churchill's war

i Introduction  ii churchill’s war David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Incompletely educated at Imperial College of Science & Technology and at Uni- versity College London, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the German language. Among his thirty books, the best-known include Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field-Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe; Göring: a Biography, and Nuremberg, the Last Battle. He has translated several works by other authors in- cluding Field-Marshal Keitel, Reinhard Gehlen and Nikki Lauda. He lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and has raised five daughters. In  he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. In  he issued a revised edition, Apocalypse , as well as his important biography, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich.The first volume of Churchill’s War appeared in . iii Introduction David Irving CHURCHILL’s Wa r ii –Triumph in Adversity ‘Two books in English stand out from the vast literature of the Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, published in , and David Irving’s Hitler’s WAR’ JOHN KEEGAN, Times Literary Supplement,  F FOCAL POINT iv churchill’s war Copyright ©  Parforce (UK) Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be commercially repro- duced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission of the author in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act  (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and to civil claims for damages. Churchill’s War is a series of volumes on the life of the British statesman; vol. i was published by Veritas, of Western Australia, in , and by Hutchinson (London) in , by Avon Books (New York) in , and by Herbig Verlag (Munich), in . The volumes are also available as a free download in PDF format from our website at www.fpp.co.uk/books. FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS Duke Street, London   British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN    v Introduction Contents Temporary contents of Part I only v Introduction: Never Forget Your Trade Mark vii 1: A Very Big and Very Ugly War 3 2: Prime Minister with Nothing to Hide 21 3: The Charter that was Never Signed 37 4: Shall We Dance? asks Mr Churchill 53 5: ‘We Did It Before – and We Can Do It Again!’ 73 6: Carry a Big Stick 89 7: The ‘Nigger in the Woodpile’ 107 8: Really Not Quite Normal 135 9: Westward Look 157 10: Gaps in the Archives 163 11: A Sorry Pass 181 12: Day of Perfidy 203 Temporary contents of Part I only vi churchill’s war vii Introduction introduction: Never Forget Your Trade Mark Y ears after the Second World War, one of Winston Churchill’s wisest advisers would ask, ‘Why in  was Churchill almost universally regarded as a gifted, if eccentric politician, lacking in judgement and better out of the government, whereas in  he was re- garded as a world statesman and the revered superman of the century?’  The possible answer – he won the war – is defeated by the equally possible observation: he forfeited Britain’s empire. He won the war, as we shall see in the final volume of this trilogy, in spite of himself. He had enraged every one of his military advisers on the way. He did not spare the cruel and crushing remarks about his own chiefs of staff: ‘You may take,’ he rasped, ‘the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum total of their fears!’  By Victory in Europe Day, in May , the chiefs of staff would be so out of sympathy with their leader that when he sent for them on that day, and again when he said good-bye after losing the General Election in July, and had the whisky and soda brought in, they just sat ruminating. On both occasions the chiefs sat there ‘like dummies’ and did not even drink to his health.  After the war the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, was angered to find that Churchill had painted himself as a hero in his memoirs; the account which Alanbrooke, the former General Sir Alan Brooke, himself committed to posterity, in a leather-bound and padlocked diary, was less flattering. ‘On the whole,’ grumbled Churchill, reading the first volume, ‘I think that I am against publishing day to day diaries written under the stress of events so soon afterwards.’  Had he seen, as we have, what Brooke omitted, he would have expressed himself rather more forcefully. vii viii churchill’s war the first volume of this trilogy appeared in , thirty years after Church- ill wrote those words.* It is fitting to commence a second volume, appearing after such an in- terval, with a survey of what we achieved with the first. We saw how after a ‘wilderness period’ of ten years Winston S. Churchill, described by Harold Balfour as this ‘singularly unlovable’ man, came to power on May , , to the alarm of his monarch and the dismay of at least three of his cabinet ministers (Lords Beaverbrook and Halifax, and Mr Neville Chamberlain); how, by playing on a non-existent threat of Nazi invasion he entrenched himself in office, and rebuffed the peace settlement which Adolf Hitler re- peatedly and secretly offered, and which more than one of King George VI’s ministers, his consort Queen Elizabeth, and (on certain dates in May and June  even Churchill himself) seemed disposed to accept;  how having thus sabotaged the prospects of peace, he contrived to prolong the war and, cynics would observe, his own premiership, by propelling Britain and Germany into a campaign of mutual air bombardment. At a time when Hitler embargoed all raids on London, Churchill ordered a -bomber raid on Berlin on August , , deliberately unleashing a bombing cam- paign which would reach a climax of barbarism only after the present vol- ume comes to a close.