The Editor

The Atlantic Monthly
77 North Washington Street
Boston, MA 02114 USA

(By post and e-mail)

Dear Sir/Ma'am,

I was dismayed to read the article by Christopher Hitchens about Winston Churchill, which was published in your magazine this month.

Mr. Hitchens has repeated many iconoclastic myths about Churchill, which have been proven to be false, many times, over many years. I will not go through them all, but shall look at the two most obvious examples.

Firstly, the claim that "...three crucial broadcasts were made not by Churchill but by an actor hired to impersonate him". This charge, which has been given much publicity by the notorious David Irving, has been decisively refuted by eyewitness accounts. Shelley's recording was of an obscure and otherwise unknown Churchill speech, recorded in 1943, and intended for broadcast in the USA, for which it was never used. It is certain that the 1940 speeches were broadcast either by Churchill himself, or by an announcer reading extracts. The latter was the case on 4th June, the speech against which this charge is most commonly made: Churchill gave it only in the House of Commons, and an announcer read extracts. You may care to read Robert Rhodes James' definitive article ("Finest Hour" 112 P.52) on this issue.

A related point: the unfounded slur "perhaps Churchill was too incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself" is somewhat strong for a charge made without evidence, is it not?

Secondly, the notion that "when Enigma gave him private information about a raid on London itself, he would decamp to the country house of a wealthy friend" is similarly without foundation. Churchill did indeed have the use of a country house for the nights when the moon was full and Chequers was vulnerable. On the night of the 1941 Coventry raid, he was on his way there. On reading decrypts wrongly suggesting the target to be London, he turned round and went straight back to Downing Street, where he awaited the bombers that never came. This has been proved by Churchill's Private Secretary, John Colville, as well as historians Messers McIver, Jones and Longmate. Furthermore, Public Record Office documents AIR2/5238 and AIR20/2419 show that no one knew where the blow would fall that night, but that Churchill headed back to London in the belief that it would be there. It could cogently be argued that Churchill showed too much appetite for danger (see the trenches in 1915/6, or the bridge over the Rhine in 1945) but no one, apart from Mr Hitchens and Mr Irving, has ever argued and certainly never shown, that Churchill displayed a desire to run from a fight.

No one disputes that Churchill had his faults and flaws, just like any man. The key point is that when his hour came, he rose to meet it with astonishing success. It is fortunate for us all that he did. Mr Hitchens, who is a great writer, seems to have missed this point in his gullibility for conspiracy theories. There are many well-researched, quality revisionist pieces out there about Churchill. But with the greatest respect, Mr Hitchens' is not one of them.

Yours faithfully,

Churchill Online.org.uk

(Member of the International Churchill Society - UK)

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THE ATLANTIC TAKES A FALL

Richard M. Langworth (this article is due to be published in the journal of the Churchill Centre ("Finest Hour" No. 114, Spring 2002), posted here by kind permission of the editor Richard Langworth and the Churchill Centre:  www.winstonchurchill.org.)

Perhaps in self-defense, The Atlantic website has now posted links to other articles about Churchill from its archives. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/churchill.htm

The cover story on the April issue of The Atlantic was, "Churchill Takes A Fall: The Revisionist Verdict: Incompetent, Boorish, Drunk, and Mostly Wrong,” by Christopher Hitchens. It was not as bad a piece as the title suggests.

Hitchens, a paid iconoclast who regularly skewers phonies of the left and right, takes proper aim at the politicians who’ve wrapped themselves in Churchillian rhetoric since September 11^th.  (They’re still at it, and unless they begin seriously to mobilize their country, it's going to take another attack to make us realize what we're up against. Instead of frisking dowagers at airports and showing us colored disks to define the current threat level, they should have declared a state of war with “the nation of terrorism,” financed it with War Bonds, plugged porous borders, ceased issuing visas to Saudis, and started discriminating against Middle Easterners boarding airplanes. Call it racism—or call it survival.)

Unfortunately, Hitchens larded his 10,347 word critique with every accusation against Winston Churchill except the one about how he caused the stock market crash in 1929. As Churchill once remarked, “I have never heard the opposite of the truth stated with greater precision.”

