Diary: March 21, 2002

If
Sir Martin Gilbert’s work is the quarry from which the wagons of orthodoxy continue to trundle away . . . then Irving’s projected trilogy Churchill’s
War is the dynamite that lies still unexploded around the quarry.

March
21, 2002 (Thursday)
Key
West

A pleasing end to my brief stay in the
United States is the arrival in Key West of the April edition of The Atlantic
Monthly, one of the country’s premier intellectual magazines.

Christopher Hitchens has
reviewed
the five most prominent biographies of
Winston Churchill available in this country (or, in the case of my own,
not available, which adds to the piquancy of his review): it is the free intellectuals again striking back against the bigots, just as when, after St
Martins Press caved in to Jewish thuggery and blackmail and cancelled production of my

Goebbels biography, Professor Gordon Craig
chose to dedicate no fewer than six pages of the New York Review of Books to a review of the work although it was never available in US bookstores and never would be. Now comes Hitchens, a brave journalist, liberal and leftwing but with fearlessly independent opinions, who has already once upset the Jewish mafia of
Washington by his exposure of one of
Clinton’s advisers for having perjured himself.

What gulfs divide me from these money-minded people, writers who do anything for Gold!
Prostitutes of the pen. It hurts me of course when my high-ranking friends in the
US publishing industry tip me off that they no longer dare to publish my books, after some forty years.

But a hundred years from now it will matter not one whit whether or not I was able to pay my child’s school fees or our grocery bills, or to live in adequate style; what will ultimately matter is whether mine are the biographies and works of real history that count, or those of the potboiler-writers and hacks like John Lukacs, Geoffrey Best,
Alan Bullock and Lord Jenkins.

If when I fly home tomorrow the pilot announces in mid-Atlantic that the plane will hit the sea in two minutes, unlike the screaming fellow passengers all around, I shall unbuckle my belt, fold my arms and smile a benign smile: I have written thirty books and fathered five beautiful daughters, and generally done my bit for civilization.

It is the books that I will be known for, but for how long? For ten years or more I have been quietly defining it as my ambition that future schoolchildren and scholars, a hundred years from now, will be advised to use my books rather than the others, as mine were the first to eschew the propaganda and hero worship that soils the others.

I don’t know whether I put it like that to Christopher Hitchens on the two or three times that we met for dinner or lunch in his chosen hometown, Washington.
Probably not: his last references to me, in an article somewhere that I have forgotten, were defensive, and less flattering than earlier.

He claimed to recall that I had chanted the “Baby Aryan” ditty to his infant daughter; and he had not chortled, according to his recollection, when I gave him, as a memento, a couple of the last remaining
Rudolf-Hess-Platz adhesive stickers that I had caused to be manufactured ten years ago (Hess was the only man who ever risked his life to halt the madness of World War
Two, and he paid for his unwanted temerity with 47 years in a prison cell).

I wanted to enable thoughtful young
Germans to commemorate him in proper style, by sticking these bogus white-and-blue street signs over the more offensive street signs commemorating the
German traitors (there is no other word for them) like Stauffenberg or
Moltke or Seydlitz.

I had a thousand of the blue “Hess Platz” signs manufactured, and more than a few were hoisted in the manner prescribed, resulting in jail terms, alas, for a few of the less cautious young men who did the hoisting.

ANYWAY, Hitchens has obviously spent some weeks of his life reading all the major
Churchill biographies — to be precise not only those by Sir Martin Gilbert, John
Charmley, Clive Ponting, and
William Manchester, who has skidded to a well-publicized halt after completing only two of the three volumes; but also the time-serving concoction by Geoffrey
Best, and the oleaginous hagiography of
Roy Jenkins, and both volumes of my own trilogy (the third is currently

in preparation).

Admittedly, it takes Hitchens some time to warm to his theme, or at least to disclose his hand. He starts by recalling
Churchill’s most famous 1940 speeches, including “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” and “We shall fight on the beaches,” and
“Even if the British Empire were to last for a thousand years, this would be remembered as its ‘finest hour.'”

