C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. (It is magnificent, but it is not war)
French General Pierre Bosquet, observing the charge of the Light Brigade, Crimean War October 28, 1854.
In the high summer of 1940, the politicians who comprised the British Government faced a terrible and momentous problem.
So, on a personal level, did the new British Prime Minister from May 10th, Winston Churchill. More on this later.
At the time, the British Empire is often said to have ruled a quarter of the land surface of the world and upon which the sun never set. It had an appropriate navy. The white Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were expected to follow Britain’s lead, and indeed did.
It was a world power.
To everyone’s astonishment, the outbreak of war with Germany in September 1939 had not deadlocked in the static trench warfare of the Western Front in World War I (1914–1918).
Instead, the Germans, starting in April 1940, conquered Norway and Denmark, and then went on to conquer the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Most of the British Army was extricated from France via Dunkirk, but without much heavy equipment.
This admittedly was a stunning emotional blow to Britain’s elite, quite a few of whom (unlike their American counterparts) had fought on the Western Front in World War I and where many of whom had lost relatives.
Britain by the middle of the twentieth Century had had tremendous experience in fighting wars, in an astonishing number of countries (Wikipedia reckons 171). Quite a few of these had been unsuccessful. sometimes humiliatingly so — most notably of course the American War of Independence.
War, to the British, was a business. They were not Crusades. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. Then you moved on.
What was so different about 1940?
Operation Sea Lion (the German sea crossing to England) was of course in planning. But it was pro forma. It is clear from the literature that the German Navy — the Kriegsmarine — always said it could not protect cross channel transports from devastating attacks from the then enormous Royal Navy. The Luftwaffe was also not optimistic.
This must also have been the assessment of the British military (never, as far as I know, ever disclosed).
Paradoxically, Britain was probably in a less dangerous position in 1940 than during the several years in the early nineteenth century during which Napoleon controlled the Continent and threatened invasion .
The internal combustion engine had allowed air raids on England, distressing — but with no possibility of being decisive. However it also eliminated the ghastly chance that unfavorable winds would prevent the Royal Navy attacking vulnerable invading vessels. Wind had been a critical element of risk in previous crises. The two most significant successful invasions — William the Conqueror’s in 1066 and William III’s in 1688 — had been able to avoid defending warships because of the chance of wind.
What the British Government had to consider in 1940 was: Why fight on?
Britain had always been against an excessively powerful Continental entity. But this had now happened.
Britain had also in recent centuries become extremely concerned to protect its extensive overseas assets — the British Empire. France had usually been the threat to this — and so, around the turn of the twentieth century, had been Imperial Germany.
But Hitler’s Germany was not a threat. Archival evidence proves that Hitler was absolutely opposed to destroying the British Empire which he saw as a congenial component of an ideal world order. Instead, he was completely focused on the geopolitical threat from the Soviet Russia. This was known at the time.
The geopolitical threat from the Soviet Union was also — or should have been — as great a concern to the British. They had actually borne the brunt of Soviet subversion efforts in their Empire during the interwar years. National Socialism had little intrinsic appeal to the British people, oblivious as they were to the threats and problems which engendered it. But this was far from true with Communism and Socialism. Varieties of these had struck deep roots in British society. The scandalous post-war espionage revelations of the ‘Cambridge Five’ were probably just a hint of the reality.
In August 1940, Britain simply had no path to military victory. During World War I there was always the hope that the next offensive would break through (which indeed did happen in late 1918). France was never knocked out of the war. Fighting on in World War I may not have been sensible, but it was not irrational.
In 1940 this hope was gone. The idea that Britain by itself had any chance of subduing Germany in a continental land war was clearly ridiculous.
There was the alternative of seducing other countries into the war, as with America in 1917.
Experience had proved this was a highly unattractive option. America had brought much strength but little wisdom into World War I, insisting on imposing an unstable redrawing of the European map and creating dangerous problems. Furthermore she had proved a merciless and irresponsible creditor for much of the next two decades.
The fact was that the American elite was endemically Anglophobic and anti-imperialist. They were jealous of the British Empire. Confusingly this was disguised somewhat by often very pleasant interpersonal relationships. And this was before one considered the increasing influence of the tedious Irish and the newly arrived Russian Jews.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union was a flat-out proven danger. Beyond their incessant promotion of their antithetical and blood-soaked doctrines between the wars, the Russians under Stalin’s highly enterprising leadership had made war certain in 1939. By concluding the Ribbentrop Molotov Pact on August 23, 1939, they freed Hitler’s hand in Western Europe. They went on to bolster Germany by supplying large new quantities of raw materials. Even worse, the Soviet seizure of the Baltic States, a large slice of Poland, part of Romania, and a (dearly-bought) fragment of Finland removed all doubt that the USSR was additionally an aggressive predatory power in the old style.
