Table Of ContentIntroduction i
David Irving
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CHURCHILL’s War
VOLUME II: TRIUMPH IN ADVERSITY
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ii churchill’s war
David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Incompletely
educated at Imperial College of Science & Technology and at Uni-
versity College London, he subsequently spent a year in Germany
working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the German
language. Among his thirty books, the best-known include Hitler’s
War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field-Marshal Rommel;
Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall
of the Luftwaffe; Göring: a Biography, and Nuremberg, the
Last Battle. He has translated several works by other authors in-
cluding Field-Marshal Keitel, Reinhard Gehlen and Nikki Lauda. He
lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and has raised five daughters.
In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a
best-seller in many countries. In he issued a revised edition,
Apocalypse 1945, as well as his important biography, Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich.The first volume of Churchill’s
War appeared in 1986.
Introduction iii
David Irving
CHURCHILL’s
War
ii –Triumph in Adversity
‘Two books in English stand out from the vast literature of the
Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe,
published in , and David Irving’s Hitler’s War’
JOHN KEEGAN, Times Literary Supplement,
F
FOCAL POINT
iv churchill’s war
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Churchill’s War is a series of volumes on the life of the British statesman;
vol. i was published by Veritas, of West Australia, in , by Hutchinson
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Introduction v
Contents
introduction: Never Forget Your Trade Mark vii
Part I
1: A Very Big and Very Ugly War 3
2: Prime Minister with Nothing to Hide 21
3: The Charter that Was Never Signed 37
4: Shall We Dance? asks Mr Churchill 53
5: ‘We Did It Before – and We Can Do It Again!’ 73
6: Carry a Big Stick 89
7: The ‘Nigger in the Woodpile’ 107
8: Really Not Quite Normal 135
9: Westward Look 157
10: Gaps in the Archives 163
11: A Sorry Pass 181
Part II
12: Day of Perfidy 203
13: At the White House 243
14: Some Chicken 267
15: The Completest Intimacy 291
16: Poor Winston 315
vi churchill’s war
Introduction vii
introduction: Never ForgetY our Trade
Mark
Updated Sunday, August 6, 2000 6:32 PM
Y
ears after the Second World War, one of Winston’s Churchill’s
wisest advisors would ask, ‘Why in was Churchill almost
universally regarded as a gifted, if eccentric politician, lacking in
judgement and better out of the government, whereas in he was re-
garded as a world statesman and the revered superman of the century?’1
The possible answer – he won the war – is defeated by the equally possible
observation: he forfeited Britain’s empire.
He won the war, as we shall see in the final volume of this trilogy, in
spite of himself. He had enraged every one of his military advisors on the
way. He did not spare with cruel and crushing remarks about his own chiefs
of staff: ‘You may take,’ he rasped, ‘the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid
airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what
do you get? The sum total of their fears!’2
By Victory-day in Europe, in May , the chiefs of staff would be so
out of sympathy with their leader that when he sent for them on that day,
and again when he said good-bye after losing the General Election in July,
and had the whisky and soda brought in, they just sat ruminating. On both
occasions the chiefs sat there ‘like dummies’ and did not even drink to his
health.3 After the war the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field-Mar-
shal Lord Alanbrooke, was angered to find that Churchill had painted him-
self as a hero in his memoirs; the account which the former General Sir
Alan Brooke himself committed to posterity in a leather-bound and pad-
locked diary was less flattering. ‘On the whole,’ growled Churchill, reading
the first volume, ‘I think that I am against publishing day to day diaries
written under the stress of events so soon afterwards.’4 Had he seen, as we
have, what Brooke omitted, he would have expressed himself rather more
forcefully.
vii
viii churchill’s war
the first volume of this trilogy appeared in 1987, thirty years after those
words were written.*
It is fitting to commence a second volume, appearing after such an in-
terval, with a survey of what we achieved with the first. We saw how after
a ‘wilderness period’ of ten years Winston S. Churchill, described by Harold
Balfour as this ‘singularly unlovable’ man, came to power on May , ,
to the alarm of his monarch and the distaste of at least three of his ministers
(Lords Beaverbrook and Halifax, and Mr Neville Chamberlain); how, by
playing on a non-existent threat of Nazi invasion he entrenched himself in
office, and rebuffed the peace settlement which Adolf Hitler repeatedly
and secretly offered, and which more than one of King George VI’s minis-
ters, his consort Queen Elizabeth, and (on certain dates in May and June
even Churchill himself) seemed disposed to accept;5 how having thus
sabotaged the prospects of peace, he contrived to prolong the war and,
cynics would observe, his own premiership, by propelling Britain and Ger-
many into a campaign of mutual air bombardment. At a time when Hitler
embargoed all raids on London, Churchill ordered a -bomber raid on
Berlin on August , , deliberately unleashing a bombing campaign
which would reach a climax of severity and barbarism only after the present
volume comes to a close.† In his orgy of destructiveness, Churchill even
issued orders – never carried out – a few days after the firestorm in Ham-
burg, for the ruthless saturation bombing of the Eternal City of Rome.
