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THE JOURNAL OFWINSTONCHURCHILLSUMMER 2009NUMBER 143

DESPATCH BOX3Number 143 • Summer 2009ISSN 0882-3715www.winstonchurchill.org____________________________Barbara F. Langworth, Publisherbarbarajol@gmail.comRichard M. Langworth CBE, Editorrlangworth@winstonchurchill.orgPost Office Box 740Moultonborough, NH 03254 USATel. (603) 253-8900Dec.-March Tel. (242) 335-0615___________________________Editor Emeritus:Ron Cynewulf RobbinsSenior Editors:Paul H. CourtenayJames W. MullerNews Editor:Michael RichardsContributorsAlfred James, AustraliaTerry Reardon, CanadaAntoine Capet, FranceInder Dan Ratnu, IndiaPaul Addison, Winston S. Churchill,James Lancaster,Sir Martin Gilbert CBE,Allen Packwood, United KingdomDavid Freeman, Ted Hutchinson,Warren F. Kimball, Justin D. LyonsMichael McMenamin,Robert Pilpel, Christopher Sterling,Manfred Weidhorn, United States___________________________• Address changes: Help us keep your copies coming!Please update your membership office whenyou move. All offices for The Churchill Centreand Allied national organizations are listed onthe inside front cover.__________________________________Finest Hour is made possible in part through thegenerous support of members of The ChurchillCentre and Museum, the Number Ten Club,and an endowment created by the ChurchillCentre Associates (page 2).___________________________________Published quarterly by The Churchill Centre,offering subscriptions from the appropriateoffices on page 2. Permission to mail at nonprofitrates in USA granted by the UnitedStates Postal Service, Concord, NH, permitno. 1524. Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.Produced by Dragonwyck Publishing Inc.UNINTENDED RESULTSDavid Jablonsky’s “The ChurchillExperience and the Bush Doctrine” (FH141) was a thoughful reminder ofChurchill’s warning that war is full of unexpectedturns and unpleasant surprises.—JAMES MACK, FAIRFIELD, OHIODON CORLEONE VS.STAN AND OLLIEColonel Jablonsky’s piece on theuse of force in Churchill’s context asopposed to the “Bush Doctrine” is likecomparing “The Godfather” with “Laureland Hardy.” Churchill was a student ofthe use of the military to attain politicaladvantage. He never utilized a preemptiveattack such as Bush did on thegovernment of Iraq.Jablonsky makes a stretch to arguethat Churchill utilized a preemptiveattack on the Vichy fleet at Oran. At thisparticular time of World War II, GreatBritain was fighting for its very survival.Vichy France was a mere puppet state ofNazi Germany. Jablonsky states that theVichy was “nominally independent.” Hisargument is weak and superfluous.Jablonsky is correct in stating thatChurchill expounded the virtues of militarypreparedness to make sure that theagreements of Versailles and Locarnowere followed. How these prescient activitiesby Churchill during his wildernessyears compare to anything PresidentBush advocated is beyond me.As stated in the author’s conclusion,Churchill would have taken greatercare in relations with Iraq. It wasChurchill’s folly which created this dysfunctionalentity. He knew that whengoing to war, one must examine all theconsequences. Churchill was a soldierstatesman.In retrospect Bush was a manseeking statesmanship through warwithout the knowledge of a soldier.—RICHARD C. GESCHKE, BRISTOL, CONN.Editor’s response: Ordinarily Iwould ask the author to respond, butsince Col. Jablonsky is ill, I will reply forhim. To label something a “BushDoctrine” doesn’t necessarily mean oneapproves of it. It seems to me thatJablonsky’s piece, while sympathetictoward the former President’s dilemmas,was more critical than supportive: “theIraq war...has raised doubts not only inU.S. claims to legitimacy in its use ofFINEST HOUR 142 / 4force, but the efficacy of such efforts.” Tosay Vichy France was only “nominallyindependent” compared to Iraq is tostruggle asymptotically towards truth. InVichy France they had disagreement. Bycomparison Hussein’s Iraq was only“nominally independent,” and I’m nottoo sure it had a government, in the sensewe understand it. None of whichendorses or dismisses the Bush Doctrine.“Churchill’s folly” in Iraq (the titleof a recent book, which was not persuasive)is a judgment based on what weknow now. David Freeman (“Churchilland the Making of Modern Iraq,” FH132) explains that the factors governingWSC’s actions there ceased to applyalmost as soon as they were taken. Yet hisfolly kept Iraq stable for nearly fortyyears, even as his folly in Ireland kept thepeace for nearly fifty. Iraq today is lessscary than it was, but it asks too muchthat Churchill (or Bush) should be heldresponsible decades later, after the factorshave changed and others have had allthat time to repair or extend whateverfollies they committed.As Churchill said in 1952: “It isalways wise to look ahead, but difficult tolook farther than you can see.”★★★Your book, Churchill by Himself,praised by Mary Soames and MartinGilbert (FH 142: 53) sits tall and eclipseslesser compendiums. It reminds me ofChurchill’s alleged reply to a taunt aboutIreland being only a small, weak country:“Yes, but it is a mother country.”I was twigged also by your contributionsto the pages of Finest Hour.Having just rifled through some backissues, I was struck by your meticulousnessand willingness, like Churchill, torecognize negatives while accentuatingpositives. Example: balanced treatment ofthe delicate issue of Churchill, Islam andrace (FH 114:45)—a subject that mightresurface over Kenya.My enthusiasm derives in partfrom having served as chairman of theorganization with the longest name, theChurchill Society for the Advancementof Parliamentary Democracy, and theprivilege of talking with some of thosewho were closest to the great man.ERNEST J. LITTLE, HAMILTON, ONT.Editor’s response: Mr. Little, meetMr. Geschke. Continued success to yourfine organization.✌

EDITOR’S ESSAYChurchill and Theodore RooseveltIs there a market for a symposium on Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt that would welcome both theChurchillians and the “TR advocates” I know are among our readers? If you like the idea, email the editor.We have long been chary of joint conferences, which “gang aft agley.”At one such event recently Churchillianspolitely turned out for all the non-Churchill panels; but the “other fellows” left as soon as their programs finished,or didn’t bother to attend at all. Perhaps we would have done the same had “they” hosted. The ideal approach wouldprobably be a symposium in some neutral corner, with a distinguished moderator and, to ice the cake, C-Span coverage.There’s more to the TR/Churchill relationship than seems apparent from its inauspicious beginnings. On hissecond visit to America in December 1900, Churchill met the Vice President-elect, who, as Robert Pilpel observed, “hadcharged up San Juan Hill two months before Churchill had charged at Omdurman. In their vitality, their energy, theirlust for adventure, the two men had other things in common as well. It was a case of likes repelling.” Roosevelt wrote: “Isaw the Englishman, Winston Churchill here....he is not an attractive fellow.”Six years later the President read Lord Randolph Churchill: “I dislike the father and I dislike the son, so I supposeI may be prejudiced....both possess or possessed such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinatethirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants.”The ice melted slightly in 1908, when, planning a safari to Africa, Roosevelt read Churchill’s My African Journey.“I do not like Winston Churchill but I supposed I ought to write him,” TR wrote U.S. Ambassador to Britain WhitelawReid. “Will you send him the enclosed letter if it is all right?” The letter thanked Churchill “for the beautiful copy ofyour book,” expressing the wish that “I shall have as good luck as you had.”Both Roosevelt and Churchill enjoyed a relationship with Winston Churchill the New Hampshire novelist. (See“That Other Winston Churchill,” FH 106.) TR often visited Churchill and others gathered around Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ literary colony in Plainfield, New Hampshire, not far from Churchill’s home in Cornish. Alistair Cooke,speaking at our 1988 Bretton Woods conference, began by saying he was pleased that so many had “come to the statewhere Winston Churchill spent the last forty years of his life.”“Why don’t you go into politics?” English Winston wrote the American, after they’d met on the same journey inwhich Churchill visited Roosevelt. “I mean to be Prime Minister of England: it would be a great lark if you werePresident of the United States at the same time.” American Winston was elected to the New Hampshire legislature (1903,1905), but rose no higher—in part because of TR. In 1912 Roosevelt broke with William Howard Taft and formed theProgressive or “Bull Moose” party, unsuccessfully opposing Taft for President. In the same election American Winston,also running as a “Bull Moose,” lost a bid for Congress. I suspect, but have not been able to prove, that the relationshipbetween the two Winstons withered because of TR’s influence: they could hardly been so close and not have discussedAmerican Winston’s opposite across the Atlantic.Roosevelt began to admire English Winston after World War I broke out in 1914, when he wrote a friend: “Ihave never liked Winston Churchill, but in view of what you tell me as to his admirable conduct and nerve in mobilizingthe fleet, I do wish that if it comes your way you will extend to him my congratulations on his action.”English Winston for his part seemed to harbor no hostility for TR—quite the contrary. Despite the BolshevikRevolution in 1917, Churchill typically remained committed to job #1: “beating the Hun.” As Martin Gilbert has stunninglyrevealed, Churchill actually proposed that Britain send what he called a “commissar” to Lenin, to negotiate Russia’sre-entry into the war—in exchange for which Britain would guarantee the Bolshevik revolution! When he realized that inno event would that commissar be he, Churchill recommended Theodore Roosevelt.Sir Martin tells me he sprang this remarkable factoid in Moscow, in a lecture before a large number of highrankingSoviet officers. “You could have heard a pin drop,” he said.Teddy Roosevelt had died when Winston Churchill next visited America in 1929, but he did find himselfseated at a dinner party with the President’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. “Despite her lineage,” Robert Pilpelwrote, “Mrs. Longworth seems not only to have taken to him but even to have engaged in a little flirtation as well.When he asked her to state her opinions about Prohibition, for example, she leaned over and murmured, ‘I wouldrather whisper them to you.’ (Of course, this may simply have been because bad language from a lady was stillunacceptable in polite society.)”Pilpel’s judgment of “likes repelling” was confirmed by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., after I published apiece on their relationship in Finest Hour 100. “I once asked Alice Roosevelt Longworth why her father disliked WinstonChurchill so much,” Schlesinger wrote. “She replied, ‘Because they were so much alike.’”✌FINEST HOUR 143 / 5

DATELINESWITH A FRIEND: 1951 General Election.BULLDOG NOTLONDON, JANUARY 12TH (REUTERS)—The classic English bulldog,symbol of defiance and pugnacity(though in fact a friendly andaffectionate animal) may now disappear.A shake-up of breedingstandards by the Kennel Club hassignalled the end of the dog’sChurchillian jowl. Instead, the dog willhave a shrunken face, a sunken nose,longer legs and a leaner body. TheBritish Bulldog Breed Council is threateninglegal action against the KennelClub. Chairman Robin Searle said:“What you’ll get is a completely differentdog, not a British bulldog.”Finest Hour referred this one tolongtime colleague, prominent motoringwriter and bulldog partisan GrahamRobson, who writes:“As a long-time bulldog owner(your editor has met various of mymuch-loved mutts) I am at oncedelighted and appalled by what is beingproposed. Loud-mouthed critics of ‘traditional’bulldogs talk about breathingdifficulties (usually untrue), too-fatbodies (only some breeders encouragethis—mine never), heads too large andlegs too short (arguable—none of minewere ever grotesque), and difficulties indelivering puppies without a vet’s help(unfortunately true).“The KennelClub (for historicparallels think ofthe Gestapo orGeorge Orwell’s Thought Police) isdemanding changes to what is known asthe written standard for dogs—not justbulldogs, but other breeds too. They willeventually get their way, but it will takedecades of selective breeding to producea series (rather than an occasionalexample) of bulldogs to a ‘new’ standard.“I would be delighted to see bulldogswith somewhat longer legs, but stillwith the traditional look (including ‘flat’face and Churchillesque attitude), and awide-legged stance—like each of theseven generations of bulldog which myfamily has owned, and owns to this day.However, I would be appalled to seelonger noses, shrunken faces and leanbodies, since this means we will be goingback to the “Boxer” identity, destroyingthe most endearing characteristics of thetrue bulldog.“Anyone who doubts that my son’sfive-year-old bulldog cannot play, run, andenjoy himself in every way is welcome totry to wear him out before I do.”HMS Bulldog (H91), 1929-1946Since 1782, seven Royal Navyships have borne the name Bulldog. Thelast was a B-Class fleet destroyer laiddown on 10 August 1929. Early inWW2 she was deployed as an attendantto HMS Glorious and HMS Ark Royal.As part of the Home Fleet in a 1940action against E-boats, Bulldog towedLord Mountbatten’s badly damagedHMS Kelly to the Tyne for repairs. Afterdistinguished convoy duty through thewar, Bulldog was broken up at Rosyth in1946. She achieved the distinction ofbeing in operational service for most ofthe war apart from periods of refit orrepair. —www.navalhistory.netLAS PALMAS REMEMBERSLAS PALMAS, CANARY ISLANDS, MARCH26TH— Winston Churchill visited theCanary Islands three times* but theplaque being unveiled at the Port in LasPalmas in honour of one of GreatQuotation of the Seasonppeasement from weakness“Aand fear is alike futile andfatal. Appeasement from strength ismagnanimous and noble and mightbe the surest and perhaps the onlypath to world peace. When nations orindividuals get strong they are oftentruculent and bullying, but when theyare weak they become better mannered.But this is the reverse of whatis healthy and wise.”—WSC, HOUSE OF COMMONS,14 DECEMBER 1950Britain’s most internationally influentialfigures was to commemorate his visitfifty years ago. As a guest aboard theOnassis yacht Christina, he came to theisland for a holiday, and as a tourist,chose to visit Caldro de Bandama andMontaña de Arucas. In memory of hisvisit a plaque was unveiled by theMayor of Las Palmas, JerónimoSaavedra Acevedo.It has been written that GeneralFranco’s reluctance to risk losing theCanary Islands was the reason Spainnever officially entered into the war, asChurchill had warned that an invasionwas logistically possibile.A painting of Churchill hangs inthe British Club, where the fondlyremembered Churchill Restaurant waslocated. Matthew Vickers, chairman ofthe Club and his wife were present “torepresent the British community….It’sinteresting that here they respect himenough to unveil a plaque….He wassomeone who could see all of theenjoyment there was to see here….Hewas never one to shrink from challengesand there are lots of challengesfor everyone. He had that ‘never saydie’ spirit. Ultimately he was all abouthow you can build stronger linksbetween people.”The consensus among the guestsattending was that Churchill was aunique character who deserved beingremembered in the Canary Islands.Francisco Marin Loris, from the RealSociedad Economica de Amigos delPais de Gran Canaria, said it gives asense of pride to the Canarians that aman of Churchill’s stature chose toFINEST HOUR 143 / 6

holiday on Gran Canaria, and increasesthe interest of British visitors to learnmore about the history of the island.—DEBORAH WOODMANSEY(WWW.ROUNDTOWNNEWS.CO.UK)1959: Onassis, WSC, and Sgt. Murray onGran Canaria. (Editorial Prensa Canaria)*Editor’s note: The 1959 visit wason 26 February; see Gilbert, Winston S.Churchill VIII: 1284. I have verified the1961 visit, again via Christina, but notthe third. Can readers assist? RMLBRITAIN FORGETSLONDON, 25 MARCH 2009— Children willno longer study World War II andQueen Victoria, but instead learn how toassert themselves on the Internet underradical plans to overhaul primary schoolteaching. According to reports today, thenew draft curriculum commissioned bythe government claims that pupils can dowithout learning about the battle againstNazism and the rise and fall of theBritish Empire.In a move which will horrify manyparents, it would see children focus oninternet tools such as Wikipedia andpodcasting, as well as innovations such asblogging and Twitter, which allows usersto post instant minute-by-minuteupdates about their lives. How thissmacks of the “Me Generation.”Schools Minister Lord Adonis sayschildren will still have to learn about theSecond World War as part of secondaryschool curriculum, including Churchill’srole in defeating the Nazis. CuttingChurchill from history lessons, he toldSky News’ Sunday Live programme, is“completely wrong….It is a statutory andmandatory requirement of the new curriculumfor all students in secondaryschools in England to study the SecondWorld War. I cannot conceive how youcan teach the history of the SecondWorld without having Churchill, Hitlerand Stalin as part of the story.”—DAILY MAILGILBERT WINS BRADLEYWASHINGTON, JUNE 3RD— One of four2009 Bradley Prizes, each carrying astipend of $250,000, was presented toCC Honorary Member and Trustee SirMartin Gilbert at the John F. KennedyCenter for the Performing Arts.“The Bradley Foundation selectedSir Martin Gilbert for his compellingwork in historical research and his commitmentto freedom,” said FoundationPresident and CEO Michael W. Grebe.“Sir Martin’s seminal work in history hasbeen widely acclaimed, and his work isconsidered the standard in its field.”Sir Martin was knighted by QueenElizabeth II in 1995 for “services toBritish history and international relations,”and earlier named a Commanderof the Most Excellent Order of theBritish Empire (CBE). He is anHonorary Fellow at Merton College,Oxford, a Distinguished Fellow atHillsdale College, and the author ofseventy books, specializing in the twoWorld Wars, the Holocaust and scholarlyatlases in addition to Churchill.The selection was based on nominationssolicited from more than 100prominent individuals and chosen by acommittee including Terry Considine,Pierre S. du Pont, Martin Feldstein,Michael Grebe, Charles Krauthammer,Heather MacDonald, San W. Orr Jr.,Dianne J. Sehler and Shelby Steele.Founded in 1985, The Lynde andHarry Bradley Foundation is devoted tostrengthening American democratic capitalismand the institutions, principles andvalues that sustain and nurture it. Its programssupport limited government,dynamic economic and cultural activity,and a defense of U.S. ideals and institutions.Recognizing that self-governmentdepends on enlightened citizens, theFoundation supports scholarly studiesand academic achievement.BRITAIN REMEMBERSLONDON, MAY10TH— Withhis “Into theStorm” telefilmappearingin Americaand Britain,Irish actorBrendanGleeson’s portrayalofFINEST HOUR 143 / 7Winston Churchill drew raves. Thenotice that stands out most for him camethe other night at a screening in London,from Churchill’s daughter, 86-year-oldLady Soames.“I think she was genuinelypleased,” Gleeson reports. “She said Ididn’t fall into the usual traps or somethingof that nature. Of course for her itwas looking into the past. She said, ‘Thisis very emotional for me.’”The joint HBO-BBC production(reviewed on page 44) picks up where the2002 “The Gathering Storm” (FinestHour 115) left off, with the war yearsseen via flashbacks as Winston andClementine (Janet McTeer) awaitpostwar election results. “The GatheringStorm” won shelves of awards, includingEmmys for Outstanding Made for TVMovie and Outstanding Lead Actor forAlbert Finney—a fact of which Gleesonwas quite aware when he took on the job.Finney’s performance, he says, “had suchforce and humanity in it that you say,‘Where do you take it from there?’”Portraying the iconic figure “was ahuge acting challenge” which includedportraying someone twenty years olderthan himself. Gleeson admits, “I was alittle wary of it being a bridge too far, ofmiscasting myself, but the peopleinvolved were very encouraging.”— MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH,NATIONAL LEDGERGAMESMANSHIPAUGUSTA, GA., APRIL 7TH— It was 1957when Gary Player first pointed his cardown Magnolia Lane to the AugustaNational clubhouse—a place, he so oftenhas implied, where golfers “begin tochoke as you drive in the gates.”The Hall of Fame golfer did itagain today, commencing his fifty-secondweek at the Masters Tournament. Putanother way, he will have spent an entireyear of his life chasing golf balls aroundAugusta National by the match’s end.And that’s where Player has decided itshould conclude. The 73-year-old SouthAfrican announced Monday that thisMasters will be his last as a competitor,signing off on a tenure that began beforeeighty-nine of this week’s other ninetyfiveentrants were born. “I’ve had such awonderful career,” Player said. “Mygoodness, when I think of the career I’vehad—you can’t have it all, and I did haveit all. You can’t be greedy. Winston >>

DATELINESGARY PLAYER...Churchill, one of my all-time greatheroes, always said it’s never a bad thingto cry. It’s a cry of appreciation andenjoyment, a cry of gratitude.”FOR THEBIRDS:Giles Palmersays theswans aresettling innicely.—JEFF SHAIN, MIAMI HERALDBLACK SWANS RETURN“All the black swans are mating, not onlythe father and mother, but both brothersand both sisters have paired off. ThePtolemys always did this and Cleopatra wasthe result. At any rate I have not thought itmy duty to interfere.”—WSC TO HIS WIFE, CHARTWELL, 21JAN35WESTERHAM, KENT, MAY 26TH— Seventyfiveyears ago Lady Diana Cooper surveyedChartwell’s birds: “five foolish geese, fivefurious black swans, two ruddy sheldrakes,two white swans—Mr. Juno and Mrs.Jupiter, so called because they got the sexeswrong to begin with, two Canadian geese(‘Lord and Lady Beaverbrook’) and somemiscellaneous ducks.”Chartwell’s black swans have beenlooked after as zealously as the apes onGibraltar (Finest Hour 125:6), but overthe years marauding foxes and minkreduced the population, which reachedzero last year. Happily last winter,Chartwell head gardener Giles Palmerinstalled a new floating “swan island” toprovide natural protection, and two newblack swans (Cygnus atratus) are nowcruising the ponds designed by SirWinston himself.Mr. Palmer told Kent News(www.kentnews.co.uk): “I have seen theswans on their island once or twice butam confident that they will see just whatthey are missing out on as soon as thefoliage on the island grows up. For now,I’m simply thrilled that the swans are settlingon so well and getting to know thegardens. They’re getting so brave nowthat they ventured all the way to thekitchen garden recently.” The floatingisland has allowed gardeners to removeugly mesh screening set up against predators,returning the lakes to theirappearance in Churchill’s time. (We hopethey’re right about this.)The first black swans were a giftfrom Sir Phillip Sassoon in 1927. Thepopulation was topped up by the governmentof Western Australia, where theblack swan is a state symbol. C. atratus isnative also to Tasmania and has beenintroduced to New Zealand. It is theworld’s only black swan, though its flightfeathers, invisible at rest, are white. GilesPalmer hopes the pair will soon breedand begin a new generation.Churchill was devoted to his swansand regularly conversed with them in“swan talk,” in which he claimed proficiency.But a former bodyguard, RonaldGolding, wrote (see page 31) that thiswas one of WSC’s little myths, becausethe swans would cry out to anyone whoapproached within a certain distance:“It was some time after this discoverythat I was walking down to thelake with Mr. Churchill. I was a little infront, and watched carefully for the criticalspot. I then called out in ‘swan-talk’and the birds dutifully replied. Mr.Churchill stopped dead. I turned roundand he looked me full in the eye for amoment or two. Then the faintest suspicionof a smile appeared and he walkedon in silence. No comment was evermade that this secret was shared.”FH TRAVEL GUIDELONDON, APRIL 1ST— On England’s“Churchill Trail,” Carol Ferguson of theHerald-Banner, Greenville, Texas, stoppedto chatwith twogents on abench onNew BondStreet. “I’mpromptedto thankFinest Hour for its regular travel tips,”Carol writes, “especially the addresses ofChurchill’s London homes and directionsto Chartwell. My daughter and I scoutedthem out together.”GETTING TO CHARTWELLPERIODIC ADVISORY— Chartwell is openWednesdays through Sundays fromMarch through 1 November from 11amto 4pm, and on Tuesdays in July andAugust. Local telephone: (01732)863087. We like to remind readers ofhow to get there from London.By car: the drive nowadays is notsomething for the faint-hearted or trafficchallenged,or North Americans notfamiliar with righthand-drive. Chartwellis two miles south of Westerham on theA25, accessed by M25 junctions 5 or 6.Drive to the town centre, take the B2026a few miles to the car park (on left).By bus: Sevenoaks station 6 1/2miles; Oxted station 5 1/2 miles;Metrobus 246 from Bromley station toEdenbridge passes the gates. TheNational Trust’s Chartwell Explorercoach takes visitors from Sevenoaks toChartwell for £3, which provides unlimitedbus travel to any local Trust propertyand a pot of tea at Chartwell. You canalso get a combined ticket from London,which includes train and coach, for £13,or £8.50 for Trust members. Details at(08457) 696996.By rail: Some recommend CharingCross Station to Sevenoaks (four fasttrains per hour). Others suggest VictoriaStation (fewer trains, but some marked“to East Grinstead and calling atOxted”). Though only a mile closer thanSevenoaks, Oxted is less congested,making for a lower taxi fare. Arrange tohave the cabbie pick you up for yourreturn from Chartwell, so you don’t getstranded—although there are worseplaces to be stranded than Westerham.There’s a lovely footpath from Chartwellto the town, with its famous King’s Armspub. (Factoid: the Nemon statue ofChurchill on the village green was a giftfrom the people of Yugoslavia.)CHERIE REVEALS ALLLONDON, MAY 5TH— The wife of formerBritish PrimeMinister TonyBlair compares herspouse to WSC.Cherie Blair toldVanity Fair thather husband “wasfantastic. I’m surehistory will judgehim very well. Ithink he’ll be upthere with Churchill.” But, she was lesscomplimentary about her own image:“Just looking at the press cuttings, youcould not say that it was a triumph,could you!” Cherie has admitted that herhusband was taken aback a little by someDRAWING BY KARL MEERSMANFINEST HOUR 143 / 8

of the saucy contents in her new memoir,Speaking for Myself: “I think he’s ratherembarrassed by the love affair bits. Idon’t think he particularly read thoseclosely. Been there, done that!”Yes, well... At least Cherie didn’tliken herself to Clementine Churchill.“THE SEASHORE”LONDON, MAY 21ST— Churchill’s “TheSeashore” (Coombs 320) was placed onauction at Christie’s today, estimated at£200,000-300,000. The sale benefittedthe Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust.The provenance is WilliamGreenshields, Churchill’s butler between1948 and 1953. “The Seashore” wasgiven to him by Churchill, as well as afurther work called “Antibes,” which soldat Sotheby’s in 1966.According to David Coombs, thepreeminent expert and co-author withMinnie Churchill of Sir WinstonChurchill: His Life through His Paintings,the scene is one of a series that Churchillpainted during the 1930s, in which hedemonstrates his fascination with the seabreaking on the shore. The exact locationis not known, but these coastal scenesappear to be painted from the FrenchRiviera.Since 1977, The Queen’s SilverJubilee Trust has supported charities thatwork with young people in the UK,Channel Islands, Isle of Man and theCommonwealth. Through its grantmakingactivity, the Trust has helpedhundreds of thousands of young peopleto find employment, volunteer in theirlocal communities or experience newopportunities that they would not otherwisehave enjoyed.PUBLIC INTELLIGENCEWASHINGTON, APRIL 30TH— R. EmmettTyrell, Jr., editor of The AmericanSpectator, comments on the recent debateAROUND & ABOUTThe Things They Say Department: the Wall StreetJournal, April 24th, reports: “In London, [PresidentObama] said that decisions about the world financialsystem were no longer made by ‘just Roosevelt and Churchillsitting in a room with a brandy’—as if that were a bad thing.” Maybe not, butit’s a simplification of wartime decision-making. Also, FDR drank vermouthlacedmartinis, which Churchill reportedly dumped in the nearest flower pot.Thanks to Elliot Berke for this snippet.❋❋❋❋❋How the Mighty Have Fallen Bureau: “When Prime Minister GordonBrown came a-calling at the White House, there was no trip to CampDavid, no state dinner or joint meeting with the press, and nobodyquoting Churchill that we noticed. An aide explained to the UK’s SundayTelegraph: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same asthe other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”One editorial suggested the UK threaten to set off one of itsnuclear weapons: “That might get their attention.”❋❋❋❋❋Last issue we presented the Finest Hour Re-Rat Award to SenatorJudd Gregg (R.-NH), who accepted nomination as President Obama’sSecretary of Commerce but then withdrew. (Churchill, who deserted theConservatives for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back to the Tories in1925, later said, “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuityto re-rat.”) Re-ratting, a lost art, is experiencing a revival. Just a fewweeks later, Senator Arlen Specter (D.-Pa.) re-ratted by switching fromthe Republicans to the Democrats. A registered Democrat, Specter beatPhiladelphia Democrat District Attorney James Crumlish in 1965,and subsequently changed his registration to Republican.We must now commission twocopies of the Re-Rat Award, which we thinkmight take the shape of the “Flying Fickle Fingerof Fate” once dispensed by the Rowan andMartin TV show “Laugh-In.” Re-ratting, if itspreads, could produce a historic realignment,perhaps even new Liberal and ConservativeParties, which would better define the two oppositeapproaches to issues of the day. Then wecould get down to the business of arguing outthe debate, instead of obfuscating, dodging and weaving in order to toesome known or imagined party line. As Churchill, who always put principlebefore party, remarked early in 1907: “The alternation of Parties inpower, like the rotation of crops, has beneficial results.”over declassifying top secret documents:“…frankly I am uneasy about this newclimate here in Washington. Historically,intelligence documents have been keptfrom public eye, not just here butthroughout the Western world. The ideais that we do not want our enemies to beinformed of what we know. DavidReynolds’ In Command of History, onhow Churchill wrote his World War IImemoirs, repeatedly shows Churchill andhis opponents in the Labour governmentcooperating to keep secrets from thepublic. British intelligence techniqueswere not divulged….Intelligence officerswithin our service have been intimidatedby our own government. Foreign intelligenceofficers who have been sharingintelligence with us abroad are going tobe much less forthcoming.” >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 9

