Dan Snow's History Hit - Winston Churchill: From Failures to Finest Hour

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

Churchill is one of the great figures of history and this totemic figure is often cited as one of the greatest British figures of all time. However, whilst his achievement during the dark days of the Second World War is unquestionable, much of the rest of his career had much more to do with failure than success. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, journalist and author of Churchill's Shadow: An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy, joins Dan for this episode of the podcast. They discuss Geoffrey's radical reappraisal of Churchill's life and work and the myth that continues to shape our view of one of the most complex figures of the 20th Century.

Hello, everybody. Welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got the big man back on the podcast today. We've got Winston Churchill. A life that is constantly being re-evaluated, is a source of constant fascination, drama, and import for all of us. Such an extraordinary life lived. Geoffrey Wheatcroft turns his attention to Churchill in a new book called Churchill's Shadow. Geoffrey's a British journalist, author, and historian. He writes for all sorts of different publications, and he has now written this about Winston Churchill. And it is a bit of a reappraisal. We talk about 1940 when Churchill is widely regarded to have saved his country, but we also talk about other moments in his career when he experienced failure as well.

Winston Churchill is at the centre of the culture wars, the history wars that we're fighting in Britain and America at the moment, so it always makes him an interesting person to talk about and hear from people on different sides. We've also got podcasts on this network featuring Andrew Roberts, who's written many highly acclaimed biographies of Churchill, tends to have a far more positive view of Churchill

than Geoffrey Reacroft does. You can go back and listen to those episodes by subscribing to History Hit TV. Join the revolution while you're doing it. Go to historyhit.tv, simple as that, historyhit.tv for the price of a smart cappuccino every month.

You get the world's best history channel, hundreds of hours of documentaries. You'll just get the world's best history channel, hundreds of documentaries. You just get all the back episodes of this podcast without the ads. You can go and listen to Andrew Roberts talking about Winston Churchill. You can go and listen to other Churchill experts like Richard Toy talking about his oratory and all sorts of other people. You get 30 days free if you sign up right now. So please head over there and do that.

I was talking to AC Grayling for the podcast the other day, one of the most prolific, remarkable writers and philosophers in the world. And he says he does his morning exercise every day. He trains the body as well as the mind on his treadmill in the morning. What does he do? He watches history hit TV documentaries. Of course he does. That's what you do when you're one of the cleverest, most brilliant men alive. So be like A.ling and watch HistoryHit.tv. But in the meantime, everyone, here's Geoffrey Wheatcroft talking about Winston Churchill. Geoffrey, thank you very much for coming on. I'm delighted to be here.

This is very naughty. I'm having you on the podcast to say things about Winston Churchill. Voted number one Britain of all time. Am I going to be cancelled? You never know. I mean, it's a risk we all take nowadays, old mate. The historiography of Churchill is so interesting, because actually it was not a very controversial view at all to hold

before the Second World War that Churchill was a dangerous chancer, was it? I mean, it was that sort of extraordinary moment in 1940 that means that most people can't lay a glove on him. There is a brilliant description by a great historian, which really is the theme of the first part of my book. Sir Michael Howard, who died two years ago this coming autumn, the day after his 97th birthday. He had been Regis Professor of Modern History at Oxford and many other things before that. But before that, he could remember the rise of Hitler. He was a schoolboy in the summer of 1940. And by 1943, he was a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards and won an MC at Salerno,

leading his platoon. And he wrote, this great old soldier and brilliant historian, the problem for the historian is not, as so many Americans seem to think, and he could have added, and they have been encouraged to think by some writers, why Churchill was ignored for so long, but how it was that a man with such an unpromising background and such a disastrous track record could have emerged in 1940 as the saviour of his country. And that's the problem I have addressed. The alternative version, which was actually used as the title of a biography of Churchill, was walking with destiny, which was a phrase he used about when I became prime minister, I felt as though I were

walking with destiny and my whole life had been a preparation for this hour and this trial. But really, that makes no sense at all, because if becoming prime minister at that moment had been Churchill's destiny, why did no one else think so? There was a very good book about Churchill published 50 years ago now by Robert Rhodes James, who had been a clerk in the House of Commons and became a Tory MP. And it was about Churchill's life up to 1939, and it was called A Study in Failure. And that was what it was. I mean, he probably would have thought that himself. He'd had a very checkered political career indeed, in the course of which he really made himself the most disliked and even more

distrusted political figure in England. Let's talk, there are several moments that you, obviously, you talk about his career in the broadest sense, but for this conversation, you've chosen a couple of points, I think are great. And one is his time in the mid-1920s, following the war, following his not particularly celebrated time as Chancellor at Cheka, for example. And you used the expression, our own Mussolini. That's quite provocative.

