishers refused to pay for the rest! The first Russian edition (1956-58) contained only the first three volumes, though Ronald Cohen also lists a later, complete Russian edition published in 1997-98.

On the one-volume abridged edition (1959), Mr. Cohen lists eight translations: Arabic, Catalan, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Slovene.

Official histories

Does Great Britain have an official History of the Second World War, like the American “Green Books”? Where might I find them?  —L.L., Raleigh, N.C.

Yes: several specialized multi-volume series, under the umbrella title History of the Second World War, were published by HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Since 2006, HMSO has been part of the Office of Public Sector Information within the British National Archives, formerly the Public Records Office.

There are five sub-series, for example, Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (five volumes, 1970). Other series were Military, Civil, Intelligence and Medical. HMSO also published individual collections of papers and documents.

The scope is colossal. For example, the Military Series alone comprises thirty-two volumes. There are nine groupings: Grand Strategy, The War at Sea, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, Home Defence, Victory in the West, The War Against Japan, Mediterranean and Middle East, and Civil Affairs & Military Government. Some of these also appeared as abridged one-volume editions.

There are disclaimers in the volumes stating that the opinions are those of the authors. Their quality varied, and some were controversial. Captain Stephen Roskill, who wrote all three volumes of The War at Sea, was one of Churchill’s strongest critics. Books were subsequently published by pro-Churchill naval authorities which disputed Roskill’s conclusions.

You can search for individual titles on Bookfinder, but major libraries should have them; they may also have been digitalized.

Related reading

“Winston Churchill’s World War Accounts: History or Memoirs?,” 2023

”Churchill and the Avoidable War: Book Outline,” 2017.

“Hillsdale College Acquires Cohen Churchill Recordings Collection,” 2018.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 20223.

“Grand Alliance: A Way Out of the Second World War?” 2021.

Routinely since the 1990s, hostile tyrants and others dismiss overtures from American administrations, saying they see no change in policy under the latest U.S. administration. “They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice,” was a typical line.

The last thing we want is a fight, the U.S. often replies. Often we add that we want to engage and improve decades of strained relations.

This reminded me of Harold Nicolson’s letter to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, 1 March 1938 (Nicolson Diaries, I, 328). Nicolson was not yet a backer of Churchill in the debate over policy toward Germany. He hoped reason and compromise would prevail:

I went to such an odd luncheon yesterday. It is called “The Focus Group,” and is one of Winston’s things. It consists of Winston, Norman Angell, Wickham Steed, Walter Layton, Robert Cecil, Violet Bonham-Carter, Clynes and some other of the Labour people.

I was made to make a speech without any notice and was a trifle embarrassed. But one gets a thick skin and an easy habit about these things and my speech was rather a hit.

Winston was enormously witty. He spoke of “this great country nosing from door to door like a cow that has lost its calf, mooing dolefully, now in Berlin and now in Rome—when all the time the tiger and the alligator wait for its undoing.”

Don’t be worried, my darling. I am not going to become one of the Winston brigade. My leaders are Anthony [Eden] and Malcolm [MacDonald].

Harold Nicolson came round soon enough. After Churchill’s broadcast, “The War of the Unknown Warriors,” on 14 July 1940, he wrote Vita:

I clapped when it was over. But really he has got guts, that man. Imagine the effect of his speech in the Empire and the USA.

I felt a great army of men and women of resolution watching for the fight. And I felt that all the silly people were but black-beetles scurrying into holes.

When to fight?

Along those lines a reader writes: “I remember a quip: ‘When will we fight? When we have no hope.’ Can you help me identify the source?”

That line doesn’t track among Churchill’s 20 million  published words. He did voice similar thooughts. You may be thinking of this one:

[If] you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.

There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. (The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, 272.)

Churchill was writing about the belated British guarantee to Poland in early 1939. He held this far too late: “decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment….”

The time to act had been a year earlier,  when Hitler at Munich had demanded the Czech Sudetenland. Poland was guaranteed only after Hitler had invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, which he had promised to respect.

Further reading

“Crocodiles: Churchill’s Animal Analogies,” 2022.

Review of “Munich: The Edge of War,” with Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain, 2023.

“Munich Reflections: Peace for ‘A’ Time and the Case for Resistance,” 2022.

Q: Did Ike offer to go? 

This question involves the weeks before Operation Overlord, the invasion of France in 1944. The producer of a forthcoming documentary asks if General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, threatened to resign over bombing policy. The specific question: “Was Churchill so fixated on bombing German cities that he resisted supplying bombers for D-Day?” 

A: Neither truth nor heresy 

The answer is twofold. Yes, Eisenhower threatened to resign over bombing policy. No, it was not because Churchill wanted withhold bombers in order to maintain bombing of German cities. Contrary to popular cant, Churchill was never an enthusiast of bombing cities; he was the only Allied leader ever to question the practice. (See “The Myth of Dresden and Revenge Firebombing.”)  

Eisenhower’s threat to resign was not made to Churchill, but to his colleagues, General Carl Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris.

A related subject is Churchill’s pre-D-Day concern for French civilian casualties—another expression of his sense of morality versus the exigencies of total war. That is also a reminder of current proportional concerns for Gaza.

The vital role of air power 

Dwight Eisenhower appreciated the importance of air superiority. The February 1943 first encounter of U.S. and Axis forces in Africa was at the Kasserine Pass. German General Irwin Rommel inflicted a disastrous defeat, thanks in part to U.S. air power being assigned to local commanders. In his book Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower explained that the invasion of Europe could not happen “until we had established ourselves so firmly that danger of defeat was eliminated—all air forces in Britain, excepting only the Coastal Command, should come under my control.” 

Defeat at Normandy, Eisenhower wrote, would have meant redeploying all U.S. forces accumulated in Britain. “The setback to Allied morale and determination would be so profound that it was beyond calculation.”

In that event, Russia might consider her Allies “completely futile and helpless,” even make a separate peace with Hitler. “[W]hen a battle needs the last ounce of available force,” Eisenhower wrote, “the commander must not be in the position of depending upon request and negotiation….”

Eisenhower’s ultimatum 

The crunch came on Saturday, 25 March 1944. The historian Rebecca Grant wrote: “Eisenhower convened a meeting to settle the issues. On the Wednesday prior, he grimly thought through the idea that if he did not get the decision he wanted, ‘I am going to take drastic action and inform the combined chiefs of staff that unless the matter is settled at once I will request relief from this command.'”*

Lieutenant-General Carl Spaatz, commanding U.S. Strategic Air Forces, believed that air superiority would best be achieved by “sustained strategic bombing of synthetic fuel plants and aircraft factories.” Royal Air Force Marshal Arthur Harris also dissented. He opposed diverting his nighttime bombing of German cities.

Churchill first supported Spaatz and Harris, but in Washington, Generals George Marshall and “Hap” Arnold backed Eisenhower. Churchill then deferred to Roosevelt, who would not countermand his supreme commander. By early April, Harris had come around, and Eisenhower had overruled Spaatz.

*Rebecca Grant, “Eisenhower, Master of Air Power,” Air & Space Forces, 1 January 2000.

Bombing France 

An adjunct to this question is a controversy often involving Churchill: civilian bombing casualties. Pre-Normandy bombing targeted German railroad marshaling yards and airfields in France. Estimates were circulating of French civilian losses as high as 80,000.

Churchill acted with his sense of morality and concern for French allies. On 3 May 1944, he importuned the War Cabinet. What he feared, he told them, was “propaganda to the effect that, while the Russian and German armies advanced bravely despite the lack of air superiority, the British and Americans relied on the ruthless employment of air power regardless of the cost in civilian casualties.”

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said French reaction to these necessary bombings had so far been good. But Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced alarm. The “political disadvantages of the plan,” Attlee said, “outweighed its military advantages.”

Churchill asked Air Marshal Tedder whether he could accept a limit of 10,000 French civilian deaths up to D-Day. Tedder said yes. In fact, only 3000-4000 had been killed to date. 