† In his orgy of destructiveness, Churchill even issued orders – never carried out – a few days after the firestorm in Hamburg, for the ruthless saturation bombing of the Eternal City of Rome. We have seen how as part of the price for his accession to office in May  Churchill gave the ‘kiss of life’ to Britain’s then moribund Labour Party, elevating several of its leaders to unhoped-for cabinet office and pav- ing the way for the socialists’ eventual return to power in , a political upheaval which brought in its train the inevitable end of the empire built by three centuries of British endeavour.  The revisionist historians Maurice Cowling and John Charmley have endorsed our first volume’s assessment of Churchill’s responsibility for the war and his part in the resurgence of socialism in  and Britain’s international decline.  Churchill, the war- lord, showed himself indifferent to post-war problems, and displayed no interest in the dangerous revival of socialism by labour minister Ernest Bevin and the trades unions.  * David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol. i: The Struggle for Power (Cranbrook, Western Aus- tralia, ; London, ; New York, ). † Vol. i, pages –. ix Introduction a history of Churchill’s war years therefore inevitably remains a history of how he directed his war. We have seen how from the first moment he nourished the sinews of Britain’s most secret agency, the codebreaking or- ganisation at Bletchley Park, which we have called his ‘Oracle,’ and guarded that source not only from the enemy abroad but from his senior colleagues at home (while his cronies, often far less suitable, were privy to the secret and on occasion blurted out what they knew to even less suitable recipi- ents).  Knowledge was power, and Churchill clutched ultra, the ‘most secret sources,’ boniface, the ‘BJs’ and whatever else he called them, close to his watch-chained waistcoat, dealing these cards in the war game only rarely, to obviate, or sometimes, as some have suggested, even to engineer military misfortunes as and when his strategic poker made it necessary. We have seen how Churchill worked for many months after his appoint- ment to stifle every overture for peace.  In our first volume we portrayed the Duke of Windsor, the former king, as working from his overseas bases to end the war – a portrait which is now widely accepted, though embel- lished with the unwarranted epithet of traitor.  There is much that cannot be fully explored even now. We shall see again how close were the secret ties that Churchill maintained, to the chagrin of the foreign office, with the collaborationist regime at Vichy, while still ex- coriating its leader Marshal Pétain in his public utterances. Aware of the opprobrium that this dual standard might invite, he took steps after the war to remove all trace of this from the files. The secret agreement which he reached with Pétain in October  might never have existed – were it not for the writings of Professor Louis Rougier, the emissary who engi- neered it.* All relevant correspondence in the papers of Lord Halifax, then foreign secretary, and twenty-eight letters exchanged between him and Jacques Chevalier in  and  about the Rougier mission, are still withheld from public access; so are the letters sent to Pétain by Churchill through the American attaché in Vichy at the end of December  and a month later through Admiral Leahy and Chevalier.  As Sir William Deakin, one of Churchill’s ghost-writers, wrote after the war to Sir William Strang of the foreign office, the ‘Pétainist legend’ reflected poorly on Churchill and ‘should be suppressed once and for all.’  Strang sealed his own file on Rougier with a cover note that it was not to be used without the consent of the foreign office. This theme, Churchill’s ambivalence about Pétain and his unconcealed hostility toward Anthony Eden’s enfant gâté General Charles * Vol. i, pages –, . x churchill’s war de Gaulle, surfaces again in the present volume; towards its end we pro- duce the evidence, in his own handwriting, that it was Eden who engi- neered the assassination of Admiral Darlan to appease de Gaulle. We have seen too in the first volume how Britain’s unspoken war-aims, which were at first assumed to be ‘to save Poland,’ elided invisibly during  to become instead ‘the defence of the heart of the British empire against Nazi invasion’ although in fact, as Churchill knew, such an invasion was never seriously threatened; how he nonetheless forged an alliance with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who harboured even less enthusiasm for the perpetuation of Britain’s empire than Churchill did in truth himself; and how, when it became opportune to woo the United States, whose presi- dent had no love whatsoever for the empire, Churchill subtly shifted his stance and began perforce to portray his war-aim as being to destroy Hitler, the Devil incarnate, or ‘anti-Christ.’  In fact he was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war. At the same time as he was telling Lord Halifax that his intention was to fight Germany until Hitlerism was finally broken ‘and the world relieved from the curse which a wicked man has brought upon it,’  and he was similarly telling his military guests at Chequers that there was only one aim, ‘to destroy Hitler,’  he was assuring Edouard Bene that Czechoslovakia’s restoration was a war-aim, like that of Poland.  