He goes straight to the kill, revealing that these three crucial broadcasts were made not by
Churchill himself “but by an actor hired to impersonate him. Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC’s
Children’s Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners. Perhaps Churchill was too much incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself.”

Hitchens might have revealed as early as this (but he does not) that I am the researcher who first discovered this fact, which Norman Shelley himself had confirmed to me many years ago, and that my claim has been borne out by scientific research more recently.

Never mind, Hitchens gives me more than enough credit later on for other bold stands on history, even though he more once chooses not to reveal, for instance, that it was I who first maintained, as is now commonly accepted by proper historians, that “The German High
Command never got beyond the drawing-board stage of any plan for the invasion of
Britain.”

After dealing with the criminal attack by Churchill on the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir in July 1940, Hitchens asks: “Which air force was the first to bomb civilians, and in whose capital city?
(The RAF, striking the suburbs of
Berlin.)” That again was a conclusion which my biography was the first to draw.

LIKE my own father, Hitchens’ father served as a lieutenant-commander in the
Royal Navy, in the cruel Arctic convoy operations.

Like myself, Hitchens had his first epiphany when he compared official archive records with the popular version of events: In the early 1970s he was working near the Public Record Office, when wartime papers covering Churchill’s talks with Stalin about Eastern
Europe were released. “The matter had moral as well as historical importance,” comments Hitchens, “since it was in defense of Poland that Britain had finally declared war on Hitler, in September of
1939.”

When A.J.P. Taylor prompted
Hitchens to examine the documents, however, the archival authorities informed him that the entries for Anglo-Soviet discussion of wartime Polish policy had been unaccountably “mislaid.”

His lack of proper reverence for national leaders probably originates from that moment. Hitchens mercilessly lacerates President Bush, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar
Weinberger, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and others for their wanton theft of
Churchillian rhetoric for their own speeches.

Equally mischievously Hitchens quotes
The New York Times, which lamented in an editorial, no less, that William
Manchester would now never write his third volume (being quite content to sit upon the Gold laurels he had procured by writing the first two); the NYT quoted the closing lines of Manchester’s second volume:

And
now, in the desperate spring of 1940,
with the reins of power at last firm in
his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain
and her fading empire in one last great
struggle worthy of all they had been
and meant, to arm the nation, not only
with weapons but also with the mace of
honor, creating in every English breast
a soul beneath the ribs of
death.

How hilarious. Hitchens comments wickedly: “Never in the field of human biography can metaphor have been more epically mixed.”

Having said which, he turns his glare upon two volumes published in the quite recent past , the Churchill biography by Geoffrey Best, and that by the Hungarian Jew, John
Lukacs; “these, together with Lord
Jenkins’s tome, only continue a process begun by Churchill himself when he annexed the papers of his time in office to write his own version of events.”

He calls Sir Martin Gilbert the doyen of Churchill historians, and makes proper reference to Churchill’s speeches, writing with a sarcasm so refined that it almost escapes my notice of how Sir Isaiah
Berlin penned something in The
Atlantic Monthly, “in one of his many courageous stands for the conventional wisdom.”

Soon after that comes the first direct acknowledgments by Hitchens of my own first two Churchill volumes:

Churchill
and his right-wing critics, from John
Charmley to David Irving, have
something in common. They unite around
the two propositions that communism was
to be opposed and British imperialism
was to be upheld. For the first few
decades of his political career
Churchill was happy to be counted an
extremist — if not, indeed, a fanatic
— on both these counts.

He helped to
organize the brutal, abortive invasion
of Lenin’s Russia in 1918, and
published at least one subsequent
article blaming the Jews for
Bolshevism. He also wrote and spoke
until quite late in the day (though
more as an anti-Communist than an
anti-Semite) in favor of Mussolini,
Franco, and even Hitler.

His
fundamentalism about India, and the
racist language in which he opposed the
smallest concession to the Indian
independence movement, were among the
many reasons for the wide distrust that
hampered him in the 1930s, and for his
exclusion from the Tory Cabinets of
that decade. [….]

The hagiographer and the hatchet man are in unspoken agreement here. William
Manchester and David Irving lay considerable stress on the near eclipse that overtook Churchill in the mid-1930s.

