Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Had Churchill not been a dedicated Zionist, he might have suffered the fate of Father Coughlin, though it needs to be emphasized: Churchill was no anti-Semite. He admired Jews, respected their abilities and accomplishments, befriended Zionists and national Jews, and loathed only those apostates to their faith who had cast their lot with Lenin and Trotsky.

  “All is race,” wrote Disraeli in Tancred, “there is nothing else.” Churchill would have agreed. In Eminent Churchillians, Andrew Roberts writes that his views were not only “more profoundly racist than most,” they influenced his conduct as a statesman.187

  Churchill’s racial assumptions occupied a prime place both in his political philosophy and in his views on international relations. He was a convinced white…supremacist and thought in terms of race to a degree that was remarkable even by the standards of his own time. He spoke of certain races with a virulent Anglo-Saxon triumphalism which was wholly lacking in other twentieth-century prime ministers, and in a way which even as early as the 1920s shocked some Cabinet colleagues.188

  To Churchill, blood and race were determinant in the history of nations and civilizations. Introducing the peoples of the Sudan in The River War, his memoir of the campaign in which he had served under Kitchener, Churchill wrote:

  The qualities of mongrels are rarely admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and negro types has produced a debased and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than the primitive savages. The stronger race soon began to prey upon the simple aboriginals…. All, without exception, were hunters of men.189

  To Churchill, Negroes were “niggers” or “blackamoors,” Arabs “worthless,” Chinese “chinks” or “pigtails,” Indians “baboos,” and South African blacks “Hottentots.”190

  Churchill’s physician Lord Moran wrote in his diary that, while FDR was thinking of the importance of a China of four hundred million, Churchill “thinks only of the color of their skin; it is when he talks of India and China that you remember he is a Victorian.”191 Years after the war, Moran wrote, “It would seem that he has scarcely moved an inch from his attitude toward China since the day of the Boxer Rebellion [of 1899–1901].”192

  Writing to the Palestine Commission in 1936, Churchill made his convictions clear: “I do not admit…that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia…by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race…has come and taken their place.”193

  Churchill, writes Andrew Roberts, “found Indians ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans.’”194

  During the 1943 Bengal famine, in which over a million Indians died, [Churchill] reassured the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, that they would nevertheless continue to breed “like rabbits.” After such an outburst in 1944, Amery was prompted to tell the Prime Minister that he “didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”195

  During the war, Churchill ranted against Indian demands for independence. “I hate Indians,” he said. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”196 Beseeched by Amery and the Indian viceroy to release food stocks in the wartime famine, “Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.”197

  One may find like comments in other leaders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty in two wars and prime minister for five years of the bloodiest war in history, was in a position to act on his beliefs. And he did.

  “KEEP ENGLAND WHITE”

  THOSE RACIAL BELIEFS were behind the uncompromising stand Churchill took on “what was then called coloured immigration from the British Commonwealth” in his last days as prime minister in the mid-1950s.198 Churchill was a restrictionist. His thinking paralleled that of Lord Salisbury, who had declared: “It is not for me merely a question of whether criminal negroes should be allowed in or not…it is a question whether great quantities of negroes, criminal or not, should be allowed to come.”199

  “Churchill’s feelings were strongly in [Salisbury’s] direction,” writes historian Peter Hennessey.200 To the governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, Churchill said in 1954 that were immigration from the Caribbean not halted, “we would have a magpie society: that would never do.”201

  Colored immigration weighed heavily on his mind. Churchill told one interviewer, “I think it is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take notice.”202 Writes Hennessey, “Just as [Churchill] was distressed by the break-up of the British Empire, he was, for all his imperial romance, deeply disturbed about its black or brown members coming to the mother country.”203

  Future prime minister Harold Macmillan, in his diary entry on the Cabinet meeting of January 20, 1955, wrote: “More discussion about the West Indian immigrants. A Bill is being drafted—but it’s not an easy problem. P.M. [Churchill] thinks ‘Keep England White’ a good slogan!”204

  Had Churchill endured in office, there might have been legislation, says Hennessey. London would look entirely different today. But by April, against his will, Churchill was out as prime minister, no longer able to lead a campaign to “Keep England White”—an astonishing slogan in a day when Dr. Martin Luther King, a disciple of Gandhi whom Churchill had detested, was starting out in Montgomery. In 1968, Enoch Powell, Tory shadow minister of defense, would take up the banner of Salisbury and Churchill and deliver his “Rivers of Blood” speech. By then, time had passed the restrictionists by, and England was on its way to becoming the multiracial, multicultural nation of today, no longer Churchill’s England.

  STATESMAN—OR WAR CHIEF?

  THAT CHURCHILL WAS A GREAT war leader who inspired as he led his people is undeniable. But was he a great statesman?

  “You ask: What is our policy?” he had roared to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940.

  I will say, “It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.”

  You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.205

  This is the rhetoric of a war chief.

