Reid Churchill 1940-1945

Under Friendly Fire
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-126-2
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 502 Seiten

In 1940, after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, it could be seen that immediate and ignominious defeat by Nazi Germany had been averted. But victory seemed improbable. Relations with those whom Churchill had to work with against the Nazi threat were far from easy. He had to battle with his generals, Tory backbenchers and the War Cabinet, de Gaulle and the Free French, and - above all - the Americans. Walter Reid, bestselling author of Douglas Haig, Architect of Victory, reveals how much time and energy Churchill devoted to fighting the war that was excluded from the official accounts: the war with his allies. 'Recommended to all students of the high strategy of the Second World War without reservation' - The British Army Review

Walter Reid studied at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh and is the author of a number of acclaimed biographies and books of military and political history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reid, Walter

Leseproben

1

There was never any doubt that Churchill would write a history of the Second World War if he lived to see its end. Even if he had not repeatedly said he would, he had never been involved in a military enterprise without recording his experiences, either as a book or in journalism.

He was proud of the fact that throughout his life he had supported his family and an elevated lifestyle by his pen. Between 1898 and 1958 he wrote fifty-four volumes. By adding in his final speeches, a 1962 compilation of his early articles and eight books published posthumously, he produced seventy-four volumes and, including articles, published letters, speeches and books, a total output of about 15 million words.1

His first book, , an account of his experiences on the Afghan frontier, was published when he was only twenty-three. He had already written many newspaper articles, describing his experiences as an observer of the Cuban Civil War in 1895. In India, as well as composing his story of the Field Force he was sending reports both to the and the . He was also writing short stories and working on his one novel, .

So it went on. In Egypt in 1898 he was writing for the and . The articles for the , he told his mother, would ‘act as foundations and as scaffolding for my book’. That book, , was published at the end of 1899. By then he was in South Africa, which similarly provided material for publication.

All of this can be seen as preparation for his remarkable survey of the First World War, . At the Admiralty, Munitions and the War Office, Churchill had been at the centre of the direction of the war, and the history he published between 1923 and 1931 is detailed, remarkably accurate and still very well worth reading. His vivid descriptions and dramatic prose are undergirded by the authority of a mass of statistical data.

But in another respect, too, foreshadows the still more monumental history of the Second World War. He is the hero as well as the narrator, prompting Arthur Balfour’s celebrated quip: ‘I hear that Winston has written a book about himself and called it ’. Churchill appears to be at the centre of events, dominating, directing and controlling them. His vision and his initiatives are those that count.

In the course of the Second World War he did not disguise the fact that his account of the conflict would be equally subjective. When a companion wondered what history would make of events, he famously replied, ‘I know, because I intend to write the history’. On another occasion he gave the same response, though more elliptically, to the observation that it would be interesting to see what the verdict of history would be: ‘That will depend on who writes the history’.

These, then, were to be the hallmarks of : massive quotation of official documents, supporting a particular and skewed account of the historic events of the years 1940 to 1945. The treatment was to be noble, like the magnificent Gibbonian prose in which the story was told: the pettinesses, confusion, bungling and ignoble squabbling which are so much the essence of history are swept from his sanitised pages to give way to myth, drama and inspiration.

, like , runs to six volumes; but the second series of volumes is bigger than the first: it extends to nearly 2 million words. Something like 12 per cent of these words is contained in appendices, in which official minutes and papers are quoted in part or whole. Churchill’s approach to these papers was very simple: ‘They are mine. I can publish them’. The constitutional position was much more opaque, and all that can be said with certainty is that Churchill was quite wrong. All the same, for a variety of reasons, many of them depending on rules which he himself had drawn up before surrendering office in 1945, he was able to take with him a substantial volume of his ‘own’ minutes and telegrams. He also had the right to consult an even bigger volume of papers, which was left in the government’s hands. Furthermore, although government consent was required to quote from official documents and despite the fact that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, was anxious to avoid a repetition of the rash of memoirs based on official papers that occurred after the First World War, Churchill was accorded a very special dispensation. The government came to think of his memoirs as having a quasi-official status and representing a statement for the historical record in the interests of the nation.

There were distortions in his narrative. The war in the Pacific is dealt with very sketchily, and there is no acknowledgement at all that it was Russia which really won the war in Europe. These faults reflect the egotistical nature of Churchill’s project. His account was the sort of story that Julius Caesar told, history created by Great Men, events moulded by titans. When Eisenhower’s naval assistant, Harry Butcher, published his diaries in 1946, Churchill wrote to his old colleague: ‘The Articles are, in my opinion, altogether below the level upon which such matters should be treated. Great events and personalities are all made small when passed through the medium of the small mind.’2

The archival approach and the self-justifying process came together: because the documentary evidence more readily available consisted of Churchill’s minutes and directives, not the responses to them, the picture that he painted was of events which he galvanised, and in which others’ roles were minimised or completely excluded. This was resented by some, and the reaction of Sir Alan Brooke, later Viscount Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff for most of the war, will particularly be noted later in this narrative. Lord Reith, who had been a disappointing Minister of Information and was no friend of Churchill, complained, ‘Winston prints in his war book innumerable directives and never once lets us see a single answer’.

In a fascinating piece of scholarly detective work, Professor David Reynolds has revealed the remarkable history of the writing of Churchill’s history.3 Sir Norman Brook, Bridges’ successor as Cabinet Secretary, became less a censor than a co-author, and actively helped, drafting chunks of the narrative. Other public servants also made contributions. The price of government approval was a certain amount of vetting, but political control of the narrative stemmed less from the Labour government, in power when the first volumes appeared, than from Churchill himself. Even in opposition, but particularly when he was in power again after 1951, he distorted the historical record for political reasons.

In his second ministry he was greatly preoccupied by the tragic sense that the victory of 1945 would be succeeded by another war, even more terrible than the last. Nothing was to be done which might prejudice the chances of avoiding that disaster. Differences with Stalin were minimised, and in particular the tensions in the relationship with America and the increasing divergence of the views of the two allies were almost written out. By the time that the last volumes were appearing, Eisenhower, the wartime Supreme Commander, was President of the United States, and the true nature of Anglo-American relations by the end of the war is accordingly scarcely hinted at.

There was some criticism of the history as the successive volumes were published. Emmanuel Shinwell adapted Balfour and said that Churchill had written a novel with himself as the chief character. Michael Foot, though generally well disposed, spoke of Churchill ‘clothing his personal vindication in the garb of history’.4 Other criticisms were made, both in regard to detail and to the nature of the books, but they were overshadowed by the vast preponderance of favourable reviews. In so far as criticism was noticed at all, it was largely discredited because it came from those who had never been Churchill’s supporters.

The publication of the six volumes was the literary phenomenon of the time. Each volume was published in America before Britain, and a series of different editions was published in each country, as well as elsewhere: concurrent Canadian, Australian, Taiwanese and book club editions appeared with translations in almost every language in Europe, including Russian. Editions in the remaining languages of the world followed. Among the various printings which subsequently appeared were paperbacks, and in addition to publication in book form, the history was serialised in Britain, America, Australia and other countries. The first volume appeared in forty-two editions of the .5 In Britain alone the hardback six volumes were printed in quantities of about 250,000 each, and in the case of the early volumes they sold out within hours.

Churchill never claimed that his book represented the whole story: ‘I do not describe this as history, for that belongs to another generation. But I claim with confidence that it is a contribution to history which will be of service to the future.’ Those closest to the centre of affairs knew well that Churchill had not been alone in controlling events and that he was justifying himself before history and enhancing his personal role. But no one wished to destroy a myth that flattered not just Churchill, but Britain collectively – and indeed the...