August 2, 2013

Finest Hour 122, Spring 2004

Page 33

BY DAVID FREEMAN

Sometimes peace can only be achieved by risking war…


Some may find my title striking. Certainly I hope to play upon the perceived popular image of Churchill as war leader to focus attention on less well-known aspects of his long career. Let me begin, however, by noting that I do not intend to engage in what Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby has described as “the ultimate conceit,” that is, presuming to speak to how one’s biographical subject would judge current events. Rather, my intention is to illustrate what Churchill did do during his own life to prevent or defuse situations that threatened to escalate into conflict, and what resulted. Such examples may serve to guide us today and in the future. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to how they may apply.

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Churchill brought nothing less than the Olympian abilities to every task he undertook. The man who famously remarked, “never maltreat the enemy by halves,” gave as much of himself to waging peace as he ever did to waging war. Indeed, if more people had shared Churchill’s views on preventing war, much of the sorrow of the past century might have been avoided. The great paradox of Churchill’s career is that he is best known for his performance in conflicts he sought to avoid, brought about by people who thought they knew better than he did.

Winston Churchill was first elected to Parliament in 1900 on the strength of notoriety as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer War. Briefly, that conflict pitted the Dutch-descended Boers against British settlers for control of the region and its rich mineral resources. Churchill’s capture by the Boers and subsequent dramatic escape made him an electable hero. When the bitter war finally ended with a British victory in 1902, it was on the understanding that “as soon as circumstances permit [ted], representative institutions, leading up to full self-government” would be introduced in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, where the Boers made up a majority of the white population.

By the time Churchill first assumed ministerial office in 1906, as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, negotiations were under way for Boer self-government within the British Empire. The British Conservative Government, which left office at the end of 1905, had proposed a further transitional stage between the existing colonial rule in South Africa and complete Home Rule with a scheme that called for legislatures elected by adult white males, governing in conjunction with an executive still appointed by the British. The Boers, however, preferred immediate Home Rule, which would give them virtually full control over their domestic affairs. Churchill concurred. It must be remembered that the fear which then existed was a resumption of warfare between the two
white populations.

Although native Africans then outnumbered the total white population by a ratio of 5:1, their situation did not then comprise a source of political unrest. Churchill believed continued British sovereignty provided the surest guarantee of civil rights for the non-white populations of South Africa, which included many Indian immigrants; but he also saw regional autonomy for the Boers as a key to peace.

Churchill’s stance for immediate devolution won the support of the British Cabinet, which carried through on the plan in 1906 for the Transvaal and 1907 for the Orange River Colony, and which ultimately created the Union of South Africa in 1910. Churchill’s solution held firm for forty years. War was avoided, and it was not until the Boers insisted upon full autonomy after the Second World War, which Britain could no longer prevent, that the wretched policy of Apartheid was implemented.

In his memoirs of the Second World War, Churchill adopted as the moral of his work the mantra: “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” Certainly this was the policy that he pursued throughout his own dealings with the Boers. Whatever other misfortunes beset South Africa in the century after the Boer War, a full-scale civil war is not one of them.

As the South African situation settled down, a new foreign challenge posed a graver threat to British security. This was Germany’s rapid naval armament. Since the turn of the century the German naval minister, von Tirpitz, with the gleeful support of the German Kaiser, had championed an ever more powerful navy. Determined to maintain its own preeminence at sea, the British government responded by constructing a new class of super-battleships, the Dreadnoughts. The result was a fully-fledged and costly arms race.

From the British perspective, the German rush to build a strong navy could only be interpreted as a provocation. Against whom did the Germans anticipate using such a force? With its maritime empire, Britain had established itself as the world’s largest creditor nation. A navy maintained at a size greater than that of the next two largest navies in the world combinedโ€”a policy known as the two-power standardโ€”was viewed as the guarantor of Britain’s national and financial security.

But the Liberal governments in which Churchill served were laying the foundations of a welfare state. Many ministers preferred new expenditure for social programs to more naval vessels. The Cabinet compromised by abandoning the two-power standard in favor of a policy of maintaining 60 percent superiority over the German navy. Even this arrangement proved costly, however, as Tirpitz continued to force the pace.

In 1911 Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, the British equivalent to the position held by Tirpitz. To be certain, Churchill brought to the job his characteristic enthusiasm. With gusto he prepared the Royal Navy for possible war with Germany. But in stark contrast with Tirpitz, Churchill also boldly proposed an embargo on new naval construction in order to reduce tensions based on mutual suspicion and to build bonds of trust that might preclude a war altogether.

The First Lord called his plan a “naval holiday,” and he first proposed the idea while presenting his budget estimates to Parliament in March 1912. His suggestion had the potential of uniting those within his own government who favored social spending, and those who placed first importance on maintaining naval superiority. The idea might also prove attractive to the Germans, Churchill explained: “…the three ships that she [i.e., Germany] did not build would therefore automatically wipe out no fewer than five British potential super-Dreadnoughts, and that is more than I expect them to hope to do in a brilliant naval action.”

