Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  On January 10, 1942, with Britain isolated, his armies deep inside Russia, Hitler confided, “Confronted with America, the best we can do is hold out against her to the end.”81 General Alfred Jodl would testify shortly after the Nazi surrender that from “the high point of the start of 1942,” Hitler realized “victory was no longer attainable.”82

  On January 27, 1942, with the Americans holed up on Bataan, Hitler was absorbed in self-pity: “Here, too, I am ice cold. If the German people are not prepared to stand up for their own preservation, fine. Then they should perish.”83 Seven weeks after Pearl Harbor, Hitler had begun to contemplate the annihilation of the Third Reich.

  CHAPTER 14

  Man of the Century

  I DO NOT CARE SO much for the principles I advocate as for the impression which my words produce and the reputation they give me.1

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1898

  Winston has no principles.2

  —JOHN MORLEY, 1908

  Cabinet Colleague

  Churchill will write his name in history; take care that he does not write it in blood.3

  —A. G. GARDINER, 1913

  Pillars of Society

  AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ended, a debate ensued over who had been its greatest man. The Weekly Standard nominee was Churchill. Not only was he Man of the Century, said scholar Harry Jaffa, he was the Man of Many Centuries.4 To Kissinger he was “the quintessential hero.” A BBC poll of a million people in 2002 found that Britons considered Churchill the “greatest Briton of all time.”

  His life was surely among the most extraordinary, his youth full of those “crowded hours” of which Theodore Roosevelt spoke after San Juan Hill. He came under fire as a correspondent attached to the Spanish army in Cuba, fought with the Malakind Field Force in India, rode in the last cavalry charge of the Empire at Omdurman, was taken prisoner in the Boer War, escaped to march to the relief of Ladysmith and capture of Pretoria, wrote bestselling books about his war experiences, became an international celebrity, and entered Parliament at twenty-six. At thirty-six, he was First Lord of the Admiralty, where his was the most powerful voice in the Cabinet for war. “Winston, who has got on all his war paint, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of tomorrow morning,” wrote Asquith on August 4, 1914, for Britain the first day of the Great War, “the whole thing fills me with sadness.”5

  Cashiered after the Dardanelles disaster, Churchill went to France to fight and returned as Minister for War and Air in Lloyd George’s Cabinet. He would participate in all the great decisions, become the dominant British leader of the twentieth century, the most famous of all prime ministers. His six-volume history of World War II would win him the Nobel Prize for Literature, besting Hemingway. Few statesmen have approached his mastery of the language. His conversation and speeches sparkle with wit, insight, and brilliance. One biographer titled his book on Churchill simply The Great Man. But what was the legacy of the most famous of all British statesmen?

  THE ARMORED TRAIN

  IT WAS THE BOER WAR that made Churchill famous and revealed the qualities that would make him both admired and distrusted all his life.

  Sailing to South Africa as a correspondent for the Morning Post, Churchill was anxious to see a battle up close. With 150 soldiers in three trucks, attached in front of and behind the engine, Churchill rode an armored train north to scout out Boer-infested territory south of the besieged town of Ladysmith in Natal. Historian Thomas Pakenham relates:

  The patrols were made by armored train, unaccompanied by mounted troops. It was a parody of modern mobile war: an innovation that was already obsolete. Imprisoned on its vulnerable railway line, the armored train was as helpless against field-guns in the veld as a naval dreadnought sent into battle with its rudder jammed.6

  As the train chugged north, Churchill observed Boers on horseback, observing him. The Boers let the train pass, then piled rocks onto the tracks. Farther north, the train drew fire from a Boer field gun. Immediately, it went into reverse and roared back down the tracks, slamming into the rocks. The trucks were derailed and Boer sharpshooters with Mausers and a field piece began to pour fire into the British. Churchill helped clear the tracks to enable the engine to flee south with fifty survivors, mostly wounded. He, along with fifty-eight other British, were forced to surrender—a debacle and a humiliation for the British army. The Boers had suffered only four wounded.

  Churchill was imprisoned in Pretoria, escaped, and returned to South Africa. Few incidents in his young life are more instructive in understanding the future leader Churchill would become.

  Gen. Redvers Buller, the commander in South Africa, described the operation as one of “inconceivable stupidity.”7 And Churchill, more than any other, had apparently been responsible. Writes Pakenham:

  [I]t was Churchill’s burning desire to see a battle, it appears, that helped persuade the officer commanding the armoured train, Churchill’s unfortunate friend, Captain Aylmer Haldane, not to turn back when they first saw the signs of Botha’s trap on their journey northwards.8

  Churchill would embellish the story, contending he had been taken prisoner by the Boer general and future prime minister Louis Botha himself. But when he returned to South Africa, Churchill gave Major General Hildyard “a damning account,” admitting they had run “confidently on to within range of the Boers, being unaware they had guns with them and hoping to give them a lesson.” To John Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, Churchill blurted that the Boers had rounded them all up “like cattle. The greatest indignity of my life.”9

  Of the British colonial army it was said that it exhibited a courage that was matched only by stupidity. In the armored train incident, Churchill had shown both reckless daring and dismal judgment. Both would mark his long career. Yet when his own depiction of the incident and his escape ran in the British press, he became an international figure and returned home one of the most famous young men in the world. Before his twenty-sixth birthday, Churchill was elected to Parliament, where he would remain, with two brief interludes, for sixty-four years.