By January  he was refusing all such pronouncements, explaining to his cabinet colleagues that to state his war-aims precisely would be compromising, while anything vaguer would disappoint.  ‘Just shoot at two targets,’ we shall hear him declaim in September , and he defines these as ‘Prussian militarism’ and ‘Nazi tyranny.’ Nor does he want his people to bother explaining what those phrases mean. ‘This will also have the advantage of not committing you to anything definite when Germany is beaten.’  For Winston Churchill, as for Adolf Hitler, making war was an aim in itself.  In April  a London agent of Roosevelt’s overseas Intelligence serv- ice, the Office of Strategic Services, would report that watching Churchill he often reflected that, just as the Eighth Army owed a great deal to Rommel, so Churchill owed ‘a hell of a lot’ to Hitler: ‘When he turns from Hitler to the home front, he becomes a smaller figure, the dextrous English politi- cian, master of the telling phrase and the useful monetary compromise.’ One could tell just when Churchill slipped from one role into the other, continued the agent, by the change in his practised oratorical tone. In do- mestic politics he revealed his less felicitous nature. ‘War,’ reported the [...]... Triumph in Adversity june – december  xix xx churchill ’ s war : A Very Big and Very Ugly War 3 : AVery Big andVery Ugly War t the beginning of  Mr Winston Churchill had lisped these words to Brigadier Stewart Menzies – otherwise known as ‘C,’ chief of M.I., the secret service: ‘In  we shall have a very big, and very ugly, war. ’ June of this year had witnessed Hitler’s long-prepared... East – the ratio of teeth to tail was to become an obsession with him. : A Very Big and Very Ugly War 9 The war office hated his interference Major-General Sir John Kennedy, the director of military operations, remarked to the American military attaché upon the autocratic way that Churchill ran the war ‘There is a good deal of uneasiness,’ wrote the American in a private letter on July , ‘over Churchill’s... little interest in the post -war period, and he had told Hopkins to deal on this with Eden rather than with the P.M.Visiting Eden a few days later, the American lectured him that Britain was not to commit herself to any frontiers for any country before peace came ‘H said,’ the British foreign secretary afterwards noted in his handwritten diary, ‘that U.S would come into the war & did not want to find after... call upon it He sacrificed the substance to defeat the myth xvi churchill ’ s war Paul Johnson’s attitude to the end of the empire is plain: ‘The loss of the British empire,’ he submitted, ‘was neither here nor there, merely a matter of fashion.’This view would not have been shared by the millions who fought in Churchill’s war, nor indeed by Churchill’s leading ministers to whom the preservation of... of South Africa In a later work, Charmley would adopt many of our views about the wartime transatlantic alliance too, in which a British prime minister allowed and encouraged a streetwise American president to exploit Britain’s inventive genius, to plunder her imperial wealth, and thereby reap world-wide geopolitical rewards. Reviewers of these later works have, it is true, generously pointed to the... the Introduction to our Hermann Göring biography, or to Hitler’s War, that we were ‘indebted for assistance to the Carinhall Foundation’ or to the ‘Adolf Hitler Memorial Trust’ – but of course we were not – it is hard to believe that reviewers would not have mentioned this admission for a while after the first volume of our churchill’s war appeared, its heresies and contentions were automatically challenged... with us xviii churchill ’ s war he exclaimed piously, ‘as an abstemious man.’ ‘I do not know a fault of his life,’ he added, ‘save only a too strong devotion to his friends.’ The truth about both men is different ‘The Providence which is kind to drunken men, and fools, will in the end preserve us,’ wrote Sir P J Grigg, roughly at the time our narrative resumes, ‘but it [the war] is being so much more... Winston’s substantial pre -war earnings for ‘retelling famous stories’ from Anna Karenina to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Mr Churchill was paid one thousand dollars apiece for boiling these tomes down into one page of newsprint for the Chicago Tribune syndicate – indeed, he was so preoccupied with rehashing one such masterpiece that he failed to notice Adolf Hitler’s coming xii churchill ’ s war to power in Berlin... children played A I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still... Dunkirk, in May , he had coarsely defined his forward policy as ‘K.B.O.’ – to ‘keep buggering on.’ Meeting with Fleet-street – the national newspaper editors – on the morning of June  he would claim to know no more about Hitler’s progress than they did, but he did allow that his advisers were baffled that Stalin had had his main troops so far forward, instead of echelonned in depth, for defence. . responsibility for the war and his part in the resurgence of socialism in  and Britain’s international decline.  Churchill, the war- lord, showed himself indifferent to post -war problems, and. his unconcealed hostility toward Anthony Eden’s enfant gâté General Charles * Vol. i, pages –, . x churchill’s war de Gaulle, surfaces again in the present volume; towards its end we pro- duce. Not Quite Normal 135 9: Westward Look 157 10: Gaps in the Archives 163 11: A Sorry Pass 181 12: Day of Perfidy 203 Temporary contents of Part I only vi churchill’s war vii Introduction introduction: Never