Alas, the German government disapproved of Churchill’s proposal. Ironically, while the British hoped to spare money from defense for social spending, the Germans feared that cancellation of large shipping orders would raise unemployment and lead to social unrest. The Kaiser politely passed on the naval holiday. The British Foreign Office also had doubts about the scheme, realizing that it would require participation of other naval powers such as France and Russia if it were to be successful.

Such a multilateral approach was not necessarily beyond attainability, and of course just such a treaty was eventually adopted in Washington in 1921-22โ€”but only after the First World War had run its terrible course. Churchill renewed his naval holiday suggestion in October 1913, but the Germans responded with a game of deceit. Publicly they declared themselves to be open to British suggestions on naval disarmament; privately, they made it known that such approaches would not be welcome. Eventually, the British were constrained to reveal Berlin’s duplicity, and Anglo-German relations further deteriorated.

Churchill nevertheless continued to explore ways of ending the arms race. He held out hope that a personal dialogue between himself and Tirpitz might open the way to disarmament talks and secure peace. Accordingly, he attempted to have himself invited to Germany by the Kaiser, who raised expectations of success by indicating his potential willingness to go along with the plan until | nearly the last possible minute in June 1914. Tirpitz steadfastly refused to meet with Churchill, however, and the proposed time of the conference bore witness to the Sarajevo assassination that triggered the war.

It must be stressed that Churchill repeatedly made good faith efforts to negotiate with Germany and to prevent war. These efforts were all rebuffed, and war came. Unilateral disarmament by the British would have been worse than useless. Indeed, Tirpitz interpreted Churchill’s naval holiday proposal as evidence that Germany’s own military build-up was paying dividends. The conclusion would appear to be that disarmament, while desirable, requires at least two willing parties. It would take not one but two world wars for the German people to appreciate the wisdom of Churchill’s naval holiday proposal.

Paradoxically, the First “World War had interrupted a drift towards civil war in British-controlled Ireland. The struggle for a durable peace in Eire closely involved Churchill. The Liberal Government to which be belonged depended on support from the Irish Nationalist I Party which expected as a quid pro quo a Home Rule Bill for Ireland analogous to that granted to the Boers. But Irish Protestants, who made up a majority in the northern province of Ulster, feared being swamped in a Catholic-dominated, self-governing Ireland and threatened to oppose Home Rule by force.

Churchill fully supported Irish Home Rule and was among those working to effect a peaceful resolution when the First World War erupted and placed the crisis in abeyance so far as the British were concerned. Frustrated Irish Nationalists, radicalized in the new Irish Catholic political party Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone”), emerged to demand not a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire but full and immediate independence.

After the war Sinn Fein swept elections in southern Ireland and refused all cooperation with the British. The Government of Prime Minister Lloyd George, under whom Churchill served as War Secretary and then as Colonial Secretary, responded with a Home Rule Bill that partitioned Ireland so as to preserve British rule in the North, a solution satisfactory to the Ulstermen. Although at the same time southern Ireland had finally been granted Dominion status, many Irish Catholics would now accept nothing less than complete independence.

Violence erupted and both sides committed atrocities. Churchill opposed full independence for the South but understood the dissatisfaction of Irish Catholics with the existing compromise. He urged them to accept the Home Rule Bill, however, not as “the last word” but “the first word” upon which future negotiations could build peacefully. He believed that Ulster would ultimately unite with the South, but that such a development would have to come through the free will of the North.

In the meantime, Churchill advised his own government to let Irish elections under the new Bill proceed, even though Sinn Fein would sweep the board. This action, combined with an announced truce in the ongoing terrorism, opened the way for talks. Ultimately, Churchill played an integral role in convincing most Sinn Fein leaders to accept a form of Dominion status under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922, and to put an end to the slaughter between Irish rebels and British forces.

Sadly, a final round of violence erupted which pitted Sinn Fein members against one another in disagreement over whether to accept the treaty. While the pro-treaty forces prevailed and peace was established, their leader, Michael Collins, was assassinated. Shortly before his death, Collins sent a message which read: “Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him.”

Churchill’s actions helped secure permanent peace in southern Ireland. In the North violence did not re-emerge until 1969, nearly a half-century after the treaty and four years after Churchill’s death. In dealing with the Irish matter, Churchill showed both a willingness to negotiate and to accept a gradual solution. The violence was carried out by those who had no patience with either. Yet despite direct threats to his own life, Churchill persevered and succeeded.

In dealing with the Boers, the Germans, and the Irish, Churchill always practiced a carrot-and-stick policy. For him, magnanimity flowed from a position of strength. He had supported the Boer War, the build-up of the Royal Navy against Germany, and the deployment of military forces in Ireland. Bargaining required something to bargain with. Paradoxically, Churchill was willing to risk war in order to secure peace. This approach led many to conclude that he was a war-monger, seeing only in absolute pacifism a sincere willingness for peace. Such was the background to the Second World War.

