(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.

In our electronic Speaker’s Corner (the Internet), Winston Churchill is beset by haters. Their knee-jerk spouts are laced with out-of-context quotes and preconceived notions. Call it Churchill Derangement Syndrome. Where is the truth? Perhaps we need a Derangement Index. Click on “A” for Aryan Supremacy, “B” for the Bengal Famine, etc. A handy reference to every derangement you can access with a couple of clicks.

An e-zine called This is Local London, describing its offerings as “quality local journalism,” is a standard example. Well, maybe not so standard. “The Problem with Glorying Winston Churchill” was written not by a historian or researcher, but a student at Wallington County Grammar School. If this what they’re teaching in British grammar schools, the Prime Minister has a bigger problem than Brexit.

It’s a tongue-lashing for the ages. “Blind worship and romanticisation [sic] of Churchill…is dangerous to our understandings of race and understanding” [sic]. Especially given “the harrowing reality.” What is that? Why, you doofus, it’s Churchill’s “virulent racism, sympathy for fascist and extremist ideology.” Yet—can you believe it?—we still airbrush his “horrible actions and distasteful racist, xenophobic venom.” Why do we glorify “this self-identified white supremacist as a figure worthy of acclaim?”

Derangement Primer

Herein we encapsulate this episode of Churchill Derangement in alphabetical order. Young Reporter’s accusations are in italics. Incorrect, unsourced, inaccurate or otherwise false quotes are marked with curly brackets {like this}. They are not worthy of quotemarks.

“A” is for Aryans

Churchill’s conviction of the {superiority of the Aryan race} “is starkly reminiscent of Hitler’s.” Churchill said whites were ‘a stronger race, a higher grade race.’ ” Churchill’s “almost Nazi belief that ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’…compelled him to engage in a number of imperial conquests.”

First, question: What imperial conquests?  Churchill said “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph” in 1901 when he was 27, the Empire long established. He spoke of “a higher grade race” to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937. Hardly reminiscent of Hitler and his plan for genocide. (N.B.: Unfortunately for him 100 years later, Churchill often said “race” when he meant “nation.” Just as he said “poison gas” when he meant tear gas—in retrospect, a bad gaffe.)

In “today’s political climate” such words sound bad. But saying “everybody thought that way in 1901 or 1937” is a poor defense of Churchill. The real defense does exist.  Anybody can read it. Perhaps “Young Reporter” should read it:

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist…. You can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense. The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights. Therefore to say that Winston Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

“B” is for Bengal Famine

“Churchill orchestrated the Bengal famine, exporting grain and being responsible for the unnecessary deaths of four million Indians.”

This vicious, tired, and hackneyed accusation has been a routine derangement since an ill-researched book made the claim a decade ago. That book was reviewed by the distinguished Gandhi biographer Arthur Herman: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine would have been Worse.” How so? All you have to do is read.

“D” is for Dung Eaters

Churchill also likened the Palestinians to {barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung}, Young Reporter writes..

This derangement is based on hearsay, though I wouldn’t dispute the context. Michael Makovsky, in his excellent work Churchill’s Promised Land, credited Malcolm MacDonald, then colonial secretary: “He told me I was crazy to help the Arabs, because they were a backward people who ate nothing but camel dung.” Makovsky wrote: “While these might not have been Churchill’s exact words the gist of the comment jibed with what he had thought of the Palestinian Arabs at least since encountering them in the early 1920s.” So Churchill had his prejudices—which didn’t stop him from urging fair treatment of Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

“E” is for Eugenics

Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races and warned the Prime Minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin, not to appoint him to Cabinet as his views on race and eugenics were so thoroughly antiquated and morally reprehensible.

Not much derangement here. Yes, circa 1912, young Churchill had a fling with Eugenics. He abandoned it within two years. Deciding it was an affront to civil liberties, he never spoke of it again. Churchill never warned Baldwin not to appoint him—from the mid-1930s he desperately wanted to be appointed. Baldwin excluded Churchill for his incessant rearmament demands. My book, Churchill and the Avoidable War, spends several chapters on all this. I would be happy to make a gift of it to Young Reporter—provided he promised to read it. By all accounts Baldwin was more of a white supremacist than Churchill.

 “G” is for Gallipoli

“Churchill was also at the helm of the diabolical Gallipoli campaign during World War II, in which tens of thousands of British civilians died unnecessarily as a result of Churchill’s needless competence.”

Yes, Young Reporter did say “World War II” and “needless competence.” He means World War I and needless incompetence. But Churchill’s diabolical helmsmanship was over the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli. He neither planned nor directed the disastrous Gallipoli landings. Also, he learned from his mistakes. After World War II he wrote of the Dardanelles: “…a supreme enterprise was cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and cardinal operation of war from a subordinate position. Men are ill-advised to try such ventures. This lesson had sunk into my nature.” Some derangement.

“H” is for Hitler

Churchill’s “sympathy for fascist ideology” begins with Hitler. In 1935, he wrote: “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 wrote that in the Evening Standard on 17 September 1937, after he had been attacked by the Nazi press as an enemy of Germany. He said he’d been wronged, mentioning all his overtures to Germany after World War I. These included shipping food to blockaded Hamburg, repatriating prisoners, opposing France’s invasion of the Ruhr, and so on.

Before the sentence quoted, he wrote: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement.” At the time, Churchill was walking on eggs. His article had to clear the Foreign Office, anxious not to insult dear old Adolf. Even so, there is nothing that suggests “sympathy for fascist ideology.” In fact, Churchill had Hitler’s number from the get-go. You can look it up.

“I” is for Indians

“Churchill openly admitted his visceral hatred of Indians, referring to them as ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion,’ and that it was their fault for dying in the famine because they ‘bred like rabbits’ and because they were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans….’ Leo Amery, British Secretary of State for India, said Churchill ‘didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s’ {regarding race and eugenics}. “But, whilst there is mostly a general consensus that Hitler is a white supremacist, authoritarian mass murdering [expletive deleted], this tag is similarly applicable to Churchill.”

Churchill Derangement has a feast of words here. WSC did make those outbursts, frustrated with disputatious demands from Delhi in the midst of all-out war. William F. Buckley put them in context: “I don’t doubt that the famous gleam came to his eyes when he said this, with mischievous glee—an offense, in modem convention, of genocidal magnitude.” Indeed so.

Amery did say that to Churchill, “which annoyed him no little.” It was Amery’s job to plead India’s case—and Churchill’s to set priorities in a war to the death. Yet in the end, Arthur Herman explained: “Even Amery admitted…the ‘unassailable’ case against diverting vital war shipping to India.” Churchill’s appointment of Field Marshal Wavell as Viceroy ultimately eased India’s famine. “Far from a racist conspiracy to break the country, the Viceroy noted that ‘all the Dominion Governments are doing their best to help.’”

This is the same Churchill who wrote of the 2.5 million-volunteer Indian Army: “the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.” Was that derangement?

“K” is for Kurds

Churchill “was a man who advocated gassing the Kurds and who declared himself ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.’”

This Golden Oldie has been around longer even than the Bengal famine nonsense. The quote is easy trap for the gullible—if they don’t read the surrounding words…

It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. [Italics mine.]

For those of you in Rio Linda, or Wallington County Grammar School, “lachrymatory gas” is tear gas. 