125-100-75-50 YEARS AGO125 years agoSpring, 1884 • Age 9“He has no ambition”At the end of the summer term,Winston’s parents removed himfrom St. George’s School in partbecause his nanny, Mrs. Everest, saw evidenceof the canings Winston hadreceived at the hands of the school’ssadistic Headmaster, Sneyd-Kynnersley,whose assessment of the young man onJune 20th was that “He has no ambition.”His final report on July 21grudginglyadmitted: “Hemight always dowell if he chose,”noting thatWinston’s diligencewas “fairon the whole,”but that he still“occasionallygives a great dealof trouble.” It ismore than likelythat Winston washappiest at St.George’s Schoolwhile he wasgiving theHeadmaster “agreat deal of trouble.”Lord Randolph and the FourthParty were once more at odds with theirleaders in the Conservative Party whowere seeking to amend the Reform Billon voter eligibility to exclude Ireland.During his formative years, Winston readand re-read all of his father’s speeches.The following excerpt from LordRandolph’s biting comments on thesubject illustrates that, as a speaker,Winston’s acorn did not fall far from hisfather’s oak:The Tories had argued that no votesshould be given to Irish peasantsbecause they lived in “mud cabins.”Lord Randolph replied: “I have heard agreat deal of the mud-cabin argument.For that we are indebted to the brilliant,ingenious and fertile mind of theRt. Hon. Member for Westminster. Isuppose that in the minds of the lordsof suburban villas, of the owners ofvineries and pineries, the mud cabinrepresents the climax of physical andsocial degradation. But the franchise inEngland has never been determined byParliament with respect to the characterof the dwellings. The differencebetween the cabin of the Irish peasantand the cottage of the English agriculturallabourer is not so great as thatwhich exists between the abode of theRt. Hon. Member for Westminster andthe humble roof which shelters fromthe storm the individual who now hasthe honour to address the Committee.”Winston later noted in his biographyof his father that “cheers andlaughter” had greeted Lord Randolph’scomment100 years agoSummer, 1909 • Age 34“It was a great coup”Churchill became a father for thesecond time on July 11th withthe birth of his daughter Diana,whom he nicknamed “the cream-goldkitten.” Three weeks later, Churchill’spersonal intervention in the coal miners’strike produced a satisfactory resolution,as he wrote his mother on 4 August:I had a great triumph….We had 20hours negotiations in the last two daysand I do not think a satisfactory resultwould have been obtained unless I hadpersonally played my part effectually. Ihad a nice telegram from the King, andletters from Asquith and Grey all veryeulogistic. It was a great coup, mostuseful and timely.Prime Minister Asquith may havebeen eulogistic over Churchill’s settling ofthe strike, but the same was not true ofWSC’s recent speech in Edinburgh inJuly, where Churchill had criticized theHouse of Lords for threatening to rejectLloyd George’s “People’s Budget”—whichincluded, among other things, a 20percent tax on increased land values.Churchill wrote defending himself,enclosing a speech he had given inBirmingham in January with whichAsquith had expressed satisfaction.“Nothing in my speech in Edinburghgoes beyond this. Indeed it seems to meto be a mere restatement.” Churchillwrote, quoting this excerpt from theBirmingham speech:I do not, ofcourse, ignorethe fact thatthe House ofLords has thepower, thoughnot, I think,the constitutionalright, tobring the governmentof thecountry to astandstill….Ifthey reallybelieve, as theyso loudly proclaim,that thecountry willhail them as itssaviours, theycan put it tothe proof….And, for my part, I shouldbe quite content to see the battlejoined as speedily as possible [cheers],upon the plain simple issue of aristocraticrule against representativegovernment [cheers], between thereversion to protection and the maintenanceof free trade [cheers], between atax on bread and a tax on—well, nevermind. [Cheers and laughter.]by Michael McMenamin75 years agoSummer, 1934 • Age 59“First requisite of peace”On June 30th Churchill’s firstcousin, “Sunny,” the NinthDuke of Marlborough, died.Churchill wrote of him in a subsequentletter to The Times as my “oldest anddearest friend.” By a gruesome coincidenceSunny died on the same day as thetrue face of National Socialism wasrevealed in Germany during the “Nightof the Long Knives,” when Hitlerordered the wholesale slaughter of hisFINEST HOUR 143 / 12

political adversaries, including ErnstRöhm, head of the SA, and all of his toplieutenants.Even political retirement did notspare those who had incurred Hitler’senmity, including the Nazi Party’s formernumber two man, Gregor Strasser—orHitler’s predecessor as Chancellor,General Kurt von Schleicher, who, alongwith his wife, was murdered by no fewerthen six gunmen from Himmler’s SS.Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw estimatesthe death toll at between 150 and 200.Sunny’s death deeply affectedChurchill and may explain why, in thedays that followed, Churchill did notexplicitly condemn Hitler’s cold-bloodedkilling of his political enemies. But, in along article in The Daily Mail on 9 July,Churchill left no doubt about the implicationsfor the future peace of Europe.No one else in England or anywhere elsefor that matter had by that time so succinctlysummarized what Germany hadbecome under National Socialism:1928: Hitler and Goering (lower left, medalsdecorating his ample bosom) with the SA ata Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. (Wikimedia)nation, seventy millions of the mostindustrious, valiant, gifted people inthe world, in the hands of a smallgroup of fierce men.When shall we learn that Britain’s hourof weakness is Europe’s hour of danger?When shall we comprehend that for sogreat and wealthy a power with suchrich possessions to remain in a positionwhere it can be blackmailed is tocommit an offence against the cause ofpeace?Surely at the very least we ought to putourselves in as good a position as wewere before the Great War. Then, wewere at any rate under the shield of theNavy. We could enter or stand outsideContinental struggles as we pleased. Thefirst requisite of peace is that Britainshould be capable of self-defence.In England’s balmy summer of 1934, fewwere listening.50 years agoSummer, 1959 • Age 84“The greatest Englishman”In July, 1959, Churchill was cruisingnear Greece and Turkey aboardAristotle Onassis’ yacht Christina,accompanied by, among others, hisphysician Lord Moran, AnthonyMontague Browne and his wife, andOnassis’ mistress, the opera singer MariaCallas. During the tour, Sir Winston metboth the Turkish and Greek PrimeMinisters.Later that summer, Churchill wasinvited by President Eisenhower to meethim during his state visit to London.They were together at two dinners on 31August and 1 September.Earlier, in the South of France,Churchill invited the Israeli PrimeMinister, David Ben-Gurion, to lunchafter learning that Ben-Gurion was alsoin France. Unfortunately, by the time theinvitation arrived, Ben-Gurion’s ship hadalready departed for Israel. Ben-Gurionwrote to Churchill:I need hardly assure you that I shouldhave been delighted to accept the invitation,if only it had found me still inFrance. Like many others in all parts ofthe globe, I regard you as the greatestEnglishman in your country’s historyand the greatest statesman of our time,as the man whose courage, wisdom andforesight saved his country and the freeworld from Nazi servitude [as well as]one of the few men in the free world torealize the true character of theBolshevik regime and its leaders. ✌29 MAY 1958: Sarah Churchill and PrimeMinister Ben-Gurion unveiling the plaquein the Churchill Auditorium, Mt. Carmelcampus of the Technion, Israel Instituteof Technology. (Wikimedia Commons)That mighty race who fought andalmost vanquished the whole world ison the march again. The whole nationis inspired with the idea of retrievingand avenging their defeat in the GreatWar. They have arisen from the pit ofdisaster in a monstrous guise: hatredinternal and external, organized as if itwere a science; debts repudiated to buythe means of making cannon; treatiesbroken to construct a gigantic AirForce; schools placarded with maps ofterritories to be regained; allParliamentary safeguards, all internalcriticism trampled down; evenChristianity itself conscripted to atribal purpose; the whole GermanFINEST HOUR 143 / 13

COVER STORYChurchill inNazi CartoonPropagandaRANDALL BYTWERK“I ALWAYS LOVED CARTOONS,” CHURCHILLWROTE IN 1931. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ASK-ING A LOT FOR HIM TO LOVE THE ONES THEGERMANS GENERATED A FEW YEARSLATER: A GRAPHIC REMINDER OF WHAT HEWAS UP AGAINST.Above: DieBrennessel (The StingingNettle) #54, 18 December 1934: The first knownChurchill cover in the Nazi press, following his earliestwarnings on Germany’s rearmament. The captionreads: “Winston Churchill juggles figures on ‘German aircraft’:‘Toss me another zero—it won't make muchof a difference.’”Churchill’s attacks on the Nazis are masterpieces ofinvective, and the Nazis returned fire. To JosephGoebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, he was“the biggest and most experienced liar in modern history,”and that was one of Goebbels’ gentler attacks. In Hitler’sspeeches WSC was “whisky-besotted,” and he was oftenportrayed in Nazi cartoons with a drunk’s red nose.Churchill’s place in Nazi propaganda varied directlywith his threat level. At first he was a minor target, an irrationalEnglishman pushing for needless war with Germany.Between May 1940 and the invasion of Russia, he was themain enemy, the drunken demagogue at the head of Britishplutocracy who stood in the way of Germany’s desire for ajust world order. After June 1941, he was the puppet ofRoosevelt and Stalin, and the Jews who controlled themfrom behind the scenes: a character of the past who wouldruin England in a vain attempt to defeat Germany. ButGoebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, came to have agrudging respect for Churchill’s ability as a propagandist.Die Brennessel #46, 15November 1938: Eden and Churchill, thewarmongers after Munich, sitting at the feet of Mars.Dr. Bytwerk is Professor of Communication at Calvin College in GrandRapids, Michigan, and author of Julius Streicher and Bending Spines:The Propagandas of National Socialism and the German DemocraticRepublic. In his Landmark Speeches of National Socialism (2008) hewrites: “The Germans claimed that they did not know what was happening—thatwas not persuasive. Everything that Nazism intendedwas revealed in its rhetoric. He who had ears could have heard.”FINEST HOUR 143 / 14

Early on, Churchill received attention only when hemade the news. A December 1934 cartoon in Brennessel,the Nazi Party’s humor weekly, had him juggling false statisticson German aircraft production. Four years later,Brennessel showed Eden and Churchill sitting at the feet ofMars, who approves of their opposition to Chamberlain’sappeasement policy at Munich. 1With the outbreak of war and Churchill’s return tothe Cabinet, he became a central figure. Nazi speakers weretold to say that he was now an “untiring warmonger,” thechief English opponent of peace with Germany. 2Through May 1940, as First Lord of the Admiralty,Churchill was presented as the bumbling victim of Germanmilitary brilliance. A January 1940 cartoon had himknocked over by a boxing ball. In April, he was shownbehind bars looking hungrily at a well-stocked table, thevictim of the U-boat blockade (back cover). Goebbels atthat time did not think much of him, commenting in hisdiaries that Churchill was energetic, but rash. 3Once Churchill became prime minister, he was thepersonification of evil for the year when Britain stood aloneagainst Germany. In July 1940, Goebbels ordered Nazi propagandists“to attack only Churchill and his clique ofplutocrats but never the British nation as such. Churchillhimself had burnt all bridges behind him so that there canbe no question of any arrangement with Britain so long ashe is at the helm.” 4In caricatures, Churchill was now less a clown than acriminal, a big-mouthed blowhard with nothing to back uphis words. A 1940 cartoon showed a sweating Churchillawaiting the gallows, looking at a list ofbombed cities. >>The humor weekly LustigeBlätter (Funny Pages) was a relentless foe.Above: WSC smashed by the New World Order, 26 January1940. Below: Awaiting the Deutschland knife (following previouslydefeated foes Schusschnigg, Beneš, Chamberlain,Daladier, Reynaud and others), 19 July 1940. Left: Facing thenoose, the condemned prisoner with a list of British citiesbombed in the Blitz, January 1941.FINEST HOUR 143 / 15

Above,Lustige Blätter, 25 October1940: Hitler had postponed Operation SeaLion, but Churchill was now being led around theworld by Ahasver, the legendary "Wandering Jew."PROPAGANDA CARTOONS...A few months later, he was being led around the world by aJew—part of the message that as evil as Churchill was, hewas only a servant of the Jews, an argument that becamemore pronounced after 1941.As the Blitz mounted, Churchill was the madmanwho had brought ruin to England (as the Nazis alwayscalled Britain). A cartoon in November 1940 showedChurchill the “madman” watching from a window asLondon burned. (The Nazis didn’t realize his preferredperch was the Air Ministry roof.)Goebbels turned up his wrath as Britain failed tobuckle. His weekly columns in Das Reich, a widely circulatedprestige weekly, increasingly attacked Churchill. InJanuary 1941, he accused WSC of the Big Lie: “The astonishingthing is that Mr. Churchill, a genuine John Bull,holds to his lies, and in fact repeats them until he himselfbelieves them.” 5 A month later, Churchill was “the firstviolin in the hellish concert that the whole demo-plutocraticworld is playing against the Axis powers.” 6Goebbels mocked Churchill’s claim that all he couldoffer was “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” It was clever propaganda,he asserted. After all, if things got bad, one couldclaim to have predicted it, and if things got better, onecould take the credit. A cartoon soon made the point: theBritish lion was ill after drinking Churchill’s cocktail of“blood, sweat and tears.”Perhaps when the war is over, Goebbels speculated,Churchill would be forced to read aloud all of his speechesBelow, Der Stürmer (The Attacker), February 1940:“Churchill, the Braggart. The ruler of all the seas weepsmany a bitter tear. The poor man can hardly grasp it, thatthis is the end to the dream of ‘the supremacyof the seas.’”Above, Illustrierter Beobachter (IllustratedObserver) #25, June 1941: The Nazis picked up on WSC’s habit ofdictating from his bath: "Take this down: In my current situation, Ifear German U-boats even less than before."FINEST HOUR 143 / 16

in public. “He would then enjoy the most original death amortal ever had: he would drown in the world’s laughter.” 7Goebbels later wrote: “We can only be thankful that wehave Churchill. One may not wish he were not there. Oneshould take good care of him, because he is the trailblazerfor our complete and radical victory.” 8Nazi propaganda suggested that Churchill was fallingunder Americancontrol to get themoney he needed tocontinue the war. A1941 cartoon hadhim hauling Englandinto a Jewish pawnshop.Not onlywould Churchilllose the war—hewould sell theEmpire to theAmericans in theprocess. >>Left, IllustrierterBeobachter,March 1941,reprinted froman Italiannewspaper:“Churchill'slast speech, from thefront of the façade.” The façade looks alot like Buckingham Palace; at any rate, the Royal Armsare over the door.Left, Simplicissimus,22 October1939. “ZircusChurchill”approachingthe MaginotLine, with theGallic cock andNevilleChamberlain asthe British lion.WSC: “You jumpthrough thehoop first, dearcock, I shallfollow after.” Aswe nowknow,nobodythought ofjumpingthrough.Left, LustigeBlätter, 15November1940. WSClooks out hiswindow onthe fires ofLondon:“The philosophyof amadman:‘Our Empireis so largethat it hardlymakes a differenceif asmall islandburns.’”Below,LustigeBlätter,14February1941.Churchilland theKing haul“England”(as theGermansalwaysreferred toBritain) to aJewish pawnshop.Thecanny artisteven pickedup theirsmokinghabits.Left, LustigeBlätter, 23 April1942: the Britishlion after aChurchill cocktailof blood, sweat andtears. About thetime this cartoonwas published,JosephGoebbels told hiscolleagues howChurchill's famouspromise wouldwork: If things gotworse, he could saythat's just what hehad predicted; ifthings got better,he could take thecredit.FINEST HOUR 143 / 17

Above: Simplicissimus #14,April 1944: Two months before D-Day,Roosevelt and Churchill are entwined by Stalin: “How neatlyyou have gotten caught in my web. Now all I need to do iswrap you up!” (www.simplicissimus.com)Der Stürmer, 13 February 1941: “Why does Britain wage thiswar? Churchill dares not make a reply. He remains dumb. Weknow quite well why one avoids giving a straight answer tothese questions—we, however, need not make a secret of theaim for which we strive, we fight for a free German life!”Above, Der Stürmer, #6, February 1943: “In the name ofHumanity.” High Priest Roosevelt: “The staff has broken, toomuch of her spoken.” Stalin wields the axe. As the tideturned and the Allies began to push German armies evercloser to the Reich, the theme became “Jewish Bolshevism.”PROPAGANDA CARTOONS...Following the invasion of Russia and the turningaside of the German onslaught on Britain, the full force ofNazi propaganda focused on Bolshevism and the Jews.Churchill now became a secondary figure. Just after theGerman defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels launched a majorcampaign against Jewish Bolshevism. Churchill andRoosevelt were “to be presented as accomplices and toadiesof Bolshevism…which is the most radical expression of theJewish drive for world domination.” 9 This theme dominatedNazi propaganda for the remainder of the war.Churchill nevertheless remained a villain. In August1944, a cartoon titled “Churchill’s Debts” showed himlooking at the list of European cities Britain had bombed,an interesting comparison to the earlier cartoon in whichhe was held responsible for bombed English cities. A late1944 mass pamphlet quoted his famous words from 1941:“Nothing is more certain than that every trace of Hitler’sfootsteps, every stain of his infected and corroding fingers,will be sponged and purged and if necessary blasted, fromthe surface of the earth.” 10 This was cited as evidence thatChurchill, like his master Stalin, intended to wipe outGermany and its people.In private, however, Goebbels gradually came to haverespect for Churchill’s abilities. In December 1941, he toldhis associates that Churchill’s strategy of promising only”blood, sweat and tears” had been correct. 11 And as the warsituation turned, he increasingly followed Churchill’sexample of admitting difficulties while confidently predictingfinal victory. Churchill, however, turned out to bethe more accurate prophet.FINEST HOUR 143 / 18

Left, DerStürmer,September1943:“Plutocrats’Domination:The Master’sChair.Churchill isannoyed atthe decorationon the throne.”Right,Simplicissimus,21 May 1941,after the Britishdebacle inGreece, a potsherdfrom aGrecian urnshows Churchillthe “strategicgenius” runningaway two-faced,crying, “Help” and“Victory.”Simplicissimus,shut down in September 1944, along with many other German magazinesand party organs, owing to the consequences of what had now become totalwar. It was revived in 1954-67.Below: Lustige Blätter, #33, 18 August 1944, one of its last issues:“Churchill’s Debts.” In an interesting contrast with the 1941 cartoon of Churchill with a list of ruined British cities (page 15), anarm marked “V1” forces WSC to look at the cities and cultural treasures of Europe destroyed by British bombs.It is an enlightening fact that Churchill was indeed saddened by the destruction of the war—asentiment expressed by no other leader on either side.Endnotes1. For a wide range of Nazi propaganda on Churchill,see the German Propaganda Archive (GPA)http://bytwerk.com/gpa/winstonchurchill.htm. See alsoFred Urquhart, W.S.C.: A Cartoon Biography (London:Cassell, 1955), which contains about a dozen Nazi cartoonson Churchill.2. A translation is available on the GPA:http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/rim1.htm.3. Georg Reuth, Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher 1924-1945 (Munich: Piper, 1999), 1373.4. Willi A. Boelcke, The Secret Conferences of Dr.Goebbels (New York: Dutton, 1970), 64-65.5. Joseph Goebbels, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich:Eher Verlag, 1941), 364.6. Ibid., 381.7. Ibid., 395.8. Joseph Goebbels, Das eherne Herz (Munich: EherVerlag, 1943), 218.9. The document is translated on the GPA:http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/bolshevist.htm.10. Heinrich Goitsch, Niemals! (Munich: Eher Verlag,1944). A translation is available on the GPA:http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/niemals.htm.11. Boelcke, 192. ✌FINEST HOUR 143 / 19

Top Cop in aTop HatCHURCHILL AS HOME SECRETARY14 FEBRUARY 1910 - 25 OCTOBER 1911RICHARD A. DEVINEThe traditional image of Winston Churchill is that ofthe courageous wartime Prime Minister, or the lonelyvoice in the 1930s warning about Nazi Germany, orperhaps that of the twice-First Lord of theAdmiralty. Few think of Churchill in the role of lawenforcer, but for approximately twenty months in 1910 and1911 that’s essentially what he was.Roy Jenkins described the Home Office as “a plank ofwood out of which all other domestic departments have beencarved. Ministries like Agriculture, Environment andEmployment have left big holes in the coverage of the HomeOffice. Apart from its central responsibility for police,prisons and the state of the criminal law it also retains a pile ofsemi-archaic responsibilities, often merely for the reason that noone has thought it worth while to put in a bid for yet anotheritem....” 1Churchill was appointed Home Secretary when he was 35: theyoungest person other than Robert Peel to hold the position. Thethen-wide ranging office made him a police superintendent, the headof prisons, a key decision-maker on clemency and commutation questions,and the head of probation services, to name a few of his duties.He was the “Top Cop” and more.The Home Office then had responsibility for the regulation ofworking conditions and administration of workmen’s compensation,but then, as now, public safety issues made the headlines: By the time hisservice as Home Secretary was over, Churchill had been assailed bystriking workers, attacked by women suffragists, challenged by decisionson capital punishment, and blamed for the fiery and dramatic deaths ofanarchist robbers. As with most of his life, when Winston was around,things were far from dull._______________________________________________________________________Mr. Devine is a member of the Chicago law firm of Meckler Bulger Tilson Marick andPearson. He served as State’s Attorney of Cook County, Illinois from 1996 to 2008. Thisarticle is based on his remarks to Churchllians of Chicagoland. In its preparation theauthor gratefully acknowledges the advice and assistance of Linnet Myers.Budget Day,27 April 1910FINEST HOUR 143 / 20

Though Churchill had little background in lawenforcement, he was a man of ideas who never hesitatedto express them at length and with vigor. The PermanentUnder-Secretary for the Home Office, Sir Edward Troup,captured a glimpse of his chief which prefigured the commentsof Churchill’s generals in World War II:Once a week or oftener, Mr. Churchill came into theoffice bringing with him some adventurous or impossibleprojects; but after half an hour’s discussion somethingevolved which was still adventurous, but not impossible. 2Strikes and StrikersGiven Churchill’s irrepressible nature, it is not surprisingthat he was a major player in significant events.There was a good deal of labor unrest, and in May 1910,a dispute erupted at the Newport docks. Feelings ranhigh. One of the employers, F.H. Houlder, said approvinglythat in Argentina they would send in “artillery andmachine guns” to handle the matter properly. 3To help maintain order local officials requested thatthe Home Office agree to the dispatch of both troops andadditional police. Churchill agreed to provide 250 footand fifty mounted policemen. Troops were kept in readinessnearby, but Permanent Under-Secretary Troupnotified the War Office that Churchill was “most anxious”that the military not be used. 4Neither police nor troops were needed. The Mayorof Newport telegraphed the Home Office on 22 May thatthe dispute had been settled by negotiations. Even thoughlaw enforcement was largely in the background, it wasgenerally agreed that the Home Office had played aresponsible role in resolving the Newport labor dispute. 5In November, 1910, there was a major dispute inthe Rhondda Valley, Wales concerning different pay scalesfor miners, about 25,000 of whom went on strike. Eventhough the Chief Constable of Glamorgan had about1400 police officers under his command, he asked fortroops and additional police. Troops were sent to the areabut held in reserve. The responsibility for maintaining lawand order was left with the local constabulary and the 300Metropolitan police officers ordered to the area byChurchill.On 7 November rioting broke out in Tonypandy,one of the towns in the Rhondda Valley. Sixty-three shopswere damaged, and one person was killed by accident.According to later reports, the police behaved withrestraint, utilizing only rolled-up mackintoshes inattempting to control the rioters.Churchill was both criticized and praised for thehandling of the disorder at Tonypandy. The Times chargedhim with weakness in failing to call in the troops, whilethe Manchester Guardian argued that his decision probably“saved many lives.” 6Interestingly, in later years Churchill was criticizedfor authorizing the use of troops at Tonypandy when, infact, he had not done so. (One commentator believesTonypandy is erroneously referenced because it is one ofthe few Welsh towns the English can pronounce.) 7In June 1911, strikes broke out in the Southamptondocks and spread to other locations. As the situation deteriorated,there were fears of a possible national railwaystrike. This led Churchill to suspend the rule that troopscould be provided only at the request of the local civicauthority. He authorized the deployment of forces at thediscretion of military commanders in the area.The strikes ended with the intervention of LloydGeorge. On 22 August 1911, Churchill spoke in theHouse of Commons, defending his actions. He said it hadbeen vital to keep the railroads running to protect thefood supply, arguing that a national railway strike wouldhave hurled the whole area into an “abyss of horror whichno man can dare to contemplate.” 8 He believed that theMetropolitan Police were not a strong enough force toprevent or quell disruptions that might have occurredanywhere in the country. Churchill acknowledged thatthere was some loss of life but argued that, in the longrun, lives were saved. 9Mobilizing the military outside of normal proceduresupset a number of people in Churchill’s Liberalparty, despite the Home Office’s measured response toprevious labor problems. In this instance his oratoricalstrengths may have contributed to an image more antilaborthan his actions suggest.The Battle of Sidney StreetChurchill’s work in law enforcement was not confinedto labor disputes. In December 1910, a group of foreignanarchists was discovered digging a tunnel into a jewelryshop in London. The police arrived on the scene, and duringthe ensuing confrontation three police officers were killedand two were wounded. The criminals escaped but weretraced on January 3rd to a house on London’s Sidney Street.The police on the scene were armed but needed heavierweapons, so they requested approval from the Home Officeto use an armed platoon of Scots Guards. Churchill wassummoned from his bath to be briefed on the events atSidney Street and to sanction the use of the military.Although some believed he’d have been wiser to stay inhis tub, Churchill decided to go to the scene himself. Hearrived at Sidney Street—not surprisingly a conspicuouspresence. His level of involvement in directing the police hasbeen the subject of debate, but Churchill always maintainedthat he left the management of the siege to the officer incharge.At some point a fire started in the building the suspectshad occupied. Churchill confirmed a police order to the firebrigade to let the house burn rather than risk the lives of firefightersto protect those of criminals. >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 21