The trouble with this sort of bunkum is that unless it is refuted, after awhile people believe it. That’s already started, with columnists bearing IQ’s no higher than their body temperature expressing “amazement” at Hitchens’s “revelations” (see “Around and About.”) So here is a response only to The Atlantic’s most egregious errors:

1. Actor Norman Shelley’s ridiculous notion that he delivered Churchill’s war speeches over the BBC has been laid to rest by eyewitness testimony for years. What Shelley recorded, apparently in 1943, was an obscure, unpublished Churchill speech, the origin of which has eluded even the Churchill Archives. Neither the 13 May speech (“Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat”) nor the 4 June speech (“Fight on the Beaches”) were broadcast by anyone purporting to be Churchill. Martin Gilbert’s official biography does quote a letter by Vita Sackville-West of 4 June, implying that at least part of that speech was repeated by the BBC announcer (Winston S. Churchill, London: Heinemann, 1983, VI:469). Shelley may have recorded the “Beaches” speech later, possibly for the BBC overseas service, but no one has ever been able to track this.

2. Amusingly, Hitchens even gets the lie wrong: Shelley’s role in “The Children’s Hour” was “Dennis the Dachshund,” not “Winnie the Pooh.” Poor Mr. Shelley can’t win.

3. Undoubtedly the “military and economic support of Canada, Australia, India, and the rest of a gigantic empire,” not to mention the fighting Greeks, was a huge consolation to the British during the Blitz. “Keep low, men, we still have the Greeks with us.” Still...

4. Hitchens wants Greece both ways. He condemns Churchill for trading Greek freedom for Stalin’s dominance of the Balkans; then he rabbits on about Greece’s resistance to tyranny. A more rational view is that saving Greece was the best Churchill could make of a sorry situation, allowing Greeks to enjoy postwar the liberties they had defended in 1941.

5. The first air force to bomb civilians was the Luftwaffe over Rotterdam, not the RAF over Berlin. In March 1945, Churchill was the first to question the carpet bombing of Dresden and other German cities (see Christopher Harmon, “Are We Beasts?”, Newport: Naval War College, 1991).

6. The silly charge that Churchill ran for the country when warned in advance of air raids on London is almost as old as the accompanying notion that Churchill let Coventry burn rather than tip the Germans that he’d read their codes. On the night of the Coventry attack Churchill, headed for the country, turned round and returned to London after reading decrypts which incorrectly held London the target. There he sent his staff to safety and mounted the Air Ministry roof to await the bombers that never came.

Hitchens has “never seen [this] addressed by the Great Man’s defenders.” Really? It was addressed in The Times by John Martin on 28 August 1976; by John Colville (The Churchilllians, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981). Norman Longmate, Ronald Lewin, Harry Hensley, and David Stafford —none of them whitewashers—are just four historians who as early as 1979 dismissed the Coventry story for the nonsense it is.

7. In cabinet discussions in May 1940 Churchill said at one point (not “more than once”) that he’d considered whether it was part of his duty “to enter into negotiations with That Man [Hitler].” On this slim thread Hitchens assures us that Churchill didn’t want to fight! Numerous historians (e.g., Sheila Lawlor, Churchill and the Politics of War, Cambridge University Press, 1991) conclude that at that point, Churchill’s political position was too uneasy overtly to dismiss Halifax’s cry for negotiation. By the end of May Churchill had convinced his cabinet to fight on. History turned on that achievement.

8. Churchill did not skip Roosevelt’s funeral out of “pique at Roosevelt’s repeated refusal to visit Britain during the war”; in fact he agonized over missing it. Mr. Hitchens forgets that there was a war on. The Allies were closing on Berlin, the end might come any day. There were more pressing things than funerals to occupy heads of government.

9. “Unless fresh information comes to light,” Mr. Hitchens will believe the fable that Churchill set up the Lusitania sinking to entice the Americans into World War I. Well, okay…but that particular red herring was exploded 20 years ago by historian Harry Jaffa (Statesmanship, Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), and by others since.

10. There is not a shred of evidence that Churchill knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and this, again, has been broadly rejected, most recently by David Stafford (Churchill and Secret Service, London: Murray, 1997). Mr. Hitchens is an able pot-stirrer, but he relies on extremists pro and con for his “facts.” He should be reading the more balanced historians: Norman Rose, Henry Pelling, Warren Kimball, Paul Addison, Robert Rhodes James.

Churchill’s virtues, like his faults, were on a grand scale. Mr. Hitchens has found almost all of them, including the lies, which continue to seep from the fever swamps. But the overriding point is that the virtues outweighed the faults. If Churchill’s “lapidary phrases” and “gallows humor” reacquired renown after September 11th, it was because Churchill more than anyone crafted words to express what free people were thinking—and because last September those words proved starkly relevant.

