Churchill’s “overreaction”

One reader wrote that Churchill “overreacted” to the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne by members of the Jewish Lehi (Stern Gang).  This is to misjudge Churchill, who deplored terrorism regardless of its source.

From Churchill by Himself, 442, WSC, House of Commons, 17 November 1944. (Source: Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, VII: 1052):

If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols, and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. If there is to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism, these wicked activities must cease. And those responsible for them must be destroyed root and branch.

Bombing Auschwitz

Another reader wrote: “Had Churchill given an order to bomb Auschwitz, rather than simply recommend that it be bombed, it would have been bombed. He did not do so, presumably, because he was loath to quarrel with his General Staff. He did not wish to stand accused of risking air crews to save Jewish lives that had no military value.”

It was more an order than a recommendation, but let that go. The more compelling idea was bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz, rather than the camp itself. The latter, as the Jewish Agency pointed out at the time, would have killed inmates who, it was hoped, would be liberated. (Remember, this was in 1944.) However, early requests by the Jewish Agency did not make this distinction (read on).

***

As to bombing railway lines, Churchill did not have plenary authority over the U.S. Army Air Force—the responsible agency for the Auschwitz sector. Martin Gilbert, in a 1993 lecture at the United States Holocaust Museum, Washington, noted that in mid-1944…

…five prisoners escaped from Auschwitz in order to bring news to the West of what was happening to the Jews there. Four were Jews. One was a Polish Catholic medical student.

The moment their information reached the West, and the truth of the gas chambers made clear, there was a tremendous and understandable outcry. (The first thing that has always struck me: What would have happened if these escapees had made their way West in 1943? Or even at the end of 1942?) The impact of their report on the Jewish and non-Jewish world was dramatic and traumatic….

On 6 July 1944, in a meeting with Anthony Eden, Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok made five urgent and desperate suggestions. The fifth was that “the railway line leading from Budapest to Birkenau, and the death camp at Birkenau and other places, should be bombed.”

When Churchill saw this request by Eden, he did something I’ve not seen on any other document submitted to Churchill for his approval: He wrote on it what he wanted done.

Normally, he would have said, “Bring this up to War Cabinet on Wednesday,” or, “Let us discuss this with the Air Ministry.”

Instead, he wrote to Eden on the morning of 7 July: “Is there any reason to raise this matter with the Cabinet? Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.”

The singularity of Churchill’s order

Martin Gilbert continued:

I have never seen a minute of Churchill’s giving that sort of immediate authority to carry out a request…. I suppose it is a great tragedy that all this had not taken place in July 1943 or October 1942. For when all is said and done, July 1944 was too late to save all but a final 100,000.

There is a vast subtext, in my book, Auschwitz and the Allies. British officials did not know on 7 July that the deportations had ceased. They had to deal with the Prime Minister’s request on the assumption that it still had some validity. Some revealed considerable distaste for carrying out any such instruction.

It is interesting, however, to note that when the request was put to the American Air Force Commander, General Ira C. Eaker, when he visited the Air Ministry a few days later, he gave it his full support. He regarded it as something that the American daylight bombers could and should do.

But as you know, the request died in Washington. On the second occasion it reached the Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy. He told his assistant to kill it.. The debate about bombing the Auschwitz lines continued for more than a month after the lines were no longer in use.

From the bomber crews

Dr. Gilbert interviewed several of those who would have bombed the Auschwitz lines as Churchill had wished. Every one, without exception, was emphatic that he would have done it. Some expressed anger that they were not asked to do it. Sir Martin continues:

I even found the young man who had taken that aerial photograph of Auschwitz displayed in the Museum. He was South African photo reconnaissance pilot. He was in extreme distress that he had no idea what it was he was flying over.

If only he had known, the pilot continued, he could at least have tipped his wings, to signal those on the ground that someone knew they were there.

Winston Churchill instantly recognized the terrible crime. Sir Martin quotes his letter Anthony Eden on the day that the escapees’ account of Auschwitz reached them:

There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe.

It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.”

Further Reading

“Sir Martin Gilbert on Churchill and the Holocaust,” 2024.

“The Polish and the Holocaust: What Churchill Knew,” 2021.

“Witold Polecki: A Brave Pole Who Did His Best for Liberty,” 2020.

“Bombing Auschwitz, from my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality,” 2020

Some years ago the Evening Standard offered Churchill’s “favourite spots in the capital.” We have seen these tourist guides before. In “The London Life of Winston Churchill” (16 June 2016), readers were invited to “browse the gallery above to find Churchill’s favourite London spots.”

