June 3, 2015

Finest Hour 112, Autumn 2001

Page 46

By Andrew Roberts

Churchill’s War, by David Irving, Volume 2: Triumph in Adversity, London: Focal Point Publications, 1064 pages, £25 ($40), member price $32.


Admirers of Sir Winston Churchill can breathe a huge sigh of relief. For 14 years since the publication of David Irving’s first volume on Churchill they have been waiting to see what new conspiracies the right-wing historian might have managed to dig up in the hundreds of archives from which he has worked, but in this thick hymn of hate it is clear he has not managed to land one single significant blow on the reputation of Britain’s wartime leader.

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All the old accusations are trotted out: that Churchill was a rude, lying alcoholic who concealed Japan’s intention to attack Pearl Harbour from the Americans, was behind the murder of Britain’s ally the Polish leader General Sikorski, wanted to flatten Rome, and so on. There are even a few new and equally groundless ones: according to this volume Churchill was also a flasher who enjoyed exposing himself to foreign statesmen, was responsible for tipping off the Nazis to the fact that Britain had broken their codes, and asked MI6 to assassinate Britain’s other ally, General de Gaulle. I have counted a dozen new accusations in this volume, most of which would be laughable if they were not so foamingly presented, complete with 160 pages of notes that are alleged to back them up.

Yet when, for example, Irving claims that the then Queen Elizabeth (now the Queen Mother) supported Hitler’s peace offer in 1940, and that the proof is to be found in Box Number 23 of Lord Monckton’s papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I recalled from my own work on Monckton that that particular box has never been open to historians. The Bodleian confirmed to me that Mr. Irving has not so much as seen the box, let alone opened it. Many of Irving’s assertions are contradictory. If Churchill “invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his own country and its empire,” why did he not warn the Americans of what was about to happen in Pearl Harbour? If Mr. Irving’s views on Auschwitz are correct— that Jews were not being systematically killed there—why should Churchill be held to account for not ordering the RAF to bomb Auschwitz?

Mr. Irving consistently wants it both ways, but winds up getting neither. Despite the book’s (surely ironically meant) subtitle, Irving sees no redeeming features in the man who had the temerity to defeat Adolf Hitler. Churchill’s funniest jokes are dismissed as “jibes.” The imperative need to meet President Roosevelt in late 1941 to coordinate a post-Pearl Harbour global military strategy against Germany and Japan is explained in terms of the Prime Ministers “desire to hobnob at the highest levels.” He is accused of winning the war “in spite of himself.” Yet whenever the evidence for Irving’s claims is minutely examined by someone who has also visited the same archives and handled the same original documents, it fails to justify the claims he makes.

The selective quotation is legion. When Irving claims Churchill wished to “eliminate” de Gaulle, what Churchill in fact recommended to his Cabinet colleagues was that they should consider whether they should “eliminate de Gaulle as a political force and face Parliament and France upon the issue.” Irving’s entire Pearl Harbour theory rests upon an obvious misreading of the diary of the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alec Cadogan.

When Irving writes that Churchill was of “partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted,” he is simply being repulsive. When he claims that Churchill “was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war,” he is ignoring the evidence of dozens of the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for human civilisation to survive and prosper. When he writes that the Duke of Windsor was forced to leave Portugal in August 1940 at British “pistol point,” Irving is simply wrong. Irving’s profession of “shock” that Churchill turned a blind eye to his daughter-in-law Pamela Harriman’s affairs is based on a failure to appreciate the mores of Churchill’s class and time. Churchill’s supposed desire “to see Rome in flames” is utterly disproved by his message to Roosevelt that “we ought to instruct our pilots to observe all possible care in order to avoid hitting any of the Pope’s buildings in the city of Rome.”

This is the way the history of the Second World War would have been written if the wrong side had won, about the man, ironically, who preserved the right of freedom of speech.


Mr. Roberts is the author of Eminent Churchillians (reviewed FH85:38 and 95:4), and Churchill, Embattled Hero (FH 90:35), and is a member of ICS(UK). The above is excerpted from a review in The Daily Telegraph and published here by courtesy of the author.

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