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 Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 3:27 pm |
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21410
Churchill and His Myths
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Winston Churchill
Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning
by John Lukacs
Basic Books, 147 pp., $24.00
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and
Helped Save England
by Lynne Olson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., $27.50; $15.00 (paper)
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
by Nicholson Baker
Simon and Schuster, 566 pp., $30.00
Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost the
Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan.
Crown, 544 pp., $29.95
1.
At the end of 1936, Winston Churchill's fortunes had sunk as low as he
would ever know. His career had long resembled Snakes and Ladders, the
nursery board game where a shake of the dice leads to either a brisk
ascent or a downward slither. Already famous in 1900 when he entered
Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he was home secretary at thirty-
four (having nimbly deserted the Conservatives before the Liberals won
their landslide in 1906), and went on climbing the ladder until the
outbreak of the Great War. Then in 1915 he stepped on a nasty snake.
He was saddled with the blame for the Dardanelles debacle and left
government to command an infantry battalion on the Western Front.
After easing his way back into office, he stealthily returned to the
Conservative fold, but in 1931, while the Tories were in opposition,
he resigned from the party leadership because of his bitter opposition
to Gandhi's release from prison, and to any measure of Indian self-
government.
A heroic account of his "wilderness years" in the 1930s, which
Churchill promoted and which is current today among his huge American
claque, has him as the noble lone voice crying out while his
countrymen willfully ignored his warnings about the need to rearm
against a resurgent Germany. It's true that most British people
understandably had little enthusiasm for another war only twenty years
after one in which they had lost three quarters of a million dead
(equivalent to nearly six million Americans today). But Churchill's
woes were largely self-inflicted, from India to what John Lukacs calls
"his impetuous (and, in retrospect, unnecessary) championing of Edward
VIII" in December 1936. In the most disastrous parliamentary
performance of his life, incoherent and seemingly the worse for drink,
Churchill pleaded on behalf of the King until he was shouted down.
London bookmakers take bets on anything from sport to the weather to
politics; what odds would they have given that December that, within
less than four years, he would be prime minister, at the supreme
crisis in his country's history?
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This will always remain an extraordinary drama; but there is another
story, of the degree to which Churchill divided opinion, in his
lifetime and—as these books show—to this day. John Lukacs is
preeminent among intellectually respectable Churchillians, and he
returns yet again to the beginning of Churchill's premiership in May
1940. Lynne Olson complements this with an admiring account of how a
number of dissident Conservative MPs helped get him there. But for
both Nicholson Baker and Patrick Buchanan—writing from utterly
different perspectives—Churchill is the villain of the piece, a
warmonger or an incompetent blunderer. Paul Addison has said that in
1945 Churchill won two great victories, one military and the other in
the "battle over his reputation that had been going on ever since the
turn of the century." That other battle continues beyond the turn of
one more century.
And it is intertwined with another argument, about the war in which he
led his country. Lukacs takes as his text, and as his title, Blood,
Toil, Tears and Sweat, the first speech Churchill gave as prime
minister on May 13, 1940—three days after the German invasion of France
—with its bleak warning of sufferings to come, telling Parliament and
people "that immediately ahead of them loomed the prospect not of a
Good War," as Lukacs puts it, "of triumphs near or faraway, but the
prospect of plight and suffering in the face of disasters." But there
was no more haunting passage in that speech than the promise "to wage
war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark
lamentable catalogue of human crime." With those words Churchill
marked out for the future the essential narrative of a noble war
fought with a unique moral purpose: the narrative of a Good War that
Baker and Buchanan want to challenge.
Despite occasional equivocations, Churchill had recognized the nature
of the Third Reich from the beginning; and in the autumn of 1938,
still in the political doldrums, he staked all his political chips on
opposing the Munich Agreement signed at the end of September. The man
who rescued his career and his reputation was Hitler. Although Neville
Chamberlain was welcomed home by cheering crowds, many Englishmen felt
at heart like Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, when he greeted
Munich "with a mixture of shame and relief," and shame soon
predominated. When Czechoslovakia disintegrated in March 1939 and
Hitler arrived triumphant in Prague, he stood exposed for perfidy as
well as brutality. Chamberlain's entire policy was discredited, and
Churchill was vindicated. The London press called for his return to
government, which came about when war was declared in September 1939;
he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty eight months before the
high drama of the following spring.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anything John Lukacs writes is worth reading, even if he has now
stretched his material to its limit. Evelyn Waugh said (through his
alter ego Gilbert Pinfold) that he "had no wish to obliterate anything
he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying
painters who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time
again, clarifying and enriching it until they have done all they can
with it." Lukacs has done just that, and on an ever-smaller canvas:
from The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941 to The Duel:
The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler to Five Days in
London: May 1940 and now this absorbing long essay devoted to a single
short speech, longer than the Gettysburg Address (and books have been
written about that, after all) though still less than one thousand
words. Miniaturism can scarcely go further.