  As we have seen, Churchill defected to the Liberal Party in 1904, on the eve of its ascendancy, and was rewarded with the Cabinet posts of Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty. In The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield described the young Cabinet minister Winston Churchill thus:

  By nature flamboyant, insolent in his bearing, impatient in his mind, and Tory in his deepest convictions, he was a curious person to be found holding a responsible position in the Liberal Party, and few men could have been more distrusted, or have taken a more curious pleasure in being distrusted.10

  Even his devoted friend, Asquith’s daughter, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, said of him, “Winston was very unpopular…. The Liberals regarded him as an arriviste and a thruster—and the Conservatives as a deserter, a rat and a traitor to his class.”11

  A parliamentary colleague once rose to complain that Churchill “walks in, makes his speech, walks out, and leaves the whole place as if God almighty had spoken…He never listens to any man’s speech but his own.”12 “The comment,” writes Lynne Olson, a chronicler of Churchill’s rise to prime minister, “received loud cheers from both sides of the chamber.”13

  Few denied his brilliance, many questioned his judgment.

  In 1916, Churchill, out of the admiralty, challenged the adequacy of the naval building program in the House of Commons, then suggested that Admiral Sir John Fisher, gone since the Dardanelles disaster, and watching from the balcony, be recalled. “[T]he following day,” writes one biographer, “Balfour tore Churchill apart by contrasting his previous statements about Fisher’s failure to support him with his current praise for his gifts.”14

  Then it was that Lloyd George said of him, “Poor Winston…. A brilliant fellow without judgment which is adequate to his fiery impulse. His steering gear is too weak for his horse-power.”15

  When Baldwin began his third premiership, in 1935, Churchill, though he had served
in Baldwin’s second cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929, was not recalled. Why was he excluded by Baldwin? Though all conceded his extraordinary gifts, Churchill was seen as a man of erratic judgment.

  His decision as Chancellor to return Britain to the gold standard had proved a disaster. It overvalued British exports, pricing them out of foreign markets. This helped to bring on the General Strike of 1926, advancing the Depression and bringing down the Baldwin government in 1929. The gold decision won for Winston the title role in Keynes’s sequel to The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes titled it The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill.

  In January 1931, Churchill resigned from the shadow cabinet in furious opposition to his party’s support for self-government for India. “Churchill’s resignation and his invective-filled campaign against the government over India were major factors in his future exclusion from any high posts in the Baldwin and Chamberlain administrations.”16

  In the debate over India Churchill seemed at times “almost demented with fury,” noted one government supporter. He launched bitter personal attacks against Baldwin…and his rhetorical assaults on India and those seeking its independence were extreme, even poisonous. Hindus, he declared were a “foul race protected by their pollution from the doom that is their due.”17

  When Gandhi, after release from prison, met the viceroy at his palace in Delhi, Churchill exploded on the floor of the Commons:

  It is alarming and almost nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of the type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.18

  “Such a spectacle,” said Churchill, “can only increase the unrest in India and the danger to which white people have been exposed.”19 To grant independence to India, Churchill went on, would constitute a “crime against civilisation” and a “catastrophe which will shake the world.”20 Invective of a high order, but unworthy of a statesman.

  His last-ditch defense of Edward VIII in the abdication crisis over the king’s determination to marry the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson reinforced the impression of wretched judgment. Churchill urged Edward to hold on to his throne, and, on December 7, 1936, “filled with emotion and brandy,” he implored the Commons not to rush to judgment, only to be shouted down by a hostile House.21

  Robert Boothby, the personal assistant to Churchill as Chancellor, who looked to him to lead the Conservatives who wished to stand up to the dictators, wrote Churchill, after his five-minute disaster, “What happened this afternoon makes me feel that it is almost impossible for those who are most devoted to you personally to follow you blindly…in politics. Because they cannot be sure where the hell they are going to be landed next.”22

  Another acolyte agreed. This abdication crisis, wrote Harold Macmillan, “undermined the reputation and political stature of the greatest and most prescient statesman then living.”23

  Baldwin merrily confided to friends that he would like to say of Churchill on the floor of the House:

  When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then a fairy came who said, “No one person has a right to so many gifts,” picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all his gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House we do not take his advice.24

  Churchill would never forgive Baldwin for leaving him out of his last Cabinet. Asked to pen a tribute on Baldwin’s eightieth birthday in 1947, the world-famous Churchill came up with the line “It would have been better for our country if he had never lived.”25 It was not used at the Baldwin tribute.

