Churchill's War, vol. ii |
BOOKS What is Real History? Donald Cameron Watt Churchill's War, Volume II: Triuph in Adversity
DAVID Irving has been in the news recently. He lost the libel suit he brought against Penguin Books. The judge, Sir Charles Gray, commended his work as a military historian, but condemned his work on Hitler and the Holocaust as the product of an illegitimate and distorted treatment of the historical evidence. His books can no longer rely on publication or distribution through commercial channels.
It reveals, as did the first, both Irving's undoubted merits -- his enormous, though not always total, mastery of the sources and of the exhausting literature, and his ability to maintain a sweep of narrative and command of detail that carry the reader along -- and, alas, his talent for injecting mean comments designed to depict Britain's national hero as the menial hireling of forces traditionally regarded by the Bulldog Drummond Right as sinister. These corrupt, conspiratorial backstage manipulators of the true forces of the British Empire -- Jews, Americans, and still worse, American Jews -- made Churchill their tool by liquidating his debts and keeping him brandy and cigars (a gambit of destruction first employed by Lytton Stratchey against General Gordon, it will be remembered).
It also asks 'What is Real History?', answering: 'It is history that travels straight from history-maker to document, and from the archives to the writer and his book, without political input and free of academic prejudice; it is history that cannot be bought and cannot be bought off.' One wonders at the conjunction of 'academic' and 'prejudice'. Is this a tacit admission that there are other kinds of prejudice that 'Real History' can accommodate without protest? As for 'political input', it is odd to find Irving praising, in his introduction, the work of the neo-conservative revisionists John Charmley and Maurice Cowling, let alone the late Alan Clark, though the latter made no bones of his desire to cleanse Conservatism of the record of Churchill and Macmillan, against whom he held the same objections as Irving reveals in his introduction: that they sold out British power and the British Empire to the Americans, when Hitler offered a deal by which the British Empire could have been preserved. Irving is a little guilty again here of the faults that Sir Charles Gray condemned in overlooking the hate side of Hitler's love-hate relationship with the image of the British Empire, one largely founded on Lives of a Bengal Lancer. The price of Hitler's friendship was to have been an alliance against the United States. As he often explained to his listening toadies, if the British Empire was to break up, Germany was singularly ill placed to snap any of the pickings. Of course had his Navy's Z-Plan been completed, as it would have been 1944 or 1946, things would have been very different. As Admiral [Erich] Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Reichmarine, lamented when 3 September 1939 brought war with Britain four or five years ahead of programme: if Hitler had waited, as he promised, the British problem would have finally been solved.[*] That does not sound like the kind of friendship that Alan Clark would have approved of. Irving has chosen his side. Hitler is his hero, or so he once said.[*] It follows that Churchill must of necessity be his villain. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 'one cannot argue with the choice of the heart'. The best way to read this book -- and there is much in the detail that was new to me -- is to hold one's nose, ignore the regular injections of pettiness, and mine its new source materials: but with care.
We only escaped having Henry Wallace as his successor because Roosevelt's health held out until after the 1944 presidential election. His New Deal was an economic failure. At the outbreak of the war the American economy was operating at less than 25 per cent of its full capacity. By 1944 it was supporting a two-ocean war and large parts of the British and Soviet war efforts into the bargain, and enjoying a consumer boom at home. None of this recovery was thanks to FDR -- except in one or two respects. He saved American's belief in their country and their culture; he moderated the class conflict which his home-grown Ivy League Marxists expected would tear America to pieces. And, somehow, thanks largely to the unsung genius of General [George C] Marshall, his chief of army staff, he kept control of the squabbling military and naval commanders. Irving regards Roosevelt as a bad thing, without ever subjecting him to proper historical analysis. If Irving's skill wavers with America, it deserts him when he comes to Japan; which, ironically, was equally true of Churchill. Irving's weaknesses in both these areas come together in his account of Anglo-American anticipations of Japanese action in 1941. He has wisely eschewed any deep entry into the joint Roosevelt--Churchill conspiracy industry. But he understands neither the Japanese nor Roosevelt's system of intelligence or command or preference, or preference for division over unity of command. He cannot fit the absurd rivalry between the American army and navy code-breakers -- which resulted in their attacking the Japanese codes and ciphers on alternate days -- into his narrative. Nor can he handle the complicated relationships of the Japanese naval and army factions with the Emperor and his civilian advisors. And it does not seem to have occurred to him that from 1922 onwards, if not before, Churchill's mental atlas of the world never extended beyond the pages covering India and the Indian Ocean. Nor does he appreciate the racist element in both the British and American assessments of Japan. To expect him to understand the true historian's duty of recognising and doing his best to transcend the limits of his native culture is to expect too much. So much for Real History. Instead we get every comment in the contemporary memoirs and diaries on how impossible a man Churchill was to work with, on the overriding egocentricity that complemented his sense of destiny and made him impose on all his advisors and commanders patterns of work and response that killed a number of them while he survived. [Oliver] Cromwell notoriously asked Sir
Peter Lely to paint his picture with the warts left in.
David Irving has followed Cromwell's approach. The trouble
is that he leaves the reader with the impression that there
was nothing to Churchill as a war leader but the warts. He
will not find many takers for this thesis; at least not in
Britain.
Donald Camereon Watt is Professor emeritus of History, the London School of Economics * See Mr Irving's response to Prof Donald Watt Related files on this website: | |||
The
best way to read this book -- and there is much in
the detail that was new to me -- is to hold one's
nose, ignore the regular injections of pettiness,
and mine its new source materials: but with
care.
As
for Churchill's fin de siècle
pan-Anglo-Saxonism, to regard Roosevelt today as
Britain's friend requires a rather more careful definition
of friendship than the Churchillians have so far proffered.
It still remains true that without Roosevelt's backing in
the autumn of 1940, and the firmness of his decision to deal
with Germany before Japan, whatever his motives at arriving
at that decision, Britain would have had a much worse war
than it actually did.
PERSONALLY I find Roosevelt a problem. It is difficult to
overlook his enormous lapses of foresight and his even more
enormous misperceptions of reality, both in his
overestimates of British wealth and strength and his
illusions about Stalin. He showed an immense gift for making
the wrong judgements as to whom to choose for his entourage
and cabinet, not to mention his overseas
representatives.
©
Focal Point
2001 |