Apart from the famous words "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil,
tears and sweat" (deftly filched from Garibaldi in 1849: "Non offro nč
paga, nč quartiere, nč provvigioni. Offro fame, sete, marce forzate,
battaglie e morte"), that speech proposed Churchill's succinct and
forthright war aims: "It is victory, victory at all costs, victory,
however long and hard the road may be." And it distilled both
Churchill's insight into the nature of Hitlerism and his honesty in
not promising easy answers. Lukacs has argued that the Third Reich was
in many ways characterized by its "modernity"; and it was, in his
view, Churchill's sense of history and his high conception of
Christian civilization—in a cultural sense rather than from the
viewpoint of a believing Christian, which he was not—that gave him his
intuition about that heart of darkness, or what, in his "finest hour"
speech of June 18, he called the threat "of a new dark age made more
sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted
science."
What had brought Churchill to power was the military disaster
following Hitler's invasion of Norway on April 8, an irony he wryly
recognized, since he bore no little responsibility for that calamity.
On May 7–8 the House of Commons debated the failure in Norway, more
vigorously than Parliament has recently been allowed to debate the
failure in Iraq; although Chamberlain won the vote at its end, his
majority fell so heavily that within two days he was replaced by
Churchill. The heroes of Olson's Troublesome Young Men (the phrase was
Harold Macmillan's) are the forty-two Tory rebels who voted against
the government, along with more than forty who abstained.
Some of these MPs had been chafing against party discipline for years,
at peril to their careers under Chamberlain, who was notoriously
unable to accept criticism, and his imperious chief whip, Captain
David Margesson. Some were new boys like John Profumo, aged twenty-
five, fresh from winning a by-election, and in uniform like a number
of his young colleagues. On the morning after he had courageously
joined the vote against Chamberlain he received a glorious dressing-
down from Margesson that should be in any dictionary of political
quotations:
And I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit. On
every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life you will be
ashamed of what you did last night.
They don't make chief whips like that anymore; but history would
endorse Profumo and not Margesson.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While readable and well researched, Olson's book would have been
better with less superfluous color ("Children floated toy boats on the
Serpentine in Hyde Park, while young lovers lay on deck chairs
nearby"), and fewer slips. Churchill entered Parliament in 1900, not
1901, and the lawyer and politician Sir John Simon went to Fettes
(Tony Blair's old school), not Eton. Olson writes in knowing tones
that Harold Macmillan was commissioned in 1914 into the King's Royal
Rifle Corps but that his mother managed to have him transferred "to
the much more prestigious Grenadier Guards, many of whose officers
were aristocrats."
For what it's worth, and whatever Mrs. Macmillan (herself American by
birth) may have supposed, the KRRC or 60th Rifles was one of the most
elegant and patrician regiments in the British army. Lord Randolph
Churchill had originally wanted his son Winston to join the 60th, and
it was the regiment in which Sir Anthony Eden served with distinction
during the Great War. Nicholson Baker has his own regimental
difficulties, writing that in May 1940 Churchill "ordered the small
British force left at Calais—rifle brigades [sic] and tanks—to fight
to the death." He means the Rifle Brigade, sister regiment of the
60th, which served as the forlorn hope at Calais.
Such minor errors serve as a reminder that all of the writers under
review are American (Hungarian by birth in Lukacs's case), and are
sometimes deaf to the overtones of English life, including political
life. Lukacs should know better than to dismiss Stanley Baldwin as
"bumbling and provincially British." Playing the simple country squire
was Baldwin's shtick, but he was in truth a clever, well-read man (see
the address he gave as president of the Classical Association); more
to the point, he was prime minister three times, easy victor of two
general elections, and altogether "the most formidable antagonist whom
I ever encountered," in Lloyd George's rueful words.
To write of Churchill's "exceptional knowledge and comprehension of
Europe," as Lukacs does, is far-fetched, and to say that "his prime
virtue was magnanimity" is even more wrong. Churchill might visit the
south of France for pleasure or Spain to play polo, but showed little
interest in local culture, and knew no other language than English, if
one excepts his idiosyncratic version of French (by comparison for
example with Eden, who spoke excellent German as well as French). When
Lukacs quotes the diplomat Alex Cadogan writing "I'm afraid that
Winston will build up a 'Garden City'[*] at No. 10, with the most
awful people," the footnote explains "*A cheap modern suburb." But
Cadogan was alluding to the nickname for the collection of temporary
buildings in the garden at Downing Street put up to house Lloyd
George's temporary offices in the previous war and thus, by extension,
to any kitchen cabinet.
