School of War - Ep 142: Andrew Roberts Debunks Darryl Cooper on Winston Churchill

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, joins the show to give his thoughts on Tucker Carlson’s controversial guest Darryl Cooper. ▪️ Times      •      01:25 Introduction      •      02:34 Churchill the villain     •      05:20 Pat Buchanan     •     08:57 Dragging America into war      •      14:50 Barbarossa     •      20:06 “Mr. Cooper simply can’t have read Mein Kampf…”     •      21:37 Terror bombings     •      24:19 Dog whistles      •      26:11 Founding mythology Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Last week, a man named Daryl Cooper went on Tucker Carlson's show on X and gave a blistering, contrarian account of the Second World War and the legacy of Winston Churchill, whom he described as the war's chief villain. Full of Hitler apologetics and anti-Semitic insinuations or just outright anti-Semitic assertions, the interview got a lot of attention. Well, here at School of War, we take the perhaps old-fashioned view that Adolf Hitler was the chief villain of World War II, and so we couldn't let something of this magnitude just pass us by. The great historian Andrew Roberts joins us today to go through Cooper's claims and separate fact from fantasy.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay-on. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people are not seen. We shall fight on the beaches, which will fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be welcoming back to the show today, Andrew Roberts, who serves in the House of Lores as Baron Roberts of Belgravia. Andrew, you've written so many books and have so many affiliations at this point that's getting a bit out of hand. I don't know if you've considered that fact. Let's save time by just going straight into it. Well, I will say you are Winston Churchill's biographer. You wrote Churchill Walking with Destiny, which became a massive bestseller, was translated into nine languages. You've also written, you're a historian of the Second World War itself. Your book, Stormivore, honestly, still shapes

my thinking about the conflict. You are Lord Halifax's biographer. You've written extensively about the period, and over the weekend, you wrote a piece about this American historian and commentator, a guy named Daryl Cooper, who appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on X to discuss Winston Churchill in a highly critical manner. And we're going to get into that today. And I thought I might ask you before we get going to tell us a bit about the tradition of Churchill criticism over the years since his passing. In my experience, in my lifetime, I have mostly detected it from the left, a strong dislike of Churchill's iconic status of his public veneration as a hero. What are the forces that drive that?

What has been behind that? Well, Aaron, I'm much older than you. And so I do actually remember him being attacked from the right as well. Of course, all the way through his lifetime, he was constantly attacked. And in fact, he loved nothing more than to be able to fight back. Since his death, it was a short period, about 10 years or so, since his death in 1965, when he was just getting veneration, essentially. Then after that, you had attacks from the right saying that he was responsible for opening the door to socialism in Britain,

because of the Second World War, that he was wrong in not making peace with Hitler and various other attacks. along the same lines, actually, sometimes as Goebbels was making. You also get David Irving, the Hitler apologist on the right. That carried on until the sort of 80s, when presumably you started to sort of get online intellectually, as it were. And yes, you're right. And then it's the left, because he was an imperialist, accused him of racism, of course, the Bengal famine and so on. So those tend to come from the left. And now, interestingly, for the first time in a long time, actually, this man, Daryl Cooper, had you ever heard of him before?

I can't say that I had. This was a first for me. Neither had I or any of the historians that I spoke to. Anyhow, he's come up with a very much, actually quite an old-fashioned attack, the same kind of attack as you got from David Irving and the old rites back in the old days. other people like Morris Cowling and Alan Clark, both of whom I knew and liked actually, criticized Churchill for essentially fighting the Second World War. What they'd have much preferred is if Britain stayed out and Hitler and Stalin fought one another.

And we hung on to the empire. That's essentially the sort of British anti-Churchel right-wing stance. But now there's an American one which comes from the sort of liberal, libertarian and more sort of right-wing areas than that, including, I have to say, some pretty unpleasant stuff about the Jews. Yeah, no, and I want to get into that directly because I think that that is an unmistakable dimension of this interview that so many people listen to. Before we do, I suppose the most immediate precursor, I'm not sure that's true, the prominent precursor to Cooper's line of attack that I'm familiar with is Pat Buchanan.