To keep going, tell me about that. Well, I didn't use it. One reviewer has abused me for using that phrase in a number of others, but every one of them is a direct quotation. Our own Mussolini was the headline on a piece in a London political magazine in 1924. Two years before that, when Churchill lost his seat at Dundee in the general election, he was defeated by two candidates. One, because it was in the still-other-days of two member constituencies, One was the only prohibitionist ever elected to Parliament,

which I find a rather nice touch in view of Churchill's own tastes. And the other was E.D. Morrill, a very important figure in a radical who had a great influence on British foreign policy. And shortly after Mussolini had taken power in Italy, and Morrill said, I would not be surprised to see Mr. Churchill leading the English fascisti. This comparison was made repeatedly. There was a provincial paper in 1927 had a headline, Winston a fascist. I mean, it seems very hard to grasp this today because of the aura of 1940 when he represented this country standing alone

against fascism and Nazism. But that was how his contemporaries and compatriots saw him. How do you see him in the 1920s? Do you think they were fair in that estimation? No, well, the Winston a fascist headline in the Nottingham Evening News, I think, was prompted by something really totally grotesque that Churchill had said, calling Mussolini the greatest lawgiver among men. He lavished praise on Mussolini, and it showed deplorable judgment in every sense, apart from the fact that Mussolini was a brutish murderer, nothing like in the same league as Stalin and Hitler, but nevertheless, he did have his opponents beaten up and sometimes killed. Apart from that, he was a total fraud.

And it really didn't show much of Churchill's political judgment that he took Mussolini seriously at all. Hitler was all too real. But Mussolini was a sham from beginning to end. What do you think Churchill did admire about Mussolini? What was his sort of lodestar? Was it fear of communism? That was precisely what it was. Churchill was unbalanced by the Russian Revolution. He loathed the Russian Revolution, not by any means without reason. The Bolsheviks were extremely brutal and murderous, but it really knocked him off balance so that he started talking about our own dear milk and water

Labour Party as a potential party of Red Revolution, which it never was. Lloyd George said that his ducal blood runs cold at the thought of what is happening in Russia, because his grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough. He became more and more erratic in his judgment, and he said that Mussolini had saved Italy from the brutal appetites of Leninism. Indeed, later on, in 1937, Churchill said in the Commons, I shall not pretend that if I were forced to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism. Quite a gratuitous thing to say, and particularly at a time when he was hoping to get support on the left as well as the right. What changed Churchill's mind? What led Churchill on the path to become such an outspoken, to look almost like a prophet and to talk about the threat that Hitler posed?

Well, Churchill never praised Hitler, it must be said, although he said some pretty odd things. Perhaps one day we shall live to see a kinder and gentler Hitler, which we did not live to see. But he did recognise, because what Churchill was concerned with wasn't the future of democracy in Europe, it was the balance of power and British greatness, a traditional view, really. And he saw resurgent Germany as a threat to the balance of power in Europe and to our own position. That was not by any means irrational as an analysis. And so he denounced German might and particularly German rearmament, although he completely misunderstood that as well. Remember, he spent the first half of the 1930s

conducting a fierce campaign against appeasement, that is to say appeasement of Gandhi and Indian nationalism. And it was only when that campaign ended in defeat with the passage of the India Bill in 1935 that Churchill turned his attention to Germany and to Hitler and spent the next five years warning against the threat that Germany presented. When closely examined, Churchill's famous warnings, you can easily pick holes in them, and I can do so if you want to. Give me a hole. I'll take a hole, yeah. Churchill either said things which were stating the obvious or were just wrong. He said that there was a resurgent Germany which might offer a threat to the peace of Europe.

Well, everyone knew that. Baldwin and Chamberlain knew that. Left and right knew that. It was staring us in the face. knew that. Left and right knew that. It was staring us in the face. All Germans believed, quite wrongly in my view, that their country had been wickedly treated by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 and wanted to reverse the Versailles judgment settlement. And Hitler merely exploited that to an extreme degree. And he clearly was going to make Germany a great power once again in Europe. And the question was how to deal with that. And the appeasers were trying to deal with it in their own way, which was far from irrational.

