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April 27th, 2013 
Peter Nolan Churchill
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When,
in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great
question: “Who was the Man of the Century?” there is little doubt
that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably,
the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry
Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the
Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.
In
a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This
has been the century of the State of the rise and hyper-trophic
growth of the welfare-warfare state and Churchill was from first
to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare
state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring
historian has written: “Among his other claims to fame, Winston
Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state.”
Thus, while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the
end betray, this does not mean that there was no slant to his
actions, no systematic bias. There was, and that bias was towards
lowering the barriers to state power.
To
gain any understanding of Churchill, we must go beyond the heroic
images propagated for over half a century. The conventional picture
of Churchill, especially of his role in World War II, was first
of all the work of Churchill himself, through the distorted histories
he composed and rushed into print as soon as the war was over.
In more recent decades, the Churchill legend has been adopted
by an internationalist establishment for which it furnishes the
perfect symbol and an inexhaustible vein of high-toned blather.
Churchill has become, in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, a “totem”
of the American establishment, not only the scions of the New
Deal, but the neo-conservative apparatus as well politicians like
Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, corporate “knights” and other denizens
of the Reagan and Bush Cabinets, the editors and writers of the
Wall Street Journal, and a legion of “conservative” columnists
led by William Safire and William Buckley. Churchill was, as Hitchens
writes, “the human bridge across which the transition was made”
between a noninterventionist and a globalist America. In the next
century, it is not impossible that his bulldog likeness will feature
in the logo of the New World Order.
Let
it be freely conceded that in 1940 Churchill played his role superbly.
As the military historian, Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, a sharp
critic of Churchill’s wartime policies, wrote: “Churchill was
a man cast in the heroic mould, a berserker ever ready to lead
a forlorn hope or storm a breach, and at his best when things
were at their worst. His glamorous rhetoric, his pugnacity, and
his insistence on annihilating the enemy appealed to human instincts,
and made him an outstanding war leader.” History outdid herself
when she cast Churchill as the adversary in the duel with Hitler.
It matters not at all that in his most famous speech “we shall
fight them on the beaches . . . we shall fight them in the fields
and in the streets” he plagiarized Clemenceau at the time of the
Ludendorff offensive that there was little real threat of a German
invasion or, that, perhaps, there was no reason for the duel to
have occurred in the first place. For a few months in 1940, Churchill
played his part magnificently and unforgettably.
Opportunism
and Rhetoric
Yet
before 1940, the word most closely associated with Churchill was
“opportunist.” He had twice changed his party affiliation from
Conservative to Liberal, and then back again. His move to the
Liberals was allegedly on the issue of free trade. But in 1930,
he sold out on free trade as well, even tariffs on food, and proclaimed
that he had cast off “Cobdenism” forever. As head of the Board
of Trade before World War I, he opposed increased armaments; after
he became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he pushed for bigger
and bigger budgets, spreading wild rumors of the growing strength
of the German Navy, just as he did in the 1930s about the buildup
of the German Air Force. He attacked socialism before and after
World War I, while during the War he promoted war-socialism, calling
for nationalization of the railroads, and declaring in a speech:
“Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you
like the word.” Churchill’s opportunism continued to the end.
In the 1945 election, he briefly latched on to Hayek’s Road
to Serfdom, and tried to paint the Labour Party as totalitarian,
while it was Churchill himself who, in 1943, had accepted the
Beveridge plans for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian management
of the economy. Throughout his career his one guiding rule was
to climb to power and stay there.
There
were two principles that for a long while seemed dear to
Churchill’s heart. One was anti-Communism: he was an early and
fervent opponent of Bolshevism. For years, he very correctly decried
the “bloody baboons” and “foul murderers of Moscow.” His deep
early admiration of Benito Mussolini was rooted in his shrewd
appreciation of what Mussolini had accomplished (or so he thought).
In an Italy teetering on the brink of Leninist revolution, Il
Duce had discovered the one formula that could counteract the
Leninist appeal: hyper-nationalism with a social slant. Churchill
lauded “Fascismo’s triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites
and passions of Leninism,” claiming that “it proved the necessary
antidote to the Communist poison.”
Yet
the time came when Churchill made his peace with Communism. In
1941, he gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcomed him as
an ally, embraced him as a friend. Churchill, as well as Roosevelt,
used the affectionate nickname, “Uncle Joe”; as late as the Potsdam
conference, he repeatedly announced, of Stalin: “I like that man.”
In suppressing the evidence that the Polish officers at Katyn
had been murdered by the Soviets, he remarked: “There is no use
prowling round the three year old graves of Smolensk.” Obsessed
not only with defeating Hitler, but with destroying Germany, Churchill
was oblivious to the danger of a Soviet inundation of Europe until
it was far too late. The climax of his infatuation came at the
November, 1943, Tehran conference, when Churchill presented Stalin
with a Crusader’s sword. Those who are concerned to define the
word “obscenity” may wish to ponder that episode.
Finally,
there was what appeared to be the abiding love of his life, the
British Empire. If Churchill stood for anything at all,
it was the Empire; he famously said that he had not become Prime
Minister in order to preside over its liquidation. But that, of
course, is precisely what he did, selling out the Empire and everything
else for the sake of total victory over Germany.
Besides
his opportunism, Churchill was noted for his remarkable rhetorical
skill. This talent helped him wield power over men, but it pointed
to a fateful failing as well. Throughout his life, many who observed
Churchill closely noted a peculiar trait. In 1917, Lord Esher
described it in this way:
He handles
great subjects in rhythmical language, and becomes quickly enslaved
to his own phrases. He deceives himself into the belief that
he takes broad views, when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively
small aspect of the question.
During
World War II, Robert Menzies, who was the Prime Minister of Australia,
said of Churchill: “His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so
attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.” Another
associate wrote: “He is . . . the slave of the words which his
mind forms about ideas. . . . And he can convince himself of almost
every truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career
through his rhetorical machinery.”
But
while Winston had no principles, there was one constant
in his life: the love of war. It began early. As a child, he had
a huge collection of toy soldiers, 1500 of them, and he played
with them for many years after most boys turn to other things.
They were “all British,” he tells us, and he fought battles with
his brother Jack, who “was only allowed to have colored troops;
and they were not allowed to have artillery.” He attended Sandhurst,
the military academy, instead of the universities, and “from the
moment that Churchill left Sandhurst . . . he did his utmost to
get into a fight, wherever a war was going on.” All his life he
was most excited on the evidence, only really excited by war.
He loved war as few modern men ever have he even “loved the bangs,”
as he called them, and he was very brave under fire.
In
1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.” This,
however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue. Churchill
lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy
of classical liberalism. In particular, he never understood that,
as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race
is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor.
Peace, not war, is the father of all things. For Churchill, the
years without war offered nothing to him but “the bland skies
of peace and platitude.” This was a man, as we shall see, who
wished for more wars than actually happened.
When
he was posted to India and began to read avidly, to make up for
lost time, Churchill was profoundly impressed by Darwinism. He
lost whatever religious faith he may have had through reading
Gibbon, he said and took a particular dislike, for some reason,
to the Catholic Church, as well as Christian missions. He became,
in his own words, “a materialist to the tips of my fingers,” and
he fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle
for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest. This
philosophy of life and history Churchill expressed in his one
novel, Savrola. That Churchill was a racist goes without
saying, yet his racism went deeper than with most of his contemporaries.
