Did I say England? The land of the Anglos? There is now a large, ahem, non-Anglo, population in Manchester, and I suspect that the usual traditional enemies of free speech have intervened.

June 25, 2005 (Saturday)
Key West (Florida)

B. phones from London for a long chat. Jessica has gone off with friends to a birthday in Battersea. B. has trepidatiously included two bottles of shampoo in the birthday gifts, as the friends' mother refuses to wash their hair, having some freakily religious objections to it. President Franklin D Roosevelt's phrase, "This Means Waah," comes to mind.

I sit at [street restaurant] from 5 to 7 pm, as the sun goes down, sipping coffee and doing the final typesetting adjustments on Rommel (1977). [New CLASSIC REISSUE editions of all Mr Irving's early works are being prepared].

I get sucked into reading it, just like a newcomer. What a great book, thanks mainly to the editing work of master-craftsman Tom Congdon (left). I can never write like that again. What magnificent chapter-endings. No wonder it got such rave reviews. I wonder if I can craft the Heinrich Himmler biography even half as well.

It is coming together, and I know just what areas I still have to cover. It won't be easy, given that I have been banned from Germany since 1993! The establishment's on-going war against Real History! Yet we are the ones who are bit by bit establishing the truth, for example about the Reichsführer-SS's life -- and death.

I find myself getting very angry again with that ugly Lesbian pipsqueak and her gang for having poured their mindless slime over me and the unpublished Joseph Goebbels biography in 1996, without ever having read a single book I wrote; and with that strange and hapless Mr Justice Gray for having sided with them in my libel action against her.

He adopted every single one of his former colleague Richard Rampton's points, almost blindly, no matter how absurd, (The peephole argument! The Dresden latecomer witnesses!), while at the same time saying what a great writer, researcher, and WW2 historian I am. As I told the BBC, if September 11, 2001 had come before the trial and not after, Rampton and Gray would have found some way of working the Twin Towers and Mohammed Atta into their defense and Judgment too. That is one reason why I called his Judgment "perverse" and I have stuck to that adjective ever since.

I cycle up to Stock Island for supper, a lovely quiet evening ride with no wind whatever, as the sun sets behind me across the Gulf. I get back to the Old Town at nine pm. The house is cool and empty, and I like it that way. I work for another hour on the Rommel setting.

June 26, 2005 (Sunday)
Key West (Florida)

HORRIBLE night; awake for two hours around four and five a.m. What did that? Last night's fish, I suppose.

The Manchester invitation and its withdrawal

I HAVE the opportunity to arrange a talk at the Imperial War Museum (North) on the afternoon of 9 August - the 60th anniversary of the A-bombing of Nagasaki. I would like to set up a debate between two historians on the A bombings and their views on whether the use of atomic weapons was justifiable. I understand this is a subject that you have researched and published on. If I am successful in arranging this meeting then we would publicise it in the Manchester Evening News to attract an audience. It would fall within part of the Museum's community outreach work. I can offer reasonable expenses if you are able to accept. I appreciate that the notice is very short but write hoping you may be in a position to consider this invitation. Stewart Kemp Principal Policy Officer Chief Executives Dept Tel: 0161 234 3244 Fax: 0161 234 3379 Email (local): [email protected] Email (remote): [email protected] Mobile: 07771 930196 I AM happy to accept your invitation because I shall be in the UK on August 9 and will prepare a solid talk based on the documents which I shall also be using in my third volume of my Churchill biography, "Churchill's War", vol. iii: "The Sundered Dream". Please note that I am author of thirty books (which you can review at http://www.fpp.co.uk/books and http://www.fpp.co.uk/reviews David Irving THANK you very much for replying positively. I am sorry not to have responded sooner but I have been away from my desk for several days. I will write with further details tomorrow. Stewart Kemp Principal Policy Officer Chief Executives Dept

At 10:04 am Jessica phones from Hertford Street for ten minutes, asking for information on The Mormons; homework, no doubt. I tell her they are a very clean-living sect, who once practised polygamy and are now not supposed to; I tell her about Joseph Smith and the founding of Salt Lake City. I advise her to look those two up in the encyclopædia. She says all her friends ("the whole school," which I hope is hyperbole) have looked up DAVID IRVING on Google, and she giggles.

I work until ten p.m. on photos for The Destruction of Convoy PQ.17. How very amateurish of me to have allowed all the original photos and maps for these books to slip out of my hands over the years; the rest have been looted and destroyed by the trustees. Their hour is soon to come.

June 27, 2005 (Monday)
Key West (Florida)

A BETTER night, but the end of the bed suddenly subsides about two inches with a loud metallic clang at four-forty a.m, waking me for an hour.

Message from Stewart Kemp at the Imperial War Museum about their invitation to debate in Manchester on August 8 on the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima. He will get back to me later today with further details. Anticipating that he will run into a major "convoy battle", I respond:

It may be useful for you to have this brief synopsis: In my proposed talk I will discuss the evidence that the Americans and British had intercepted on July 13, 1945 the code messages from Tokyo to Moscow, asking for Soviet good offices in surrendering immediately on condition that their Emperor could be retained; the evidence that these intercepts reached both Churchill and Truman at Potsdam, and were cynically disregarded by both; the fact that Stalin decided not to pass the surrender offer on to them; and the reasons why the Americans (Truman, Stimson, Groves) decided to proceed with the atomic bombing operations despite this. Their later talk of the desire to save hundreds of thousands of US lives was hogwash. I have, of course, the supporting documents.