Very much. A lot of this is sort of neo-Buchananite stuff, you know, that you shouldn't fight the war in order to try and stop Hitler from going east, that the Jews don't matter, essentially, and the Holocaust has got nothing to do with American foreign policy. And if America stuck to an isolationist stance, then it would be in a much stronger position by 1945. These are pretty old arguments. In fact, I used to debate against Pat Buchanan back in the 80s, early 90s.

And I mean, in person, in big meetings, you know, where 2,000 people would turn up to enormous meetings. It was exciting stuff. But frankly, the argument hasn't really come on very much now with Mr. Cooper. Well, let's get into his argument directly. It goes beyond what I think would still be a false but more nuanced. argument that this war was the British Empire's war and Churchill's war and not America's war. It goes well beyond that. And he opened in his interview with Tucker Carlson with the claim that Winston Churchill's the chief villain of the period and the man primarily responsible for the war. I think those are his exact words.

He does sweetly state that it's true that Churchill wasn't responsible for the same number of deaths as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, which I think is pretty bloody obvious, frankly, to anybody who has any understanding of the history of the 1930s and 1940s. But that, I think, is the last moment at which he says anything nice about the Black Church. The case would go something like, and we'll see here. It's funny, I'm channeling Cooper here,

but I don't know if you've had the pleasure. Listeners will know I'm semi-obsessed with these masterpieces of American middle-brow. fiction, Herman Wilkes wins of war and war in remembrance, which are wonderful documents because there are characters in them who are fascist sympathizers and there's a wonderful literary trope where you have a memoir of a former German general, which actually transmit a lot of the arguments that you can hear in Cooper because it's transmitting things that people said at the time, but, you know, after the war became unfashionable. Well, we have that with Evelyn War, of course.

Yes. Bertram Motrum is the Tory MP who is making pretty sort of ultra-pro-apismant, anti-Semitic, and sort of soft pro-Hittler apologism. Right, right. So the Hitler apologist argument would run something like, and the Churchill is villain argument, is Germany is sort of like it was the first time around looking for its place in the sun. It was harmed by the Treaty of Versailles. It's engaged in a series of disputes.

and once it invaded Poland, it was somewhat absurd for Britain and France to declare war. And then there were opportunities for peace after that. And indeed, opportunities for peace even after the fall of France, opportunities for peace that would have allowed Britain to preserve its empire and what could have been in Britain's interest, but the preservation of its empire, who really cares about, you know, the fate of Eastern Europe or even the fate of occupied France from the narrow point of view of the British interest. And instead, instead of seeking and getting a deal that,

would have made sense and saved a lot of lives and a lot of America to stay out of the war. Churchill does the opposite. He seeks war. He wants war. He embraces war. He drags America into the war. And as a consequence, we have something like World War II as opposed to a much more limited series of European territorial squabbles. How do I do? Very well. You have you've just summed up the Buchananite argument and Cooperite argument extremely well. And it's only actually when you do that I am reminded quite what a load of unadulterated stripe. It really is, isn't it? I mean, so a historical apart from anything else. The idea that we in Britain should, at the time of the phony war between September and 1939 and May

1940, or even more once the actual war had got hot, and we've been expelled from the continent to Dunkirk in the May and June of 1940. I did that we should have made peace at that point, when, yes, we seemed to have lost, we did indeed lose militarily on the continent, but where the next stage would very clearly have been Hitler attacking in the east in the way that he did in June 1941 in Barbarossa, And instead of only having 70% of his Lufufa, with the other 30% kept back to protect against British bombing, and of course many divisions being kept in France and the West

and the low countries, Belgium, and so that he would have been able to have unleashed the entire Wehrmacht against the USSR. As it was, Hitler got to within about 30 miles of the Kremlin. you know, in the October of 1941, if he'd had his entire force rather than 70% of it, he could well have knocked the Soviet Union out of the war. And the whole of, one of the great things about Winston Churchill was that he was an historian. And the whole of British history from 1588 onwards, the time of the Spanish Armada onwards, and you look at the wars of Spanish succession, the wars of Austrian succession, Napoleon,

the First World War, and now, of course, the Second World War, The key thing is to ensure that there is no hegemony on the continent held by an aggressive continental power, be it Philip II of Spain, be it Louis XIV, the 14th of France, be it Napoleon, be it the Kaiser, and certainly Adolf Hitler, who in his career ripped up every single treaty that he ever signed. For his 50th birthday in the April of 1939, the foreign ministry, German foreign ministry, gave him a silver casket with copies of all the treaties that he'd signed. And they privately had a good laugh because he hadn't stuck to a single one of them. And the idea that he would stick to a peace agreement with Britain in the in the Phelie War, or indeed when he made his last appeal to what he called the last