It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation
of war to the central place in human history, and his racism,
as well as his fixation on “great leaders,” Churchill’s worldview
resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.
When
Churchill was not actually engaged in war, he was reporting on
it. He early made a reputation for himself as a war correspondent,
in Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan and in the Boer War. In December,
1900, a dinner was given at the Waldorf-Astoria in honor of the
young journalist, recently returned from his well-publicized adventures
in South Africa. Mark Twain, who introduced him, had already,
it seems, caught on to Churchill. In a brief satirical speech,
Twain slyly suggested that, with his English father and American
mother, Churchill was the perfect representative of Anglo-American
cant.
Churchill
and the “New Liberalism”
In
1900 Churchill began the career he was evidently fated for. His
background as the grandson of a duke and son of a famous Tory
politician got him into the House of Commons as a Conservative.
At first he seemed to be distinguished only by his restless ambition,
remarkable even in parliamentary ranks. But in 1904, he crossed
the floor to the Liberals, supposedly on account of his free-trade
convictions. However, Robert Rhodes James, one of Churchill’s
admirers, wrote: “It was believed [at the time], probably rightly,
that if Arthur Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill
would not have developed such a burning interest in free trade
and joined the Liberals.” Clive Ponting notes that: “as he had
already admitted to Rosebery, he was looking for an excuse to
defect from a party that seemed reluctant to recognise his talents,”
and the Liberals would not accept a protectionist.
Tossed
by the tides of faddish opinion, with no principles of his own
and hungry for power, Churchill soon became an adherent of the
“New Liberalism,” an updated version of his father’s “Tory Democracy.”
The “new” liberalism differed from the “old” only in the small
matter of substituting incessant state activism for laissez-faire.
Although
his conservative idolators seem blithely unaware of the fact
for them it is always 1940 Churchill was one of the chief
architects of the welfare state in Britain. The modern welfare
state, successor to the welfare state of 18th-century absolutism,
began in the 1880s in Germany, under Bismarck. In England, the
legislative turning point came when Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman
as Prime Minister in 1908; his reorganized cabinet included David
Lloyd George at the Exchequer and Churchill at the Board of Trade.
Of
course, “the electoral dimension of social policy was well to
the fore in Churchill’s thinking,” writes a sympathetic historian
meaning that Churchill understood it as the way to win votes.
He wrote to a friend:
No legislation
at present in view interests the democracy. All their minds
are turning more and more to the social and economic issue.
This revolution is irresistible. They will not tolerate the
existing system by which wealth is acquired, shared and employed.
. . . They will set their faces like flint against the money
power heir of all other powers and tyrannies overthrown and
its obvious injustices. And this theoretical repulsion will
ultimately extend to any party associated in maintaining the
status quo. . . . Minimum standards of wages and comfort, insurance
in some effective form or other against sickness, unemployment,
old age, these are the questions and the only questions by which
parties are going to live in the future. Woe to Liberalism,
if they slip through its fingers.
Churchill
“had already announced his conversion to a collectivist social
policy” before his move to the Board of Trade. His constant theme
became “the just precedence” of public over private interests.
He took up the fashionable social-engineering clichés of the time,
asserting that: “Science, physical and political alike, revolts
at the disorganisation which glares at us in so many aspects of
modern life,” and that “the nation demands the application of
drastic corrective and curative processes.” The state was to acquire
canals and railroads, develop certain national industries, provide
vastly augmented education, introduce the eight-hour work day,
levy progressive taxes, and guarantee a national minimum living
standard. It is no wonder that Beatrice Webb noted that Churchill
was “definitely casting in his lot with the constructive state
action.”
Following
a visit to Germany, Lloyd George and Churchill were both converted
to the Bismarckian model of social insurance schemes. As Churchill
told his constituents: “My heart was filled with admiration of
the patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the
many glories of the German race.” He set out, in his words, to
“thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside
of our industrial system.” In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech
in Dundee: “I am on the side of those who think that a greater
collective sentiment should be introduced into the State and the
municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new
functions.” Still, individualism must be respected: “No man can
be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone. He must be
both an individualist and a collectivist. The nature of man is
a dual nature. The character of the organisation of human society
is dual.” This, by the way, is a good sample of Churchill as political
philosopher: it never gets much better.
But
while both “collective organisation” and “individual incentive”
must be given their due, Churchill was certain which had gained
the upper hand:
The whole
tendency of civilisation is, however, towards the multiplication
of the collective functions of society. The ever-growing complications
of civilisation create for us new services which have to be
undertaken by the State, and create for us an expansion of existing
services. . . . There is a pretty steady determination . . .
to intercept all future unearned increment which may arise from
the increase in the speculative value of the land. There will
be an ever-widening area of municipal enterprise.
The
statist trend met with Churchill’s complete approval. As he added:
I go farther;
I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous
experiments. . . . I am very sorry we have not got the railways
of this country in our hands. We may do something better with
the canals.
This
grandson of a duke and glorifier of his ancestor, the arch-corruptionist
Marlborough, was not above pandering to lower-class resentments.
Churchill claimed that “the cause of the Liberal Party is the
cause of the left-out millions,” while he attacked the Conservatives
as “the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their
dependents against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the
happy, and the strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions
of the weak and poor.” Churchill became the perfect hustling political
entrepreneur, eager to politicize one area of social life after
the other. He berated the Conservatives for lacking even a “single
plan of social reform or reconstruction,” while boasting that
he and his associates intended to propose “a wide, comprehensive,
interdependent scheme of social organisation,” incorporated in
“a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative
acts.”
At
this time, Churchill fell under the influence of Beatrice and
Sidney Webb, the leaders of the Fabian Society. At one of her
famous strategic dinner parties, Beatrice Webb introduced Churchill
to a young protégé, William later Lord Beveridge. Churchill brought
Beveridge into the Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions,
thus starting him on his illustrious career. Besides pushing for
a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system
of national labor exchanges: he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith
of the need to “spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state
intervention and regulation” over the British labor market. But
Churchill entertained much more ambitious goals for the Board
of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby:
The Board
of Trade was to act as the “intelligence department” of the
Government, forecasting trade and employment in the regions
so that the Government could allocate contracts to the most
deserving areas. At the summit . . . would be a Committee of
National Organisation, chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer
to supervise the economy.
Finally,
well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, Churchill
became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter,
for instance, of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906. This Act reversed
the Taff Vale and other judicial decisions, which had held unions
responsible for torts and wrongs committed on their behalf by
their agents. The Act outraged the great liberal legal historian
and theorist of the rule of law, A.V. Dicey, who charged that
it
confers
upon a trade union a freedom from civil liability for the commission
of even the most heinous wrong by the union or its servants,
and in short confers upon every trade union a privilege and
protection not possessed by any other person or body of persons,
whether corporate or unincorporate, throughout the United Kingdom.
. . . It makes a trade union a privileged body exempted from
the ordinary law of the land. No such privileged body has ever
before been deliberately created by an English Parliament.
It
is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions,
the bête noire of Margaret Thatcher, was brought into being
with the enthusiastic help of her great hero, Winston Churchill.