“L” is for Landslide (1945)

“It is telling that as soon as those incredibly brave soldiers returned home, they helped to vote Winston Churchill out of office in large numbers, in what was a landslide victory for the most radically left-wing Labour government in history.”

It is telling, but not in that way. In 1945, Britons voted massively for the Labour opposition (hardly the most radical in history). Not because of Churchill, who was handily reelected. Voters rejected the Conservative Party, which who had brought them a decade of appeasement and war. And for Labour, which promised a grand future. “I wouldn’t call it [ingratitude],” Churchill said. “They have had a very hard time.”

“M” is for Mussolini 

Churchill was “a raving supporter of Mussolini.” He said {fascism has rendered a service to the entire world}. And: “If I were Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”

My book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, devotes a chapter to “Mussolini, Law-Giver and Jackal.” Churchill did praise Musso twice. The first time (correctly quoted above), was in 1927, when WSC was Chancellor of the Exchequer. His aim was to get Il Duce to cough up the Italian war debt. (He did get some of it.) The second was in 1940 when he tossed a few bouquets at the Italian, hoping he wouldn’t join the war with Hitler. He failed. For Churchill, Mussolini then became the “whipped jackal” yelping at the side of “the German tiger.” Early on, of course, lots of people who feared Leninism were praising Mussolini. But Churchill and the Italians delivered the final verdict. They must have suffered from Mussolini Derangement.

“N” is for Nuking the Soviets

“Churchill wanted to inflict nuclear holocaust on Soviet Union in peacetime,” Young Reporter breathlessly asserts.

The truth is less spectacular. Shortly after the war, Churchill speculated privately about taking out the Soviets in a nuclear strike. He said as much to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges. Often he voiced apocalyptic scenarios to visitors to gauge their reaction. He never formally proposed to bomb Moscow to American presidents or ambassadors.

Churchill’s formal statements took a different tack, as Graham Farmelo correctly wrote: “He soon softened his line. In the House of Commons he went no further than the words he used after British relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated again, in January 1948: the best chance of avoiding war was ‘to bring matters to a head with the Soviet Government…to arrive at a lasting settlement.’” He sought that settlement through 1955. When it continued to elude him, he retired as prime minister.

“O” is for Ordinary People

“Churchill just didn’t have the interests of ordinary working classes, or indeed anyone, other than a narrow circle of middle-class straight white men at heart.”

Granted, it was pretty hard to spot non-white folks in 1904 Britain, when Churchill began being called a “traitor to his class.” (Speaking of derangement.) Why? Because Churchill, and Lloyd George, instituted the most sweeping anti-poverty legislation in British history. Taxation, old age pensions, unemployment benefits, widows and orphans support—all initiatives of the great reforming Liberal governments. Churchill was in the vanguard. He shared an understanding of the actual causes of poverty, wrote Malcolm Hill: He did not believe the state should take all responsibility for retirement, education, health and welfare. But he showed “unusual stature” in his efforts to mitigate poverty.

Ordinary people? Churchill said in 1944: “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.” Game, set and match.

“P” is for Prejudice

“Churchill’s rampant racial prejudice was considered backwards [sic], even by Victorian standards,” writes Young Reporter. “Indeed, even at the time, Churchill was seen as extremist in his ideology and at the most brutal and racist end of the British imperialist spectrum.”

By whom? Is this the same Winston Churchill who in 1899 argued with his Boer jailer in Pretoria about equal rights for black Africans? Or the Churchill remembered kindly by Gandhi for his efforts to ease inequalities for Indians in South Africa? The Churchill who, during WW2, said Americans could segregate their black soldiers if they liked, but not the British. Read the evidence. If you still want to call Churchill a racist, by all means do. But first “dig a little deeper.”

“S” is for Savages

Churchill referred to also Egyptians as “degraded savages.” He believed Pakistanis were “deranged jihadists” whose violence was explained by a {strong aboriginal propensity to kill}.

Ah, the wonders of the partial quote. By “degraded savages” Churchill was referring to a Cairo crowd which attacked the BOAC offices in January 1952. (Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 214.) In The Story of the Malakand Field Force Churchill wrote (3): “The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour.” So… Some Egyptians are savages, but not all savages are Egyptians. Some Pakistanis have an aboriginal propensity to kill, but not all killers are Pakistanis. Do I have this right? Duh!

“T” is for Tonypandy

“Churchill sent soldiers to brutally crush the strikes of hundreds of innocent, oppressed Welsh miners in Tonypandy protesting for better rights, saying, and these were his own words: {If the Welsh are striking over hunger, then we must fill their bellies with lead.}”

This derangement has been around for 100 years. Neither the quote nor the assertion are correct. Churchill specifically forbade the use of troops unless demanded by police. The last Welsh strike leader alive, Will Mainwaring, spoke to the BBC in 1960: “We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.”

“W” is for White Supremacy

In the 1955 general election, Churchill wanted the Conservatives to promote white supremacy: “The Tories should campaign on a platform of preventing {degenerate} ‘coloured’ immigration from the West Indies, along with his suggested campaign slogan for the Tories’ 1955 General election, ‘Keep England White.’”

Right in the narrow sense, wrong in the broad. Here is the reality. “Keep England White” is hearsay. It was a diary entry by Harold Macmillan after January 1955 cabinet meeting, Macmillan wrote: “The P.M. thinks ‘Keep England White’ a good campaign slogan!”

Macmillan was not given to exaggeration, but the context matters. “The P.M. thinks…” is not a quote, nor did the words ever appear in public. Macmillan followed it with an exclamation mark, which could mean that Churchill was wise-cracking. Ask yourself: Would any astute politician, even then, seriously propose “Keep England White” as a campaign slogan?

Out of context, the words seem stark. In context, Churchill was arguing for limits on Caribbean immigration. He did not discuss other black or brown people. Is this racist? We report, you decide.

“X” is for X-Rated (No attribution or off the wall)

“Churchill claimed that China was a {barbaric nation that required British partition} to bring it into civilization.” There is no attribution for this statement in his published canon.

“This was a man, who let’s not forget… force-fed the suffragettes.” Churchill force-fed nobody, opposed female suffrage only once in Parliament (when he thought more women would vote Conservative). The rest of the time he was pro-suffrage.

Truth at last!

Churchill said of Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” In the end, happily, Young Reporter stumbles over the truth:

“It would be reductive to merely credit [defeating the Nazis] to Churchill and not the role of ordinary British citizens, our allies, the 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians who died during that war, the Americans, the French Resistance and how their blood, strength, tears and sacrifice was pivotal….”

End of unreality, welcome to reality. Churchill himself said it was the British people around the world who had the lion heart. “I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” Or as Charles Krauthammer put it:

Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies [and] the great leaders: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

Young Reporter is an earnest fellow and, like many older practitioners, convinced he’s right. He “firmly rejects” Churchill’s “overstated role,” but not his overstated sins, like “the deaths of millions” in Gallipoli. But hey, he’s very young.  Perhaps by the time he reaches A-levels he’ll have developed the curiosity, and integrity, to read a bit more widely.