The accompanying gallery offers a bottle of Pol Roger champagne, the National Liberal Club, a box of Romeo y Julieta cigars, a restaurant with a Churchill bar, Paxton & Whitfield’s cheese shop, Austin Reed’s menswear, and Brown’s Hotel. (“I don’t stay in hotels, I stay in Brown’s,” they claim he said, without attribution.)

With the exception of the National Liberal Club, this array would more aptly be entitled “Churchill’s household staff’s favourite shopping places.”

Sir Martin to the rescue

Happily, the real Churchill’s London, “Spinning Top of Memories,” was described long ago by his official biographer, the late Sir Martin Gilbert. The text is online. Here you may read “of Ungrand Places and Moments in Time.” These are locations genuinely crucial to the Churchill story.

It was the first Gilbert speech I’d heard, and I listened mesmerized, at both the intrigue and the great biographer’s command of detail. Here is the briefest review—which I hope will send you in to the full text. Better yet, seek out the illustrated booklet published at the time, on either Amazon or bookfinder.com. The places are still there. Some now have blue historical plaques, which were not affixed at the time.

12 Bolton Street

Young Winston’s first bachelor flat was furnished in part by his friend and mentor, Sir Ernest Cassel. That fact later caused Churchill trouble. After the Battle of Jutland, he was accused of making false statements about the result to enrich his Jewish benefactor, Cassel. It was all nonsense, of course. Churchill dispensed with it quickly. But the way he handled his accuser, Lord Alfred Douglas, and later forgave him on the outbreak of the Second World War, tell us much about Churchill’s magnanimity.

London Magazine, Hyde Park

Recently refurbished as an up-market restaurant, this unassuming building near the Serpentine figured large in the Churchill saga. Sir Martin explained that in 1911, when war threatened with Germany over the Agadir Crisis, this was the munitions magazine for the defense of London:

In his mind’s eye—and this was one of his great attributes—Churchill had immediately conjured up…the possibility of a small group of Germans, possibly German agents in London, seizing this magazine, and destroying it.

Churchill’s determined action in seeing it safely guarded was a key factor in convincing Prime Minister H.H. Asquith to give him a fighting department—the Admiralty—which he headed from 1911 to 1915. Thanks to his massive reforms and administrative reorganization, when war came “the Fleet was ready.”

Ho Chi Minh’s Veggies

New Zealand House, the modern building at the bottom of Haymarket, is just a stand-in for the former Carlton Hotel—about which Sir Martin had an amazing tale. On one of the nights before war was declared, in August 1914, Churchill and Lloyd George dined here. And one of the cooks, or one of the waiters (accounts vary) was Ho Chi Minh!

“It’s true,” Sir Martin explained, “Ho Chi Minh had been in London as a vegetable cook on the outbreak of war, when he had gone to the French Embassy in London to volunteer his services to fight, as a patriotic Indo-Chinaman (as they were then called). He was turned down, crossed the Channel to Paris, and began his career of disgruntlement and revolution.”

I searched for the likely dates of the Churchill-Lloyd George dinner. It is unlikely to have been the night war was declared, August 4th. More likely it was on the 2nd or 3rd.) I tracked Ho’s activities at the time.  The dates coincide perfectly.

Sir Martin never much indulged in the “what ifs” of history, but I coaxed a smile out of him with this one: Suppose on that fateful night, Churchill said to Lloyd George, “My dear David, these are the best string beans I’ve ever tasted. We must hire the cook and promote him to a head chef for the rest of his career.” 

Admiralty House

Its ultimate fate is uncertain nowadays, but the great building is still there, and features large in the saga. “Not only did Churchill write his great speeches of the early months of the First World War there, but also the first great speeches of the Second,” Sir Martin explained.

“Fight on the Beaches” was written in Admiralty House because, being a kind-hearted man underneath the gruff exterior, Churchill did not want to dislodge the sick and dying Neville Chamberlain precipitately from 10 Downing Street.

At the Admiralty, Gilbert continued, Churchill arranged some of the oak paneling to swivel open, displaying maps of all the oceans and the locations of all British ships. “The idea was that if someone came through the room, a well-meaning young naval officer, or, dare one imagine it, a politician, he could shut the panel and the naval dispositions would be hidden from view.”

Nearly a quarter century later, in September 1939, he returned to the Admiralty. He strode into the room. “He went up to the paneling and pulled it open. And there, exposed to view after twenty-four years, was the last of his maps, still bearing the fleet dispositions in May 1915.”

Charing Cross Hotel

It’s a four-star Amba hotel now, but a century ago it was a down-at- the-heels backwater to which few paid attention. That made it ideal for Churchill’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher, to hide when he disappeared from the Admiralty in May 1915. Fisher was at loggerheads with Churchill over the Gallipoli campaign. His abrupt resignation caused the crisis that would dismiss Churchill from the Admiralty.

