The big Three

[Hedgehog]

1291: Edward I's wife, Eleanor of Castile, dies. Crosses are erected where her body rests on the way to London.
1660: The 12 founding members of the Royal Society meet for the first time at Gresham College in London.
1943: The 'Big Three' of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet in Tehran to discuss the invasion of France.


Kind history
'History will judge us kindly', Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943; when asked how he could be so sure, he responded: 'because I shall write the history'. And so he did, in the six massive volumes of The Second World War. The first volume, The Gathering Storm, describes his opposition to the appeasement of Hitler during the 1930s, and provides the text for a BBC TV drama of the same name.


It is a good tale, told by a master story-teller, who did, after all, win the Nobel prize for literature; but would the Booker prize for fiction have been more appropriate?
There is, in fact, nothing very controversial about the claim that Churchill was alone in his opposition to appeasement; it was one he made himself in 1948, and is generally acknowledged. If you want controversy, it must come in the form of an argument to counter the central thesis of The Gathering Storm, namely that Churchill was right and his critics wrong. This is a difficult task, because The Gathering Storm has been one of the most influential books of our time. It is no exaggeration to claim that it has strongly influenced the behaviour of Western politicians from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush.

Its central theme - the futility of appeasement and the need to stand up to dictators - is one that has been taken for granted as a self-evident truth in Western society, both during the period of the Cold War and subsequently. The evidence for this supposed truth is Churchill's view of the 1930s as 'the years that the locust hath eaten', during which the Western powers, by their own folly, allowed Germany to re-arm; never again, the message went, must this be allowed to happen. It is a good tale, told by a master story-teller, who did, after all, win the Nobel prize for literature; but would the Booker prize for fiction have been more appropriate?

 

[Hedgehog]

Want of judgement?
Churchill spent much effort in the late 1930s in trying to warn of the danger that Hitler posed to Europe, and of the lack of Britain's preparedness for war. In The Gathering Storm, he says nothing about his secret sources of information about the state of Britain's weaponry (which mainly came from discontented RAF officers), but talks in detail about the central event in his own personal psycho-drama, the Munich settlement of 1938, when Chamberlain accepted the transfer of part of Czechoslovakia to Germany as the price to be paid for 'peace in our time'.

Most historians have dismissed most of the supposedly secret information passed to Churchill as pretty worthless, but that is really beside the point - the central flaw in Churchill's version of events is that it amounts to no more than an exercise in self-promotion. The sheer unlikeliness that everyone was out of step but our Winston is obscured by his iconic status as the man who won the war and as 'the prophet of truth' before it.


... the central flaw in Churchill's version of events is that it amounts to no more than an exercise in self-promotion.
It is not just that Churchill was inconsistent in his criticisms of Hitler (whom he once hoped to see 'a kinder figure in a gentler age'); his whole reading of events leading up to World War Two was badly flawed, and looks good only with the advantage of hindsight. Because the war was won by a 'Grand Alliance' of Britain, America and the Soviet Union, it is easy to argue that Churchill's advocacy of such an alignment in 1938 should have been listened to at the time. As the pressure on Czechoslovakia from Hitler mounted in early 1938, Churchill did indeed call for a 'Grand Alliance'; but far from this being an example of his far-sightedness, it actually showed the myopia and want of judgement that kept sensible men away from him during the 1930s. As Neville Chamberlain commented at the time, 'there is everything to be said for Winston's plan, until you examine it.' If Churchill was crying in the wilderness, it was the wildness of his own ideas that had taken him there.

Contrary to the view promoted by Churchill, Prime Minister Chamberlain did not reject his plans without taking official advice, but as far as the Foreign Office was concerned, Churchill's ideas were the equivalent of amateur night at the karaoke bar, and the arguments against them were very strong. First, America, the first part of the 'Grand Alliance', was still an isolationist power. It had no army capable of intervening in Europe and no politician arguing for such a policy. Next, the second part of the alliance, the Soviet Union, which (as Stalin had not forgotten) Churchill had tried to strangle at birth, was actually part of the problem, not of the solution; only a mentality as Anglocentric as Churchill's could have imagined otherwise.

 

[PoorOldSpike]

Despite what modern lefty authors may say to try to sensationalise their cheap trash, nothing in Churchill's actions have the stench of appeasement about them throughout the whole war, instead he did all he could to get at Hitler's throat right from the start, eg- blowing up the French Fleet to stop them falling into Adolf's hands; ordering "Sink the Bismarck!";Ordering Bomber Command to "devastate" Germany; Ordering commando raids on German-held coastlines; and of course (along with Roosevelt and Stalin) telling Hitler he must "surrender unconditionally" with no negotiation.
Even Guderian knew Churchill wouldn't give an inch as early as 1940, he says in Panzer Leader (page 439) that if the British Army had been captured at Dunkirk, Britain might have discussed peace terms "despite Churchill"