May 7, 2015

Finest Hour 111, Summer 2001

Page 08

Q: Whatever happened to Detective Inspector Thompson, who accompanied Churchill throughout World War II? I cannot find any reference to him after 1940. A friend thinks he was killed in an air raid during the Blitz. —Bill Fisher, Atlanta, Ga. USA

A: Walter H. Thompson served with the Special Branch, Scotland Yard beginning 1913. He was bodyguard to Lloyd George (1917-20) and Churchill (1930-32), and accompanied Churchill on his American lecture tour in 193132 (but was unfortunately not on hand when WSC was knocked down by the car on Fifth Avenue, New York, in 1932). Thompson retired from the Yard in 1936 and became a greengrocer, but when Churchill joined the Government in 1939 he called him back, and he remained a bodyguard until May 1945.

Thompson’s tall, angular features appear in a remarkable number of photos; he stuck pretty close. He was not killed in the Blitz but did lose a son in the war. He either married or courted one of Churchill’s secretaries. One of his successors, the late Ronald Golding, told me that Thompson left under a cloud involving the waving around of a firearm at Chartwell. Gilbert’s Vol. V does not record birth and death dates, but Thompson was still around in the Sixties, signing copies of his various books, most of which, except his first, Guard from the Yard (1932), are readily available. They include / Was Churchill’s Shadow (1951), Sixty Minutes With Winston Churchill (1953), and Assignment Churchill (1956). —Ed.

Q: Was Churchill for or against the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I have read numerous articles saying the decision was debatable. —[email protected]

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A: Churchill wrote in his war memoirs, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (1953, chapter 19): “British consent in principle to the use of the weapon had been given on July 4, before the test had taken place. The final decision now lay in the main with President Truman, who had the weapon; but I never doubted what it would be, nor have I ever doubted since that he was right. The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.

[Note: some historians have cited a minor official in the Foreign Office who argued that Japan would surrender without the bomb, if the Allies promised she could keep her emperor; it was never proven that this ever reached the plenary level. —Ed.]

Churchill continued, “I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island, where many thousands of Japanese, rather than surrender, had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand-grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the rite of harakiri. To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that of British—or more if we could get them there: for we were resolved to share the agony.

“Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision—fair and bright indeed it seemed —of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks. I thought immediately myself of how the Japanese people, whose courage I had always admired, might find in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honour and release them from being killed to the last fighting man.”

In introducing Alistair Cooke at the 1988 Churchill Conference, I quoted his words on the 25th anniversary of the bombing, which I have long since committed to memory: “Without raising more dust over the bleached bones of Hiroshima I should like to contribute a couple of reminders: The first is that the men who had to make the decision were just as humane and tortured at the time as you and I were later. And, secondly, that they had to make the choice of alternatives that I for one would not have wanted to make for all the offers of redemption from all the religions of the world.”