The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
Page 162
136. WSCHCS, 8062.
137. WSCHCS, 7800.
138. WSCHCS, 8028, 8048; Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 4.
139. WSCHCS, 8119, 8075.
140. WSCHCS, 8065; Nigel Nicolson, Diaries, 372.
141. WSCHCS, 8068–69.
142. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 6, 7, 10.
143. Time, 10/16/50, 10/30/50.
144. Acheson, Present, 467–69, 478; Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 33.
145. Acheson, Present, 478, 481–82.
146. WSCHCS, 8109.
147. W&C-TPL, 558.
148. Nigel Nicolson, Diaries, 374.
149. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 33, 47, 49.
150. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 52.
151. Colville, Fringes, 759; Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 63.
152. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 53–54, 90; WSCHCS, 8203, 8238, 8240.
153. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 90–91; Moran, Diaries, 360.
154. Soames, Clementine, 562; GILBERT 8, 631.
155. GILBERT 8, 638; WSCHCS, 7214.
156. WSCHCS, 8243.
157. WSCHCS, 8246.
158. WSCHCS, 8253.
159. Alec Cairncross, The British Economy Since 1945, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1995), 55–57, 102–3.
160. Moran, Diaries, 384; WSCHCS, 8256, 8261.
161. Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait (New York, 1965), 4–5; WSCHCS, 8268.
162. WSCHCS, 8283.
163. Moran, Diaries, 366; Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 105; WSCHCS, 8283.
164. Soames, Clementine, 429.
165. Hastings Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (London, 1960), 453.
166. Colville, Fringes, 631.
167. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 111, 114–15.
168. Acheson, Present, 608.
169. WSCHCS, 8307.
170. WSCHCS, 7793.
171. WSCHCS, 8307.
172. WSCHCS, 8297.
173. Nigel Nicolson, Diaries, 378; Acheson, Present, 595.
174. WSCHCS, 8329.
175. Colville, Fringes, 634, 641.
176. Moran, Diaries, 433, 436–37; Colville, Fringes, 675.
177. Moran, Diaries, 473.
178. Colville, Fringes, 672.
179. Moran, Diaries, 475.
180. Colville, Fringes, 673.
181. Moran, Diaries, 489.
182. WSCHCS, 8504–5.
183. Moran, Diaries, 527; Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 272.
184. Moran, Diaries, 535–36; W&C-TPL, 575.
185. Soames, Clementine, 581.
186. Colville, Fringes, 683–85.
187. Moran, Diaries, 540.
188. Moran, Diaries, 557; WM/Malcolm Muggeridge, 11/25/80.
189. GILBERT 8, 593.
190. Moran, Diaries, 595.
191. Colville, Fringes, 692–93.
192. Colville, Fringes, 698; Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 325.
193. GILBERT 8, 1036.
194. GILBERT 8, 1039.
195. Catterall, Macmillan Diaries, 343.
196. Colville, Fringes, 706–7.
197. Soames, Clementine, 446; GILBERT 8, 1073.
198. WSCHCS, 8609.
199. Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (London, 1967), 17.
200. GILBERT 8, 958; Colville, Fringes, 705.
201. WSCHCS, 8627.
202. WSCHCS, 8633.
203. Sunday Times, 3/6/55; GILBERT 8, 1101.
204. Colville, Fringes, 708.
205. Colville, Fringes, 708; Browne, Long Sunset, 148.
206. Soames, Clementine, 597.
Postscript
1. GILBERT 8, 1151.
2. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset (London, 1996), 158; WM/Anthony Montague Browne, 11/15/80.
3. WM/A. J. P. Taylor, 12/1/80.
4. Browne, Long Sunset, 150; Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage (New York, 2003), 545, 552.
5. Browne, Long Sunset, 152.
6. W&C-TPL, 628; Soames, Clementine, 633.
7. Soames, Clementine, 634–35.
8. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Boston, 1966), 840; Roy Howells, Churchill’s Last Years (Philadelphia, 1965), 65.
9. Browne, Long Sunset, 302, 310.
10. Atlantic Monthly, 3/65.
11. Soames, Clementine, 619.
12. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (New York, 1985), 720–21.
13. Moran, Diaries, 756; Colville, Fringes, 51, 721.
14. W&C-TPL, 621.
15. Nigel Nicolson, ed., The Harold Nicolson Diaries: 1907–1963 (London, 2004), 412; NYT, 11/5/57.
16. John Colville, The Churchillians (London, 1981), 214.
17. Howells, Churchill’s Last Years, 64; Browne, Long Sunset, 142; WM/Anthony Montague Browne, 11/15/80.
18. WSCHCS, 8687.
19. Moran, Diaries, 562; Time, 6/13/60.
20. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874–1900 (Boston, 1996), 257; Winston S. Churchill, Memories and Adventures (London, 1989), 115.