"The most awful people" were significant words, and they relate to the
problem with Olson's story. "People talk of rearming," Anthony
Powell's character Widmerpool tells Nick Jenkins over lunch. "I am
glad to say the Labour Party is against it to a man—and the more
enlightened Tories, too."
Olson's heroes by contrast were a very mixed bunch. Some were
politically lightweight, like Harold Nicolson, some were obscure, like
Dick Law and Ronald Cartland, and some were thoroughly dubious.
Cartland is forgotten for a poignant reason. An amiable, earnest young
MP (in a party which didn't care for prigs: Macmillan's earlier group
of leftish Tories had been sneeringly known as "the YMCA"), he had
bravely criticized appeasement before the war, and then voted against
Chamberlain in the Norway debate. Unlike our present-day saber-
rattlers at Westminster or on Capitol Hill, Cartland at least
practiced what he preached by joining the army, and was killed in
action during the retreat to Dunkirk.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One day Churchill would win the Nobel Prize for literature (largely on
the strength of The Second World War, much of which, as David Reynolds
has shown in his splendid book In Command of History, was
ghostwritten), but Churchill the writer also divided opinion. Lukacs
mentions several eminent English writers who dismissed Churchill's
"sham-Augustan prose," as it was called by Waugh, who added at the
time of Churchill's death that he had been "always surrounded by
crooks." His phrase comes to mind when Olson attempts to make another
hero out of Churchill's hanger-on Robert Boothby, while relating the
story of Harold Macmillan's unhappy marriage to Lady Dorothy
Cavendish, and her decades-long liaison with Boothby.
If truth be told Boothby was decidedly one of Waugh's "crooks": a
bumptious charlatan who had been a parliamentary aide to Churchill,
although when he got in trouble through shady financial dealings he
was abandoned by Churchill (in a way which didn't say much for any
"magnanimity"). A buccaneer himself, Churchill was all his life
attracted by others. The fact that so many of his associates verged on
the disreputable never did his career much good; in those crucial
years, it may have done the nation harm.
Such cronies apart, Churchill had very little personal following in
the 1930s; and Lukacs knows enough to be aware that his hero had been
one of the most disliked and distrusted men of his age. From an early
stage, Churchill had acquired two reputations—as an ambitious,
unprincipled careerist and as an impulsive, reckless adventurer—which
are the more striking for being on the face of it mutually exclusive.
A large anthology could be compiled of the contemptuous things said
about him from the 1900s to the 1940s, by colleagues and friends as
well as by enemies; at times contempt shaded into hatred. At the 1922
general election, he was defeated in Dundee by two candidates, one of
them the only Prohibitionist ever elected to Parliament as such (a
nice touch in view of the great man's own habits), and the other the
foreign policy radical E.D. Morel, who said, "I look upon Churchill as
such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against
him with a whole heart."
Just as telling in its way was the verdict of Sir Basil Bartlett, well
known in theatrical and social London—"the actor baronet" to the
popular newspapers—and a very astute observer. "Winston Churchill is
making inflammatory speeches again," he wrote in his diary in May
1936, months before the abdication fiasco.
He is a curious character. A sort of Mary Queen of Scots of modern
politics. He is bound to emerge historically as a romantic and
glamorous figure, but he is surrounded by corpses. No one who has ever
served him or been in any way connected to his career, has ever
survived to tell the story.*
That is what plenty of civilized, intelligent Englishmen thought.
Even after Churchill had become prime minister he inspired alarm.
"Chips" Channon, the American-born Chamberlainite MP and social
diarist, may have been unusual in thinking Churchill's accession
"perhaps the darkest day in English history," but Lukacs cites plenty
of other witnesses that spring of 1940 who called Churchill
"unscrupulous," "unreliable," and "lacking political judgement." Not
only appeasers and pacifists were dismayed about what kind of war he
might wage. The situation after the retreat from Dunkirk at the end of
May 1940 was desperate; was it not likely that Churchill would resort
to desperate measures?
2.