World
War I
In
1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and now was
truly in his element. Naturally, he quickly allied himself with
the war party, and, during the crises that followed, fanned the
flames of war. When the final crisis came, in the summer of 1914,
Churchill was the only member of the cabinet who backed war from
the start, with all of his accustomed energy. Asquith, his own
Prime Minister, wrote of him: “Winston very bellicose and demanding
immediate mobilization. . . . Winston, who has got all his war
paint on, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the
morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben. The whole
thing fills me with sadness.”
On
the afternoon of July 28, three days before the German invasion
of Belgium, he mobilized the British Home Fleet, the greatest
assemblage of naval power in the history of the world to that
time. As Sidney Fay wrote, Churchill ordered that:
The fleet
was to proceed during the night at high speed and without lights
through the Straits of Dover from Portland to its fighting base
at Scapa Flow. Fearing to bring this order before the Cabinet,
lest it should be considered a provocative action likely to
damage the chances of peace, Mr. Churchill had only informed
Mr. Asquith, who at once gave his approval.
No
wonder that, when war with Germany broke out, Churchill, in contrast
even to the other chiefs of the war party, was all smiles, filled
with a “glowing zest.”
From
the outset of hostilities, Churchill, as head of the Admiralty,
was instrumental in establishing the hunger blockade of Germany.
This was probably the most effective weapon employed on either
side in the whole conflict. The only problem was that, according
to everyone’s interpretation of international law except Britain’s,
it was illegal. The blockade was not “close-in,” but depended
on scattering mines, and many of the goods deemed contraband for
instance, food for civilians had never been so classified before.
But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions
by which men have tried to limit the horrors of war meant nothing
to Churchill. As a German historian has dryly commented, Churchill
was ready to break the rules whenever the very existence of his
country was at stake, and “for him this was very often the case.”
The
hunger blockade had certain rather unpleasant consequences. About
750,000 German civilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused
by malnutrition. The effect on those who survived was perhaps
just as frightful in its own way. A historian of the blockade
concluded: “the victimized youth [of World War I] were to become
the most radical adherents of National Socialism.” It was also
complications arising from the British blockade that eventually
provided the pretext for Wilson’s decision to go to war in 1917.
Whether
Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania
on May 7, 1915, is still unclear. A week before the disaster,
he wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that
it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores,
in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.”
Many highly-placed persons in Britain and America believed that
the German sinking of the Lusitania would bring the United
States into the war.
The
most recent student of the subject is Patrick Beesly, whose Room
40 is a history of British Naval Intelligence in World
War I. Beesly’s careful account is all the more persuasive for
going against the grain of his own sentiments. He points out that
the British Admiralty was aware that German U-boat Command had
informed U-boat captains at sea of the sailings of the Lusitania,
and that the U-boat responsible for the sinking of two ships in
recent days was present in the vicinity of Queenstown, off the
southern coast of Ireland, in the path the Lusitania was
scheduled to take. There is no surviving record of any specific
warning to the Lusitania. No destroyer escort was sent
to accompany the ship to port, nor were any of the readily available
destroyers instructed to hunt for the submarine. In fact, “no
effective steps were taken to protect the Lusitania.” Beesly
concludes:
unless
and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly
driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately
to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an
abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the
war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without
Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.
In
any case, what is certain is that Churchill’s policies made the
sinking very likely. The Lusitania was a passenger liner
loaded with munitions of war; Churchill had given orders to the
captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines
if they encountered them, and the Germans were aware of this.
And, as Churchill stressed in his memoirs of World War I, embroiling
neutral countries in hostilities with the enemy was a crucial
part of warfare: “There are many kinds of maneuvres in war, some
only of which take place on the battlefield. . . . The maneuvre
which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that
which wins a great battle.”
In
the midst of bloody conflict, Churchill was energy personified,
the source of one brainstorm after another. Sometimes his hunches
worked out well he was the chief promoter of the tank
in World War I sometimes not so well, as at Gallipoli.
The notoriety of that disaster, which blackened his name for years,
caused him to be temporarily dropped from the Cabinet in 1915.
His reaction was typical: To one visitor, he said, pointing to
the maps on the wall: “This is what I live for . . . Yes, I am
finished in respect of all I care for the waging of war, the defeat
of the Germans.”
Between
the Wars
For
the next few years, Churchill was shuttled from one ministerial
post to another. As Minister of War, of Churchill in this position
one may say what the revisionist historian Charles Tansill said
of Henry Stimson as Secretary of War: no one ever deserved the
title more. Churchill promoted a crusade to crush Bolshevism in
Russia. As Colonial Secretary, he was ready to involve Britain
in war with Turkey over the Chanak incident, but the British envoy
to Turkey did not deliver Churchill’s ultimatum, and in the end
cooler heads prevailed.
In
1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservatives and was made Chancellor
of the Exchequer. His father, in the same office, was noted for
having been puzzled by the decimals: what were “those damned dots”?
Winston’s most famous act was to return Britain to the gold standard
at the unrealistic pre-war parity, thus severely damaging the
export trade and ruining the good name of gold, as was pointed
out by Murray N. Rothbard. Hardly anyone today would disagree
with the judgment of A.J.P. Taylor: Churchill “did not grasp the
economic arguments one way or the other. What determined him was
again a devotion to British greatness. The pound would once more
‘look the dollar in the face’; the days of Queen Victoria would
be restored.”
So
far Churchill had been engaged in politics for 30 years, with
not much to show for it except a certain notoriety. His great
claim to fame in the modern mythology begins with his hard line
against Hitler in the 1930s. But it is important to realize that
Churchill had maintained a hard line against Weimar Germany, as
well. He denounced all calls for Allied disarmament, even before
Hitler came to power. Like other Allied leaders, Churchill was
living a protracted fantasy: that Germany would submit forever
to what it viewed as the shackles of Versailles. In the end, what
Britain and France refused to grant to a democratic Germany they
were forced to concede to Hitler. Moreover, if most did not bother
to listen when Churchill fulminated on the impending German threat,
they had good reason. He had tried to whip up hysteria too often
before: for a crusade against Bolshevik Russia, during the General
Strike of 1926, on the mortal dangers of Indian independence,
in the abdication crisis. Why pay any heed to his latest delusion?
Churchill
had been a strong Zionist practically from the start, holding
that Zionism would deflect European Jews from social revolution
to partnership with European imperialism in the Arab world. Now,
in 1936, he forged links with the informal London pressure group
known as The Focus, whose purpose was to open the eyes of the
British public to the one great menace, Nazi Germany. “The great
bulk of its finance came from rich British Jews such as Sir Robert
Mond (a director of several chemical firms) and Sir Robert Waley-Cohn,
the managing director of Shell, the latter contributing £50,000.”
The Focus was to be useful in expanding Churchill’s network of
contacts and in pushing for his entry into the Cabinet.
Though
a Conservative MP, Churchill began berating the Conservative governments,
first Baldwin’s and then Chamberlain’s, for their alleged blindness
to the Nazi threat. He vastly exaggerated the extent of German
rearmament, formidable as it was, and distorted its purpose by
harping on German production of heavy-bombers. This was never
a German priority, and Churchill’s fabrications were meant to
demonstrate a German design to attack Britain, which was never
Hitler’s intention. At this time, Churchill busily promoted the
Grand Alliance that was to include Britain, France, Russia, Poland,
and Czechoslovakia. Since the Poles, having nearly been conquered
by the Red Army in 1920, rejected any coalition with the Soviet
Union, and since the Soviets’ only access to Germany was through
Poland, Churchill’s plan was worthless.
