Charmley Churchill: The End of Glory

A Political Biography
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30940-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 776 Seiten

Of the three revisionist works John Charmley has written about British foreign policy in the mid-twentieth century this is the centrepiece. The author argues that Churchill deserves more credit for 'their finest hour' than has been granted, but just as his virtues were built on the heroic scale, so too were his faults and failures. The statesman who had struggled to destroy Nazism and restore Europe's balance of power ended by allowing Stalin to dominate central and eastern Europe. This is no mere exercise in debunking, in many ways the complex man presented in these pages is more interesting than the more hagiographical portraits. 'This is not instant history run up to cause a sensation, but a meticulously documented reappraisal of Churchill's war leadership and of the career that led up to it. Nor is its tone contemptuous or vindictive. The author accepts that Churchill was a great man. His starting point is that even great men make mistakes.' John Keegan, Daily Telegraph 'Probably the most important revisionist text to be published since the war.' Alan Clark, The Times

John Charmley is a British diplomatic historian and a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia, where he is head of the school of history. He is the author of eight books, five of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. He is perhaps most famous for his revisionist interpretation of British foreign policy in the mid-twentieth century, dealing with subjects like Appeasement and the Second World War with a degree of iconoclasm.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Charmley, John

Leseproben

Preface for the 1995 Paperback Edition

What historians know and what the general public knows are often two different things. For many years, at least in the historical profession, it has been commonplace to question Churchill’s judgement both before 1940 and after 1945, but the central pillars of the Churchill legend, his fight against appeasement and his wartime leadership, had generally remained unchallenged, even if parts of them had been discreetly questioned in the decent obscurity of academic journals. Similarly, no one would question the fact that since the Second World War Britain has suffered a traumatic decline from her Great Power status, or that she has, to quote Dean Acheson, ‘lost an Empire and not yet found a role’. Acheson, in fact, only had it half right, Britain had in fact found a role – that of the martyr-hero of 1940. Enshrined in national memory, and bolstered by Churchill’s noble account and by the embellishments of rose-tinted hue which retrospect often lends to events, ‘Their Finest Hour’ was a national myth. To ask what part Churchill’s leader ship had played in the decline of Britain was not done. Still less was anyone asking whether the results of 1945 had been worth the efforts of 1940–45? If anything were more taboo than these things, it was to ask whether some other road than the one actually followed might have been open to the British Government. The reaction to the first edition of this book shows why these questions were not asked.

When a former Government Minister, Alan Clark, wrote a piece for The Times questioning whether Britain might have made peace with Hitler in 1940 or 1941 and, in the course of it, mentioned my forthcoming book, calling it ‘the most important revisionist text to be published since the war’, the heavens seemed to fall. Alan Clark found himself being called a ‘rich goon’ by a fellow Conservative mp, and he and I found ourselves under assault from every conceivable direction. When I had arrived at the Churchill Memorial in Fulton, Missouri, in August, I had been asked whether there was really any more mileage in Churchill: the furore which commenced in January 1993 gave a decisive answer to that question.

There were those who had served in the war who were outraged that a young man should come along and question the version of events which had been so long accepted. The argument that if I had lived through it I would have seen things differently’ was often heard, without the speakers stopping to reflect how silly this was – few of them would have dreamed of saying that ‘you can’t write about the Civil War unless you experienced it’ – but such was the heat of the moment after my book came out that Churchill’s grandson committed himself to the nonsensical statement that if I had lived through it I would have seen things differently. The book attracted leaders in The Times and The Guardian calling for a period of calm reflection and directing people to the book rather than Alan Clark’s article. But even now outraged Churchill worshippers write to their house journal protesting at my existence.

Having had all sorts of intentions imputed to the book, it might be in order to state here what its purpose was. Its genesis lay not in a desire to épater the Churchillians or anyone else, but rather in a decade and half of scholarly interest in the subject. It is some reflection on the general standard of reviewing that not one reviewer pointed out that in 1986 and 1987 I had published two well-received books, Duff Cooper and Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire, which took a purely orthodox view of appeasement and Churchill’s role in the 1930s. Instead of wild speculation that the author was a ‘Thatcherite historian’ (to be expected, no doubt, of the Independent newspaper), commentators would have been better employed asking why I had changed my tack.

