May 7, 2015

Finest Hour 117, Winter 2002-03

Page 35

By Conrad Black

Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian, by John Lukacs. Yale University Press, 224 pp. $21.95, member price $16

John Lukacs, an original and lively historian, provides some new insights on a heavily travelled subject in this small volume, which he calls an essay. It is a catchment for varied perspectives on Winston Churchill, as visionary, historian, and historical subject. Unfortunately, the author tries to exalt Churchill by denigrating Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and trots out what is broadly known as the Yalta Myth.

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John Lukacs knows perfectly well that the British voted with the Russians against the Americans to demarcate the borders of the occupation zones in Germany at the European Advisory Commission in 1943. Roosevelt wanted to leave these unspecified because he believed that the Western Allies would advance (as they did) a good deal more quickly against the Germans than the Russians would. Here, Roosevelt was the visionary.

Roosevelt had to cajole Stalin into helping him convince Churchill to agree to a cross-Channel invasion in 1944. Churchill and Alanbrooke thought Stalin was motivated in his support of Roosevelt by a conviction that it would be a fiasco. They were probably mistaken about Stalin but they were far from visionary about Normandy.

British diplomacy managed the considerable achievement of securing one-third of prewar Germany as an occupation zone, despite having (with Canada), only about one-fifteenth of the Allied military manpower in or near Germany, to a quarter for the U.S. and two-thirds for the Russians. Churchill was undoubtedly prescient in championing a French occupation zone.

This was especially a feat given that between the initial occupation zone agreement and its ratification in 1944 the Teheran Conference moved Russian and Polish borders 200 miles to the west at Germany’s expense. So most of the Soviet-occupied zone was in Poland. Millions of Germans literally moved Germany into Western Europe as they fled westwards. This was the principal geopolitical prize of the war won by Churchill and Roosevelt together, although Stalin unflinchingly took 90 percent of the casualties from fighting the Germans.

Roosevelt and Churchill secured strong Declarations on Poland and Liberated Europe at Yalta, and Roosevelt hoped to trade money, technology and respectability to Stalin in exchange for better behaviour from him in Eastern Europe. As the Roosevelt and Churchill biographer Ted Morgan wrote, if Yalta had been a sell-out to Stalin—as John Lukacs implies, though he knows better—Stalin would not have judged it necessary to violate every clause of it. Roosevelt’s Russian policy was not a posthumous success, but Churchill’s was no more promising. They were both vindicated eventually; Stalin’s unleashing of the Cold War proved one of the greatest strategic disasters in history, leading to the end of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism.

Given that the British had caused the pre-commitment of what became East Germany to the Russians, it is a bit rich for Churchill’s more enthusiastic supporters to blame Truman, Marshall and Eisenhower, following Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945, for not sacrificing Western Allied lives to take territory pledged to the Soviet Union. Ten weeks before the first atomic bomb test, the Americans wanted the Russians to share some of the one million casualties expected in the invasion of the Japanese home islands. (The Americans had suffered 50,000 casualties in Iwo Jima and Okinawa already.)

Most of Lukacs’s attack on Eisenhower is rather churlish. Eisenhower was authorised at Yalta to communicate directly with the Soviet high command and there is nothing wrong with his having done so. Yet Eisenhower never explained his failure to capture Prague (although he went to considerable lengths to keep the Russians out of Denmark), and here Lukacs’s criticism is justified.

It is not at all clear that anything useful would have been achieved by a summit meeting with the post-Stalin Soviet leaders in 1953 or 1954, as Churchill (and Lukacs) believed. Khrushchev sacked these men in 1955, and Eisenhower did meet with him, to no great effect, in 1959 and 1960. Eisenhower was not a figure of comparable stature to Churchill or Roosevelt. But he was a distinguished soldierstatesman and Lukacs is unfair to represent him as a simple-minded tool of his own secretary of state, Dulles (not such an ogre as Lukacs represents him, either, though his charm was not unlimited).

John Lukacs’s celebration of Winston Churchill the historian is unambiguously successful. Churchill’s achievements in other areas have tended to deemphasise his attainments as a non-fiction author, although it was for literature that he received the Nobel Prize in 1953. Here Lukacs debunks a number of other historians—deservedly. John Charmley’s theory, like that of Enoch Powell, that Churchill should have made a live-andlet-live agreement with Hitler’s Germany and not sought intimacy in alliance with an ever more powerful America, is insane, as Lukacs rightly claims. Regardless, America would have become as powerful as it has, but with no particularly kindly disposition to Britain, which Hitler would have devoured when he had finished with Stalin.

Churchill was a visionary most of the time, other than in his attachment to the permanence of Empire. But so was Roosevelt, and neither should be elevated at the expense of the other. Lukacs does ungrudgingly acknowledge that they were the co-saviours of civilisation. Anyone who writes otherwise is a myth-maker and not a historian.

The quotations from Churchill’s works are very well selected. In an affecting personal recollection of Churchill’s funeral, the author acknowledges that Churchill is his “spiritual father.” This commendable inspiration explains some of his more unrigorous effusions.

This book is a good read and will reward the attention of Churchill buffs. The general reader may be misled and possibly even discouraged by its otherwise rather endearing idiosyncrasies.

Lord Black is a CC honorary member; his review, from the 2Nov02 Daily Telegraph, is reprinted by permission of the author.