Ironically
considering that it was a pillar of his future fame his drumbeating
about the German danger was yet another position on which Churchill
reneged. In the fall of 1937, he stated:
Three or
four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite
of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that
a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there
is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime.
. . . I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism
and Nazism, I would choose Communism.
For
all the claptrap about Churchill’s “far-sightedness” during the
30s in opposing the “appeasers,” in the end the policy of the
Chamberlain government to rearm as quickly as possible, while
testing the chances for peace with Germany was more realistic
than Churchill’s.
The
common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an
ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, feels obliged to write:
The time
is long past when it was possible to see the protracted debate
over British foreign policy in the 1930s as a struggle between
Churchill, an angel of light, fighting against the velleities
of uncomprehending and feeble men in high places. It is reasonably
well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that
his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions
impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.
Moreover,
as a British historian has recently noted: “For the record, it
is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose
the appeasement of either Italy or Japan.” It is also worth recalling
that it was the pre-Churchill British governments that furnished
the material with which Churchill was able to win the Battle of
Britain. Clive Ponting has observed:
the Baldwin
and Chamberlain Governments . . . had ensured that Britain was
the first country in the world to deploy a fully integrated
system of air defence based on radar detection of incoming aircraft
and ground control of fighters . . . Churchill’s contribution
had been to pour scorn on radar when he was in opposition in
the 1930s.
Embroiling
America in War Again
In
September, 1939, Britain went to war with Germany, pursuant to
the guarantee which Chamberlain had been panicked into extending
to Poland in March. Lloyd George had termed the guarantee “hare-brained,”
while Churchill had supported it. Nonetheless, in his history
of the war Churchill wrote: “Here was decision at last, taken
at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground
which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of
people.” With the war on, Winston was recalled to his old job
as First Lord of the Admiralty. Then, in the first month of the
war, an astonishing thing happened: the President of the United
States initiated a personal correspondence not with the Prime
Minister, but with the head of the British Admiralty, by-passing
all the ordinary diplomatic channels.
The
messages that passed between the President and the First Lord
were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, culminating in the affair
of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. London embassy
who was tried and imprisoned by the British authorities. The problem
was that some of the messages contained allusions to Roosevelt’s
agreement even before the war began to a blatantly unneutral cooperation
with a belligerent Britain.
On
June 10, 1939, George VI and his wife, Queen Mary, visited the
Roosevelts at Hyde Park. In private conversations with the King,
Roosevelt promised full support for Britain in case of war. He
intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the
U.S. Navy, and, according to the King’s notes, the President stated
that “if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for
the consequences.” The biographer of George VI, Wheeler-Bennett,
considered that these conversations “contained the germ of the
future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement
itself.” In communicating with the First Lord of the Admiralty,
Roosevelt was aware that he was in touch with the one member of
Chamberlain’s cabinet whose belligerence matched his own.
In
1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough
when the Chamberlain government resigned because of the Norwegian
fiasco which Churchill, more than anyone else, had helped to bring
about. As he had fought against a negotiated peace after the fall
of Poland, so he continued to resist any suggestion of negotiations
with Hitler. Many of the relevant documents are still sealed after
all these years but it is clear that a strong peace party existed
in the country and the government. It included Lloyd George in
the House of Commons, and Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in the
Cabinet. Even after the fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler’s
renewed peace overtures. This, more than anything else, is supposed
to be the foundation of his greatness. The British historian John
Charmley raised a storm of outraged protest when he suggested
that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have been to the advantage
of Britain and Europe. A Yale historian, writing in the New
York Times Book Review, referred to Charmley’s thesis as “morally
sickening.” Yet Charmley’s scholarly and detailed work makes the
crucial point that Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen
to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him
the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent
in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European
Jewry. It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there
are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits
to historical debate.
Lloyd
George, Halifax, and the others were open to a compromise peace
because they understood that Britain and the Dominions alone could
not defeat Germany. After the fall of France, Churchill’s aim
of total victory could be realized only under one condition: that
the United States become embroiled in another world war. No wonder
that Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring precisely
that.
After
a talk with Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, American ambassador to
Britain, noted: “Every hour will be spent by the British in trying
to figure out how we can be gotten in.” When he left from Lisbon
on a ship to New York, Kennedy pleaded with the State Department
to announce that if the ship should happen to blow up mysteriously
in the mid-Atlantic, the United States would not consider it a
cause for war with Germany. In his unpublished memoirs, Kennedy
wrote: “I thought that would give me some protection against Churchill’s
placing a bomb on the ship.”
Kennedy’s
fears were perhaps not exaggerated. For, while it had been important
for British policy in World War I, involving America was the sine
qua non of Churchill’s policy in World War II. In Franklin
Roosevelt, he found a ready accomplice.
That
Roosevelt, through his actions and private words, evinced a clear
design for war before December 7, 1941, has never really been
in dispute. Arguments have raged over such questions as his possible
foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1948, Thomas A. Bailey,
diplomatic historian at Stanford, already put the real pro-Roosevelt
case:
Franklin
Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the
period before Pearl Harbor. . . . He was like a physician who
must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good. . . .
The country was overwhelmingly noninterventionist to the very
day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people
into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost
certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat
of his ultimate aims.
Churchill
himself never bothered to conceal Roosevelt’s role as co-conspirator.
In January, 1941, Harry Hopkins visited London. Churchill described
him as “the most faithful and perfect channel of communication
between the President and me . . . the main prop and animator
of Roosevelt himself”:
I soon
comprehended [Hopkins’s] personal dynamism and the outstanding
importance of his mission . . . here was an envoy from the President
of supreme importance to our life. With gleaming eye and quiet,
constrained passion he said: “The President is determined that
we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He
has sent me here to tell you that all costs and by all means
he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him there
is nothing that he will not do so far as he has human power.”
There he sat, slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with
refined comprehension of the Cause. It was to be the defeat,
ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other
purposes, loyalties and aims.
In
1976, the public finally learned the story of William Stephenson,
the British agent code named “Intrepid,” sent by Churchill to
the United States in 1940. Stephenson set up headquarters in Rockefeller
Center, with orders to use any means necessary to help bring the
United States into the war. With the full knowledge and cooperation
of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, Stephenson
and his 300 or so agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked
safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared
their favorite targets, the “isolationists.” Through Stephenson,
Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization,
the embryonic U. S. intelligence service.
Churchill
even had a hand in the barrage of pro-British, anti-German propaganda
that issued from Hollywood in the years before the United States
entered the war. Gore Vidal, in Screening
History, perceptively notes that starting around 1937,
Americans were subjected to one film after another glorifying
England and the warrior heroes who built the Empire. As spectators
of these productions, Vidal says: “We served neither Lincoln nor
Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.” A key Hollywood figure
in generating the movies that “were making us all weirdly English”
was the Hungarian émigré and friend of Churchill, Alexander Korda.