21. Browne, Long Sunset, 278, 288–89.
22. Browne, Long Sunset, 312.
23. Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill: Stories, Sayings and Impressions of Sir Winston Churchill (London, 1985), 325; Browne, Long Sunset, 312.
24. Moran, Diaries, 566; Howells, Churchill’s Last Years, 128, 140.
25. Howells, Churchill’s Last Years, 194–95.
26. Moran, Diaries, 840–41; Colville, Churchillians, 19.
27. The Editors of the Viking Press, The Churchill Years 1874-1965, with foreword by Lord Butler of Saffron Walden (London, 1965), 240–42.
28. Moran, Diaries, 842.
* Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), biographer, historian, diarist, member of Parliament from 1935 to 1945. From May 1940 to June 1941 he served under Duff Cooper as parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Information. He later moved to the BBC. He was married to the writer Vita Sackville-West. Their sons, Nigel and Ben, served in the British armed forces during the war.
* In Britain, Scotch whisky; in the U.S., rye whiskey.
* For an inscription on a monument to the Great War to be erected at Versailles, Churchill had suggested “In war fury; in defeat defiance, in victory magnanimity, in peace goodwill.” The suggestion was rejected (Colville diary, Jan. 24, 1941). Ever willing to rework a phrase with an eye toward future historical considerations, Churchill replaced “fury” with the more temperate “resolution” on the frontispiece of his six-volume war memoir.
* Chambrun, a descendant of Lafayette, was a lawyer before he was mobilized, and served as a liaison to the British. Following the fall of France, he was a guest of Franklin Roosevelt aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia, where he gave the president a briefing on the battle.
* He appears in volume 1 of this work as Edward Spiers. He changed the spelling of his name in 1918.
† Ismay, who looked like one.
* “That Man” to Churchill was always Hitler.
* Reliable figures are difficult, and often impossible, to find. However, the French official history, Histoire de l’Aviation Militaire Française (Paris, 1980), puts the British sacrifice much higher: “The losses suffered by the RAF in France are enough in themselves to demonstrate its effective participation in the battle of May–June 1940. More than 1,500 flyers were killed, wounded, or missing, and more than 1,500 planes of all types were destroyed.”
* Cato was the pseudonym of three journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard.
* Geoffrey-Lloyd (1902–1984) managed the Petroleum Warfare Department within the War Department. In 1945 he was appointed minister of information.
* Churchill, dismayed by Irish intransigence on the use by the British of three Irish naval bases, proposed to the War Cabinet that Britain no longer subsidize Irish agricultural products and no longer risk British ships and sailors to deliver vital food supplie
s to Ireland. A treaty of 1922, which Churchill helped draft, gave the British the right to use the bases, but the Chamberlain government in 1939, with astounding lack of foresight with war looming, gave control back to the Irish. Churchill telegraphed his tough new stance on Ireland to Roosevelt on December 13. Churchill was ready and willing to take back the Irish ports by force. Britain, he wrote Roosevelt, would no longer help the Irish “while de Valera is quite content to sit happy and see us strangled.” (C&R-TCC, 1:112–13
* Although the Australians and New Zealanders (“Anzacs,” for Australian New Zealand Army Corps) were not configured as a corps during World War Two, the term “Anzac” stuck, and was used in reference to units of those nations deployed in any theater or operation.
* Channon (1897–1958), American by birth, was elected the Conservative MP for Southend in 1935. According to Jock Colville, Sir Henry was “a leading light in London café society,” a friend of Lady Cunard’s and R. A. Butler’s. He wrote with elegance and deployed a sharp wit.
* Among those who chose the name were a young, working-class Liverpool couple, “Alf” and Julia Lennon, who honored the Old Man when they named their son—born during an October air raid—John Winston Lennon.
* Churchill’s choice of The Grand Alliance as the title for the third volume of his war memoirs is pure Winston: he bestows his thanks on the Americans for their wartime help while at the same time, in the fashion of an inside joke, invokes a comparison between his war leadership and that of his glorious ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, whose Grand Alliance defeated the Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession.
* Boer spelling.
* Two hundred thousand European Jews had been granted immigration status by HMG since 1933, more than twice the per-capita rate of the U.S., which had accepted 160,000. See Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 409.
* Breguet, Paris made since 1775, the timepiece of choice for Washington, Wellington, Napoleon, and most of Europe’s royal swells, including Marie Antoinette.
* In the next decade it would be rechristened Commonwealth Day, and the date moved first to June 10, Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, then to the second Monday of March. By the time Churchill celebrated his ninetieth birthday, its original meaning was fast fading from the collective memory.
* Sixty members of the Other Club had the previous autumn each contributed one pound sterling to buy Winston a solid gold snuffbox known to have been owned by Lord Nelson, one of Churchill’s heroes. A dip into the gold box would, for a romantic, invoke an almost spiritual experience. Winston dipped often.
* Ha-ha: a deep garden trench, one side vertical, the other gently sloping, designed to keep livestock out of gardens. Popular since the seventeenth century, the ha-ha allowed for views uncluttered by walls or fences.
