April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 14


CHURCHILL OF ARABIA?

Among current red herrings is a line that Churchill supported Arab activities against Israel, including such groups as the PLO. He did believe that Palestine should have been partitioned in 1946. He chastised the Labour government for its inaction. But he was also pro-Israel. Prior to his death he had visits from David Ben-Gurion, and they amused themselves arguing who was the greater man, Moses or Jesus, WSC arguing for Moses, Ben-Gurion for Jesus! Churchill was a humanist, and an optimist. He really did believe that people could get along with each other once grievances were settled and justice ruled. Cynics might say it was one of his fatal flaws. Time will tell.

BURGOYNE, SARATOGA, FDR

In Washington in June 1942, Churchill was handed a telegram by President Roosevelt which revealed that the Eighth Army was in retreat and Tobruk had fallen with 25,000 men taken prisoners. According to Kay Halle’s Irrepressible Churchill (Cleveland: World, 1966, 200), Churchill responded: “I am the most miserable Englishman in America since Burgoyne” (the English general who surrendered at Saratoga during the American Revolution).

We amused Doug Lindsay, superintendent of the Saratoga Battlefield in Stillwater, New York with this remark, and he suggests a reason why Churchill chose Burgoyne for this quip, instead of the more obvious Cornwallis:

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“FDR had an intimate connection with this park, having lobbied for its creation as a state park site in the 1920s; then, when President, seeing that it was added to the National Park System in 1938. In 1940 he drove up from Hyde Park one morning to meet with the new superintendent and the Park Service architect to pick out the site for a proposed visitor center. One of three possible sites was on a wooded hill overlooking the battlefield. In order to get him to the summit, Civilian Conservation Corps workers had cleared a path and constructed a dirt road in less than twenty-four hours. Roosevelt drove himself to the summit, commenting to the superintendent, who rode along on the running board, ‘This road appears to have been recently constructed.’ He decided on this as the site and that is where our Visitor Center was built. Imagine a president today getting involved in the minutiae of a small federal agency’s work!”

ON TRAINING OFFICERS

There is a proposal under study in the Pentagon to cut back resident professional military education for many middle-grade officers from some ten months to perhaps one-third of that. This “efficiency” reminds us to study anew a speech by Churchill at the Pentagon in 1946, when he complimented the American officer corps and spoke of its long-term educational needs:

“The United States owes a debt to its officer corps. In time of peace in this country, as in my own, the military profession is very often required to pass a considerable number of years in the cool shade. One of Marlborough’s veterans wrote the lines, now nearly 250 years ago,

God and the soldier we adore
In time of danger, not before;
The danger passed and all things righted,
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.

“…That you should have been able to preserve the art not only of creating mighty armies almost at the stroke of a wand—but of leading and guiding those armies upon a scale incomparably greater than anything that was prepared for or even dreamed of, constitutes a gift made by the Officer Corps of the United States to their nation in time of trouble…

“We now have to choose very carefully the line of division between the officers and other ranks upon which authority should stand. There is only one line in my view, and that is professional attainment. The men have a right to feel that their officers know far better than they do how to bring them safely and victoriously through the terribly difficult decisions which arise in war. And for my part as far as Great Britain is concerned, I shall always urge that the tendency in the future should be to prolong the course of instruction at the colleges rather than to abridge them and to equip our young officers with that special technical professional knowledge which soldiers have a right to expect from those who give them orders, if necessary, to their deaths.

“Professional attainment, based on prolonged study, and collective study at colleges, rank by rank, and age by age—those are the title deeds of the commanders of the future armies, and the secret of future victories.”

“WE CUT THE COAL”

Student Kristin Elkinton (Kristin_ [email protected]) asked us to verify the accuracy of what Churchill said to improve morale among wartime coal miners, whose work was so vital in WW2.

Churchill was speaking to the Coal Owners and Miners Conference, Central Hall, Westminster, on 31 October 1942. The text of his speech is on pages 6687-92 of vol. VI, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James (New York: Bowker, 1974). It was first published on page 204 of The Unrelenting Struggle (London/Boston: Cassell/Little Brown, 1943), and later in The War Speeches (1952):

“We shall not fail, and then some day, when children ask, ‘What did you do to win this inheritance for us, and to make our name so respected among men?’ one will say: ‘I was a fighter pilot’; another will say: ‘I was in the Submarine Service’; another: ‘I marched with the Eighth Army’; a fourth will say: ‘None of you could have lived without the convoys and the Merchant Seamen’; and you in your turn will say, with equal pride and with equal right: ‘We cut the coal.'”

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