Vidal very aptly writes:
For those
who find disagreeable today’s Zionist propaganda, I can only
say that gallant little Israel of today must have learned a
great deal from the gallant little Englanders of the 1930s.
The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate
our entire culture . . . Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly
infiltrated by British propagandists.
While
the Americans were being worked on, the two confederates consulted
on how to arrange for direct hostilities between the United States
and Germany. In August, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the
Atlantic conference. Here they produced the Atlantic Charter,
with its “four freedoms,” including “the freedom from want,” a
blank-check to spread Anglo American Sozialpolitik around
the globe. When Churchill returned to London, he informed the
Cabinet of what had been agreed to. Thirty years later, the British
documents were released. Here is how the New York Times
reported the revelations:
Formerly
top secret British Government papers made public today said
that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston
Churchill in August, 1941, that he was looking for an incident
to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. . . . On
August 19 Churchill reported to the War Cabinet in London on
other aspects of the Newfoundland [Atlantic Charter] meeting
that were not made public. . . . “He [Roosevelt] obviously was
determined that they should come in. If he were to put the issue
of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for months,”
the Cabinet minutes added. “The President had said he would
wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and
more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could
attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force
an incident.”
On
July 15, 1941, Admiral Little, of the British naval delegation
in Washington, wrote to Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord: “the
brightest hope for getting America into the war lies in the escorting
arrangements to Iceland, and let us hope the Germans will not
be slow in attacking them.” Little added, perhaps jokingly: “Otherwise
I think it would be best for us to organise an attack by our own
submarines and preferably on the escort!” A few weeks earlier,
Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war,
wrote to Pound regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen:
“It would be better for instance that she should be located by
a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus
providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be
so grateful.” Incidents in the North Atlantic did occur, increasingly,
as the United States approached war with Germany.
But
Churchill did not neglect the “back door to war,” embroiling the
United States with Japan as a way of bringing America into the
conflict with Hitler. Sir Robert Craigie, the British ambassador
to Tokyo, like the American ambassador Joseph Grew, was working
feverishly to avoid war. Churchill directed his foreign secretary,
Anthony Eden, to whip Craigie into line:
He should
surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States
into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully
conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions
sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire
and the United States being co-belligerent.
Churchill
threw his influence into the balance to harden American policy
towards Japan, especially in the last days before the Pearl Harbor
attack. A sympathetic critic of Churchill, Richard Lamb, has recently
written:
Was [Churchill]
justified in trying to provoke Japan to attack the United States?
. . . in 1941 Britain had no prospect of defeating Germany without
the aid of the USA as an active ally. Churchill believed Congress
would never authorize Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. .
. . In war, decisions by national leaders must be made according
to their effect on the war effort. There is truth in the old
adage: “All’s fair in love and war.”
No
wonder that, in the House of Commons, on February 15, 1942, Churchill
declared, of America’s entry into the war: “This is what I have
dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass.”
Churchill’s
devotees by no means hold his role in bringing America into World
War II against him. On the contrary, they count it in his favor.
Harry Jaffa, in his uninformed and frantic apology, seems to be
the last person alive who refuses to believe that the Man of Many
Centuries was responsible to any degree for America’s entry into
the war: after all, wasn’t it the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor?
But
what of the American Republic? What does it mean for us that a
President collaborated with a foreign head of government to entangle
us in a world war? The question would have mattered little to
Churchill. He had no concern with the United States as a sovereign,
independent nation, with its own character and place in the scheme
of things. For him, Americans were one of “the English-speaking
peoples.” He looked forward to a common citizenship for Britons
and Americans, a “mixing together,” on the road to Anglo-American
world hegemony.
But
the Churchill-Roosevelt intrigue should, one might think, matter
to Americans. Here, however, criticism is halted before it starts.
A moral postulate of our time is that in pursuit of the destruction
of Hitler, all things were permissible. Yet why is it self-evident
that morality required a crusade against Hitler in 1939 and 1940,
and not against Stalin? At that point, Hitler had slain his thousands,
but Stalin had already slain his millions. In fact, up to June,
1941, the Soviets behaved far more murderously toward the Poles
in their zone of occupation than the Nazis did in theirs. Around
1,500,000 Poles were deported to the Gulag, with about half of
them dying within the first two years. As Norman Davies writes:
“Stalin was outpacing Hitler in his desire to reduce the Poles
to the condition of a slave nation.” Of course, there were balance-of-power
considerations that created distinctions between the two dictators.
But it has yet to be explained why there should exist a double
standard ordaining that compromise with one dictator would have
been “morally sickening,” while collaboration with the other was
morally irreproachable.
“First
Catch Your Hare”
Early
in the war, Churchill, declared: “I have only one aim in life,
the defeat of Hitler, and this makes things very simple for me.”
“Victory, victory at all costs,” understood literally, was his
policy practically to the end. This points to Churchill’s fundamental
and fatal mistake in World War II: his separation of operational
from political strategy. To the first the planning and direction
of military campaigns he devoted all of his time and energy; after
all, he did so enjoy it. To the second, the fitting of military
operations to the larger and much more significant political aims
they were supposed to serve, he devoted no effort at all.
Stalin,
on the other hand, understood perfectly that the entire purpose
of war is to enforce certain political claims. This is the meaning
of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of
policy by other means. On Eden’s visit to Moscow in December,
1941, with the Wehrmacht in the Moscow suburbs, Stalin was ready
with his demands: British recognition of Soviet rule over the
Baltic states and the territories he had just seized from Finland,
Poland, and Romania. (They were eventually granted.) Throughout
the war he never lost sight of these and other crucial political
goals. But Churchill, despite frequent prodding from Eden, never
gave a thought to his, whatever they might be. His approach, he
explained, was that of Mrs. Glass’s recipe for Jugged Hare: “First
catch your hare.” First beat Hitler, then start thinking of the
future of Britain and Europe. Churchill put in so many words:
“the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of
all other purposes, loyalties and aims.”
Tuvia
Ben-Moshe has shrewdly pinpointed one of the sources of this grotesque
indifference:
Thirty
years earlier, Churchill had told Asquith that . . . his life’s
ambition was “to command great victorious armies in battle.”
During World War II he was determined to take nothing less than
full advantage of the opportunity given him, the almost unhampered
military management of the great conflict. He was prone to ignore
or postpone the treatment of matters likely to detract from
that pleasure. . . . In so doing, he deferred, or even shelved
altogether, treatment of the issues that he should have dealt
with in his capacity as Prime Minister.
Churchill’s
policy of all-out support of Stalin foreclosed other, potentially
more favorable approaches. The military expert Hanson Baldwin,
for instance, stated:
There is
no doubt whatsoever that it would have been in the interest
of Britain, the United States, and the world to have allowed
and indeed, to have encouraged the world’s two great dictatorships
to fight each other to a frazzle. Such a struggle, with its
resultant weakening of both Communism and Nazism, could not
but have aided in the establishment of a more stable peace.
Instead
of adopting this approach, or, for example, promoting the overthrow
of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans, instead of even considering such
alternatives Churchill from the start threw all of his support
to Soviet Russia.
Franklin
Roosevelt’s fatuousness towards Joseph Stalin is well known. He
looked on Stalin as a fellow “progressive” and an invaluable collaborator
in creating the future New World Order. But the neo-conservatives
and others who counterpose to Roosevelt’s inanity in this matter
Churchill’s Old World cunning and sagacity are sadly in error.