So he did. After the Luftwaffe attacked London in September 1940,
Churchill broadcast an eloquent denunciation of "these cruel, wanton,
indiscriminate bombings." He always had a capacity for believing what
he wanted to believe, sometimes to the point of cognitive dissonance,
and that phrase was rich coming from him. Two months earlier he had
told Beaverbrook (one more of his disreputable circle) that the only
thing that could now defeat Hitler was "an absolutely devastating,
exterminating attack by very heavy bombers."
Those words are quoted by Nicholson Baker in Human Smoke, a genuine
curiosity (which has already appeared on The New York Times best-
seller list, while being denounced as "a bad book" by Lukacs). It is
an anthology or collage that the novelist has compiled from
contemporary sources—notably the old newspapers he collects—and is
made of short items, mostly from the years 1939–1941. One dated "It
was June 15, 1940" will tell us that the war cabinet was discussing
the merits of poison gas (whose use against "uncivilised tribes" in
Iraq Churchill had defended in 1920), another, "It was July 2, 1941,"
that Reinhard Heydrich had issued murderous instructions to the SS.
These clippings are printed usually without comment, though not
without purpose. In reply to the phrase "selective quotation," Conor
Cruise O'Brien once observed that all quotation was selective,
otherwise it wouldn't be quotation, but Baker's method is not so much
selective as openly polemical: his items are presented in such a way
as to defend those who opposed the war, and indict those who waged it.
This doesn't always work. The admirable Jeanette Rankin, Republican of
Montana, the first woman to be elected to the House of
Representatives, one of fifty who voted there against the declaration
of war in April 1917, and the only one who did so in December 1941,
comes out well. As William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette wrote,
one may entirely disagree with her vote after Pearl Harbor, "But Lord,
it was a brave thing!" Gandhi comes out badly, on the other hand, with
his offensive advice to the European Jews to accept their fate: "I can
conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not
thousands, to appease the hunger of the dictators"—fatuous words,
admittedly said before millions rather than thousands were immolated.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Was it a 'good war'?" Baker asks. "Did waging it help anyone who
needed help?" He doesn't present a precise or a consecutive argument
in reply. But there are really several more distinct questions. Is all
war wrong? Was this war wrong? And even if it was justified, was it
waged with means which defiled its purpose? In Churchill, Hitler, and
the Unnecessary War, Patrick Buchanan raises further questions almost
more unusual than Baker's, while his thesis is still more provocative,
insisting that this particular war was needless.
Although Buchanan's argument isn't stupid, it requires something like
a historiographical sleight of hand, and is conducted backward, as it
were. He cannot say that there was nothing wrong with Hitler, and he
doesn't argue, as some right-wing English historians such as John
Charmley and the late Alan Clark have done, that Hitler represented no
threat to England and the British Empire and that he should have been
given a free hand in Europe. And from his position as an American
conservative nationalist, Buchanan is scarcely going to follow
Charmley and Clark and say that the real enemy of Great Britain and
its empire was the United States.
Instead he says that Hitler would never have come to power had it not
been for the previous war followed by the vengeful Versailles
settlement, and that the war in 1914 had itself been mistaken, or even
provoked by British policy, however little the English ostensibly
wanted it (apart from Churchill, needless to say; Buchanan quotes Sir
Maurice Hankey: "He had a real zest for war"). This is not new.
Between the wars it was regularly asserted by high-minded Englishmen
and Americans that no country was ever more responsible than any other
for any war; that Germany had been at least as much sinned against as
sinning; and that the postwar settlement was a grave injustice. Since
these were specifically liberal doctrines, it is amusing to see them
reiterated by Buchanan, who is not specifically liberal.
What Buchanan seems unaware of is how much those views have been
undermined by recent scholarship. One may well think the whole idea of
war guilt foolish, and the clause in the Versailles Treaty attributing
such guilt to Germany "caddish," as Harold Nicolson called it. And yet
many historians in the field now concur that Germany bears the
principal responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. As Bernard
Wasserstein shows in Barbarism and Civilization, his excellent recent
history of the twentieth century, a belief that war was the only way
that Germany could achieve its rightful aims had "become deeply
entrenched in the collective mentality of the German political elite
by 1914."
As to the postwar settlement, Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six
Months That Changed the World and Zara Steiner in The Lights That
Failed: European International History, 1919– 1933 (to take but two
recent learned studies) concur that Versailles wasn't really such a
vindictive treaty in the circumstances. Buchanan has a point when he
indicts the entire Wilsonian creed of self-determination, and its
hypocritically partial application after 1918, quoting another critic
for whom Versailles "draped the crudity of conquest...in the veil of
morality." But it is mere rhetoric for him to say that "France and
Britain got the peace they had wanted. Twenty years later, they would
get the war they had invited."
