March 12, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 52

By Richard M. Langworth

From Reid’s and Manchester’s Majestic Last Lion to a modest biography of Lady Randolph’s third husband, a trio of new books shed light on obscure corners of the Churchill story

Finest Hour’s definitive review, by Warren F. Kimball, will appear next issue, but in answer to the many questions by readers, I distill here some of the passages that particularly impressed me, and perhaps our readers as well.

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Preamble: The Depressive

On the psychoanalysis of Anthony Storr, originator of the “Black Dog” thesis, in his essay “The Man,” in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Churchill: Four Faces and the Man (London: Allen Lane, 1969):

★ It is part of the contradictory nature of Churchill that he manifested various symptoms of depression—risk taking, excessive drinking, mood swings—not intermittently, but regularly (even daily), lifelong. A fierce determinism informs Storr’s thinking. His Churchill is a creative genius driven by subconscious influences who somehow, instinctively, pursues hobbies and interests beneficial to his mental health because not to do so would invite his depression, always swimming just below the surface, to rise up and drag him down into the darkness.

Storr’s Churchill is nothing more than the sum of his genes and his childhood environment….He ascribes to Churchill an “iron will” in pursuit of his therapeutic pastimes, but for Storr even Churchill’s will is both a product of and a prophylactic against the influences of genes and environment. This is a lot of tautological nonsense akin to claiming that absent the joy Churchill found in life he would have found no joy in life. Storr’s determinism removes the moral quotient from Churchill and his actions. Winston Churchill believed in the exercise of free will, and in the acceptance of responsibility for the consequences. Those, like Storr, who stuff Churchill into a determinist mould, deny themselves the mystery of his myriad personality quirks, the power of his will, and the pleasure of his company.

1942: Before First Alamein

Written by Paul Reid, this is as fine a piece of narrative as one could hope for from the pen of Manchester himself….

★ Rommel had retreated before Auchinleck, but more to the point, he had escaped, and rearmed. The peril had shifted to “The Auk,” although the danger was belied by the quietude that had settled over the desert, where the armies dug in and faced each other just beyond field artillery range. Nights were cool. Intermittent rain showers brought forth blooms to stunted shrubs while small desert flowers scrabbled from beneath the cracked sand and stones as sunshine as weak as camomile tea threw indeterminate shadows across the sands.

1942: Lord Moran’s Diaries

Sir Martin Gilbert and other historians, examining Moran’s actual diaries, were surprised to find in them much less than Moran published in his book, suggesting strongly that the book was composed partly from memory….

★Lord Moran’s book (1966) is part diary and part after-the-fact recollection presented as diary entries. Wilson was not present in many of the scenes he paints himself into, and in which he quotes WSC. Churchill’s postwar secretary, Anthony Montague Browne later declared (WM interview, 15 November 1980) that Churchill would no more hold substantive conversations with Wilson about politics “than he would discuss the state of his bowels with his chiefs of staff.” Browne held suspect much of the “debating, conversations and quotes [Wilson] put into people‘s mouths.”

1942-43: The Second Front

Here is one of the most balanced summaries we may hope to read of disagreements over the Second Front, and what Churchill actually believed….

★ Three months before TORCH [the invasion of North Africa] kicked off, Churchill told Roosevelt that the British would willingly accept Marshall as supreme commander of ROUNDUP [initial codeword for the invasion of France]. Churchill did this knowing full well Marshall had one and only one strategy in mind, to strike straight into France. Sherwood: “This nomination of the most vehement proponent of the Second Front would hardly indicate that Churchill was attempting to relegate it to the Files of Forgotten Things.” He…had also begun to proclaim a truth as he saw it, that a disastrous defeat on the coast of France “was the only way in which we could lose this war.”

That conclusion was self-evidently correct. A defeat on the coast of France would lead, if not to immediate defeat, to Marshall and King shifting the entire American effort to the Pacific….These were Churchill’s sentiments exactly. ROUNDUP was to be one of several operations. Churchill’s multi-front thinking was a constant source of worry to Brooke, who wrote in his diary: “He is now swinging away from those [Sardinia and Sicily] for a possible invasion of France in 1943!” Eisenhower, meanwhile, was swinging toward Sardinia, where three German divisions were dug in.

1943: His Great American Moment

The last vestige of American isolationism died with Churchill’s speech at Harvard (FH 80; audio at www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/audioarchive). Here he went so far as to propose Anglo-American common citizenship, which would have been considered flagrant meddling in U.S. internal affairs only a year or so earlier….

★ Churchill’s extraordinary proposal of common citizenship had certainly been cleared by Roosevelt, who in fact assured him that America was now so far removed from its isolationist past that the idea of dual citizenship would not “outrage public opinion or provide another Boston Tea Party.” Eager to measure public reaction to the speech, Churchill ordered the British Embassy to sift American newspapers for opinions. But because the White House had announced the speech would contain little of political significance it had not been covered. As well, two horrific train crashes that week occupied the front pages of American newspapers. Churchill’s great American moment went largely unnoticed. Still, The New York Times declared the speech “opened a vast and hopeful field of discussion…. Down the grim corridors of war light begins to show.” On this day Churchill quite possibly reached the high water mark of his war leadership.

