World War I Archives - Richard M. Langworth

“Rats in a Hole”: Churchill’s Apology

12 May 2015

Imagine if the President of the United States declared, “We will dig out terrorists ‘like rats in a hole.” Many would applaud and think maybe they had misjudged him. Or would they?

A colleague sends an exchange in the House of Commons on 7 March 1916. “Colonel Churchill,” recently returned from the Front but still a Member of Parliament, was speaking about the naval war with Germany. British naval planners must provide, Churchill was saying,

against what will be a continually increasing element of the unknown. I must also just point out another argument which shows that, great as were the anxieties with which we were faced in the first four months of the War, they have not by any means been removed, or, indeed, sensibly diminished by the course of events.…

Dardanelles Then, Afghanistan Now: Apples and Oranges

4 July 2009

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Professor Andrew J. Bacevich considered the war in Afghanistan against Churchill’s experience in World War I. Churchill, he says, looked for alternatives to “sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders.” Just so. And we should be looking for alternatives to chewing dust in Afghanistan.

Bacevich describes Churchill’s alternative as “an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles.” (That is a physical impossibility.) Churchill championed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, followed by an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula). Bacevich adds that Churchill wished to “support the infantry with tanks.”…