This
first analysis of Churchill's best-selling
history of the Second World War reveals
how the great man sometimes glossed over
the truth  In
Command of History: Churchill Fighting and
Writing the Second World War
by David Reynolds (Penguin,
£30) Reviewed by Andrew
Roberts "HISTORY shall be kind
to me," Winston Churchill is said
to have remarked. "I know because I'll be
writing it." Not since Julius
Caesar's Commentaries described the
invasion of Gaul has a principal actor in
a great conflict also been its most
influential chronicler.  David
Irving comments: "FIRST
ANALYSIS"? It may be true that Mr
Roberts, the wealthy, socialising
author of this article, has not
read the Churchill history
volumes and compared them with
the archival facts. Others
have.
I have
too, as readers of my first two
volumes of Churchill's
War will know: Winston's
brazen manipulation of history,
for instance with regard to the
1940 Coventry air raid, the
deliberately provocative bombing
of Berlin in August 1940, and the
resulting Blitz on London, the
1942 Dieppe fiasco, the total
omission of the problems with
General de Gaulle, and all
the rest: the fact that there is
no mention of Auschwitz, and he
offers only two dry lines about
the raid on Dresden -- on all of
these facts I have commented as
the years have passed.
Roberts has
not, because it was, and still
is, dangerous ground to
tread.
Dr Reynolds has
been kind enough to review my
books most positively, if I
remember rightly (the British
authorities seized all the files
of reviews of my books in May
2002): he is widely read and a
proper archival researcher.
Eventually the laptop
a**licker Mr Roberts may aspire
to the same credentials:
eventually; but so far, he
does not.
My third
volume reveals incidentally under
what means Mr Churchill came to
be awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature; one of that prize's
less auspicious moments in
history. |
Churchill's six-volume history, a
record-breaking best-seller simply
entitled The Second World War,
profoundly shaped our whole understanding
of that cataclysm, yet no one has
comprehensively studied it to find out
just how historically accurate it really
was.Now David Reynolds, professor of
international history at Cambridge
University, has subjected Churchill's
undeniably great work to a microscopic and
withering analysis. He has discovered that
for all his Nobel Prize for Literature and
untarnishable glory as a world-historical
statesman, Churchill constantly allowed
contemporary political considerations to
cloud, alter and often censor his
objective reportage of what had taken
place between 1939 and 1945. Churchill was leader of the Tory
opposition when he took up his pen in
1948, and Prime Minister when he laid down
his pen two million words later in 1954.
It is therefore unsurprising that
immediate political questions intruded in
his quest for truth. The leaders of
several of Britain's wartime allies --
including Joseph Stalin and
presidents [Harry S] Truman
and [Dwight D] Eisenhower
-- were still in power during that period,
and had to be treated very warily if the
memoirs were not to damage a vulnerable
Britain's international relations. In
this, Churchill put his country's
interests before his publishers. In this truly
outstanding and original work of
scholarship, Reynolds deconstructs and
itemizes every exaggeration,
plagiarism, embellishment, omission,
bowdlerization, undeclared ellipsis,
half-truth and even occasional untruth
that Churchill adopted. Yet Churchill often had little
alternative, as he tried to render to his
vast global readership an account of the
war that would be popular, would become
the authorized version, would keep his own
massive contribution centre-stage, but yet
would not wreck his personal relations
with the important people with whom he had
to work as Prime Minister.
IN the days before word processors, proofs
used to be sent backwards and forwards
between publishers and authors, before
both were happy with what was about to be
printed. Churchill kept all these early
corrected proofs -- 400 box files of them
-- so Reynolds has been able to spot all
the small but tell-tale ways in which
Churchill's account of the war altered
during the writing of the six volumes.  What Churchill dubbed his "Syndicate"
of research assistants used to produce the
initial factual drafts that he would then
turn into his inimitable prose, and much
of their correspondence with Churchill
also survives, providing Reynolds with
many more fascinating insights. Reynolds is particularly acute on what
did not appear in Churchill's
account, despite their taking up much of
his time during his momentous five-year
premiership. There is no mention of his
disputes with his deputy PM Clement
Attlee, only one passing reference in
an appendix to the Special Operations
Executive, hardly a mention of the whole
of Asia in the first volume The
Gathering Storm, no mention of the
1943 Quebec agreement on nuclear weapons
(because Truman asked him to excise it
during the Korean War), nothing about
Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer
corps in the Katyn forest, and much else
besides. If the Forgotten Army of the Burma
campaign feels forgotten, it might be
because its contribution was reduced to a
mere 3,000 words in the relevant volume.
Usually there were perfectly reasonable
explanations for Churchill's silence; the
breaking of the Enigma code could not be
included for security reasons, for
example. Occasionally Churchill dissembled in
order to protect colleagues, as when he
wrote that, over the issue of a negotiated
peace in May 1940, the War Cabinet "were
much too busy to waste time upon such
unreal, academic issues", whereas, in
fact, its agenda shows that five
protracted meetings were held over three
days on exactly that subject. Churchill
also generously cut references to the
foreign secretary, Lord Halifax,
trying to "buy off" Mussolini with
various British Mediterranean
possessions. Cover-ups of that magnitude were few,
but Reynolds lists literally scores of
occasions on which Churchill made
alterations on personal or political
considerations, such as when Lord
Mountbatten's blustering managed to
secure a major toning down of Churchill's
initial criticisms of the planning and
intelligence relating to the Dieppe raid
debacle of August 1942. Or when Marshal
Tito broke with the Soviet Union in
1948, and the West therefore began making
overtures to him, the Yugoslavian dictator
was rewarded with the removal of any
"unduly sharp" references to him in the
book. Churchill fought the Second World War
twice over; once from 1939 to 1945, and
once when he relived it as its principal
historian. He won both times, but this
superbly researched book shows why his war
memoirs should now be read more as
uplifting literature than as objective
analysis. 
Revealed:
why Churchill considered negotiating
with Germany in 1940
|
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Irving