“Piling up an awful load of hatred” 

The “Transportation Plan,” as it was known, went ahead in the weeks preceding D-Day. Churchill followed it with mounting concern. “Terrible things are being done,” he wrote Eden. “The thing is getting much worse.”

To Tedder he wrote they should have attacked the German armies, which “involve no French casualties. You are piling up an awful load of hatred. I do not agree that the best targets were chosen. Have you exceeded the 10,000 limit?”

June 6th came and the troops swarmed ashore at Normandy. Churchill’s alarm proved unfounded. French civilian losses in pre-D-Day bombings remained under the limit he had set.

Some care, some don’t

As supporters of Israel argue over the current civilian casualties in Gaza, this history is relevant. It seems that civilian casualties only occur to leaders of civilized governments. Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and certainly Hamas, never worried about deaths of innocents.

In 1944, the arguments, heart searchings and constant changes of targets continued almost up to D-Day. The 1945 Battle of Manila (which had half Gaza’s population) resulted in 250,000 civilian casualties including 100,000 deaths. When told that statistic, Prime Minister Netanyahu was astonished: “100,000…well, we have incurred considerably fewer.” (The proportion is on the order of 15 to 1.)

Civilian casualties: further reading

“The Myth of Dresden and ‘Revenge Firebombing,'” 2023.

“Winston Churchill’s Revulsion Over Napalm Bombing,” 2023.

“Bombing Auschwitz: ‘Get Everything Out of the Air Force You Can,'” 2020.

“Bombing Japan: Churchill’s View,” 2016.

“Churchill and the Bombing of Coventry,” 2012.

“Winston Churchill and the Use of Chemical Warfare,” 2015.

John Spencer – Benjamin Netanyahu Interview, 27 February 2024.

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

Oh no, not again!

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

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

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

Here’s the windup

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

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

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

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

Now for the pitch 

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

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

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

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

Heart of the argument 

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

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

Non-smoking gun 

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

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

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

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

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

Churchill on D-Day, 1941 

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

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

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

1942-43 

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

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

“Impulse and authority” 

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

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

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

More on Churchill and D-Day

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

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

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

The Memoirs: An Appreciation

We were welcomed here like people returning from the Promised Land of Utopia. A million questions…. “What do they really think?” “Do they think us phony?” “Are they on our side?” “Why is the betting going against us?”…. And weaving through the alarms was the conviction of Parliament and the people that Winston must take the helm of our scandalised ship. He must shoulder our hopes and our efforts and imbue us with courage, or the ship would sink. —Lady Diana Cooper, returning from America, March 1940, Trumpets from the Steep, 1960.

*****

Let us begin by recording the main criticisms of Churchill’s The Second World War. It is not history. Its grandiose prose was inflicted on apathetic readers who only wanted peace and a quiet life. It is biased—the author never puts a foot wrong. He publishes hundreds of his own memoranda and directives—but few replies to them. He moralizes incessantly about dictators and their empires—but not Britain’s. The impact of the war on Britain, the details of Cabinet meetings, are vague. Churchill alone confronts the French, Hitler, the Soviets, the Americans. “Every instance of adversity becomes an occasion for the narrator’s triumph.” Finally, Churchill didn’t write it himself—he relied on a team of researchers, military and political.

In the words of Arthur Balfour, these indictments contain much that is true and much that is trite. “But what’s true is trite, and what’s not trite is not true.”

“This is not history—this is my case”

Professor J.H. Plumb referred to Churchill’s work as A History of the Second World War —and then said it was not history. Churchill himself contributed to the confusion: “…it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.” He also referred to his “history” in letters to Truman and Eisenhower. But it’s a memoir, not a history—like The World Crisis, his volumes on the First World War. There he had explained his approach:

I must therefore at the outset disclaim the position of the historian. It is not for me with my record and special  point of view to pronounce a final conclusion. That must be left to others and to other times. But I intend to set forth what I believe to be fair and true; and I present it as a contribution to history of which note should be taken  together with other accounts.

Some thought Churchill dissembled and was too modest. John Keegan called The Second World War “a great history” of “monumental quality…extraordinary in its sweep and comprehensiveness, balance and literary effect; extraordinary in the singularity of its point of view; extraordinary as the labour of a man, already old, who still had ahead of him a career large enough to crown most other statesmen’s lives; extraordinary as a contribution to the memorabilia of the English-speaking peoples.”

“Britain was led by a professional writer”

If that seems too positive a view, consider Manfred Weidhorn’s evaluation: “a record of history made rather than written…. No other wartime leader in history has given us a work of two million words written only a few years after the events and filled with messages among world potentates which had so recently been heated and secret. Britain was led by a professional writer.”

As a professional writer wishing to build a legend, goes another refrain, our author ignored or buried unpleasant facts, or twisted them to suit his purpose. I have yet to read a memoir that didn’t. Yet few memoirs are so magnanimous, as illustrated by a principle Churchill adopts in his preface: “Never criticising any measure of war or policy after the event unless I had before expressed publicly or formally my opinion or warning about it.” The effect, Keegan tells us, “is to invest the whole history with those qualities of magnanimity and good will by which he set such store, and the more so as it deals with personalities.”

Intensely personal

So much for the non-trite and non-true. Other criticisms are hardly crippling. That Churchill assigned passages of military and political  history to teams of specialists should hardly surprise us. When he began the writing he was over 70, not in the best of health, exhausted after six years of struggle. How many septuagenarians would take on such memoirs without help? Yet Churchill,  of course, signed off on every word. He corrected multiple galleys, demanding fresh ones, correcting again, until beyond the last moment, to the exasperation of publishers.

The Second World War is indeed intensely personal, considering the war from Churchill’s angle not Britain’s. He even gave the work its own Moral: “In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will.” The memoirs are biased; they exaggerate; they commit sins of omissions and a few counterfactuals. All personal memoirs do.

His own spin

Churchill had a right to make his case. Many times in his career he had been second-guessed or misjudged. There was Antwerp and the Dardanelles in the First World War. There was Bolshevism, Irish independence, the General Strike in the 1920s. Then came the India Act, the Abdication, the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini and Hitler. That is a formidable assortment of grist for critics.

During the war Churchill had attacked an ally’s fleet, fired generals, lost battleships, stalled on launching a second front, argued with Roosevelt and Stalin, and carpet-bombed Germany. He felt the need to defend his actions, knowing that very soon he would be second-guessed by postwar critics, former colleagues and historians eager to seize on and emphasize his mistakes. And the mistakes were there.

In fact, “revisionism” had already begun as he wrote the second of six volumes. Churchill confronted it:

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

Simply great writing

The merits of Churchill’s memoirs eclipse their evident flaws. There is, first, what Robert Pilpel calls “the warm sense of communion,” through which only a great writer can place the reader at his side in the march of events. Those events are conducted like a symphony.

Or if you will allow the risk of hyperbole, consider Manfred Weidhorn’s comparisons of Churchill’s greatest scenes with those of a first class novel:

Such is the eerie sense of déjà vu and ubi sunt upon his return in 1939, as First Lord [of the Admiralty], to Scapa Flow, exactly a quarter of a century after having, at the start of the other world war, paid the same visit during the same season in the same capacity….

The collapse of the venerable and once mighty France and Churchill’s agony are beautifully rendered by the sensuous detail of the old gentlemen industriously carrying French archives on wheelbarrows to bonfires….

Near the end of the work appears one of the greatest scenes of all. On the way to the Potsdam Conference, Churchill flies to Berlin and its “chaos of ruins.” Taken to Hitler’s Chancellery, he walks through its shattered halls for “quite a long time”…. The great duel is over; the victor stands on the site from which so much evil originated…. “We were given the best first-hand accounts available at that time of what had happened in these final scenes.”

Puck’s escape

Amid the pathos, humour bubbles incessantly to the surface, Pilpel writes, “as if Puck had escaped from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and infiltrated Paradise Lost.” Few other memoirs, let alone histories, leaven their wisdom with such merry wit.

There is Churchill’s famous desert conference with his Generals, “in a tent full of flies and important personages.” We read his courtly letter to the Japanese Ambassador, signed “your obedient servant,” announcing “with highest consideration” that a state of war exists between Britain and Japan. “When you have to kill a man,” he adds, “it costs nothing to be polite.”