David Riddle, a National Trust volunteer at Chartwell, gave me the background of the “Butterfly House” Churchill established to propagate the insects on the grounds of his home:

The Butterfly House was first used as a game larder between 1869 and 1889 by the Colquhoun family, who owned Chartwell between 1830 and 1922, when Churchill bought the estate. Two years later Philip Tilden, his architect, converted the larder to a summer house by removing the east wall. In 1946 it was converted to a Butterfly House. Churchill used it for raising caterpillars and chrysalises. He received advice from butterflies expert L. Hugh Newman, who owned a “butterfly farm” in nearby Sidcup. Lady Churchill planted buddleia, lavender and other nectar-rich flowers in order to encourage the butterflies. Sir Winston changed the walk from gravel to turf and stepping stones in 1950.

Butterflies: A Lifetime Interest

Churchill became fascinated with butterflies as a young officer stationed in India, where they were colorful and prolific. Years later, in 1939, and again after the war, he determined to propagate them at Chartwell. L. Hugh Newman, as David Riddle states, was his chief supplier.

Ronald Golding, Churchill’s Scotland Yard detective during 1946-47, told me an amusing episode involving Newman’s first visit to Churchill:

He took the breeder for a walk round the grounds and gave a general idea of his plans. The expert then gave advice and went into technical details. Mr. Churchill said very little. Rather like a penny dropping in the butterfly man’s mind, you could almost hear him thinking: “Ah, I’ve got the old boy. He’s not nearly as clever as I thought. This is one sphere in which I know a lot more than he does.”

Mr. Newman became just the slightest bit patronizing and boomf! Mr. Churchill came back at him with very lucid comments showing that he was fully acquainted with everything being said. Visibly shaken, the expert never tried to “talk down” again. It was a pattern of conversation I’d noticed with other experts. I can’t help feeling that Mr. Churchill pretended ignorance to a certain extent, then came down like a ton of bricks if there was any attempt to patronize him.

A very successful scheme was put in hand and some of the rarest butterflies and moths of the greatest beauty were hatched out. By careful provision of the right flowers and bushes, the butterflies were kept well fed.

“In Durance Vile”

Churchill’s daughter Lady Soames was not sure when he stopped raising butterflies, but it might have been after an event described by longtime Chartwell secretary and administrator Grace Hamblin, at a 1987 Churchill Conference:

He had a little hut in the garden, which is still there. In those days he had the front covered with gauze, with a gauze door opening into it. A nearby butterfly farm sent him chrysalises. which he liked to see develop. One morning, I was with him spreading out the chrysalises. Upon leaving the little hut, he left the door open. I said, “Did you want to leave the door open, or should I close it?” He said, “I can’t bear this captivity any longer!” Thus we no longer kept butterflies, but they are supposed to remain in the garden once you start. It’s a lovely occupation. When he knew that Chartwell would eventually go to the National Trust and be open to the public he said, “I hope the National Trust will grow plenty of buddleia for my butterflies.”

This charming story reminds us of Churchill’s hatred of imprisonment. In his autobiography, he writes of being jailed by the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, in a chapter entitled, “In Durance Vile.” Ten years later as Home Secretary, he strove to avoid imprisoning people for trivial offenses and was ahead of his time in his ideas about rehabilitating inmates.

Herein, some edits of the edits, which diverged slightly from the draft. The published subtitle was, “Here’s betting he would have loved America’s new embassy.” (Never bet on what Churchill might love or not love.) It’s worth noting that the U.S. Embassy is in West Jerusalem. In a settlement, there could also be an Arab seat of government in East Jerusalem. RML

Britain and Israel

Prince William landed in Israel June 25th for the first royal visit to the country. In many respects this marks a historic British recommitment. Churchill’s resolve nearly a century ago ensured that an Israel would exist.

British support of Israel is largely attributed to Arthur James Balfour, for whom the Balfour Declaration is named. By it, Britain backed a “Jewish national home” after the end of World War I. But few know or note that Winston Churchill contributed more to what became Israel than Arthur Balfour. His words to the House of Commons, spoken on American Independence Day, 1922, saved the national home from extinction.

Controversy over the creation of a Jewish state had been building for several years before Churchill made his case on the 4th of July. The Zionist movement, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, strove to reestablish a Jewish community in that part of Palestine which was the ancient homeland of the Jews. In 1920, Churchill wrote that if “there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State…an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial.”

Not everyone agreed. Britain had fought the war in part to defeat the Ottoman Empire. Arabs, many argued, should rule there exclusively.

Mandate of Palestine

In the peace that followed World War I, the new League of Nations provided legal status, called “mandates,” for territories transferred from the control of one country to another. The League defined mandates as “waypoints toward independence.” Cynics said it was a polite term for colony-building. Britain received the Mandate of Palestine, including what is now Jordan and Israel. Its capital was Jerusalem.

As colonial secretary in 1921, Churchill established Jordan in six-sevenths of the Mandate and backed a Jewish homeland in the remainder, where the Zionists had largely settled. “One principle of the Balfour declaration,” he told a Jewish delegation, “is that the process of the establishment of a national home for the Jews is to be without prejudice or unfairness to the Arab and Christian inhabitants.” (See Warren Dokter, Churchill and the Islamic World.) Many in Parliament objected. In 1922, they tried to cancel the Balfour Declaration — with warnings that sound remarkably familiar.

In 1922, two-thirds of the House of Lords voted to reject Balfour’s promise, declaring that a Jewish homeland was unacceptable “to the sentiments and wishes of the great majority of the people of Palestine.” The Arabs, said Lord Sydenham, a former colonial administrator, “would never have objected to the establishment of more colonies of well-selected Jews; but, instead of that, we have dumped down 25,000 promiscuous people on the shores of Palestine…. What we have done is… to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Pushback

In a bravura performance in the House of Commons on 4 July 1922, Churchill turned things around, hurling the earlier words of doubters back at them. Lord Sydenham, he noted, had earlier hoped “…to free Palestine from the withering blight of Turkish rule, and to render it available as the national home of the Jewish people, who can restore its ancient prosperity.”

The Conservative stalwart Sir John Butcher, Churchill said, “has just addressed us in terms of biting indignation.” Then he quoted what Butcher had said in 1917: “I trust the day is not far distant when the Jewish people may be free to return to the sacred birthplace of their race, and to establish in the ancient home of their fathers a great, free, industrial community….”

Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a popular Tory and future government minister, had led the attack on the Balfour Declaration. Churchill flung back at “Jix” his words from 1917: “I will do all in my power to forward the views of the Zionists, in order to enable the Jews once more to take possession of their own land.” Churchill concluded: “If, over the portals of the new Jerusalem, you are going to inscribe the legend, ‘No Israelite need apply,’ then I hope the House will permit me to confine my attention exclusively to Irish matters.”

Turnback

It was, as the historian Paul Johnson wrote, “one of [Churchill’s] greatest speeches.” And it had the intended effect. The House of Commons voted 292-35 to continue Balfour’s Palestine policy, reversing the House of Lords. Johnson considers the speech a watershed: “Without Churchill, it is very unlikely that Israel would ever have come into existence.”

In 1922, Churchill rejected a demand by Arabia’s King Ibn Saud to stop Jews from settling in Palestine. He proposed a compromise, allowing immigration based on Palestine’s economic capacity. As a result, 400,000 Jews escaped from Europe before World War II.

In 1939 Churchill opposed a British white paper again attempting to slow immigration. In 1941, he exempted Palestine from the Atlantic Charter. This declared the right of all peoples to the government of their choice. He explained to President Roosevelt that the Arabs would claim a majority and block Jewish immigration.

