June 26, 2013

DESPATCH BOX: FINEST HOUR 132, AUTUMN 2006

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SHORT SNORTER CAUGHT OUT

Anent the Short Snorter article (FH 131: 26), General Mark W. Clark DSC KCB KBE spoke of the manner in which he and General Eisenhower “made Mr. Churchill a Short Snorter” at our Sixth Annual Memorial Dinner at the Macdonald Hotel, Edmonton, on 1 June 1970:

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“Now Chequers, that was another deal. That came on every Friday afternoon, and we went down there and did not get away till the first thing Monday morning. …One evening Ike and I made him a Short Snorter….We told him the rules, that he had to carry his short snorter on his person, and if he did not have it when another short snorter challenged him, he had to pay the fine, which was five dollars.

“So at dinner, one evening, Ike said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, would you show us your short snorter?’ He jumped up and went out of the room. Finally he came back waving it, and Ike said: ‘That’s not permissible, sir. You’re supposed to have it on your person.’ Mr. Churchill held it up and said, ‘I make my own rules in my own house.'”

]. EDWARD HUTSON, PRESIDENT RT HON SIR WINSTON S. CHURCHILL SOCIETY EDMONTON, ALBERTA

‘LIKE LAST TIME”

I enjoy Finest Hour, but I hope you will watch your writing style a little more. In your review of Churchill’s Triumph, you write that the novel “centers around.” Something cannot “center around.” It can “revolve around” or “center on.” And you wrote that Stalin was determined to break Germany “like last time.” This should be “as was done last time” or “the way the victors did last time.” The word “like” should not be used if a verb or an implied verb appears on both sides of the “like.” It’s not a conjunction. We can’t all write like Winston Churchill. But we can avoid these errors of style.

DON BUCK, ORFORD, NH

Editor’s response: We can’t, but we can try. I was actually thinking of Churchill’s words when I wrote “like last time,” so I looked them up, in The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1948, 175):

“One day in 1937 I had a meeting with Herr von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to Britain….There was a large map on the wall, and the Ambassador several times led me to it to illustrate his projects…I thought it right to say to the German Ambassador—in fact I remember the words well, ‘When you talk of war, which no doubt would be general war, you must not underrate England. She is a curious country, and few foreigners can understand her mind. Do not judge by the attitude of the present Administration. Once a great cause is presented to the people all kinds of unexpected actions might be taken by this very Government and by the British nation.’ And I repeated, ‘Do not underrate England. She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another Great War she will bring the whole world against you, like last time.'”

He admired brevity and I can’t believe he would have used either of your alternatives. So I am putting in for an exemption! Mea culpa on “center ground” and many thanks for reading FH so closely.

“ZIONISM VS. BOLSHEVISM”

Michael McMenamin writes in “Real Versus Rubbish: Rumbles Left and Right” {FH 123: 38-43) that Churchill’s 1920 article on Jewish involvement in Bolshevism (“Zionism vs. Bolshevism”) was meant as a defense of the Jews rather than as an indictment of them. I agree and would like to know if he might lead me to supplementary documentation which backs up what contemporaries must have regarded as a philosemitic protestation.

DAVID VERBEETEN, VIA EMAIL

Mr. McMenamin replies: There probably is supplemental documentation but I’m not aware of it specifically. Maybe Sir Martin Gilbert presents it in essays he’s written on Churchill and Zionism and Churchill and the Holocaust. My conclusion on WSC’s “Zionism” article was based largely on its contents, which clearly refute the anti-semitism libel. You also might check out on the Centre website my article “Churchill and the Litigious Lord” (FH 95:28), where Lord Alfred Douglas claimed Churchill was in the pocket of Jewish moneymen after the Battle of Jutland…and was convicted of criminal libel.

One would think having as your official biographer the leading Holocaust scholar in the world is sufficient inoculation against being called an anti-semite…I love the line in Gilbert’s In Search of Churchill where a source he is interviewing is about to tell him one of Winston’s chief flaws. Sir Martin leans forward as the source says, “He was too fond of the Jews.”

THE PITY OF WAR

As his Christmas present, my 22-year-old grandson presented me with the intriguing book, The Pity of War, by Niall Ferguson (Basic Books), which presents a rather deep analysis of the multiple circumstances leading up to the outbreak of World War I, and the conduct of the war itself.

On page 177, dealing with the reaction of prominent individuals to the outbreak of war, Ferguson writes: “Alone together in his office at the Commons earlier that afternoon, Asquith and his wife ‘could not speak for tears’ after he told her simply: ‘It’s all up.’ But a few months into the war on 22 February 1915, Churchill told their daughter Violet Asquith, ‘I think a curse should rest on me—because I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering the lives of thousands every moment—& yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it’….But Churchill was at heart an incurable optimist who never quite ceased to believe that there was an easy way to win the war. His wife evidently did not share his keenness.”