Putting Britain at the mercy of these dangerous parties was not obviously more attractive than coming to an agreement with Germany.
However, before Winston Churchill who became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, could think about this problem, he had a more pressing crisis to weather.
He was about to become insolvent, which would have forced his retirement from Parliament.
Churchill’s return to office in September 1939 had destabilized his always precarious finances. He could no longer hope to complete various lucrative writing deals on which he had counted. Income taxes, interest on bank loans and many personal debts were falling due at the month end. He did not have the cash to pay them.
As recounted in the extraordinary 2015 book “No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money” by David Lough, Churchill was rescued by a GBP 5,000 check from Sir Henry Strakosch, arranged by Churchill’s ‘fixer’ Brendan Bracken. At the time Bracken was co-owner with Strakosch of the famous magazine “The Economist”. (Derived from Lough’s figures, this would be about GBP 347,000 or some $410,000 today).
Lough drily comments
The amount reached Churchill’s account on 21 June. Thus fortified, he paid a clutch of overdue bills from shirt-makers, watch repairers and wine merchants before he turned his attention back to the war.
This was not the first time nor the most desperate crisis from which Sir Henry Strakosch had rescued Churchill. In March of 1938 a collapse in the American stock market, in which he habitually speculated aggressively, brought Churchill margin calls he could not meet. He faced bankruptcy, which as noted above would have forced him out of Parliament. Both his London and Kent homes were briefly put up for sale.
But Brendan Bracken approached Sir Henry Strakosch, who paid the broker off for GBP18,000 (about GBP1.518 million or $1.765 million today). Strakosch entered into a curious and apparently unwritten agreement with Churchill for Strakosch to hold and manage the portfolio for at least 3 years, with Churchill paying GBP 800 a year in interest. There seems to have been no explicit arrangement about repayment.
This rescue enabled Churchill to continue leading the anti-German faction in Parliament and the country.
So who was this Sir Henry Strakosch, whose generosity quite likely altered the course of British and World history?
Henry Strakosch, according to Wikipedia (at present), was born in “Hohenau, Austria” on May 9, 1871. Actually, Hohenau is in Germany. His parents were Jewish, a fact that Wikipedia sometimes stipulates but at this writing is repressing. (David Irving, who appears to be the first historian to realize the significance of Strakosch, thought he was born in Moravia. This is now the southeastern part of the Czech Republic. If so, he was born a subject of the Hapsburg Austrian-Hungarian Empire).
Strakosch was clearly part of the highly sophisticated and cultured German-Jewish community the American manifestation of which was memorialized by Stephen Birmingham in his book “Our Crowd”.
At an early age, the decision seems to have been made to migrate Strakosch into the Anglosphere. Wikipedia says he completed his education in England and was working in the London financial district by 1891 at the age of 20. By 1895 he was employed by an entity called the Anglo-Austrian Bank of South Africa.
This involved Strakosch in the extraordinary South African gold mining boom, which had started in about a decade earlier.
To a remarkable degree, this phenomenal cornucopia of wealth was facilitated by stock market activities. To an equally remarkable degree, these quickly became dominated by emigre German Jews.
Individual mines were incubated by investment firms which became known as ‘Mining Finance Houses’. When operational, mines were introduced to the stock market with the remit to exhaust the property and maximize dividends. The whole process, unlike the otherwise analogous Silicon Valley phenomenon, was driven by dividends, frequently of enormous size.
This meant that the ‘Randlords’ were not just rich on paper. They rapidly started swimming in cash.
Strakosch became involved in the Mining Finance House of A Goerz & Co, which was renamed Union Corporation in 1918. He was Chairman from 1924 to his death in 1943. He became a British citizen in 1907 and was knighted in 1921.
In the interwar years, which he spent primarily in London, Strakosch displayed strong interest in public affairs and in political influence. Writing on the Gold Standard in the early 1920s, he became heavily involved in the affairs of India (then of course the Crown Jewel of the British Empire) from the mid ‘20s. From 1929 to 1943 he was Chairman of The Economist magazine and, as mentioned, a part owner.