1943-44: Palestine

Here is a sound and fair description of the prewar Palestine White Paper and its anti-Semitic implications. “Palestine,” remember, consisted of what is now Jordan and Israel. Arabs were left with 6/7ths of Palestine and are still the majority: Israel 7.3 million (75% Jews, 20% Muslims); Jordan 6.2 million (90% Muslims, 8% Christians, no Jews).

★ The 1939 White Paper called for an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1944, and the establishment of a single Palestinian state in which the Arabs, by virtue of holding veto power on further Jewish immigration, would outnumber Jews by 3-1. It was intended to placate Arabs throughout the Middle East. Chamberlain believed that if war came, the Arab world would be a far stronger ally against Hitler than 500,000 Palestinian Jews….The British military chiefs advocated adoption. Churchill did not, and considered the White Paper to be a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration a n d a betrayal of Jews. He had opposed the policy in 1939 and still did, because the Arab majority within a single Palestinian state would never allow the Jewish minority to execute a partition into two separate states. If trouble arose over partition, Churchill told Ismay, it will come from the Arabs and that “left to themselves, the Jews would beat the Arabs.”

His support for Zionism never flagged, even when later in the year two young Zionist terrorists assassinated Lord Moyne….When Churchill learned that Zionists worldwide protested the death sentence imposed on Moyne’s assassins he advised Cairo officials, where the murder took place, to hang the killers, and hang them quickly. The sentence was carried out.

1944: Iran

Among the book’s special qualities is its relentless pursuit of naïve and deleterious notions—of President Roosevelt as well as Prime Minister Churchill. Most writers continually dwell on the latter and overlook the former.

★ In early March Churchill received a short letter from Roosevelt which contained an extraordinary proposal in the form of a memorandum on the future of Iran….Roosevelt offered that it would take “thirty or forty years to eliminate the graft” in Iran and to properly prepare the people for democracy. In the interim the country would “need trustees”; Roosevelt nominated America, Russia and Britain for that role. The trustees’ mandate would be the “care and education” of Iranians. For comic relief he tossed in, “From your and my personal observation I think we could add something about cleanliness as well.” One line offered a direct challenge to Churchill and the British Empire: “I do not want the United States to acquire a ‘zone of influence’—or any other nation for that matter.”

1944: WSC and His Generals

The book’s descriptions of the often fraught relations between the Prime Minister and his military chiefs, particularly Alanbrooke, are finely crafted. Brooke wrote his waspish notes, thinking only he would ever see them, late at night when he was often tired, frustrated and depressed. Only years later, strapped for cash, did Brooke allow portions of his diaries to be published, accompanied by a written apology to WSC.

★ Despite the tumultuousness of the staff meetings, to say nothing of the tumultuous goings on in Churchill’s mind, the Chiefs and Churchill complemented each other. Churchill brought illumination, which his Chiefs brought into focus. Churchill never seriously considered sacking any of them, and none of them ever seriously considered resigning. In his capacity as Minister of Defence he never overrode their policies. Anthony Eden wrote that attending a meeting with Churchill was “a splendid and unique experience. It might be a monologue. It was never a dictatorship.”

Colville noted the criticisms leveled at Churchill by the Chiefs of Staff who, in Colville’s opinion, lacked Churchill’s “imagination and resolution” and could not see that it was Churchill who provided them “guidance and purpose.” The Chiefs and Churchill worked together in harness, the black steed of Churchill’s passion and the white steeds of the coolly logical Brooke, Cunningham, and Portal. Clementine Churchill later said of Brooke, “We might have won the war without Alanbrooke; I don’t think we would have won it without Winston.”

1965: Bladon

Mr. Reid’s conclusion was praised by his hard-bitten editors. Truly, it could not have been improved upon…

★ Queen Elizabeth II honored Churchill by her presence in St. Paul’s. She was joined by representatives from more than 110 nations, including four kings, a queen, five heads of state and sixteen prime ministers. Charles De Gaulle, wearing a plain kepi and simple uniform, unadorned with insignia, medals or ribbons, stood a head taller than all present as the great Imperial ceremony began.

From St. Paul’s the coffin was taken by motor launch up the Thames to Waterloo. There it was put aboard one of five Pullman coaches pulled by the Battle of Britain class locomotive Winston S. Churchill for the sixty-mile journey to the Oxfordshire village of Bladon and the little churchyard of St. Martin’s, within sight of the spires of Blenheim palace, where the story had begun. Lord Moran, finding in the end his literary voice, wrote: “And at Bladon, in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to the English earth, which in his finest hour, he had held inviolate.”

Excerpted from the book Winston Spencer Churchill, The Last Lion, volume 3, Defender of the Realm 1940-1965, by William Manchester and Paul Reid. Copyright © 2012 by John Manchester, Julie Manchester, Laurie Manchester and Paul Reid.  Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, all rights reserved.