May 8, 2015

Finest Hour 111, Summer 2001

Page 40

By Andrew Roberts

Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best, London, Hambledon, 370 pp., illus., published at £19.95 ($30), CC Book Club price $25.

History is, as Pieter Geyl called it in Napoleon: For and Against (1945), “an argument without end,” and this book is a masterly summation of the present arguments for and against Winston Churchill. Although he usually comes down in Churchill’s favour, Geoffrey Best is scrupulously objective in explaining the anti-Churchill case of the so-called “revisionists.” Indeed, no better book has been written about the state of the historiographical struggle over Churchill.

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Geoffrey Best is well placed to adopt the Olympian stance necessary to eschew subjectivity in this most emotive of historical fields. A former history professor at Edinburgh and Sussex universities, he is a senior member of St Antonys College, Oxford. Unlike some academic historians, he has a felicitous turn of phrase. I defy anyone who starts his chapter on 1940, “His Finest Hour,” not to finish it in a sitting.

Unfortunately, this book has been published just too early for Best to be able to include reference to the second volume of David Irving’s Life of Churchill (expected in August). He does make short work of several of the more hoary anti-Churchill myths, writing, “I have enjoyed making my own mind up.” His subtitle—an answer, perhaps, to the late Sir Robert Rhodes James’s Churchill: a Study in Failure (1970)—allows no doubt as to which side Best finally favours.

Yet this is by no means an uncritical, Fifties-style hagiography. Best admits Churchill’s “innocence of false modesty” (that is, his vanity); his error in rejoining the Gold Standard in 1925 at a level which dangerously overvalued the pound; his “over-the-top” rhetoric before the rise of Hitler; and he states that Churchill’s pro-King stance during the abdication crisis “suggested that there was something amiss in his head.” These are today’s standard views, perhaps, but this eminently sane book is, in its quiet and dignified way, occasionally ferociously politically incorrect. The analysis of Churchill’s anti-independence Indian policy includes the opinion that Mahatma Gandhi’s “own non-violence often served as a signal for the violence of others.” The strategic bombing of German cities, Best writes, “gave German civilians the same opportunity” as British civilians of joining the dangers of the front line so long endured by their fighting men.

Best agrees with the view I propagated in 1994 of Churchill as an unashamed white supremacist, something which caused outrage at the time but is now generally accepted, especially if placed in its historical and social context. And we are spared the tendentious moralising of historians such as Clive Ponting, who wish us to judge Churchill according to the standards of the 21stcentury BBC rather than those of 19thcentury Blenheim Palace.

This book is particularly impressive when it comes to criticising the views of the Tory Nationalist school, which takes Churchill to task for not making peace with Hitler in 1941 in order to save the British Empire, remain independent from America and preserve Britain from socialism. Best describes the views of Dr. John Charmley and Alan Clark as the “most prominent and powerful” so far put forward against Churchill, but he dismisses them as resting on the suppositions that the Empire was not already crumbling and that Britain could somehow have remained free within easy reach of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Best writes: “These suppositions are simply not believable by anyone who has taken the measure of the mentality of Adolf Hitler, the principles of National Socialism, and the directions in which military technology was developing.”

Full of wise summations of difficult issues, this book represents far more than thejeu d’esprit that the author claims for it in his introduction. If he finds Churchill’s schooldays “a bit of a puzzle,” for example, or believes that there “is no generally agreed conclusion” to the debate over the sinking of the French fleet at Oran in June 1940, he has the intellectual self-confidence to say so.

By encouraging his readers to come to their own conclusions, Best subdy guides us towards his own mature and overwhelmingly pro-Churchill ones. The argument over Churchill will not end, but it will rarely be conducted as impressively as this.