Aftermath

Churchill retained sympathy for Arab aspirations and was not unafraid to criticize Jewish extremism. Outraged when his friend Lord Moyne, British minister of state in Cairo, was killed by Stern Gang (Lehi) militants in 1944, he urged Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to suppress extremism, lest Zionism only produce “a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany.” Weizmann agreed.

Churchill’s speeches after the founding of Israel were consistently supportive. On his 75th birthday, he 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.”

In 2015, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance in New York celebrated Churchill’s

everlasting love and affection for the Jewish people.… Over 600 people watched with an awe that transcends generations…. [This] signaled gratitude to a family that bore much criticism, heartache and professional consequence for its steadfast support of our people and our national home.

Nearly 110 years ago, Churchill said, “Jerusalem must be the [Jews’] only ultimate goal. When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy… That it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.”For Britain as for America, it looks as though that day has arrived. But let us remember to whom we are really indebted for these achievements.

Churchill on Smoking

The journalist and broadcaster Collin Brooks wrote a sprightly essay, “Churchill the Conversationalist,” in Charles Eade‘s collection of articles, Churchill by His Contemporaries. (This 1953 book is inexpensive and well worth owning. It’s an evergreen collection of perceptive pieces on aspects of Churchill’s life and character.)

Churchill’s defense of smoking is classic, Brooks wrote. And, like much of his conversation, this too has passed from the spoken to the printed word. “Some people say that I have smoked too much,” Churchill once exclaimed. “I don’t know. If I had not smoked so much, I might have been bad-tempered at the wrong time.”

“A Second Choice”

That’s cute, but not as good as Churchill’s remarks in his 1931 article, “A Second Choice.” This was reprinted as the first essay in his book Thoughts and Adventures. Here Churchill considers whether he would make the same choices were he able to live his life again:

I remember my father in his most sparkling mood, his eye gleaming through the haze of his cigarette, saying, “Why begin? If you want to have an eye that is true, and a hand that does not quiver, if you want never to ask yourself a question as you ride at a fence, don’t smoke.”

But consider! How can I tell that the soothing influence of tobacco upon my nervous system may not have enabled me to comport myself with calm and with courtesy in some awkward personal encounter or negotiation, or carried me serenely through some critical hours of anxious waiting? How can I tell that my temper would have been as sweet or my companionship as agreeable if I had abjured from my youth the goddess Nicotine? Now that I think of it, if I had not turned back to get that matchbox which I left behind in my dug-out in Flanders, might I not just have walked into the shell which pitched so harmlessly a hundred yards ahead? [Stationed in the trenches in 1916, where he had several miraculous escapes, just managing to be missed by German shells, one of which demolished said dug-out moments after he’d left.]

Libertarian Preferences

Churchill was a libertarian on personal preferences. He abjured vegetarians, teetotalers, dieters and non-smokers, but didn’t attempt to interfere with them. In Dundee, Edwin Scrymgeour, a Scottish prohibitionist, teetotaler and non-smoker, ran against Churchill six times. He finally beat him in 1922. Churchill is alleged to have said, though I can’t confirm it, that Scrymgeour had “all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

In certain respects Churchill quite admired the socialist Stafford Cripps, a member of his wartime coalition. But he didn’t approve of Cripps’s diet: “…there is a man who habitually takes his meal off a handful of peas, and, when he gets a handful of beans, counts that his Christmas feast.”

To his Minister of Food Lord Woolton in July 1940, concerned about too severely imposing wartime rationing, Churchill wrote:

Almost all the food faddists I have ever known, nut-eaters and the like, have died young after a long period of senile decay.…The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes, etc., washed down on gala occasions with a little lime-juice.

So would Churchill legalize the growing and smoking of pot? Of course we have no idea. But on the whole, given what we know about his attitudes toward life, it’s more likely than not.

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

“If Putin likes Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset, not a liability. Now I don’t know that I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do. But there’s a good chance I won’t.”     —Donald Trump, 2017

Russia National Interests

Trump-Churchill comparisons are invidious and silly. After all, we’re not working with the same raw material. But their two statements are oddly congruent. Churchill’s Russian experience has something to offer the President as he embarks on his own attempt—fraught as it may be—at a modus operandi with Mr. Putin.

In the 1930s Churchill had to decide which was the greater threat: Stalin’s Soviet Union, whose tyranny was still confined to its borders; or the Greater German Reich, which had by 1939 swallowed the Saarland, the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and was threatening Poland.

Churchill’s study of history held the answer: Britain had always backed the second strongest powers on the European continent: France, of course…and Russia.

“Historic life interests”

Ever the deft rhetorician, Churchill was unafraid to criticize “Soviet” economics, but foresaw the need to appeal to “Russian” national interests in the coming confrontation with Hitler. To paraphrase Churchill, “It cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia,” Churchill said in 1939, “that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of South-Eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.”

Accordingly, earlier in 1939, after Prime Minister Chamberlain had issued a belated guarantee to defend Poland, Churchill cornered Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador. Adopting what today seems almost Trumpist language, he asked the ambassador for his support:

Look here Mr. Ambassador, if we are to make a success of this new policy we require the help of Russia. Now I don’t care for your system and I never have, but the Poles and the Romanians like it even less. Although they might be prepared at a pinch to let you in, they would certainly want some assurances that you would eventually get out.

Maisky liked this blunt approach and conveyed Churchill’s views to Moscow. Alas Churchill was out of power, and Chamberlain—not without reason—regarded Stalin as a thug. He sent low-level negotiators to Moscow, to hint at some vague future agreement. Hitler sent his foreign minister. The resultant Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact left Germany free to attack Poland, and World War II was on.

“Favourable reference to the Devil”

When the two tyrants fell out and Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, Churchill, now prime minister, reverted to type, promising Moscow all-out support. An aide reminded him of the dreadful things he’d said about communists. Churchill growled: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Again he pursued the main objective: victory.

Churchill’s Russian experience was stony. In the war, he failed to save the Balkans and central Europe from the onrushing Red Army. He did save Greece, and foster a semi-independent Yugoslavia. Given the military situation, it was the best he could do with the prevailing situation.

Of the Russians, he said in 1946: “There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness. But he qualified that in 1951: “I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.”

It’s Still National Interest

Churchill never abandoned his idea of appealing to national interests. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he urged “a meeting at the summit,” but Eisenhower resisted. Russia might have a new dress, the President declared, but “there was the same whore underneath it.” Even Ike spoke like Donald Trump on occasion.

Well, it cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia that ISIS should plant itself upon the shores of the Mediterranean, or that it should overrun Syria and subjugate the Iraqi peoples. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia. There lies a Churchillian opportunity.

Mr. Trump believes he can work with the Muscovites. So too did Churchill, when his country’s fate hung in the balance. Churchill met with little enough success. But when he did, it was when he dangled “national interest” in front of the Russians.

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.

Seventy-five years ago today, Winston Churchill was pondering survival. Hitler gripped Europe from France to deep inside Russia. Nazi U-boats were strangling British shipping; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing on Suez. Britain’s only ally beside the Empire/Commonwealth, the Red Army, was fighting before Moscow. America remained supportive…and aloof.