They were trying to prevent a war which, when it came, was catastrophic for all of Europe and had very unhappy consequences for this country's own interests, as Churchill would have seen them. Then he made more specific warnings and prophecies. It's quite comical that he should have retained his reputation as a great prophet, because every single thing he said in the late 30s on a specific military subject turned out to be wrong. He said, the days of the tank are over. Well, one wonders whether he remembered

that in May 1940 when the panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht were smashing through the French army. He said that the aircraft will play no further role on the battlefield. Likewise, he might have remembered that when Stuckers were dive-bombing the British army. He said the submarine will in the future represent no serious threat to us. He might have remembered that in 1942 at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic when we came near to starving. He loved making cocksure, confident predictions, like many an armchair warrior. And he was a journalist.

Indeed, Lady Soames, his daughter, said not long before she died, you must always remember about my. And he was a journalist. He was indeed Lady Soames. His daughter said not long before she died, you must always remember about my father that he was a journalist. And we journalists do have a tendency sometimes to say confident, but not necessarily very sensible things. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, in the 1930s, if he was thinking in a more traditionally strategic way about Germany in terms of imperial competition,

rather than Nazism somehow representing a threat to a thousand years of Western, as you described it, Western Christian values, that he comes to that point in 1940, doesn't he? But is that not present initially? Initially, like any statesman in British history who worries about the power of Louis XIV, the 15th, Napoleon, the Kaiser, it was just a resurgent Germany he's kind of worried about.

Yes, that's true. Although he did say some things which read extremely well today, I should say. Like in 1938, he said, speaking at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, we could, of course, make easy terms with Germany. We would only have to muzzle our press and to suppress all freedom of speech and to institute some form of Gestapo like theirs, you know. And he did understand the character of the German regime fairly clearly, although he was also, of course, equally horrified by communism. And this presented for him, as well as for the British government of Chamberlain, a most insoluble because the only way perhaps to resist Hitler was to make some form of alliance with Stalin, which most British people, left and right, did not want to do because it was the height of Stalin's bloodbath, his terrible purges. and the Labour Party abhorred Stalin at that time.

Of course, the supreme irony is that by 1942, Churchill would be spending long nights getting plastered with Stalin in Moscow. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Winston Churchill. More after this. Romans, gods, Spartans, the wars of Alexander the Great's successors, More after this. big topics from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series

Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. You talk a lot about Palestine in your book and Palestine was, I think, the biggest deployment of the British Army between World War I and World War II. And this brings us on to, you mentioned India before, but Churchill's ideas about empire. Tell me, how did Churchill write and think about the insurgency in Palestine that the

British Army was forcefully putting down at the time? Well, the insurgency at that time in the 1930s was the Arab revolt of 36 to 39. Churchill was a committed Zionist. He had met Chaim Weizmann, who was a very young Zionist activist, who would become the leader of the Zionist movement and one day become president of Israel. or who would become the leader of the Zionist movement and one day become president of Israel. They met in 1905 when Churchill was standing as an MP for a Manchester constituency and Weizmann had a day job as a research chemist at Manchester University and Churchill became a genuine supporter of the Zionist scheme. He was entirely untroubled by the fact that the large majority of the inhabitants of Palestine were Arabs, Muslim or Arab, Christian, as the case might be. And he visited Palestine in 1921 and extolled the Zionist settlers and he went on doing so and writing very strong pieces on the Zionist side. And then in 1937, he gave the most extraordinary evidence.

What happened was that because of the bloodshed in Palestine, the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, during the course of which the British army used pretty savage methods to suppress the revolt, not least hanging at least 100 Palestinians, sometimes on rather flimsy evidence. And the Peel Commission was set up by the British government to investigate the problem. Its report was much later called by Isaiah Berlin, the most thorough and scrupulous examination of the conflict in Palestine there had ever been. And they heard evidence from every possible range of opinion from Zionists of different kinds, right and left, from Palestinian Arabs, of course, and from Churchill. And it was then when Lord Peel

said to Churchill, didn't he think that the Palestinian Arabs were getting a raw deal, he put it up slightly differently than that, being downed, as he said. Churchill said he had no sympathy with that view, and then he went on to say, without being prompted, any more than he had any sympathy, that the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines had suffered some injustice when they were expropriated or even exterminated, because it was no more than the natural advance of history when a lower people

was supplanted by a stronger, or this is his precise phrase, a higher grade race. And that was what he thought was happening in Palestine and a good thing too. Andrew Roberts in his recent biography quotes these words, doesn't suppress them, but he then adds that they might seem shocking to modern sensibilities, but it was perfectly orthodox thinking at the time. But that's not true, actually. It really wasn't. Very many people by the 1930s did not think in blunt terms any longer of higher grade and lower grade races. One person who did, of course, one other person, was Hitler. And Hitler thought the Jews were a lower grade race. One person who did, of course, one other person was Hitler. And Hitler thought the Jews were a lower grade race who deserved to be persecuted and eventually exterminated.