STEVE Kippax says he was also contacted on Heinrich Himmler's death by a ZDF [German television] journalist, Annette von der Heyde. He now has a theory that Winston Churchill's guilty conscience over Himmler had something to do with a second anti-Hitler coup that was never staged:

The little Foxley files from March 1945 suggest a deal-and-decapitation- of-leadership strategy by HH and the British. If HH had got on the witness stand at Nuremberg and shown that his strings were being pulled by Brendan Bracken et al.., it would have had a huge political impact on both the international and domestic political standing of WSC [Churchill]; therefore he had to be silenced.

I reply that I shall have to run my eye over the "Foxley" files in the archives and see if I get the same reading: "The Churchill-Bracken relationship (right) was a very odd one, like father/son. Bracken was deliberately forced out of Parliament in the 1945 Election by [Lieutenant-General Sir Noel] Mason-Macfarlane, governor of Gibraltar at the time of the Sikorski episode, who stood against Bracken as an act of personal spite [to hurt Churchill], as M-M's papers show." I add:

The difficulty of accepting your theory is that there is absolutely no echo of such a manipulation of Himmler at the German documentary end: interrogations of his staff, records, etc.

Paloma emails that she has started teaching English in Madrid. Her spoken English is, I tell her, "the best in the family (apart from Jessica's!)" -- which is just a tease. Her little boy is going to the Dominican Republic in July for a week or two. I answer:

Dominican Republic, eh? That's not far from here. The other end of Haiti, also known as Hispaniola. Not a good time of year, hurricane season etc., and very rainy and hot. I took you and Beatrice to Haiti, was it in 1981? (I had confused it with Tahiti). Spooky, only guests in that clifftop motel, then to the Holiday Inn at Port au Prince where they wrecked my Hertz rental car during the night because I did not pay them protection money.

Paloma has not forgotten that stay in Haiti. She reminds me about the Tonton Macoute agent assigned to us, who slept in our car outside the motel, and the mob that threw stones at her and her sister in the market square, and the relief to get back to Miami.

"Did you seriously think it was Tahiti?" she asks. I reply: "Yup, but don't tell anyone." In those days Eastern Airlines had a $300 fly-anywhere ticket, and I didn't check the name too closely.

I contact Joanne C., who will be transcribing my dictation of draft memoirs, to confirm her correct mail address -- I would not like to lose the tapes in the mail. I began writing memoirs back in 1949. The manuscript was looted and destroyed by the British Government's trustees who seized my property in 2002 while I was speaking in Seattle. As said, their hour will soon come.

DURING the afternoon, at 2:10 p.m., I find a further brief message from England. It comes several weeks earlier than anticipated (I am inured to this kind of thing). The Manchester speaking invitation has been withdrawn.

Further to my note earlier today I must now write to say that it is not possible to proceed as proposed. Sincerely, Stewart Kemp

I reply with a straight bat: "I must say I am astonished, as I have prepared a paper subsequent to your invitation, as indicated in my synopsis [above], and as recently as this morning your email indicated no problem; I would be grateful for the courtesy of a detailed explanation, at very least."

I remind Mr Kemp that I have lectured on WW2 topics at many official and semi-official bodies in the very recent past, including the US National Archives in Washington DC, the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, the RNVR Association at the Royal Naval College at Woolwich, the University of Denver last autumn, and two US army military headquarters in Germany.

Unusually, and to his credit, Stewart Kemp replies almost at once with a very full and candid explanation. "I issued an invitation to you in good faith knowing your background. However, I must now withdraw the invitation. For many years, as an officer of Manchester City Council I have arranged occasional events and I have tried to seek out fresh perspectives. However, on this occasion I have seriously misjudged the view within Manchester City Council. Around lunchtime today I reported progress with arrangements for the event in the usual way to elected members of the Council. I was immediately informed that the Council does not wish to be associated with any event involving yourself. The Council will not fund the proposed meeting at the Imperial War Museum (North) and I have no authority to proceed any further. That is the factual position. Sincerely Stewart Kemp."

It takes me back to Berlin, October 1989, when a panel of worthy but ignorant German historians including Eberhard Jäckel and Joachim Fest refused to sit at the same table as me for a television discussion on Sender Freies Berlin. I know what they were afraid of. Instead of sacking them, SFB disinvited me. I still flew to Berlin that day, and staged a demonstration outside their building, with friends carrying banners reading: GERMAN HISTORIANS. LIARS AND COWARDS. (Years later, my lawyers found that the Nuremberg public prosecutor had started race-hate proceedings against me for that word German!)

"Very many thanks and I appreciate your position," I reply to Kemp in Manchester. "You could have drawn their attention to the highly positive things that Mr Justice Gray said about me, e.g. 'his knowledge of WW2 is unparallelled,' etc."

In Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, I have no trouble speaking; I did so last year, and shall return there this fall. But not in Manchester, England.

Did I say England? The Land of the Anglos? There is now a large, ahem, non-Anglo, population in Manchester, and I suspect that the usual traditional enemies of free speech have intervened. Perhaps I can hold a private meeting somewhere on this topic. A sad state of affairs. 

Hate-mail from Kelly Snowden about the Manchester ban