Eighteen months earlier he had become prime minister. No one else had wanted the task. “God alone knows how great it is,” he muttered, his eyes filling. “I hope that it is not too late.”

On the evening of December 7th, despondent over odds against him, Churchill was alerted to a radio broadcast. The Japanese had attacked the American fleet in Hawaii. Quickly he telephoned Washington: “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?”

“It’s quite true,” came the booming voice of his friend across the Atlantic. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor….We are all in the same boat now.” A supreme climacteric had occurred. For generations, Americans would ask where they were on December 7th, as we do now for 9/11.

“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,” Churchill wrote:

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!…Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

Pearl Harbor not only awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve (as Admiral Yamamoto is said to have observed). It welded an enduring relationship among the English-speaking Peoples. Today we call it the Anglosphere: the great democracies—and by that I mean to include India—which share to a great extent the same values, the same ideals.

What are they? Churchill defined them: “Common conceptions of what is right and decent; a marked regard for fair play; especially to the weak and poor; a stern sentiment of impartial justice; and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law’—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking Peoples.”

To know the present, know the past

Churchill’s wisdom is Hillsdale College’s privilege, as publisher of his official biography, to refract. Every day we pour through his archive, spanning fifty years of global prominence. Every day we are struck, as biographer Martin Gilbert before us, “by the truth of his assertions, the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals, his humanity, and, most remarkable of all, his foresight.”

He was right, of course, 75 years ago. We were saved after all. “We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands. Let no man underrate our energies, our potentialities and our abiding power for good.”

The spirit of common purpose which Britain, America and the Commonwealth forged in 1941 serves today in countless relationships: commercial, economic, political, military: a fresh focus on national security in an un-national world. Whether the challenge is tyranny or globalization, fanaticism or free trade, our past is the key to our future. And hanging together, as the patriot Richard Penn said, is preferable to hanging separately.

Raymond Seitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, likes to picture the park bench in London where a sculptor placed a life-size bronze of Churchill and Roosevelt sitting together, smiling and shooting the breeze:

“They may be talking about where matters stand and how to handle things. They may be doing in someone’s reputation. Or maybe they’re recollecting that day a long time ago when they heard about Pearl Harbor and strapped their nations together in joint purpose. And maybe they’re saying that, even if today the ocean is different, we’re still in the same boat.”

Let no one underrate our energies, our potentialities, and our abiding power for good.

“The Art of the Microphone”

An excellent piece on this subject was by Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965), the BBC’s first war correspondent and later its leading TV news commentator. His “Churchill the Broadcaster” is in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953). Old as it is, the book remains a comprehensive set of essays of the many specialized attributes of WSC.

Dimbleby offers four areas of discussion: the technical background, the drama of World War II, the factual material, and Churchill’s methods of delivery.

Dimbleby provides detail about how the BBC handled the wartime broadcast, which originated in vastly different places, from commodious Chequers (the PM’s official country residence) to the cramped confines of the underground Cabinet War Rooms.

“Be Quiet—Churchill’s Broadcasting”

“Churchill had a ready-made, keen, sympathetic audience,” Dimbleby wrote:

He had created enormous national confidence in himself. The great majority of the people—there were, of course, his opponents—trusted him, supported him and were avid for anything he had to say, even if his major promises were of “blood, toil tears and sweat.” Here, they felt, was a man who would say what had to be said, however unpleasant it was, and who would always hold out some hope of better things.

Of course the man himself was deeply conscious of this waiting audience, of the fact that he was speaking with authority, with a full private knowledge of the truth….

It was not only in Britain or the countries of her allies that people hung on Churchill’s words. I was told recently by a German broadcasting official who worked at Hamburg during the war that he walked into the offices one night and found normal work at a standstill. Even William Joyce, then in the full foul flood of his radio oratory as “Haw Haw,” was away from his desk. Asking what was up, the official was told to be quiet—“Churchill’s broadcasting.”

Broadcast Consistency

Churchill’s “magic of word and phrase, the forceful delivery, the mastery of language that made each of his great wartime broadcasts a pageant,” Dimbleby continued. Ironically, Churchill’s transgressions of the rules were what made him so good:

…he breaks every accepted rule of broadcasting….He drops his voice where he should raise it, he alters the recognised system of punctuation to suit himself (some of his scripts were virtually unintelligible to anyone else), he speaks much of the time with anything but clarity. Yet such is his power as an orator, and such his feeling of the public pulse, that during the war years he was sure of a silent and appreciative audience of millions, following every word and phrase with relish.

Churchill was also consistent over the years. His patterns of speech never changed. During a lecture, Dimbleby played Churchill’s very first 1909 published recording, on the Liberal Government’s budget:

There was no need for me to announce the speaker, for the first half-dozen words established his identity. The passage of nearly half a century has made virtually no difference to the voice, except to deepen and thicken it slightly. The same faint sing-song is there and the same lilting cadences, though there is never a cadence where you might expect it, at the end of a sentence. Generally the voice goes up, leaving the listener with the feeling that the sentence has not really ended at all.

These techniques were features of the special talent Churchill laid on his palimpsest of oratory. What was the real key? Dimbleby said it was “mastery of the English language.” Churchill loved words, especially in broadcasts, when he was not there to be seen to gesture or to grimace to aid his delivery. It was all based on words alone:

“Purblind Worldlings”

The historian will not fail to note that description of Mussolini as “this whipped jackal, frisking at the side of the German tiger…..” Von Ribbentrop was “that prodigious contortionist.” Those who dared to ask what Britain was fighting for were “thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings.”

The actions of Russia in October 1939, as they seemed Churchill, were “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But there was no puzzlement about the character of “Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption.” Then there were the neutral States, each one of which “hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” The crocodile was seen in another form when it turned upon Russia in June 1941…. “Now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanised armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.”

Those were fighting words, Dimbleby continued: words that made men and women in the midst of all-out war chuckle, knowing they were “exactly what they themselves would have liked to say”:

And when Britain stood alone after the fall of France, how magnificent was that sentence, “Faith is given to us, to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny.”

This was surely the art of the microphone, or the art of the orator adapted to the microphone, at a level higher than had ever been reached before or has ever been attained since.

Whatever have been Churchill’s fate in the years after the war, Dimbleby concluded—whatever public utterances he might yet make— “he will always be remembered by the people of Britain for the way in which he spoke to them in their homes when death was very near.”

Bibliography of Recordings

The first-ever bibliography of Churchill’s recordings (which include speeches and readings from his war memoirs) has been posted by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, compiled by Ronald Cohen, author of the seminal Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill.

Mr. Cohen’s new list includes the 1909 Budget speech Dimbleby alluded to, which was published in the then-new flat disc format that, in the 1920s, replaced the roller form of recording. That was, of course, a speech, not a broadcast. Broadcasting in Britain began in June 1920.

Churchill’s first broadcast, his hilarious speech about “St. George and the Dragon,” for St. George’s Day 1933, may be the earliest speech to be broadcast and recorded. Part of his remarks can be heard online: click here. I can’t help reflecting how relevant they seem, with relation to the recent nuclear deal with Iran.

In the October 19th presidential debate, Mr. Trump said the U.S. and Iraqis forfeited “the element of surprise” in publicizing the coming offensive against Mosul. This, he insisted, allowed Islamic State ringleaders to remove themselves from the danger zone: “Douglas MacArthur, George Patton [must be] spinning in their graves when they see the stupidity of our country.” Earlier in the week he had asked: “Why don’t we just go in quietly, right? They used to call it a sneak attack.”