Where Buchanan, in his vehement way, is obviously right is that the
war to defeat Hitler had largely unintended and immensely destructive
outcomes. In a chapter entitled "Fatal Blunder," he condemns as utter
folly the British guarantee to Poland in 1939, the proximate cause of
the war, thereby allowing himself another swipe at Churchill, who said
that "the preservation and integrity of Poland must be regarded as a
cause commanding the regard of all the world." These words sounded
very hollow after the alliance with Stalin and its consequences,
including the repressive Communist regime in Poland. (Buchanan makes
free with the word "blunder": he also calls Hitler's horrible
Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 "an historic blunder.")
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whether or not one follows Buchanan's apocalyptic vision of the West
in terminal decline—like other conservatives, he doesn't seem to have
noticed that communism has been routed—it is of course true that World
War II led to the cold war and the forty-year subjection of Eastern
Europe. But then much of what he is saying was said more concisely by
A.J.P. Taylor long ago, in a throwaway line glossing the very speech
that is Lukacs's main text, and the one phrase "victory at all costs."
Taylor writes:
This was exactly what the opponents of Churchill had feared, and even
he hardly foresaw all that was involved. Victory, even if this meant
placing the British empire in pawn to the United States; victory, even
if it meant Soviet domination of Europe; victory at all costs.
Here was the nub of the problem. To defeat Hitler meant paying a very
heavy political price, and meant waging war, when there seemed no
other way in 1940–1941, with methods which would have seemed atrocious
not long before. "At all costs" for Churchill also meant the ruthless
bombing of German and Japanese cities and the killing of their
civilian inhabitants. Nothing is more chilling in Human Smoke than
Churchill's language about this, especially since, as Baker puts it,
Churchill saw bombing in pedagogic terms:
Let them have a good dose where it will hurt them most.... It is time
that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homelands and
cities.... The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs [will
bring home their errors] in a most effective way.
Why, it might almost be Hillary Clinton threatening "to totally
obliterate" a distant country.
And yet the strangest thing is that Churchill knew what a hateful
regression all this was, or a part of him knew that. In My Early Life,
his most engaging book, he writes a romantic reverie about cavalry
warfare in the good old days, cast aside in "a greedy, base,
opportunist" manner by
chemists in spectacles and chauffeurs pulling at the levers of
aeroplanes.... War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now
become cruel and squalid...we now have entire populations, including
even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual
extermination.
Ten years after writing that, Churchill led the way in cruel, brutish,
and exterminatory war-making against women and children, partly thanks
to his uncompromising personality, partly thanks to what was seen as
the logic of the situation. Three years after he hoped for
"devastating, exterminating" attacks on civilians, he was shown
blazing German towns filmed from the air, and exclaimed, "Are we
beasts? Have we taken this too far?" And two years after that he tried
(not very creditably) to dissociate himself from the destruction of
Dresden by Bomber Command. He was the same man—the same immensely
complex man—in 1930, 1940, 1943, and 1945. He was the same man still
when, in his last speech as prime minister before his final retirement
in 1955, he wondered sadly, "Which way shall we turn to save our lives
and the future of the world?"
Those words are quoted by John Lukacs at the end of his essay, though
he doesn't draw any further moral. Lynne Olson does. In the best
sentence in her book, about the Suez adventure of 1956, she writes,
"Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the lessons
of Munich and appeasement were wrongly applied to a later
international crisis." Likewise, having rightly observed that "there
has arisen among America's elite a Churchill cult," Patrick Buchanan
devotes a chapter, "Man of the Century," to denouncing the cult, and
the man. He not only looks askance at Churchill's saying in September
1943 that "to achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no
lengths of violence to which we will not go"; he chastises the
administration of George Bush the Younger—who installed a bust of
Churchill in the Oval Office—for having emulated "every folly of
imperial Britain in her plunge from power," and having drawn every
wrong lesson from Churchill's career. There is by now an entire book
to be written about the way that "Munich," "appeasement," and
"Churchill" have been ritually invoked, from Suez to Vietnam to Iraq,
so often in false analogy, and so often with calamitous results.
Which of us knows for sure whether any war can ever be "good"? The
conclusion one might well draw from the story told in different ways
by these books is that there may never be good wars or just wars, but
that there may be necessary wars; and that the war in which Churchill
led his country, awful and inexcusable as its means sometimes were,
and grim as many of its consequences, really was a "war of necessity,"
just as much as the present war in Iraq was not. We should almost be
grateful to George Bush and Tony Blair for illuminating the
distinction. |
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