April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 117, Winter 2002-03

Page 12

Comment on the BBC Greatest Britons poll (page 8) was mixed. The satirical magazine Private Eye wrote: “British people may have stopped voting in general elections but the life of the couch potato is a more or less permanent ballot. Last weekend alone channel-hoppers got to vote on the UK’s single greatest person ever, the five blokes forming Peter Waterman’s Xmas boy-band, and whether Goldie should be the first kicked out of Celebrity Big Brother….the credibility of [the Greatest Briton] project could not have survived a victory for Diana, a dead Sloane who only entered British history in 1980, or Brunel, his cause inflated by organised voting at the college named after him and some expert populist willy-waving by his advocate….So it was lucky for everyone that Churchill came through at the last minute, an utterly boring and uncontroversial but historically correct choice as, without him, this series would have been in German.” …. Author Mike Davis in his new book, Dead Cities, claimed that Churchill pursued using anthrax-laden bombs as a first-strike weapon against Nazi Germany. Mr. Davis’s point, wrote Mark Laswell, “is to show the murderous hypocrisy of Western leaders.” But, Laswell continued, The Guardian wrote that Davis based this “fact” on a 1987 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that pretended to know Churchill’s mind; it was later authoritatively rebutted in the same journal. Historian John Keegan said, “Nobody responsible thinks that Churchill intended to use anthrax against the Germans.”