So why World War Two? Could it have been prevented, and was Churchill the man to do so?

The
blunt conclusion, encouraged by a
reading of Manchester no less than of
Irving, is that the Last Lion needed a
last hurrah — a campaign issue that
allowed him scope for all his talents
and energies.

Rereading this record, writes Hitchens, and surveying the ever multiplying fund of fresh sources, the reader must find himself reviewing the “career of a vaulting prince of opportunists.”

” HERE,” continues Hitchens, “one must negotiate the toxic figure of David
Irving. If Sir Martin Gilbert’s work is the quarry from which the wagons of orthodoxy continue to trundle away, laden with the building blocks for lesser edifices of loyalism, then Irving’s projected trilogy Churchill’s War
is the dynamite that lies still unexploded around the quarry.

Two volumes have so far been published, bringing the story up to
1943, with the Battle of Kursk balanced by the impending invasion of Sicily. Since his first volume was published, to some acclaim, in 1987, Irving has been reduced to publishing and marketing his books himself. The reason for this is now well understood.

Both in his public life as a fringe speechmaker and in his career as a freelance archivist and historian, Irving has tainted himself with the one thing of which no serious person can even be suspected: a sympathy for the Nazi cause.
Much of this taint is the consequence of an unsuccessful libel lawsuit against the Holocaust specialist
Deborah Lipstadt.

Anyone
who reads his first two Churchill
volumes with open eyes will see at once
that Irving invites, if not enjoys, his
reputation as an untouchable. Whenever
he mentions Nazi defectors or mutineers
or anti-Hitler plotters (and the frigid
reception given to such men by
Chamberlain and Lord
Halifax was yet another clue to
their real sympathy for the
Führer), he refers to them as
“traitors.”

He repeatedly describes
Churchill as a front man for “the
Socialists” and for (variously) “the
Zionists” and “the Jews.” He has an
unconcealed contempt for mongrel
America, and for the wiles of
Roosevelt as he schemed to poach
the wonderful British Empire. Yet in
the text Irving often refers to
Churchill as “Winston.” (Irving, as
those who study him will know, has a
tendency to mix the oleaginous with the
aggressive.)

About halfway through
Volume One, describing the tit-for-tat
raids by which, he maintains, Hitler
was first induced by Churchill to bomb
London in September of 1940, he
summarizes his essential
position.

“This
first attack had killed 306
Londoners. It was the first lurch
towards the holocaust.

Now Churchill
and Portal needed no further
justification for what they proposed
to unleash — a new kind of war, in
which ultimately one million
civilians in Germany as well as
hundreds of thousands of French,
Poles, Czechs and others would die
under the trample of the Allied
strategic bomber forces.”

(“Holocaust” literally means a devouring by fire, so the term may be technically allowed, but you see what I mean.) Irving has a great facility for innuendo; its most successful application is the repeated suggestion that Churchill used his foreknowledge of German air raids sheerly for grandstanding purposes.

On the nights when he knew that Göring’s bombers would overfly London on their way to, say, Coventry, he would make a point of standing on the Air Ministry roof, or of taking a stroll in the Downing
Street garden, thus impressing his staff and subordinates with his pluck and daring and sangfroid. On the nights when Enigma gave him private information about a raid on London itself, he would decamp to the country house of a wealthy friend.

This accumulation of detail is so subversive of the legend as to make a greater difference in the mind of the reader than many more-serious shortcomings of generalship. The allegation has now been in print for fifteen years, and I have never seen it addressed by the
Great Man’s defenders, let alone rebutted.

I think that Hitchens perhaps goes too far — the works display no hatred
for Churchill (and I know the meaning of the word, having been subjected to waves of hatred from my enemies over the last decades). I feel contempt for Churchill, and annoyance that this man sashayed his way into power in Downing-street at a time of crucial importance for the empire: he was a drunkard, in charge not of an automobile but an empire.

” SO visceral is his contempt for
Churchill,” continues Hitchens, “that even the later revisionist historians handle
Irving with tongs. Clive Ponting’s
study 1940: Myth and Reality,
published in 1991, does not acknowledge
Irving’s existence except in the bibliography.