appeal to reason in late August 1940 is completely for the birds. Wouldn't the Buchanan line of argument push back a bit to what you just said? Oh, and by the way, sorry, I just part in one other thing. One other thing that you said and that Buchanan and also Cooper say, but which is completely untrue, is that Churchill dragged America into the Second World War. You entered the Second World War when Adolf Hitler declared war against you on the 11th of December, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor. All of that propaganda work by the British and the intelligence services and so on, intended to try and to essentially smash the America First Movement and isolationism and bring America into the Second World War failed completely.

Wouldn't a Buchananite might say, despite the obvious danger in having German power consolidated on the continent in a way that British policy had always aimed to prevent a single power from consolidating power on the continent, wouldn't it nevertheless be in Britain's interest to see the annihilation of Soviet communism? Isn't that, isn't German a sentencing the price worth paying to eliminate Bolshevism from the world? But what if that hadn't happened? And there had been no Anglo-Allied, Anglo-American Canadian Army in France in 1944. By the time the Red Army won that war, I mean, yes, we wouldn't have been able to have supported them with all the tanks and ships that knew the Americans and we gave them, especially, of course, on the Atlantic convoys.

But at the same time, the Russians proved that they were willing to suck up 27 million killed and carry on fighting. The great battles of Kersk and Stalingrad, Moscow, ultimately, of course, Berlin cost them unbelievable casualties. And they still had more men. So what if Stalin had won that war and that Hitler instead have been defeated and Stalin had marched through to, well, to France? There's a movement actually in Potsdam, the Potsdam Conference in 1945. When Stalin goes off to visit the grave of Frederick the Great, it's been very badly damaged and blown up at Saint-Sucis. And one of his marshals, rather or the aginously,

he ups up to him and says, well, General Secretary, you know, isn't it extraordinary that your armies have managed to come as far west as this? And Stalin just shrugged and said, Alexander made it to Paris. Yeah. Well, let's stick in the east then in Cooper's comments on the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in the summer of 1941 Operation Barbarossa. In a line of argument that I'm quite sure could have and no doubt did. You would be the expert in this, of course, come out of the mouths of German officers at the time. Cooper's account for the German invasion is it was to protect Hitler's control. of Romanian oil fields. It had a kind of defensive character. It was sort of reasonable when you understood the dicey strategic position Hitler was in. How much of any truth is there to that? Hogwash from beginning to end. The Soviets didn't have any plans to attack Hitler.

Stalin was perfectly happy with his agreement, the Nazi-Soviet pact of the August of 1939. He was very happy when he took the eastern part of Poland and the Baltic states. He was still sending huge railway trucks that vast numbers of them were still going westwards to give Germany the oil and wheat and so on that had been agreed under the terms of the Molotov-Riventrop Act. And so the idea that the Abraer was spotting some attack that Stalin was about to unleash is completely ludicrous, frankly. It's in this section of the interview that we move into, I think, some of the darkest stuff and some of the most troubling stuff that Cooper said, which I think we ought to pay careful attention to because I think it starts to point us towards fundamental motives. The first is, in an almost offhanded manner, he starts to talk. about, you know, the death toll in the East, in particular the death toll in camps. And he makes a

claim that, in essence, the death toll, it's unclear, it's actually a bit ambiguous. The most generous interpretation, and I think it is supported if you just read it carefully, is he really is purely talking about Soviet prisoners of war. And that's, that's, it's only so generous because it's still pretty appalling. There are other interpretations, if you're being less generous. But the, the idea is that following the invasion of the East in 41, so many people died in camps because essentially the Germans were unprepared for the glut of prisoners of war and prisoners more broadly that they took. And they ended up in these camps and they ended up dying. I think his words are more or less exactly to that effect. How do you assess that claim? Well, it's true. A 3.5 million or so Soviet

prisoners were captured. P.O.Ws were captured in the first six weeks of that campaign. It is extraordinary. I mean, it's the largest invasion in the history of mankind, obviously. 10080 German divisions crossing the border on the 21st and 22nd of June 1941 and outmaneuvering through Blitzkrieg the Russian armies, which were far too far forward because Stalin totally disbelieved the 80 or so. Intelligence reports that he had saying that Barbarossum going to take place because he trusted Hitler. A complete paranoid like Stardin, only trusted one person in his entire life, and it was Adolf Hitler of all people.