In the 1930s, that period of his career which Mr. Hitchens finds beyond contempt, Churchill said: “The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within.…They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.” Brainy people have been celebrating Churchill’s feet of clay (and they were big feet) for half a century. Theirs is an error of proportion. They forget that at the key moment in the 20th century, as Charles Krauthammer wrote, one man proved indispensable. How sad to find a good writer like Christopher Hitchens suffering from the same amnesia.

  —Richard M. Langworth

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From the Archives

1. There is no proof that any of Churchill's famous broadcasts were made by Norman Shelley. This claim is made by David Irving in his first volume of Churchill's War, based apparently on conversations with Shelley [although Irvng’s footnote for said conversations is dated after Shelley’s death! —Ed.]

As far as I can establish, Shelley did claim to have recorded as Churchill during the war, but (in public at least) never claimed that he broadcast the famous 1940 speeches contemporaneously. He may have claimaed to have broadcast the June 4th “Beaches” speech at a later date. The only proof that his family have been able to offer is a BBC recording of Shelley speaking as Churchill and delivering an address that seems to relate to 1942, and does not seem to equate with the text of any Churchill speech held here.

There is no doubt that Churchill delivered the speeches in the House of Commons (at least there are hundreds of witnesses to that). However, where the argument really falls down, is that the speeches of 13 May and 4 June were only delivered by Churchill in the Commons and were not broadcast by him or anyone else at the time (although after the war WSC recorded them for Decca). The speech of 4 June was repeated by the BBC radio announcer.

2. We have the evidence that Churchill's speeches were set out by his office in the blank verse style that they referred to as “psalm style,” so this did not originate with Manchester’s book. Anyone can come to the Archives Centre and consult the original speaking notes.

—Allen Packwood Acting Keeper , Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge

Christopher Hitchens sets out to expose what he sees as the real Winston Churchill behind the revered legend. The Churchill he portrays was boundlessly ambitious and opportunistic, to the point where he would abandon any past allegiance that  might hinder his upward trajectory. (He switched back and forth between the conservative and liberal political parties, for example, as suited his purposes). He was also, Hitchens suggests, impulsive, excessively militaristic, and frequently misguided in his policy decisions. (He had Britain destroy a French fleet early in World War II, for example, because of a mistaken notion that they might end up joining forces with the Germans if he didn't attack them first). His rise to power and prominence, according to Hitchens, seems to be the result not only of calculating ambition, but also of sheer luck. On many occasions, when he bungled something that should have earned him the reprobation and resentment of the British people, some larger, more dramatic event would divert attention or set right the problems that his own unwise actions had caused or in some other strange way end up working out to his advantage. He had problems with alcohol, and according to Hitchens, some of those who worked closely with him considered him "a demagogue, a bluffer, an incompetent, and an inebriate." Hitchens argues that Churchill deserves recognition as a great man for one heroic act alone: of all the significant actors on the world stage at the time, only Churchill stood up to Hitler and the Nazis for the right reasons:

It is natural, Hitchens suggests, to want to create glorious myths and legends. But it is also important, he emphasizes, to be ready to give those cherished myths up in order to better understand the truth of what really happened. Human nature being what it is, we will always create new legends to replace those we've lost. The task of criticism could be defined as the civilizing of this need—the appreciation of true decency and heroism as against coercive race legends and blood myths.  

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Dear Sir,

I'm surprised that Atlantic Monthly should have published an article so studded with factual inaccuracies. For example:

1 Norman Shelley did not broadcast Churchill's speeches. The BBC have gone into this in tremendous detail and have discovered that the original recordings were mis-labelled. (See BBC History Magazine for the full story.)

2 The idea that Churchill was a hopeless alcoholic, 'incapacitated by drink', is quite wrong. As he put it himself, alcohol was his servant not his master. We know precisely how much was consumed at Chequers and once it is divided by the large numbers of guests he invited it is not excessive. Furthermore, his private secretaries all attest that he greatly watered down his whiskies and brandies.

3 The point that the Germans did not have detailed plans for the invasion of Britain in no way lessens the heroism of the British Empire's decision to fight on, because we did not know that no such plans existed. And plans were being drawn up feverishly by the German High Command between May and September 1940.