Churchill thought that the Jews were a higher grade race who deserved to take over Palestine from the Palestinian Arabs. And if we were forced to choose, I suppose we would prefer Churchill to Hitler. But that's not a choice many people today would want to make. You also talk about him after the war, which I think is fascinating. But let's quickly come to 1940. I mean, he gets the decision to fight on in 40 absolutely right, doesn't he? Oh, yes, of course. I mean, I say this as clearly and loudly as I can.

I think it was absolutely right. His defiance in 1940 was heroic and a unique personal contribution which no one else could have made. It did, on the other hand, have consequences which were very unwelcome to Churchill. I mean, when he said in his first parliamentary speech, blood, toil, tears and sweat, my policy is victory, however hard and long the road may be, victory at all costs. Well, what all costs turned out to mean was victory with half of Europe in Stalin's hands, victory with England and the British Empire, a bankrupt financial dependency of the United States, and with the British Empire on the point of

dissolution, the very thing he said he didn't want. So it was a great act of self-sacrifice, in a way, by Churchill, but unconscious and unintended. Did he realise that? No, he didn't, because he said in November 1942, he said in a phrase which became well known and was for some reason considered so amusing that Ronald Reagan paraphrased it in his first inaugural address as president in 1981. Churchill said, I have not become his majesty's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British empire. But in fact, he had. That was the logic of his position. And others saw that. One perceptive observer said so years later. In 1969, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Prime Minister,

said to Henry Kissinger, it was Mr. Churchill who ended the age of the British Empire. That was not his subjective wish, but that was his objective doing. And that was true. Did Churchill ever acknowledge that? No. As we now say, he was in denial. He tried to wish it away. He tried to pretend that the empire could have lasted forever. And he was very bitter about the Attlee government granting independence to India in 1947, when Churchill had said not many years before that Britain must always remain master of India with its backward races, primitive races, I believe is the phrase. And then decolonization

in Africa seemed to him monstrous as well, but there was nothing he could do about it. He completely misunderstood what was happening. I mean, you know, he was stuck in the late 19th century. And he said rather sourly later that he could have preserved the British Empire from everything except the British people, which was not true, because the age of European Empire was coming to an end in any case, quite obviously, and its ending would not have been prevented by the united will of the British people, even if that will had existed.

But he was right about one thing, that that will did not exist. And I think there was a graffito exchange after the war. This time there was a Zionist revolt in Palestine in 1946-48. Yorgon, the right-wing extremists, conducted a campaign of terrorist violence against the British and Palestinians as well. And there was a graffito painted on a wall in Jerusalem by one Zionist activist which said, Tommy, go home,

underneath which one such Tommy replied, I wish I could. And that was the spirit of the British people in the last days of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Churchill's response was partly by talking about an Anglo-British axis, which he hoped would be sort of one of equals, potentially, but it a brilliant Sir Churchill spin on what had become a dependent relationship. Well, precisely so. That's exactly right. I mean, he hit on the idea of the English-speaking peoples, writing a book about the history of the English-speaking peoples, although he was originally, interestingly, going to call it the English-speaking races,

which is really what he meant. interestingly going to call it the English-speaking races, which is really what he meant. And that was in 1929 when he was on a luxurious and lucrative American visit. And he saw America as a source of considerable income for him, as indeed it became. And then in 1943, he gave one speech about the unity of the English-speaking peoples at Harvard in September 1943. And it wasn't by accident that he hit on the idea of the English-speaking peoples in 1929. And it wasn't by accident that he hit on this idea of the unity of the English-speaking peoples in 1943, which has been described by one historian, A.J.P. Taylor, as the decisive year when world leadership passed from the British Empire to the United States. And Churchill could sense that, although it grieved him that the United

