Christopher Priest - The Separation

A ten-year period followed, 1929 to 1939, when Churchill was again out of high office, though he remained a backbench Member of Parliament. He changed his attitude to military spending and became a strenuous advocate of rearmament, being in effect the only voice raised in public to warn of Adolf Hitler’s ambitions. Cynics in the political establishment said then, and continued to say after 1941, that Churchill helped to stir up the war for his own political ends. Indeed, in 1939, on the outbreak of war in September, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, appointed Churchill for the second time to the Admiralty, a triumphant return to power, recognized as such within the ranks of the Royal Navy. In the first months of the German War, the navy bore the brunt of military operations, which with hindsight is not coincidental.

In spite of the fact that events in Germany from 1936 onwards seemed entirely to have vindicated his militaristic stand, Churchill was by this time regarded by his political contemporaries as unreliable by nature and a warmonger by instinct. Churchill was unpopular with most of the other MPs, few of whom were able to say they trusted him. He appeared to remain popular in the country, but by modern standards the sampling of popular opinion was only approximate at best.

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, the day the Wehrmacht marched into the Low Countries. Chamberlain felt obliged to resign because he knew a national government had become necessary and he could no longer count on the support of Parliament. Because experience of high office was essential, only two men were deemed to be qualified to replace him: Churchill or the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Churchill’s disadvantage was his most recent military fiasco: the British had been ignominiously thrown out of Norway by German forces after an adventure in which Churchill’s actions arguably breached Norwegian neutrality. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill enthusiastically engineered the action and so was ultimately responsible for its failure. Halifax’s disadvantage was that he was a peer and therefore sat in the House of Lords. He was also well known for his appeasement policies, a serious drawback in May 1940. In a private meeting at 10 Downing Street between the three men, Churchill opted to say nothing. Breaking the long silence, Halifax eventually yielded. Churchill immediately accepted that the duty fell on him. By the evening he had been asked by the King to form a new government. Churchill’s own reaction, recorded in his post-war account of the war years, was that he felt as if he were walking with destiny, that all his past life had been but a preparation for that hour and trial. So his twelvemonth premiership began, as did the process by which he would take Britain out of the war.

By the late summer of 1940 it would seem that Churchill was in an unassailable position, both within the government and in the country as a whole: in a series of brilliant speeches he stiffened the sinews of the British nation with plainly spoken messages of unshakeable defiance against the German enemy. Neither defeat nor surrender was an option: he was determined to prevail against Hitler’s machinations. Meanwhile his political standing had improved immeasurably. Before the end of 1940 most of the men who served in Chamberlain’s pre-war cabinet, still identified as appeasers, were gone from the government and Churchill commanded almost universal respect and loyalty.

By the following May, the fortunes of war had started to swing in Britain’s favour. The Italian army was defeated in Africa. The Battle of Britain had been won. The threat of invasion across the English Channel had receded. The Blitz against British cities was slowly reducing in intensity, with both sides realizing that the bombing of the cities had been a blessing in disguise for the Royal Air Force, which in the meantime built up the strength of both its Fighter and Bomber Commands. The British had cracked the German codes. From decoding those ciphers, and from other intelligence sources, Churchill knew that Germany was planning to launch a huge attack on the Soviet Union. The USA seemed likely to come into the war on the side of the British, later if not sooner.

On the face of it, the war situation looked like a formula for eventual military success, a different prospect indeed from the days of the previous summer, when Adolf Hitler had disingenuously offered peace. To accept Hitler’s terms then, in the state of weakness that existed, would have been to capitulate.

In this more advantageous spring of 1941, thoughts of formulating any kind of peace with Nazi Germany must have been a long way from Churchill’s mind as he contemplated the reports from his Chiefs of Staff. His principal concern at the time, as recorded in his London Wartime Diaries (1950), was to persuade the Americans to convert their brand of Britain-favouring neutrality into a full-blooded military alliance that would rid the world first of fascism, then of communism.

The USA, meanwhile, was tormented by the situation in China and Japan. It was by no means certain that President Franklin Roosevelt would be able to swing the USA to Churchill’s assistance. Had the Japanese expanded eastwards, with some kind of provocation against the USA, then Churchill’s plans might well have borne fruit. Japan was in alliance with Nazi Germany, so the USA would have had to come into the German war on Britain’s side.

Instead, after Churchill’s final and most sensational reversal of policy in May 1941, the USA felt itself released from all obligations to the British. Within four weeks of the British armistice, and two weeks before the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, they launched their series of pre-emptive attacks on expansionist Japan and the Japanese-occupied areas of mainland China. When Japan had been defeated, and the Bolshevist threat posed by the Maoist revolution had been crushed, the USA’s opportunistic alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang enabled them to move swiftly on Manchuria and, eventually, across the vast eastern reaches of the Soviet Union.

Churchill always claimed after the event that the destruction of communism was for him a higher priority than the defeat of Nazism, the latter being but a step on the way to the former. There is, however, no real historical evidence that this was the case. All contemporary records reveal Churchill’s obsession both with his own central position within British history and with the relatively straightforward war with Germany.

The infinitely more complex and dangerous war against communism was in effect fought by the Germans invading Russia from the west and the Americans from the east. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union after the cease-fire at the Urals, the two former superpowers then settled into the Third War stalemate. They both collapsed into economic and social stagnation as the incalculable costs of their wars were counted. From this ruin, only Germany so far has recovered - and then only with the aid of the denazification programme from the European Union. For the USA, the half-century of stalemate has been a disaster, still with no solution in sight. At the beginning of the twentieth century the USA was shaping into the newest and perhaps best democracy in the Western world. Instead, because of bad military decisions, corrupt civilian governments and a level of political inwardness that puts pre-war isolationism into the shade, it has become a shaky but authoritarian republic, run in effect by capitalist adventurers and armed militias, and undermined by social dissent, organized crime and a heavily armed populace.

By the time the Third War stalemated in the early 1950s, Britain was by contrast in a supreme military alignment with the democracies of Western Europe. With her uncontested access to the oilfields of the Middle East, Britain remains to this day a dominant political and economic power in world affairs. Those who support the Churchill version of history ascribe Britain’s supremacy to the warmonger’s ambitions in the middle of the twentieth century, but they do not, of course, explain his volte-face.