October 17, 2008

Reviews by Raymond Callahan and Richard Langworth

Published in Finest Hour 74

By Thomas Lamb
(London: Bloomsbury Books, 4OOpp. Illus. 1991)

Raymond Callahan:

I approached Richard Lamb’s Churchill as War Leader: Right or Wrong? with expectations set by the author’s very interesting Montgomery in Europe, 1943-1945: Success or Failure? (London: 1983) as well as by a favorable notice from John Keegan in The Times Literary Supplement. The fiftieth anniversary of World War II is, after all, a good time for reflection and reconsideration, and the continuing flood of books on the subject, many of which bear on Churchill, need to be evaluated for their bearing on our assessment of his career. It was, therefore, with considerable disappointment that I finished the book, which is badly flawed and contributes little, if anything, to our understanding of either the events of 1939-45 or Churchill’s role in them.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

A project of the sort Mr. Lamb had in mind can be done in one of two ways. An author can summarize his reading and reflection in an interpretive essay. J.H. Plumb did this, for example, in his thoughtful assessment of Churchill as an historian, published over twenty years ago. Alternatively, a detailed study, properly researched and documented, can be done. Since, in Churchill’s case, this would amount to rewriting the history of World War II, it is no wonder Mr. Lamb shrank from it (although he has looked at some archival sources). A middle course, which is the one he chose, risks falling between two stools: failing to have the clarity, concision and impact of the reflective essay, while lacking the broad and deep scholarly underpinning necessary for the full scale study. This, it seems to me, is exactly the fate that has befallen Mr. Lamb. A few examples will suffice, I think, to demonstrate this.

No military campaign of the war, not even the desperate, doomed Norwegian venture, has generated more controversy over Churchill’s relationship with his military commanders than the Desert War. Mr. Lamb repeats the tired argument that Churchill failed to realize the qualitative edge that the Germans had over the British in armor and, in effect, asked his field commanders for impossibilities. This is nonsense. It is what was claimed by British commanders at the time, and by their postwar apologists. It is not what any serious historian has believed for some time.

Churchill questioned this argument both at the time and in his memoirs. Historians have come to agree. British weakness was not in technology but in technique – a failure in doctrine, training and command. This point was made by Shelford Bidwell and Dominic Graham in their ground breaking study Firepower (London: 1982) as well as in much subsequent writing. Firepower is not in Mr. Lamb’s bibliography.

A second example of inadequate research is Mr. Lamb’s argument that the cancellation of the proposed allied airborne landing at Rome, timed to coincide with the announcement of the Italian armistice in September, 1943, was a terrible mistake that cost the Allies opportunity to foreshorten the Italian campaign with possible decisive results for the European war as a whole. It is hard to see how he arrives at this conclusion. No serious military historian has ever argued that ‘Giant II” would have been a sensible risk. General James Gavin, one of the brightest and toughest of the airborne commanders involved, argued persuasively in his memoirs – On to Berlin (New York: 1978) that it would have failed with the loss of the elite troops committed. Gavin’s memoirs – and much other relevant literature – are absent from Mr. Lamb’s bibliography.

In any case, why argue that this was Churchill’s error? It was Eisenhower’s decision and he reported to the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff. Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Marshall, rightly or wrongly, did not overrule American theater commanders, as Mr. Lamb surely knows.

Then there is the case of Yugoslavia and the 1943 decision to switch British support from the royalist Serb guerilla leader, Draza Mihailovic, to Tito. Mr. Lamb argues that this decision was shaped by the machinations of a mid-level Special Operations Executives staff officer in Cairo, Major James Klugman, who was a Communist. John Keegan seems to accept this argument. It is hard to see why. Historians are taught to beware of explaining in a simple fashion complex events.

The 1943 decision involved the Cairo office of SOE certainly, but also the Middle East commanders-in-chief, the Chiefs of Staff in London, SOE’s London headquarters, and the Foreign Office, as well as Churchill. Did Klugman bamboozle them all? Quite a feat for a temporary major! Mr. Lamb has not appeared to notice the interesting coincidence that in 1943 London decided to back another Communist-dominated Balkan guerrilla group, ELAS in Greece. No one has claimed sinister influences in that decision. Perhaps in both Yugoslavia and Greece the decision was, as was claimed at the time, a military one determined by who was in Churchill’s phrase, “killing Germans” (or at least was thought to have the greatest capacity to do so).

Retrospectively those 1943 decisions may seem unwise, but wartime decisions are not made retrospectively. In any case, confidence in Mr. Lamb’s argument is once again undercut by the absence from his bibliography of such key items as Mark Wheeler’s Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940-1943 (New York: 1980) or the important symposium, edited by Richard Clogg and Phyllis Auty, British Policy Towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London: 1975).