* Goebbels, in his diary, cites June 21 as the anniversary. Hitler, to avoid the obvious comparison, later held June 23 to be the anniversary. Historian Will Durant places Napoleon at the Russian frontier—the Niemen River—on June 23. It was at the Niemen that Napoleon and Czar Alexander five years earlier had pledged their friendship for life.
* Churchill planned to promote Dill to field marshal and ship him to Bombay, a consolation prize for the old soldier, but after Argentia, where Dill displayed an easy ability to get along with the Americans, especially Marshall, Churchill took the new field marshal with him to Washington in late December, there to leave him as liaison to the American chiefs. Dill became, in the estimation of George Marshall and Roosevelt, one of the primary talents of the war, instrumental in creating a genuine working relationship between the Americans and British.
* A private secretary almost always dined with Churchill in order to receive, assess, and pass along to him communications deemed vital. The principals at such dinners—Winston, Harriman, Dill, Hopkins, etc.—often neglect to note in their memoirs any lesser aide who might also have attended, referred to as a dogsbody by the British, because they were always around and underfoot, as it were.
* A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1890).
* George Malcolm Thomson, a Scottish-born journalist, served during the war as a deputy to Lord Beaverbrook. By the 1970s, Thomson had earned a reputation as a talented historian and novelist.
* She was the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, who served as prime minister from 1908 to 1916, and the mother of Violet Bonham Carter.
* First published in Britain as Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (Constable and Company, 1966). Published in the United States as Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966). Knighted in 1942, Sir Charles was made the first Lord Moran in January 1943. The book is part diary and part after-the-fact recollection presented as diary entries. Moran was not present in many of the scenes he paints himself into, and in which he quotes Churchill. Churchill’s postwar secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, later declared (author interview, Nov. 15, 1980) that Churchill would no more hold substantive conversations with Moran about politics “than he would discuss the state of his bowels with his chiefs of staff.” Browne held suspect much of the “debating, conversations and quotes he [Moran] put into people’s mouths.”
* The U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R., China; Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa, and Yugoslavia.
* The Statute of Westminster, passed by Parliament in 1931 over Churchill’s violent opposition, granted autonomy to certain Dominions—Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, subject to ratification by their respective parliaments.
* When, in 1960, Churchill was told of Bevan’s death, he mumbled a few words of moderate respect, then paused for effect before asking, “Are you sure he’s dead?”
* A reference to Dr. Frank Buchman, an American evangelical who relocated to England and formed the Oxford Group to preach his creed of reaching God through the practice of frequent and robust confession—“sin and tell,” Time called it (Jan. 18, 1943). By the late 1930s Buchman’s theology formed the underlying creed of Alcoholics Anonymous.
* Churchill wrote of the Englishmen of his generation who either would not or could not pronounce the letter “r.” In My Early Life, he described an attempt by the commanding officer of the 4th Hussars, Colonel John Brabazon, to catch a train: After waiting for some time on the station platform, Brabazon turned to the stationmaster and asked, “Where is my twain?” Told that his train had already gone, the colonel responded, “Gone? Bwing me another.”
* Persia had taken the name Iran in 1935. To avoid possible confusion with Iraq in official communications, Churchill ordered that “Persia” be used rather than “Iran” in all wartime memos regarding Iran.
* Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only halfway up,
They were neither up nor down.
* This was not an exaggeration, if both civilians and soldiers are included. Every three months, more Russians died than did Americans in all the wars in American history.
* “The antlers of the deer.”
* Although he frequently spoke of a “United States of Europe,” Churchill did not specify whether that entity would be a loose confederation or a federal system, with member states bound together by a constitution. He continued to speak only in broad and imprecise terms even while championing a “united” Europe after the war.
* Coward was finally knighted in 1969.
* In September 1959, Lord Cherwell offered to a colleague that he had finally “b
uried the hatchet with Tizard…. But,” the Prof added, “I know where to find the handle.” Tizard died the next month (Moran, p. 813).
* In Britain, the publishing of a report such as Beveridge’s as a “white paper” signifies HMG’s overall intent (without necessarily announcing a time frame) to analyze, debate the merits of, and possibly act upon some or all of the recommendations made.
* As with many of the Americans who visited the Churchills, Stettinius brought them a Virginia ham, from his own farm. When he learned that the maximum weight he could bring on board the Pan American Clipper out of New York was forty pounds, he trimmed the fat off the ham. In London, a colleague told him, “Ed, you should have left your shoes at home if necessary, but not the fat off that ham.” Churchill, thanking Stettinius for the diminutive ham, peered into the bag, smiled, and told him never again to trim the fat.
* Cooper had been a minister without portfolio since the fall of Singapore, where he had been resident cabinet minister.
* The destruction, Bomber Harris later wrote, “must have been even more cataclysmic than the bursting of the two atom bombs over Japanese cities.” (Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 179)