All this levity “somehow sits well with the cataclysmic and lugubrious matter of the story,” Weidhorn adds, “for Churchill does not allow the humor to take the sting out of events or reduce war to a mere game. He simply refuses to overlook the light side…. Such a tone, markedly different from the histrionics of the other side, may well be a secret of survival. As Shaw said, he who laughs lasts.”

Telegrams, directives, harangues

Churchill also adds lengthy appendices of personal communications and directives to military and civilian officials. Here again he has been accused of bias, selectivity and an air of infallibility. Some of the messages were trivial—even unworthy of him. But in the main they had a powerful effect: they kept everyone’s eyes on the prize.

Eliot A. Cohen has described a vivid example of one of these, in volume 3, The Grand Alliance. It followed the invasion exercise called VICTOR, in January 1941, which presupposed that the Germans landed five divisions on the Norfolk coast and established a beachhead. Churchill wrote its commander, General Alan Brooke:

I presume the details of this remarkable feat have been worked out by the Staff concerned. Let me see them. For instance, how many ships and transports carried these five Divisions? How many Armoured vehicles did they comprise? How many motor lorries, how many guns, how much ammunition, how many men, how many tons of stores, how far did they advance in the first 48 hours, how many men and vehicles were assumed to have landed in the first 12 hours, what percentage of loss were they debited with?

What happened to the transports and store-ships while the first 48 hours of fighting were going on? Had they completed emptying their cargoes, or were they still lying in shore off the point protected by superior enemy daylight Fighter formations? How many Fighter airplanes did the enemy have to employ, if so, to cover the landing places?… I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast at the same extreme range of our Fighter protection and assuming that the Germans have naval superiority in the Channel….

* * *

Brooke gamely replied, Churchill rebutted, and the debate went on until it finally petered out in May. What is its significance? Professor Cohen explains:

It is noteworthy, first, that the commander in charge of the exercise, Brooke, stood up to Churchill and not only did not suffer by it, but ultimately gained promotion to the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. But more important is Churchill’s observation that “It is of course quite reasonable for assumptions of this character to be made as a foundation for a military exercise. It would be indeed a darkening counsel to make them the foundation of serious military thought.”

By no means did Churchill always have it right, but he often caught his military staff when they had it wrong. Churchill exercised one of his most important functions as war leader by holding their calculations and assertions up to the standards of a massive common sense, informed by wide reading and experience at war.

“Trumpets from the steep”

Space is running out, and I haven’t told you the half of it. The memoirs remind us of Trumpets from the Steep, Diana Cooper’s deathless title (from Wordsworth). The Second World War is indeed a trumpet call—from heights the reader might not otherwise glimpse. A prose epic like The River War and Marlborough, it belongs among the first rank of Churchill’s books. Flaws and all, it is indispensable reading for anyone who seeks understanding of the war that made us what we are today. As Manfred Weidhorn concludes, “this is not just a unique revelation of the exercise of power from atop an empire in duress, but also one of the fascinating products of the human spirit, both as an expression of a personality and as a somewhat anomalous epic tale filled with the depravities, miseries and glories of man.”

Bibliography: Books on the Book

Arranged chronologically: All of these works concentrate in part or whole on Churchill memoirs, often disputing them on specific points. For notes, editions and links to reviews see my Annotated Bibliography, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2021. Look for copies on Bookfinder.com or Amazon.

Fabre-Luce, Alfred. La Fumée d’un Cigare [The Smoke of a Cigar]. Paris: L’Élan, 1949, 246 pp., softbound, text in French; an Italian edition was also published.

Kwasniewski, Tadeus. An Open Letter of a Chicago Waiter to Winston Churchill. Chicago, privately published by the author, 1950, 20 pp., softbound. On the half-title: “Let’s Face the Truth, Mr. Churchill.”

Neilson, Francis. The Churchill Legend. Appleton, Wis.: C. C. Nelson Publishing Co., 1954, 470 pp. Republished as The Churchill Legend: Churchill as Fraud, Fakir and Warmonger,  Brooklyn, N.Y.: Revisionist Press, 1979. Also listed as Churchill’s War Memoirs, 1979.

J.H. Plumb, “The Historian,” in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Churchill: Four Faces and the Man (London: Allen Lane, 1960); Churchill Revised. New York: Dial Press, 1969, 274 pp.

Vicuñia, Alejandro. Winston Churchill a través de sus Memorias [through His Memoirs]. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universidad Catôlica, 1961, 398 pp., text in Spanish.

Graebner, Walter. My Dear Mr. Churchill. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; London: Michael Joseph, 1965, 128 pp. Translations: German, Finnish, Norwegian.

Ashley, Maurice. Churchill as Historian. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968, 246 pp.

Weidhorn, Manfred. Sword and Pen: A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1974, 278 pp.

Weidhorn, Manfred. Sir Winston Churchill. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979, 174 pp. “Twayne’s English Author” series.

***

Alldritt, Keith. Churchill the Writer: His Life as Man of Letters. London: Hutchinson, Random Century Group, 1992, 168 pp.

Woods, Frederick. Artillery of Words: The Writings of Sir Winston Churchill. London: Leo Cooper Pen and Sword Books, 1992, 184 pp.

Gilbert, Martin. Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence 1937-1964. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1997, 398 pp.

Valiunas, Algis. Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, 192 pp.

Reynolds, David. In Command of History: How Churchill Waged the War and Wrote His Way to Immortality. London: Allen Lane, 2004, 600 pp.

Rose, Jonathan. The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, 528 pp.

Allport, Alan. Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941. New York: Knopf, 2020, 608 pp.

Was there any pushback to the Pat Buchanan book, Churchill, Hitler and the “Unnecessary War” (2009)? It questioned Churchill’s judgment over his whole life, but particularly his decision to fight on in 1940. I’m sure there has been, but could you give me a citation? —W.M.

A: Here’s one….

On publication of the book in 2009 I wrote an editorial, which I reprise below.

Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan. New York, Crown, 518 pp.

No animus toward the author: I have respect for Pat and even voted for him in a New Hampshire Primary. I helped him with a few items during his research (while lampooning his beliefs in friendly banter). “I like a man who grins when he fights,” as Churchill said.

But a problem with Pat Buchanan’s book is the rampant use of selective quotes. Partial quotations edited to distort reality, or to fit a predetermined conclusion, are out of bounds.

Lusting after Armageddon

To establish Churchill’s “lust” for the First World War, for example, Buchanan quotes him on 28 July 1914: “Everything tends towards catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?…” (28)

But he omits the rest of that passage: “…The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity. Yet I w[oul]d do my best for peace, and nothing w[oul]d induce me wrongfully to strike the blow.” (from Martin Gilbert, editor,  The Churchill Documents, vol. 3, 1989.

As the war continues on 10 January 1915, Buchanan has Churchill exclaiming: “My God! This, this is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me (eyes glowing but with a slight anxiety lest the word ‘delicious’ should jar on me).” (66)

The latter is pure hearsay from the notoriously waspish Margot Asquith—but let’s assume he said it. To suit his thesis, Pat trims the rest of what Margot reported: “…I say, don’t repeat that I said the word ‘delicious’—you know what I mean…..” (The Churchill Documents, vol. 6, 400.

Possessed of the words Buchanan deleted, one might ask what Churchill meant by “you know what I mean”? Did he assume Margot knew he realized what barbarity war was—that he had been warning of the apocalyptic nature of a European war since 1903?

“Vile & wicked folly & barbarism”

I searched in vain among Pat’s collection of lusty war quotes for contrary expressions by Churchill—and there are many. Take his 1909 remark after watching German Army maneuvers: “Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations—I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.” (The Churchill Documents, vol. 4, 912.)

Buchanan does include an early 1900s remark about the dangers of a European war, but only to imply that Churchill had changed his tune by 1914. Nowhere do we read exculpatory evidence. Nothing is here on Churchill’s 1911 proposal for an Anglo-German “naval holiday,” for example. Or his plea, at the eleventh hour, for a peace conference attended by all the Heads of State of Europe.

