August 13, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 38

TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION: INTERNET DIALOGUES – PUBLIC OPINION, PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE


Here are two more examples of the intriguing email The Churchill Centre fields and replies to from young people all over the world almost every day. They cause us to hope that the future of the world is in good hands despite the odds.

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Iam in my last year of high school and am a very passionate student of history. I was recently asked to design and conduct an investigation in an area of changing historical interpretation. I am a great admirer of Winston Churchill, and have decided to base my investigation on him. This is why I am writing to you.

My goal is to research historical sources to determine whether Churchill was able to shift public opinion as a consequence of his language and action, or whether he responded to events as they unfolded.

This project is still its early stages and during my research I located The Churchill Centre website, www.winstonchurchill.org. I was hoping to gather your suggestions on my objective, and some assistance on the topic. Can you please help?
—STEVE LOZANOVSKI

• Steve, that’s a big topic, and I have forwarded your message to several authorities who may have other thoughts in addition to mine.

You may wish to consider whether he was more able to reflect public opinion than to shift it. Until the war came in 1939, the British public tended to distrust him. For a summary of the reasons why, which go back to his early career, read “Churchill the Great? Why the Vote Will Not Be Unanimous” ( Finest Hour 105, Autumn 1999) on our website at http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=822.*

*Note: hereafter, to avoid long URL locations, we have shortened our own URL by selecting http://metamark.net/ and using the handy Metamark Shortening Service.

Once the war was on, and the public knew they would have to fight, their opinion of Churchill improved rapidly, because they recognized him as a fighter. His words were able to capture what they felt, but perhaps hadn’t put into words themselves. An RAF veteran who later served as one of his Scotland Yard bodyguards once told me, “After hearing his speeches, we wanted the invasion to come!”

You could safely state that his speeches and broadcasts gave courage to people. He did not just react to events—nor did he try to gloss over the dangers. He often predicted that there would be a great deal of bad news before the news became better.

One of the books you might consult is Steven Hayward’s Churchill on Leadership, an outstanding work on the subject, which should be available through your local library. A review of this book, from Finest Hour 95, Summer 1997, is at http://xrl.us/d2i2.

Then use our search engine to search for phrases like these, which will bring up a lot of useful articles: Churchill’s leadership, Churchill’s broadcasts, and so on.

Read our review of Volume VI of the official biography, Finest Hour 42, Winter 1984, http://xrl.us/d2i6. Also check the book itself, because it covers the precise period (1939-41) where Churchill’s speeches and broadcasts reached their peak in influencing public opinion— not only in Britain but also in the United States.

Good luck with your essay; when it’s done we’d like to see it—we sometimes publish student essays.

Hello. I live in Australia and I am completing my final year of high school before University. I am studying Modern History and chose to write about Winston S. Churchill for an independent study, which shall be the basis of my marks for this topic. The question posed to me is: “Winston Churchill obtained information that would predict Adolf Hitler’s movements well in advance of the commencement of World War II. Evaluate the accuracy of this statement.” —DANIEL STEVENS

• Daniel, I am copying Alfred James, our representative in Australia, and a scholar who has the advantage of being fairly close to you. I would be interested in reading your final essay.

Prior to World War II, Churchill had several sources of secret information gathered by British Intelligence about Hitler’s rearmament programme, specifically about the recreation of the German air force, which was prohibited by the Versailles Treaty. Although the British government knew that he was receiving this information privately, and using it to criticise the government’s lack of preparation for war, they allowed it to go on—one of the intriguing aspects of the prewar period, when the government was officially in favor of appeasement and opposed Churchill’s proposals.

Use our website search engine to search for articles on two people who were key to Churchill’s inside information: Desmond Morton and Ralph Wigram. You will find many articles and references to their relationship with Churchill and the news they brought him.

Churchill also knew many of Hitler’s plans during the war, thanks to the code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, which broke the German “Enigma” code. Churchill was prohibited by secrecy laws from disclosing this in his war memoirs, but it came out later, when the various documents were declassified and secrecy lapsed. Today, Bletchley Park is a shrine to the people who worked there and made such an important contribution to the war effort.

Please do not, however, accept the widespread myth that Churchill let the city of Coventry be attacked because to defend it would have compromised his secret intelligence. This is utterly untrue. His information that night was that the raid would occur over London, not Coventry; he actually turned his car around and headed for London so as to be present during the attack. One hundred nineteen fighter aircraft were mustered to defend Coventry once the direction of the German bombers became apparent.

Use our search engine to search for the word “Bletchley”—you will find many articles. The Coventry story was published in Finest Hour 114, Spring 2002, and is on our website at http://xrl.us/b8uv. Also visit Bletchley Park’s fine website: www.bletchleypark.org.uk.

And we occasionally get a message like this one, which makes us wonder: Did a teacher simply say, “Write a report on Winston Churchill,” or do students just pick a name out of a hat? We wish we knew!

Hi I’m doing a school project and i need tonnes of info on who he is and what he does by tommorow WA time. Please help. Bye for now. —GUY SEBASTIAN

• Guy, use our website, and its search engine. There are tonnes of info on it. —RML

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