It was the first time I have ever read of Churchill’s almost boyish attitude towards war. Ferguson’s remarks about Clementine’s attitude suggest that she was “not sharing his enthusiasm” over the “easy way” to win, which a footnote says comes from “Davies’ Europe, p. 885.” I do not have that book to hand, but I wonder if you have any knowledge of that specific incident of negativeness on Clementine’s part. WSC’s remark I find rather peculiar coming from a person holding high office.

I don’t think any of us, in the battalion I was serving in on 3 September 1939, exulted at the news we were at war. It reached us in the Simla Hills during that night; we merely accepted it as part of the job for which we had signed up. But in Burma, much later, there was no doubting the fact that one and all felt deeply thankful that the Yanks had dropped some mighty big bombs on Japan and that, after the second one went off, the Japanese Emperor had decided to call off the war.

WILLIAM ROBERT DALES, SANTA FE, N.M.

Editor’s response: Churchill confessed to mixed emotions about war to intimates on several occasions. After observing German army maneuvers in 1909 he wrote to Clementine: “Much as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations I feel more deeply every year and can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is.” (Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill 11:225.)

One cannot help remarking at the honesty of his assertion. Few politicians would make such a confession then, let alone today. And of course, he carefully preserved it in his papers, for future critics to quote from selectively (“War attracts me and fascinates my mind”— full stop.)

According to www.bookfinder.com, the reference is to Norman Davies, Europe: A History, subtitled, A Panorama of Europe, East and West, from the Ice Age to the Cold War, from the Urals to Gibraltar (Harper Collins, 1998).

Clementine Churchill’s views on World War I were fairly robust: When WSC was to be cashiered in 1915 she told Prime Minister Asquith that Winston alone had “the power, the imagination, the deadlines to fight Germany.” Her letters can be reviewed in Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves, and the companion volumes of the official biography. 

WAS WSC MENTALLY ILL?

EH 131 parenthetically asks: “WSC suffered from mental illness?” with an implicit exclamation point scoffing at such an idea. But let’s bear inmind octogenarian George Bernard Shaw’s famous anecdote about his visit to an ophthalmologist who discovered he had 20/20 vision. “So, I’m right in thinking I still have normal vision?” Shaw asked. “Absolutely not!” the doctor replied. “You have perfect vision, which is altogether abnormal.

So it goes with “mental illness.” I’m in my seventh decade of life, and have encountered barely a handful of people who were entirely free of neurosis. Thus, those who are “mentally well” are altogether abnormal, and more often than not, uninteresting. WSC was unquestionably neurotic. I would even go so far as to say that much of his character and genius derived from the fact that he had “Attention Deficit Disorder.”

What EH 131 was objecting to was the notion that mental illness was a defining trait of WSC’s character. And of course it was not. But saying, for example, that he was an undiagnosed ADD sufferer is not the same as saying that ADD was a defining trait of his personality. He won’t shrink in our estimation because he diverged from perfection in one or another respect. We do him and history scant service by reflexively dismissing analyses of his behavior that don’t comport with our particular image of the man. And we do our fellow creatures scant service by throwing around epithets like “mental illness.”

ROBERT H. PILPEL, SCARSDALE, N.Y.

Editor’s response: Bob, it was the charity Rethink that threw around the epithet “mental illness.” (EH 126:7 reports them also saying that Churchill “might never have become prime minister if the public had known the depth of his mental health problems.”)

By the dictionary explanation of “illness,” WSC was not mentally ill, though we don’t quarrel with the point that most people have neuroses, and knowing about his own adds to our knowledge, and does not subtract from his stature. Carol Breckenridge explains how ADD might well have been diagnosed in young Winston in “Art as Therapy: How Churchill Coped,” FH 120: 20-23.

CONFUSIONS & COINCIDENCES

As the author of My Original Ambition {Finest Hour 130:7) I was as surprised as your readers to find Sir Winston Churchill’s photograph alongside the letter of his namesake grandson in The Daily Record. Nonetheless, I am delighted that you mentioned this error, as I am a fan of Sir Winston.

Did you know that Svetlana Stalin, daughter of the Soviet dictator, also resided for more than a year at Sir Winston’s former London residence, Morpeth Mansions? Indeed, Ms. Stalin shouted at me in Sir Winston’s kitchen when I questioned her about her father. What an irony that Stalin’s daughter should have resided in Churchill’s own home some twenty years after his passing! The old warrior would turn in his grave, and possibly, the late generalissimo too!

DOMINIC SHELMERDINE, VTA EMAIL