Roosevelt’s nauseating flattery of Stalin is easily matched by
Churchill’s. Just like Roosevelt, Churchill heaped fulsome praise
on the Communist murderer, and was anxious for Stalin’s personal
friendship. Moreover, his adulation of Stalin and his version
of Communism so different from the repellent “Trotskyite” kind
was no different in private than in public. In January, 1944,
he was still speaking to Eden of the “deep-seated changes which
have taken place in the character of the Russian state and government,
the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin.”
In a letter to his wife, Clementine, Churchill wrote, following
the October, 1944 conference in Moscow: “I have had very nice
talks with the old Bear. I like him the more I see him. Now they
respect us & I am sure they wish to work with us.” Writers like
Isaiah Berlin, who try to give the impression that Churchill hated
or despised all dictators, including Stalin, are either ignorant
or dishonest.
Churchill’s
supporters often claim that, unlike the Americans, the seasoned
and crafty British statesman foresaw the danger from the Soviet
Union and worked doggedly to thwart it. Churchill’s famous “Mediterranean”
strategy to attack Europe through its “soft underbelly,” rather
than concentrating on an invasion of northern France is supposed
to be the proof of this. But this was an ex post facto
defense, concocted by Churchill once the Cold War had started:
there is little, if any, contemporary evidence that the desire
to beat the Russians to Vienna and Budapest formed any part of
Churchill’s motivation in advocating the “soft underbelly” strategy.
At the time, Churchill gave purely military reasons for it. As
Ben-Moshe states: “The official British historians have ascertained
that not until the second half of 1944 and after the Channel crossing
did Churchill first begin to consider preempting the Russians
in southeastern Europe by military means.” By then, such a move
would have been impossible for several reasons. It was another
of Churchill’s bizarre military notions, like invading Fortress
Europe through Norway, or putting off the invasion of northern
France until 1945 by which time the Russians would have reached
the Rhine.
Moreover,
the American opposition to Churchill’s southern strategy did not
stem from blindness to the Communist danger. As General Albert
C. Wedemeyer, one of the firmest anti-Communists in the American
military, wrote:
if we had
invaded the Balkans through the Ljubljana Gap, we might theoretically
have beaten the Russians to Vienna and Budapest. But logistics
would have been against us there: it would have been next to
impossible to supply more than two divisions through the Adriatic
ports. . . . The proposal to save the Balkans from communism
could never have been made good by a “soft underbelly” invasion,
for Churchill himself had already cleared the way for the success
of Tito . . . [who] had been firmly ensconced in Yugoslavia
with British aid long before Italy itself was conquered.
Wedemeyer’s
remarks about Yugoslavia were on the mark. On this issue, Churchill
rejected the advice of his own Foreign Office, depending instead
on information provided especially by the head of the Cairo office
of the SOE the Special Operations branch headed by a Communist
agent named James Klugman. Churchill withdrew British support
from the Loyalist guerrilla army of General Mihailovic and threw
it to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito
would mean was no secret to Churchill. When Fitzroy Maclean was
interviewed by Churchill before being sent as liaison to Tito,
Maclean observed that, under Communist leadership, the Partisans’
ultimate
aim would undoubtedly be to establish in Jugoslavia a Communist
regime closely linked to Moscow. How did His Majesty’s Government
view such an eventuality? . . . Mr. Churchill’s reply left me
in no doubt as to the answer to my problem. So long, he said,
as the whole of Western civilization was threatened by the Nazi
menace, we could not afford to let our attention be diverted
from the immediate issue by considerations of long-term policy.
. . . Politics must be a secondary consideration.
It
would be difficult to think of a more frivolous attitude to waging
war than considering “politics” to be a “secondary consideration.”
As for the “human costs” of Churchill’s policy, when an aide pointed
out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist
dictatorship on the Soviet model, Churchill retorted: “Do you
intend to live there?”
Churchill’s
benign view of Stalin and Russia contrasts sharply with his view
of Germany. Behind Hitler, Churchill discerned the old specter
of Prussianism, which had caused, allegedly, not only the two
world wars, but the Franco Prussian War as well. What he was battling
now was “Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism,” the “two main
elements in German life which must be absolutely destroyed.” In
October, 1944, Churchill was still explaining to Stalin that:
“The problem was how to prevent Germany getting on her feet in
the lifetime of our grandchildren.” Churchill harbored a “confusion
of mind on the subject of the Prussian aristocracy, Nazism, and
the sources of German militarist expansionism . . . [his view]
was remarkably similar to that entertained by Sir Robert Vansittart
and Sir Warren Fisher; that is to say, it arose from a combination
of almost racialist antipathy and balance of power calculations.”
Churchill’s aim was not simply to save world civilization from
the Nazis, but, in his words, the “indefinite prevention of their
[the Germans’] rising again as an Armed Power.”
Little
wonder, then, that Churchill refused even to listen to the pleas
of the anti-Hitler German opposition, which tried repeatedly to
establish liaison with the British government. Instead of making
every effort to encourage and assist an anti-Nazi coup in Germany,
Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance
with cold silence. Reiterated warnings from Adam von Trott and
other resistance leaders of the impending “bolshevization” of
Europe made no impression at all on Churchill. A recent historian
has written: “by his intransigence and refusal to countenance
talks with dissident Germans, Churchill threw away an opportunity
to end the war in July 1944.” To add infamy to stupidity, Churchill
and his crowd had only words of scorn for the valiant German officers
even as they were being slaughtered by the Gestapo.
In
place of help, all Churchill offered Germans looking for a way
to end the war before the Red Army flooded into central Europe
was the slogan of unconditional surrender. Afterwards,
Churchill lied in the House of Commons about his role at Casablanca
in connection with Roosevelt’s announcement of the policy of unconditional
surrender, and was forced to retract his statements. Eisenhower,
among others, strenuously and persistently objected to the unconditional
surrender formula as hampering the war effort by raising the morale
of the Wehrmacht. In fact, the slogan was seized on by Goebbels,
and contributed to the Germans’ holding out to the bitter end.
The
pernicious effect of the policy was immeasurably bolstered by
the Morgenthau Plan, which gave the Germans a terrifying picture
of what “unconditional surrender” would mean. This plan, initialed
by Roosevelt and Churchill at Quebec, called for turning Germany
into an agricultural and pastoral country; even the coal mines
of the Ruhr were to be wrecked. The fact that it would have led
to the deaths of tens of millions of Germans made it a perfect
analog to Hitler’s schemes for dealing with Russia and the Ukraine.
Churchill
was initially averse to the plan. However, he was won over by
Professor Lindemann, as maniacal a German-hater as Morgenthau
himself. Lindemann stated to Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal
physician: “I explained to Winston that the plan would save Britain
from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor. . . . Winston
had not thought of it in that way, and he said no more about a
cruel threat to the German people.” According to Morgenthau, the
wording of the scheme was drafted entirely by Churchill. When
Roosevelt returned to Washington, Hull, and Stimson expressed
their horror, and quickly disabused the President. Churchill,
on the other hand, was unrepentant. When it came time to mention
the Morgenthau Plan in his history of the war, he distorted its
provisions and, by implication, lied about his role in supporting
it.