The New York Times, ever watchful for gaffes by Mr. Trump, jumped on this comment: “Donald Trump is Wrong on Mosul Attack, Experts Say.” Their article was not all wrong, but I’m not sure its ideas are Churchillian.

I am not comparing Trump with Churchill. (We aren’t working with the same raw materials.)The question I pose is: was Churchill right about keeping mum over operations like Mosul?

Mosul Redux

Here is the essence of the Times’s critique of Trump on Mosul:

• Mr. Trump’s armchair generalship revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of Iraqi politics, military warfare—and even some of the most famous campaigns commanded by MacArthur and Patton.

Try to think of which of their attacks were ballyhooed three weeks in advance. MacArthur’s Inchon landings in the Korean War, Patton’s shortcuts to Palermo and Messina in the battle for Sicily, are examples of campaigns kept very quiet beforehand. They would have been far less successful had they been announced in advance.

We may think of more. Normandy, as the site of the World War II D-Day landings, is of course the biggie. Hitler knew an attack was coming. Thanks to secrecy, he did not know when or where.

• Unlike the top-secret raid by American commandos to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, there are many good reasons to foreshadow an impending ground offensive, like Mosul, mainly to reduce civilian casualties, isolate the enemy and instill fear within its ranks, military scholars and retired commanders said.

There is a difference between a commando raid and a major ground offensive. But the “many good reasons” to pre-announce the attack on Mosul are questionable. Mosul civilians have nowhere to go. It’s not like they’re living next to an on-ramp for I-95 with a BMW in the garage. I.S. fighters are demonstrably afraid of nothing. Advance warnings gave them extra weeks to complete and provision their underground tunnel network.

They and Us

• Ever since Iraq’s second-largest city fell to Islamic State fighters in June 2014, American and Iraqi officials have made no secret of their larger goal to recapture Mosul. It has been a political imperative for Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, to rally public support for an Iraqi-led military campaign to reclaim cities such as Tikrit, Ramadi, Falluja and, the major prize now, Mosul.

This is ivory tower commentary which supposes that “they” are like “us.” And that “Iraqi public support” actually matters. What is remarkably absent from news accounts so far is that so many units we see attacking Mosul are flying Kurdish not Iraqi flags. When so identified, they are glossed over by the implication that Kurds and Iraqis are brothers in arms. They are anything but. What will happen if Mosul falls and they get on to its future administration was perhaps an important question to be considered in advance. What are the odds that it was?

• Moreover, it would be impossible to hide a force of about 30,000 Iraqi and Kurdish troops that have been massing for weeks on the outskirts of Mosul, gradually encircling the city while conducting artillery fire and airstrikes to soften up enemy defenses in advance of the main ground offensive.

How hard would it have been to obscure preparations, given an enemy with no air force, no serious surveillance and no satellites? Obviously, as the circle tightened, they would realize what’s going on. But proclamations weeks in advance only enable the ringleaders to clear out, and the remainder to set up human shields with innocent civilians.

Mixed Messages

• Before this week’s offensive, Iraqi warplanes dropped thousands of leaflets and Mr. Abadi broadcast into the city, urging Mosul residents to hunker down, if they could, to avoid getting caught in the crossfire or adding to the sea of refugees already gathering outside the city and surrounding areas.

As if the poor devils will be walking around the streets when the attack moves to the city. If thought has been given to “escape routes” (believe that when you see them), the idea is commendable. But how does that jibe with dropping leaflets telling civilians to stay put? Seems a conflicted strategy—which is not surprising given the combination of 21st century military operations with what passes for same in the Iraqi army.

Expert Testimony

• “What this shows is Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy,” said Jeff McCausland, a retired Army colonel and former dean at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

He may be right; I will not reflect on who, exactly, knows about military strategy. But Col. McCausland recently retweeted, “Thank-you Robert Deniro,” who delivered a Trump-like rant that compares nicely with some of Trump’s own. So we know where he’s coming from.

• …the reverence of Patton and MacArthur, and Mr. Trump’s military assessment, do not impress national security historians like Richard H. Kohn, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina: “I don’t think it really demonstrates any understanding of warfare.”

Professor Kohn is a distinguished scholar, but this is his only quote. His presence in the discussion is one reason why I believe the article is worth considering. But it’s another expert who gets most of the ink….

• Robert Scales, a retired Army major general and former commandant of the Army War College, said the unfolding Mosul campaign is a course in Military Operations 101 that American and Iraqi armies have followed for years. A large allied force…peels away the outlying towns and villages, all the while opening an escape route for refugees….

“The American and Iraqi armies” implies that they are equal in resources, ability, leadership, strategy and fortitude. Last March in villages near Mosul, the Iraqi army turned and fled.

• “There are over a million innocents in the city so you want to give them an opportunity to take cover or to leave,” said General Scales. “If you kill too many civilians, the political outcome is a disaster.”

On 10 March 2015 General Scales said of the war in Ukraine: “The only way the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians—killing so many Russians that even Putin’s media can’t hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags.”

What Churchill Thought

The Times article glossed over the heart of the critique—that we are, in general, forever inclined to bloviate in advance on what we’re going to do. It is quite true, in fact, that fighting wars like a CNN broadcast is stupid. 

During World War II, Winston Churchill strongly objected to divulging tactics or strategy in advance of military operations. The Mosul controversy erupted as I was reading proofs of The Churchill Documents, May-December 1944, twentieth document volume in Churchill’s official biography, to be published next year by Hillsdale College Press. I flagged two memoranda by Churchill as pertinent to the discussion above.

I do not like press conferences, even off the record, on the eve of an important battle. Once zero hour has struck, the principles desired…should be inculcated upon the press, who should be allowed to mingle in the fighting. I have recently been perturbed at reported statements from Naples, one in the Corriere, explaining that we are about to attack. Is it really necessary to tell the enemy this? Of course, he may possibly think we are such fools that it is an obvious blind, but this is a dangerous chance to take.

—Winston S. Churchill to General Sir Hastings Ismay on the Italian campaign. Prime Minister’s Personal Minute D.144/4 (Churchill papers, 20/152), 7 May 1944

Tactics and Strategy

I recently made enquiries about a newspaper article which appeared to me to contain very dangerous forecasts about our forthcoming operations. During the course of these my attention was drawn to an official handout by AEAF [Allied Expeditionary Air Force]…which begins as follows:

“Striking again at the European invasion area, approximately 200 Ninth Air Force Marauders carried out a two-pronged attack in mid-morning today against military objectives in Northern France and an important railroad bridge near Rouen, near the northern coast of France.”

The Chief Censor requested the press to delete the first seven words but had it not been for his intervention a very dangerous breach of security would have taken place. I do not understand how such a statement could have been passed.

I shall be glad if you will make enquiries and take special steps to ensure that all those concerned realise the extreme importance of preventing the issue of any statement which might give the enemy any assistance in his efforts to discover our future intentions.

You will report the name and appointments of the officer concerned.