And so a lot of Russian prisoners of war were captured, and a million of them also died in captivity. But what Cooper argues is that this was all some terrible, terrible mistake because the Nazis hadn't realized how successful they were going to be, essentially, and that they were much better fighters, their strategy was much better, and therefore they hadn't bothered to collect the necessary great coats for the poor old Russian POWs.

This completely ignores the central factor that one needs to remember about the Nazis in general, and indeed that campaign in particular, which is that Nazis couldn't care less if a million Soviet POs. W's died, that would be just an awful lot of food that they would be able not to have to give to them, but instead could give to their collaborators and their troops. It's, you know, each time he seems to Cooper this is, apologize for Hitler doing something. And you get it a lot more later on in that interview. And each time, he's just straightforwardly factoring incorrect.

Yeah. I mean, we know, not least because, sorry to butt in, but not least. because we know what was going through Hitler's mind at this time. All of the furor conferences, certainly from 1942 onwards, are taken down by stenographers. It was very interesting. When the Ryshtag was burned down, the stenographers essentially didn't have to do anything very much until the German high command hired them to take down everything that Hitler said. And so we know what was being said in these meetings,

when Runstedt and Manstein, Romel, other important, Wendelik and others, talk for hours about strategy. And Hitler replies and also talks for hours. And so we know what's going through his mind. And at no point does he say, this is a terrible tragedy that lots of, you know, Slavic POWs are dying.

Well, we also have, we have MNConf. It's just odd to talk about... Well, Mike Karp, yes, absolutely. I mean, this, that's another thing. It strikes me that Mr. Cooper just simply can't have read Minkinv, because that is a book about what's essentially capturing what was called the World Island by the Nazis. Carl Haushofer and Rudolf Hess in the Landberg prison, the period of the Lambert prison, had a lot of time to fill.

Hitler with these grandiose schemes about what turned into Laban's realm. And so, of course, it was going to be an attack in the, it was always going to be, it bound up with Nazism, as well as, of course, wiping out the Jews. Was this attack in the east to take the breadbasket of Ukraine and Belarus and to have a final reckoning, as Gerbils called it, with the, with the Bolsheviks. And yet instead, Mr. Cooper says that Hitler had a, had a sort of much more sophisticated attitude towards Bolsheviks and didn't believe that Moscow was the center of

world communist revolution by the time he attacked. And this is all pretty sort of weird stuff, frankly. Also conspicuous by its absence in that portion of the interview, weird not to mention when you're talking about the summer, fall of 1941, are Einstein's group and the deliberative, and the deliberate plan of murder of commissars and Jews amongst other groups. And, you know, I suppose he might say, well, there's a lot to discuss. I didn't mention that. And by the way, when you talk about terror and murder, why don't you talk about Churchill's

firebombing of German cities, of the Black Forest, which he does bring up somewhat strangely? Yeah, he does. The Black Forest attack, which took place in the Foley War, was, a, it was terror bombing and the fact is unfortunately for the Royal Air Force bombers, the Black Forest didn't catch fire. And so in fact, very little was achieved. The, it wasn't burnt down. The munitions that were there weren't terribly badly affected. But the RAF who's got all the intelligence reports about what they knew was there and what they wanted to hit. And it was a legitimate military operation, but there was also an element, obviously, of

trying to get revenge for the attacks on Poland, especially on Warsaw. These were bombing of innocent civilians and so on. But again, the great debate over Dresden and Hamburg and all of these kind of things, I think is pretty much over. I mean, yes, we accept that terrible things happened. But two things. Firstly, of course, the Allies didn't start this. And secondly, it did taper off completely the rate of increase in German war production. And therefore, it was wholly just about it. In my view, the lowest point of the Carlson interview of Cooper, which really implicates both men, comes when Cooper is giving a, I mean, even again, sort of taking it generously and sort of accepting things he's saying on its face, a particularly slightly paranoid account of Churchill's

decision-making and war-mongering and constantly seeking war at the expense of opportunity after opportunity for peace. And Carlson asks him bluntly, you know, well, what would Churchill's motive be? You know, why would he, why would he do this? And then Cooper pauses. There's this uncomfortable pause, and he smiles. He gives this kind of smirk. And which Carlson says is the raeist. smile he's ever seen. Yeah. In my opinion. Pretty ghast that it's about to happen.