Beyond
the issue of the plan itself, Lord Moran wondered how it had been
possible for Churchill to appear at the Quebec conference “without
any thought out views on the future of Germany, although she seemed
to be on the point of surrender.” The answer was that “he had
become so engrossed in the conduct of the war that little time
was left to plan for the future”:
Military
detail had long fascinated him, while he was frankly bored by
the kind of problem which might take up the time of the Peace
Conference. . . . The P. M. was frittering away his waning strength
on matters which rightly belonged to soldiers. My diary in the
autumn of 1942 tells how I talked to Sir Stafford Cripps and
found that he shared my cares. He wanted the P. M. to concentrate
on the broad strategy of the war and on high policy. . . . No
one could make [Churchill] see his errors.
War
Crimes Discreetly Veiled
There
are a number of episodes during the war revealing of Churchill’s
character that deserve to be mentioned. A relatively minor incident
was the British attack on the French fleet, at Mers-el-Kebir (Oran),
off the coast of Algeria. After the fall of France, Churchill
demanded that the French surrender their fleet to Britain. The
French declined, promising that they would scuttle the ships before
allowing them to fall into German hands. Against the advice of
his naval officers, Churchill ordered British ships off the Algerian
coast to open fire. About 1500 French sailors were killed. This
was obviously a war crime, by anyone’s definition: an unprovoked
attack on the forces of an ally without a declaration of war.
At Nuremberg, German officers were sentenced to prison for less.
Realizing this, Churchill lied about Mers-el-Kebir in his history,
and suppressed evidence concerning it in the official British
histories of the war. With the attack on the French fleet, Churchill
confirmed his position as the prime subverter through two world
wars of the system of rules of warfare that had evolved in the
West over centuries.
But
the great war crime which will be forever linked to Churchill’s
name is the terror-bombing of the cities of Germany that in the
end cost the lives of around 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000
seriously injured. (Compare this to the roughly 70,000 British
lives lost to German air attacks. In fact, there were nearly as
many Frenchmen killed by Allied air attacks as there were Englishmen
killed by Germans.) The plan was conceived mainly by Churchill’s
friend and scientific advisor, Professor Lindemann, and carried
out by the head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris (“Bomber Harris”).
Harris stated: “In Bomber Command we have always worked on the
assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing
nothing.” Harris and other British airforce leaders boasted that
Britain had been the pioneer in the massive use of strategic bombing.
J.M. Spaight, former Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air
Ministry, noted that while the Germans (and the French) looked
on air power as largely an extension of artillery, a support to
the armies in the field, the British understood its capacity to
destroy the enemy’s home-base. They built their bombers and established
Bomber Command accordingly.
Brazenly
lying to the House of Commons and the public, Churchill claimed
that only military and industrial installations were targeted.
In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible thus,
“area” bombing, or “carpet” bombing and in this way to break the
morale of the Germans and terrorize them into surrendering.
Harris
at least had the courage of his convictions. He urged that the
government openly announce that:
the aim
of the Combined Bomber Offensive . . . should be unambiguously
stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of
German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout
Germany.
The
campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old
urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals
of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins.
There were high points: the bombing of Lübeck, when that ancient
Hanseatic town “burned like kindling”; the 1000-bomber raid over
Cologne, and the following raids that somehow, miraculously, mostly
spared the great Cathedral but destroyed the rest of the city,
including thirteen Romanesque churches; the firestorm that consumed
Hamburg and killed some 42,000 people. No wonder that, learning
of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard,
was driven to telling “anyone who would listen” that Churchill
and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan.
The
most infamous act was the destruction of Dresden, in February,
1945. According to the official history of the Royal Air Force:
“The destruction of Germany was by then on a scale which might
have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan.” Dresden, which was the
capital of the old kingdom of Saxony, was an indispensable stop
on the Grand Tour, the baroque gem of Europe. The war was practically
over, the city filled with masses of helpless refugees escaping
the advancing Red Army. Still, for three days and nights, from
February 13 to 15, Dresden was pounded with bombs. At least 30,000
people were killed, perhaps as many as 135,000 or more. The Zwinger
Palace; Our Lady’s Church (die Frauenkirche); the Bruhl Terrace,
overlooking the Elbe where, in Turgenev’s Fathers
and Sons, Uncle Pavel went to spend his last years; the
Semper Opera House, where Richard Strauss conducted the premiere
of Rosenkavalier; and practically everything else was incinerated.
Churchill had fomented it. But he was shaken by the outcry that
followed. While in Georgetown and Hollywood, few had ever heard
of Dresden, the city meant something in Stockholm, Zurich, and
the Vatican, and even in London. What did our hero do? He sent
a memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff:
It seems
to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing
of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror,
though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise,
we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. . . .
The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the
conduct of Allied bombing. . . . I feel the need for more precise
concentration upon military objectives . . . rather than on
mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.
The
military chiefs saw through Churchill’s contemptible ploy: realizing
that they were being set up, they refused to accept the memorandum.
After the war, Churchill casually disclaimed any knowledge of
the Dresden bombing, saying: “I thought the Americans did it.”
And
still the bombing continued. On March 16, in a period of 20 minutes,
Würzburg was razed to the ground. As late as the middle of April,
Berlin and Potsdam were bombed yet again, killing another 5,000
civilians. Finally, it stopped; as Bomber Harris noted, there
were essentially no more targets to be bombed in Germany. It need
hardly be recorded that Churchill supported the atom-bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of another
100,000, or more, civilians. When Truman fabricated the myth of
the “500,000 U.S. lives saved” by avoiding an invasion of the
Home Islands the highest military estimate had been 46,000. Churchill
topped his lie: the atom-bombings had saved 1,200,000 lives, including
1,000,000 Americans, he fantasized.
The
eagerness with which Churchill directed or applauded the destruction
of cities from the air should raise questions for those who still
consider him the great “conservative” of his or perhaps of all
time. They would do well to consider the judgment of an authentic
conservative like Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who wrote: “Non-Britishers
did not matter to Mr. Churchill, who sacrificed human beings their
lives, their welfare, their liberty with the same elegant disdain
as his colleague in the White House.”
1945:
The Dark Side
And
so we come to 1945 and the ever-radiant triumph of Absolute Good
over Absolute Evil. So potent is the mystique of that year that
the insipid welfare states of today’s Europe clutch at it at every
opportunity, in search of a few much-needed shreds of glory.
The
dark side of that triumph, however, has been all but suppressed.
It is the story of the crimes and atrocities of the victors and
their protégés. Since Winston Churchill played a central role
in the Allied victory, it is the story also of the crimes and
atrocities in which Churchill was implicated. These include the
forced repatriation of some two million Soviet subjects to the
Soviet Union. Among these were tens of thousands who had fought
with the Germans against Stalin, under the sponsorship of General
Vlasov and his “Russian Army of Liberation.” This is what Alexander
Solzhenitsyn wrote, in The
Gulag Archipelago:
In their
own country, Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments
of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations,
their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as
astonishingly obvious . . . what was the military or political
sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands
hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not
to surrender.
Most
shameful of all was the handing over of the Cossacks. They had
never been Soviet citizens, since they had fought against the
Red Army in the Civil War and then emigrated. Stalin, understandably,
was particularly keen to get hold of them, and the British obliged.