  When Hitler invaded Russia, Churchill welcomed Stalin into the camp of the saints. On September 21, 1943, after the tide had turned at Stalingrad and the vast Red Army was moving inexorably westward toward Europe, Churchill was still monomaniacal on the evil of Germany:

  The twin roots of all our evils, Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism, must be extirpated. Until this is achieved, there are no sacrifices we will not make and no lengths in violence to which we will not go.206

  It was this mind-set that led Churchill to accept the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland and Eastern Europe, to endorse FDR’s call at Casablanca for “unconditional surrender,” to agree to Morgenthau’s plan to turn Germany into a pasture, to test anthrax cakes to poison German civilians, to unleash waves of bombers on the defenseless cities of a defeated country.

  This single-minded determination of Churchill to pulverize and punish Germany played directly into the hands of Goebbels and Stalin. The Nazi propaganda minister used the Allied demand for unconditional surrender and the vindictive Morgenthau Plan to convince Germans they must go on fighting to the death, as defeat meant no survival for the nation. Eisenhower believed the demand for an unconditional surrender at Casablanca extended the war by years and cost countless lives. And the destruction of Germany to which Churchill had dedicated himself left a power vacuum in Europe Stalin inevitably filled. Britain fought Nazi tyranny for six years, only to pave the path to power for a greater tyranny.

  Within months of the war’s end, Churchill was bewailing the “Iron Curtain” that had fallen across Europe and the horrors taking place on the far side. Within a few years, he was to call
for the rearmament of those same Germans he had called “Huns,” to help defend Christian civilization. Evil as they were, “Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism” had not been “the twin roots of all our evils.” When the Nazi tyranny fell, others—Stalin’s, Tito’s, Mao’s, Kim Il Sung’s, some mightier and even more murderous—arose.

  “War,” said the soldier-scholar Clausewitz, “is a continuation of policy by other means.”207 The warrior’s goal is victory. The statesman’s goal is a peace that leaves the nation more secure. Churchill succeeded magnificently as a war leader. He failed as a statesman.

  As time went by, Churchill seemed to realize it. “As the blinkers of war were removed,” writes John Charmley, “Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake that had been made.”208 After the war, he told Robert Boothby, “Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.”209

  Stalin kept in mind always what Europe would look like after the war. Churchill seemed not to have thought long or deeply over the fate of the continent if Germany, Europe’s ancient barrier to Oriental despotism and barbarism, were annihilated. Blindly, he helped bring it about.

  Full of honors, late in life Churchill must have realized the depth of his failure. For had not he himself written, “Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.” Yet statesmen have done both: Washington, Wellington, Bismarck, and MacArthur come to mind.

  “MILKING THE BRITISH COW”

  WHAT WAS THE LEGACY of Winston Churchill?

  If one traces his career from his entry into the inner Cabinet as First Lord in 1911 to his final departure from 10 Downing Street in 1955, that half century encompasses the collapse of British power. In 1911, the sun never set on the British Empire. In 1955, all was lost save honor. India was gone. Egypt and the Suez Canal were gone. Palestine was gone. All the colonies in Asia and Africa were going. Russians and Americans were the hegemons of Europe and the Dominions were looking to Washington, not London, for protection and leadership. Britain was no longer great. The long and brilliant career of the Man of the Century coincided precisely with the decline and fall of Britain as a world power and a great power.

  When Churchill at last yielded office to Eden in 1955, the ex–Labour minister Anuerin Bevan said satirically: “Sir Winston Churchill’s superlative personal gifts have eased the passage of Britain to the status of a second-rate power.”210

  The twentieth century was not the British Century. It was the American Century. Churchill believed the two English-speaking peoples would be eternal partners, with British statesmen playing Greeks to America’s Romans. But when Britain was in her darkest hour, FDR shook her down for every dime. Poring over a list of British assets in the Western Hemisphere that Morgenthau had requested, Roosevelt “reacted with the coolness of a WASP patrician: ‘Well, they aren’t bust—there’s lots of money there.’”211

  Looking back, Alan Clark was appalled by Churchill’s groveling to the Americans:

  Churchill’s abasement of Britain before the United States has its origins in the same obsession [with Hitler]. The West Indian bases were handed over; the closed markets for British exports were to be dismantled; the entire portfolio of (largely private) holdings in America was liquidated. “A very nice little list,” was Roosevelt’s comment when the British ambassador offered it. “You guys aren’t broken yet.”212

  Before Lend-Lease aid could begin, Britain was forced to sell all her commercial assets in the United States and turn over all her gold. FDR sent his own ship, the Quincy, to Simonstown near Cape Town to pick up the last $50 million in British gold reserves.213

  “[W]e are not only to be skinned but flayed to the bone,” Churchill wailed to his colleagues.214 He was not far off. Churchill drafted a letter to FDR saying that if America continued along this line, she would “wear the aspect of a sheriff collecting the last assets of a helpless debtor.”215 It was, said the prime minister, “not fitting that any nation should put itself wholly in the hands of another.”216 Desperately dependent as Britain was on America, Churchill reconsidered, and rewrote his note in more conciliatory tones.

