Churchill Flawed, But He'll Survive 'Woke' Attacks

He was named Man of the Century, helped win two World Wars, defined the Cold War in his "Iron Curtain" speech, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but today things are not looking bright for Winston Churchill and his reputation. 

           

His bust has been removed for the second time from the Oval Office by President Joe Biden where Presidents George Bush and Donald Trump had kept it. Biden replaced it with that of the agricultural labor leader, Cesar Chavez. His statue in Westminster has been defaced and he has been called a racist, an imperialist, and a lover of war. A new book, Churchill’s Shadow by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, blames Churchill for Britain’s decline because in Wheatcroft’s view he single-handedly prevented the British people from coming to terms with their true place in history. That is a lot of responsibility for one man, even one as great as Churchill. 

For the longest time after World War II, Churchill’s reputation remained high. He believed that his view of the war would dominate because as he said, “I propose to write that history.”  His six-volume history of the war did exactly that. He staked out his interpretation of the war especially in Volume One, The Gathering Storm, with its theme of how the Allies lost peace. All subsequent interpretations fed off Churchill themes and he was treated with great respect by historians of the war. (It is difficult to find a history of the war without Churchill’s volumes in the bibliography) Some of his wartime decisions have been questioned, especially his conviction that the Mediterranean was the decisive theatre of the war, in his words the “soft underbelly” of the Axis powers. His doubts about the wisdom of a frontal landing have been noted by historians, who link it to his experiences with the terrible bloodletting of the First World War. But overall, as Churchill once observed “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

That was true. He was the only member of the four titans (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler) who directed the war to produce a memoir. Criticism of Churchill in the years immediately after the war were few and minor. The historian and Conservative MP, Robert Rhodes James wrote a study Churchill: A Study In Failure (1970) that dealt with his career in the 1930s. It focused on reasons for Churchill’s inability to reach the Premiership until the crisis of 1940. James attributes this to flaws of character, his vanity, his refusal to go along with broadly popular Conservative measures such as the India Bill which he fought despite its overwhelming popularity in Parliament.

Churchill’s support for King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, James argues, dealt a serious setback to his reputation and undermined his calls for dealing with the growing power of Nazi Germany. Churchill also was regarded as too ambitious by many, a charge that dated back to the early days of his career. Sir Charles Dilke recorded a note in his diary in the 1870s regarding Lord Rosebery, the future prime minister, that he was most ambitious man he had met. Thirty years later he crossed that line out and wrote “I have since met Winston Churchill.”

The American historian Trumbull Higgins produced two books in the 1950s and 1960s dealing with what he regarded as flaws in Churchill’s concept of strategy. One dealt with the Gallipoli campaign while the other discussed Churchill’s belief that the Mediterranean was the key theatre of war. While Higgins was critical of the Gallipoli fiasco, he also demonstrated that it was not Churchill’s responsibility. He noted how politicians and especially British military leaders leaped at the opportunity to turn the tide by a side show campaign.

Higgins was more critical of Churchill’s fascination with the Mediterranean. The hope to avoid a bloodletting like the trench warfare of World War I led Churchill, as well as many other British political and military leaders, to believe (hope might be a better word) that the Axis could be defeated by campaigns on the periphery. This was illusionary, given that after 1940 the British had been driven out of Europe and almost all their military forces were spread throughout the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Middle East. Churchill opposed an attack on the German-dominated continent until the United States entered the war and even then, he and the British military leaders believed such frontal assaults should be avoided.

These were minor criticism and did not constitute an attack on Churchill’s character. The first serious charge against Churchill’s war time leadership came in the 1960s at the hands of the German author Rolf Hochhuth whose 1963 play, "The Deputy" caused a sensation with his claim that Pope Pius VII conspired with the Nazis. Five years later Hochhuth went after Churchill arguing in his play, "Soldiers," that to appease Stalin, Churchill had arranged for the murder of the Polish resistance leader, General Sikorski. Hochhuth was encouraged in these charges by David Irving, a pro-German (some would pro-Nazi) author of numerous books on World War II, many of which have been discredited for their scholarly distortions.

The claim Churchill ordered the assassination of General Sikorski quickly fell apart, but that did not stop David Irving from producing a tendentious study of Churchill’s role in World War II, Churchill’s War (1989). Some idea of the lengths that Irving would go to denigrate Churchill can be found in the opening scene of the study. It has Churchill “shoveling” caviar into his mouth “with accompanying belches” while regaling an audience of rich Americans with assorted crudities about the war.

Irving argued that Churchill bore ultimate responsibility for the conflict by not accepting German domination of the continent after the defeat of France in 1940. He portrays Churchill happily poring over photographs of the bomb damage to Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin and with sleight of hand argues that the British (and American) bombing campaigns killed millions of innocent Germans and other Europeans. The best scholarly figure for German bombing losses in 590,000, a ghastly enough figure but not millions.

Irving’s criticisms have lost any claim to seriousness since he lost a defamation trial brought against the American scholar and historian Deborah Lipstadt who charged him with being a Holocaust denier among other things. Reputable scholars no longer take he or his work seriously, and he has been labelled as a Holocaust denier, not a charge one wants to have associated with his or her name.

Still these accusations took root among some historians who questioned Churchill’s wartime leadership. Clive Ponting, a British civil servant turned historian in two books, 1940 and a biography of Churchill, accused Churchill of narcissism, elitism, and a life-long distain for democracy. He also argued that Churchill gave important technical information the United States during the war as a way of currying favor with President Roosevelt. Ponting also argued that Churchill should have made peace in 1940 once it was clear that Germany had defeated France. Continuing the war was a mistake that eventually led to the loss of independence at the hands of the Americans and the collapse of the British Empire.

This charge was developed in greater detail by a more serious scholar, the historian John Charmley. In Churchill: The End of Glory (1993), he argued that a peace with Hitler was unrealistic. Any such deal in 1940 would be a first step toward German domination and control of Britain’s future. But Charmley was critical of Churchill’s attempts to curry favor with the United States. The result, he argues, bankrupted the nation and effectively ended the independence of the British Empire.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s recent study picks up these charges both personal and political and argues that Churchill’s long dominance of British politics and the policies he initiated were a disaster for the nation that never reconciled itself to a new, diminished role in world affairs.

The question becomes: will Churchill’s reputation survive? The answer as with most historical figures is complicated. There is no doubt that Churchill will remain a central figure in all studies of World War II. His role may be interpreted differently but his centrality to the war cannot be dismissed, or his significance diminished. The historian John Lukacs noted that Churchill’s role in winning the war may have been exaggerated, but in May 1940 he could have lost the war if he had made peace with Nazi Germany. Without Britain draining resources from Germany, it is possible that Hitler might have succeeded in conquering the Soviet Union in 1941.

Churchill will survive especially in the United States where he is more popular than in England. Other than Churchill College in Cambridge there is virtually nothing honoring Churchill in England. In the United States he remains popular. Along with the Marquis de Lafayette, he is only foreigner honored with American citizenship. A bust of him has been placed in the National Statuary Hall in Washington. There is even a scholarly journal, "Finest Hour," featuring articles and essays about him and his contemporaries.

Churchill was bigger than life. He fought in the last Imperial wars in India and in the Sudan and played key roles in both World Wars. He was one of the few political leaders to recognize the danger of the rise of Nazism. He was the first statesman to alert the West to the threat from expansive communism in his "Iron Curtain" speech. If that was not enough, he also won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He will survive attacks from the woke.