We have seen how as part of the price for his accession to office in May
Churchill gave the ‘kiss of life’ to Britain’s moribund Labour party,
elevating several of its leaders to unhoped-for cabinet office and paving the
way for the Socialists’ eventual return to power in , a political up-
heaval which brought in its train the inevitable end of the empire built by
three centuries of British endeavour.6 The revisionist historians Maurice
Cowling and John Charmley have endorsed our first volume’s assessment
of Churchill’s responsibility for the war and his part in the resurgence of
socialism in and Britain’s international decline.7 Churchill, the war-
lord, showed himself indifferent to post-war problems, and displayed no
interest in the dangerous revival of socialism by labour minister Ernest Bevin
and the trades unions.8
*David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol. i: The Struggle for Power (Cranbrook, West Australia,
; London, 8; New York, ).
†Vol. i, pages –.
Introduction ix
a history of Churchill’s war years therefore inevitably remains a history
of how he directed his war. We have seen how from the first moment he
gathered together the sinews of Britain’s secret agency, the codebreaking
organisation at Bletchley Park, which we have called his ‘Oracle,’ and guarded
that source not only from the enemy abroad but from his senior colleagues
at home (while his cronies, often far less suitable, were privy to the secret
and on occasion blurted out what they knew to even less suitable recipi-
ents).9 Knowledge was power, and Churchill clutched ultra, the ‘most
secret sources,’ boniface, the ‘BJs’ and whatever else he called them, close
to his watch-chained waistcoat, dealing these cards in the war-game only
rarely, to obviate or sometimes, some have suggested, even to engineer
military misfortunes as and when his strategic poker made it necessary.
We have seen how Churchill worked for many months after his appoint-
ment to stifle every cry and overture for peace.10 In our first volume we
portrayed the Duke of Windsor, the former king, as working from his over-
seas bases to end the war – a portrait which is now widely accepted, though
embellished with the distasteful and unwarranted epithet of traitor.11
There is much that cannot be fully explored even now. We shall see again
how close were the secret ties that Churchill maintained, to the chagrin of
the foreign office, with the collaborationist regime at Vichy, while still ex-
coriating its leader Marshal Pétain in his public utterances. Aware of the
opprobrium that this dual standard might invite, he took steps after the war
to remove all trace of this from the files. The secret agreement which he
reached with Pétain in October might never have existed – were it
not for the persistent, if not entirely impeccable, writings of Professor Louis
Rougier, the emissary who engineered it.* All relevant correspondence in
the papers of Lord Halifax, then foreign secretary, and twenty-eight pieces
exchanged between him and Jacques Chevalier in and about the
Rougier mission, are still withdrawn from public access; so are the letters
sent to Pétain by Churchill through the American attaché in Vichy at the
end of December and a month later through Admiral Leahy or Cheva-
lier.12 As Sir William Deakin, one of Churchill’s ghost-writers, wrote after
the war to Sir William Strang of the foreign office, the ‘Pétainist legend’
reflected poorly on Churchill and ‘should be suppressed once and for all.’13
Strang sealed his own file on Rougier with a cover note that it was not to be
used without the consent of the foreign office. This theme, Churchill’s am-
*Vol. i, pages –, .
x churchill’s war
bivalence about Pétain and his unconcealed hostility toward Anthony Eden’s
enfant gâté General Charles de Gaulle, surfaces again in the present volume;
in the next, we find the evidence, in his own handwriting, that it was Eden
who engineered the assassination of Admiral Darlan to appease De Gaulle.
We have seen too in the first volume how Britain’s unspoken war-aims,
which were at first assumed to be ‘to save Poland,’ elided invisibly during
to become instead ‘the defence of the heart of the British empire
against Nazi invasion’ although in fact, as Churchill knew, such an invasion
was never seriously threatened; how he nonetheless forged an alliance with
the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who harboured even less enthusiasm for
the perpetuation of Britain’s empire than Churchill did in truth himself;
and how, when it became opportune to woo the United States, whose presi-
dent lost no love whatsoever for the empire, Churchill subtly shifted his
stance and began perforce to portray his war-aim as being to destroy Hitler,
the devil incarnate; or ‘anti-Christ.’14 In fact he was ambivalent about why
he was really fighting this ruinous war. At the same time as he was telling
Lord Halifax that his intention was to fight Germany until Hitlerism was
finally broken ‘and the world relieved from the curse which a wicked man
has brought upon it,’15 and he was similarly telling his military guests at
Chequers that there was only one aim, ‘to destroy Hitler,’16 he was assuring
Edouard Bene that Czechoslovakia’s restoration was a war-aim, like that
of Poland.17 By January he was refusing all such pronouncements,
explaining to his cabinet colleagues that to state his war-aims precisely would
be compromising, while anything vaguer would disappoint.18
‘Just shoot at two targets,’ we shall hear him declaim in September ,
and he defines these as ‘Prussian militarism’ and ‘Nazi tyranny.’ Nor does he
want his people to bother explaining what those phrases mean. ‘This will
also have the advantage of not committing you to anything definite when
Germany is beaten.’19 For Winston Churchill, as for Adolf Hitler, making
war was an aim in itself.20 In April a London agent of Roosevelt’s
overseas Intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, would re-
port that watching Churchill he often reflected that, just as the Eighth Army
owed a great deal to Rommel, so Churchill owed ‘a hell of a lot’ to Hitler:
‘When he turns from Hitler to the home front, he becomes a smaller fig-
ure, the dextrous English politician, master of the telling phrase and the
useful monetary compromise.’ One could tell just when Churchill slipped
from one role into the other, continued the agent, by the change in his
practised oratorical tone. In domestic politics he revealed his less felicitous