At some point in the mid 30’s Strakosch began supplying Churchill with data purporting to evidence the size of the German military buildup. Where Strakosch obtained this material from is not clear. As noted, he himself had been absent from Germany all his adult life. Lough suggests his knowledge of South African trade with Germany in strategic metals may have been involved, but South Africa’s activity in these areas only really became substantial after World War II.
Most likely Strakosch was the conduit for intelligence collected by anti-Nazis in Germany, very probably many themselves Jewish.
Whether this information was accurate or alarmist is also a cloudy question. In 1934–5 Churchill utilized very high claims about the rate of German aircraft production to participate in a Kennedy Missile Gap-like scare. This destroyed the political career of the Air Minister, his second cousin, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry. While British Intelligence had (probably justified) confidence in its own lower assessments, Londonderry’s ability to use espionage sources in his own defense was obviously limited.
This was the pattern of the latter 30s. Heavily armed with information from a wide range of sources, by no means all Jewish, Churchill continued as undisputed leader of the anti-German element in British public opinion. In this he was helped of course by the craven and irresponsible pacifistic line of the moderate British Left, exemplified by the Labour party.
Generally, Churchill biographers have treated this situation of financial dependence with great circumspection and conspicuous lack of interest.
In Churchill: The End of Glory John Charmley, the harshest of Churchill’s biographers on the appropriateness of the Strakosch arrangement, displays most penetration:
So was Churchill “hired help” for a Jewish lobby, which, regarding Jewish interests as superior to those of the British Empire, was determined to embroil that Empire in a war on their behalf?
Excusing himself from answering this question on the grounds that it is too dangerous, Charmley then sidesteps the issue by arguing that an anti-German stance was congruent with Churchill’s world view. It was lucrative for him to do what he wanted to do.
Recently this question of Churchill’s financial dependence on Jewish money came into the limelight by being mentioned in the Tucker Carlson/Darryl Cooper interview discussed here in The Free Press Versus Darryl Cooper for deviating from the WWII narrative by Horus Nov 13, 2024 and at greater length by Ron Unz.
Cooper actually endorsed Charmley’s assessment that Churchill’s hostility to Germany was sincere and not just a mercenary decision. Nevertheless, the Political Police were outraged, Court Historian and all-round Big Foot Niall Ferguson was ordered into action.
Fergusson’s petulant tantrum History and Anti-History (Worldwide Speakers Group, September 5, 2024) reveals a very deficient character. He makes a fool of himself. I think he may have been drinking while writing. But the essay does indicate something very significant about the Churchill/Strakosch discussion.
Ferguson sneers that Cooper reads.
David Irving, whose remaining reputation as an historian was destroyed in 2000 when he was exposed as Holocaust denier in a libel case that he himself brought against Deborah Lipstadt …
and
Ah yes, of course. Churchill, the puppet of the financiers. Now why does that seem familiar? Well, because it was one of the leitmotifs of Joseph Goebbels’s wartime propaganda.
Not an argument, of course. And having lived through the Biden years, we are now well aware what politically motivated lawfare looks like.
On David Irving as an Historian, I commend Ron Unz’ definitive exculpation: The Pyrrhic Attack on David Irving
But the suspicion arises that Fergusson has to smear his way out of the Churchill financial issue because he has no other defense.
Certainly it is more than possible Ferguson has never read or heard of David Loach’s definitive discussion of Churchill’s finances, No More Champagne. After all, Loach is not an Academic! He did achieve first-class honors in history at Oxford but then defected to a lowly City of London career in lowly finance.)
But the facts of the Churchill/Strakosch relationship have been known for decades. For instance, William Manchester’s The Last Lion, volume 2, which lays out the matter clearly (but with no analysis) was published in 1988.
Throughout his political life, Churchill seems to have been a surfer in search of the Perfect Wave. He was elected to Parliament in 1901 as a Conservative during a surge of patriotism as the Boer (South African) War 1899–1902, in which he had become a celebrity, was successfully concluding. In 1904, sensing massive socialistic reform was in vogue, he crossed the floor and joined the Liberals. He appears to have been an enthusiast for war in 1914. When the Liberals imploded after World War I, he managed to rejoin the Conservatives. In the 1930s he experimented with resisting the decision of the British Establishment to withdraw from ruling India and then with dissuading Edward VIII from abdicating. Finally, with characteristic opportunism, he fixed on leading the anti-German lobby.