No, exactly. And you're a free beacon piece, which is really brilliant. I really commend it to listeners. I think you go a bit easy on Cooper in that moment. I think I know exactly what that smile means. And he gets to it sort of several bullet points down. He lards it up with a couple of bullet points first. And then he hits what I think.

I think that smile means, Tucker, you know why. You know why Churchill did all this. And you're going to make me say it out loud on your show. show, aren't you? And you're going to get me into all kinds of trouble. That's what that smile means. And he gets to it. Design is... Look, I'm writing an article. I can't delve into the mind of somebody I've never met before and claim that what's going through is his mind. I'm sorry you think I let him up a bit, but frankly, I'm no more of a psychologist than he is, trying to work out what's going through Winston Churchill's mind. But what we do know, and what as one of Churchill's biographers,

I can attest is that we do know what was indeed going through Winston Churchill's mind because he was writing about it. He went to 900 meetings of the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet when he was Prime Minister and First Lord of the Admiralty. He was, all of the people around him were keeping diaries. He was speaking in the House of Commons regularly and giving broadcasts. We know what Churchill was thinking. And he did not stick to the Second World War because he was either, as Cooper says, an alcoholic or psychologically disturbed by the First World War or that he needed redemption and certainly not because he was in the pay of Zionist financiers as he calls them. And we know what dog whistle. He's blowing that, don't we?

Well, it's a trumpet. I think that trend. sends whistles, that's all but saying it just outright. You know, I will say, I think Cooper and Carlson get one thing right, or at least partially right, and it's probably a good place to end our discussion with, because I know I want to be respectful of your time. They discuss how, as part of a broader sort of silly conversation, but how they're saying things you're not allowed to say, and they're just asking questions, and you can't say this kind of stuff, none of which is really true, because there they are saying it, and it's been said before in Patrick Buchanan, wrote a whole book about it. They say that the Second World War and its understanding today and Churchill's iconic

status all forms a kind of founding mythology of the world in which we live. And there is something to that, I think. Yes, absolutely. Thank God. Thank God it does. And I do think they're right. They obviously hate the idea that the anti-appeasement message of Winston Churchill, the anti-totalitarian message of Winston Churchill, the obviously anti-isolationist message, the way in which he believes in sticking up for small nations against neighbouring totalitarian powers who invade them. Of course, these have big modern-day echoes with regard to Ukraine being the classic example. And we all know where Tucker Carson stands on that. So yes, there are modern implications for what Winston Churchill said, even though he died over half century ago.

And we should be thankful to him for that. Yeah. The main disadvantage that they have and their side of the argument has is that the true account of the mythology is the one that you present. That is to say, yes, it's a foundational story. And foundational stories get simplified and they get taught to children and nuance gets lost in that process inevitably. but fundamentally the actual account of things is the account that historians like you lay out

and that the alternative account laid out by sort of American right-wing isolationists or others is simply less factually true and that's a problem for them they actually i think find it difficult to muster the facts as as i mean even when when cooper took to twitter in the aftermath of his interview you know twitter of all places and sort of laid out a lot of his claims the twitter platform has this community notes function. And the Twitter community found claim after claim after claim he was making in this thread to simply be factually inaccurate. That's essentially what I was trying to do in my Washington Free Beacon article, you know, was to take him at his word, to quote him and listen to what he had to say and to analyze it in perfectly rational, logical way and to see what he got

right and what he got wrong. And the fact is that I believe out of ideological obsession, including some very, very dark ones, he got pretty much every single thing wrong. He put his own ideology, I believe, before the actual facts of the period. Well, Lord Roberts, thank you for all you do. You're the author of Churchill, Walking with Destiny. You more recently wrote a book called Conflict, The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza with David Petraeus. And our conversation in this episode makes me think that we need to redouble our efforts

to teach people the facts about the Second World War because I think it's important that they understand them and the generation that lived them, of course, is essentially gone at this point. So thank you, sir. Thanks for coming on the show. I agree with everything you say. Thanks very much indeed, Darren.

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