By the time I had finished Lord Lloyd I had become deeply dissatisfied with the orthodox presentation of appeasement. In a review of Duff Cooper’s memoirs written in 1954, Lord Hailsham pointed out that the difference between Cooper’s position on Munich and Chamberlain’s was that the former enjoyed the luxury of not having to formulate an alternative policy. Lloyd and Churchill had opposed home rule for India for the same reason they fought appeasement – they were convinced that British power was extensive enough to maintain the position won by their forefathers. Yet in my teaching I was constantly telling undergraduates that the objective facts showed that Britain did not possess the power necessary to do this. A book was started in 1987 to show this by examining British foreign policy from 1937 to 1945, but as these things do, the project changed in the writing and became Chamberlain and the Lost Peace. Alan Clark wrote a review of it for The Spectator, but the Cabinet Office seemed to think it was inconsistent with his position as a Minister of the Crown and so it never appeared. Chamberlain was, as it turned out, the first of three volumes which set out to examine the accepted version of British foreign policy in the mid-twentieth century. That book questioned the notion that there was something shameful about appeasement; the next volume set out to tackle the notion that Britain had gained something from the Second World War, whilst the third volume would examine the great myth of the Anglo-American special relationship. But things did not work out that way – which was Churchill’s doing. The more Churchill’s behaviour from 1940 to 1945 was studied, the more necessary it became to go back into his past to explain how and why the views he held had been formed; the book turned into a political biography of Churchill.

The usual versions of Churchill implied some great change in him in 1940 and then some equally great reversion to type in 1945. This always appeared unlikely; men of sixty-five do not suddenly change their character. Thus it was necessary to establish, by reference to his earlier career, that the character istics which marked Churchill’s wartime leadership had always been there: the obsessional approach to politics and strategy; the fixation on personality; the tendency, whenever strategy was discussed, to overestimate the effect of any operation he liked and to underrate the difficulties which lay in the way of its execution; the narrowness of focus and of vision; the concentration on the short-term and the contingent; and, above all, the sense of personal mission which invested much of Churchill’s political career, his consciousness of being a ‘glow worm’ in a world of worms. It was also necessary to restore the conservative dimension of Churchill’s character.

Churchill was, in many senses, a quintessential Victorian liberal, who, like many such, found the springs of his liberalism drying up after the Great War. The tale he tells of his education in the excellent My Early Life is barely half the story. He may have been no great shakes as a student, but he had a quick and retentive mind and absorbed many of the intellectual fashions of his youth. He was without formal religious faith, but possessed a vague and undefined belief in Providence – something typical of many young men of his generation. He imbibed unthinkingly liberal nostrums about ‘progress’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, all of which were defined for him in a way characteristic of the liberalism of John Mill. But once the Great War exploded the idea of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ seemed to become licence, Churchill’s essentialy conservative caste of mind stood revealed. This was even more apparent when ‘democracy’ became something which ‘the people’ demanded from below rather than something which was bestowed on them from above by bien peasant aristocrats. Even during his most Liberal phase under the influence of Lloyd George, Churchill had spoken the language of radicalism with an upper-class accent; it was never to him the native tongue which it was to Lloyd George.

Although it passed almost unnoticed in the storm over other things, the portrait of Churchill which emerged from the book restored to him that deep conservatism which many contemporaries noticed. Over India, and over appeasement, his stance was profoundly reactionary. Most orthodox accounts of Churchill’s career take the view that he was wrong and reactionary on India, but right on appeasement; this seemed wrong. If Churchill had not held the views which he did about the British Empire and the imperial mission of the Anglo-Saxon race, then he could hardly have talked in the way he did about Britain’s duty to maintain ‘the balance of power’ in Europe. In both areas Churchill’s were the politics of nostalgia.

One of the features of the book which aroused some criticism was what was taken to be the argument that the British Empire could have been maintained in the form it had in the 1930s; here critics confused Churchill’s arguments with those of the author. Churchill accused Baldwin and company of wanting to surrender the Empire, just as he was later to accuse them of appeasing Hitler from craven motives; in both cases he failed to understand what was going on. It was no accident that the men who were prominent in the late 1930s in trying to carry out the policy of appeasement were, with the exception of Neville Chamberlain, those who, earlier in the decade, had promoted what became the India Act of...