Reviews of Churchill’s War, vol. ii — Aug 2001

DAVID IRVING’S Churchill’s War, vol. ii your index to these reviews It is difficult to avoid being impressed, even dazzled, by Churchill’s colorful personality. . . July-August 2001, published by Institute for Historical Review [ click to open footnotes in a separate window ] Churchill’s UNSETTLED LEGACY Churchill’s War: (Vol. II) Triumph in Adversity , by David Irving. London: Focal Point, 2001. Hardcover. Dust jacket. 1,060 pages. Photographs. Appendices. Source references.

Index. (Available from the IHR for $50, plus shipping.) by Mark Weber (right) IT HAS been 14 years since the publication of the first volume of David Irving’s three-part biography of Britain’s legendary wartime leader. This second volume, subtitled Triumph in Adversity, traces Winston Churchill’s career from June 1941 through July 1943, the pivotal period when, after calamitous setbacks, the tide of war turned decisively in favor of the Allies.

With this handsome, meticulously referenced and generously illustrated work (including many color photographs), Britain’s best-known and most controversial historian once again displays his extraordinary knack for extracting information from overlooked diaries and suppressed records, and his gift for turning mountains of data into well-crafted prose. This measured, masterful examination of Britain’s towering twentieth-century premier is Irving at his best.

It is difficult to avoid being impressed, even dazzled, by Churchill’s colorful personality, in comparison with which most political leaders of the past 50 years seem pale midgets. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid portrait of an often exasperating and sometimes callous man of quick wit, myriad prejudices, puckish humor, arresting eloquence, and enormous energy. As with Irving’s other biographical works, this book’s strength is also its weakness.

While it is packed with day-to-day and even hour-to-hour detail, Irving sometimes, and perhaps unavoidably, neglects context and the “larger picture.” He sheds new light on Churchill’s relations with major and minor figures of the fragile Allied wartime coalition World War II, including, for example, his deep, abiding loathing of “Free French” leader Charles De Gaulle .

Irving traces Churchill’s wartime hypocrisy and treachery — most tragically toward the Poles, on whose behalf Britain had declared war against Germany in 1939. Excessive space is devoted to speculation about the July 1943 death of Wladyslaw Sikorski , prime minister of Poland’s London-based government in exile.

Irving musters evidence to suggest that Sikorski’s death in a freakish airplane crash at Gibraltar was not an accident , as officially announced, but instead may have been secretly arranged by British authorities, perhaps on Churchill’s order.

As Irving notes, Churchill and other British officials received reports — from Jewish agencies, from intercepted and decrypted secret German dispatches, and from other sources — of killings of Jews in the lands under Axis rule.

[1] And yet, in his own six-volume history of the great conflict, The Second World War , some 4,448 pages altogether, he made only passing references to wartime Germany’s harshly anti-Jewish policies (what is now called “the Holocaust”), and no mention whatsoever of “gas chambers” or “gassing.” [2] Adding significantly to the work of such skeptical historians as John Charmley (notably in his 1993 work, Churchill: The End of Glory ), Irving delivers here another powerful blow to Churchill’s

well-manicured image as the heroic figure who “saved” Britain and “Western civilization.” Churchill, writes Irving in the introduction, “won the war in spite of himselfBritain, in short, surrendered her own empire to defeat a chimera conjured up by Winston Churchill, a putative danger from Nazi Germany — a threat which never existed except when Churchill needed to call upon it. He sacrificed the substance to defeat the myth.”

During our own cynical era, when the reputations of once-towering figures are routinely debunked and discredited, Winston Churchill is still held in high regard.

Churchill, says British-American writer Christopher Hitchens , has become a “totem” of the Establishment. “His titanic standing depends principally on a set of rotundly defiant speeches made in the years 1940 and 1941, when he staked everything on resistance to Hitler,” writes Hitchens. “…For innumerable readers and reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic (Arthur Schlesinger prominent among them) the iconic status of Churchill is an indispensable ‘fact’ of life.

If it can be shown that he was a vain old fool, then their world would turn upside down.” [3] In the view of the influential Jewish writer Charles Krauthammer — a Washington Post columnist — Churchill is “the only possible” individual to be regarded as “Person of the Century.” Krauthammer explains: “Take away Churchill in 1940and Britain would have settled with Hitler — or worse. Nazism would have prevailed.

Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon , had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into darkness.” [4] Henry Kissinger has called Churchill “the quintessential hero.” [5] CONTRIBUTING not insignificantly to the durability of his reputation was Churchill’s lifelong philo-Semitism.

Throughout his career, as Irving makes clear in both the first and second volumes of his trilogy, Churchill was an ardent booster of Jewish and Zionist interests. [6] He believed Jews to be “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.”

In the words of British historian Andrew Roberts , Churchill “felt an instinctive affinity for their genius as well as a historians’ respect for their trials, and he supported Jewish aspirations wherever they did not clash with those of the Empire.

He may have inherited this philo-semitism from his father, but he certainly give it a new lustre in his own life.” [7] The well-entrenched idealization of Churchill is part and parcel of a drastically misleading view of World War II that Americans have been fed for decades. One comm

on deceit is to give the impression that Hitler sought war against Britain and France, and that Germany aggressively attacked those two countries. Routinely suppressed is the key fact that Hitler strenuously sought to avoid conflict with Britain and France, and that it was those two countries that declared war against Germany. As Irving points out: “Britain was the one country of which Hitler consistently spoke favourably.

From 1918 to the day of his suicide in 1945 he avowed that his one ambition had been to work in unison, even in grand alliance, with the British empire. There is nothing to be found in the archives to contradict our view that he meant it.” Churchill’s enduringly stellar image is all the more remarkable considering that his views on a range of issues were, by today’s standards, hopelessly backward and politically incorrect.

He was, for example, a strong and seemingly sincere supporter of the British empire. [8] In November 1942, for instance, he declared: “Let me, however, make this clear, in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter; we mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” [9] Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an unabashed racist.

Blacks he dismissed as “niggers” and “blackamoors.” Arabs were “worthless,” Chinese were “chinks” or “pigtails,” and dark races were “baboons” or “Hottentots.”

Indians, in his view, were “the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans.” [10] Churchill not only favored white supremacy in Britain, and disparaged racial mixing, but, as Irving points out, wanted English-speaking whites — whom he was not ashamed to proclaim as a superior breed — to rule the entire world. “We are superior!,” he exclaimed during a White House luncheon, to which vice president Henry Wallace responded sarcastically: “So you believe in the pure Anglo-Saxon race.

Anglo-Saxondom über alles!” [11] Given such views, it is not surprising, as Irving records, that Churchill and other high-ranking officials were distressed over the impact on British society caused by the wartime arrival of thousands of Black US servicemen. [12] Similar sentiments voiced by Irving earned censure during his well-publicized lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt.

[13] To Judge Charles Gray’s castigation of him as a “racist,” for example, Irving retorted: “My own feelings about race are precisely the same as 95 percent of the people of my generationIf the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach.” [14] Although Churchill’s harshly anti-Hitler rhetoric is well known, as late as 1937, in his book

Great Contemporaries , he was extolling the German leader’s “patriotic ardor and love of country.” The story of Hitler’s struggle, Churchill went on, “cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.” [15] In another publication from that same year Churchill wrote: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic

achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us