Arthur Balfour: “I understandwhat the photographer wasdoing, but what was the Rt.Hon. Gentleman doing?”Sidney Street, 3 January 1911,WSC in top hat.HOME SECRETARY...(Churchill denied that he gave the initial order.)Eventually two bodies were found in the building. One ortwo of the criminals were never accounted for, includingthe leader, “Peter the Painter,” who escaped and was neverheard from again. 10A newsreel camera captured Churchill at the scene,and one of the newspapers had a picture of him in top hatand fur collared coat, along with that of a photographerwho was covering the event. Referring to the photo,Arthur Balfour stated in the House of Commons:He was, I understand, in military phrase in what is knownas the zone of fire—he and a photographer were bothrisking valuable lives. I understand what the photographerwas doing, but what was the Rt. Hon. gentleman doing? 11Churchill conceded that Balfour’s comment was notwithout some justification.Suffragettes and Dirty CursOne of the characteristics Churchill brought topublic life was stating his views with clarity. He was notone to be all things to all people or to adopt a positionbecause it was the least offensive. Churchill’s record on theissue of women’s suffrage could not, however, be said to fitthat description.The issue was emotional and resolution morecomplex then one might first think from the vantagepoint of the 21st century. It was not simply a matter ofgiving the vote to females on the same basis as males. Inthe early 1900s the male vote was limited to householders.If the same standard had been applied to women, the votewould have been given to only a small percentage ofunmarried or widowed women. 12With the hope of finding a way through a difficultissue, a Conciliation Committee was established in thespring of 1910. TheCommittee’s leadershipwas seeking to removethe issue from theclamor of partisan politicsand find a solutionthat would be acceptableto a majority in theCommons. Churchillwas approached and agreed to the use of his name as asupporter of the undertaking.The result of the Committee’s work was introducedin the House of Commons in July 1910. Despite hissupport of the Committee, Churchill spoke against thebill. This resulted in a heated exchange of correspondencebetween WSC and H.N. Braidsford, Honorary Secretaryof the Committee, who referred to his conduct as “treacherous.”Churchill replied that his support had beenlimited to the creation of the Committee, not any endproduct. Further letters followed.Braidsford and Lord Lytton claimed that Churchillhad made positive comments to them about the specificproposal in private meetings. Churchill pointed out thatin addition to being private, those were preliminary discussionsand that Braidsford and Lytton should haveunderstood that his final views had to await analysis byexperts in the Home Office.Reviewing the correspondence gives a sense thatBraidsford and Lytton were most offended by Churchill’staking an active role in the debate and using his oratoricalskills against a cause they strongly supported. They mighthave understood and accepted a quiet neutrality, but wereupset by WSC’s statements and opposing vote.For Churchill’s part, he was deeply upset that privateconversations had been used against him in public, especiallyby Lytton, who had been a personal friend. It alsobothered him that supporters of suffragettes would accusehim of treachery when he had offered help to a group thathad badgered and bullied him during the course of severalelection campaigns.Churchill wrote a private memorandum on 19 July1910, outlining his recollections of his meetings and conversationson the suffrage issue. At paragraph 15 he notedthat in a meeting he had told Braidsford he could not votefor the bill but also “expressed his intention of not votingagainst the Bill.” 13This suggested he wasn’t going to vote at all—butFINEST HOUR 143 / 22

he changed his mind two days before the proposal’ssecond reading. He decided to speak and vote against themeasure for two reasons. First, research by his staff and hisown study of the bill revealed serious problems that madeit a bad piece of legislation and “deeply injurious to theLiberal cause.” 14 Second, he understood that both thePrime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequerwould oppose the proposal in public. Because emotionsran high, and there had even been threats of violence,Churchill said he would have considered it cowardly tohave sat on the sidelines.Whatever Churchill’s rights and wrongs on theFranchise Bill, he managed to alienate a number ofpeople, including some supporters. In a political sense, heowed nothing to the suffragettes. As he noted, they hadlong made his life miserable by regularly disrupting hisspeeches. Yet he had given his support to the Committee,so his subsequent conduct, even if justified in the particulars,left him open to the claim that he was saying onething and doing quite another.The Franchise Bill ultimately failed, and it soonbecame clear that Parliament would not take up the issueany time in the near future. This led to a demonstrationin Parliament Square by suffragettes and their backers onwhat came to be known as Black Friday (18 November1910). Not surprisingly, feelings continued to run high,and eventually there were clashes between the police anddemonstrators. Over 100 arrests were made. 15There was substantial criticism of how the policehandled the situation, including a letter from Churchillhimself, who wrote the head of the Metropolitan Policeexpressing his concern that officers had been slow inmaking arrests. It was true that the police did not actquickly to arrest the demonstrators, but that approach wasconsistent with past practice. At the last minute Churchillhad suggested a change in that practice but too late,according to the police commander, to get the message tothe officers on the scene.Press accounts focused on police excesses in firsttrying to control the crowd and then in making arrests.Even though Churchill promptly ordered the release ofthe arrestees, many suffrage leaders blamed him for theviolence and even accused him of ordering the releases toprevent the truth from being stated in court.A few days later, as the so-called Battle of DowningStreet took place, Churchill again appeared at a demonstrationin support of votes for women, and ordered thearrest of a participant. A few days later Hugh Franklin, asuffrage backer, attacked Churchill with a whip, shouting“Take that, you dirty cur!” 16 Franklin was charged withassault and sentenced to six weeks in prison. Suffrage continuedas a problem for the Liberal Party until theoutbreak of World War I in 1914 put the matter on theback burner.Prisoners and SentencesAmong the Home Secretary’s duties was reviewingdeath sentences considering mercy. Churchill took thisobligation seriously and, by all accounts, gave close attentionto each of the forty-three capital cases presented forreview. He reprieved twenty-one, which was a higher ratethan the 40 percent reprieved during 1900-09. 17Even though Churchill was not reluctant to showmercy in individual cases, he remained a supporter of thedeath penalty throughout his life. He did, however, viewthe ultimate punishment in a rather unusual light. In aletter to Sir Edward Grey he stated, “To most men—including all the best—a life sentence is worse than adeath sentence.” 18If this seems odd, it fit Churchill’s persona. He ledan adventurous life and appeared to have no fear of beingkilled. A long term of imprisonment would have beenmuch worse than death for a man of his temperament.Whether “most men” felt that way is another question.To the Home Secretary’s responsibility for England’sprison system Churchill brought a unique perspective—he was the only Home Secretary who was everincarcerated. In My Early Life he entitled the chapter onhis 1899 captivity by the Boers “In Durance Vile.”At the time Churchill took office, England wassending a large number of people to prison. In 1908-09over 180,000 people were incarcerated, over half forfailure to pay a fine, and a third for drunkenness. 19 Thegreat percentage of convicts were from the poorer classes,a fact which did not escape Churchill’s notice.He studied prison issues for several months aftertaking office. On 20 July 1910, he told the House ofCommons that one of the main principles for a goodprison system was to “prevent as many people as possiblefrom getting there.” 20 Some 90,000 people had been sentto prison in 1909 for failure to pay fines. Many wouldnever have gone to prison at all if they had been given areasonable period of time to pay their fines. Churchilladvocated extending the time for payment. Even thoughhis proposal didn’t become law, the concept of more timewas accepted as national policy, reducing the number ofpeople sent to prison.The changed approach had a dramatic effect onthose charged with drunkenness. In 1908-09 over 62,000were imprisoned for failing to pay fines imposed for thatoffense. By 1918-19 the number was only 1600. 21Churchill also worked to extend the Children’s Actto those who were 16-21 years old, placing a greateremphasis on rehabilitation and alternative punishmentssuch as “defaulters drill” for petty offenses. He was reluctantto send any young person to prison unless a seriousoffense was involved. To his credit, Churchill’s attitudewas affected by the reality that those who were sent awaywere almost always sons of the working class. He pointedout that many of the same acts, if committed by a >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 23

HOME SECRETARY...young man at Oxford, were not punished in any way. 22 Asa result of Churchill’s efforts, far fewer young peopleentered the country’s prisons.One of Churchill’s duties was to write regular memosto the King on House of Commons activities. Though thisfalls outside the law and order category, it is worth a discussionbecause of WSC’s approach to the task.On 10 February 1911, Churchill wrote the King:“…as for tramps and wastrels there ought to be properlabour colonies where they could be sent….it must not,however, be forgotten that there are idlers and wastrels atboth ends of the social scale.” 23 Greatly offended, GeorgeV concluded that WSC’s view was “very socialistic.” 24 TheKing’s reaction prompted a series of notes betweenChurchill and Lord Knollys, the King’s private secretary.At one point Churchill suggested that the duty ofupdating the King should perhaps “be transferred to someother minister.” He finally calmed down when the King,through Lord Knollys, assured him that he wantedChurchill to continue, and that his letters were “alwaysvery interesting.” 25The exchange was enough for Knollys to commentthat Churchill “means to be conciliatory I imagine, but heis rather like ‘a bull in a china shop.’” 26 Knollys mighthave overstated things, but there’s no denying that whereverChurchill served, there was action and controversy.Summing UpEven though his time as Home Secretary was a briefand little-known part of his public life, Winston was stillWinston. The issues he faced provoked controversy andintense feelings. His actions prompted both praise andstinging criticism. Even when his actions were reasonableand temperate, his oratorical flourishes could at timesleave the impression he was following an extreme course.Whatever else might be said about Churchill’s timeat the Home Office, there can be no dispute that hisunique personality and strong views guaranteed interestingtimes. After approximately twenty months asHome Secretary, the controversial Churchill went on tobecome First Lord of the Admiralty—and times remainedas interesting as ever.Endnotes1. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (Macmillan, 2001), 170.2. Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955(London: Pimlico, 1995), 128.3. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, CompanionVolume II, Part 2, 1907-1911 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 1172.4. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. II, YoungStatesman 1901-1914 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 358.5. Ibid., 363.6. Ibid., 364.7. “Leading Churchill Myths,” Finest Hour 140, Autumn 2008, 11.8. Young Statesman, 367.Hendon Aviation meeting, 12 May 1911: Churchill, second from right, chatswith newspaper magnate Lord Northliffe; Mrs. Churchill shades her eyes atleft. Although still Home Secretary, WSC was now takng a serious interest inaircraft and flying, which would bear useful fruit in World War I.9. Ibid., 371-37210. Ibid., 394.11. Ibid., 395.12. Addison, 132.13. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, CompanionVolume II, Part 3, 1911-1914 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 1452.14. Ibid., 1453.15. Addison, 136.16. WSC, Companion Volume II, Part 3, 1911-1914, 1459.17. Addison, 119.18. Young Statesman, 403.19. Ibid., 373.20. Addison, 114.21. Young Statesman, 375.22. Ibid., 376.23. Ibid., 418.24. Ibid., 419.25. Ibid., 423.26. Ibid., 423.Other SourcesWinston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (Wilmington,Delaware: ISI Books, 2009).Ted Morgan, Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1982).Donald Rumbelow, The Siege of Sidney Street (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1973).Maxwell P. Schoenfeld, Sir Winston Churchill: His Life andTimes (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1986).WebsitesChurchill Centre: “Action This Day, A Daily Chronicle ofChurchill’s Life; Young Statesman: 1901-1914” (http://www.winstonchurchill.org).Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge: Chartwell Papers,CHAR 12: Home Office (http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk).✌FINEST HOUR 143 / 24

“Grasp the Larger Hope”Wit & WisdomOnce he found a felicitous phrase, it stuck...In writing the footnotes for JamesMuller's new edition of Thoughtsand Adventures (reviewed on page45), I came across this line in Churchill’sarticle, “The Irish Treaty”: “Both areneeded to explain the perplexities of theBritish Government and the causeswhich led them ‘to grasp the largerhope.’” I traced the likely source (“trustthe larger hope”) to Alfred Tennyson(1809-92), who became First BaronTennyson in 1884. He was appointedPoet Laureate in 1850.The poem is IN MEMORIAMA.H.H - OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII. It waswritten by Tennyson in memory of hisclose Cambridge friend Arthur HenryHallam, who died suddenly in 1833 of acerebral haemorrhage, aged 22; he hadbeen engaged to marry Tennyson's sister.Tennyson was so affected by theloss of Arthur Hallam that he spent thenext seventeen years writing this longwork, which consists of no fewer than131 separate poems presented as one. Itwas published in 1850. Section LV (55)consists of five verses, “the larger hope”coming from its final lines:I stretch lame hands of faith and grope,And gather dust and chaff, and callTo what I feel is Lord of all,And faintly trust the larger hope.The phrase rang a loud bell and I recalledthat Churchill had also deployed it in MyEarly Life and The Gathering Storm. Withthe editor's help I found it to have beenone of his favourites, having been used ina variety of contexts as follows:1930Churchill in My Early Life,Chapter X, writes amusingly aboutacquiring his taste for whisky:“I now found myself in heatwhich, though I stood it personally fairlywell, was terrific, for five whole days andwith absolutely nothing to drink, apartfrom tea, except either tepid water orPAUL H. COURTENAYtepid water with lime-juice ortepid water with whisky. Facedwith these alternatives I ‘graspedthe larger hope.’ I was sustainedin these affairs by my high morale.Wishing to fit myself for active-serviceconditions I overcame the ordinary weaknessesof the flesh. By the end of thesefive days I had completely overcome myrepugnance to the taste of whisky.”1931In a speech on the Statute ofWestminster Bill, 20 November 1931(Complete Speeches, V: 5099) Churchillspoke of continued Empire unity:“I feel that we are bound, wherethe great self-governing Dominions ofthe Crown are concerned, boldly to graspthe larger hope, and to believe, in spite ofanything that may be written in Acts ofParliament, that all will come right, nay,all will go better and better betweenGreat Britain and her offspring.”1934In Arms and the Covenant, the collectionof Churchill speeches leading upto World War II, is his speech of 8March 1934, “The Need for Air Parity”(see also Complete Speeches V: 5330):“We all hope [war] will never takeplace, and I am not at all prepared,standing here, to assume that it willinevitably take place. On the contrary, Istill grasp the larger hope and believe thatwe may wear our way through these difficultiesand leave this grim period behind.”1937Step by Step, Churchill’s collectionof articles about foreign affairs, includes“How to Meet the Bill,” first published22 January 1937:“I personally grasp the larger hope;but, however this grim issue in worlddestiny may be decided, it is evident thatGreat Britain should finance the expansionof her defence programmes to thefullest possible extent….”FINEST HOUR 143 / 251938Sir Martin Gilbert in Churchill:The Wilderness Years, (London:Macmillan, 1981, 240), seems to bequoting Churchill post-Munich, thoughthis does not come up in the officialbiography:“In many letters [Churchill]referred to his deep distress and in onehe explained why he felt he was ‘gropingin the dark.’ Until Munich the ‘peaceloving powers’ had ‘been definitelystronger than the Dictators,’ but in 1939‘we must expect a different balance.’ Itwas this new situation, he wrote, which‘staggered’ him and momentarily causedhim to despair. But, in his characteristicway he immediately struggled to graspthe ‘larger hope’ and turned to the possibilityof greater United Statesinvolvement in Europe.”1948In The Gathering Storm, Chapter20, Churchill writes of what he calls“The Soviet Enigma”:“Statesmen are not called upononly to settle easy questions. These oftensettle themselves. It is where the balancequivers, and the proportions are veiled inmist, that the opportunity for worldsavingdecisions presents itself. Havinggot ourselves into this awful plight of1939, it was vital to grasp the largerhope.”1948Speaking of European Unity atThe Hague on 7 May 1948 (EuropeUnite, 317), Churchill used the phrasewith a plural:“...if we all pull together and poolthe luck and the comradeship…andgrimly grasp the larger hopes ofhumanity, then it may be that we shallmove into a happier sunlit age...” ✌

“CORRERAI ANCOR PIU VELOCE PER LE VIE DEL CIELO.”Jack French Kemp1935-2009RICHARD M. LANGWORTHOn Eleuthera, where we live from December toApril, there was vast fascination, as one mightexpect, over the recent U.S. Presidential election.One of the virtues of this Bahamas OutIsland is that racism, in the sense we all know it in theso-called First World, doesn’t really exist. On our easygoingstrand, amid the smiles of friendly locals and oldfriends, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the face infront of you is black or white.So it was natural for thewife of our local grocer to ask mein all innocence and withoutrancor: “Is it possible for a nonwhiteto be elected President?”……And for me to replyinstantly: “It was possible twelveyears ago, if the ticket had beenColin Powell and Jack Kemp.”I am convinced it was possible—notonly because ColinPowell, Honorary Member ofThe Churchill Centre, is a manvast numbers of people like oradmire; but because Jack Kemp,Trustee of The Churchill Centre,though they say he ran a bumcampaign, was equally so: apolitician who, like Churchill,never wrote off any voter, whobelieved that his libertarian philosophy could appeal toall, that it was the height of patronization to single out aminority and declare that they must have more governmentbecause they cannot get by with less of it.Jack was a man who lived life at maximum rpm,whether as champion quarterback for the Buffalo Bills,as a Congressman who promoted enterprise zones ininner cities, as a empowerment-advocating HousingSecretary, or as a candidate for Vice President whodescribed himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative.” Butyou can read all about those achievements by Googlinghis name. I’d rather write about what he meant to hisfellow Churchilllians.The Tenth Churchill Conference in Washington in1993 was a stellar occasion. Co-sponsored by SenatorsBoxer and Feinstein, we welcomed Lady Thatcher,Winston Churchill, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, CeliaSandys and Gen. Colin Powell. At the Navy Yard Chapelwe reprised the services at Argentia in August 1941, withreadings by veterans of USS Augusta and HMS Prince ofWales. Ambassador Alan Keyes not only sang five nationalanthems including God Defend New Zealand, but all sixverses of The Battle Hymn of the Republic—sans music infreezing cold on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. AsChurchill wrote of Argentia: “Every verse seemed to stirthe heart. It was a great hour to live.”Jack Kemp was our keynotespeaker at that conference. Werepublish here what he said:words of wisdom and inspiration,delivered with hisaccustomed vigor, and notwithout humor.When his introducer madeso bold as to compare him to aformer Congressman namedLincoln, Jack rose red-faced todisclaim even the slightest similarity.After her appreciationfollowing his speech, JeaneKirkpatrick and Jack embraced:old colleagues, veterans of politicalwars, together again, eventhough (as Jeane told me atdinner), they had differed ferventlyover the 1982 FalklandsWar, with Jack firmly on theside of Margaret Thatcher and Great Britain.Jack and his wife Joanne were with us again at thecommissioning of USS Winston S. Churchill in 2001,and we dined together in the wardroom (Finest Hour111). His last campaign was six years past, but he wasstill passionate about what The New York Times called his“most important idea….the theory that deep cuts intaxes would lead to such an economic boom that muchif not all of the revenue lost from lower taxes would beoffset by the additional tax receipts that resulted fromgreater earnings.”FINEST HOUR 143 / 26

“What was it Churchill said about Supply-Sideeconomics?” Jack asked between bites.“He didn’t say anything about Supply-Side economics,”I winked. “He was a Liberal.”“Yes, he did!” Jack retorted. “You know, aboutkeeping money in people’s pockets.”Later I looked it up and sent it to him, because hewas right, and Churchill’s words ring as true now aswhen Churchill spoke them, on 16 August 1945:“What noble opportunities have the newGovernment inherited! Let them be worthy of theirfortune, which also is the fortune of us all. To releaseand liberate the vital springs of British energy and inventiveness,to let the honest earnings of the nation fructifyin the pockets of the people….”In January Jack Kemp announced that he had beendiagnosed with cancer. Four months later he was gone.Immediately I thought of the words Churchill offered, asonly he could, quoting from Adam Lindsay Gordon’sgrand poem “The Last Leap,” upon the death of hisdearest friend, Lord Birkenhead: “The summons whichreached him, and for which he was equally prepared, wasof a different order. It came as he would have wished it,swift and sudden on the wings of speed. He had reachedthe last leap in his gallant course through life. All is over!Fleet career, Dash of greyhound slipping thongs, Flightof falcon, bound of deer, Mad hoof-thunder in our rear,Cold air rushing up our lungs, Din of many tongues.”Oddly too, remembering the rapidfire way Jacklived and spoke and thought, I thought of another figurein a galaxy far away, the immortal Tazio Nuvolari, thegreatest racing driver who ever lived. In Mantua, Italy,where passing drivers in the Mille Miglia would raise ahand in mute salute as they raced through “Nivola’s”home town, his tombstone bears this epitaph: Correraiancor piu veloce per le vie del cielo. You will travel fasterstill upon the highways of heaven.Godspeed, my friend. ✌REMEMBERING JACKI have three abiding memories of Jack Kemp. The first was his visit to the Churchill Archives Centre, when hestood in the middle of our reading rooms, a bust of Sir Winston at his back, and insisted not just on reading but on declaimingone of the great wartime speeches from Churchill's original speaking notes, at full volume, with full emphasis, as if deliveringit to an election rally: one master orator paying tribute to another.My second memory is walking with him to the reception after the commissioning of USS Winston S. Churchill,watching him engage in lively banter with the crowd, with a natural ease and without airs or security.But my most important memory is of the meeting I had with him in his office in Washington, D.C. I thought it wasa courtesy call and I briefed him on the reason for my trip, and the fact that I was having meetings with key staff at theLibrary of Congress to discuss a possible Churchill exhibition. I had underestimated his interest and his networks, for onthe back of my brief visit he picked up the phone to his friend, Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress. Suddenly doorsbegan to open. The exhibition that followed in 2004 might never have happened without this crucial political intervention.—Allen Packwood, Director, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge“Never Splash inShallow Waters”The Hon. Jack KempTenth International Churchill ConferenceMayflower Hotel, Washington,7 November 1993Churchillians are a diverse group with a commonpurpose. By your reenactment of the 1941Atlantic Charter services today at the NavyChapel, you bring to mind again Churchill’s memoriesof that scene: “It was a great hour to live. Nearly halfthose who sang were soon to die.”Through experiences like these we can betterunderstand our world today, and the unique set of challengeswe face. No one has made that more clear to methan Sir Martin Gilbert. As exemplified by his addressthis weekend, “Churchill and the Holocaust,” he has setan unequaled standard of scholarship. Martin has alsowritten of Churchill’s “uncanny understanding andvision of the future unfolding of events.” This is whyChurchill speaks to us so clearly across the years.Over the past eighty years the Western democracieshave overcome unprecedented challenges. Two >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 27

JACK KEMP...world wars destroyed nations, empires, millions of lives.A cold war haunted us with nuclear nightmares, andturned suddenly hot in places like Berlin, Korea,Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Cambodia andAfghanistan. Whole nations became prisons where wordsof freedom were spoken only in private, and in fear.Many in the intellectual community, from OswaldSpengler to Jean-François Revel, predicteddemocracy’s demise.The man who experiencedall the trials of our centuryalso foresaw their end.Speaking at M.I.T. in1949, Churchill foreshadowedthetriumph offreedom: “Themachinery ofpropagandamay packtheir mindswith falsehoodanddeny themtruth formany generationsoftime, butthe soul ofman thusfrozen in along night canbe awakened bya spark comingfrom God knowswhere, and in amoment the wholestructure of lies andoppression is on trial forits life.”We have weathered thiscentury’s violent storms. At the endof each, there have been both opportunitiesand tests. Consider the tragic mistakes and the terribleconsequences which could have been averted. AtVersailles, we tried to create a new world. We createdinstead the seeds of another war. At Yalta, we tried toconstruct a stable peace. We raised an iron curtain.We have won “the long twilight struggle” againstCommunism. The history of the response is now to bewritten. What new challenge may lie ahead?In shaping this response, we can learn from theman who both made and wrote history: from internationalrelations to trade, economic policy to social policy.Charles de Gaulle said that a great leader “mustaim high, show that he has a vision, act on the grandscale, and so establish his authority over the generality ofmen who splash in the shallow water.” Churchill alwaysswam in deep waters. The essence of his vision wasliberty. His greatest contribution was to preserve it fromextinction by rallying people behind a noble cause. Buttoday his legacy is under attack by authors who “splashin shallow water.” Some argue thatChamberlain, Baldwin and theappeasers were just “pragmaticrealists,” Churchill an ideologuewilling to sacrificeBritain’s Empire for thefutile cause ofdefeating Hitler.The Fuehrer, afterall, only wantedLebens-raum; hehad nodesigns westward.Churchilladvocated“peacethroughstrength.”He spentten yearswarning ofNazi rearmamentandthe dangers ofisolationism.He challengedthe government’spolicies of appeasementand bluntlyasked whether Britainwas doing all it could todefend democracy. Twoyears before the Munich pactdismembered Czechoslovakia hespoke of “simple uncounted truths todayfor which better men than we are have died on thescaffold or the battlefield.” Yet without him, the newrevisionists would have us believe Britain would havethrived under Hitler’s boot. That’s more than badhistory; it is a dangerous blindness.Today we are engaged in a fresh debate overAmerica’s role in the world. On the political right, somewant to turn inward, believing there are no great threatsto our security. They say, “Come Home, America!”Behind this lies a timid nationalism based on fear thatAmerica can’t compete. I disagree. I believe America hasServices aboard HMS Prince of Wales with the President and Prime Minister, Argentia, 10 August 1941.Reprised by The Churchill Centre, Washington Navy Yard Chapel, 7 November 1993Lesson read by David Robinson, USN (ret.), USS AugustaBe strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the landwhich I sware unto their fathers to give them. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth;but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that iswritten therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed;for the Lord thy God is with thee, whithersoever thou goest. —Joshua 1: 6, 8-9Prayer read by Raymond Goodman, RN (ret.) HMS Prince of WalesSave us and deliver us from the hands of our enemies; abate their pride, assuage their malice,and confound their devices; that we, being armed with Thy defence, may be preserved evermore from all perils, to glorify Thee, who art the only giver of all victory. Stablish ourhearts, O God, in the day of battle, and strengthen our resolve, that we fight notin enmity against men but against the powers of darkness enslaving the soulsof men, till all the enmity and oppression be done away and thepeoples of the world be set free from fear, to serve one anotheras children of our Father, who is above all and throughall and in all, our God for ever and ever.Amen.FINEST HOUR 143 / 28

a vital national and world interest in expanding liberty.Wherever they exist, democracies give rise to peaceand progress. But there is also a passion to foreign policythat goes beyond a narrow Realpolitik. There is a moralcommitment, enshrined, as Churchill declared, in theDeclaration of Independence and Magna Carta: “Oughtwe not to produce in defence of right, champions as bold,missionaries as eager, and if need be, swords as sharp asare at the disposal of the leaders of totalitarian states?”The defining principle of Western foreign policymust be freedom. Achieving it will not be through hollowwords or shallow idealism. Churchill said, “Virtuousmotives are no match for armed and resolute readiness.”The first obligation is the defense of the nation.The breaking up of empires is always a moment ofheightened danger. It is certainly true in the fragments ofthe Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union.Parts of the world are again in the grip of nationalist,religious, and ethnic violence. Missiles and nuclear technologyspread easily from hand to hand, to places likeNorth Korea and Iran. The CIA estimates that fifteen ortwenty “developing” nations will have ballistic missilesby the end of the century. We still face a world of risk.Who knows where it will rise from next?I am concerned, in particular, about the determinationto gut the Strategic Defense Initiative. Whenweapons of mass destruction proliferate, regional conflictcan quickly become global. Churchill understood theneed to protect free peoples against the terrible weaponsof the modern age. That is why he always championednew technology against objections from politicians andthe military. In World War I, he was the chief advocatefor the tank and military aircraft. During his politicalwilderness, he challenged the British government tomaintain its technological edge. As Prime Minister, hesaw the vital importance of radar.But freedom, Churchill knew, must also be protectedby collective security: maximum power in thehands of democratic nations. Recent events have proventhe point. American troops in Somalia were left withoutclear objectives. Their goals were muddied by multilateralism,not aid by allies. Churchill hated military actionwithout strategy. But that is exactly what we’ve seen toooften lately, from leaders who view collective security asan excuse for inaction and indecision. This is not collectivesecurity. It is collective ineptitude.For Churchill, freedom was also his lodestar indomestic politics, finding its most consistentexpression in his commitment to capitalism. Hesought no “third way” between capitalism and socialism.He believed capitalism was inextricably linked to humanfreedom. More than a utilitarian economic structure, itwas a prerequisite for a free society. Socialism, hethought, would bring the slow death of democracy. “Weare for the ladder,” he said. “Let all try their best toclimb. They [socialists] are for the queue. Let each waithis place until his turn comes.”For Churchill, a thriving democratic-capitalistsystem was based on three fundamental principles: therule of law, low taxes, and Free Trade. Months before hecrossed the floor of the House of Commons on the issueof Free Trade, he gave an impassioned speech ridiculingthe growing protectionist sentiment in the Tory party:“It is the theory of the protectionist that imports areevil....we free-traders say it is not true. To think that youcan make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a manthinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himselfup by the handle.”The debate of 1904 divides nations and my partytoday, and the stakes are as high. The outcome of theNorth American Free Trade Agreement will determinemore than my country’s economic future; it will determineits future character. It will determine whether weturn inward or look outward, whether we try futilely topreserve the past or boldly seek a greater future; whetherwe view the global economy with fear or confidence.Churchill also believed in a tax system where rateswere low and incentives high: “The idea that a nationcan tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest delusionswhich has ever fuddled the human mind.” Lowtaxes, he said, were the key to upward mobility for thedisadvantaged in society. One of the first changes heannounced as Chancellor of the Exchequer was a tenpercent reduction in income taxes for the lowest incomegroups, to “liberate the production of new wealth [and]stimulate enterprise and accelerate industrial revival.”Churchill’s was not a Darwinian vision where thestrong thrive and the weak suffer. He fought to establisha system that doesn’t surrender control to bureaucracy,but shows compassion for the least fortunate in society.We call it a safety net, but Winston Churchill describedit like this:“We want to draw a line below which we will notallow persons to live and labour, yet above which they maycompete with all the strength of their manhood. We wantto have free competition upwards; we decline to allow freecompetition to run downwards. We do not want to pulldown the structures of science and civilization, but tospread a net over the abyss.” These are the direct and vitalcontributions of Churchill to the debates of today.We have lived to see a world revolution of liberty,but freedom’s march is not complete and its success isnever assured. America and the West must do more thanjust stand against something. All defenders of freedomstand on Churchill’s shoulders. Thank God we have thisorganization to perpetuate his legacy and relevance: toremind us never to “splash in shallow waters.” ✌FINEST HOUR 143 / 29