  Chamberlain, who succeeded Baldwin in 1937, “had a similar view and, moreover, feared that Churchill would demand excessive spending for defense and make jingoistic speeches offending foreign governments.”26

  In November 1938, when Churchill asked for a vote on setting up a Ministry of Supply, only to be humiliated when almost no one supported him, Chamberlain jabbed the needle in. Echoing Baldwin, the prime minister observed to laughter from the House:

  I have the greatest admiration for my right hon. Friend’s many brilliant qualities. He shines in every direction…[but] if I were asked whether judgment is the first of my right hon. Friend’s many admirable qualities, I should have to ask the House of Commons not to press me too far.27

  “The shaft went home because it corresponded so closely with the view many Conservatives had of Churchill,” writes biographer John Charmley.28

  Yet to call these the “wilderness years” of Winston Churchill is hyperbole. Churchill remained in Parliament throughout and was, the prime minister excepted, the most famous political figure in Britain, with an entourage and following not unlike that of an opposition leader.

  FINEST HOUR

  WHAT MAKES CHURCHILL the Man of the Century?

  Comes the reply: He was the indispensable man who saved Western civilization. Without Churchill, Britain might have accepted an armistice or sued for peace in 1940. The war in the west would have been over. Hitler, victorious, would have turned on Russia and crushed her, and the world would have been at his feet. By standing alone from June 1940 to June 1941, the British bulldog held on until Hitler committed his fatal blunders—invading the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States. These decisions sealed his doom. But without Churchill’s heroic refusal to accept any peace or armistice, Hitler would have won the war and the world.

  Churchill’s claim to be Man of the Century rests on a single year: 1940. Assuming power as the German invasion of France began on May 10, he presided over the miraculous evacuation of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, as Fighter Command defended the island in one of the more stirring battles of the century. Magnificent it was, and, in that hour, it was the good fortune of Churchill to have been chosen by destiny to give the British lion its roar. Asked what year he would like to live over again, Churchill replied, “1940 every time, every time.”29 He was the man of destiny who inspired Britain to keep fighting until the New World came to the rescue of the Old.

  In Five Days in London: May 1940, John Lukacs reveals that Churchill did entertain the idea of a negotiated peace in the last hours before Dunkirk. Lukacs describes the situation in the War Cabinet meeting on May 26, when Foreign Secretary Halifax “no longer wished merely to state his views; now he wanted to extract a commitment from Churchill.”30

  Halifax recounted how he put the proposition to Churchill:

  We had to face the fact that it was not so much now a question of imposing a complete defeat on Germany but of safeguarding the independence of our Empire…. We should naturally be prepared to consider any proposals which might lead to this, provided our liberty and independence were assured…. If he [Churchill] was satisfied that matters vital to the independence of this country were unaffected, (would he be) prepared to discuss such terms?31

  Here, Lukacs writes, is how Churchill answered Halifax:

  At this juncture Churchill knew that he could not answer with a categorical no. He said that he “would be thankful to get out of our present difficulties on such terms, provided we retained the essentials and the elements of our vital strength, even at the cost of some territory”—an extraordinary admission.32

  Churchill thus considered a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany. He considered ceding some imperial territory if Britain’s independence could be assured and the essentials of the empire preserved. These would include the Royal Navy. Chamberlain, who sat between Halifax and Churchill at the Cabinet meeting, recalled in his diary Churchill’s response to Halifax’s suggestion that they negotiate with Hitler through Mussolini, who had not yet entered the war:

  The P.M. [Churchill] disliked any move toward Musso. It was incredible that Hitler would consent to any t
erms that we could accept—though if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta & Gibraltar & some African colonies he would jump at it. But the only safe way was to convince Hitler that he couldn’t beat us…. I [Chamberlain] supported this view.33

  In the War Cabinet meeting of May 28, 1940, Churchill gave his final rebuke to those who held out hope for a negotiated peace with Germany: “The Germans would demand our Fleet…our naval bases and much else. We should become a slave state.”34

  “This was surely right,” Niall Ferguson wrote in 2006.35 But was it?

  Where is the evidence that Hitler intended to demand the British fleet, when he did not demand the French fleet? Where is the evidence he sought to make Britain a “slave state”? As we saw in the last chapter, in June 1940, at the apex of his power after France’s surrender and the British evacuation, Hitler wanted the British Empire to survive and endure. He wanted to end the war.

  Lukacs contends that even had Churchill entertained the idea of a negotiated peace, he resisted the temptation and became the indispensable man who made the decision to fight on. Lukacs’s point seems indisputable. Churchill held on until the Soviet Union was invaded and Hitler declared war on the United States, the decisions that would bring Hitler and his regime down in fiery ruin.

  INDISPENSABLE MAN

  WAS CHURCHILL TRULY THE indispensable man in Hitler’s defeat?

  F. H. Hinsley, whose 1951 Hitler’s Strategy relies heavily on Hitler’s war directives and conversations with Adm. Erich Raeder, documents the case convincingly.

  As we have seen, after the British guarantee to Poland, Hitler came to believe that he would have to fight for Danzig. But he did not want war with Britain. Among the reasons Hitler struck his pact with Stalin was to convince the British that the fate of Poland was sealed. But when Chamberlain reaffirmed his war guarantee to Poland on August 24, a stunned Hitler, his diplomatic coup having failed, called off the invasion scheduled for the twenty-fifth.