Hitler red herrings

Then there is Hitler, on whom Pat is industrious. Under Hitler’s photo we read: “‘If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ —Churchill on Hitler, 1937.”

This sentence has often been culled out of context to be misunderstood by the foolish or the unwary. Here is the full passage (Churchill, Step by Step, 1947 edition, 158). Draw your own conclusions:

To feel deep concern about the armed power of Germany is in no way derogatory to Germany. On the contrary, it is a tribute to the wonderful and terrible strength which Germany exerted in the Great War, when almost single-handed she fought nearly all the world and nearly beat them. Naturally, when a people who have shown such magnificent military qualities are arming night and day, its neighbours, who bear the scars of previous conflicts, must be anxious and ought to be vigilant. One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations. I have on more than one occasion made my appeal in public that the Führer of Germany should now become the Hitler of peace.

A different light falls on Churchill’s attitude when that was first written (in 1935, as he footnotes in Great Contemporaries). There was still hope then, he thought. All of which shows yet again that you can use Churchill’s words, vacuumed like a gigantic Hoover and offered unabridged by the faithful Martin Gilbert, to prove anything. You only have to pre-select and edit the ones that make your point, however misinformed.

…Churchill was howled down in Parliament, pleading for more time for Edward VIII to decide on his future. What a reversal in fortune! Only five years later on the same date, he knew the war was won.” —J.G., Rye, New York

A: He had his downs and ups…

[December 7th, 1936, House of Commons:] May I ask my Rt. Hon. Friend [Prime Minister Baldwin] whether he could give us an assurance that no irrevocable step… [Hon. Members: “No!”] …that no irrevocable step will be taken before the House has received a full statement, not only upon the personal but upon the constitutional issues involved. May I ask him to bear in mind that these issues are not merely personal to the present occupant of the Throne, but that they affect the entire Constitution.” [Hon. Members: “Speech,” and “Sit down!”]

At that moment Churchill temporarily lost all his recently-built political capital by rising to defend Edward VIII. The King was facing abdication over his insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson. His colleagues shouted down the Member for Epping. Ruled out of order for making a speech during Question Time, he stormed from the House. “I am finished,” he muttered.

Five years later, a lot had happened

December 7th 1941, Chequers: Churchill was at the Prime Minister’s country residence, dining with U.S. Ambassador John Gilbert Winant and FDR’s emissary Averell Harriman, when he received news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They immediately put in a call to the President.

In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” he replied. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now”…. I got on again and said, “This certainly simplifies things. God be with you,’ or words to that effect.” Churchill wrote nine years later:

“No American…

…will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.

So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk, after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s-breadth; after 17 months of lonely fighting and 19 months of my responsibility in dire stress.

We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious…. Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

1940: His most important letter to FDR

London, December 7th, 1940 (sent on 8th), to President Roosevelt: The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies…. Moreover, I do not believe that the Government and people of the United States would find it in accordance with the principles which guide them, to confine the help which they have so generously promised only to such munitions of war and commodities as could be immediately paid for. You may be certain that we shall prove ourselves ready to suffer and sacrifice to the utmost for the Cause, and that we glory in being its champions.

According to Richard Lamb (Churchill as War Leader, 77), WSC considered this his most important letter to Roosevelt: “It gave a full statement of Britain’s hopeless financial position…. Straightaway Roosevelt stated at a press conference that he would ‘lease’ material to Britain, get rid of the ‘dollar sign’…. These words had immense significance and raised the curtain on the historic Lend Lease arrangement.”

December 7th in other years

London, December 7th, 1923: “My dear Churchill: Your defeat stamps this election and covers Leicester with shame, but I rejoice to see you stick to your platform of opposition to extremes on either side of politics.” —Sir William Tyrrell. (By 32 votes, WSC had lost his attempt to return to Parliament for West Leicester.)

New Delhi, December 7th, 1935: “Dear Mr. Churchill: May I send you the greeting of the season and good wishes for the New Year. May the New Year bring more happiness and better opportunities for advancing a better understanding between the two countries. I showed your cable to Gandhiji who was very pleased.” —Ganshayam Das Birla

Constantinople, December 7th, 1943: “Do you know what happened to me today, the Turkish President kissed me. The truth is I’m irresistible. But don’t tell Anthony [Eden], he’s jealous.” —WSC to his daughter Sarah.

London, December 7th 1947: “Halifax’s virtues have done more harm in the world than the vices of hundreds of other people. And yet when I meet him, I can’t help having friendly talk.” —WSC to his doctor, Lord Moran

Bermuda, December 7th, 1953: “I cannot make it out…. t seems that everything is left to Dulles. It appears that the President is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll…. This fellow preaches like a Methodist Minister, and his bloody text is always the same: That nothing but evil can come out of meeting with Malenkov. Dulles is a terrible handicap. Ten years ago I could have dealt with him…. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —WSC to Lord Moran

Further reading

“Dinner at Chequers on the Night That Changed Everything,” 2021.

For more versions of the Cheques conversations see “Canada First to Declare War,” 2017.

Quotations from Churchill By Himself: In His Own Words (Kindle edition, 2016).

Update: Whose Body?

The body used to deceive the Germans may not have been that of Glyndwr Michael but of Royal Navy sailor John Melville. Admiral Lord West raised this likelihood in the Daily Telegraph on 16 April 2022. Thanks to David Boler for alerting me to his article.

By the time of Mincemeat, West writes, Michael’s body was too deteriorated to fake that of a recently drowned sailor. More recently deceased was John Melville, one of 379 sailors drowned when the escort carrier HMS Dasher sank in the Firth of Forth on 27 March 1943. (A news blackout prevented the sinking being known publicly.) Lt. Norman Jewell, commander of the submarine HMS Seraph, who committed the body to the waters off Spain, stated he did not believe the body was that of Glyndwr Michael.

Lord West admits that without exhumation and DNA testing, there is no way to verify the true identity, but the Royal Navy appears to accept his theory. In 2004, a memorial service for John Melville was held aboard the current HMS Dasher. Melville’s daughter, Isobel Mackay, who was only three when her father died, told The Scotsman: “I feel very honoured if my father saved 30,000 Allied lives.” All honor to the memory of John Melville, who served his country in life and death.

A stirring documentary

A new Netflix drama portrays a wartime intelligence deception plan which Churchill first doubted but ultimately welcomed. How important Operation Mincemeat actually was is uncertain, but the presentation is well done.  Christy Lemire ably summarizes the general opinion:

Imagine Weekend at Bernie’s set during World War II, with a dash of romance sprinkled in amid the spy craft and physical gags, and you’ll have some idea of the tricky tonal balance this film improbably achieves. Operation Mincemeat takes its title from the real-life mission that tricked Hitler into believing the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than Sicily, in 1943. Ben Macintyre’s non-fiction book of the same name also provides the basis for television veteran Michelle Ashford’s sprawling script. But while the film as a whole may seem dense and restrained, the performances and attention to detail consistently bring it to life.

Naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu was often credited as the the principal Mincemeat planner. Netflix correctly spreads the credit around—including Ian Fleming, whose James Bond novels were inspired by his wartime intelligence work. There is dramatic license, but it is accompanied by faithfulness to reality. This is not always the case in TV dramas. The result is a film respectful of history.

“You’ll have to take him on another swim…”

Martin Gilbert covered Op Mincemeat years ago in Road to Victory 1941-1945.Having driven Rommel from North Africa, the Anglo-Americans eyed Sicily as a springboard to Europe. (They also considered Sardinia, but Churchill snorted: “I absolutely refuse to be fobbed off with a sardine.”)

The Germans were expecting a Sicily attack. Mincemeat planners conceived of dropping a corpse near a Spanish beach, planted with false papers naming Greece as the target and Sicily a diversion. If the Spaniards passed the papers to the Germans Hitler might shift his defenses to Greece.