In my view, the process by which Britain found itself in the terrible crisis of Summer 1940 is best discussed in Patrick Buchanan’s great book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War
All of this is beside the point. The question is: why did Churchill push Britain to fight on in 1940?
The consequences were totally disastrous. The Americans ruthlessly plundered the British Empire. At the 1943 Tehran Conference Roosevelt privately invited Stalin to take over and Sovietize India — with American help! Britain was quickly forced to abandon plans to make the British Empire an economic bloc (“Imperial Preference”). It was rapidly stripped of its enormous financial overseas assets, many acquired at fire sale prices by Americans . Henry Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White (both Jewish and the latter also a Soviet Asset) also engineered the Allies into adopting the Morgenthau Plan which proposed to deindustrialize and agrarianize Germany, rendering it unable to feed its people. (Churchill, to his credit, reflexively denounced the plan as “Unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary” — but he was quickly bullied into going along). This stiffened German resistance in the West, conveniently for Stalin, but in any case, it would have been a catastrophe for the European economy.
Worse, the Soviet Union was able to tyrannize Eastern Europe for half a century, causing huge suffering and inflicting much anxiety and massive expense on the West.
Too easily it can be forgotten that without nuclear weapons there is every reason to expect that the USSR would at some point have started another conventional ground war. With its enormous forces, it would very likely have conquered the rest of the Continent. Britain’s leaders in 1940 could have had no inkling such a Guardian Angel stood in the future.
Another highly predictable consequence was that the social stresses and resentments of war precipitated the election of the socialist Labour Government in 1945. Labour’s price for participating in the wartime Coalition Government had already been the imposition of many of its policy nostrums in domestic affairs. By the time the 1945–51 Labour Government ended, Britain was tightly bound in a socialistic straight jacket which crippled the economy until Mrs. Thatcher’s Administration in the 1980s.
Labour of course was only too happy to start the collapse of the British Empire with the blood-stained scuttle out of India in 1947.
All these deplorable events flowed from the decision, made in August 1940 and maintained thereafter, not to settle with Hitler.
The simple fact is that Sir Henry Strakosch had Churchill by his financial throat. Had he wished, he could probably have ruined Churchill financially and certainly have shattered his public reputation. This was not simply a matter of being a hired hand: Churchill could not easily have resigned.
That Churchill was uneasy about this relationship emerges from two events.
Not normally notably quick to pay off debts, he did repay the GBP 5,000 June 1940 Strakosch loan in the first half of 1941, as steeply rising enthusiasm for his literary properties improved his liquidity. This despite it seemingly not having had any particular due date. Probably he felt it just looked too bad.
Even more dramatic is the situation revealed by the only Strakosch reference in Andrew Robert’s widely praised 1,152-page 2018 biography Churchill Walking with Destiny.
On 30 October 1943, Churchill was bequeathed GBP 20,000 … on the death of his friend the South African miner and financier Sir Henry Strakosch. The next day Marion Holmes’ diary records that Churchill was understandably ‘in high spirits. He began, but did not finish, the jingle “There was a young lady of Crewe.’
In addition, Strakosch forgave the GBP 18,000 amount of the 1938 loan.
Strakosch had died that day, so Churchill must have known of the will’s provisions in advance.
At first glance, Robert’s treatment of the Strakosch/Churchill relationship (providing no context) appears professionally negligent. And it certainly is timid. But to those who know, what Roberts did is to unpin and roll in a grenade.
What we are invited to contemplate is that the leader of the British Empire, almost two-thirds through the world war, was so riven with anxiety about what his creditor might do that he exploded with emotion when the Damoclean sword was removed.
(GBP 20,000 is about GBP 1.143 million or $1.486 million today. So the total gift from Strakosch was worth some $2.8 million. Puny by the standards of what, say, the Biden family appears to have raked in, but financial assets had gone through a 14-year deflation, not a 40-year inflation.)
David Irving, in his masterly second volume on Churchill Triumph in Adversity discloses that two other cabinet ministers (whom he does not name) had received loans from Strakosch. This he discovered by reading the Strakosch Will, which expunged them.
The depressing thing about this sorry story is that Churchill, of all men, had the wide knowledge, erudition and vision that would have enabled him to exert what might be called statesmanship. Relapsing into emotional war hysteria was for lesser beings.
This stands out in stark relief in his magisterial and colossal biography of his great ancestor John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough: Marlborough: His Life and Times
(In my view this book is the most valuable component of his legacy to his country.)