Finally, there is a quite remarkable amount of carelessness – misdatings, misspellings, mistitlings – of a sort that furthers the impression of a work executed in a haste incompatible with the scope of the project. One wonders if there was a copy-editor involved at all.

Mr. Lamb does say some shrewd things about the relationship between Churchill’s return to office in 1951 and the writing of Britain’s official histories. Here he is on to something which he might profitably have developed further. As it is, it gets rather lost amid the attempt to assess everything.

Churchill’s role in World War II will continue to attract research, analysis and revision. This is as it should be. History is not religious dogma, revealed and unalterable. However, this process of reexamination has to be firmly grounded in all the relevant literature. Sadly, Mr. Lamb’s is really not, which makes it impossible to recommend to students of Churchill’s career, or of Britain’s role in the war.

Richard M. Langworth:

Whatever our views of Mr. Lamb’s conclusions, his book is not scurrilous. It is sincerely meant, and it exonerates Churchill from many popular misconceptions trotted out by more gullible critics: Dieppe, the raid on Coventry, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Mr. Lamb believes deeply in his criticisms, and charmingly takes issue with every critic. He certainly seems like the kind of chap with whom one could enjoy a right good debate, and valid debate has always appealed to readers of Finest Hour. So…..

One of Mr. Lamb’s more extraordinary passages is his criticism of Churchill for failing somehow to drive the Red Army out of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after it had swarmed back in during late 1944. “Unlike Roosevelt and Hull, Truman and Byrnes would not give Churchill wholehearted support in his efforts to prevent Russia dominating countries which had been free and independent. The Baltic states were always on the side of the Allies. They never succumbed to the blandishments of Ribbentrop.”

As this journal recorded in an exhaustively footnoted article (“Churchill and the Baltic,” Finest Hour 53 and 54), almost exactly the opposite is true. The Baltic States were on no one’s side – they were too frightened to be. It was Roosevelt not Truman who joked with Stalin that he might have to “show some solicitude” for the Baltic peoples owing to the number of Baltic-American voters; it was Latvian volunteers who fought with the Germans in a desperate rearguard action against the oncoming Red Army in Kurland through 8 May 1945; it was Churchill who told Eden the Baltic States “were acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler,” and that abandoning them “would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause . . . there must be no mistake about the opinion of any British Government of which I am the head, namely that it adheres to those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter.”

Mr. Lamb fails to cite these Churchill remarks, and dwells instead on Churchill’s softened line of March 1942, when he suggested to the Americans that the Anglo-Soviet treaty might depend on granting Russia “the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her.” He fails however to appreciate the relief of Churchill, and Cadogan (all available for quoting from many sources including this journal), when the United States replied that this compromise would be unacceptable; nor does he provide Churchill’s final view, in his memoirs: “The Baltic States should be sovereign independent peoples.”

The final chapter of Churchill as War Leader was written, the author says, because “I was shocked when I read the file about Potsdam with the British and American Foreign Office objections (which no other historian has used) . . . it contradicted Winston’s assertion in his memoirs that ‘there was never a moment’s hesitation’ [over the decision to drop the bomb]. “(The file intimated that Japan would have surrendered in July if she were allowed to keep her Emperor.) I would argue that no other historians have used this file because they didn’t consider it significant, and that when Churchill spoke of “never a moment’s hesitation” about dropping the bomb, he was representing opinion on the plenary level.

Another source curiously absent from Mr. Lamb’s bibliography is Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-48 (New York: 1977) by Robert J. Donovan, a veteran Washington correspondent whose book was acclaimed for its combination of firsthand reporting with new historical material. Donovan establishes that the A-bomb decision did not rest with the Foreign Office or even Churchill, although Churchill certainly was consulted and signed off on it; the decision rested with Harry Truman.

Lamb writes that in April 1945 Admiral Suzuki, “known to be in favour of a negotiated peace,” became Japan’s prime minister. But, though even the Emperor favored accepting the Potsdam Ultimatum of 26 July, calling for unconditional surrender or “utter devastation” of Japan, “Suzuki, now eighty years old, did not respond” (italics mine). If he was so in favor of peace, why not? Because he was eighty years old? Well, says Lamb, “if it had been an official declaration to the Japanese Government, Suzuki would almost certainly have responded.” This seems an extraordinary confusion over what constitutes an official declaration given Lamb’s admission that “the Japanese were expecting to hear from [the Allies]” combined with uncanny understanding of what was going on in Admiral Suzuki’s eighty-year-old mind.