Martin Gilbert wrote that Mincemeat was conceived by Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondley, pronounced “Chumley” (played by Matthew Macfadyen). He was a RAFVR* liaison officer with Col. John Bevan‘s deception team, the London Controlling Section. Bevan later directed another ruse, Operation Bodyguard, which deflected enemy attention from Normandy as the target for D-Day.

John Bevan took “Mincemeat” to Churchill, who had reservations. “Of course,” he said, “there’s a possibility that the Spaniards might find out that this dead man was in fact not drowned at all from a crashed aircraft, but was a gardener in Wales.” Minister of Labour Ernest Bevan (no relation to John) thought winds and tides might not wash the body ashore. Churchill replied, “Well, in that case you’ll have to take him on another swim, won’t you?” (Road to Victory, 405. See update above on the identity of the corpse.)

Key fakery or a side issue?

It is notable that Operation Mincemeat was largely the work of volunteer officers. Martin Gilbert explained that Cholmondley’s idea was passed for action to Naval Intelligence Division* Capt. Ewen Montagu RNVR*. (Montagu is ably played by Colin Firth, a convincing King George VI in The King’s Speech.) Gilbert credits Montagu with “indispensable support” for the successful plan.

Churchill later believed Mincemeat had worked, but he was always a fan of intelligence operations. Gilbert, Macintyre and Netflix said it did, each in their own way. Netflix mentions the transfer of German troops from Italy to Greece. But German minefields and port defenses in Greece did not need resources from Sicily. Some motor torpedo boats were transferred, but they did not significantly weaken Sicily’s defenses.

Among historians, views are mixed. One writes: “It may be just a good story that exaggerates the importance of the deception, as intelligence operatives and officers invariably do. But to do more than suggest that would require research in the military intelligence files, to detect just what the effect of the deception really was.”

“Corporal Schicklgruber*”

Fortunately, the Spaniards found the washed-up body. After some hesitation they conveyed the fake papers to the German High Command. Among the enemy there was one scoffer: Benito Mussolini, who insisted Sicily was the real target. Of course, Mussolini had his own reasons for wanting the Germans in Italy. But Hitler apparently fell for the ruse. Admiral Karl Doenitz wrote: “The Führer does not agree with the Duce that the most likely invasion point is Sicily.” Hitler sent his crack General Erwin Rommel to Greece, a sign that he seriously thought it was the real target.

If all that is so, it was another bad mistake for Hitler. And we must tote one up to Mussolini, who was not renowned for his military perspicacity. The story is remindful of what Churchill told Parliament in September 1944, after Hitler had survived assassination:

When Herr Hitler escaped his bomb on July 20th he described his survival as providential; I think that from a purely military point of view we can all agree with him, for certainly it would be most unfortunate if the Allies were to be deprived, in the closing phases of the struggle, of that form of warlike genius by which Corporal Schicklgruber has so notably contributed to our victory.

*Notes

NID: Naval Intelligence Division, founded by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1912. It was merged into the combined Defence Intelligence Staff in 1964.

RAFVR: Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, established 1936 by the Air Ministry to bolster preparedness. The war’s soaring demand for aircrew soon saw the RAFVR become the chief pathway for personnel to enter the RAF.

RNVR:  Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, nicknamed “Wavy Navy” for the undulating stripes on uniform sleeves. Created 1938, the RNVR saw heroic service from the Second World war to the war in Afghanistan.

Schicklgruber: Adolf Hitler’s father Alois, the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, changed his name to Hitler before Adolf was born, but the well-known ancestral name was irresistible to Churchill.

More Churchill and Secret Intelligence

“Churchill, Henry Ford and Sidney Reilly: Anti-Bolshevik Collaborators?, 2022

Crocodiles and that ilk

My colleague and friend, the historian Andrew Roberts, asks how often Churchill described the Soviets as crocodiles. The answer is: a lot—but not just the Soviets. A search of Churchill’s canon produces an interesting review of a literary technique: animal analogies. Piers Brendon’s charming and comprehensive Churchill’s Bestiary (2018) is a particularly good source.

Churchill was generally an animal lover, but nursed a serious dislike for certain species. He wrote about the Nile crocodile after touring Kenya as Undersecretary for the Colonies in 1907. In his travelogue, My African Journey, he sheepishly admits his dislike, while demonstrating his flair for narrative:

I avow, with what regrets may be necessary, an active hatred of these brutes and a desire to kill them. It was a tempting shot, for the ruffian lay sleeping in the sun-blaze, his mouth wide open and his fat and scaly flanks exposed…. The crocodile gave one leap of mortal agony or surprise and disappeared in the waters. But then it was my turn to be astonished…. At the sound of the shot the whole of this bank of the river, over the extent of at least a quarter of a mile, sprang into hideous life, and my companions and I saw hundreds and hundreds of crocodiles, of all sorts and sizes, rushing madly into the Nile….

Bolshevik crocodiles

After the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s assault on liberty, Churchill revived his images of saurian predators. In The Aftermath, his account of the decade after the Great War, he wrote of Lenin’s misleading assurances of moderation:

[The Bolshevik] crocodiles with master minds entered upon their responsibilities upon November 8 [1917]. Many tears and guttural purrings were employed in inditing the decree of peace.… But the Petrograd wireless stirred the ether in vain. The crocodiles listened attentively for the response; but there was only silence.

In 1920, Commissar Lev Kamenev came to London, trying to negotiate a trade agreement. Young and self-assured, he also romanced Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan. After sculpting him, writes David Stafford,

Clare rushed off to a lunch with her cousin Winston. Here she listened, starry-eyed, while he expounded on Bolshevism. Nobody hated it more than he, and he would like to shoot every one he saw. But, he added with a grin, Bolsheviks were like crocodiles: sometimes they became simply too expensive to hunt.

…Just like his youthful desire to kill the “ruffians” on the Nile. In 1926 the Soviet labor leader Mikhail Tomsky addressed a British trades union conference. Churchill declared: “We do not want this new-laid crocodile egg from Moscow put upon our breakfast table.”

German crocodiles

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill’s crocodiles took on Nazi form. Speaking to Parliament in January 1940, he registered regret at the neutrality of Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” The historian A.L. Rowse wrote: “In the struggle with Nazi Germany the existence of the nation was at stake: if one is in mortal combat with a tiger, and a crocodile or great bear comes to one’s aid, is it sense to reject it?”

Remembering his original crocodiles In June 1941, Churchill told reporters that “the Soviet Government resembles a crocodile, which bites whether you beat it or pat it. Once Stalin was on-side, he tried his best to pat it. In August 1942, giving Stalin the unwelcome news of no “second front,” he tried to placate him with his southern strategy:

To illustrate my point I had meanwhile drawn a picture of a crocodile, and explained to Stalin with the help of this picture how it was our intention to attack the soft belly of the crocodile as we attacked his hard snout. And Stalin, whose interest was now at a high pitch, said, “May God prosper this undertaking.”

Often thereafter Churchill used the term “soft underbelly” to describe the invasion of Italy—which, as General Mark Clark quipped, proved to be “one tough gut.”

The Soviets again

As Allied fortunes improved, Churchill reverted to his old image of Bolshevik saurians. Russia, he told a dinner party in 1943, “is like an immoral crocodile waiting in the depths for whatever prey may come his way.” Next he quipped to Field Marshal Alan Brooke: “Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile. You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it over the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up.” In April 1944, Molotov complained that Britain’s Special Operations Executive was secretly backing Romania’s pro-German Antonescu. “Bolsheviks are crocodiles,” roared Churchill. “But they were crocodiles,” Martin Gilbert added, “who had to be fed: in the previous eight months Britain had convoyed 191 ships to Russia’s northern ports, with more than a million tons of war stores, including aviation fuel.”

The war ended and he was out of office, but his view of the Soviets remained. “He called them ‘realist lizards,’ all belonging to the crocodile family,” wrote Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. “He said they would be as pleasant with you as they could be, although prepared to destroy you. That sentiment meant nothing to them—morals meant nothing. They were hard realists, out for themselves and for no one else and would be governed only in that way.”

Incidentally

The hard-used crocodile did have one favorable reference from the Prime Minister. Major General Sir Percy Hobart engineered a secret weapon that proved devastating to German resistance. A tank-like flame-thrower, it blasted flammable liquid with a range of 150 yards.  