GLIMPSESABERDEEN, 27 APRIL 1946: WSC traveled to Scotland to receive the Freedom ofAberdeen and an honorary LLD. To WSC’s left: Sir Thomas Mitchell, Lord Provost ofAberdeen, and Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Aberdeen University Sir WilliamHamilton Fyfe. (The Chancellor, Field Marshal the Viscount Wavell, was absent in Indiawhere he was Viceroy.) Behind them, with RAF moustache and raincoat, is the author.GUARDINGGREATNESSRONALD E. GOLDING • PART I“IMADE ASLIGHTBOW ANDSAID, ‘HOW DO YOUDO, SIR.’ HE WASABOUT TO LEAVETHE HOUSE ANDHAD HIS COAT ON.THE BUTLER WASHANDING HIM HISBLACK HOMBURGAND SILVER-MOUNTED WALKINGSTICK. HE LOOKEDME RIGHT IN THEEYE—A STAREFAMILIAR TOEVERYONE WHOWORKED FOR HIM.FINALLY HE ASKED:“‘DID YOU FLY?’“‘YES, SIR.’“‘HMMPH.’“...AND AWAY WEWENT TOCHARTWELL...THEFIRST OF MANYSUCH JOURNEYS.”For several years before The Second World War Iserved in the Special Political Branch of NewScotland Yard. In 1946, after five years in theRAF, I returned to the Yard to take up my civilianduties again. It was still a pretty grim period inEngland, particularly in London, for there was severerationing and a bitterly cold winter. I had a trying timegetting accustomed to normal life once more.At the Yard too there was an air of general disillusionment.The Special Branch had sent many men to the war,mainly as combatants, some on intelligence duties. Twentythreehad been killed. Those who returned represented allthree services and ranked from Brigadier to FlightLieutenant. For many, returning to police duties meant atremendous cut in salary. In order to complete our rehabilitation,the police sent us on a special course lasting six weeksor so to become reacquainted with our normal police work.I had been back in the Branch only two or three weekswhen I was summoned by the Superintendent.“Golding, how are you settling down now?”“Not badly I suppose, sir.”“Hmmph. I want you to go on protection duty.” Iraised my eyebrows.“We’re putting another man on Winston Churchill.He’s a terribly difficult man as you know, but it’ll be a goodexperience for you.”I should just think it would! I had been seriouslythinking of resigning from the Police Force and emigratingto Canada. This, however, was something different.A few days later I went to 28 Hyde Park Gate,Churchill’s London home. I was introduced. At the time Istill affected a rather outsize Air Force moustache. Thesenior officer said, “Mr. Churchill, this is DetectiveSergeant Golding. We are seconding him to your staff andhe’ll be responsible for looking after you. Golding hasrecently returned from the RAF.” I made a slight bow andsaid, “How do you do, sir.”Churchill was about to leave the house and had hisFINEST HOUR 143 / 30

coat on. The butler was handing him his black Homburgand silver-mounted walking stick. WSC looked me right inthe eye, a stare familiar to everyone who worked for him.Finally he asked: “Did you fly?”“Yes, sir.”“Hmmph.”I followed him out to the car. The chauffeur, whosename was Bullock (WSC referred to the limousine as “TheBullock Cart”) opened the door, Churchill got in the back,1 got in the front, and away we went. In the police car followingimmediately behind were my colleague Sgt.Williams, the butler and the cook—the renowned Mrs.Landemare. And so we travelled thirty miles down toChartwell, Churchill’s country estate in Kent.This was the first of many such journeys. Churchillloved Chartwell and spent as much time there as he could—every weekend at least. He was forced to spend a lot of timein London because of the many functions he needed toattend, particularly his duties as Leader of the Opposition.There was no doubt that his defeat in the 1945 general electionhad come as a shattering and unexpected blow.My first few days at Chartwell were a bit of a nightmarebecause there were sixty to eighty German prisonersof war working in the grounds and on the farm. Sullen andsubdued looking, they were armed with pick-axes andshovels, with only one English foreman to look after them.Churchill was completely unconcerned. He wouldsay “good day” to them when he went by. They would stopand look up from their digging; I’m quite sure they wereabsolutely amazed over where they were.I was fairly athletic in those days and, mainly toimpress the prisoners, used to run round the grounds, particularlyin the early mornings, wearing a white sweater andshorts. I tried to look as fierce as possible, hoping that Iwould give the impression that I was a superman! I wasindeed worried. If any of those prisoners had wanted to hitthe old man with a shovel or pick-axe, it would have beenvery difficult to stop them.The manor had started as a hunting lodge for HenryVIII. It had been much enlarged over the years, and by 1946was quite a beautiful mansion. It is a two-storeyed building,and I was given a small flat on the ground floor whichopened onto lawns. The property was lovely, neatly dividedfarmland stretching over both sides of a small valley.Fascinated by water, Mr. Churchill had spent yearsengineering his system of ponds and rivulets. His sourcewas a small spring, the Chart Well (hence the estate’sname), that rises near the house. He ran it through thegrounds by pipes and spillways to artfully constructed smallwaterfalls, emptying into pools of various sizes. The waterwas then piped to the large lake at the bottom of the valley.A powerful pump forced the water back up from the lakeso that it could run down again, reinforcing the naturalsupply and providing a fine display over the waterfalls.To have a constant show of moving water, he needed asufficient supply. In summer, the level of the Chart Well andthe lake would fall. So Churchill built a reservoir on the farside of the valley, piping its water into the lake. Nearby was alarge, heated swimming pool, fed from the lake and filtered.The system had required many years to complete, and wasalways a source of great interest and endeavour.The lake at the valley’s bottom was a quarter-mile long,picturesque and stocked with fish, which were occasionallypoached by herons. On the lake were a pair of black swans, agift from Western Australia after the war (see “Black SwansReturn,” page 8). When Mr. Churchill came within a certaindistance of the shoreline he would give a loud and ratherweird “swan-noise” and the birds would invariably answer.Whilst he continued down to the lake, a veritable conversationwould ensue between him and the swans!This was a regular performance whenever he wasshowing guests around, and it never failed to impress. Mr.Churchill was given credit for another wonderful gift: theability to commune with wildlife.I was very taken by this until one day I went down tothe lake on my own, and the swans started to cry and callat me. By experiment I found they would call whenever ahuman came within a certain distance. Now, if one wasclever enough, one could cry out just before getting to thiscritical distance; the swans would appear to reply if onecontinued to walk, and the “conversation” came naturally.Some time after this discovery I was walking down tothe lake with Mr. Churchill. I was a little in front, andwatched carefully for the critical spot. I then called out in“swan-talk” and the birds dutifully replied. Mr. Churchillstopped dead. I turned round and he looked me full in >>THE AUTHOR: Mr. Golding’s memoirs ran in Finest Hour 34-35, 1981-82: so long ago that we respond to several requeststo republish and archive them on our website.FINEST HOUR 143 / 31

GLIMPSESCHARTWELL ROCKERIES: From a fickle and insipid stream,whose source was the Chart Well, Churchill developed anextensive and elaborate system of waterfalls and rockybrooks, which bubbled down the hillside into his ponds,where powerful pumps sent the water back up to the top.After the war, Gavin Jones Nurseries Ltd. overhauled thedisplay, in which they obviously took great pride.GUARDING GREATNESS...the eye for a moment or two. Then the faintest suspicion ofa smile appeared and he walked on in silence. No commentwas ever made that this secret was shared.During the war, Churchill had shut Chartwell for theduration. Golden Orfe from the small ponds were tippedinto the lake where they would get enough food, and left totake their chance against herons and other marauders. In1946 I had the interesting task of fishing in the lake (withvery light tackle of course), pulling out the goldfish, now sixyears older and enormous. They were put in pails and takenback to their original homes in the smaller ponds. It was Mr.Churchill’s great pleasure to feed them regularly. They cameto his hand after a while and this pleased him. He was veryfond of demonstrating his “oneness” with nature.He laid down a very lovely butterfly and moth “farm”at Chartwell in 1946 (See “Butterflies to Chartwell,” FinestHour 89, Winter 1995-96). When he got the idea he sent foran expert, who bred very beautiful specimens. Churchill, ofcourse, always had world-famous people to advise him on hishobbies and other interests. The pattern of conversation wastypical when the butterfly man came.He took the breeder for a walk round the grounds andgave a general idea of his plans; the expert then gave adviceand went into technical details. Mr. Churchill said very little.Rather like a penny dropping in the butterfly man’smind, you could almost hear him thinking: “Ah, I’ve got theold boy. He’s not nearly as clever as I thought. This is onesphere in which I know a lot more than he does.”The butterfly man became just the slightest bit patronizingand boom! Mr. Churchill came back at him with verylucid comments showing that he was fully acquainted witheverything being said. Visibly shaken, the expert never triedto “talk down” again. It was a pattern of conversation I’dnoticed with other experts. I can’t help feeling that WSC pretendedignorance to a certain extent, then came down like aton of bricks if there was any attempt to patronize him.A very successful scheme was put in hand and some ofthe rarest butterflies and moths of the greatest beauty werehatched out. By careful provision of the right flowers andbushes, the butterflies were kept well fed.Churchill was usually always successful inhis hobbies. His pigs and sows were famousthroughout the land; a Guernsey cow, given him bythe people of that island, won all the awards available.Whilst I was with him he bought his first racehorse. I think it won just about every time it cameout and was always very heavily backed by thepublic. I thought this was unfortunate because Iused to back it too, and because of its favoritism,the odds were never very high.On another occasion that I rememberduring wheat harvesting, Mr. Churchill’s farmmanager and others were rabbit shooting. They hadgone the whole morning without bagging a rabbit.About noon, I drove WSC up in a Land Rover, which he frequentlyused to get round the farm. We stopped at a fieldwhich was almost harvested, with just a small square ofwheat in the middle.Mr. Churchill clambered slowly out of the Jeep—hewas about seventy-three years old at the time. Just as he gothis feet on the ground there was a shout from the others anda rabbit darted from the center of the field. In a flash Mr.Churchill raised his gun and fired one barrel. The rabbitkeeled over dead. It was a wonderful shot, the usualChurchill luck. The others had been waiting for hours forthe opportunity.Concluded next issue ✌LAND ROVER ENTHUSIAST: Churchill also got roundChartwell in an old Morris, but as former secretary GraceHambin related, it often became stuck in the valley’s wetgrounds. A four-wheel-drive vehicle was the clear solution.This photograph is from 1954, so whether UKE 80 was thesame Land Rover from which WSC alighted to shoot therabbit during Ronald Golding’s tenure is unclear.FINEST HOUR 143 / 32

LEADING CHURCHILL MYTHS (18)Myth: “We Don’t Torture”Fact: We Did.In a 29 April press conference, inresponse to a question on releasing topsecret memos about “enhanced interrogationmethods,” President Obamacited an article he’d read, that “duringWorld War II, when London was beingbombed to smithereens, [the British] had200 or so detainees. And Churchill said,‘We don't torture,’ when the entireBritish—all of the British people—werebeing subjected to unimaginable risk andthreat.... Churchill understood—you starttaking shortcuts, over time, that corrodeswhat's best in a people. It corrodes thecharacter of a country.”Whether his thesis is right orwrong, the quotation is incorrect andgives a false implication. While Churchilldid express such sentiments with regardto prison inmates, and the lack of torturein World War I, he said no such thingabout prisoners of war, enemy combatantsor terrorists, who were tortured byBritish interrogators during WW2.“Torture” appears 156 times indigital transcripts of Churchill’s 15million published words (books, articles,speeches, papers) and 35 million wordsabout him. Not one appears in thecontext the President stated. Similarly,key phrases like “character of a country”or “erodes the character” do not track.Mr. Obama was misled by AndrewSullivan’s Atlantic article, “Churchill vs.Cheney” (http://xrl.us/beqyfx), whichcalmly urged that former Vice PresidentCheney be prosecuted. 1Most enemy spies, Sullivan wrote,“went through Camp 020, a Victorianpile crammed with interrogators. AsBritain's very survival hung in thebalance, as women and children werebeing killed on a daily basis and Londonturned into rubble, Churchill nonethelessknew that embracing torture was theequivalent of surrender to the barbarismhe was fighting….”“Churchill nonetheless knew”appears suddenly and with no evidenceto back it up. Sullivan makes no otherreference to Churchill, or to how hedivined Churchill’s views.It seems that Sullivan picked upthis impression in a 2006 article aboutCamp 020’s chief interrogator, Col.Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens. In “TheTruth that Tin Eye Saw,” by BenMacintyre (London Times Online,http://xrl.us/beqyfc), Stephens was identifiedas an MI5 officer who extractedconfessions out of Nazis: “a bristling,xenophobic martinet; in appearance, withhis glinting monocle and cigarette holder,he looked exactly like the caricatureGestapo interrogator….he deployedthreats, drugs, drink and deceit. But henever once resorted to violence....Hismotives were strictly practical. ‘Neverstrike a man. It is unintelligent, for thespy will give an answer to please, ananswer to escape punishment. Andhaving given a false answer, all elsedepends upon the false premise.’”Nowhere did Macintyre mentionor quote Churchill. Incidentally, after thewar, Stephens was cleared of a charge of“disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind” andtold he was free to apply to rejoin hisformer employers at MI5.The CIA argues that “enhancedinterrogation” works, others that it doesnot. Whoever is right, the “Tin Eye”Stephens story is just another redherring—because according to recentresearch the British did use suchmethods: in the “London Cage,” a POWcamp in London, “where SS and Gestapocaptives were subject to beatings, sleepdeprivation and starvation.” 2Churchill spoke frequently abouttorture, mostly enemy treatment of civiliansor conquered nations. Cdr. LarryKryske reminded us of this example,from WSC’s World War I memoirs:“When all was over, Torture andCannibalism were the only two expedientsthat the civilized, scientific,_________________________________________________________________________For twenty-five years Finest Hour has skewered world-famous fictions, fairy tales and tallstories. For lists see FH 140:20, or www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/myths/myths. Gratefulthanks to Alex Spillius, “Obama Likes Winston Churchill After All,” Daily Telegraph, 30 April2009 (http://xrl.us/beqyft), to Telegraph readers responding, and to Cdr. Larry Kryske.FINEST HOUR 143 / 33Christian States had beenable to deny themselves:and these were ofdoubtful utility.” 3 Thegeneral sentiment is clear enough, thoughcombined with “Cannibalism” it seemslikely to refer to the practices of conqueringarmies.The situation was more acute inWorld War II, when Britain was beingbombed and threatened with invasionand Churchill had plenary authority.Certainly it is hard to imagine him beingunaware of activities at places like the“London Cage,” or not condoning whatwent on there. Lady Soames once said,“He would have done anything to winthe war, and I daresay he had to do somepretty rough things—but they didn'tunman him.”If Churchill is on record about“enhanced interrogation,” his words haveyet to surface. The nearest I could cometo his sentiments on the point refers notto terrorist fanatics but to prison inmates.In 1938, responding to a constituentwho urged him to help end the use ofthe “cat o’nine tails” in prisons, WSCwrote: “the use of instruments of torturecan never be regarded by any decentperson as synonymous with justice.” 4If that line appeals to Mr. Obama,he can certainly deploy it with confidence.—EDITOREndnotes1. Longtime members may recall thatSullivan appeared at our 1987 Dallas conference,made friendly conversation, then wrotea long polemic in The New Republic aboutour “weird mix” of Churchill worshippers, as“the damp seam of détente seeps into theReagan Administration.” We reprinted it,noting twenty-four “terminological inexactitudes,”in Finest Hour 58, Winter 1987-88.2. Ian Corbain, “The Secrets of theLondon Cage,” The Guardian, 12 Nov05(http://xrl.us/beqyue). The Cage was keptsecret, Corbain wrote, though a censoredaccount appeared in the memoirs of its commandant,Lt. Col. Alexander Scotland.Corbain does not mention Churchill, but tobelieve Churchill wasn’t aware of this activitywould be asking a lot.3. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 1,1911-1914 (London: Butterworth, 1923), 11.4. Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S.Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 3. TheComing of War 1936-1939 (London,Heinemann: 1982), 1292. n. 2. ✌

STUDENT ESSAYHOW A YOUNG MAN’S WRITINGSSHAPED A HEROFROMPEN TOPARLIAMENTALLISON HAYLess attention is paid to Churchill’s literary works than tohis statesmanship, but his literary influence is notable,and its bearing on the intellect undeniable. What wouldour heritage be without the timelessly inspirational “This WasTheir Finest Hour”? Would World War II have ended differentlyhad he not “mobilized the English language,” as Murrowand Kennedy said, “and sent it into battle”?By their titles alone his great wartime speeches showthe quality and authority of Churchill’s work. Seventy yearssince the height of his career he remains a hero, but his politicalachievement rests on the foundation of his writings.Beyond his speeches, his books and articles left few historicalstones unturned. For his literary genius, Winston Churchillis a premier example of the greatness of British Literature.Long before he became a statesman, Churchill was anauthor. Many new to him are surprised to learn that he hadno university education. His father, who saw no promise inhis son at Harrow, found no reason to send him to Oxfordor Cambridge. Instead he became a soldier.It was left to young Winston to educate himself, whichhe did through the epic histories of Macaulay and Gibbon.Stationed in India in 1896, he “embarked on that process ofself-education which was to prove so serviceable a substitutefor the opportunities which he had neglected or rejected inhis formal education...within a few months of his arrival inBangalore he was making insatiable demands upon hismother for more books.” 1Studying the history of ancient wars and governments,parliamentary debates and his father’s speeches would serveChurchill well in future writings. Self-education made him amaster of prose, and by the time he began writing seriously,his stylistic patterns were formed.Churchill wished to establish himself as a respectedand intelligent author among the statesmen whose role he_________________________________________________________Ms. Hay is a graduate with distinction from the University of Oklahoma,where she was a Letters major under Professor Ronald Schleifer. She beginslaw school this autumn at OU.craved for himself. But the war dispatches he wrote fromCuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa from 1895 to 1900did not satisfy his ambitious desire to be noticed.His first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force,was hastily written in five weeks and shipped to his motherwith a note on the last day of 1897: “I don’t want anythingmodified or toned down in any way. I will stand or fall bywhat I have written. I only want bad sentences polished &any repetitions of phrase or fact weeded out.” 2Although the story was embarrassingly full of errors,Churchill achieved a taste of success and established hisapproach to writing history: a combination of personal experiencesand a realistic description of what he believed hadhappened. This method made his stories come alive forreaders far beyond those interested in the war tales. 3 TheMalakand Field Force sold well, bringing Churchill to theattention of publishers and the general public.There followed The River War, whose two volumesmade Churchill known as a legitimate and trusted militaryreporter. Reviews were not all positive, but most agreed thathe was “an astonishing young man,” his book “an astonishingtriumph. It is well-written, it is impartial, it isconclusive, and we do not think that any other living mancould have produced it. Of course, it has its faults. It is fartoo long, for instance.” 4 Length never seemed to botherChurchill; his best books usually ran in multiple volumes;nor were his speeches ever described as models of brevity.With two books complete, Churchill began to writewith more confidence and quickly produced three morebooks, including his only novel, Savrola. To call it entirelyfictitious would be misleading, since the main characterresembles Churchill in an ideal manner. Savrola is a manwho champions politics, specifically a republic, as a savingforce of justice. He becomes disillusioned with politics andprefers philosophic contemplation and a love for the beautifulthings in life. 5Winston himself was often disillusioned with politicalFINEST HOUR 143 / 34

developments, though not politics itself. He was blunt insuch moments, as evidenced by remarks about politicians as,“He is asked to stand [for office], he wants to sit and he isexpected to lie.” 6The year 1900 marked Churchill’s shift from the militaryto the political sphere. After publication of two accountsof the Boer War, he entered Parliament and began to criticizehis own party to such an extent that he soon changed sidesover the issue of Free Trade. He published several volumes ofnotable speeches and an African travelogue, fast shaping hisleadership style. Although the issues then were not as seriousas what was to come, they gave him the experience of persuadingothers to understand his opinions.Churchill wrote his speeches, and would often spendeight to ten hours perfecting one. He wrote out the full textto guard against any lapses, speaking in a professional andpersuasive manner. 7 He was developing an ability to conceivelarge ideas and to express them inspirationally, so listenerscould clearly understand his position. A leader without suchability would certainly be unable to unite a country in war.World War I was next on Churchill’s learning curve asa writer. The Admiralty, Munitions Ministry and War Officegave him an insider’s perspective on the actions and realitiesof war, deftly conveyed in his multi-volume (five volumes insix) memoir, The World Crisis. Nowhere is Churchill’s politicalawareness better expressed than in his fourth volume,Part II, at the end of the war in 1918:Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel andsenseless story? Will a new generation in their turn beimmolated to square the black accounts of Teuton andGaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastatedlands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflictthat reconciliation of the three giant combatants, whichwould unite their genius and secure to each in safety andfreedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe? 8During the publication of the first two World Crisisvolumes Churchill was out of office, and had begun his skeinof hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines bywhich he earned a living in the 1920s and 1930s. All toosoon they began to warn of German rearmament. Readingthem today, one is conscious of his prophecy. His aim wasclear: warn the country. Although in the 1930s he had nooffice and few backers, he tried to make his voice heard—tobe noticed, just as when he was a young soldier in India.Churchill’s looks into the future were complementedby his writings of his past, notably the life of his ancestorJohn Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, in four massivevolumes between 1933 and 1938. This great work “took himback not to the politics of his youth but to the global conflictof another century and his required mastery of the spiritof a remote age.” 9 Churchill invested nearly a million wordsin Marlborough; it was significant not just as a biography butas a description, then only hopeful, of what he saw as hisdestiny. Reading its account of an English patriot confrontinga continental tyrant who seeks England’s ruin, it iseasy to find the genesis of the immortal speeches of 1940.Churchill’s affinity for Marlborough’s wars compares vividlyto his abhorrence of 20th century war in The World Crisis.Then came the Hitler war and the year Churchill said“nothing surpasses.” On 13 May 1940, as Britain faced aseemingly all-powerful enemy, came his first speech as PrimeMinister: one of the most resolute, honest and inspiring everdelivered by a politician.The speech itself is posted on our website (http://xrl.us/beuner). Let us consider only its best-known sentence:“I would say to the House, as I said to those who havejoined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood,toil, tears, and sweat.” 10 I disagree with his sentiment—Churchill did have more to offer: inspiration, eloquence,leadership—but how modest and honest these words are.The famous phrase had a long and somewhat complicatedgestation, and Churchill, like all good writers,developed it over time. He first used “blood and sweat”speaking with a friend in 1900; mentioned “their sweat, theirtears, their blood” in regard to the Russians in 1931, and“blood, sweat and tears” later in the Daily Telegraph. 11Now the words came together as he rallied his country,despite his concern that it might be too late: “If this longisland story of ours is to end at last,” he told Cabinet privately,“let it end only when each one of us lies choking inhis own blood upon the ground.” 12 They responded withcheers and roars, but how many would have had the samethoughts had Churchill not crystallized the words?Churchill is the reason Britain continued to fight. Hiswords and spirit gave strength to the people. Because he wascourageous, they were. Words rallied a nation desperatelyshort of weapons. Ronald Golding, a Royal Air Forcesquadron leader later WSC’s bodyguard (see previousarticle) said of the famous voice crackling over the radio:“After those speeches, we wanted the Germans to come.” 13Churchill, the orator without speechwriters, was Britain’ssource of courage.More powerful and rousing speeches followed, like “BeYe Men of Valor” a few days later on Trinity Sunday: “Sideby side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the greatDominions and by the wide Empires which rest beneaththeir shield—side by side, the British and French peopleshave advanced to rescue not only Europe but mankind fromthe foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has everdarkened and stained the pages of history.” 14Brtain’s task was not for herself but for the world: “Armyourselves and be ye men of valour,” Churchill quoted fromthe Book of Macabees, words familiar to his nation.As France fell and doubts rose again, Churchillresponded directly: “…we shall not flag or fail. We shall goon to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on theseas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence andgrowing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whateverthe cost may be….we shall never surrender.” 15Churchill had learned reading Gibbon and Macaulayyears before that the Romans and Greeks won wars by stayingthe course. In what was arguably his most desperate >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 35

STUDENT ESSAYspeech, on 18 June 1940 with France defeated (“anotherbloody country gone west,” he remarked), he took on the tangibleand real threat to Britain herself. With utter franknesshe declared, “The whole fury and might of the enemy mustvery soon be turned on us.” But then he added: “Let us thereforebrace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves thatif the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousandyears, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” 16Brace they did.A point often missed in the soaring rhetoric of thisspeech was its appeal to patriotic duty, a reference to suchBritons as the wardens who ushered people into bomb shelters,the blackout curtains, the fire brigades and the HomeGuard. Churchill was making a call to duty for all citizens toperform the patriotic duty requested of them, which gavethem a sense of power over the enemy. The enemy mightcome—but their visit would not go unanswered.Churchill admitted that things would get worse beforethey got better, and chaffed over the continued aloofness ofAmerica. His 9 February 1941 world broadcast shows howpassionately he was campaigning for American aid, even if hehad to shame Americans into it: “Give us your faith and yourblessing, and, under Providence all will be well. We shall notfail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire….Give us the tools,and we will finish the job.” 17When he put it that way, it did not seem as if he wasasking for much. Of course, he was asking for a great deal:Roosevelt was limited by the fact that only Congress coulddeclare war. Churchill chose simple language so there wouldbe no misunderstanding; coal miner and statesman alikecould understand.We all know how the story ended. The Allies won thewar and Churchill was voted out of office. The whys andhows of that episode have already been discussed in thesepages (“Why Churchill Lost,” Finest Hour 140:74). But considerthe consequences, which were not all bad.In defeat Churchill had time to do more of what hedid best: writing. Between 1948 and 1958 he published sixvolumes of war memoirs, five volumes of speeches, fourvolumes of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, even abook on his hobby of painting. At Fulton in 1946 he warnedof the dangers of a new war, and suggested how to preventit. Throughout those years he stressed the common heritageof Britain and America, and how their bonds should be as hesaid, “cemented.” 18 His writings described the mistakes ofthe past, and warned against repeating them. In 1953 hereceived Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of historicaland biographical description as well as for brilliantoratory in defending exalted human values.” 19It has been said of his writing style that he was notafraid of repetition: “Once a felicitous phrase had occurredto him, Churchill never hesitated to reuse it, resulting in aremarkable consistency over half a century.” 20 His photographicmemory stood him well throughout. He often usedold-fashioned phrases, like something your grandfather saidas you bounced on his knee. I believe Churchill saw in oldexpressions an association with a better or at least moresettled time; surely his use of them was not accidental.Churchill did minimize his affinity for language byusing a simplified syntax, hoping to drive people not to dictionariesbut to courage and heroism. As a professionalwriter he knew how to connect. His words humanized him,connecting him with people of all classes. This tactic is thecapstone of the Churchill style, whether to tug our heartstrings,to gain sympathy, or to inspire action or devotion.He was always, triumphantly, in touch.Churchill himself was humble about his war speeches.“The people’s will was resolute and remorseless,” he recalledin 1954. “It fell to me to express it, and if I found the rightwords you must remember that I have always earned myliving by my pen and by my tongue.” 21It was a remarkable triumph for a young man,unschooled and self-educated, who went on to become theforemost statesman of the 20th century. Churchill the writershould be known at least as well as the statesman and the warleader—for “the incandescent quality of his words,” asPresident Kennedy said, which “illuminated the courage ofhis countrymen.” 22Endnotes1. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol.1: Youth1874-1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 307, hereafter Youth.2. Youth, 353.3. Maurice Ashley, Churchill as Historian (New York: CharlesScribner’s Sons), 41.4. Youth, 442.5. James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79.6. Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself: TheDefinitive Collection of Quotations (New York: Public Affairs, 2008),392.7. Rufus J. Fears, “Churchill” (Teaching Company, 2001).8. John Lukacs, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning(New York: Basic Books, 2008), 13.9. Manfred Weidhorn, Sword and Pen: A Survey of the Writingsof Sir Winston Churchill (Albuquerque: University of New MexicoPress, 1974), 110.10. David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, The LongmanAnthology of British Literature, 3rd ed., (New York: Pearson, 2006),2799.11. Langworth, 4.12. Gretchen Rubin, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill(New York: Ballantine, 2003), 53.13. Langworth, 2.14. Ibid., 4.15. Ibid., 5.16. Ibid., 5.17. Ibid., 7.18. Ashley, 210.19. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953, “Winston Churchill,”Nobel Prize.org, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1953/index.html/.20. Langworth, ix.21. Ibid., viii.22. John F. Kennedy conveying Honorary AmericanCitizenship on Sir Winston Churchill, the White House,Washington, 9 April 1963.✌FINEST HOUR 143 / 36

http://xrl.us/beuiy6For years, Churchill Centre editors and webmasters have wished to post material on our website that is either toolong for Finest Hour or of such immediate interest as to deserve a faster track than Finest Hour can provide.Webmaster John Olsen has now done it with FINEST HOUR ONLINE (FHO): fresh articles which bring an addeddimension to Churchill Studies. The following article by Justin Lyons is an abridgement of his full paper, which youcan read on FHO—together other pieces of high merit. Please tell us how you like this new service.Winston Churchill’sConstitutionalism: A Critiqueof Socialism in AmericaJUSTIN D. LYONSWhile Churchill’s heroism in World War II wasthe high point of his career, he was PrimeMinister twice, held every major Cabinet postexcept the Foreign Ministry, and was prominentfor over sixty years. This extensive politicalexperience produced in him a deep and often underappreciatedreflection on political matters.Churchill’s wartime leadership was not unreasoned orincoherent—and would have been unsuccessful if it were. Itdepended, he stressed, upon consistent, coherent thought:Those possessed of a definite body of doctrine and ofdeeply rooted convictions will be in a much better positionto deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairsthan those who take short views, indulging their naturalimpulses as they are evoked by what they read from dayto day. 1Churchill’s convictions flowed from the Anglo–American constitutionalism of which he was so proud anddevoted an heir. His attachment to the principles of politicalfreedom guided his decisions and was the heart of hisJustin Lyons is Associate Professor of History and Political Scienceand Adjunct Fellow in the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairsat Ashland University, and a valued part of Churchill Centre educationalactivities. This is an excerpt from his article first posted by theHeritage Foundation (http: //xrl.us/bev4gv) which is now found alsoon Finest Hour Online (http: //xrl.us/beuiy6).profound ability to inspire, but it was not merely instinctiveor inherited. Rather, it was the product of reason andexperience.Churchill reflected broadly and deeply on both thedomestic and international issues of his day. Indeed, it isindicative of his comprehensive understanding that henever lost sight of the connections between those spheres.In the Twenties and Thirties in particular, he surveyed withunease the collectivist trends already sapping the internalstrength of his own country and threatening to create instabilityabroad. He opposed such programs, whetheroriginating on the Left or on the Right of the British politicalspectrum, as destructive of freedom. It is well worth theeffort to examine his thoughts on these matters, both forhis diagnosis of political ills and for his prescriptions forpolitical health.Because scholars have paid so much attention to theworking relationship between Churchill and FranklinRoosevelt in matters of foreign policy, we tend to assumethat they were entirely agreed on domestic policy. But byviewing Churchill’s thoughts on America as shown throughthe great issue of the day—the New Deal—we see thatChurchill was an opponent of FDR’s centralized administrativephilosophy of government and that his opposition wasgrounded in a recurrence to our founding principles. >>1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, TheGathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 210.FINEST HOUR 143 / 37

