Churchill's War Volume II: Triumph in Adversity PDF
Preview Churchill's War Volume II: Triumph in Adversity
Introduction i David Irving This section updated: Friday, August 11, 2000 6:25 PM CHURCHILL’s War VOLUME II: TRIUMPH IN ADVERSITY Website download edition © Parforce UK Ltd This Adobe .pdf (Portable Document Format) edition is uploaded onto the FPP website as a tool for students and academics. It can be downloaded for reading and study purposes only, and is not to be commercially distributed in any form. Readers are invited to submit any typographical errors to David Irving by mail at the address below, or via email at [email protected]. Rewards are paid for each error found and accepted. The website edition will be constantly updated and corrected. Informed comments and corrections on historical points are also welcomed. David Irving Focal Point Publications Duke Street London phone: fax: email: [email protected] ii churchill’s war David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Incompletely educated at Imperial College of Science & Technology and at Uni- versity College London, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the German language. Among his thirty books, the best-known include Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field-Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe; Göring: a Biography, and Nuremberg, the Last Battle. He has translated several works by other authors in- cluding Field-Marshal Keitel, Reinhard Gehlen and Nikki Lauda. He lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and has raised five daughters. In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. In he issued a revised edition, Apocalypse 1945, as well as his important biography, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich.The first volume of Churchill’s War appeared in 1986. Introduction iii David Irving CHURCHILL’s War ii –Triumph in Adversity ‘Two books in English stand out from the vast literature of the Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, published in , and David Irving’s Hitler’s War’ JOHN KEEGAN, Times Literary Supplement, F FOCAL POINT iv churchill’s war To Download Source Notes to Part I: http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Churchill/endnotes1.pdf + Copyright © Parforce (UK) Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be commercially repro- duced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission of the author in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and to civil claims for damages. Churchill’s War is a series of volumes on the life of the British statesman; vol. i was published by Veritas, of West Australia, in , by Hutchinson (London) in , by Avon Books (New York) in , and by Herbig Verlag (Munich), in . The volumes are also available as a free download in PDF format from our website at www.fpp.co.uk/books. FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS Duke Street, London British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN Introduction v Contents introduction: Never Forget Your Trade Mark vii Part I 1: A Very Big and Very Ugly War 3 2: Prime Minister with Nothing to Hide 21 3: The Charter that Was Never Signed 37 4: Shall We Dance? asks Mr Churchill 53 5: ‘We Did It Before – and We Can Do It Again!’ 73 6: Carry a Big Stick 89 7: The ‘Nigger in the Woodpile’ 107 8: Really Not Quite Normal 135 9: Westward Look 157 10: Gaps in the Archives 163 11: A Sorry Pass 181 Part II 12: Day of Perfidy 203 13: At the White House 243 14: Some Chicken 267 15: The Completest Intimacy 291 16: Poor Winston 315 vi churchill’s war Introduction vii introduction: Never ForgetY our Trade Mark Updated Sunday, August 6, 2000 6:32 PM Y ears after the Second World War, one of Winston’s Churchill’s wisest advisors would ask, ‘Why in was Churchill almost universally regarded as a gifted, if eccentric politician, lacking in judgement and better out of the government, whereas in he was re- garded as a world statesman and the revered superman of the century?’1 The possible answer – he won the war – is defeated by the equally possible observation: he forfeited Britain’s empire. He won the war, as we shall see in the final volume of this trilogy, in spite of himself. He had enraged every one of his military advisors on the way. He did not spare with cruel and crushing remarks about his own chiefs of staff: ‘You may take,’ he rasped, ‘the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum total of their fears!’2 By Victory-day in Europe, in May , the chiefs of staff would be so out of sympathy with their leader that when he sent for them on that day, and again when he said good-bye after losing the General Election in July, and had the whisky and soda brought in, they just sat ruminating. On both occasions the chiefs sat there ‘like dummies’ and did not even drink to his health.3 After the war the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field-Mar- shal Lord Alanbrooke, was angered to find that Churchill had painted him- self as a hero in his memoirs; the account which the former General Sir Alan Brooke himself committed to posterity in a leather-bound and pad- locked diary was less flattering. ‘On the whole,’ growled Churchill, reading the first volume, ‘I think that I am against publishing day to day diaries written under the stress of events so soon afterwards.’4 Had he seen, as we have, what Brooke omitted, he would have expressed himself rather more forcefully. vii viii churchill’s war the first volume of this trilogy appeared in 1987, thirty years after those words were written.* It is fitting to commence a second volume, appearing after such an in- terval, with a survey of what we achieved with the first. We saw how after a ‘wilderness period’ of ten years Winston S. Churchill, described by Harold Balfour as this ‘singularly unlovable’ man, came to power on May , , to the alarm of his monarch and the distaste of at least three of his ministers (Lords Beaverbrook and Halifax, and Mr Neville Chamberlain); how, by playing on a non-existent threat of Nazi invasion he entrenched himself in office, and rebuffed the peace settlement which Adolf Hitler repeatedly and secretly offered, and which more than one of King George VI’s minis- ters, his consort Queen Elizabeth, and (on certain dates in May and June even Churchill himself) seemed disposed to accept;5 how having thus sabotaged the prospects of peace, he contrived to prolong the war and, cynics would observe, his own premiership, by propelling Britain and Ger- many into a campaign of mutual air bombardment. At a time when Hitler embargoed all raids on London, Churchill ordered a -bomber raid on Berlin on August , , deliberately unleashing a bombing campaign which would reach a climax of severity and barbarism only after the present volume comes to a close.