“I am very glad that the Churchill Crocodile Flame Thrower has justified your hopes,” wrote Churchill in 1944. Here at least was one saurian which earned his approval.

Further reading

“The Brendan Bestiary: Churchill Animal Friends and Analogies” (2019)

“Were ‘Soft Underbelly’ and ‘Fortress Europe’ Churchill Phrases?” (2016)

(Updated from 2015). The Huffington Post offered an unsubstantiated Churchill quote to describe something then-candidate Donald Trump said about Syrian aliens: “Shocked by anti-Muslim Hysteria? Churchill Wanted to ‘Collar The Lot.'” Compared to Trump’s xenophobia, they wrote,

Churchill went even farther. He ordered the internment of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees in England, labeling them dangerous enemy aliens…. Nationals from Germany and Austria, who were living in England when World War II broke out, had already been assigned to different groupings based on their apparent threat to the UK. Category A were the “high security risks.” All 600 of them were immediately interned.

Those deemed “no-security risk” in Class C included 55,000 refugees from Nazi oppression. The great majority were Jewish, and left free—at first. But then, in the Spring of 1940, France fell. With fear of a German invasion and the entry of Italy into the war, spy fever broke in England. Action was demanded against thousands of “dangerous aliens” living there. Unwilling to consider which of those foreigners might actually be dangerous, Churchill commanded “Collar them all.”

Surely Churchill had more important things on his mind in 1940 than which refugees were dangerous. But let it go. People who write such things have no concept of what it was like to live under the threat of imminent extinction. More important are the questions: Did he actually say this? And what was his attitude toward “undocumented aliens”?

Did Churchill say it?

It’s an open question. Nowhere among Churchill’s 20 million published words (books, articles, letters, papers, government documents) does “collar the lot” or “collar them all” appear. Of course, not everything is published. But a phrase so widely bandied about should have provenance. One possible source I must check is Peter and Leni Gillmans’ 1981 book, Collar the Lot. If it’s a book title, surely they offer a source?

Among works about Churchill, the phrase appears only once: In Churchill: The Unruly Giant, Norman Rose says “collar the lot” was an expression of WSC’s sympathy, not outrage, toward alien refugees:

Britain took action against its own suspect groups. Local Fascist elements, Mosley and others of his ilk, were interned with little regret. But the order also went out to round up “enemy aliens,” mainly German, Austrian, or Czech refugees, once victims of Nazism, now casualties of an ugly strain of collective hysteria. Approximately 70,000 in number, many of whom were Jews, included distinguished academics, scientists, musicians, artists, as well as ordinary folk. “Collar the lot,” instructed Churchill, convinced that he was protecting them from “outraged public opinion.” (265)

“Outraged pubic opinion” is not Churchill’s phrase either, though quite believable. During the First World War, Londoners kicked German dachshunds in the streets. It was as Rose writes, a kind of collective hysteria. The words bear further research, and perhaps a more expansive article.

“Unjust to treat our friends as foes”

Good historian that he is, Dr. Rose does provide footnotes to support his summary. In the official biography, Martin Gilbert lists the groups of particular concern to the War Cabinet on 15 May: Italians; Czech, Dutch and Belgian refugees;  British Fascists and Communists. “It was much better, Churchill added,

that these persons should be behind barbed-wire, and internment would probably be much safer for all German-speaking persons themselves since, when air attacks developed, public temper in this country would be such that such persons would be in great danger if at liberty. (Winston S. Churchill, vol. 6, 342.)

A few weeks later,

it was Churchill who sounded a note of caution. “Many enemy aliens had a great hatred of the Nazi regime,” he said, “and it was unjust to treat our friends as foes.” His idea was to form such anti-Nazi aliens into a Foreign Legion, for training, and eventual use overseas, for example, in Iceland. (Ibid., 586.)

Britain detained only 2000 Class A security risks among 70,000 German, Czech, Austrian and other aliens. Certainly, many of the 70,000 were Jews, who had good reason to exit the Greater German Reich. Churchill’s concern that they might become victims of “public temper,” as Rose characterizes it, reflected his sympathy toward oppressed peoples.

“The test of civilisation”

A related question arose after my talk to the Bay Area Churchillians: Did Churchill ever object to Roosevelt’s Japanese internment order? Finding no evidence, I queried Andrew Roberts, who replied: “Not that I know of, either privately or publicly. But we know how he’d have felt.”

Another colleague, Dave Turrell, wrote: “I’d have to suggest that he did not. He favored it when necessary. But, deeply in character, he was eager to end it as soon as possible.”

Indeed Churchill was the first leader to urge an end to wartime restrictions on liberty. In 1943 he ordered the release of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who had been interned in 1940. Churchill wrote eloquently:

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian Governments, whether Nazi or Communist…. Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation. —21 November 1943; Churchill by Himself, 102

Churchill, as William Manchester wrote, “always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of this pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity.”

Watching police knocking down, macing and arresting peaceful protestors for what amounts to disagreeing with government restrictions on liberty, Churchill’s experience is remindful. Civilization is fragile.

Postscript by Michael Dobbs

Lord Dobbs of Wylie, creator of “House of Cards” and author of what I personally consider the best Churchill fiction, writes: “I dug this out from my novel, Never Surrender, and have used it many times since. It is from Churchill’s ‘fight on the beaches” speech 4 June 1940, Hansard Col. 795. Even during the greatest peril, he gave thought to those unfairly treated. He declared that they had not been forgotten, even thought they had been gravely and unjustly put out.”

The Prime Minister: We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency, not only against enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nationalities, but also against British subjects who may become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United Kingdom. I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do. If parachute landings were attempted and fierce fighting attendant upon them followed, these unfortunate people would be far better out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for ours.

There is, however, another class, for which I feel not the slightest sympathy. Parliament has given us the powers to put down Fifth Column activities with a strong hand, and we shall use those powers, subject to the supervision and correction of the House, without the slightest hesitation until we are satisfied, and more than satisfied, that this malignancy in our midst has been effectively stamped out.

Churchill was criticized for his extremely respectful letter to the Japanese Ambassador to Britain in December 1941, when informing him that their countries were at war. Churchill’s response to critics was, “After all, when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.” Was Shigemitsu acually killed?  —W.H., New York

A: No, he lived on

Churchill was writing in the abstract, so did not actually propose to slay the Ambassador. Mamoru Shigemitsu  was Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union 1936–38 and to Britain 1938–41. Following Japan’s attacks of December 1941 he received unhampered passage home. As Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at the end of World War II, he signed the instrument of surrender on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. This was the formal end of the Second World War.

Convicted of war crimes, Shigemitsu received a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment, but was paroled in 1950. In 1954-56 he served as Japan’s Foreign Minister, and he died in 1957 at the age of 70.

Churchill’s letter to the Ambassador…

…caused a flutter in Parliament for excessive floweriness and diplomatic niceties. Churchill decided to mention this in his war memoirs, but more as a humorous note than a serious defense of it.  But decide for  yourself—here is the passage from The Second World War, volume III, The Grand Alliance, pages 542-43:

Sir,

On the evening of December 7th His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom learned that Japanese forces without previous warning either in the form of a declaration of war or of an ultimatum with a conditional declaration of war had attempted a landing on the coast of Malaya and bombed Singapore and Hong Kong.

In view of these wanton acts of unprovoked aggression committed in flagrant violation of International Law and particularly of Article 1 of the Third Hague Convention relative to the opening of hostilities, to which both Japan and the United Kingdom are parties, His Majesty’s Ambassador at Tokyo has been instructed to inform the Imperial Japanese Government in the name of His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom that a state of war exists between our two countries.

I have the honour to be, with high consideration,

Sir,

Your obedient servant,

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL.

Reference

For this and other quotations on the subject see Churchill by Himself, Chapter 20, “Nations…Japan.”

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The Question

“What do you think are Churchill’s best books on war? Though he was a great peacemaker, his work there is eclipsed by the climacterics of war. What are his best?”