While it is perfectly valid to point out that Eden and Churchill ignored a minor British official’s belief that Japan might quit without the bomb, a balanced presentation ought also to explain the factors arrayed against that theory by President Truman, whose decision this was. Donovan notes that the US Combined Intelligence Committee warned Truman as early as 8 July “that Japan might put out peace feelers to try to cause dissension among the Allies.” Truman, who repeatedly declared his lack of faith in Japan’s declarations, could have hardly felt confident about the tenuous peace feelers with which he was presented.

For example, on 18 July Stalin gave Truman a note from the Japanese Ambassador to Moscow saying that Hirohito wished to explore the possibility of mediation. Lamb writes that even “after this news of Japanese peace efforts Churchill did nothing to try to dissuade Truman from unleashing his atom bombs.” Donovan writes: “Stalin suggested that since the Soviets were going to declare war on Japan, the best course might be to ignore the note. Truman replied that that was agreeable to him, that he had no respect for Japan’s good faith.” It is difficult to confront Churchill with the responsibility here.

Mr. Lamb finally suggests that Churchill supported the A-bomb decision partly because “it would remove the need to pay a high price for Russia [sic] assistance in the Far East.” After both bombs were dropped some Japanese still wished to fight on. (“General Anami still wanted to force the Allies to invade in the hope of repulsing them in a great battle.” – Toland, The Rising Sun, also absent from Lamb’s bibliography.) Wrote Truman to Sen. Russell on 9 August: “I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the ‘pigheadedness of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into the war the Japanese will very shortly fold up. My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.” This does not sound like a President bent on reducing Japan to rubble to stop the Russians from coming in – or one convinced that Japan would surrender even after Nagasaki.

The history of Japan’s treachery, the prospect of millions of casualties both Japanese and American, and the lack of empirical knowledge of the terrible weapon they now had, outweighed the arguments of a few, always opposed by many more, that Japan would come meekly to the peace table. To this extent there really was “no hesitation” by Truman and Churchill. It is easy to dwell on the fine moral dilemma of that appalling episode, fifty years removed from it. It was something else to have had to make the decision.

Alistair Cooke, broadcasting on the 25th Anniversary of the bombing, said it well: “Without raising more dust over the bleached bones of Hiroshima I should like to contribute a couple of reminders. The first is that the men who had to make the decision were just as humane and tortured at the time as you and I were later. And, secondly, that they had to make the choice of alternatives that I for one would not have wanted to make for all the offers of redemption from all the religions of the world.”

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR OF FINEST HOUR

(published in Finest Hour 76)

“Churchill As War Leader”

Jean Howard, London

My attention has been drawn to your reviews (issue #74) of Richard Lamb’s Churchill as War Leader, which I consider the best revisionary history to date, extremely well researched from archives and current books.

I read all the German Enigma signals on Yugoslavia, at the time of the switch from Mihailovich to Tito, and agree with every word Lamb says. These German signals are not available in Public Records, but a German version of the Webrmachtfaebrungstab Diary has been released to the Imperial War Museum, together with their Order of Battle Maps and Charts. The Diaries prove that Fitzroy Maclean believed Tito’s exaggerated claims and Mr. Churchill based his switch from Mihailovich to Tito on Maclean’s November 1943 report. Tito doubled the figures of partisans under arms, and more than doubled the number of German Divisions he was alleged to have been holding down. Farrish, the American liaison officer at Tito’s HQ (whose reports can be found in the Pentagon papers together with MacDowell’s report on the situation in Yugoslavia) make the error quite clear. We have all read the outdated Wheeler and Auty contributions but they have now been superceded by modem researchers with access to more recently released material.

It is more than probable that Klugman did have great influence in both the Yugoslav and Greek theatres of war, since he never concealed his Communist affiliation and is now known to have recruited Caimcross (the spy in Hut 3 Bletchley Park) who admits that he gave information on the Battle of Kursk to the Russians.

Churchill was shown inaccurate order of battle maps at SOE HQ, which were probably compiled from low grade SD and Gestapo ciphers decrypted in the Middle East. He continued to quote the figure of thirty to thirty-six German divisions in Yugoslavia, when there were less than fourteen understrength German divisions in Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Crete and Rhodes:

These few German divisions had to disarm the Italians after their collapse, and guard the coast against a possible invasion. They were so understrength that they set up strong points near as many vital communication areas as they could manage, leaving others at the mercy of guerillas.

However, in Churchill’s volume V Appendix E there is a more or less accurate German Order of Battle. One does wonder if Churchill was shown it at the time, and whether he realised that it had been included in Volume V by one of his secretaries.

Yugoslavia is still suffering from the myths and treachery which led to the switch from Loyalists to Partisans at that time, and Tito’s Communist Generals hold sway in both Croatia and Serbia. We force-repatriated Yugoslavs who were butchered by Tito, and are now recognising the rump of the Ustase regime who were responsible for murdering 700,000 Serbs in Hitler’s independent Croatia, which included Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1941 and 1945.