Even before Hitler came to power in 1933, Churchill appreciated that the would-be dictator’s rhetoric held evil portent. As word reached him in the 1930s that Chancellor Hitler was rearming Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty, Churchill as a private member of Parliament began to call upon a reluctant Parliament to take punitive action. He hoped the French would act when an emboldened Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, in further violation of the treaty.

But the war-weary British public strongly supported the policies of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his successor Neville Chamberlain as well as those of the Opposition Labour Party, which rationalized the actions of Hitler and insisted that unilateral disarmament was the only guarantor of peace. When Churchill remonstrated that Britain should, in fact, begin its own rearmament program so as to show the Third Reich it meant business, he was dismissed as a threat to peace.

Churchill was willing to run the risk of an immediate conflict if it might avoid a greater conflict later. He understood that in the final analysis peace can always be preserved if one is willing to submit. But submission was not in his nature.

As war approached he continued to believe that it could be avoided if Britain acted quickly to form a Grand Alliance with France and Russia, as well as lesser powers such as Czechoslovakia, to check Nazi aggression. His was true realpolitik, for Churchill had been one of the earliest opponents of Bolshevism. Yet he prioritized perceived threats and concluded that the Nazi menace overshadowed any danger then posed by Stalinist Russia. But it was to no avail. The British Government continued to fear that any aggressive behavior on its part would aggravate Germany and lead to war. Britain’s leaders sought to preserve peace by redressing the Fuhrer’s proclaimed grievances. Thus Appeasement was born.

Churchill dismissed Appeasement as a policy of “feeding the crocodile in the hopes that he will eat you last.” When the world breathed a collective sigh of relief after Chamberlain’s return from the Munich Conference in 1938 and the proclamation of “peace in our time,” Churchill denounced the sell-out of Czechoslovakia as an “unmitigated defeat.” Negotiations could actually be worse than useless if one of the parties was already known to be untrustworthy. “We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame,” Churchill wrote to a friend. “My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”

The Second World War came about without any of Churchill’s suggestions ever having been adopted. Not until war had been declared was he invited to join the Government, by a Prime Minister whose policy had failed utterly. Not for nothing did Churchill insist in his memoirs that there had never been a war in all of history that could more easily have been avoided by timely action.

During the Second World War, as Prime Minister himself, Churchill had the responsibility of negotiating with Roosevelt and Stalin to lay the foundations of a new peace. He did what he could under the growing realization that Britain’s greatly reduced power precluded him from doing as much as he would have liked to see the establishment of free and democratic states throughout Europe.

At great personal risk, he traveled to Athens in December 1944 to negotiate a settlement that secured Greece from communist control. Those who accuse Churchill and Roosevelt of “selling out” Eastern Europe at Yalta in February 1945 must bear in mind that Stalin would not have been constrained to break so many of the promises he made at that conference if he had really gotten such a good deal; and that Churchill’s success in Greece was at least partly owed to the widely denounced “spheres of influence” agreement he had made privately with Stalin.

In the final phase of his career, Churchill’s erstwhile hope was to orchestrate a “meeting at the summit,” as he called it, between the leaders of the great powers. Though sometimes characterized as an “old man in a hurry” during this period, Churchill saw the nuclear arms race as a much graver danger than the pre-1914 Anglo-German naval race. Once again Churchill hoped that through personal diplomacy, bonds of trust could be established which would reduce tension and avoid war of unthinkable proportions.

This noble goal, however, was thwarted both by the paralysis of Soviet leadership resulting from Stalin’s final illness and death, and the anti-communist mood that simultaneously gripped the United States. With Germany defeated and his own country economically prostrate, Churchill could no longer command the attention of his former allies. Detente would have to wait. Realizing he did not have time to wait himself, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister in 1955, to live out a retirement tinged with melancholy.

Ironically, when detente did come about in the 1970s and 1980s, it was characterized by the very “summitry” that Churchill had championed, but through bilateral negotiation onlyโ€”so far had Britain’s place fallen in the world. If Winston Churchill’s last campaign seemed to many at the time as quixotic, as it did to some in his own government, that was because they still did not appreciate his earlier career.

Churchill is supposed to have experienced some disappointment that the Nobel Prize he received in 1953 was for literature, not peace. To many, he was forever and only a war leader. But that is too limited a view, for Churchill understood that meaningful peace cannot always be secured strictly by peaceful means. Sometimes the seeker of peace must be willing to risk war. Understood this way, we may see Churchill correctly as a man who spent most of his life as a peacemaker.


Dr. Freeman teaches history at California State University, Fullerton. This text is from his remarks to the Dartmouth Alumni Association in Newport Beach, California on 12 March 2003.

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