Ordered to return to duty “in the King’s name,” Fisher was nowhere to be found. Secretly, he had holed up at the Charing Cross Hotel, with close rail access to the south-of-England home of his lady friend, the Duchess of Hamilton. Sir Martin Gilbert explained:

Churchill, who was a shrewd person, many years later met the Duchess and told her: “If only I had known about your friendship with Fisher then, I would have gone to see you. You were the only one who could have persuaded him to go back to the Admiralty.” So have a look at this hotel, which was in a way so disastrous to Churchill’s fortunes.

41 Cromwell Road

This large house just opposite the Natural History Museum belonged to Churchill’s brother Jack. From here, after deciding to leave the government in November 1915, Churchill departed for the trenches.

Through Autumn 1916, Cromwell Road housed both Churchill brothers, their wives and children, and their mother, Lady Randolph. Here Clementine Churchill received Winston’s long, plaintive, sometimes despairing letters from the front. Sir Martin drew attention to these “very private letters never intended for publication”….

“Twenty more yards to the left…”

It was 28 March 1916, a wintry day. The Germans were sending yet another methodical artillery barrage along the British front line. Churchill calculated that the fifth or sixth shell would hit the ground quite near to where he was standing. Indeed it did. As he wrote his wife:

“Twenty more yards to the left and no more tangles to unravel, no more anxieties to face, no more hatreds and injustices to encounter. A good ending to a chequered life. A final gift, unvalued, to an ungrateful country, an impoverishment of the war-making power of Britain which no one would ever know, or measure, or mourn.”

Metropole Building

In London, Sir Martin advised, one should visit places where Churchill found himself at important moments in history. One of these is the Metropole Building, where he served as Minister of Munitions in 1917-19. At the time it was requisitioned by the government. Here Churchill was looking out his window at Northumberland Avenue at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, as Big Ben began to chime the hour that would signal the end of the First World War….

I looked at the broad street beneath me. It was deserted. From the portals of one of the large hotels absorbed by Government Departments darted the slight figure of a girl clerk, distractedly gesticulating while another stroke of Big Ben resounded.

Then from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street. Streams of people poured out of all the buildings. Northumberland Avenue was now crowded with people in hundreds, nay thousands, rushing hither and thither in a frantic manner, shouting and screaming with joy.

“Was this really the end?”

I could see that Trafalgar Square was already swarming. Around me in our very headquarters, in the Hotel Metropole, disorder had broken out. Doors banged. Feet clattered down corridors. Everyone rose from the desk and cast aside pen and paper. All bounds were broken. The tumult grew. It grew like a gale, but from all sides simultaneously. The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic. Streams of men and women flowed from the Embankment. They mingled with torrents pouring down the Strand on their way to acclaim the King. Almost before the last stroke of the clock had died away, the strict, war-straitened, regulated streets of London had become a triumphant pandemonium.

And Churchill wondered as he stood there: Was this really the end? Or was it merely another chapter in a “cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of Teuton and Gaul?” We now know the answer.

11 Morpeth Mansions

Not part of Sir Martin’s talk, though he spoke of it on other occasions, was Morpeth Mansions. A flat here was the London home of Winston and Clementine Churchill from late autumn 1931 until war in September 1939.

It is hard to exaggerate the historic importance of this residence. (And it does have a historical plaque.) Here Churchill kept made surreptitious rendezvous with informants who, at risk of their careers, gave him secret reports on German rearmament. With these he urged the government to rearm. The government did respond, but insufficiently.

Morpeth Mansions frequently saw meetings of The Focus: distinguished citizens opposed to appeasement, hoping to ward off conflict through preparedness—frustrated, in the end, by a reluctant government. Here Churchill and his colleagues gathered as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had left for Bad Godesberg to meet Hitler on 22 September 1938, a preliminary to the Munich Agreement.

“It is the end of the British Empire”

Harold Nicolson, the last to arrive, was waiting for the lift when Churchill paid his cabbie and hurried in. They ascended together. Nicolson said: “This is hell.” Churchill muttered: “It is the end of the British Empire.”

According to Nicolson’s diary, Churchill told The Focus that the Cabinet had demanded “a firm stand,” insisting on German demobilization, supervision of the Sudetenland transfer to Germany by an international commission, refusal to discuss Polish or Hungarian claims on Czech territory, and a German guarantee of Czech borders. William Manchester wrote:

Almost in chorus, his guests said: “But Hitler will never accept such terms!” Winston replied, “In that case, Chamberlain will return tonight and we shall have war.” In that event, one peer pointed out, “It will be inconvenient having our Prime Minister in German territory.” Winston shook his massive head and growled, “Even the Germans would not be so stupid as to deprive us of our beloved Prime Minister.”