FINEST HOUR ONLINESOCIALISM IN AMERICA...A Unity of SpiritAt a time when America was undergoing significantpolitical change following the Great Depression and NewDeal, Churchill had much to say about political change inthe United States. While the governing forms of the UnitedStates and Britain differed, Churchill saw the governingprinciples as built upon identical principles of freedom.Speaking to a joint session of Congress as the United Statesentered World War II in December 1941, he noted thatboth Congress and Parliament were animated by essentiallythe same principles, and strove for the same ends:Therefore I have been in full harmony all my life with thetides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlanticagainst privilege and monopoly, and I have steered confidentlytowards the Gettysburg ideal of “government ofthe people by the people for the people.” In my country,as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of theState and would be ashamed to be its masters. 2Despite certain “historical incidents,” the War ofIndependence primary among them, Churchill viewed theAmerican Declaration of Independence from Britain as inperfect harmony with British political principles. 3 Indeed,he argued that the Declaration belonged not to Americaalone but to all of the children of the English common law:“The Declaration is not only an American document. Itfollows on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the thirdgreat title deed on which the liberties of the Englishspeakingpeoples are founded.” 4In the war years to come, Churchill never tired ofstressing the harmonious political and legal doctrines of thetwo nations and the common traditions and goals of thetwo peoples. 5 He continued to do so even after the war.Speaking to the American Bar Association in 1957, forexample, Churchill maintained that, though their laws weresomewhat different in form, they were united in principle:In the main, Law and Equity stand in the forefront of themoral forces which our two countries have in common.…National governments may indeed obtain sweepingemergency powers for the sake of protecting the communityin times of war or other perils. These will temporarilycurtail or suspend the freedom of ordinary men andwomen, but special powers must be granted by theelected representatives of those same people by Congressor by Parliament, as the case may be.They do not belong to the State or Government as aright. Their exercise needs vigilant scrutiny, and theirgrant may be swiftly withdrawn. This terrible twentiethcentury has exposed both our communities to grim experiences,and both have emerged restored and guarded.They have come back to us safe and sure. I speak, ofcourse, as a layman on legal topics, but I believe that ourdifferences are more apparent than real, and are the resultof geographical and other physical conditions rather thanany true division of principle. 6“I GREW UP IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE to believe in democracy.‘Trust the people’—that was his message. I used to see him cheeredat meetings and in the streets by crowds of working men way backin those aristocratic Victorian days when, as Disraeli said, the worldwas for the few, and for the very few.” —WSC before Congress, 26December 1941.Churchill was not engaging in sentimental reflectionwhen he gave such speeches. The unity of principle hepointed to was, and always had been in his view, the basisfor unity of action.“What Good’s a Constitution?”In The Age of Roosevelt, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.quotes Churchill’s 1936 article “What Good’s aConstitution?,” 7 introducing the former Prime Minister as“an eminent English observer.” But Schlesinger gives a falseimpression of his message, quoting only the last few paragraphs,suggesting that Churchill fully supportedRoosevelt’s views of the Constitution and the need to overcomethe Supreme Court’s opposition to New Dealpolicies: “This is an age in which the citizen requires more,and not less, legal protection in the exercise of his rightsand liberties.”The reader quite naturally takes away the impressionthat Churchill, like FDR, believes the conditions ofmodern industrial society—especially the concentration ofeconomic power in large corporations—require a muchgreater degree of governmental intervention and control tosecure the liberties of the common man.But this is not Churchill’s meaning. Reading theentire article, it is clear that he means quite the opposite—that liberty is best protected by the established boundariesof the constitutional order. “The rigidity of theConstitution of the United States is the shield of thecommon man,” writes Churchill. Here, too, Schlesingermisleads the reader by rendering it as follows: “TheConstitution, he said, was ‘the shield of the commonman.’” 8 The surreptitious substitution of “was” for “is” servesthe New Deal understanding that the Constitution is noFINEST HOUR 143 / 38

longer an adequate framework for meeting the challenges ofAmerican life and economic crisis. Churchill’s article is infact much less favorable to the New Deal understandingthan Schlesinger admits.Churchill begins his discussion of constitutionalismby suggesting that a person must first consider “the fundamentalissue….Does he value the State above the citizen, orthe citizen above the State? Does a government exist for theindividual, or do individuals exist for the government?”The world is divided on this question, Churchill writes, butRussia, Germany, and Italy have definitely chosen “to subordinatethe citizen or subject to the life of the State.” Allthree have adopted, in peacetime, a level of subordinationof the individual proper only to a time of war, and seek todirect their national life permanently on that basis.What these three nations have in common, Churchillnotes, is the doctrine of socialism, which argues that economiccrises are “only another form of war,” which justifiesgovernmental controls. But Churchill rejects the comparisonof economic war: “One of the greatest reasons foravoiding war is that it is destructive to liberty. But we mustnot be led into adopting for ourselves the evils of war intime of peace upon any pretext whatever.”Churchill was to combat this tendency personallyduring the 1945 British election. The government hadassumed many extra controls during the war. Churchillwarned that if the Labour or Socialist party won, government’sgrip on the individual citizen, far from beingloosened, would grow ever tighter:...even today they hunger for controls of every kind, as ifthese were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictionsand monstrosities. There is to be one State to which allare to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State isto be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the archadministratorand ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss. 9Of course, this economic-crisis-as-war language was frequentlyemployed by the New Dealers, including FranklinRoosevelt himself. 10Socialism, Churchill noted, grafts itself onto nationalismand the features of nations it infects. WeimarGermany was destroyed and Hitler propelled to powerthrough patriotism, tradition, and pride, combined withdiscontent over inequalities of wealth. RussianCommunism was buttressed by national sentiment andimperialist aspirations. The next country Churchill mentions,in a shift that must be shocking, is the United States,which he says has experienced developments similar tothose inspired by socialism in the dictatorships:In the United States, also, economic crisis has led to anextension of the activities of the executive and to the pillorying,by irresponsible agitators, of certain groups andsections of the population as enemies of the rest. Therehave been efforts to exalt the power of the central governmentand to limit the rights of individuals.The combinations at work in the United States, however,are different. Passions and economic jealousies have beenunleashed—not with imperial ambition or twisted racism,but with a sense of public duty and the desire for nationalprosperity. But the result, Churchill warns, can be just asdangerous: “It is when passions and cupidities are thusunleashed and, at the same time, the sense of public dutyrides high in the hearts of all men and women of good willthat the handcuffs can be slipped upon the citizens andthey can be brought into entire subjugation to the executivegovernment.”After describing trends in Germany, Russia, Italy, andU.S., Churchill takes “the opposite view.” He had alwaysrejected any policy or propaganda that would use crisis toextend the power of the state as subverting individualliberty and perverting the purpose of government:I hold that governments are meant to be, and mustremain, the servants of the citizens; that states and federationsonly come into existence and can only be justifiedby preserving the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”in the homes and families of individuals. The rightand power rest in the individual. He gives of his right andpower to the State, expecting and requiring thereby inreturn to receive certain advantages and guarantees. >>2. “A Long and Hard War,” 26 December 1941, in RobertRhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches1897–1963 (London: Chelsea House, 1974), III:6536. Cited hereafteras Complete Speeches.3. “The Declaration was in the main a restatement of the principleswhich had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuartsand the English Revolution of 1688, and it now became the symboland rallying centre of the Patriot cause.” Winston S. Churchill, AHistory of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 3, The Age ofRevolution (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 189.4. “The Third Great Title-Deed of Anglo–American Liberties,” 4July 1918, Complete Speeches, III:2614.5. See for example “A New Magna Carta” (Lend-Lease), 12March 1941, Complete Speeches, VI: 6360, and “The Task Ahead,”27 June 1942, ibid., 6644: “The day will come when the British andAmerican armies will march into countries, not as invaders, but as liberators,helping the people who have been held under the cruelbarbarian yoke….Also, it will open the world to larger freedom and tolife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the grand words of yourDeclaration of Independence put it.”6. “Liberty and the Law,” 31 July 1957, Complete Speeches,VIII:8682–83.7. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 3, ThePolitics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 495, quotingfrom Winston S. Churchill, “What Good’s a Constitution?” Collier’s, 22August 1936.8. Ibid.9 “Party Politics Again,” 4 June 1945, Complete Speeches,VII:7171–72.10. To give one example: “I shall ask the Congress for the oneremaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power towage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that wouldbe given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Franklin D.Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” Washington, 4 March 1933.FINEST HOUR 143 / 39

FINEST HOUR ONLINESOCIALISM IN AMERICA..Churchill then gives the tests by which he judges thecivilization of any community:What is the degree of freedom possessed by the citizen orsubject? Can he think, speak and act freely under wellestablished,well-known laws? Can he criticize theexecutive government? Can he sue the State if it hasinfringed his rights? Are there also great processes forchanging the law to meet new conditions?A vital support for freedom also lies in the independenceof the courts, Churchill continues:In both our countries the character of the judiciary is avital factor in the maintenance of the rights and libertiesof the individual citizen. Our judges extend impartially toall men protection, not only against wrongs committedby private persons, but also against the arbitrary acts ofpublic authority. The independence of the courts is, to allof us, the guarantee of freedom and the equal rule of law.In other words, the safeguard is to be found in astructural feature of American and British constitutionalarrangements. These remarks hardly appear sympathetic toFDR’s frustration with the Supreme Court’s repeatedstriking down of New Deal programs as unconstitutional,and his search for ways to limit the powers of the Court.Churchill did not hesitate to state his opinion onwhether a fixed constitution is a “bulwark or a fetter.” Hewrote: “I incline to the side of those who would regard it asa bulwark….” Yet it is very difficult, he writes, for those inEngland to comprehend the kind of governmental deadlockthat has been reached in the United States.That major bills affecting the whole life of the peoplecould be passed by Parliament only to be struck down andnullified by a court of law would be beyond imagination.The unwritten British Constitution thus has great flexibility:“There is no limit to the powers of Crown andParliament. Even the gravest changes in our Constitutioncan in theory be carried out by simple majority votes inboth Houses and the consequential assent of the Crown.”But limits on government and the separation ofpowers were central to America’s founding. The judiciarywas to be independent, but whether the Supreme Courtwould have a veto over legislation passed by Congress was amatter of debate among the Framers. While the actual languageof the Constitution gives no specific grant of such apower, the idea was advanced and became entrenched as animplied power very early. 11Churchill found the opportunity for a conflictbetween American branches of government remarkable:“…anyone may bring a test case challenging not merely theinterpretation of a law, but the law itself, and if the Courtdecides for the appellant, be he only an owner of a fewchickens, 12 the whole action of the Legislature and theExecutive becomes to that extent null and void.”Churchill recognizes and understands the Americanhesitancy to approve such arrangements as the “Britishdemocracy expressing itself with plenary powers through aGovernment and a Parliament controlled only by the fluctuatingcurrents of public opinion…Yet all classes and allparties have a deep, underlying conviction that these vast,flexible powers will not be abused,” citing British respectfor law and constitutional usage, the stability of a permanentcivil service, and the attachment of popular opinion tothe unwritten constitution.The Better System?Lest readers assume that Churchill believes the Britishsystem superior, he notes that the U.S. situation is quitedifferent: The size and complexity of the United Statesmakes the flexible British arrangement impractical andunwise: “the participants of so vast a federation have theright to effectual guarantees upon the fundamental laws,and that these should not be easily changed to suit a particularemergency or fraction of the country.”Thus Churchill concludes that the United Statesrequires both federalism, in order to function properly, andthe Supreme Court, to enforce the principle, especially intime of crisis.Roosevelt, however, was impatient with those likeChurchill, who opposed an evolving interpretation of theConstitution that would permit the federal government totake an increasingly active role in the life of the states. In1937, for example, FDR called for an “enlightened view” ofthe Constitution: “Difficulties have grown out of its interpretationbut rightly considered, it can be used as aninstrument of progress, and not as a device for the preventionof action.” 13The language of constitutional flexibility wascommon New Deal parlance to which Churchill in hisessay takes great exception: “‘Taking the rigidity out of theAmerican Constitution’ means, and is intended to mean,new gigantic accessions of power to the dominating centreof government and giving it the means to make new fundamentallaws enforceable upon all American citizens.”Change, Freedom and TyrannyChurchill’s 1937 article, “This Age of Government byGreat Dictators,” is a meditation on political change, anessay of sweeping historical breadth, starting with theancient European kings, who were granted powers sufficientto remedy the defects of an earlier, chaotic age andwere elevated to an almost godlike status. While this was animprovement on anarchy, the accidents of individual birthand character were unstable foundations on which to riskthe fortunes of nations: “At one period Pericles orAugustus, at another Draco or Caligula!”Once society was set on a firm footing, Churchillexplains, constitutions were invented to restrain the excessesof kings—particularly in England, which gave rise to theFINEST HOUR 143 / 40

“What isthedegree offreedom possessedby thecitizen orsubject? Can hethink, speak andact freely underwell-established, well-knownlaws? Can he criticize the executivegovernment? Can he sue theState if it has infringed hisrights? Are there also greatprocesses for changing the lawto meet new conditions?”famous English Parliamentary system and constitutionalmonarchy….The English conception, wrought by the islandnobility from Magna Carta to the age of Anne, spread overwide portions of the globe. The forms were often varied, butthe idea was the same. Sometimes, as in the United States,through historical incidents, an elected functionary replacedthe hereditary king, but the idea of the separation of powersbetween the executive, the assemblies and the courts of lawwidely spread throughout the world in what we must regard asthe great days of the nineteenth century. 14But the point of this essay is to convey a modernwarning. In the 20th century, he continues, just when theprogressive faith was at its zenith—when the illusion ofmastery over man’s fortunes had taken on its most vibranthues—all those hopes failed: “Then came terrible warsshattering great empires, laying nations low, sweeping awayold institutions and ideas with a scourge of molten steel.”The world now learned (or re-learned) that politicalchange does not necessarily follow consistent directions.19th century thinkers had hoped for the spread of democraticinstitutions, but as Churchill points out, democraticregimes are as subject to degradation because they, likeother regimes, carry their own dangers with them:Democracy has been defined as “the association of us allin the leadership of the best.” In practice it does notalways work this way. Vast masses of people were investedwith the decisive right to vote, while at the same timethey had very little leisure to study the questions uponwhich they must pronounce; and an enormous apparatusfor feeding them with propaganda, catchwords andslogans came simultaneously into existence.When responsibilities are shirked, Churchill continued,the control of the people will become an illusionand eventually vanish. Flatterers will sway the people.Demagogues will convince them to surrender their powerfor safety or comfort. Propagandists will play on their fears.Tyrants will be born:Alike in fear of anarchy and in vague hopes of futurecomforts a very large proportion of Europe have yieldedthemselves to dictatorship. Nations [have] made haste torally in the parades and processions of a set of violent,wrathful, resourceful, domineering figures cast up by thebloody surge of war and its cruel lacerating recoil. Wehave entered the age of the dictators. 15Thus, the early 20th century witnessed politicalregression. Nations were subject to lords many times morepowerful than the ancient kings. The reader recognizes thespirit of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, but Churchill’swarning is for those who have not yet fallen under the yokeof such men—for those countries which imagine themselvesimmune from such a transformation, including theWestern democracies. Whatever political victories may havebeen won, the danger of tyranny is never removed.“Roosevelt from Afar”The common political heritage of America andBritain was the basis for Churchill’s appeal for aid from theUnited States in the Second World War. His initial successhad much to do with his personal relationship withRoosevelt, which has rightly received a vast scholarly attention.Their disagreements over war policy and the Sovietsare well documented.Almost completely ignored, by contrast, areChurchill’s comments on the political, economic, and socialpolicies Roosevelt pursued—reflecting Churchill’s concernthat even regimes built on the principles of freedom canbecome corrupted and lose their way.Churchill believed that the United States was notimmune to the political degradation then affecting much ofthe world. In a 1934 essay on the New Deal, first entitled“While the World Watches” and later changed to >>11. Marbury vs. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).12. A reference to A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation vs.United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), in which the National IndustrialRecovery Act was overturned by the Supreme Court.13. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to the Congress,”6 January 1937.14. Winston S. Churchill, “This Age of Government by GreatDictators,” in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, vol. 4,Churchill at Large (London: Library of Imperial History, 1976), 394.15. Ibid., 394–95.FINEST HOUR 143 / 41

FINEST HOUR ONLINESOCIALISM IN AMERICA..“Roosevelt from Afar,” 16 he warned that a moment of socialand economic crisis is also a moment of political danger.Churchill admired Roosevelt’s desire to deliver hispeople from the problems of the Depression, but his essayhad another purpose, as he wrote to the editor of Collier’s:to warn against the possible ill-effects of the New Deal: “Ihave tried to strike a note of warning while at the sametime expressing my sincere sympathy with the great effortthe President is making,” 17For a statesman to remark on the domestic policiesand personalities of a friendly country without excitingresentment requires diplomatic skill, and Churchill wasvery careful. He went so far as to leave final judgment tohis American editor: “…if there are any phrases which youthink would cause offence…you are quite at liberty tosoften or excise them without reference to me.” 18 Yetdespite his caution, “Roosevelt from Afar” conveys seriouswarnings about America’s Depression-era economic andsocial policies.Churchill admits that the new President faced a stiffchallenge: “Everybody had lost faith in everything.”Roosevelt chose to seize direction of the whole scene, and“[s]ince then there has been no lack of orders.” (Rooseveltissued an extraordinary number of executive orders—morethan all of his successors through Bill Clinton combined.)Using a word that must have shocked Roosevelt supporters,Churchill continued: “Although the Dictatorship isveiled by constitutional forms, it is none the less effective.Great things have been done, and greater attempted.” 19Churchill is careful to attribute possible excesses to misguidedfollowers rather than to Roosevelt himself:But the President has need to be on his guard. To a foreigneye it seems that forces are gathering under his shieldwhich at a certain stage may thrust him into the backgroundand take the lead themselves. If that misfortunewere to occur, we should see the not-unfamiliar spectacleof a leader running after his followers to pull them back. 20While Churchill describes these forces as dangers toRoosevelt’s “valiant and heroic experiments,” it is clear fromthe essay, as from New Deal history, that these are in factdangers arising from those very experiments.Trade UnionismChurchill identifies two in particular: trade unionismand redistribution of wealth. While praising Roosevelt forhis attempt to reduce unemployment by shorteningworking hours and thus to spread employment more evenlythrough the working class, he has “considerable misgivings…whena campaign to attack the monetary problembecomes intermingled with, and hampered by, the elaborateprocesses of social reform and the struggles of classwarfare.” 21Churchill, who had been Chancellor of theExchequer during the 1926 General Strike, knew whereofhe wrote. Trade unionism, he wrote,has introduced a narrowing element into our public life.It has been a keenly-felt impediment to our productiveand competitive power. It has become the main foundationof the socialist party, which has ruled the Stategreatly to its disadvantage, and will assuredly do so again.It reached a climax in a general strike, which if it hadbeen successful would have subverted the Parliamentaryconstitution of our island. 22Churchill accepted that British trade unions hadbecome a stable force, and were, in any case, much better forsociety than “communist-agitated and totally unorganizedlabour discontent.” 23 But British trade unionism had developedover fifty years, allowing time for economic adjustmentsand abatement of passions. “But when one sees an attemptmade within the space of a few months to lift Americantrade unionism by great heaves and bounds to the positionso slowly built up—and even then with much pain andloss—in Great Britain, we cannot help feeling gravedoubts.” 24 The conflicts involved in such a transformation,he warns, could “result in a general crippling of that enterpriseand flexibility upon which not only the wealth, but thehappiness of modern communities depend.”Such sweeping decrees are exactly what characterizedthe Roosevelt Administration—as illustrated by the compulsoryunionism of the National Industrial Recovery Act(1933) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935).Redistribution of WealthThe second great danger Churchill identifies inRoosevelt’s experiments is “the disposition to hunt downrich men as if they were noxious beasts.” This may be “avery attractive sport,” but redistribution through penaltieson the wealthy does not benefit a society in the long run—instead it drains the wellsprings of economic development:The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly economicanimal. He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency from allquarters. In this process, far from depriving ordinarypeople of their earnings, he launches enterprise andcarries it through, raises values, and he expands thatcredit without which on a vast scale no fuller economiclife can be opened to the millions. To hunt wealth is notto capture commonwealth….meanwhile great constructionshave crumbled to the ground. Confidence is shakenand enterprise chilled, and the unemployed queue up atthe soup-kitchens or march out to the public works withever growing expense to the taxpayer and nothing moreappetizing to take home to their families than the leg orthe wing of what was once a millionaire….It is indispensableto the wealth of nations and to the wage and lifestandards of labour, that capital and credit should be honouredand cherished partners in the economic system.Yes, Churchill admits, there is some justification forthe anger of the American people against their leaders ofFINEST HOUR 143 / 42

the two systems—yet Churchill believed that the Americanpeople would never willingly accept the “dull brutish servitudeof Russia,” though he also believed that a nation canslide into doctrines it would not accept with open eyes.Churchill concluded:“WE MUST NEVER CEASE to proclaim in fearless tones thegreat principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the jointinheritance of the English-speaking world and which through MagnaCarta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and theEnglish common law find their most famous expression in theAmerican Declaration of Independence.”-WSC, 1946. Painting by John Trumbull. (Wikimedia Commons)finance. But “[t]he important question is whether Americandemocracy can clear up scandals and punish improprietieswithout losing its head, and without injuring the vitalimpulses of economic enterprise and organization.” 25The U.S. is not the first country to deal with thequestion of whether “it is better to have equality at theprice of poverty, or well-being at the price of inequality.”Churchill lamented the drift toward Socialism in Britain inthe 1920s (and again in the 1940s), pointing out that theseschemes produced little but economic disaster. 26Churchill strongly favored government action to easethe plight of the poor in modern industrial society; hiswhole career was marked by a concern for social justice,echoed in his cautious admiration of FDR. Ultimately,however, Churchill held that free markets should beallowed to operate without centralized, bureaucratic controls,which destroy the principle of competition that is themainspring of economic health. 27 The capitalist system cancreate concentrations of wealth, since free competitionresults in inequalities of property, but the removal ofreward for investment and risk will stultify economic developmentand ultimately harm society as a whole.Throughout his discussion of the economic choicesAmerica faces, Churchill refers to “the Russian alternative”—nationalizationof production, distribution, credit,and exchange to cure the abuses and inequities of the capitalistsystem. One cannot take a middle ground betweenThere it seems to foreign observers, lies the big choice ofthe United States at the present time. If the capitalistsystem is to continue, with its rights of private property,with its pillars of rent, interest and profit, and the sanctityof contracts recognized and enforced by the State,then it must be given a fair chance.Given the regulatory activities of the NationalRecovery Administration, increases in taxes on successfulbusinesses, frequent anti-trust lawsuits, and FDR’s antibusinessrhetoric, Churchill’s words can only be read as arebuke to the New Deal approach to reining in “the vitalimpulses of economic enterprise and organization.” 28ConclusionChurchill’s critique of the New Deal does not nullifyhis admiration for Roosevelt, especially as it developed intothe “special relationship” in the Second World War andafterward. While they had their disagreements, Churchill’sgratitude to Roosevelt was immense. Speaking in the Houseof Commons a few days after Roosevelt’s death, heexpressed that gratitude in some of his finest words: “Forus, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt theredied the greatest American friend we have ever known, andthe greatest champion of freedom who has ever broughthelp and comfort from the new world to the old.” 29Churchill’s critique does, however, have importance.Written in the context of worldwide economic upheaval,and collectivist trends destructive of freedom, it reveals hisopposition to the philosophy of the New Deal as equallydangerous to political and economic liberty.Churchill thought seriously, not only about the unityof spirit between Great Britain and the United States, butthe ways in which both countries were subject to thedangers of abandoning the supports of law and liberty intimes of crisis. The two countries were bound together inthe defense of freedom; Churchill knew that freedom mustbe guarded internally as well as externally.✌16. Winston S. Churchill, “While the World Watches,” Collier’s, 29December 1934. Republished in 1937 as “Roosevelt from Afar” inGreat Contemporaries, deleted from 1940-45 editions. Cited hereafteras Great Contemporaries (University of Chicago Press, 1973).17. WSC to William Chenery, editor, Collier’s, 13 September1934 (Chartwell Papers 8/493) in Martin Gilbert, Winston S.Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 2, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (London: Heinemann, 1981), 870.18. Ibid.19 Great Contemporaries, 373–74.20 Great Contemporaries, 381.21 Great Contemporaries, 374-75.22 Great Contemporaries, 374-75.23. Great Contemporaries, 375.24. WSC would echo this concern in “Roosevelt and theFuture of the New Deal,” The Daily Mail, 24 April 1935; CollectedEssays II:372.25. Great Contemporaries, 376–79.26. “Socialism,” 12 February 1929, Complete Speeches,V:4551–52: “Show me the parts of the country which at the presenttime are in the deepest depression, show me the industries which aremost laggard, and at the same time you will be showing me the partswhere these withering doctrines have won their greatest measure ofacceptance.”27. See for example Liberalism and the Social Problem (NewYork: Haskell House, 1973; reprint of 1909 ed.), 82–83.28. Great Contemporaries, 379–80.29. 17 April 1945, Complete Speeches, VII:7141.FINEST HOUR 143 / 43