The River War

In 1885 the Sudan had been overrun by Dervish tribesman under their religious leader, the Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad). Fourteen years later, London sent Lord Kitchener and an Anglo-Egyptian force (including Churchill) to reestablish sovereignty. Notwithstanding the superiority of British weapons and tactics, the obstacles presented by the Nile, the desert, the climate, cholera and a brave, fanatical Dervish army were formidable.

Churchill excitingly describes the British victory, culminating in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Yet he doesn’t hesitate to criticize the actions of his own side. He is particularly critical of Kitchener, whose treatment of the dead Mahdi was shameful, even barbaric. Far from accepting uncritically the superiority of British civilization, Churchill appreciates the longing for liberty among the indigenous Sudanese. But he finds their native regime defective in its disdain for the human rights of its inhabitants.

***

In 1902 for an abridged edition, Churchill excised one-fourth of the narrative, including his criticisms of Kitchener. By then he had entered Parliament, and was wary of burning bridges. He also added some material, so there are two texts: 1899 and 1902. A new and complete edition, prepared by Professor James Muller, containing both the original and 1902 texts has long been developing. It will be linked here when available. (For Dr. Muller’s video presentation at Hillsdale College, “Lessons from The River War, “ click here.)

Uncommonly for a Victorian, Churchill had words of praise for the Muslim warriors, while deploring their savagery toward other Muslims. There are in The River War many examples of Churchill praising Muslims. He considered his Dervish enemies “as brave men as ever walked the earth.” Years later he wrote with deep feeling of Muslim and Hindu soldiers of the Indian Army in the Second World War. Context matters.

For further reflections see Dr. Paul Rahe’s essay, “The Timeless Value of Winston Churchill’s The River War.”

The World Crisis

In 1905 Churchill hired a polymath who was to remain his literary assistant for thirty years. Edward Marsh was a classical scholar, a civil servant and a brilliant litterateur. From that time, Churchill stopped writing his books in longhand and began dictating to teams of secretaries. Marsh vetted the drafts for Churchill’s final approval. They made a marvelous team.

Marsh appears frequently in Churchill’s life. When he died in 1953 Churchill, who seemed to outlive everybody, waxed eloquent: “He was a master of literature and scholarship and a deeply instructed champion of the arts. All his long life was serene, and he left this world, I trust, without a pang, and I am sure without a fear.”

Marsh helped Churchill write The World Crisis, his memoir of World War I. Here Churchill began as First Lord of the Admiralty, fell disastrously from power and volunteered for the front. Then he returned to office as Minister of Munitions. He became Secretary of State for War ironically, just as the war ended. Perhaps not ironically, for the appointment was made by Prime Minister Lloyd George, who nursed a wry sense of humor.

“All about himself”

Whenever I’m asked to recommend a big book by Churchill, I always name The World Crisis. Like all of his war books it is highly personal. One of his friends called it, “Winston’s brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the Universe.” One of his enemies said, “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis.”

A thoughtful critic, Sir Robert Rhodes James, regarded The World Crisis as Churchill’s masterpiece. But he correctly noted that “one can never quite separate Churchill the orator from Churchill the writer.”

Even if you do not read war books you will be entranced by Churchill’s account of the awful, unfolding scene of the First World War. Readers learn of the great power rivalries that caused the war. We observe Churchill’s failed effort to break the deadlock on the Western Front by forcing the Dardanelles, knocking Turkey out of the war. We revisit the carnage of the Somme and Passchendaele. Finally we see Germany almost win and then lost the war in 1918. A fifth and final volume, The Eastern Front, relates the lesser-known horrors of the war in Russia and Austria-Hungary. In his fourth volume, The Aftermath, Churchill covers the decade after victory.

“Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong”

Two brief excerpts from The World Crisis. The first is a favorite of Colin Powell, who asked me to look it up when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It tells us a lot about Powell, said to be the voice of caution before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 1911, the Germans sent a gunboat to Agadir, Morocco, and almost went to war with France over it. Churchill here describes the exchange of diplomatic telegrams between Berlin, Paris and London as the Agadir Crisis deepened.

They sound so very cautious and correct, these deadly words. Soft, quiet voices purring, courteous, grave, exactly measured phrases in large peaceful rooms. But with less warning cannons had opened fire and nations had been struck down by this same Germany. So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing…less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century….

No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.

“The King’s ships were at sea…”

Of course, the mistakes were made, and the world plunged into war, with Churchill running the Royal Navy. In 1914 he did a prescient thing. In July Britain’s Grand Fleet had assembled for a Naval Review. On his own authority, Churchill ordered the Fleet not to disperse. Instead, it sailed in darkness through the English Channel to its war station at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Here is Churchill’s description of the passage of the armada:

We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs….

If war should come no one would know where to look for the British Fleet. Somewhere in that enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands, cruising now this way, now that, shrouded in storms and mists, dwelt this mighty organization. Yet from the Admiralty building we could speak to them at any moment if need arose. The King’s ships were at sea.

One has to look far and wide for writing like that. When he wrote it, our author was 49. 

 The Second World War

The first book New York Mayor Giuliani read after 9/11 was Churchill’s The Second World War. Anyone who wonders whether Winston Churchill remains relevant today need only consider it.

Consider the major criticisms of Churchill’s most famous work: It is not history. It is filled with grandiose prose, inflicted on an apathetic postwar public who only wanted peace and a quiet life. It is highly biased—the author never puts a foot wrong. He publishes hundreds of his own memoranda and directives, but few replies to them. It moralizes incessantly about dictators and their empires, but not the British Empire. It is vague on the impact of the war on Britain, or the details of Cabinet meetings. Churchill alone seems to confront the French, Hitler, the Soviets, the Americans.

In the words of Arthur Balfour, these complaints contain much that is trite and much that is true. But what’s true is trite, and what’s not trite is not true.

Perhaps one of the best descriptions is by Professor Manfred Weidhorn: “a record of history made rather than written….No other wartime leader in history has given us a work of two million words written only a few years after the events and filled with messages among world potentates which had so recently been heated and secret.”

Humor: his secret of survival

The Second World War  is conducted like a symphony, Weidhorn continues—or a first class novel:

Such is the eerie sense of déjà vu and ubi sunt upon his return in 1939, as First Lord [of the Admiralty], to Scapa Flow, exactly a quarter of a century after having, at the start of the other world war, paid the same visit during the same season in the same capacity…. The collapse of the venerable and once mighty France and Churchill’s agony are beautifully rendered by the sensuous detail of the old gentlemen industriously carrying French archives on wheelbarrows to bonfires.

The end finds our hero in Berlin amid its “chaos of ruins.” Churchill walks Hitler’s shattered chancellery for “quite a long time.” The great duel is over; the victor stands where so much evil originated. “We were given the best first-hand accounts available at that time of what had happened in these final scenes.”

“Amid the pathos, humour bubbles,” writes Robert Pilpel. It is “as if Puck had escaped from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and infiltrated Paradise Lost.” There is Churchill’s desert conference with his Generals, “in a tent full of flies and important personages.” There is lunch with King Saud, whose religion forbids tobacco and alcohol—which Churchill says are mandated by his religion. In 1941 he sends a courtly letter to the Japanese Ambassador, signed “Your Obedient Servant.” He announces “with high consideration” that a state of war exists between their countries. (“When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”)

Prudence in statesmanship

What was it, I’ve wondered, that Mayor Giuliani paused over? I’m told he read Volume 2, Their Finest Hour, about Britain in the Blitz. I can only wish today’s leaders, who squabble over inconsequentia as danger mounts, read from Volume 1, The Gathering Storm:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story…. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong. These are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

How often must we slide slowly down from invincibility, only to be reminded by sudden calamity that we have neglected the primary mission of the state: to provide for the common defense? Churchill wondered. In an unpublished passage for The Gathering Storm he wrote:

Some historians will urge that admiration should be given to a Government of honourable high minded men who bore provocation with exemplary forbearance…. I hope it will also be written how hard all this was upon the ordinary common folk who fill the casualty lists. Under-represented in Government and Parliamentary institutions, they confide their safety to the Ministers of the day.