As we know, war was averted. After a final meeting with Hitler at Munich, the Prime Minister returned promising “peace for our time.” The peace lasted less than a year.

Number Ten Annexe

Many have visited the Cabinet War Rooms, the underground London bunker, now a museum, designed to shelter the government during the Blitz. But Martin Gilbert directed us to walk across the street to St. James’s Park and then look back:

Cast your eye from the entrance on the War Rooms slightly to the right. You’ll see a doorway well above ground. To the right of that doorway you will see a set of six windows ending in a curved window at Storey’s Gate. Those are the actual rooms in which Winston Churchill slept and worked during the second World War.

Prosaic, perhaps, next to the iconic War Rooms—and he deeply disliked the place. Sir Martin continued:

He said he felt “like a rat in a  hole.” He spent, it seems, only three nights there in the 1562 nights of the war. These unassuming ground floor rooms were the center of the war effort. Churchill was at the Annexe when he did not slip back, as he often did, to 10 Downing Street itself, where most of the Cabinets were held. If you look closely you will even see the holes where the metal shutters were affixed. Churchill did not want, after all, to be blasted out of his rooms, so the shutters were there to be closed during the bombing.

Number Ten Annexe is of course valuable real estate nowadays, too valuable for a museum. But from those above-ground rooms came many of Churchill’s great speeches, directives and decisions. Next time you go by, have a look at them. Please tell me if there is a blue historic plaque. Last time I checked, it still wasn’t there.

“How many speeches did Churchill make, and in how many words? Also, how many words did he write in his books and articles? [Updated from 2014.]

Word counts

Through the wonders of computer science (Ian Langworth and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project), we know that the present corpus of works by and about Winston S. Churchill exceeds 80 million words (380 megabytes). This includes 20 million (120 megabytes) by Churchill himself (counting his letters, memos and papers in the 23 volumes of Churchill Documents. Here are his the top word counts among his books:

The Churchill Documents: 10,000,000*

Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963: 5,200,000

The Second World War: 1,600,000 (not counting appendices)

The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill: 860,000

The World Crisis: 824,000

Marlborough: His Life and Times: 779,000 (not counting appendices)

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: 510,000 (not counting appendices)

Lord Randolph Churchill: 278,000

The River War: 200,000

*Total word count for the twenty-three volumes is 15.3 million; we estimate 10 million are WSC’s own words.

Word count: speeches

To be precise you’d have to count (I won’t!) the speeches listed in the Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963. Rough estimate: there are forty speeches per page of contents, about eight contents pages per volume, and eight volumes. So, at a guess, 2500 speeches.

But the Complete Speeches are not complete. Try to find his famous Durban speech after escaping from the Boers in 1899, for example. And some are only excerpts—as from his lecture tours of North America. Also, you must deduct notes by editors. But let’s add say 10% for missing speeches and guess that he made about 3000 in all.

The 5.2 million-word Complete Speeches, at eight volumes, is the longest book-length “work by Churchill.” Subtract 100,000 words of introductions and add missing speeches or verbiage. Let’s estimate six million words of speeches alone.

Official Biography

Some readers also ask about word counts for the Official Biography. The total for the eight biographic volumes is over 3,000,000 words. The twenty-three Companion or Document Volumes  add 15.3 million, for a grand total of over 18 million words (80+ megabytes). Of course, these include many million words not by Churchill.

Someone once told Sir Martin Gilbert,  “You’ve only published one-tenth of Churchill’s story!” Sir Martin replied: “Really? That much?”

Digital capacity

This doesn’t impress software engineers, but it does me: A single, old fashioned 250 gigabyte hard drive disk would hold over 1800 copies of all Churchill’s words and all the words in the Official Biography.

A modern hard drive holds about 3 terrabytes (3000 gigabytes). Therefore, your personal computer could house about 200,000 copies of Churchill’s works and the Official Biography.

What would Sir Winston Churchill make of this? No one can say, except to remember one of his maxims: “Words are the only things that last forever.”

Who here is in their Forties? Are you as pessimistic as he was?

Winston Churchill was 48 when he penned some “Reflections on the Century,” which may arrest you with their prescience—and their eerie relevance.