Books, Arts&CuriositiesTrue Persona: Two Works of GeniusRICHARD M. LANGWORTH1“Into the Storm,” with BrendanGleeson as Churchill and JanetMcTeer as Clementine. A televisiondrama broadcast by the BBC andHBO, produced by Ridley Scott,directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan,Screenplay by Hugh Whitemore.Then out spake brave Horatius,The Captain of the Gate:“To every man upon this earthDeath cometh soon or late.And how can man die betterThan facing fearful odds,For the ashes of his fathers,And the temples of his gods...”—“Horatius,” stanza XXVII in Lays ofAncient Rome, by Thomas BabbingtonMacaulay. Recited at the beginning and atthe end of “Into the Storm.”Here is a TV docudrama packingexceptional honesty. An old man,at an age when most retire (or in histime die), is handed command of hisnation, when no one else wants it, inthe greatest crisis of her history. Theyfight alone, save for their kith and kin,“the old lion and her lion cubs,” as heput it, “against hunters who are armedwith deadly weapons.” And they win—only to see the old man dismissed inthe moment of victory.The opening scene is Hendaye,France, July 1945, where Churchill, hiswife and daughter Mary spend a week’sbreak between polling-day in theBritish General Election and the startof the Potsdam Conference (see FH128:45). Anxious for election returns(delayed for a fortnight to count theservice vote) Churchill relives the pastfive years in a series of flashbacks.This is the film’s one jarringelement: the back-and-forth occurswithout obvious transition, and youhave to remind yourself whether youare in the past or present. But overall,the story is massive, the action real, thehistory honest, the dialogue convincing,the scenes artful, the acting superb.Brendan Gleeson is the bestChurchill since Robert Hardy. He fallsinto none of the usual traps. Mostimpersonators overdo the accent or thefamous lisp, the V-sign or siren suits,the caricatures painted by Lord Moranor Alanbrooke. Gleeson was praised byLady Soames, the sternest of critics.Hugh Whitemore, who alsowrote the script for the preceding film“The Gathering Storm” (FH 115:32),helps by not loading the dialogue withsoaring rhetoric. “Papa spoke inprivate,” his daughter says, “much as hedid in public.” And here is the privateChurchill, with doubts about winning,fears of the future, and faults of hisown—for he was as human as anyone,freely admitted it, and often apologizedfor it, especially to his wife.Several quotes are taken out oftime or context, but Whitemore blendsthem flawlessly into the story, and thestudent of Churchill’s words doesn’tmind. Several scenes—like the “nakedencounter” with Roosevelt—didn’thappen that way, but are so seamlesslyintegrated and well acted as to makethem acceptable. Churchill’s habits, likethe siesta which enabled him to workinto the wee hours, are deftly conveyed.History is not bent for the sake ofdrama. Only extreme pedants canobject to the film’s artistic license.Janet McTeer is no VanessaRedgrave, the archetypal Clementine in“The Gathering Storm,” falling shortof the character described by herdaughter and biographer. Though shegives Winston good advice, she seemsmore a neurotic scold than a pillar ofstrength. It doesn’t matter becauseGleeson, “throws himself into the characterand completely owns him,” asDaniel Carlson writes, “from thenonstop cigars to the famous cadenceof his speeches. Gleeson is believablytough but doesn’t make Churchill awarmonger or bully; if anything, he’sburdened by the thought of the boyshe has sent to die.”Carlson has his finger on thefilm’s greatest quality: its sensitivity toWSC’s true persona. Resisting opportunitiesfor ignorant political posturing—the leveling of German cities, forexample—Scott and Whitemore alwayshave Churchill saying what he trulybelieved—culled in this case from MyEarly Life: “War, which used to be crueland magnificent, has now become crueland squalid.”“Into the Storm” packs less depththan “The Gathering Storm”—like thepersecution of Ralph Wigram forsending WSC secret reports onGerman rearmament. But too much ishappening for sidebars. This is WorldWar II, remember: the French debacle,Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, theBlitz, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, thefraught meetings with Roosevelt (LenCariou) and Stalin (Alexy Patrenko),the all-or-nothing assault on FortressEurope. Leadership is the plot, sub-plotand sidebar.Some Churchillians have askedwhy Ridley Scott couldn’t havestopped at Pearl Harbor and done aFINEST HOUR 143 / 44

Yalta: Gleeson, Cariou, Patrenkothird film later; why there couldn’t bemultiple parts; why it wasn’t aChurchill version of “Lord of theRings.” The best editor I ever workedfor said: “A bore is someone who tellseverything.” And we are not filmmakers.We have no idea whatconstraints Scott labored under. We doknow that he had ninety minutes. Andwhat he does in that time to portraythe true Churchill is a work of genius.The enduring impression of“Into the Storm” is of an old man, realizingafter the most heroic chapter inhis country’s history that history itselfhas passed him by, “the palmy days ofQueen Victoria and a settled worldorder,” as he put it in 1947, goneforever. The war is won, the countrylost in a Socialist dream. Hardly, alas,unfamiliar: a signal message in 2009.A lot of us who grew up inChurchill’s time feel the way Churchilldoes at the end of this film, as he readsa sympathetic post-election note fromhis old friend Jack Seely: “I feel our2Thoughts and Adventures, byWinston S. Churchill, edited withan introduction by James W. Muller.ISI Books, 380 pages, illus., softbound,$22. Member price $17.60.If Churchill’s 1932 volume of essayson politics, cartoons, elections,hobbies and adventures is really an“undiscovered classic” (as stated on theback cover of this new edition) it willbe news to generations of readers.Thoughts and Adventures (first publishedin the U.S. as Amid TheseStorms) has seen twelve or more editionsin English, and translations intoDanish, French, German, Korean,Spanish and Swedish. Four of its essaysworld slipping away.”Churchill thinks back: “I methim in South Africa, riding across theveldt. He was Col. Seely then. I sawhim at the head of a column of Britishcavalry, riding twenty yards in front, ona black horse. I thought of him as theepitome of Imperial power.”Watching this film, I had the sensationthat it was well Britain choseWorld War II for what John Charmleycalled “The End of Glory.” A greatcountry, focused one last time by aleader steeped in history and language,held the fort “till those who hithertohad been half blind were half ready.”Better to go out in a flash of light thanface the long decline that seems now toattend another superpower. “Theproud American will go down into hisslavery without a fight,” Pravda (astonishingly)declared recently, “beating hischest and proclaiming to the worldhow free he really is.” That will takeyears. For Britain the End of Glorycame in months.“Yes, I’ve worked very hard andachieved a great deal,” Churchillreflected at the end of his long life,“only to achieve nothing in the end.” Alife that rose to the heights of fame, thehonors of the world showered uponhim—for what? “I feel,” he said, “likean aeroplane at the end of its flight, inthe dusk, with the petrol running out,in search of a safe landing.”Not only he. ✌are the subject ofthe 2009 ChurchillConference.What makesthe new volume sovaluable, asidefrom its easygoingpaperback price, isan outstandingnew introductionby Churchill Centre Chairman ofAcademic Advisers James W. Muller,Professor of Political Science at theUniversity of Alaska Anchorage. In a28-page essay, Muller plumbs thedepths of Churchill’s intellect, theraison d’être of a book which is farmore than a haphazard collection ofFINEST HOUR 143 / 45Churchill Centre Book ClubManaged for the Centre by ChartwellBooksellers (www.churchillbooks.com),which offers member discounts up to25%. To order please contactChartwell Booksellers, 55 East 52ndStreet, New York, NY 10055.Email info@chartwellbooksellers.comTelephone (212) 308-0643Facsimile (212) 838-7423Thoughts and Adventures...“potboilers” (as WSC himself sometimesreferred to his articles): “Theessays...are meant to convey his practicalwisdom about politics. In everyessay, even the most unassuming onesor those a sophisticate would find mostunpromising, Churchill explores thetopography of life in a modern liberaldemocracy. He treats simple subjectsthat appeal to a practical man, but hisessays take up questions that wouldpuzzle a philosopher.”Armed with Muller’s introduction,the reader comprehends howdeeply Churchill, despite no formaleducation, thought about transcendentalmatters, and why ChurchillStudies remain evergreen. Here are his“big four” futurist essays—“Shall WeAll Commit Suicide?,” “Fifty YearsHence,” “Consistency in Politics” and“Mass Effects in Modern Life.” Hereare “My Spy Story” and “The Battle ofSidney Street,” which use everydayexperiences to treat issues of civilliberty and civilian control of the militaryand police.We witness Churchill’s collegialpolitics in his tolerant appreciation ofopponents in “Election Memories” and“Cartoons and Cartoonists,” and meetthose who influenced him in “PersonalContacts.” We see war as Churchill sawit in “With the Grenadiers,” “The U-Boat War,” “‘Plugstreet’” and “TheDover Barrage.” We watch historymade over his burly shoulder in “TheIrish Treaty.” We find two of his heroesfrom the opposite ends of history in“Clemenceau” and “Moses.” We evenlearn how to relax, with “Hobbies” and“Painting as a Pastime.” All the whileour wise editor is there with a moderninterpretation of what Churchill tellsus, and why it still matters. Nor is >>

BOOK REVIEWSThoughts and Adventures...the fastidious Professor Muller contentwith a foreword. He offers a host ofnew footnotes, largely written by FinestHour senior editor Paul Courtenay,which aid the modern reader bydescribing events, people and places nolonger familiar. Finally, in the back ofthe book, he appends a thick set ofnotes, investigating—with RonaldCohen’s epic Bibliography of theWritings of Sir Winston Churchill athand—the origin of each essay, itstitular and textual variations, and inmany cases how it came to be written.We learn for example thatChurchill’s own foreword was notwritten by WSC (who was “in anursing home recuperating from arelapse of paratyphoid in early October1932”). It was penned for him by hislongtime friend and secretary EddieMarsh, who emulated the boss’s style soperfectly that Churchill wrote on hiscopy, “Rather good pastiche.”The Stuff of HistoryCHRISTOPHER H. STERLINGMasters and Commanders: HowRoosevelt, Churchill, Marshall andAlanbrooke Won the War in the West,by Andrew Roberts. Harper, 720pages, illus., $35. Member price $28.This immensely readable book tellsa long tale of frustration and cooperation–oftenmore the former than thelatter—in the strategic planning ofWorld War II. Here are four quite differentpersonalities; Roberts considershow they interacted and struggled toestablish the priorities that would eventuallywin the European war.This is ground treated by manyothers—including multiple biographiesof each man discussed here—butnowhere else is the material as clearlyfocused on how their relationshipevolved, and they only met face-to-face____________________________________Dean Sterling teaches Communications atGeorge Washington University.Muller’s notes record alterationsin each essay, as Churchill, anindefatigable reviser, tweaked andmolded his work to suit his audience.In “My Spy Story,” for example, Mullerproduces five lengthy paragraphs fromthe original appearance in Cosmopolitanwhich Churchill omitted from thebook, describing a “much trusted”German spy in Britain, whose reportswere studied in Berlin andWilhelmshaven. (And, just to be sureyou know, Muller adds thatWilhelmshaven, “named after KaiserWilhelm I in 1869,” was the “headquartersof Germany’s High Seas Fleetin World War I.”)Truly this is as eminent an editionof an ingenious book as we could hopefor—a tribute to the editor as to theauthor. In keeping with ISI’s practice, itwill be in print a long time, to educateand inform future generations ofChurchill’s political instinct, judgment,foresight and magnanimity. ✌in mid-1942.Much of theircommunicationbefore and afterwas by meansof tenuoustelecommunicationlinks, orthrough aidessent on perilousflights acrossthe Atlantic. What they wrought wasthe stuff of history.Drawing on a host of diaries,many heretofore unpublished, Robertsprovides an almost over-the-shoulderview of his subjects in action. (Indeed,his very effective use of these diariesmakes me wonder how future historianswill ever write of present-dayevents when so few keep diariesanymore.) Thanks to the pictures hepaints in words, we are silent observersof exchanges by which the masters(Churchill and Roosevelt) and theircommanders (Alanbrooke andMasters and Commanders...Marshall, respectively) developed awinning strategy. The depth, highquality, and working habits of each ofthese leaders comes through clearly—asdo their disagreements.So do their huge frustrations,especially early on, as the British andU.S. leadership teams struggled tocarry out the policy of “GermanyFirst.” The give-and-take on how tocreate a “second front” to siphon offpressure against the Soviets is a farragoof code-name references to potentialmilitary actions: “Bolero,” “Roundup,”“Sledgehammer,” “Gymnast,” and—eventually—“Torch,” the invasion ofNorth Africa in November 1942. Attimes the four men did not even usethe terms to refer to the same things,muddied the waters with “SuperBolero” and other variant code names.At the heart of the decisionmakingwas tension between the newlyarrived Americans, who wanted toattack via France as soon as possible,and the battle-tested British, who feltthe need to wear Germany down at themargins (North Africa, Italy, maybeNorway) before a make-or-break cross-Channel invasion. The British desire tostrike at North Africa won out.As important was the very differentworking relationship betweeneach “master” and his commander.Marshall sometimes went six weekswithout seeing FDR directly, whileAlanbrooke complained he rarely gotsix hours without some (often difficult)interaction with Churchill. As we knowfrom many accounts, FDR didn’t likewriting things down, preferring oralcommunications. Churchill on theother hand, while sometimes pushingodd tangential actions, committed hisfinal orders to writing. Neither masterdirectly overruled his senior commanders,especially when theypresented a unified front. Out of suchseemingly minor matters of communicationand consistency arose some ofthe wartime controversies so wellrelated and accessed here.Roberts capably reviews the emotionalups and downs for Brooke andMarshall concerning the covetedcommand of the Overlord invasion.FINEST HOUR 143 / 46

Churchill promised Brooke the role onat least three occasions, though it wasclear even by mid-1943 that it was nothis to confer. Roosevelt, in his obliquefashion, considered Marshall but thenhe couldn’t be spared from his existingpost. Eisenhower got the nod based onhis experience with the North African,Sicilian, and Italian campaigns. Brookenever got over the slight, made worsein his mind because Churchill seemednot to notice.Roberts makes clear the constantand never-ending strategic debatebetween the British and Americans,which no one else has so clearlydescribed. Every decision was battledout, the Americans steady winning thearguments by late 1943, since they hadmore men, aircraft, and supplies tobring to bear. Churchill is seen as petulantand argumentative as hissecondary role to Roosevelt andMarshall. Fights over proposed southeastPacific ventures to free occupiedBritish colonies were refought, as werethe August 1944 landing in southernFrance (Anvil, later Dragoon), becausethey pulled American troops from thedifficult Italian theater. Reading aboutthese conflicts today, the reader can’tconceive of just how tired all the principalswere as the war wore on.Churchill’s famous long nights (he, ofcourse, took naps others couldn’t)didn’t help the outlook of Brooke andhis colleagues, all of whom made thatclear in their ever-present (thoughillegal) diaries.This is a long book, but onefilled with insight. Roberts’ extensiveuse of sources is evident but does notdominate the narrative. He clarifiesmany of the war’s strategic turningpoints with an even hand. He is eminentlyfair in his judgments about whosaid what to whom, and who was right.Sometimes the British come out ontop; at least as often the Americanswin, especially late in the war, whenthe American strategic view, so oftendismissed by Brooke in the privacy ofhis diary, came to dominate events.This is a book to own. No matterwhat you think you know aboutChurchill or the war, you will learn fascinatingnew things here. ✌Russia 1918: Folly or Opportunity?DAVID FREEMANChurchill’s Crusade: The BritishInvasion of Russia 1918-1920, byClifford Kinvig. Continuum, 374 pp.,softbound, illus., $34.95. Memberprice $27.95.Major General Kinvig, a formersenior lecturer at Sandhurst andDirector of Army Education, has doneprodigious research to piece togetherthe full story of Churchill’s famouseffort “to strangle Bolshevism in itscradle.” Previously, the best record ofthis story was in the official biographyby Martin Gilbert, and Kinvigacknowledges his debt to Sir Martin.But whereas Gilbert related eventslargely from the political perspective ofChurchill, Kinvig integrates the politicalbackground with a full militaryhistory, providing a broader understandingof why Churchill’s crusadewas doomed to failure.British forces entered northernRussia late in the First World War outof fear that the Germans might captureMurmansk and use the port, which isice-free year round, to break the Alliedblockade already strangling the CentralPowers. The operation was also abelated attempt to reestablish the semblanceof an Eastern Front, drawing offGerman troops from France. But theGerman threat in the Arctic was neverserious, nor did Allied forces (British,French, Canadian, Australian andAmerican) in Murmansk and laterArchangel have any success in luringmore German troops to the east.Justification for the Allied presencein Russia ended with the war, butChurchill, now Secretary of State forWar, envisioned using Allied troops tosupport the various anti-Bolshevik factions(known collectively as Whites) inthe ongoing Russian Civil War.Kinvig shows that Churchillattempted to do too much with toolittle. The Allied presence in Russia,____________________________________Professor Freeman teaches history atCalifornia State University, Fullerton.including political/militarymissions in thesouth and fareast, were nevermore than askeletal force,and unreinforceable;thebest Churchillcould do wascobble togethervolunteer-units by promising continuedemployment and good pay.Churchill did have the politicalsupport of the Conservative MPs whomade up a free-standing majoritywithin Britain’s governing coalition,but his policy was opposed by PrimeMinister Lloyd George, who read thewill of the nation better than the Toriesor Churchill, the leading Liberal in theCabinet after himself.Still, Lloyd George was politicallyconstrained. He had to allow Churchillsomething of a free hand to appease hisConservative backers, while attemptingto talk them out of what he saw as afutile campaign. In vain Lloyd Georgecited the example of British interferencein the French Revolution as anaction that only intensified the atrocitiescommitted by the revolutionaries.Churchill responded by citing stories ofatrocities committed by the Bolsheviks.We know now that Churchill wascorrect in foreseeing that a CommunistRussia would inflict unprecedentedhorror on its people, but in 1919 theRussians could see only the disasterbequeathed to them by the incompetent,corrupt and callous regime of thelate Czar. War-weary peasants couldnot be expected to support anti-Bolshevik forces led by unrepentantCzarists, who displayed toward theirsoldiers nothing but contempt.In Russia, British forces of allranks, even those opposed toBolshevism, grew to despise the Whiteswhom they were sent to assist. Czaristeraofficers, far from professional andhopelessly corrupt, drank and quarreledwith one another while preferring >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 47

BOOK REVIEWSChurchill’s Crusade...billets far from the front. Churchilllabeled such reports as defeatist, but intruth he had no understanding of thereal situation. Not once did he visitRussia during this time.The White forces of AdmiralKolchak and General Denikin committedatrocities every bit as horrific asthose of the Reds. In the South theWhites and their Cossack alliesunleashed terrible new pogroms againstRussian Jews. In vain did Churchillplead for Denikin to halt such actions,which obviously undermined supportfor the anti-Bolshevik cause. TheWhites also hampered their own effortsby unrealistically insisting upon maintainingthe integrity of “GreaterRussia,” forsaking any crucial assistancethey might have received from Polandand Romania or the emergent nationsof Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.Under Trotsky, Bolshevik armies haddifficulties of their own, but the Redwar effort, Kinvig says, “was a model ofruthless efficiency compared with theperformance of its opponents” (319).Yet the Allied troops managed todo surprisingly well, despite limitedsupplies and the extreme climate. Ayoung Brig. Gen. Edmund Ironsidecommanded at Archangel, and twoVictoria Crosses were awarded—bothto Australians. In the first half of 1919the ring of anti-Bolshevik forces evencame tantalizingly close to victory.Once the Versailles Treaty was concluded,however, Allied support for thecampaign evaporated. Withdrawalsbegan at the end of the summer.Following the Dardanellesdebacle, Churchill famously remarkedthat he had attempted to do too muchfrom a subordinate position. Incrediblyhe made the same mistake in Russia.He was labeled a military adventurerand blunderer, a reputation that madeit easy for many people to disregard hislater warnings about the Nazis. Kinvigdescribes Churchill’s own account ofhis Russian adventure published in TheAftermath (1929) as “among the morefanciful of his historical writings”(xviii). Unfortunately for the Russianpeople, Churchill’s fears were not fancifulat all. ✌PAUL H. COURTENAYA Sight for Lore EyesBlenheim and the Churchill Family: APersonal Portrait, by Henrietta Spencer-Churchill. Cico, 218 pages, hardbound,illus., $50. Member price $40.Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill isthe elder daughter of the Eleventhand current Duke of Marlborough;having grown up at Blenheim Palace,she has an intimate knowledge of andfeel for its history and contents. Herbook is filled with a large number offine photographs, accompanied by alively commentary.Here you will find a wonderfuldisplay of all parts of the Palaceincluding the famous tapestries andmany historic paintings. As the Dukesays in his foreword, the book “bringsout vividly how eleven generations ofmy family have, in their various ways,contributed to a house designed notonly as a family home, but also as amonument of such significance that it____________________________________Mr. Courtenay is a FH senior editor.is now identified as a WorldHeritage Site.”Beyond the iconic imagesfamiliar to many, there arehitherto unseen family photographs ofrecent times,which give aglimpse ofeveryday life insuch historicsurroundings;these areaccompaniedby the author’spersonal recollections.It is almostimpossible to list any points withwhich to quibble: I found just one ofmodest substance, a misidentified photograph:Queen Mary is mistakenlystated to be Princess Alice (actually HerMajesty’s sister-in-law and secondcousin once removed, who is not portrayed).This is a trifle in a book ofgreat interest to those who have visitedBlenheim, and to those who still havethis treat coming. ✌Too Many Errors You Shouldn’t Know274 Things You Should Know AboutChurchill, by Patrick Delaforce.O’Mara Books, 188 pages, hardbound,$25. Member price $20.This slim volume is strictly for thosewho are new to the Churchillstory; there is little in it which wouldbe unknown even to semi-informedreaders. Having said that, the storyunfolds in a readable way. The authorhas chosen 274 topics which, packagedas 274 short, headed paragraphs, followa reasonably chronological route fromLord Randolph Churchill to his son’sState funeral.The author is of an age to haveserved in 11th Armoured Division inNormandy, where he was wounded,and certainly knows the general outlineof Churchill’s life. But he reveals it in away which casts doubt on his detailedawareness of muchwhich occurred. It is,after all, easy to pickplums from a biographyand to publishthese in the way theyare presented here,which is not tosuggest plagiarism.As I read, my reactions oscillatedbetween approval and disapproval. Thefirst sentence aroused my suspicions:“With grateful thanks to DominiqueEnright…” Enright wrote The WickedWit of Winston Churchill, published bythe same O’Mara Books. In my reviewin FH 115 (http://xrl.us/bejq4v) Iquoted her statement that “some of thestories are definitely authentic, butthere are no doubt many that havebeen embellished….they have beenselected for their Churchillian flavour.”So I was primed to look forflaws—which came thick and fast.FINEST HOUR 143 / 48

274 Things You Should Know...Leaving aside a number of typographicalerrors, which should havebeen eliminated by the publisher, Icounted over forty errors of fact,ranging from incorrect dates throughwrongly identified names to strangeimprobabilities. A few examples: 4thQueen’s Own Hussars was part of theArmy in India (not the Indian Army);Churchill sailed from LourençoMarques to Durban (he did not use atrain); in 1914 Kitchener was SecretaryofState for War (not Commander-inChief of the Army); in early 1915 theC-in-C of the British ExpeditionaryForce was French (not Haig); in 1916Balfour was a former not future primeminister; in 1945 Churchill is said tohave flown from Berlin to Potsdam(perhaps the aircraft taxied all the way);the 1945 nuclear test did not take place“in Mexico”; Lady Soames will be surprisedto learn that she spent Christmas1943 with her father in Carthage (itwas her sister Sarah).These examples give a flavour ofthe careless research and editing, whichare balanced by only one amusing andoriginal comment. Relating howChurchill ordered that code-namesshould not be overconfident, gloomyor frivolous, but that constellations andracehorse names were among theacceptable, Delaforce writes: “Racehorses yes—but race meetings?….Thisauthor fought in Epsom, almost inGoodwood and was wounded inAscot!” For this remark, I can forgivehim almost anything: call it a draw. ✌Churchill as a Literary CharacterWSC IN FICTION (2) • MICHAEL T. McMENAMINNovels are rated one to three stars on two questions: accuracy of portrayal andreading value. Churchill was always a controversial figure and many simply didn’t likehim. If a novel attempts to see Churchill though the eyes of someone who doesn’t like him,the portrait may be disagreeable to his admirers; but that doesn’t make the portrait inaccurate,unless the author ascribes to him words or actions that are inaccurate.Two novels reviewed in the first column in this series (FH 141:48) portrayedChurchill in a relatively positive and accurate light, through characters who viewed himbenignly. The two novels reviewed here do not.The Man from St. Petersburg, by KenFollett (Signet, 1983).Portrayal ★★★ Worth Reading ★★★No library of any Finest Hour subscribershould be without KenFollett’s historical thrillers (Eye of theNeedle, etc.), the best of which are setin World War II. Follett is an excellentwriter and all of his books, includingthis one, are still in print in paperbackand available.The Man from St. Petersburg isunusual for a thriller in that it takesplace in the days before World War Iand features Churchill as a majorplayer in a conspiracy to conclude asecret naval alliance between Britainand Russia in the spring and summerof 1914. Churchill is seen through theeyes of the Earl of Walden, aConservative Party stalwart and generalgood guy who hasbeen a “semi-officialdiplomat” forLord Salisbury andArthur Balfour. Hecan’t standChurchill. In thosedays, few Toriescould.Churchill is anarchetypal character, the one who setsthe plot in motion and keeps itmoving, with several appearances fromtime to time. While the hero Waldenobviously dislikes WSC, he doesn’t letit show. Bad form y’know. And he relishesthe role Winston has given him tolead, at the Czar’s request, British negotiationswith the young RussianAdmiral Orlov, head of the Russianteam and, not coincidentally, nephewto both the Czar and to Walden’sThe Man from St. Petersburg...attractive Russian-born wife Lydia.That way, the young admiral’s visit canbe passed off as a holiday in Englandwith family.Alack! Felix, the assassin sent byRussian anarchists to kill Orlov (“theman from St. Petersburg”) was onceWalden’s wife’s lover, and he is notfooled. As with most Follett villains,Felix has sympathetic human traitswhich help explain why he and Lydiawere lovers when they were young.Let’s just say things get complicatedafter that for Walden, Lydia, heridealistic teenage daughter Charlotteand Felix who, between attempts to killOrlov, seeks out Charlotte, whom hebelieves to be his daughter. VintageFollett, the pace rarely lets up. If Orlovis killed, the Czar won’t sign the treaty.That’s the reason for the three starsunder “Worth Reading.”Three stars also go for the portrayalof Churchill, because anythingnegative about him comes from theviewpoint of the biased Walden. Butit’s all historically accurate: Tories of hisage and class did think Churchill wasan impulsive demagogue. Yet Follett, inportraying Churchill, has him do or saynothing that rings false. WSC is, inturn, shown by Follett to be charming,manipulative and ruthless. There’s onescene where he is impulsive, butWalden’s restraint prevails. In a finaltwist, where all seems lost and the badguys have won, Churchill comes upwith the (somewhat cold-blooded)solution that saves the day. Read it; youwon’t be disappointed. ✌Imperial Kelly by Peter Bowen(Crown, 1992). Portrayal ★★ WorthReading ★★Caveat. Theratings for thisbook—no longerin print but easilyfound online forless than $10—arebased on theassumption thatyou’ve read andenjoyed any of theSir Harry Flashman novels by the latecontinued on page 62...FINEST HOUR 143 / 49

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSChurchill and theAnglo-Irish War 1919-1922COGADH NA SAOIRSE, THE IRISHWAR OF INDEPENDENCE, WAS THEUNFORTUNATE CULMINATION OFBRITAIN’S 700-YEAR ATTEMPT TOFIND A CONSTITUTIONALRELATIONSHIP WITH IRELANDTHAT MADE SENSE TO BOTH SIDESALAN J. WARDUntil 1800, Great Britain and Ireland shared acrown but had separate parliaments. With theUnion of 1801, the two parliaments weremerged and this should have led to the substantialpolitical integration of the two countries;but by an extraordinary oversight, the new relationshipbetween Britain and Ireland was not defined precisely.Some elements of the old order persisted along withIreland’s new representation at Westminster: the IrishExecutive, which had represented the Crown in Irelandbefore the Union, continued. A Lord Lieutenant resided inDublin in vice-regal pomp, with responsibility for law andorder. The senior minister for Ireland, the Chief Secretary,sat in the Cabinet in London, but his under- and assistantsecretariespresided over a rambling Irish administration inDublin Castle which included thirty-six independent Irishgovernment departments. 1 Wales and Scotland were certainlynot governed in this way after their unions.Order in Ireland was the responsibility of two policeforces, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the DublinMetropolitan Police. There was also a 100,000-strong militarycontingent in 1919, primarily a reserve force ofrecruits in training for operations elsewhere. Only aboutten percent were available for operations in Ireland whenthe Anglo-Irish War began in 1919. 2 Thereafter, the armynever had sufficient men or equipment to crush the enemyand its military intelligence was woefully inadequate.______________________________________________________Dr. Ward is Class of 1935 Professor of Government Emeritus at theCollege of William and Mary. His four works on Irish History includeThe Easter Rising, 1916: Revolution and Irish Nationalism (1980,2nd ed. 2003) and The Irish Constitutional Tradition: ResponsibleGovernment and Modern Ireland, 1782-1992 (1994). Our thanks toProfessor Warren F. Kimball for editing this paperThe police were similarly unprepared for the kind ofconflict that emerged in 1919. The responsible BritishCabinet and Irish Executive were never properly integratedwith the police and military into a single command. Linesof authority were always blurred, and multiple intelligenceservices were extremely inefficient.At the end of World War I, Churchill had no significantvoice in Irish affairs, but in January 1919 he enteredthe Cabinet as Minister for War, and was responsible forthe British garrison in Ireland and the Irish police. Movingto head the Colonial Office in 1921, he remained in theCabinet, and was part of the team that negotiated andsigned the Anglo-Irish Treaty which ended the war inDecember 1921.The Cabinet was woefully ignorant about Irishaffairs. No one, including Churchill, intuitively understoodthe Irish or really appreciated what had been happeningthere since the Easter Rising of 1916. Within two years theCatholic or Nationalist parts of the country had steadilyfallen under the control of a republican political organizationSinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone”), which wonseventy-three of Ireland’s 104 seats in the House ofCommons in the December 1918 UK general election. Theremaining seats were won by Protestant Unionists.Sinn Fein boycotted Parliament after the electionand, on 21 January 1919 established a renegade IrishParliament in Dublin, called Dáil Éireann, whichappointed an Executive. As its first act, Dáil Éireannaffirmed that an Irish Republic had been declared inDublin on 24 April 1916, the first day of the Easter Rising.The Dáil was suppressed by the UK government but itmanaged to create an Irish executive and a parallel systemof government departments and courts, and in the 1920-21FINEST HOUR 143 / 50