After the Allies betrayed Mihailovich, he helped 500 Airmen to escape, and Truman gave Mihailovich a posthumous decoration. He also helped his Allied liaison officers to escape.

With regard to the North African Campaign, British tanks could not get into range because of the German 88 mm guns, as was shown at El Alamein.

I wrote the initial Bletchley report on Yugoslav guerillas at Mr. Churchill’s request, and thereafter wrote him a weekly report on all battlefronts from the German Enigma point of view. My admiration for Mr. Churchill, at the time and to the present day, is overwhelming, but no man at the summit can operate 100% if his aides let him down. In my opinion Richard Lamb has written a remarkably accurate book.

Richard Lamb:

In his interesting review of my book Richard Langworth suggests the reason why historians have not used the file in the Public Record Office on Potsdam which reveals that the British Foreign Office (supported by the USA Foreign Office) advised Japan would surrender immediately if the Emperor was allowed to continue to rule, is that the file is “in-significant.” This is incorrect. Other historians have not found it; one of the official British historians, John Ehrman, relied on it for a volume on Potsdam and the atom bombs. This was not published because it contradicted Churchill’s memoirs, and might have upset the Russians. The memorandum from the Foreign Office did not come from a “minor official” but from the Permanent Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan.

Raymond Callahan can only have read my book superficially as he construes my words into meaning that Churchill was responsible for cancelling the 82nd Airborne Division landing on Rome in September 1943.1 make it clear the decision was made in Rome in the middle of the night by Badoglio and General Maxwell Taylor when Churchill was far away in Quebec.

Reviewers should not presume because a book is not in the bibliography that the author has not read it. I know both the books on Yugoslavia – Mark Wheeler’s (published twelve years ago) and Clogg and Auty’s (published seventeen years ago). They have been made out of date by the discovery in the Public Record Office of a cache of documents quoted in Michael Lees’ Rape of Serbia (1990) and David Martin’s Web of Disinformation (1988) which prove Mihailovich was a valuable ally.

Firepower by Bidwell/Graham confirms German armour was superior to British in the desert, stating (page 224) that not until British armoured regiments were equipped with Sherman tanks were they able to “engage the German anti-tank guns at a matching range.”

Callahan evidently considers my reassessment of Churchill should be based on already known books and not on newly released official documents.

Richard Langworth:

Whether a Foreign Office file is “in-significant” or a Foreign Office official “minor,” is something over which people may differ. What I wrote was that I believed Churchill’s statement (that there was “never a moment’s hesitation” about dropping the bomb) “was representing opinion on the plenary level.” Cadogan was never near the plenary level.

I agree that the latest sourceworks are important, and so offer one from 1992: David McCullough’s brilliant new biography, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster): When Japan heard the Potsdam Declaration (demanding Japan surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction”) Prime Minister Suzuki and his Cabinet “went into an all-day meeting. Meanwhile, over Tokyo and ten other Japanese cities, American planes were dropping millions of leaflets with a printed translation of the declaration. Suzuki’s decision was to ignore the matter. The declaration, he said at a press conference, was nothing but a rehash of old proposals and as such, beneath contempt. He would ‘kill [it] with silence,’ he said.” This is the man Mr. Lamb would have us believe was “in favour of a negotiated peace” and “would almost certainly have responded” if the Potsdam Declaration had been “official.”

Raymond Callahan:

A reviewer’s task when dealing with serious non-fiction is to inform potential readers of a book’s overall quality, which means its conceptual soundness, clarity of exposition and adequacy of research. If an author decides that standard works in a field have become dated due to new interpretations and/or the availability of new documentation he needs to say so – in his text, in a content footnote or in a bibliographic essay. If he does not, he runs the risk of appearing not to be aware of them.

This general observation leads to my second point. Mr. Lamb observes that his failure to mention a book ought not be taken to mean that he has not read it. Applying this remark to Firepower by Shelford Bidwell and Dominic Graham, I must assume that he has read the following lapidary summary of the Desert War:

The British, . . . were in many respects better off in weapons and resources than their opponents but, following their own theories (if theories they were), went badly astray to the point at which they almost lost control of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Then, in August 1942, there was a well-known change in command and a reversion to older but sounder principles and methods (p.222.)

If Mr. Lamb does not accept this it is up to him to say why. Implying that he is aware of the book’s existence, while ignoring its now widely accepted analysis simply will not do in a book that claims to be a piece of serious historical writing. (Incidentally, after carefully searching p. 224 of my copy of Firepower, I cannot find either the statement to which Mr. Lamb refers, or the words he has placed within quotation marks.)

I do not believe there is any point in going further to establish my point: Mr. Lamb’s book has some serious weaknesses.