The Second World War, a prose epic like The River War and The World Crisis, is in the first rank of Churchill’s books. Flaws and all, it is indispensable reading for anyone who seeks a true understanding.

Last thoughts

In the last few years of his life Churchill gave in to the pessimism he had always dodged before. In the late Fifties he told his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne: “Yes, I have worked very hard and accomplished a great many things—only to accomplish nothing in the end.”

I ventured that Churchill was thinking of the “special relationship” with America, which never reached the closeness he sought. Then too, there was his failure to reach a “settlement” with Russia, although in 1949 he predicted communism would expire. “Yes,” said Sir Anthony, “It was very sad.”

Here anyway are three Churchill books that are must reading: The River War, The World Crisis and The Second World War. They represent an understanding of statesmanship in times of duress. And also, Manfred Weidhorn wrote, “fascinating products of the human spirit.”

They are “epic tales of the depravities, miseries, and glories of man.”

Chapter 1. Germany Arming, 1933-34

“Revisionists” 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.” In appraising Hitler, Churchill knew the truth well before most of his contemporaries.

Notable in this chapter is a pleading letter Hitler wrote to Churchill’s friend Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere. If you ignore Hitler’s references to Aryan supremacy, one might almost think it was written by the Pope.

Strife with Britain was so avoidable, Hitler wrote All his life he has worked for peace and understanding between the two dominant white races. Germany and “England” had lost the flower of a generation in World War I, and for what?

Rothermere bought Hitler’s plaints—hook, line and sinker. He sent a copy to Churchill. Churchill’s reaction to it was couched in noble words of appreciation for the British democracy and Britain’s historic role of opposing continental tyrants. It was exactly what we would expect. It helps to show that in his broad understanding of Hitler, Churchill was right all along: dead right.

Chapter 2. Germany Armed, 1935-36

It is often said that Churchill supported Hitler because of a remark which, taken out of context, makes him sound like a fan: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

This chapter provides Churchill’s surrounding words, which give a very different picture. The British statesman had only loathing for what Hitler’s policies led to. The chapter also examines Churchill’s famous and contentious essay, “Hitler and His Choice,” in the Strand Magazine, 1935, later reprinted in Great Contemporaries—and Churchill’s consistent warnings of the perils of disarmament in 1934-35.

Chapter 3. Rhineland: “Act to win,” 1936

Years later, Churchill wrote that Hitler could have been stopped when he marched into the Rhineland in 1936. On the evidence, this is true. The French army was overwhelmingly superior. Indeed Hitler had ordered his troops to turn around should they encounter French opposition. At the time, however, Churchill failed to press the issue. He met and encouraged French foreign minister Pierre Flandin, who came to London pleading for British support in a showdown with the Germans.

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin turned Flandin down flat. He didn’t know much about the Germans, Baldwin declared, but he knew his own. And the British people did not want war. Hoping for office under Baldwin, who had become prime minister with a large majority just four months earlier, Churchill chose not to buck his leader. Knowing that France was under no such constraints, Churchill clung to a hope Flandin would return and encourage French action. But the Paris cabinet was divided, and would not move without British support. There are legitimate criticisms of Churchill’s inconsistency in this episode, which belong in the history of a missed chance.

Chapter 4. Derelict State: Anschluss, 1938

In March 1938, Hitler proclaimed an Anschluss, or union with Austria. Churchill did not see this coming, though he had warned of the probability. He was also wrong in believing that the majority of Austrians were against it. I quote reliable sources showing that they were behind it by large majorities.

Ironically, to quote Manfred Weidhorn’s review of Churchill and the Avoidable War, “the performance of the Wehrmacht in the Anschluss was out of a Viennese operetta.” Mechanical breakdowns were 30%. Officers and men arrived late and untrained. VII Army Corps described its motorized vehicle situation as nahezu katastrophal (almost catastrophic). I quote one account: “Like some great malfunctioning clockwork, the Wehrmacht lurched and shuddered towards the Austrian capital. Only a few parts of it finally grated to a halt in the suburbs of Vienna one week later.”

His generals reminded an infuriated Hitler that they had warned him Germany was not ready for a major conflict. Yet, as with the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive thirty years later, operational disaster did not equate to propaganda disaster. The Nazi propaganda machine successfully convinced the world that Germany had enjoyed a glorious success. British Intelligence must have had reports of the truth. Yet the facts seemed almost to be a state secret.

Chapter 5: Munich: Mortal Folly

The Munich agreement entrenched Hitler in power. It gave him the fat prize of Czechoslovakia with its outstanding armaments industry. In the invasion of France in 1940, three of the ten panzer divisions were Czech-built. It was a classic example of wishful thinking and fatal compromise.

Yet over Munich, a curious narrative has evolved: that the agreement was actually wise, since it gave the Allies another year to arm. Less often remarked is that it also gave Germany another year to arm. Even German sources agree the Nazis were less formidable in 1938 than they were in 1939-40. What was there about fighting them a year later that made this preferable?

Well, goes the argument, Britain and France could not have defended landlocked Czechoslovakia. This is a bit silly. “It surely did not take much thought,” Churchill wrote, “that the British Navy and the French Army could not be deployed on the Bohemian mountain front.” There were other avenues open: a blockade of Germany by the mobilized Royal Navy; French action in the Rhineland. This chapter also examines the credible 1938 plot to overthrow Hitler. After Munich the plotters despaired. Later most were executed.

Chapter 6. “Favourable Reference to the Devil”: Russia, 1938-39

Munich sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate. On 14 March 1939, Catholic fascists proclaimed an independent, pro-Nazi republic of Slovakia. The next day Ruthenia seceded, only to be occupied by Hitler’s ally Hungary. Summoned to Berlin, Czech President Emil Hácha agreed to German occupation of the rest of his country. It became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—an arrangement which “in its unctuous mendacity was remarkable even for the Nazis.”

Churchill and the Avoidable War herein examines Churchill’s evaluation of the Soviet danger versus the Nazi danger; his conclusion that the latter was the greater threat; his urgent efforts, particularly with Soviet Ambassador to Britain Ivan Maisky, to encourage an understanding with Stalin; and the rebuff his prescriptions received by the British (and to some extent the Soviet) government. Sadly, while Prime Minister Chamberlain was sending low-level diplomats to negotiate with Moscow, Hitler was sending his foreign minister. Thus the surprise announcement of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which left Hitler free to attack Poland.

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

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. 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. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe….”

Google this alleged 1936 statement and you’ll find a half dozen citations ascribing it to Churchill. That’s a striking reversal of his off-stated view that America was indispensable to winning World War I. As World War II approached, these alleged words resurfaced. Churchill sued the perpetrator and won.

An opportunity to welcome American support of Britain and France arrived on 11 January 1938, when President Roosevelt sent Chamberlain a message offering to mediate an easement of tensions after consulting with the British government. A golden opportunity? Chamberlain rebuffed it. Privately he complained that the Americans “are incredibly slow and have missed innumerable busses….I do wish the Japs would beat up an American or two!” His wish is fulfilled four years later at Pearl Harbor.

Chamberlain’s rebuff ended the last frail chance to save the world from catastrophe. Churchill’s memoirs were censorious:

That Mr. Chamberlain, with his limited outlook and inexperience of the European scene, should have possessed the self-sufficiency to wave away the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic leaves one, even at this date, breathless with amazement.

The lack of all sense of proportion, and even of self-preservation, which this episode reveals in an upright, competent, well-meaning man, charged with the destinies of our country and all who depended upon it, is appalling. One cannot today even reconstruct the state of mind which would render such gestures possible.

Chapter 8. Was World War II Avoidable?

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

Was the war really avoidable? Yes, it was—at Munich in particular—but with great difficulty. No one can underestimate the problems in the way. And yet, tantalizing opportunities existed.

“Appeasement” is not in Churchill and the Avoidable War. It is far over-used, and broadly misunderstood. It is not popular, Churchill wrote, “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…from weakness and fear [it] 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.

There are lessons in Churchill’s Avoidable War that serve us well today. Will we listen? We rarely have.