Solzhenitsyn wrote, of Winston Churchill:
He turned
over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men.
Along with them he also handed over many wagonloads of old people,
women, and children. . . . This great hero, monuments to whom
will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered
to their deaths.
The
“purge” of alleged collaborators in France was a blood-bath that
claimed more victims than the Reign of Terror in the Great Revolution
and not just among those who in one way or other had aided the
Germans: included were any right-wingers the Communist resistance
groups wished to liquidate.
The
massacres carried out by Churchill’s protégé, Tito, must be added
to this list: tens of thousands of Croats, not simply the Ustasha,
but any “class-enemies,” in classical Communist style. There was
also the murder of some 20,000 Slovene anti-Communist fighters
by Tito and his killing squads. When Tito’s Partisans rampaged
in Trieste, which he was attempting to grab in 1945, additional
thousands of Italian anti-Communists were massacred.
As
the troops of Churchill’s Soviet ally swept through central Europe
and the Balkans, the mass deportations began. Some in the British
government had qualms, feeling a certain responsibility. Churchill
would have none of it. In January, 1945, for instance, he noted
to the Foreign Office: “Why are we making a fuss about the Russian
deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . .
I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand
of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider
that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin
they like to work in the Russian coal-fields.” About 500,000 German
civilians were deported to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance
with Churchill and Roosevelt’s agreement at Yalta that such slave
labor constituted a proper form of “reparations.”
Worst
of all was the expulsion of some 15 million Germans from their
ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania,
and the Sudetenland. This was done pursuant to the agreements
at Tehran, where Churchill proposed that Poland be “moved west,”
and to Churchill’s acquiescence in the Czech leader Eduard Benes’s
plan for the “ethnic cleansing” of Bohemia and Moravia. Around
one-and-a-half to two million German civilians died in this process.
As the Hungarian liberal Gaspar Tamas wrote, in driving out the
Germans of east-central Europe, “whose ancestors built our cathedrals,
monasteries, universities, and railroad stations,” a whole ancient
culture was effaced. But why should that mean anything to the
Churchill devotees who call themselves “conservatives” in America
today?
Then,
to top it all, came the Nuremberg Trials, a travesty of justice
condemned by the great Senator Robert Taft, where Stalin’s judges
and prosecutors, seasoned veterans of the purges of the 30s, participated
in another great show-trial.
By
1946, Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage of the happenings
in eastern Europe: “From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the
Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended over Europe.” Goebbels
had popularized the phrase “iron curtain,” but it was accurate
enough.
The
European continent now contained a single, hegemonic power. “As
the blinkers of war were removed,” John Charmley writes, “Churchill
began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been
made.” In fact, Churchill’s own expressions of profound self-doubt
consort oddly with his admirers’ retrospective triumphalism. After
the war, he told Robert Boothby: “Historians are apt to judge
war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction
than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by
that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done
very well.” In the preface to the first volume of his history
of World War II, Churchill explained why he was so troubled:
The human
tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions
and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the
victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace
or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils
than those we have surmounted.
On
V-E Day, he had announced the victory of “the cause of freedom
in every land.” But to his private secretary, he mused: “What
will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs
of Dover?” It was a bit late to raise the question. Really, what
are we to make of a statesman who for years ignored the fact that
the extinction of Germany as a power in Europe entailed . . .
certain consequences? Is this another Bismarck or Metternich we
are dealing with here? Or is it a case of a Woodrow Wilson redivivus
of another Prince of Fools?
With
the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own policy, there
was only one recourse open to Churchill: to bring America into
Europe permanently. Thus, his anxious expostulations to the Americans,
including his Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtain” speech. Having destroyed
Germany as the natural balance to Russia on the continent, he
was now forced to try to embroil the United States in yet another
war, this time a Cold War, that would last 45 years, and change
America fundamentally, and perhaps irrevocably.
The
Triumph of the Welfare State
In
1945, general elections were held in Britain, and the Labour Party
won a landslide victory. Clement Attlee, and his colleagues took
power and created the socialist welfare state. But the socializing
of Britain was probably inevitable, given the war. It was a natural
outgrowth of the wartime sense of solidarity and collectivist
emotion, of the feeling that the experience of war had somehow
rendered class structure and hierarchy, normal features of any
advanced society, obsolete and indecent. And there was a second
factor British society had already been to a large extent socialized
in the war years, under Churchill himself. As Ludwig von Mises
wrote:
Marching
ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then
Great Britain and many other European countries have adopted
central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is
noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted
to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by
Bruning . . . and in Great Britain not by the Labour Party but
by the Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.
While
Churchill waged war, he allowed Attlee to head various Cabinet
committees on domestic policy and devise proposals on health,
unemployment, education, etc. Churchill himself had already accepted
the master-blueprint for the welfare state, the Beveridge Report.
As he put it in a radio speech:
You must
rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory
insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to
the grave.
That
Mises was correct in his judgment on Churchill’s role is indicated
by the conclusion of W. H. Greenleaf, in his monumental study
of individualism and collectivism in modern Britain. Greenleaf
states that it was Churchill who
during
the war years, instructed R. A. Butler to improve the education
of the people and who accepted and sponsored the idea of a four-year
plan for national development and the commitment to sustain
full employment in the post-war period. As well he approved
proposals to establish a national insurance scheme, services
for housing and health, and was prepared to accept a broadening
field of state enterprises. It was because of this coalition
policy that Enoch Powell referred to the veritable social revolution
which occurred in the years 1942 44. Aims of this kind
were embodied in the Conservative declaration of policy issued
by the Premier before the 1945 election.
When
the Tories returned to power in 1951, “Churchill chose a Government
which was the least recognizably Conservative in history.” There
was no attempt to roll back the welfare state, and the only industry
that was really reprivatized was road haulage. Churchill “left
the core of its [the Labour government’s] work inviolate.” The
“Conservative” victory functioned like Republican victories in
the United States, from Eisenhower on, to consolidate socialism.
Churchill even undertook to make up for “deficiencies” in the
welfare programs of the previous Labour government, in housing
and public works. Most insidiously of all, he directed his leftist
Labour Minister, Walter Monckton, to appease the unions at all
costs. Churchill’s surrender to the unions, “dictated by sheer
political expediency,” set the stage for the quagmire in labor
relations that prevailed in Britain for the next two decades.
Yet,
in truth, Churchill never cared a great deal about domestic affairs,
even welfarism, except as a means of attaining and keeping office.
What he loved was power, and the opportunities power provided
to live a life of drama and struggle and endless war.
There
is a way of looking at Winston Churchill that is very tempting:
that he was a deeply flawed creature, who was summoned at a critical
moment to do battle with a uniquely appalling evil, and whose
very flaws contributed to a glorious victory in a way, like Merlin,
in C.S. Lewis’s great Christian novel, That
Hideous Strength. Such a judgment would, I believe, be
superficial. A candid examination of his career, I suggest, yields
a different conclusion: that, when all is said and done, Winston
Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle,
whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and
morality in politics and history.
Due
to space limitations, the 169 detailed footnotes which
thoroughly document all assertions in Professor Raico’s paper
are not included. They are, of course, included in the
printed version of the paper, published in The
Costs of War.
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