—Winston S. Churchill to Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory on pre-D-Day bombing. Prime Minister’s Personal Minute M.613/4 (Churchill papers, 20/152), 25 May 1944

The reader may decide whether Churchill’s wisdom applies to the fanfare preceding the attack on Mosul. It may be apposite in the future, in the mess that is Iraq. Essentially, Iraq is the former Mesopotamia, which Churchill once referred to as “Messpot.” Rather appropriate in today’s circumstances.

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.

A recent kerfuffle over draping Nazi banners on beloved British icons reminds me that this has been going on a long time and is perfectly acceptable in examining historical possiblities. Take the late Norman Longmate, who offered a gripping pastiche about what might have happened in 1940. As a result, we have a glimpse of a possible alternative.

Longmate’s Yarn on the Worst Possibility

Later that afternoon with the Germans already in Trafalgar Square and advancing down Whitehall to take their position in the rear, the enemy unit advancing across St. James’s Park made their final charge. Several of those in the Downing Street position were already dead….

At last the Bren ceased its chatter, its last magazine emptied. Churchill reluctantly abandoned the machine-gun, drew his pistol and with great satisfaction, for it was a notoriously inaccurate weapon, shot dead the first German to reach the foot of the steps. As two more rushed forward, covered by a third in the distance, Winston Churchill moved out of the shelter of the sandbags, as if personally to bar the way up Downing Street. A German NCO, running up to find the cause of the unexpected hold-up, recognised him and shouted to the soldiers not to shoot, but he was too late. A burst of bullets from a machine-carbine caught the Prime Minister full in the chest. He died instantly, his back to Downing Street, his face toward the enemy, his pistol still in his hand.

Alternate History

This chilling vision is the highlight of the Longmate’s thriller. His fancied action of a successful German invasion in 1940 is thoroughly believable, and all the more frightening. Based on a BBC television film of the same name, If Britain Had Fallen was originally conceived by Lord Chalfont, Basil Collier and Richard Wade.

It is not the first book to contemplate a German invasion and occupation of the British Isles. There was Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903), H.H. Munro’s When William Came (1913) and C.S. Forester’s If Hitler Had Invaded England (1960). But these works covered just one phase of the subject—preparations, landings, or subsequent campaigns. Longmate covered them all, and was the first author to do so.

The Plot

The first four (factual) chapters describe German and British pre-invasion activities. The last thirteen describe in “an entirely non-fictional way what the German occupation would have been like.” The author uses captured documents to show how the Germans behaved in countries and areas they occupied. Of special note are the Channel Islands—the one part of Britain they did occupy.

Only three chapters are entirely fictional. The plot here hinges on the crux of the Battle of Britain: Hermann Goering’s decision to stop attacking military targets and bomb open cities from the air. In this book, Goering behaves the opposite way. (Longmate does not allow for the actual deciding factor—an infuriated Hitler ordering London to be leveled).

So Longmate has Goering order his pilots to redouble their efforts:

Knock out the radar stations, then the forward airfields, then the main fighter stations and sector and group headquarters. Every bomb and every bullet was to be aimed at an Air Force target. The renewed attack on the radar chain took Fighter Command by surprise and soon ominous gaps were appearing on the plotting boards at 11 Group Headquarters at Uxbridge and at Fighter Command at Bentley Priory, Stanmore. …And, final proof that the RAF was losing the battle, the Stuka dive-bombers again flew far inland and got safely home.

Operation Sea Lion

Longmate next refers to German documents on “Operation Sea Lion,” and mounts the Nazi offensive on “S-Day,” 24 September 1940, in the small hours under a bright moon. Landings are made from Dover to Lyme Regis, supported by swarms of Messerschmitts and Junkers 88s, which “ranged the skies over Britain at will.” Rapidly, the Wehrmacht seals off the Kentish coast and establishes a line from Margate to Brighton. Soon the entire peninsula from Woolwich to Southampton has been occupied. The Royal Family reluctantly leaves London—followed a few weeks later by the Downing Street scene described above.

The nightmare continues. Jews are rounded up; the fascist Oswald Mosley becomes Britain’s Quisling. But I am not going to give more away here. What happens to the King and the government? What would America have done in the event? Would Canada and Australia have come to the rescue? Would the British people have come to accept the occupation—even feel hostile toward resistance fighters? Would the deportation of friends, the flying of the Swastika over Westminster, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, incite docility—or resistance? Obtain a copy and find out. This is a non-essential but thought-provoking addition to the Churchill library.

Transformers: Blenheim Palace bedizened with Nazi Swastikas? File this in the overflowing catalogue of much ado about nothing.

Blenheim Affront

On September 25th, several Churchill writers received an email: “Urgent Media Request—the Sin.” (A typo for the Sun newspaper, though ironically appropriate.)

“I’m a journalist with the Sun,” we were told by a member of their staff. “I’m working on a story in our paper tomorrow about a disgusting act which tarnishes Sir Winston Churchill’s memory.” He didn’t say what, but it was easy to guess.

The disgusting act, already blasted around via the Internet, was to drape Blenheim (“Churchill’s home” according to reports) with huge Nazi banners. This was for an episode for the fifth “Transformers” film, The Last Knight, opening next June.

Offense

Transformers huff and puff! Not only was Blenheim Churchill’s home, the Jerusalem Post informed its readers. Sir Winston himself “is buried on the grounds.” (Blenheim was never Churchill’s “home,” and he is buried in the nearby village of Bladon.)

None of us replied to this naked attempt to stir artificial uproar. A friend and colleague in London wrote: “I told the Sun when they called that I can manufacture synthetic outrage as much as the next man, but couldn’t on this occasion.”

Of course that did not stop the quality press from flogging newspapers over movieland’s affront to Churchill and Blenheim. The scene crawled with Nazi storm troopers, they reported. Why, there was even a representative German Jeep (Kübelwagen). The newspaper found two veterans to denounce the sacrilege. “I know its a film,” said a colonel who served in Afghanistan. “But it’s symbolically disrespectful to Churchill. He will be turning in his grave.” The grave in Bladon, I presume.

Some Churchill admirers joined the ruckus, saying it would mislead the young. Into what? Believing the Nazis won World War II? Even assuming the film identifies the building as Blenheim, the young are familiar with the Internet. Two or three clicks will inform them that the Germans, er, never got quite that far.

Remarkably, but perhaps typically, the Sun seems the only paper willing to publish photos of the offensive scene. It was in place only for a short time. It appears to have been shot in the dead of night. The banners were pulled down before the day trippers arrived.  Blenheim is a popular venue, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough.

Defense

“Transformers” director Michael Bay defended the shoot, claiming Churchill would in fact be pleased with the plot of The Last Knight. “People have not been fortunate enough to read the script and they don’t know that Churchill in this movie is a big hero,” he told the BBC. “Churchill would be smiling. When you see the movie, you’ll understand.”

What is the problem with using Hitleriana as a prop in some fictional story? It’s been going on for years. Back in 1972, Norman Longmate displayed a Swastika flying over the Palace of Westminster on the jacket of his alternate history, If Britain Had Fallen. Nobody was even slightly outraged. Perhaps this latest kerfuffle is a product of our all-too-ready habit of taking “offense” at anything that might disturb 0.001% of the citizenry.

Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, is always able to put nonsense in perspective. Speaking to the Guardian, he described the episode as “a completely manufactured row” and “absolutely the most dismal, idiotic story I’ve ever read….