  And FDR knew exactly what he was doing. “We have been milking the British financial cow, which had plenty of milk at one time, but which has now about become dry,” Roosevelt confided to one Cabinet member.217

  Writes A.J.P. Taylor of how Roosevelt humbled Churchill:

  Great Britain became a poor, though deserving cousin—not to Roosevelt’s regret. So far as it is possible to read his devious mind, it appears that he expected the British to wear down both Germany and themselves. When all independent powers had ceased to exist, the United States would step in and run the world.218

  At Teheran and Yalta, where FDR should have supported his British ally, he mocked Churchill to amuse Stalin. FDR thought the British Empire an anachronism that ought to be abolished. “We are therefore presented,” writes Captain Grenfell, “with the extraordinary paradox that Britain’s principal enemy was anxious for the British empire to remain in being, while her principal ally, the United States, was determined to destroy it.”219

  When Churchill’s successor Eden invaded Suez in 1956 to retake the Canal from the Egyptian dictator who had nationalized it, Harold Macmillan assured the Cabinet, “I know Ike. He will lie doggo.”220

  Like many Brits, Macmillan misread Ike and the Americans. Ike ordered Britain out of Egypt. Faced with a U.S. threat to sink the pound, the humiliated Brits submitted and departed. Eden fell. The new Romans would not be needing any Greeks. Correlli Barnett is savage on Churchill’s naiveté in believing in a “special relationship” with the Americans:

  The Second World War saw the disastrous culmination of the long-standing but unreciprocated British belief in the existence of a “special relationship” between England and America. For the Americans—like the Russians, like the Germans, like the English themselves—were motivated by a desire to promote their own interests rather than by sentiment, which was a commodity they reserved for Pilgrim’s Dinners, where it could do no harm. Churchill’s policy therefore provided the Americans with the opportunity first, of prospering on British orders, and secondly, of humbling British world power, a long-cherished American ambition. From 1940 to the end of the Second World War and after, it was America, not Russia, which was to constitute that lurking menace to British interests which Churchill, in his passionate obsession with defeating Germany, failed to perceive.221

  Canadian historian Edward Ingram seconds Barnett, calling Britain’s “alignment with the United States…a strangling alliance in which one party uses the alliance to destroy the other.”222

  The relationship between the United Kingdom and Britain is shown in the U.S. offer during World War II to defend the United Kingdom but not the British Empire. As the destruction of Britain as a world power was the price to be paid for the safety of the United Kingdom, Englishmen and Scots were asked to buy safety for themselves by throwing [other subjects] and Indians to the wolves.223

  “We must never get out of step with the Americans—never,” Churchill told Violet Bonham Carter.224 Charmley considers this maxim to reflect one of Churchill’s greatest failures of vision, how he “imperfectly understood the dynamics of American power and its hostility to the Empire to which he had devoted so much of his life.”225

  In Eminent Churchillians, Andrew Roberts writes of how one British writer had wittily graded George VI as king and sovereign:

  Considering that King George VI’s sixteen-year reign spanned Anschluss, Munich, the Second World War, the communist domination of Eastern Europe, the loss of India and the twilight of empire, post-war Austerity and Britain’s eclipse as a global superpower, one might sympathize with Evelyn Waugh’s valediction, “George VI’s reign will go down in history as the mos
t disastrous my country has known since Matilda and Stephen.”226

  “Of course,” writes Roberts charitably, “the King was in no way personally to blame for any of this.”227 No, the King was not. But, then, who was? What did Churchill recommend at Anschluss? Did he not applaud Chamberlain’s war guarantee to Poland that led to the Second World War, Stalin’s domination of Eastern Europe, Britain’s bankruptcy, the postwar Austerity, the early and humiliating end of the British Empire, and Britain’s eclipse as a world power? Who sacrificed everything to stand atop the rubble of Hitler’s Reich? If the reign of George VI was, as Waugh said, the “most disastrous my country has known since Matilda and Stephen,” but the king was not to blame, who was? Who made British history in the reign of the late and unlamented George VI?

  The title of the last book of his six-volume history of World War II, Triumph and Tragedy, was apposite. Churchill’s words are immortal, but the deeds with which he brought triumph to himself produced tragedy for his nation and the world. He inherited a great empire, but left an island-nation off the coast of Europe with three centuries of its wealth, power, and prestige sunk. After Potsdam and his dismissal, when the lasting ruin the war had visited on his nation had sunk in, Churchill seemed often to be melancholy. Returning by train to Washington following his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill was talking with Clark Clifford and Truman’s spokesman Charlie Ross of the events that had shaped his life; suddenly he blurted, “If I were to be born again, I would wish to be born in the United States. Your country is the future of the world…. Great Britain has passed its zenith.”228