GIVING NO QUARTER: British auxilliaries, left, known as the Black and Tans. Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the National Army, right, atPresident Arthur Griffith's funeral in August 1922, ten days before his own death. (Wikimedia Commons)local elections, Sinn Fein won control of every town,county and rural council in the Catholic-majority regions. 3Parallel to Sinn Fein’s growing influence, fromJanuary 1919, was an Anglo-Irish War, which started withsporadic acts of republican violence against the Irish police.An Irish Republican Army was created out of several militias,secretly commanded by Michael Collins, then only 29.Churchill would come to know Collins extremely well in1921-22, but thought of him as Minister for Finance in theDáil Éireann Executive, and later as Chairman of the FreeState Provisional Government formed to implement theAnglo-Irish Treaty. Churchill never appreciated Collins’secret role as commander of the IRA, which operated independentlyof Dáil Éireann until a faction of the IRAbecame the Irish Free State army in 1922. 4There were no major battles in the Anglo-Irish War,but the IRA’s hit and run attacks and selective assassinationsof police and informers were difficult to contain. Thewar accelerated in 1920 when outlying police barracks wereabandoned as indefensible, and the court system in Irelandwas paralyzed by jury tampering and jury bias. 5 Built on along tradition of rebellion and agrarian outrage in Ireland,the IRA’s guerrilla tactics had considerable popular support.It could not defeat the British militarily, but the Britishcould not defeat the IRA without a substantial commitmentof military and police power.1. Alan J. Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition, 1782 to1992 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994),30-37.2. Charles Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919-1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 12.3. Ibid., 67-8.4. Ibid., 17.5. Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: CounterinsurgencyThe Cabinet long could not quite agree on what itfaced in Ireland. Was the problem the Sinn Fein “murdergang” that could be routed by a determined police force? Orwas Ireland in the grip of a war with broad support whichcould only be won by a major military operation?The Cabinet could use the police to crush the“murder gang,” and then discuss political reforms. This wasChurchill’s preference; he was considered one of the “hard”ministers, certainly among the Liberals, in Lloyd George’scoalition government. Or the Cabinet could suppress therebels with police while simultaneously engaging the SinnFein moderates. The Cabinet adopted the latter strategy,but with no great confidence. It was not until the summerof 1921 that the Cabinet began to accept that Ireland wasengaged in war against an organized army, and that theresponse had to be primarily military.It was not clear that the Lloyd George Cabinet hadthe unity or even the time to decide what Britain faced inIreland. The Prime Minister was engaged with the Parispeace settlement for most of 1919. As Minister for War,Churchill was supervising Britain’s postwar demobilizationand the replacement of its armed forces, and also planningto mobilize the army against widespread labor unrest inBritain. 6 He also forcefully urged Britain’s intervention inthe Russian civil war, which continued until October1919. 7 Then, as Colonial Secretary from February 1921, >>in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986), 56.6. In 1921, after Churchill had left the War Office, four battalionsof troops were withdrawn from Ireland because of industrialunrest in Britain at a time when the army could not mount major operationsoutside Dublin. See Townshend, The British Campaign inIreland, 175.7. Clifford Kinvig, Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion ofRussia, 1918-1920 (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006).FINEST HOUR 143 / 51

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSCHURCHILL AND THE ANGLO-IRISH WAR...Churchill found himself constructing a new Middle East inthe League of Nations mandated territories that Britain andFrance had acquired from the Ottoman Empire. 8Ireland was an awful distraction. Churchill’s frustrationwas heard in Parliament, when he spoke about theincessant boundary arguments for the Irish Free State: “...asthe deluge [of World War I] subsides and the waters fallshort we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyroneemerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is oneof the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysmwhich has swept the world.” 9The Lloyd George Cabinet was an uneasy coalition.The Prime Minister and Churchill were Liberals, whoseparty had proposed Home Rule with a Dublin Parliamentunder the Crown since 1886. In 1911 as Home Secretary,Churchill had supported “home rule all round,” a schemeto grant home rule to Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 10 Heintroduced the second reading of the Third (purely Irish)Home Rule Bill in 1912. If the British and Empire interestswere protected, Churchill had no objection to domesticself-government for Ireland. 11But the Coalition also included Tory Unionists whohad opposed Home Rule thrice over the past three decades.(See Shannon and McMenamin on the origins of HomeRule in our previous issue. —Ed.) While many had cometo accept some sort of Irish self-government, they wereskeptical of Irish republicans. Some were political associatesof “die-hard” Unionists, many from Protestant Ulster, whoopposed Irish self-government in any form. Lloyd Georgehad to balance these interests if his government was tosurvive. Churchill became his most important ally.No fair review of the Coalition from its formation inDecember 1916 shows that it ever understood Irish complexities.It did not appreciate the extent to which Irelandturned towards Sinn Fein after 1916; this led to catastrophicIrish policies in 1918. Following the final Germanoffensive of the war in March 1918, when, in LloydGeorge’s words, the British Fifth Army in France “practicallydisappeared,” the Cabinet decided to conscript theonly substantial body of men not yet drafted: 150,000Irishmen. Churchill, then Minister for Munitions, supportedthe decision, but it went against almost all Irishadvice, Nationalist and Unionist. Irish republicans, constitutionalnationalists, labor unions and the Catholic Churchunited in massive opposition.To try to ameliorate the unrest, the Cabinet decidedto couple conscription with a limited Irish Home Rulemeasure, but this was rejected by both Sinn Fein and theUlster Unionists, the two parties whose support wasabsolutely essential. To try to turn public opinion awayfrom Sinn Fein, the government arrested seventy-three ofits leaders for their alleged participation in a “Germanplot,” on insubstantial and very dated evidence. When thefirst Dáil Éireann met in January 1919, over half its sixtyninemembers were still in prison.As the situation steadily worsened, the Cabinetappointed Lord French to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland inMay 1918. Here was a general with absolutely no understandingof Irish nationalism, who wrote in October 1918:Place [Irish conscripts] in suitable surrounding and theyare just as easily roused into imperial enthusiasm as, inthe contrary case, they are filled with hatred and angerby a few crafty sedition-mongers, or young priestlyfanatics, amongst whom alone they live. Free them fromthe terrorism of the few self-seeking hotheads and themajority of them would make excellent soldiers. 12It was no surprise that in the December 1918 generalelection, Sinn Fein wiped out the Irish Parliamentary Party.But the Cabinet was unprepared, and nothing betweenthen and the middle of 1921 suggests that it improved itsunderstanding. It stumbled along, distracted by othermatters, confused by contradictory advice and assessmentsfrom “advisers” in Ireland, and under intense pressure fromthe United States and Dominions to solve the Irishproblem. But it was incapable of acting decisively.Churchill shared in the malaise. As Secretary for Warhe had a role in Irish policy but his biographerwrites that he wished to defer to the LordLieutenant and Irish Chief Secretary on most militarymatters, seeing the War Office’s job as to provide troopsand equipment. However, he was not passive and his interventions,or mostly non-interventions, had serious effects. 13Churchill and most of the Cabinet shared the “murdergang” theory of the Irish war. If enemy thugs were engagedin selective terror, rather than a para-military organizationfighting an insurgent war, there were several implications.First, there was no reason for Churchill to require the armyto develop counter-insurgency tactics—and he did not. Latein 1920, Irish military leaders said, “There was no objectivefor operation, there was no defined theatre of war, there wasno front line.” 14 This describes what we now call insurgencywarfare, which required a new strategic doctrine. Churchilldid not recognize the need.Second, if the conflict in Ireland was not a war but acriminal conspiracy, the lead agency should be the police,not the army. As Minister for War, Churchill opposedattempts to militarize the war and agreed with LloydGeorge that Ireland was “a policeman’s job supported bythe military and not vice versa.” 15The reality, however, is that the war was not simply acriminal conspiracy. It was a well organized guerrilla campaign,difficult to win without the military. The “murdergang” theory tied the Cabinet’s hands. It could not win awar so long as it denied it was fighting one. It was not untilDecember 1920 that the Cabinet agreed to the IrishCommand’s request for martial law—and then only in four,and later eight, counties. Incomplete martial law lastedonly six months. Civil trials and the usual trappings ofmartial law—mass internment of suspects, internal passportsor identification cards, press censorship—wereimpractical unless the whole country was covered.FINEST HOUR 143 / 52

Unfortunately, Churchill had a poor relationship with themilitary commander in Ireland, General Sir NevilMacready, who was appointed in 1920. Macready accusedhim of impetuosity and waywardness, 16 and in his autobiographywrites, “Mr. Churchill once told me he enjoyedtaking risks. He ought assuredly to have enjoyed himselfduring the time he was responsible for Irish affairs at theColonial Office.” 17Churchill would have preferred Field Marshal SirWilliam Robertson, but was talked into Macready’sappointment by Lord French. 18 Macready had commandedthe London Metropolitan Police and it was anticipated thathe would support the integration of the military and thepolice under his command. But Macready refused thepolice assignment, believing that the reorganization of thepolice would take too much of his time. 19Churchill did not make integration a condition ofMacready’s appointment, and without it the police and themilitary operated at cross purposes. The army saw its job asconcentrating its forces to attack the enemy, largely insearch and destroy missions; but the police dispersed itsforces to protect outlying barracks. 20 Having refused tocommand the police, Macready did not then work wellwith Churchill’s choice of Commander for both the RoyalIrish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police,General Tudor, who was appointed in May 1920. Churchillhimself worked well with Tudor.In insurgency warfare the forces of the state must have ahuge advantage in numbers over the insurgents. Thelatter are free to roam, hit and run anywhere at anytime, but state forces have to defend every possible target.The army and the police never had the capability to defendand respond. The Royal Irish Constabulary, operatingoutside Dublin, numbered just over 10,000 in January1919 and 14,200, in June 1921, 21 but it was never welltrained for paramilitary operations. In June 1920 the army’seffective strength outside Dublin for anti-insurgency purposeswas only about 8000 men.Something had to be done to get more manpowerinto the field, and it was decided that it would be thepolice. 22 Reinforcing the police rather than the army wasdriven by the “murder gang” theory. The Cabinet wantedto avoid militarizing the conflict; the IRA had to bedefeated, but putting the whole country on a war footingwould, it was thought, destroy any chance of a political settlement.The solution—to attach a number of auxiliaryforces to the RIC—would have terribly damaging consequencesto British prestige in Ireland and abroad.Churchill has been credited with conceiving the auxiliaryprogram, and he certainly approved it, but itsparentage is confused. 23 A Cabinet colleague, Walter Long,had suggested something of the kind in May 1919, 24 butthe RIC commander, General Byrne, doubted that auxiliariescould be controlled by the police code of discipline. 25He was absolutely correct, but doubts were later pushedaside. Churchill tells us that the government “decided—or,rather, drifted into a decision—to meet force with force, or,to be more exact, to meet terror with terror.” 26The first auxiliaries in the south comprised about1200 former army officers whose assignment was counterinsurgency.The second were 8000 former soldiers from theranks who came to be known as Black and Tans because ofthe uniforms they wore. 27 When these two auxiliaries wentinto action in 1920, it quickly became clear that theylacked police or military discipline. They became notoriousfor unauthorized reprisals against the Irish civilian population,including shootings and the destruction ofbuildings. 28 The Black and Tans aroused particular publicenmity for their brutality: as Townshend writes, “TheCabinet’s belief that the Black and Tans, being nominallypolice, would be less offensive to public opinio than outrightmilitary administration, was a monumental act ofself-deception….” 29In September 1920 Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of theImperial General Staff, discussed the Black and Tanreprisals in his diary: “Winston saw very little harm in thisbut it horrifies me.” 30 The truth is probably less thatChurchill saw little harm than that he had some sympathywith the Black and Tans, who were acting, he believed,under extreme provocation. 31In October 1920 the Cabinet ordered unofficialreprisals to end, but in November, at the request of the military,Churchill proposed a policy of official reprisals, whichthe Cabinet accepted in December. Houses, cooperativecreameries and other buildings could now be destroyed >>8. See David Freeman, “Midwife to an Ungrateful Volcano,”Finest Hour 132, Spring 2006, 26-33.9. Parliament, House of Commons, Hansard, 16 February1922. Speech on the second reading of the Irish Free State Bill.10. Winston Churchill, “Devolution,” 1 March, 1911, CAB37/1045/ no.16, Public Records Office, London.11. Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure, 54.12. Alan J. Ward, “Lloyd George and the 1918 Irish ConscriptionCrisis,” The Historical Journal 17:1 (March 1974), 125.13. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann,1975) IV:447.14. Quoted by Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 157.15. Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 61.16. General Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life (NewYork: George H. Doran, 1925), II: 662, 665.17. Ibid., 654.18. Macready, Annals, 425-26; Townshend, The BritishCampaign in Ireland, 73-74.19. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 60.20. Ibid., 28-30.21. Ibid., 28, 211-14.22. Ibid., 87.23. Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins: The Man Who MadeIreland (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 127.24. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 25.25. Ibid., 30.26. Rhodes James, Study in Failure, 163.27. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 56.28. Rhodes James, Study in Failure, 162-63.29. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 104.30. Ibid., 116.31. Gilbert, 455.FINEST HOUR 143 / 53

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSCHURCHILL AND THE ANGLO-IRISH WAR...under military supervision, after populations had beenremoved. The program lasted for five months. Churchilllater wrote, “Where no witnesses would give evidence orcould give it only at the peril of their lives, where no jurieswould convict, the ordinary processes of law were non-existent.”But official reprisals were no more welcomed thanunofficial ones, and there were public relations disasters inIreland, Britain and the United States. 34A third auxiliary force that Churchill approved wasattached to the RIC in Ulster from October 1920. Therewere actually three Ulster forces, known as A, B and C“Specials,” approved by Churchill and the Cabinet at theinsistence of Ulster Unionist leader Sir James Craig. “ASpecials” were full-time police auxiliaries, “B Specials” werepart-time and locally based, and “C Specials” for emergenciesand intelligence gathering. Macready and the civilianleadership in Dublin Castle vehemently opposed the establishmentof these forces because they would be exclusivelyProtestant—and so they proved to be. 35 Over the next fiftyyears the “B Specials” in particular became associated withthe worst kinds of anti-Catholic discrimination inNorthern Ireland. Their disbandment became a centralobjective of the Northern Irish Civil Rights movement inthe 1960s. 36 Neither the Black and Tans nor the “B”Specials brought any credit to Churchill.In late 1920, attempts were made by the CatholicArchbishop of Perth, Joseph Clune, to secure a trucewith the IRA, but the time was inopportune. MichaelCollins opposed a deal, arguing that what would getIreland a limited political settlement would also get it arepublic. Sinn Fein rejected Britain’s condition that the IRAshould surrender its arms before talks could begin, andinsisted on immunity for Irish leaders—something theCabinet would not offer. 37 Churchill was not a diehardopponent of a negotiated settlement, but he could see noresponsible Irish negotiating partner. In any case, the militaryleaders in Ireland urged a continuation of the war. 38But the war worsened significantly, the political geographyof Ireland had changed in a way that favored a settlement.The result was the Government of Ireland Act.On 23 December 1920, the Government of IrelandAct received the royal assent. 39 Lloyd George argued for itby asking: “…do we want peace or not? Are we to stampout the very embers of rebellion or is the policy a doubleone to crush murder and make peace with moderates?” 40He endorsed the double policy and offered moderateshome rule in the Government of Ireland Act.This created two Home Rule parliaments in Ireland,one in Belfast for six counties of Northern Ireland, and onein Dublin for the twenty-six southern counties. Both parliamentswere subordinate to Westminster Parliament,whose ultimate supremacy was explicitly stated.The proposal had emerged from two 1919-20Cabinet committees chaired by the Unionist Walter Longand dominated by hawks, one of whom was Churchill. Itwas an evolution of Churchill’s prewar proposal for “homerule all round,” what he mistakenly called federalism. 41Instead of Home Rule for each part of Britain, it proposedHome Rule for each part of Ireland, leaving regional parliamentselsewhere for later discussion. Dividing Ireland wasmeant to solve the problem without provoking civil war inUlster. It was hoped that this would appease public opinionin the USA and the Dominions, which strongly supportedIrish self-determination.Northern Ireland Unionists were prepared to cooperatebecause they realized that a parliament that theywould dominate was the surest way to ensure they wouldnever have to join a Dublin parliament. 42 Sinn Fein wasprepared to cooperate, at least to the degree of holding electionsto the southern parliament, because that woulddemonstrate their domination of Nationalist Ireland. In theelections, Unionists won forty of fifty-two seats in thenorth, Sinn Fein 124 of 128 seats in the south. Theremaining four were elected by graduates of Trinity College,Dublin, a traditionally Protestant institution.There was an element of fantasy in all this because, asthe Government of Ireland Act was being signed into law,the IRA was rejecting a truce, and martial law was beingintroduced in four southern counties. Nor was there anychance that Sinn Fein would accept a subordinate Dublinparliament. There were few moderates left, if by moderatewe mean people who would accept Home Rule as a finalsettlement. Even Dominion status, the virtual independenceenjoyed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand andSouth Africa, was at the time unacceptable to Sinn Fein.Offering Dominion status to the whole of Irelandwould have provoked an explosion in Ulster, but partitionchanged the situation. Hitherto, Ireland was always treatedas a whole and Unionists were asked to accept a Dublinparliament. Now the Unionists were secure in their ownprovince. Yet, as late as the spring of 1921, plans weremade to govern the south of Ireland from Britain as aCrown colony and to impose martial law should Sinn Feinrefuse to accept a southern parliament. 43 (This changedonce the province of Northern Ireland was in being.)By the summer of 1921, fighting had worsened andthe two sides were in stalemate. The Cabinet finallyrecognized that the war could not be won withoutsubstantial military intervention, and in June it agreed tosend an additional sixteen battalions to Ireland. LloydGeorge still argued that the war was the job of the police,supported by the army—not the other way round.Churchill still believed the police were doing a better job inIreland than the army. 44 Both recognized the need toexpand the war if victory was to be achieved, but Churchillthought that, as a moral gesture, the Cabinet should firstoffer “the widest measure of self-government to Ireland.” 45On 22 June 1921 King George V opened theNorthern Ireland Parliament with a speech calling for reconciliation,and the Cabinet made the effort. The momentwas right. The IRA knew it could not win a conventionalFINEST HOUR 143 / 54

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSwar, and had no desire to fight an augmented British military.The British Cabinet had no desire for a costly totalwar, given so many other problems at home and abroad.Lloyd George had already brought Sinn Fein’s Eamon deValera and the Unionist Sir James Craig together for secretmeetings in May; on 24 June he publicly invited de Valeraand Craig to talks.After further negotiations the British Cabinet and theDáil Éireann executive agreed on a truce to begin on 11July 1921. There now began the tough negotiation that ledto the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Irish Free State in 1921.Churchill was to be an extremely important player.32. Churchill, p.303; Townshend, The British Campaign inIreland, 118-22, 149; Coogan, Michael Collins, 149-50.33. Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (New York: Scribners,1929), 301.34. It is interesting that after the truce in June 1921, Churchillsent many of the southern auxiliaries to Palestine. Townshend,Britain’s Civil Wars, 91.35. Macready, 488.36. Coogan, Michael Collins, 335-37.37. Coogan, Michael Collins, 192-95.38. Gilbert, 470-71.39. Alan J. Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition:Responsible Government and Modern Ireland 1782 to 1992,(Washington: The Catholic University Press, 1994), 107-10.40. Townsend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 140.41. Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition, 107. This was notfederalism in the technical sense. A federation is a system of coordinatelocal and federal legislatures, neither of which can be amendedor abolished by the other. Federalism as used by Long is now calleddevolution, which describes the creation of local legislatures to whichthe central parliament assigns certain powers. The legislatures themselves,and the powers, can both be withdrawn or amended by thecentral parliament.42. In 1934 Craig said to the Northern Ireland House ofCommons, “They still boast of Southern Ireland being a CatholicState. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and aProtestant State.” Quoted by Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster(Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992), 538-39.43, Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 184.44. Ibid.45. Churchill, 306; Townshend, The British Campaign inIreland, 184.Why Ireland Won:The War from the Irish SideHOW A HANDFUL OF RADICALS, THROUGH VIOLENT ACTION, CO-OPTED IRISHCONSTITUTIONAL NATIONALISM, AND SET THE PATTERN FOR ALLSUCCESSFUL WARS OF NATIONAL LIBERATION IN THE 20TH CENTURYTIMOTHY D. HOYTIt’s important to think about the Anglo-Irish War for anumber of reasons, some of which are very contemporary.Here I would like to consider the Irish side. Firstand most important, this was the prototypical nationalistrevolution: the model for the wars of nationalliberation that began after the Second World War in particular,as the European empires weakened. For the first timesince the American Revolution Britain was up against adetermined nationalist movement with transnational linksand support. The methods and techniques used by the IrishRepublican Army set the pattern for future organizationsattempting to overthrow superior occupying powers.______________________________________________________Dr. Hoyt is Profesor of Strategy and Policy, U.S. Naval War College,and has worked or consulted for U.S. government agencies on securityissues. He is currently working on a history of the IrishRepublican Army, as well as projects on U.S. military strategy in the21st century and American relations with India and Pakistan.There are things we need to know about the originsof the Irish insurgency. The first is the myth that Irelandhad been rebelling against England for 800 years. That’spartly true, but Ireland was never rebelling in a concerted,nationalist fashion. This was the first major nationaluprising with any chance of success, and it did work. It wasbased on a number of different factors and categories.The Cultural-Ethnic DivideEthnic differences between the Irish and the Englishwere an important element of the new nationalist themesdiscussed in Finest Hour 142: Home Rule and the revival ofGaelic civilization, art, and language. There’s also a differenceof religion, which is important. In Ireland, politics arelinked with religion. Ireland never fully succumbed to theReformation, and in fact remained primarily a Catholiccountry. In an effort to squash Catholicism in Ireland, >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 55

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSWHY IRELAND WON...there were a series of Penal Laws in the 18th century, whichsome commentators have said made it illegal to be an IrishCatholic under British law. Resistance has always beenlinked in some way with religion. Although there areProtestant nationalists, for the most part national sympathycomes from the Catholic part of the population.There were profound social differences, and the Irishunderstood them, even if the English did not. Some 2500years ago a Chinese war strategist named Sun Tzu said,“Know your enemy, know yourself, and you will win ahundred battles.” One of the reasons the Irish won isbecause they knew themselves well, and they had a betterunderstanding of the English than the English had of them.Ireland has a long tradition of secret societies andrebellions. The early risings were local, primarily in thesouth and west, which in the 19th century maintained thelast remnants of Gaelic civilization and Gaelic speakers.That area was devastated by the Irish famine, which formedthe Irish population in Boston in the mid-19th century.They had deep resentments of British rule, of British imperialism,and of Britain’s failure to respond to a catastrophewhich reduced the population of Ireland from eight toabout four million in a decade through a combination ofdeath and emigration.Last but not least, the British had a sort of contemptuousview of the Irish: they were not serious, and alwaysmaking trouble. Any time there was trouble in Ireland, theylooked at it as a minor problem. In the case of the Irishrebellion in the nineteen-teens, that was a serious mistake.Then and NowThere’s a difference between the Irish rebellion andthe all-out revolts we’ve seen more recently. The former wasby no means all-pervasive. In fact, Belfast and CountyCork had thirty-six acts of violence per ten thousandpeople over a six-year period, suggesting that this was not avery violent rebellion at all. Consider 1919-21, the heightof the rebellion: in 1919, fewer than two dozen peoplewere killed through acts of political violence. In 1920, thatnumber rose to several hundred, and in the first six monthsof 1921 it rose to over 700. It was escalating quickly—yetthe initial low figures suggest why the British governmenthad difficulty comprehending the problem. It seemed verylow-key until 1920.The Rand Corporation did a study which concludedthat insurgencies generally average about nine years beforethey succeed or fail. It’s useful thinking about this, becausethe Irish insurgency really started in 1912 or 1914, withthe failure of the Home Rule Bill. That was the point atwhich Irish politics shift from being constitutional to beingat least quasi-militarized.The violent, coercive reaction and the threat of civilwar that came about in British political society as a result ofthe passage of the Home Rule Bill of 1912 led to anunprecedented militarization of Irish politics. The Loyalistpopulation, primarily Protestants in what is now Northern“KNOW YOUR ENEMY,KNOW YOURSELF,AND YOU WILL WINA HUNDRED BATTLES.”—Sun TzuIreland, mobilized over 100,000 men in a militia whovowed to fight the British if they attempted to imposeHome Rule. In response, a Catholic militia was formed in1913 that eventually numbered 180,000. It lacked arms,but the fight for Irish nationalism was morphing, possiblyinto a battle for Ireland itself, which was only prevented bythe beginning of the First World War.Britain, the “occupying power,” was concernedbecause Ireland had been used in past wars to threaten thehomeland. The Spanish had invaded and were onlydefeated at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. The French hadinvaded, and in 1798 actually landed a substantial force inIreland, which was eventually defeated by the British.Britain’s enemies have provided support for Irish rebellionconsistently throughout history. But Britain did not understandthe impact of Irish militarization that came aboutthrough the failure of Home Rule.The Easter Rising, 1916With the outbreak of war in 1914, both large militiaspatriotically disbanded, and many of their membersenlisted in the British army. Men of the Ulster VolunteerForce joined the 36th Ulster Division. Some Catholicnationalists, the Irish Nationalist Volunteers, enlisted andwere put into other army units. They did not really get aCatholic division of their own. But the 12,000 IrishNationalist Volunteers were gradually infiltrated by a groupcalled the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Formed in theUnited States in the 1850s, the Brotherhood was committedto violent overthrow of British rule.On Easter 1916, 1500 Volunteers seized the center ofdowntown Dublin and held it for about a week. In someways it was one of the most pathetic military operationsever designed, in part because the leaders believed that itwas only through their deaths that they would mobilizeIrish opinion. They didn’t necessarily tell that to the troops;it might have been demoralizing!Yet they held out for about a week. About 2500people were killed, and downtown Dublin was devastatedas the British Army took the city back, block by block. Asthe Irish prisoners were marched away, Dubliners spat onthem and pelted them with rotten vegetables. They had nosympathy whatsoever.Then the British imposed martial law and began executingthe leaders one at a time. This turned the picturearound, rallying sympathy for the rebels. In Parliament, theleader of the Irish Parliamentary Party said they would haveFINEST HOUR 143 / 56

REVOLUTIONARIES TURNEDSTATESMEN: Sean Lemass,left, was Irish Prime Minister in1959-66. Refusing to discusswhat he did on “BloodySunday,” 21 November 1920, hewould always reply, “Firingsquads should not havereunions.” Eamon de Valera,right, a commander in theEaster Rising, escaped arrestover confusion as to whether hewas an Amercan citizen. Thedominant force in Irish politicsfor over half a century, he wasboth head of government andhead of state, serving as PrimeMinister three times between1937 and 1959. EnragingChurchill, he maintained adetermined Irish neutrality inWorld War II.done better to shoot them right away, and had it over with.But the executions dragged on, including some of theworst kind. One rebel was so badly wounded he couldn’tstand, so they tied him to a chair and shot him there.Suddenly these reckless revolutionary idiots of the EasterRising became martyrs for a legitimate political vision—which had little support until the British began executions.Meanwhile, the prisoners not executed were shippedto Britain. Fron Goch, Wales, was a major facility for them.And here the future leadership of the Irish RepublicanArmy was able to sit around and talk, decide what they’ddone wrong, and plan how to do it better the next time.To this day the IRA refers to prison as “the revolutionaryuniversity,” the place where they learn from theirmistakes. This is a problem for every country which hasever fought a sustained insurgency or counter-terrorist campaign.On the one hand, you have to put these people awaysomewhere; on the other hand, it’s easier to put them all inthe same place. But in the same place, they have a chanceto talk to one another, to reassess and think about how todo it better the next time. (The problem has its moderncounterpart in the U.S. detainees at Guantanamo, thoughthe “revolutionary university” is not among the reasonsvoiced for closing that facility. —Ed.)Sinn FeinEamon de Valera, one of the commanders in theEaster Rising, survived because there was some questionabout whether he was an American citizen. He was imprisoned,then released, and soon became a figurehead. From1908 to 1915, Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone”) had about asmuch support as Ralph Nader in American elections:roughly two percent of the vote in parliamentary elections,marginal, if highly idealistic. But after the Easter RisingSinn Fein became the umbrella for everyone opposed to thestatus quo. Some would say it was hijacked, although it’snot clear that it really was. Its leader, Arthur Griffith,remained a major figure in the movement.On 25 October 1917 Sinn Fein, though a politicalparty, declared that it would use “any and every meansavailable” to achieve total Irish independence. The firstobjective was by-elections, held to replace Members ofParliament who die or leave office. Sinn Fein candidatesvowed never to attend the Parliament at Westminster.Instead they proposed to create an Irish Parliament to makeIrish law, the basis for an independent Ireland.Thirty percent of Sinn Fein’s leadership was IrishNational Volunteers, who had their own constitution andgoals. Richard Mulcahy, Chief of Staff of the IRAthroughout the war, said that civil-military relationsbetween nationalist forces were close. I would argue thiswas a rosy-colored view. What really happened was thatpeople who supported violence dragged people who wouldotherwise have supported a constitutional movement alongwith them towards radical politics.We see here the emergence of the hard men, like DanBreen, who was responsible for the murder of the first twopolicemen killed in the conflict, in January 1919. Breenlater became a fascist. He’s not an attractive fellow. He andothers in County Tipperary helped push Sinn Fein in theradical direction. Breen and others like him had no intentionof allowing this to be a peaceful movement. They didnot believe in peace. Michael Collins, then the IRA’sDirector of Intelligence, said: “The sooner fighting isforced, and a general state of disorder created throughoutthe country, the better it will be for the country.” >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 57