In this study, Churchill astutely analyzes the shifting motives of the numerous participants in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) which was in effect a World War in the West. It is a triumph of perceptiveness and judgment.
Even more impressive is his treatment of the squalid end of this war. In 1710 the leaders of the Tory party in Britain, who gained the ear of Queen Anne, evicted Marlborough’s political allies in London, and exploited national war-weariness and jealousy of Marlborough to force through a peace with France.
This abandoned the glittering prospect visible earlier in 1710, when, in large part due to Marlborough’s military and political genius, it seemed likely that the war would produce a smashing victory for Great Britain and her Allies. There was a real chance that France’s preeminent position in Europe could permanently undermined. Instead Britain spent the next 150 years struggling to block French ambitions.
Churchill might have been expected to have joined the many subsequent historians in denouncing the unwisdom and turpitude of this action, particularly since it was so damaging to his beloved ancestor.
Instead he accurately notes that the War Party in Britain had succumbed to mission creep. The unexpected death of the Austrian Emperor in April 1711 meant that his brother and heir, the Allies’ candidate for King of Spain, would if victorious rule a European Colossus not much preferable to the possible combination of France and Spain which had triggered the conflict. He also gives due weight to the war-weariness in Britain, which had largely financed the conflict.
In his own career, Churchill several times displayed remarkable far-sightedness. In 1919, he tried hard to persuade the Cabinet to intervene effectively in the Russian Revolution on the side of the White Russians. His coalition colleagues, led by the Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George did not take the Communist threat seriously enough. Probably reflexive anti-Czarism and Leftist romanticism was at work, besides war weariness, ignorance and timidity.
Obviously if the White Russians could have been sustained, the next seventy years would have been much pleasanter. Ironically Lloyd George fell in 1922 because of his aggressive anti-Turkish stance in defense of Greece in the Chanak crisis. Risking war over the fate of bits of the Greek and Turkish coastline while rejecting the possibility of stopping Communism in Russia is curious.
Churchill displayed similar vision over India. By the 1930s the British political establishment had tacitly decided to yield India to local nationalist forces. The Imperial British-Indian relationship was very subtle and complex, as Churchill, who had spent years there, well knew. So was India itself. Whether skillful management of the different forces at play could have sustained British influence there, as it had for the previous centuries, is a deeply unfashionable subject. But Churchill was unquestionably right to see that the quick termination of British rule would be the death blow to the British Empire, both in a material sense and morally. That is why the post-war Labour Government was so eager to do it.
Another example is seen in Churchill’s famous article ZIONISM versus BOLSHEVISM. A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. This was first published, strangely, in London’s Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8, 1920.
Notoriously in this essay Churchill stipulated a fact which increasingly became unmentionable in the following decades:
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by … Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. … In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.
Most Churchill enthusiasts hurry past this essay with averted eyes and tight lips. This causes them to miss the astounding prescience he displayed.
In the article Churchill suggested that Zionism could become the antidote to Communism in the Jewish community, greatly to the benefit of everyone else.
Zionism has already become … a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists. … The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes … are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal.… [i]n building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine … a task is presented on which many blessings rest.
The younger generation knows and dislikes the neoConservatives as the enforcers of the invidious “Invade The World, Invite The World” doctrine, seducing America into questionable wars and hindering the reversal of the nation-destroying 1965 Immigration Act.
But, especially now we see how difficult stopping these mistakes is. It has to be recognized that the energetic anti-Communism the neoconservatives adopted in the ‘70s and ‘80s was crucial. Without their forcefulness, the Reagan Administration might well have been unable to overcome the GOP establishment’s détente fixation and to overthrow the pro-Communism of the Democratic Party Left which had produced the Viet Nam disaster.
Of course, the NeoCons did this for Israel. But Churchill was right to see that in some circumstances Zionism could produce a general benefit.
More recently it has become apparent that Churchill’s vision, if acted upon, could have saved not only the British Empire but Britain itself.
Colored immigration into Britain started as a trickle in the late 1940s. By 1954 according to Andrew Roberts, non-Whites were only 0.16% of England’s population. But Churchill was alarmed.