† In his orgy of destructiveness, Churchill even issued orders – never carried out – a few days after the firestorm in Ham- burg, for the ruthless saturation bombing of the Eternal City of Rome. We have seen how as part of the price for his accession to office in May Churchill gave the ‘kiss of life’ to Britain’s moribund Labour party, elevating several of its leaders to unhoped-for cabinet office and paving the way for the Socialists’ eventual return to power in , a political up- heaval which brought in its train the inevitable end of the empire built by three centuries of British endeavour.6 The revisionist historians Maurice Cowling and John Charmley have endorsed our first volume’s assessment of Churchill’s responsibility for the war and his part in the resurgence of socialism in and Britain’s international decline.7 Churchill, the war- lord, showed himself indifferent to post-war problems, and displayed no interest in the dangerous revival of socialism by labour minister Ernest Bevin and the trades unions.8 *David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol. i: The Struggle for Power (Cranbrook, West Australia, ; London, 8; New York, ). †Vol. i, pages –. Introduction ix a history of Churchill’s war years therefore inevitably remains a history of how he directed his war. We have seen how from the first moment he gathered together the sinews of Britain’s secret agency, the codebreaking organisation at Bletchley Park, which we have called his ‘Oracle,’ and guarded that source not only from the enemy abroad but from his senior colleagues at home (while his cronies, often far less suitable, were privy to the secret and on occasion blurted out what they knew to even less suitable recipi- ents).9 Knowledge was power, and Churchill clutched ultra, the ‘most secret sources,’ boniface, the ‘BJs’ and whatever else he called them, close to his watch-chained waistcoat, dealing these cards in the war-game only rarely, to obviate or sometimes, some have suggested, even to engineer military misfortunes as and when his strategic poker made it necessary. We have seen how Churchill worked for many months after his appoint- ment to stifle every cry and overture for peace.10 In our first volume we portrayed the Duke of Windsor, the former king, as working from his over- seas bases to end the war – a portrait which is now widely accepted, though embellished with the distasteful and unwarranted epithet of traitor.11 There is much that cannot be fully explored even now. We shall see again how close were the secret ties that Churchill maintained, to the chagrin of the foreign office, with the collaborationist regime at Vichy, while still ex- coriating its leader Marshal Pétain in his public utterances. Aware of the opprobrium that this dual standard might invite, he took steps after the war to remove all trace of this from the files. The secret agreement which he reached with Pétain in October might never have existed – were it not for the persistent, if not entirely impeccable, writings of Professor Louis Rougier, the emissary who engineered it.* All relevant correspondence in the papers of Lord Halifax, then foreign secretary, and twenty-eight pieces exchanged between him and Jacques Chevalier in and about the Rougier mission, are still withdrawn from public access; so are the letters sent to Pétain by Churchill through the American attaché in Vichy at the end of December and a month later through Admiral Leahy or Cheva- lier.12 As Sir William Deakin, one of Churchill’s ghost-writers, wrote after the war to Sir William Strang of the foreign office, the ‘Pétainist legend’ reflected poorly on Churchill and ‘should be suppressed once and for all.’13 Strang sealed his own file on Rougier with a cover note that it was not to be used without the consent of the foreign office. This theme, Churchill’s am- *Vol. i, pages –, . x churchill’s war bivalence about Pétain and his unconcealed hostility toward Anthony Eden’s enfant gâté General Charles de Gaulle, surfaces again in the present volume; in the next, we find the evidence, in his own handwriting, that it was Eden who engineered the assassination of Admiral Darlan to appease De Gaulle. We have seen too in the first volume how Britain’s unspoken war-aims, which were at first assumed to be ‘to save Poland,’ elided invisibly during to become instead ‘the defence of the heart of the British empire against Nazi invasion’ although in fact, as Churchill knew, such an invasion was never seriously threatened; how he nonetheless forged an alliance with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who harboured even less enthusiasm for the perpetuation of Britain’s empire than Churchill did in truth himself; and how, when it became opportune to woo the United States, whose presi- dent lost no love whatsoever for the empire, Churchill subtly shifted his stance and began perforce to portray his war-aim as being to destroy Hitler, the devil incarnate; or ‘anti-Christ.’14 In fact he was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war. At the same time as he was telling Lord Halifax that his intention was to fight Germany until Hitlerism was finally broken ‘and the world relieved from the curse which a wicked man has brought upon it,’15 and he was similarly telling his military guests at Chequers that there was only one aim, ‘to destroy Hitler,’16 he was assuring Edouard Bene that Czechoslovakia’s restoration was a war-aim, like that of Poland.17 By January he was refusing all such pronouncements, explaining to his cabinet colleagues that to state his war-aims precisely would be compromising, while anything vaguer would disappoint.18 ‘Just shoot at two targets,’ we shall hear him declaim in September , and he defines these as ‘Prussian militarism’ and ‘Nazi tyranny.’ Nor does he want his people to bother explaining what those phrases mean. ‘This will also have the advantage of not committing you to anything definite when Germany is beaten.’19 For Winston Churchill, as for Adolf Hitler, making war was an aim in itself.20 In April a London agent of Roosevelt’s overseas Intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, would re- port that watching Churchill he often reflected that, just as the Eighth Army owed a great deal to Rommel, so Churchill owed ‘a hell of a lot’ to Hitler: ‘When he turns from Hitler to the home front, he becomes a smaller fig- ure, the dextrous English politician, master of the telling phrase and the useful monetary compromise.’ One could tell just when Churchill slipped from one role into the other, continued the agent, by the change in his practised oratorical tone. In domestic politics he revealed his less felicitous
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