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSTHE FIRST DÁIL ÉIREANN, Mansion House, Dublin, 21 January 1919. First row, left to right: Laurence Ginnell, Michael Collins, CathalBrugha, Arthur Griffith, Eamon de Valera, Count Plunkett, Eoin MacNeill, W.T. Cosgrave, Kevin O’Higgins. (Wikimedia Commons)WHY IRELAND WON...The Dáil ÉireannThe 1918 British general election was the first afterthe war and the first where women were allowed to vote. Ihave yet to find a good article on how they affected Irishelections, but suspect they did in some way. In any case,Sinn Fein received seventy-three of the 104 Irish seats inParliament: 75 percent of Ireland’s representatives, whorefused to attend Westminster and rejected the right ofBritain to rule Ireland.One would think this would have been viewed withalarm in Britain, and it’s very interesting that it was not. Infact, when the Irish Parliament, the Dáil Éireann, met inDublin in January 1919, over half of the delegates were notthere. As the names of absent delegates were called, theIrish words were heard: “imprisoned by the foreign enemy.”What the Dáil did was to declare war: it created militaryorganizations, a Ministry of Finance with Collins as itshead, and other cabinet positions including Foreign Affairsand Information Ministries. These were very powerfultools, successfully spreading propaganda and information.But here, again, the Irish Minister of Defence reiterated theunderlying program: “Kill them if you have to.” This wasnot a non-violent movement.The Easter Rising was run on a wish and a prayer,but now things were different. The revolution really beganin 1919—precisely the time Winston Churchill was sayingthat there was no place in the world where there was lessdanger than Ireland. Britain’s response to the Sinn Feinvote, to the Dáil’s Declaration of Independence, was to say,“Well, that’s Ireland—it’ll be okay.” Alas it was not okay.The Offensive Against the PoliceMichael Collins now asked: “What is the center ofgravity? What is the thing that England has that hurts usthe most and helps them the most?” It was, he declared,British intelligence. And after spending some time andlooking at it carefully, he realized that this was the place tohit the enemy. So Collins organized a sophisticated attackagainst the police and intelligence services in Dublin. It waslargely non-violent, because the aim was to ostracize themfrom Irish society.The police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, hadfewer than 10,000 members, mostly Catholic: long-termbeat cops who mainly patrolled the places where they lived,went to church, married and raised their families.Sinn Fein’s approach was simple and seductive. “Youcan’t talk to the Constabulary anymore,” it told the people:“They’re the enemy.” The villagers began to reject theirown neighbors who enforced the law—incredibly powerfulcoercive pressure that moved Ireland in a very differentFINEST HOUR 143 / 58

direction. It’s not hard to ostracize someone, but when youdo it, you have become radicalized.Meanwhile, with the aid of a detective named EamonBroy, Collins infiltrated the Dublin Metropolitan Police.Every night the detectives would hand their notebooks toBroy, an excellent typist, to transcribe. Broy would make acarbon copy which he would give to Collins, who readeverything the Royal Irish Constabulary had about politicalopposition in Ireland, daily for almost three years.ASSASSINS, SPIES AND COMMANDERS: Daniel Breen(poster above) touched off the war of 1919-21 bymurdering the first two constables. The price on hishead put Churchill’s Boer wanted poster in the pale. Helater became a fascist. Eamon Broy, below left, a typist atDublin police headquarters, shipped surreptitious carboncopies of every police note to Michael Collins. IRA Chief ofStaff Sean McBride, below center, was the only man to winboth the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prizes. Young Tom Berry,below right, a prominent guerrilla fighter, was against anynegotiation with the British, believing that Ireland could winher independence militarily.The Base of InsurgencyBy 1920, the base of this insurgency was secured.There was a political party which acted as the voice of theIrish people; an independent parliament; a crippled intelligence,an ostracized Constabulary. Sinn Fein was now evensetting up courts, especially in the south and west whererebellion was strongest; soon they had judicial mechanismsin two-thirds of the counties.These courts were careful to be fair and impartial—even the Protestants respected them. When I lived inBelfast in the 1980s, I met an old fellow who had beensummoned before one. He had carried out the Irish equivalentof the Boston Tea Party. On the west coast, he hadstolen a truck filled with English Bass Ale and dumped itinto the Atlantic Ocean. A local bar owner complained andhe wound up in court.When this fellow saw the judge he cheered up: it washis brigade commander in the IRA! But the judge said, “Iadmire your political sentiment, lad, but it’s a waste ofgood beer,” fined him and made him pay damages to thebartender. That’s an example of how Sinn Fein legitimacy,not just as a political party but as a source of law and order,but an incredibly powerful element delegitimizing Britishrule and setting up alternative authority. With the otherside relying on the “Black and Tans,” it was an easier sellthan ever.The IRA itself pursued the strategy: “If we can’t beatthem militarily, we’ll make their lives really difficult.” >>FINEST HOUR 143 / 59

CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGSWHY IRELAND WON...Flying columns—platoon-sized organizations of fifteen tothirty-five men—were formed in each county. Aside fromambushing British troops or the police, they spent a lot oftime wandering through villages, a clear message that theBritish weren’t in charge. “We are going to harass anddemoralize the enemy without giving them an opportunityto strike back,” the IRA declared. “It’s more profitable tokill for Ireland than to die for her”—the exact opposite ofthe leaders of the 1916 rebellion.By now Churchill had changed his view of the Irishsituation, referring to the treacherous, assassinating, conspiringtraits of the Irish people. (I take that personally.)But it was clear that by 1920, the situation was muchgraver. On Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920—elevendays after Lloyd George had declared, “we have murder bythe throat”—the IRA assassinated sixteen British militaryintelligence officers in downtown Dublin. Among the assassinswas Sean Lemass, who later became Prime Minister ofIreland. Asked later why he never talked about his experiencesin the war he said, “Firing squads should not havereunions.”By December 1920, the British government recognizedthat Ireland was out of control. They imposed martiallaw on substantial parts of the south and west: originally tofour counties, growing to sixteen. By spring, a “surge” ofBritish troops had achieved some success.But the election of May 1921 proved an absolute disaster.Sinn Fein won 124 of 128 seats in the south; 112 ofthose elected had either served time or were in jail; fifteenwere under sentence of death. It was the most direct repudiationof British rule imaginable, afterthe armed forces said they wouldsucceed. This is how to fail at counterinsurgency.Now the IRA changed tactics.Chief of Staff Sean McBride (an urbanguerrilla since sixteen, the only personto win both the Nobel and Lenin PeacePrizes) increased the attacks, so thatdespite the British efforts, it seemed asthough they were failing. There was amajor raid on the Dublin CustomsHouse in 1921, when the IRA Dublinbrigade burned thousands of historicaldocuments. The IRA also becameactive in Britain itself—nothing likethe provisional IRA campaigns of the1970s and 1980s, but they did attackthe homeland to keep pressure on.You could compare this phase ofthe war to the Tet Offensive inVietnam fifty years later: It came bysurprise, it was very large, and eventhough it was hugely unsuccessful (theentire brigade was captured), it playedwell in the media.FINEST HOUR 143 / 60VictoryIt was in Churchill’s words “victory at all costs—victory in spite of [or perhaps with the help of] all terror.”The truce and treaty will be discussed next. I would pointout, however, that Collins knew when he signed the trucethat they could not then re-engage in military operations—the British would reestablish their intelligence, and IRAmembers who came out of hiding would be marked. Thisis one of the reasons he negotiated as he did in London.Tom Berry, one of the IRA’s prominent guerrillaleaders, was upset about the treaty negotiations—this wasone of the reasons that there was a civil war afterwards. Thecommanders in the provinces, in Cork and Tipperary andKerry, rejected negotiations; they thought the war wasgoing rather well. Collins, in Dublin, had a different perspective.As a result, there was civil war, and, after a pauseof forty years, an IRA that exists even today in variousforms, still committed to the violent overthrow of Britishrule in the north.Not surprising, and pleasant to remember, is thatChurchill had the solution—largely embodied in the 1921Irish Treaty. It was not a bad solution. But the time toimpose it was in 1916, after the Easter Rising. There weremany reasons it couldn’t be done then, but 1916 was theonly point, I would argue, at which a negotiated solutionwas truly possible.Britain had many, many other things to think aboutbetween 1916 and 1920, and was never able to focus onthe Irish problem. And the result was that a small group ofradicals, through violent action, co-opted Irish constitutionalnationalism and made major achievements. ✌Curt Zoller’s AnnotatedBibliography of Works About SirWinston S. Churchill, at 410pages, is the most comprehensivebibliography of works aboutChurchill. It includes frank, forthrightreviews on 700 booksspecifically about WSC. Also listedare works substantially aboutChurchill, articles, lectures,reviews, dissertations and theses.The book was a Farrow Awardwinner in 2004. Selling for up to$189 on the web, it’s indispensablefor the serious Churchill library.SPECIAL! We will include Curt’sunabridged Addendum (specifywhether you want this by email orhard copy): $65 postpaid in USA.TO ORDER: Send check payable to The Churchill Centre, 200West Madison Street, Suite 1700, Chicago IL 60606 USA. Or phone tollfree(888) WSC-1874. Credit cards accepted: Visa, Mastercard, Amexand Discover. Postage extra outside USA.

THE CHURCHILL QUIZJAMES R. LANCASTEREach quiz includes four questions insix categories: contemporaries (C),literary (L), miscellaneous (M), personal(P), statesmanship (S) and war (W), easyquestions first. Can you reach Level 1?Level 4:1. Whom did WSC refer to as “ahaunted, morbid being” whose people“have worshipped as a god”? (C)2. Name Churchill’s first publishedbook. (L)3. What mistake did Churchillmake which resulted in his beingknocked down by an automobile inNew York on 13 December 1931? (P)4. When did Churchill first tourthe battlefields of the American CivilWar? (W)5. “It is a horrible thought thatwhile we have been frittering away ourtime, —— has been piling up words athalf a crown each.” Whom was LordRiddell referring to in 1920? (L)6. Where was WSC when he toldhis doctor Lord Moran in June 1954,“There is something in the magnetismof this great portion of the earth’ssurface which always makes me feelbuoyant”? (P)Level 3:7. After seeing the play “St.Helena,” WSC wrote a letter to TheTimes on 15 February 1936: “Here isthe end of the most astonishingjourney ever made by mortal man.”Who was this “mortal man”? (M)8. Why was Sunday, 11 July1909, a special day for Winston andClementine? (P)9. “I am an officer, and I placemyself unreservedly at the disposal ofthe Military authorities, observing thatmy regiment is in France.” To whomdid Churchill write these words? (W)10. “He has the farthest vision;he is the greatest man I have everknown.” Whom was Churchill referringto? (S)11. After meeting him atBuckingham Palace on 26 July 1945,King George VI said, “He looked verysurprised indeed.” Who looked verysurprised? (M)12. Of whom did WSC once say,“He is one of those Christians whoought to be thrown to the lions”? (C)Level 2:13. May 1906, “Who is this EffieSmith?” asked an old lady, “she can’t bea modest girl to be talked about somuch.” Who indeed? (M)14. Who accused Gladstone inJune 1886 of postponing importantreforms “For this reason and no other:To gratify the ambition of an old manin a hurry”? (P)15. What good news was thePrime Minister able to announce on 27May 1941? (W)16. Which of Churchill’s books,published in 1909, was applauded as“The clearest, the most eloquent, andthe most convincing exposition” of theNew Liberalism? (L)17. In which speech, followed bya broadcast, did WSC say “Hitlerknows that he will have to break us inthis island or lose the war”? (S)18. Who was the first AmericanPresident to write a letter to WSC? (L)Level 1:19. In July 1941, whom didChurchill instruct to “Tell the childrenthat Wolfe won Quebec”? (S)20. When he was in the EasternCape in 1940-41, who used to “huddlearound an old radio and listen to WinstonChurchill’s stirring speeches”? (S)21. Whom did WSC describe,after making friends with him on thesteamer home after Omdurman in1898, as “The most brilliant man injournalism I have ever met”? (C)22. What spiky animal didRandolph Churchill take to bed withhim during the summer months of1963? (M)23. Name the friend and colleagueof WSC who was sent downfrom Balliol College, Oxford, in 1884for “incorrigible idleness,” and who, in1928, was elected Chancellor ofOxford University “to universalapplause.” (C)24. Who said of WSC in SouthAfrica in 1900 “He really is a fineFINEST HOUR 143 / 61fellow...I wish he was leading regulartroops instead of writing for a rottenpaper?” (W) ✌Answers(19) R.A. Butler, newly appointedPresident of the Board of Education.(20) Nelson Mandela. (21) G.W.Steevens, correspondent for the DailyMail. In an article for his paper aboutChurchill he wrote: “At the rate he goesthere will hardly be room for him inParliament at thirty or in England atforty.” He was to die of typhoid feverin Ladysmith in February 1900.(22) A hedgehog which he called“Quintin Hogg,” after a Tory politicianhe did not care for. (23) Edward Grey(Viscount Grey of Fallodon), ForeignSecretary 1905-16. (24) Sir RedversBuller VC, commander of BritishForces in South Africa in 1899. Hewon his Victoria Cross during the ZuluWar in 1879.(13) Winston’s friend F.E. Smith, LordBirkenhead. (14) Lord RandolphChurchill. (15) The sinking of theBismarck. (16) Liberalism and the SocialProblem. (17) The “Finest Hour”speech on 18 June 1940. (18)Theodore Roosevelt. On 6 January1909 he wrote to Churchill thankinghim for a copy of My African Journey.(7) Napoleon. (8) It was the day theirfirst child, Diana, was born. (9) ToPrime Minister H.H. Asquith on 11November 1915. (10) Franklin D.Roosevelt. (11) Clement Attlee. AfterChurchill left the Palace in his chaffeur-drivenHumber, Attlee arrived in aStandard Ten driven by his wife. (12)Lord Halifax.(1) Hitler. (2) The Story of theMalakand Field Force 1897, in 1898.(3) From the Central Park side of FifthAvenue, he looked left and walkedhalfway across. Then he forgot to lookright at the cars coming up the Avenue.(4) October 1929. (5) Churchill. Halfa crown is about $8 today. (6)Washington, DC.

AMPERSAND&CHURCHILLcontinued frompage 49...George MacDonaldFraser. If you’ve readthe Flashman novelsand didn’t like them, you’re not going tolike this book. If you’ve heard ofFlashman but never read of him, andconsider yourself a history buff, youmight want to put off reading ImperialKelly until after you’ve tried one or twoof Fraser’s novels about VictorianEngland’s greatest fictional rake.In Fraser’s books Anglo-Americanhistory was never easier to digest. Fromthe Charge of the Light Brigade toCuster’s Last Stand, the handsome andcowardly Harry Flashman was there,always looking to save his skin and bed asmany women as possible. Scholarly footnotesand appendices in these oftenhilarious novels attest to the accuracy ofthe historical background and characters.In the Flashman tradition isImperial Kelly, one of four historicalnovels about the real-life American frontierfighter and Indian scout Luther“Yellowstone” Kelly, who wrote his ownmemoirs. The novels recount Kelly’s fictionaladventures. It’s “Flashman Lite,”without Fraser’s scholarly footnotes,appendices or ingenious plots wovenfrom real history. I enjoyed it because it’sclearly of the Flashman genre, includingthe sex, remindful of Flashman’s cynicismand reluctance to fight. Unlike Sir Harry,Kelly is no coward. But, like Fraser’sFlashman novels, the historical backgroundis fairly accurate.“Yellowstone Kelly” is recruited onthe eve of the Spanish-American War andagainst his better judgment—by then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy TheodoreRoosevelt (“Teethadore” to Kelly). He issent west to recruit Rough Riders, thenreluctantly accompanies TR to Cuba.After becoming president, TR sends astill reluctant Kelly to South Africa toobserve the Boer War, where he meetsyoung Winston and his mother Jennie,whom he has known previously, biblicallyand otherwise.The plot resembles Fraser’sFlashman novels in that it’s about Kellytrying to make it home, but it’s not ascompelling because Flashman has ahome, a loving wife and an undeservedhero’s reputation to return to. AndAS A LITERARY CHARACTERFlashman’s escapes are far more perilousthan Kelly’s. Imperial Kelly had goodreviews and pales only in comparison toFraser. Hence two stars for “worthreading.”I fault the portrayal, throughKelly’s narrative, of Roosevelt andChurchill. Much of it is accurate, entertainingand funny, but there aremoments where Bowen’s animositytowards TR and WSC takes us into therealm of caricature, destroying theverisimilitude he has built. The accuratemoments outweigh the inaccurate ones,but it doesn’t take much to suspend thebelief any novel requires. And Bowendoesn’t give you those glorious Fraserfootnotes, which cite scholarly sources topersuade you to accept the tale.Bowen’s portrayal of JennieChurchill is however quite good. You cansee that he likes and admires her, as doeshis protagonist Kelly, who is in his earlyfifties. It’s true that Jennie slept with anumber of men (even if biographers likeWilliam Manchester and Ralph Martinhave grossly exaggerated the number).But I doubt they would have includedsomeone like Kelly. Sir Harry Flashman,maybe—he shared some characteristicswith the real-life Count Charles Kinsky.But there are things about which SirHarry, like Jennie, didn’t kiss and tell. ✌CHURCHILL AS MANLY MANOur Churchill Chatlist (see our website)dispenses wisdom, silliness and amusement,a veritable Hyde Park Corner of opinion.Readers might enjoy a sample:• I founded a men-only book club.We read books about manly men doingmanly things in a manly way. I want tofeature a book about Churchill and willappreciate recommendations. —J.S.• Dear Manly Man: I don’t thinkChurchill is your man! He went weakkneedat the sight of a beautiful orintelligent woman. He cried copiouslyand was sentimental. He married astrong (not to say “manly”) woman and“lived happily ever after.” He was masculinewithout being hateful, and overall isa poor role-model for your group. Socarry on, soldier! Are women allowed inyour Churchill Centre chapter? —C.M.• Editor’s note: The website(www.hemanwomanhaters-clubnet, not aCC chapter) seems to be a lightheartedgroup perfect for the books of Churchill,Henty, Stevenson and Edgar RiceBurroughs. The chatter continues...• Churchill was an excellent athlete(fencing, polo), physically brave (almostto the point of foolhardiness), a lover offine cigars and whisky. Choose theChurchill you want. —J.H.• Try Churchill’s My Early Life. Heserved with distinction in the Sudan,Afghanistan, and South Africa where hestaged a prison-break, and in the WW1trenches. He was cool under fire, bold inaction. If that wasn’t manly, then we’d allbetter start wearing lipstick. —L.K.• I’d add Cuba, where he spent histwenty-first birthday under fire. It’smanly to leap into battle when you’resupposed to be a reporter. He rode to thesound of the guns all his life.Being tender, loving animals,loving one’s wife and children does notpreclude manliness. Escaping a POWcamp in your enemy’s capital, spendingdays on the run with a Dead-or-Alivebounty on your head is manly. Hiding ina coal mine with rats crawling over you ismanly. Reaching for your Mauser when amounted Boer has trained his rifle onyou is manly—not to mention consolingyourself about surrendering by quotingNapoleon: “When one is unarmed andalone, a surrender may be pardoned.”Riding to work daily throughHyde Park during the Irish Troubles ofthe 1920s was manly. One day in theback of his car, Churchill spotted twomen set to ambush him. Did he run? No.He said, “If they want trouble, they’ll getit.” Only his bodyguard prevented a firefight,knocking WSC to the floor of thecar and shouting to the driver, “Drivelike the devil!” (Churchill was angry athaving missed the action.) Not manly?Remember too that he wanted tobe on a ship to watch the D-Day landings,and only the personal interventionof the King convinced him to stay homeand not risk his life.I think perhaps these people arehaving a joke on us, and that it’s simplythat the word “manly” is out of fashion.But Churchill knew what it meant, andthose who aren’t afraid of passing fanciesknow what it means, too. —M.M. ✌FINEST HOUR 143 / 62

Churchill Centre Regional and Local OrganizationsChapters: Please send all news reports to the Chartwell Bulletin: rlangworth@winstonchurchill.orgLOCAL COORDINATORSMarcus Frost, Chairman(mfrostrock@yahoo.com)PO Box 272, Mexia TX 76667tel. (254) 587-2000Judy Kambestad (jammpott@aol.com)1172 Cambera Lane, Santa Ana CA 92705-2345tel. (714) 838-4741 (West)Sue & Phil Larson (parker-fox@msn.com)22 Scotdale Road, LaGrange Park IL 60526tel. (708) 352-6825 (Midwest)D. Craig Horn (dcraighorn@carolina.rr.com)5909 Bluebird Hill Lane, Weddington NC28104; tel. (704) 844-9960 (East)LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS(AFFILIATES ARE IN BOLD FACE)For formal affiliation with the Churchill Centre,contact any local coordinator above.Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer ChurchillSociety of AlaskaJudith & Jim Muller (afjwm@uaa.alaska.edu)2410 Galewood St., Anchorage AK 99508tel. (907) 786-4740; fax (907) 786-4647Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer ChurchillSociety of Calgary, AlbertaMr. Justice J.D. Bruce McDonald, Pres.(bruce.mcdonald@albertacourts.ca)2401 N - 601 - 5th Street, S.W.,Calgary AB T2P 5P7; tel. (403) 297-3164Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer ChurchillSociety of Edmonton, AlbertaDr. Edward Hutson, Pres. (jehutson@shaw.ca)98 Rehwinkel Rd., Edmonton AB T6R 1Z8tel. (780) 430-7178Churchill Centre ArizonaLarry Pike (lvpike@chartwellgrp.com)4927 E. Crestview Dr., Paradise Valley AZ 85253bus. tel. (602) 445-7719; cell (602) 622-0566Rt. Hon. Sir Winton Spencer ChurchillSociety of British ColumbiaChristopher Hebb, Pres.(cavellcapital@gmail.com)30-2231 Folkestone Way, W. Vancouver, BCV6S 2Y6; tel. (604) 209-6400California: Churchillians-by-the-BayJason Mueller (youngchurchillian@hotmail.com)17115 Wilson Way, Watsonville CA 95076tel. (831) 768-8663California: Churchillians of the DesertDavid Ramsay (rambo85@aol.com)74857 S. Cove Drive, Indian Wells CA 92210tel. (760) 837-1095Churchillians of Southern CaliforniaLeon J. Waszak (leonwaszak@aol.com)235 South Ave. #66, Los Angeles CA 90042tel. (818) 240-1000 x5844Churchill Friends of Greater ChicagoPhil & Susan Larson (parker-fox@msn.com)22 Scottdale Road, LaGrange IL 60526tel. (708) 352-6825Colorado: Rocky Mountain ChurchilliansLew House, President(lhouse2cti@earthlink.net)2034 Eisenhower Dr., Louisville CO 80027tel. (303) 661-9856; fax (303) 661-0589England: TCC-UK Woodford/Epping BranchTony Woodhead, Old Orchard,32 Albion Hill, Loughton,Essex IG10 4RD; tel. (0208) 508-4562England: TCC-UK Northern BranchDerek Greenwell, Farriers Cottage,Station Road, GoldsboroughKnaresborough, North Yorks. HG5 8NTtel. (01432) 863225Churchill Society of South FloridaRodolfo Milani (rodomila@atlanticbb.net)7741 Ponce de Leon Road, Miami FL 33143Churchill Centre North FloridaRichard Streiff (streiffr@bellsouth.net)81 N.W. 44th Street, Gainesville FL 32607tel. (352) 378-8985Winston Churchill Society of Georgiawww.georgiachurchill.orgWilliam L. Fisher (fish1947@bellsouth.net)5299 Brooke Farm Rd., Dunwoody GA 30338tel. (770) 399-9774Winston Churchill Society of MichiganRichard Marsh (rcmarsha2@aol.com)4085 Littledown, Ann Arbor, MI 48103tel. (734) 913-0848Churchill Round Table of NebraskaJohn Meeks (jmeeks@wrldhstry.com)7720 Howard Street #3, Omaha NE 68114tel. (402) 968-2773New England ChurchilliansJoseph L. Hern (jhern@fhmboston.com)340 Beale Street, Quincy MA 02170tel. (617) 773-1907; bus. tel. (617) 248-1919Churchill Society of New OrleansJ. Gregg Collins (jgreggcollins@msn.com)2880 Lakeway Three3838 N. Causeway Blvd., Metairie LA 70002tel. (504) 799-3484New York ChurchilliansGregg Berman (gberman@fulbright.com)c/o Fulbright & Jaworski, 666 Fifth Ave.New York NY 10103; tel. (212) 318-3388North Carolina Churchillianswww.churchillsocietyofnorthcarolina.orgCraig Horn (dcraighorn@carolina.rr.com)5909 Bluebird Hill LaneWeddington NC 28104; tel. (704) 844-9960Churchill Centre Northern OhioMichael McMenamin (mtm@walterhav.com)1301 E. 9th St. #3500, Cleveland OH 44114tel. (216) 781-1212Churchill Society of PhiladelphiaBernard Wojciechowski(bwojciechowski@borough.ambler.pa.us)1966 Lafayette Rd., Lansdale PA 19446tel. (610) 584-6657South Carolina: Bernard Baruch ChapterKenneth Childs (kchilds@childs-halligan.net)P.O. Box 11367, Columbia SC 29111-1367tel. (803) 254-4035Tennessee: Vanderbilt UniversityYoung Churchill Club; Prof. John English(john.h.english@vanderbilt.edu)Box 1616, Station B, Vanderbilt University,Nashville TN 37235Texas: Emery Reves ChurchilliansJeff Weesner (jweesner@centurytel.net)2101 Knoll Ridge Court, Corinth TX 76210tel. (940) 321-0757; cell (940) 300-6237Churchill Centre HoustonMarty Wyoscki (cilcia@sbcglobal.net)10111 Cedar Edge Drive, Houston TX 77064tel. (713) 870-3346Churchill Centre South TexasDon Jakeway (churchillstx@gmail.com)170 Grassmarket, San Antonio, TX 78259tel. (210) 333-2085Sir Winston Churchill Society ofVancouver IslandSidney Allinson, Pres. (allsid@shaw.ca)3370 Passage Way, Victoria BC V9C 4J6tel. (250) 478-0457Washington (DC) Society for ChurchillJohn H. Mather, Pres. (Johnmather@aol.com)PO Box 73, Vienna VA 22182-0073tel. (240) 353-6782Churchill Centre Seattlewww.churchillseattle.blogspot.comSimon Mould (simon@cckirkland.org)1920 243rd Pl., SW, Bothell, WA 98021tel. (425) 286-7364

The Hated Enemy in Lustige BlätterOf all the German periodicals, the weekly Lustige Blätter (Funny Pages) was by far the most skillful at lampooning Churchilland the effects of his leadership. Though it predated the Nazi takeover, it adjusted readily to the Goebbels propaganda line.April 1940: "England and its raw materials." WSCjailed and his food supply blocked by Nazi U-boats.April 1942: The Soviet monster. “You must trust him,Britannia, he wants only to protect you.”June 1942: In desperation, Churchill tries to stopBritain’s break-up with lies and promises.February 1943: “The Cuckoo’s Egg.” WSC returns to theEmpire nest, only to find Roosevelt has taken it over.