His words below are in his original “speech form.” This is the way they were set out on the notes he carried with him, however well he memorized his lines. They appear in this style in my collection of quotations, Churchill by Himself, but differ from the way you may have encountered them in other books:

What a disappointment [this] century has been.…

     We have seen in ev[ery] country a dissolution,

          a weakening of those bonds,

               a challenge to those principles,

                    a decay of faith

                         an abridgement of hope

                              on wh[ich] structure & ultimate existence of civilised society depends.

We have seen in ev[ery] part of the globe

     one g[rea]t country after another

          wh[ich] had erected an orderly, a peaceful, a prosperous structure of civilised society,

                relapsing in hideous succession into bankruptcy, barbarism or anarchy.

Can you doubt, my faithful friends

     as you survey this sombre panorama,

          that mankind is passing through a period marked

              not only by an enormous destruction & abridgement of human species,

                   not only by a vast impoverishment & reduction in means of existence,

                        but also that destructive tendencies have not yet run their course?

And only intense, concerted & prolonged efforts

     among all nations

          can avert further & perhaps even greater calamities?”

One might think these the words of some modern Cassandra, speaking about the 21st Century. But no, it is Churchill, ninety-four years ago, at a similar juncture in the century before—the 20th. We may debate whether things now are quite as forbidding as his description then. In 1922, “greater calamities” were indeed coming.

Churchill’s Political Philosophy

Churchill was a seasoned thinker by then, Sir Martin Gilbert tells us. Not yet fifty, he could look back on two decades of public life. For much of that time, he had been an active participant at the centre of policymaking, arguing his points with men of experience and expertise, testing his ideas amid the daily pressure of departmental business, and reflecting, with each year, on the evolution of the world scene, and the nature of man.”

He had evolved what Gilbert described as “three  interwoven strands” of political philosophy: “the appeasement of class bitterness at home, the appeasement of the fearful hatreds and antagonisms abroad, and the defence of Parliamentary democracy and democratic values….” To achieve these, his method was “conciliation…the path of moderation. But where force alone could preserve the libertarian values, force would have to be used. It could only be a last resort—the horrors of war, and the very nature of democracy, ensured that—but in the last resort it might be necessary to defend those values by force of arms.”*

“These reflection were sometimes sombre,” Sir Martin added. They are perhaps no less sombre a century later.

_____

• Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (London: British Academy, 1981), 83.

The Churchill Society of Israel serves Israelis with an interest in Sir Winston Churchill, according to Russell Rothstein, quoted in the January 9th Daily Telegraph: “Churchill’s long-standing support of Zionism and friendship with the Jewish people make it particularly appropriate that the modern state of Israel have a local organisation devoted to his memory and to preserving his thoughts, words and deeds for future generations.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, added: “Churchill was very familiar with the Old Testament. He wrote about the Children of Israel who “understood and adopted ideas which even ancient Greece and Rome, for all their power, failed to comprehend. He was familiar with the Zionist ideal and supported the idea of a Jewish state.”

“Not a Zionist?”

But Israeli professor Eli Shealtiel, who claims to be a Churchill scholar, disputes Churchill’s credentials: “He was no stranger to the latent anti-Semitism of his generation and class….he lost interest in Zionism after his close friend Lord Moyne was assassinated by Stern Gang extremists in Cairo in November 1944.”

For a Churchill scholar, Professor Shealtiel offers little insight. Churchill had many close Jewish friends throughout life. He was a Zionist at least 1908, when he represented heavily Jewish Manchester North West. As Colonial Secretary in 1921 he promoted a Jewish homeland in Palestine. (Few remember the Mandate was 6/7ths Arab, comprising modern Jordan and Israel). In the 1930s he stridently spoke against Hitler’s pogroms and the British government’s anti-semitic Palestine White Paper. His speeches from 1948 to 1955 were replete with pro-Israel sentiments. Ever the optimist, he hoped for reconciliation between Arabs and Jews.

But Churchill was not an uncritical friend. Outraged when Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), Minister Resident in Cairo, was shot with his driver by members of the terrorist Stern Gang (Lehi) on 5 November 1944, Churchill wanted Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to ensure that the Jewish Agency “do all in their power to suppress these terrorist activities.” Martin Gilbert’s official biography, volume 7, Road to Victory, records his speech to the Commons at that time: “If there is to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism, these wicked activities must cease, and those responsible for them must be destroyed root and branch.”

“Anti-Semitic”?

The Israeli E-zine Haaretz further quotes Shealtiel as saying “Churchill made a number of anti-Semitic statements.” Which statements, and when? One can’t reply to this sort of unattributed, unspecific, unsubstantiated er, mishegas.

On his 75th birthday Churchill received a message from David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: “Your words and your deeds are indelibly engraved in the annals of humanity. Happy the people that has produced such a son.”