Roberts reports:
‘Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here’ Churchill told the Cabinet on 3 February 1954. ‘Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the United Kingdom? They are attracted by the Welfare State. Public opinion in the United Kingdom won’t tolerate once it gets beyond certain limits’ …
On the issue of West Indian immigration, on another occasion he told the Cabinet that a good slogan was ‘Keep England white’ “
Unsurprisingly, since the British Conservative Party was firmly under the control, then as now, of social liberals, Churchill found no supporting interest. His colleagues were no doubt already under the influence of “Hitler’s revenge” and unwilling to consider political matters from a racial perspective. And doubtless they were complacent that any difficulties would be endured by the lower classes and not their own families.
But of course, Churchill was right. Britain has faced huge costs arising from excessive colored immigration, financially and in terms of criminality.
And even more horrifying, Britain’s political elite has moved to repress the nation’s response that Churchill predicted by abrogating the country’s ancient right to freedom of speech. The current Labour Government’s punishment of the protests following the Southport murders has proved that a police state machinery has quietly been established as onerous, if not (yet) as bloody as that of Nazi Germany or the USSR. Such punishment certainly severely limits public discussion of immigration.
This is almost precisely the reverse of what the British thought they were fighting for in World War II.
So how did it come about that this sophisticated analyst of world affairs, who, for better or worse, had striven all his career for the advantage not only of Britain but also the British Empire, should suddenly lose his will and acquiesce in steering the country into such a shattering disaster?
Could it be that at the end of his career the aging actor put aside his concerns for his nation and countrymen to grasp this one great role? Notwithstanding reservations he might have felt about the style of the production and character of its backers?
This was what his victim Lord Londonderry thought. In 1947 he wrote
[W]e need never have had this war with its ghastly results as the price for Winston gaining an everlasting historical name as a war-leader.
The more one reads of the actions of rulers, particularly in war, the more one sees that rank ego on their part does indeed play a distressingly large role.
Sadly, I think this is too charitable an interpretation for Churchill. In the summer of 1940 he was only 65. He went on to display powerful mental acuity and energy for well over another decade, running and energizing the British war machine with great competence including an exhausting travel itinerary far exceeding that of Roosevelt and Stalin. (He was also involved in regular combat with enemies on the floor of the House of Commons, a harsh test that American leaders are spared. A President Biden or Wilson situation of hidden decrepitude cannot survive in the British Parliamentary system.)
Once it became clear in the latter part of 1940 that Germany was not going to attempt an invasion, interesting possibilities for Britain arose. A settlement with Germany could have meant that he Italian threat in North Africa would have died on the vine. It would certainly not have prevented Hitler’s attack on Russia, which, to use Churchill’s phrase above, would have been “… a task…on which many blessings rest.”
If, as is not unlikely, a German-Soviet War would have still have caused dubious elements in America to provoke war with Japan to help the USSR, Britain would have been is a much stronger position to defend her interests. And having Britain as a non-belligerent might have prevented Hitler making his supreme blunder of gratuitously declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor.
Indeed had the pro-war faction in America managed to make war with Germany a possibility, Britain might even have had the pleasant experience of having the U.S. as a supplicant!
The concept that Churchill in 1940 or for years thereafter was merely an exhausted Thespian, grasping gratefully at a glorious role albeit in an uncongenial production is destroyed by considering the circumstances of his great Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri on March 5 1946:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow …I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.
From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.
This was delivered only 10 months after the German surrender. The full extent of the brutal and sinister character of the Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe was not yet widely known or indeed implemented. Czechoslovakia was not taken over fully until February 1948, and as Anne Applebaum documents in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, imposing full totalitarianism took quite some years. George Kennan’s verbose (8,000 word) “Long Telegram’, credited with alerting the US Foreign Policy Establishment to Soviet expansionism had only been sent 13 days earlier, on February 22, 1946, and so cannot have been fully digested. A public version was only published in the Foreign Affairs magazine’s July 1947 issue .
Cold War legend holds that the Fulton speech catalyzed US opinion to immediately accept the responsibility for leading the West against Soviet ambitions for the next 45 years. In reality, it was highly controversial, and the Truman Administration, which seems to have encouraged Churchill, promptly distanced itself.
A considerable element of the US elite was actually actively pro-Communist. Knowledge of the full extent of this requires the completion of the suspended Venona Project decoding. But the continued influence of this faction even under Truman was demonstrated by the rapid abandonment of the Chinese Nationalists to the Chinese Communists after World War II.
Beyond that, large swathes of the Americans were still under the influence of the pro-Soviet and dishonest media coverage of the war years — and even more were war weary. They had not yet realized that, unlike the countries the Allies had liberated in the west, eastern European nations were not going to be allowed to reclaim their independence and govern themselves. And all too many of them put a childish faith in the potency of the new United Nations.