States was taking over from us, succeeding our position as the dominant global force. But as a way of disguising this, he invented the idea that the two peoples were really one and the same, which of course is quite untrue. How successful was Churchill in one of his last missions? I mean, the special relationship is a term that has stuck around. And although every time I hear anyone say I want to throw myself in the ocean, it's proved enduring. It's proved enduring despite any amount of criticism and derision. I mean, it's been called the special relationship, chiefly special in that only one side knows that it exists. And relationships don't come more special than that. Max Hastings put it very well when he said that Churchill invented the

concept of the special relationship for reasons of political expediency, which I've just been hinting at, before he became the first of many British prime ministers to discover that it didn't exist. And it's quite an extraordinary idea that it persists to this day. I mean, look at the fact that British soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan, what has proved to be not a very successful American enterprise. in what has proved to be not a very successful American enterprise. And yet, when you look back over the years since Churchill used the phrase,

or when he used it again in his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton in Missouri in 1946, when he said there needs to be some form of special relationship between the United States and the British Empire. And over the next 70 years, again and again, this idea was completely confuted in practice. I mean, within a couple of years, it doesn't matter about the rights and wrongs of these particular issues, within a couple of years of his speech, the Truman administration had deserted the Atlee government over Palestine.

In 1956, the Eisenhower administration deserted the Eden government over Suez. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration deserted the major government over Northern Ireland. I mean, there are countless examples. And there's nothing surprising or odd about this. And if when I say these things, I'm accused of being anti-American, there's a very simple answer. The United States is a sovereign country. That's the point of the 4th of July. It has its own interests and objectives.

And like all great powers in history, it follows those interests and objectives with complete disregard for the interests and objectives of its supposed friends, let alone its avowed enemies. And that is the law of nations. And it's a complete delusion to suppose there will be an exception to it. I mean, the Americans only just supported the Brits over the Falklands, for goodness sake. There were massive splits in the cabinet. I mean, that's an open and shut case, for goodness sake. I mean, for goodness sake. There were massive splits in the cabinet. I mean, that's an open and shut case, for goodness sake. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Jean Patrick really wanted to desert us completely. She was very much in favour of General Galtieri. She was a neo-con who was the American ambassador to the United Nations at the time. And she dined with the Argentine leaders shortly after the invasion of the Falklands. And Nicholas Henderson, who Mrs. Thatcher had rather shrewdly recalled after his retirement as ambassador to Washington,

he said it's as though he had taken tea at the Iranian embassy the day after the American embassy in Tehran was stormed by the mob. You know, it was an amazing thing for her to do. But anyway. Geoffrey, how, at the end of this journey through Churchill's, this corrective to the Churchill myth, how should we think about him, just as a man with flaws who was right and was wrong? I mean, certainly we should think of that. He has become a mythical figure, an heroic figure, and although they're cliches, they're rather appropriate in his case, a totemic and iconic figure. And again and again and again, Churchill is cited as the man

whose example we should follow. George W. Bush, the American president of the Bush administration, and Dick Cheney, and the Washington neoconservatives. They all professed an intense admiration for Churchill, and the lessons they drew from studying Churchill and from his example took us into Iraq and Afghanistan. So we must judge by the outcome. It's a curious fact, it's a striking fact that every single time for 70 years at least that Churchill's name has been invoked, especially along with the names that he turned into curses, that is Munich and appeasement. It was true of Suez. It was true of Vietnam, when Lyndon Johnson said he didn't want to be another Chamberlain surrendering to Ho Chi Minh, and on and on and on, all the way through to George Bush the Young House, as he led us into those operations, Operation Enduring Freedom, that was Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, that was Iraq, both of which, by any conceivable standards, have ended in humiliating defeat for the United States and its allies. So perhaps we might think twice about following Churchill's example next time.

Or deciding what we want Churchill's example to be because it suits our purposes. Geoffrey, are you iconoclastic about everyone? Are there any politicians you think that do deserve the kind of status that some people are called Churchill? Of course I do. Yes, I mean, there are many prime ministers I admire. None of them is saintly or perfect, but I admire Mr Gladstone very much. In my own lifetime, a long lifetime, there are two prime ministers whose political views, whose governments changed the country.

That is to say, Attlee and Thatcher. And if one takes a detached view, it's possible to admire both of them. Not in my view, Blair or Johnson, the author of The Churchill Factor. We haven't got round to him yet. Yes, well, let's not, because we'll be here for a long time to come. Thank you very much, Geoffrey. What is your book called?

It is called Churchill's Shadow. We're all in Churchill's Shadow. Thank you very much. We are indeed. Okay. Thanks very much, Dan. Very good. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,

this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favor here at history here i

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