John Charmley’s first book on Churchill, Churchill: The End of
Glory, was published in 1993 (while
Charmley held the chair at, of all places,
Fulton, Missouri), and his second book,
Churchill’s Grand Alliance,
appeared in 1995.

The name David
Irving is only briefly cited in either text or index. (This method is employed in turn by Lord Jenkins, who awards Charmley a single reference en passant, doesn’t even credit Irving in his bibliography, and in general writes as if all “second thoughts” about Churchill are beneath his, and our, notice.)” Hitchens continues:

Yet
internal evidence strongly suggests
that Ponting, Charmley, and Jenkins
have read Irving with keen attention,
and have used him to enlarge their
narratives without appearing to bow to
his influence.

I would not consider as qualified in the argument about Churchill anybody who had not read Irving’s work. In those pages one may read, without the veil of discretion or constraint that descended like a thick velvet curtain after 1945, what Churchill’s colleagues and subordinates really thought about him at the time. What they often thought-ambassadors, private secretaries, generals, air marshals-was that he was a demagogue, a bluffer, an incompetent, and an inebriate.

Some of those cited are jealous subordinates, and others are military men with a pre-war sympathy for fascism. But here, for instance, is Lord Hankey, one of the leading professional civil servants during both world wars, writing in May of 1941, when he had the job of coordinating Britain’s secret services:

Churchill
has great gifts of leadership, and
can put his stuff over the people,
Parliament, his Cabinet colleagues
and even himself. But he is not what
he thinks himself, a great master of
the art of war. Up to now he has
never brought off any great military
enterprise. However defensible they
may have been, Antwerp, Gallipoli
and the expedition to help the White
Russians at the end of the last war
were all failures.

He made some
frightful errors of judgment between
the two wars in military matters,
e.g. obstructing the construction of
new ships in 1925 … his false
estimates of the value of French
generals & French military
methods … It was he who forced us
into the Norwegian affair which
failed; the Greek affair which
failed; and the Cretan affair which
is failing.

Hitchens finally accepts my view (though without stipulating that I was its first author) that the reason that
Churchill fought on, in 1940, was simply because he was “too much committed to a war to turn back without risking ridicule or obloquy.” He is merciless in his scorn for Lukacs and Best:

For
an instance of the tenacity of the
traditional view, by which one
historian underwrites and reinforces
the conventional efforts of another, I
cite this excerpt from John Lukacs’s
November 2001 review of Geoffrey Best’s
Churchill: A Study in Greatness:

One
of the stunning phrases in
Churchill’s history of World War I
is his description of the First
Fleet leaving Portsmouth for Scapa
Flow

on July 28, 1914, through the
English Channel: “Scores of gigantic
castles of steel wending their way
across the misty, shining sea, like
giants bowed in anxious thought.”
Best ends his book with Churchill’s
funeral,

on January 30, 1965, “the
great cranes along the south side of
the stretch of the river between
Tower Bridge and London Bridge,
dipping their masts in tribute as
[Churchill’s funeral launch]
went by, ‘like giants bowed in
anxious thought.'” This is the mark
of a great historian.

It is by no means the mark of a great historian. It is the mark of a recycler of familiar rhetorical themes, and of stale rhetorical expressions (“wending their way”) at that. But Lukacs is committed to this style in precisely the way he is committed to its corresponding substance, which admits of no demurral.

Yes, for one who holds authors of the money-grubbing genre of Lukacs in as deep a contempt as I, this article is surprising, unexpected, heady stuff. I devour it over a vegetarian salad lunch at a café in Duval Street; it has made up in one stroke for all the harrowing days that have preceded it these last two weeks.

I shall mount the British Airways plane tomorrow fearless of its airworthiness. If this article is any guide of opinions to come, the place of my own works seems assured. One of these days I shall invite
Christopher Hitchens to lunch in
Washington, and this time I shall pay.[Previous
Radical’s
Diary]

Relevant items on the Internet:

The
Atlantic Monthly, April 2002: “The
Medals of His Defeats: Our author takes
the Great Man down a peg or two…” by
Christopher Hitchens