Churchill knowingly accepted the price of stimulating Anglophobia and accusations of war mongering. The fury of his opponents is well documented in Fraser J Harbutt’s The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War, Chapter 7
Churchill did not have to do this. He too had been the beneficiary of American media lionization and he could have basked in ample adulation indefinitely.
Instead a strongly held opinion led him to plunge into the maelstrom of controversy to achieve a crucial national objective: rallying the US to protect the West from the Soviets. Not the action of an exhausted and selfish politician.
Churchill, as noted above, was extremely well-read in the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European diplomacy, packed as it is with betrayals and startling reversals of alliances. And he had the stomach for this cold-blooded process. Sean McMeekin reveals that right after VE day (May 8th, 1945) he ordered his Chiefs of Staff to plan an attack on the Soviet Union to improve the deal given to Poland. His appalled Generals named it “Operational Unthinkable” (freedom of speech still then existed in the UK). Whatever the merits of this idea, it demonstrates that Churchill still possessed the reptilian emotions of a real statesman.
So what happened in the high summer of 1940? (Churchill’s behavior in the run up to war in 1939 is a different issue: probably he shared the common view that the war would deadlock as in 1914 and so might not be existential).
Why did Churchill refuse to face facts, and not navigate his country away from the waterfall? Surely with his charisma and perhaps after a suitable period for the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Britain to have been formulated into soothing national legends, something could have been done?
There is no evidence he even tried — rather the reverse.
Clearly, Churchill’s behavior in 1940–41 was wooden and anomalous. Some unusual, powerful, and exogenous force appears to have been acting upon him.
It was. And of course the financial and hence political chokehold Sir Henry Strakosch had achieved was only the visible demonstration.
Throwing British war policy into reverse would have provoked lethal fury on the Left and in the Jewish community. John Charmley’s cautiously floated trial balloon cited above deserves repeating:
So was Churchill “hired help” for a Jewish lobby, which, regarding Jewish interests as superior to those of the British Empire, was determined to embroil that Empire in a war on their behalf?
This was a factor of which Churchill, as demonstrated by his 1920 article, was acutely aware.
In my view, Churchill’s long-standing hostility to Germany, very normal in his generation (b. 1874) which grew up alarmed by Germany’s industrial surge and the histrionics of Kaiser Wilhelm, may partially exonerate his actions in the run up to 1939.
But not after the events of early summer 1940, which created a profoundly different situation.
On the morning of May 25, 1940, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, Viscount Gort, woke up and abruptly reversed his orders of the night before. Rather than moving south with the French Army, the British were to move north to Dunkirk and try to evacuate. This saved them from being captured when the French surrendered.
Abandoning his French allies on the battlefield must have been emotionally and morally devastating for Gort, a straightforward man who had served alongside the French on the Western Front throughout World War I (in which he won the Victoria Cross).
Considering this action after the War, Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery, who had a low opinion of Gort professionally and who was generally uncharitable, wrote:
For this I give him full marks, and I hope history will do the same. He saved the men of the BEF…when all said and done, it must never be forgotten that in the supreme crisis of his military life, in May 1940, he acted with courage and decision – doing the right thing for Britain.If he had failed at that moment, disaster might well have overtaken British arms.
He did not fail.
Sadly for Britain, Winston Churchill did fail.
Patrick Cleburne wrote for many years for VDARE.com.
Bibliography
No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money David Lough
Churchill’s War David irving
Churchill: The End of Glory John Charmley
The Last Lion William Manchester
Stalin’s War A New History of World War II Sean McMeekin
The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War Fraser J Harbutt
Churchill: Walking with Destiny Andrew Roberts
Making Friends with Hitler Ian Kershaw
Monty: The Making of a General Nigel Hamilton
References
David Lough, No More Champagne, 288-9.
Ibid., 263-4.
David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol 1, 104.
No More Champagne, 235.
John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory, 336-7..
William Manchester, The Last Lion, vol 2, 302-3.
Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War, 497.
Fraser J Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War, 72.
No More Champagne, 294.
Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, 122.
David Irvine, Churchill’s War, vol. II Triumph in Adversity, 145 footnote
Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, 943-4.
Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler, 334.
Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War, Epilogue.
Ibid., 655.
Nigel Hamilton, Monty The Making of a General, 377.