“They do as all newspapers do,” Soames continued. “They go until they can find some wretched veteran who is prepared to say, ‘Winston would be turning into his grave.’ They’ve no idea what my grandfather would have thought!”

Transformers: What Would Churchill Think?

I know what he would have thought! Churchill loved movies. He’d be fascinated, and would greet the fiction with a guffaw as he puffed on a big cigar in his easy chair at Chartwell.

I have no particular objection to the “offensive” photo. But I won’t add to its fifteen minutes of fame. So you’ll have to click on the Sun link to see it.

Unintentionally, perhaps, the Sun included a photo of Churchill giving his famous V-sign palm-in, not palm-out. In England, this means quite something other than “Victory.” Perhaps it is appropriate to the occasion.

•Coming up: another Swastika-bedraped British icon, in my review of Norman Longmate’s alternate history, If Britain Had Fallen.

Zürich, 19 September 1946

Scarcely more than a year since fighting had ended in Europe, Churchill spoke at Zürich University. There he stunned his audience with words that perhaps only he was able to say at that time:

I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.

Zürich, 19 September 2016

Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as much as we know of it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery. For weeks afterward, his faithful lieutenants in secret ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Sadness attends our mortality, death comes to us all. Sir Winston teetered in 1953; only his inner circle knew how close he had come. The “secret” has been public now for fifty years, since publication of his doctor’s diaries in 1966. But at the time it was a secret. Not a word leaked, thanks to family, staff, and three press barons—Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose. Private secretary John Colville wrote: “They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.”

Secret Pathos

Exactly how ill the Prime Minister really was I leave to experts. At the time, many close to him thought he would die. Colville wrote: “he went downhill badly, losing the use of his left arm and left leg.” In the film Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (Bill Paterson), summoned to Downing Street, finds the PM singing incoherently: “I’m forever blowing bubbles.” Great heavens, I thought, they are going to link this to Marigold….

“Bubbles” was the favorite song of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter who died in 1921. Rarely mentioned, Marigold was buried in a corner of their hearts. With poignant flashbacks, the film unfolds their memories of the loss they still deeply felt. In a moving scene, Clementine tearfully recounts Marigold’s story to her husband’s nurse. As a device for portraying her and Winston’s humanity, this is a touch of genius.

The nurse, Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) is the film’s only fictional character. She is meant to represent “the help”—too numerous to catalogue in the space of a short film. Millie has a Yorkshire accent but her father, she tells Churchill, was Welsh: “and no fan of yours.” (WSC once allowed deployment of troops during the Welsh miners strike in 1910.) Devoted to his recovery, but always her own woman, Millie sees the job through. Confronting all challengers, she’s a perfect foil for Churchill, his wife, and their sometimes obstreperous family.

Expert Casting

Critics who say PBS dotes on British drama forget that UK theatre offers unequalled depths of talent. There are so many exceptional actors that casting lookalikes for a historical film is a relative breeze. In Churchill’s Secret, the casting is superb.

Michael Gambon is an excellent Churchill: more drawn, less cherubic, but perfect in his mannerisms and bearing. Lindsay Duncan as Clementine is almost up to the standard set by Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant alongside Albert Finney’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm” (2002)—and far superior to Sian Phillips, the great Robert Hardy’s opposite number in “The Wilderness Years” (1981).

Supporting actors are outstanding. Colville (Patrick Kennedy) and Christopher Soames (Christian McKay)—who bore the burden of state in those anxious days—could not be more lifelike. R.A. “Rab” Butler (Chris Larkin)—a Chamberlainite who had never liked and hoped to replace Churchill, whom he had hoped would retire since 1945—is the same weak reed he was in life. “I hope you don’t think of me as an enemy,” says Rab to a rapidly recovering Churchill in August. The Prime Minister replies: “I don’t think of you at all, Rab.” 

The portrayal of the Churchill children, boozing and bickering (correctly excepting Mary), is over-emphasized. These scenes are admittedly fiction. No one alive knows what really happened at Chartwell in those secret weeks. The family and staff I talked to never mentioned rows during those weeks. The film strives however to represent how the three elder children must have felt, and certainly acted, at one time or another. They had grown up under a great shadow in trying times. As Moran (perhaps wise before the fact) is made to remark: “There’s a price to pay for greatness, but the great seldom pay it themselves.” 

What Good’s a Constitution?

More time could have been spent on how Colville and Soames held the fort while the boss recovered.  Churchill once wrote a famous article, “What Good’s a Constitution?” In 1953, they must have asked themselves that question.

Today it would be impossible to keep a lid on such a secret. What they did might indeed be thought unconstitutional. Yet the nation owed a debt to those responsible lieutenants, who acted only when they knew the PM would approve. As Colville remembered:

…the administration continued to function as if he were in full control. We realised that however well we knew his policy and the way his thoughts were likely to move. We had to be careful not to allow our own judgment to be given Prime Ministerial effect. To have done so, as we could without too great difficulty, would have been a constitutional outrage. It was an extraordinary, indeed perhaps an unprecedented, situation….Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.

K.B.O.

While the testimony of insiders certainly suggests a close call, many were confident that Churchill would recover. The morning after the stroke, wrote Mary Soames, he “amazingly presided at a Cabinet meeting, where none of his colleagues thought anything was amiss.” She quoted Harold Macmillan: “I certainly noticed nothing beyond the fact that he was very white. He spoke little, but quite distinctly.” By the time he arrived at Chartwell on the 25th, he was at rock bottom. Yet a month later he was well enough to be driven the three-hour journey to Chequers, the PM’s official country house, and was resuming his literary and political work.

Churchill’s Secret is replete with Sir Winston’s famous admonition in the face of misfortune, K.B.O. (Keep Buggering On.) Amid growing calls for his retirement, he was determined to stay—long enough at least for one more try at his final goal: a permanent peace. The film is not clear about how much time elapsed between the stroke and the “test” Churchill set for himself. That was the Conservative Party Conference at Margate. There on October 10th he would have to make a major, fifty-minute speech. It was do or die: We are rushed through the weeks to Margate, actually almost four months after he was stricken.

Of course he brought the house down. Jock Colville noted: “He had been nervous of the ordeal: his first public appearance since his stroke and a fifty-minute speech at that; but personally I had no fears as he always rises to occasions. In the event one could see but little difference, as far as his oratory went, since before his illness.”

“See them off, Winston”

Some observers have faulted the portrayal of Clementine in Churchill’s Secret—not for Lindsay Duncan’s skillful acting, but for the words the script has her say. To some she seems a whiny, self-centered neurotic, the very picture given in recent biography.

I honestly didn’t have that impression. At Margate Clementine tells him firmly: “See them off, Winston.” Their daughter told me Clementine had thought in June that his life was ending. The film suggests that Lady Churchill had many regrets; and she did. She genuinely believed—and had for a long time—that he had stayed too long. “Clementine bore the brunt of all this,” Mary wrote, “and her anxiety concerning his political intentions was great.”

The film establishes a reasonably accurate picture of Lady Churchill. “None of us would be here without him,” one of his children says, “And he wouldn’t be here without you.” Winston himself tells her: “I shall face anything with you, the Tories, the Russians—even death itself.”

Unlike certain frothy popular accounts, Churchill’s Secret makes it clear that come what may, Clementine was the rock on which he depended. As he said of her on many occasions: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”