March 12, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 55

Churchill: The Prophetic Statesman, by James C. Humes. Regnery, hardbound, 300 pp., $27.95, Kindle edition $14.99, audiobook $19.95. Member price $22.36.

Churchill is more celebrated for his prophecies which came true—the two World Wars, becoming prime minister, the Nazi and Soviet threats, guided missiles, nuclear bombs, even cell phones—rather than the prophecies that didn’t—Anglo-American condominium, a settlement with the Soviets and a truly united British Commonwealth, not to mention the invulnerability of France, Tobruk, Singapore, and the survival of capital ships in concentrated air attacks.

James Humes compiles Churchill’s many accurate predictions, probably more than WSC would have labeled as such. “I always avoid prophesying beforehand,” he said in 1943, “because it is much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.”

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Although there is nothing new here, Mr. Humes has thoroughly plumbed the literature to produce a comprehensive catalogue. Twenty-eight chapters are subdivided into six parts: World War I (predicted as early as WSC’s school years); Military Weaponry (aircraft and tanks); Domestic Affairs (the age of technology, a “middle way” between capitalism and socialism); the Totalitarian Age (foreseen as early as his 1900 novel Savrola); World War II (Bolsheviks, Fascists, Nazis, the certainty of victory, his loss of the election); and the Cold War (Iron Curtain, United Europe, collective security, the Soviet collapse). I don’t think any major prediction that came true is left out.

I’ve criticized some of my old friend’s books for mangled or manufactured Churchill quotes and counter-factual history, so let me say this new book is admirably free of them. I found only three serious misquotes (to Hitler’s deputy about anti-Semitism, to Colville about Hitler invading Hell, and a minor omission in the Fulton speech).

There are however some misinter-pretations. Hitler was not “in diapers” when Churchill wrote Savrola; WSC’s remarks about Islam in The River War were not “suppressed for political reasons.” Churchill’s famous memorandum predicting a German incursion into France should war break out in 1911 was not the reason for his being elevated to the Admiralty; if it were he would have gone to the War Office. It is quite a stretch to declare that if the Dardanelles plan had succeeded “Germany might have been defeated in 1915.” When Churchill hoped to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” he was Minister of War, not Munitions. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait did not emerge from the Cairo Treaty, though Iraq and Jordan did. I don’t think Churchill ever held a pilot’s license, nor that anyone called his grandson “Winston Churchill II.” And Sir Winston did not win the Nobel Prize for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which had not been published when he won it.

More serious perhaps is a chapter, “A Rare Miss,” on what Humes believes was the outstanding mis-prediction: that Churchill thought D-Day would fail and “up to the last minute” was urging “alternative invasion plans.”

This is silly. Churchill began seeking “a lodgment on the continent” in 1942, conceived of such ideas as the Mulberry Harbors (which Humes discusses), and was fully behind the invasion of France, which was postponed by Roosevelt, and for good reason. That Churchill had cold feet is an old Russian myth. At Teheran, Stalin questioned whether or not “the prime minister and the British staffs really believe in Overlord.” Churchill shot back: “It will be our stern duty to hurl across the Channel against the Germans every sinew of our strength”—despite his personal conviction that there were targets of opportunity in places less congenial to Stalin. (See “Churchill and D-Day,” by Martin Gilbert, FH 122: 24-27.)

That peculiar chapter aside, Humes has given us a good summary of “Churchill clairvoyant” and accurately quotes many speeches not often noticed, including a prescient one in 1957, two years after Sir Winston retired, to the American Bar Association. The book contains many thoughtful summaries of the “Prophetic Statesman,” among which this may be the best:

“Churchill was the first to prophesy the possibility of German militarism’s allying itself with Russian Bolshevism, and he was the first to predict the short shelf life of such an alliance…. Churchill’s predictive abilities did not require any supernatural powers of clairvoyance. It was sufficient for him to perceive the character of tyrannical, aggressive regimes and to keep in mind the lessons of history.”