4 The RAF was not the first air force to bomb a capital city. Warsaw, the capital of our ally Poland, was repeatedly bombed by the Luftwaffe in September and October 1939. Other cities in the West such as Rotterdam also suffered severe bombing before the RAF attacked Berlin.

5 Far from exhibiting 'ruling-class thuggery against the labour movement', Churchill's actions at Tonypandy were non-violent (though not reported as such) and during the General Strike he pressed for a fair deal from the mine-owners, but was overruled. Martin Gilbert - which Hitchens acknowledges as 'the Ur-text' of Churchillian studies - goes into this in some detail.

6 Far from being 'vulgar and alarmist', Churchill's 'constant drumming on the subject' of rearmament was desperately needed and came almost too late. How can one be too 'alarmist' about such a phenomenon as the rise of Hitler?

7 Far from it being 'easy to imagine' the RAF taking part in Hitler's invasion of Russia, it is in fact completely impossible to imagine any such thing. If the British Government were unwilling to risk losing six squadrons in the Battle of France in 1940, they would hardly have committed anything to aid Hitler in dominating the entire European land.

8 To state that Churchill's 'pure ambition' actuated his opposition to German expansionism in the Thirties is to ignore the great mass of his writing - his books, journalism and speeches - in support of the concept of European Balance of Power over forty years. (See, for example, Marlborough and The World Crisis.)

9 Churchill did not turn his back on the Duke of Windsor 'only a short while' after the Abdication, but a full four years later when the Duke and Duchess's outrageous behaviour after the Fall of France forced him to reprimand them severely.

10 It is completely wrong to say that 'more than once Churchill favoured limited negotiations with Hitler' as any careful reading of his actual words in context will show. (See chapters 21-23 of my biography of Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox.)

11 The fact that Churchill ordered the Channel Islands to be evacuated has no bearing on anything, except that a single glance at the map will show that they could not be defended.

12 India might have been a more 'faraway country' than Czechoslovakia, but Britain had the most intimate ties of imperial responsibility for India, whereas she had no treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia.

13 Britain did not 'mortgage' the Caribbean islands to America; she granted 99 year leases on some bases there. This in turn freed up Royal Naval vessels for service in the North Sea.

14 Why should it be 'unbelievable' that Britain expected a Nazi invasion via Ireland? In the past Ireland had been considered by James II, Napoleon and Wilhelm II as the ideal route via which to attack Britain.

15 If Mr Hitchens thinks that Churchill's Oran oration to the House of Commons 'is one speech that has not come down to us by way of the Churchill school of historians', he ought to read Martin Gilbert's 'Finest Hour' p.641. (Back to the Ur-text.)

16 Churchill was not to know that Vichy, whose precise relationship with Nazi Germany had not yet been established, would not hand over her fleet. Mr Hitchens might be willing in 2002 to believe in the French assurances, but he was not responsible for Britain's safety in 1940.

17 When he says that Churchill chroniclers prefer to 'skate over' the Oran incident, 'or, where possible, elide it altogether', Mr Hitchens is simply talking rubbish. The episode is gone into by Martin Gilbert (in no fewer than 27 pages), Roy Jenkins, Geoffrey Best, Norman Rose, A.L. Rowse, myself and of course Churchill himself in volume two of his memoirs, as well as many other biographers.

18 The accusation that Churchill was responsible for sinking the Lusitania is pure tripe, and I'm surprised that someone not known for his belief in absurd conspiracy theories would entertain it.

19 Ditto the idea that Churchill had prior knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbour but failed to warn Roosevelt. It is true that Britain had broken the Japanese naval codes, but the crucial fact is that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence throughout the journey to within 200 miles of Pearl Harbour.

20 Far from his retirement being 'a protracted, distended humiliation of celebrity-seeking and gross overindulgence' Churchill published his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which were acclaimed by academic historians and are still a publishing phenomenon forty years later. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill had little reason to 'seek' celebrity!

21 Far from weakening Hitler, the appeasers' attempts at 'a compromise or holding operation' greatly strengthened his regime. The only time conspirators came close to deposing him was in the days just before before Munich; after the West appeased him there he was safe.

22 Although the Final Solution itself did not begin until war was declared, Hitler made his 'extermination' speech in January 1939, by which time the fate of the German Jews was sealed. Dachau had been in existence since 1933. The only sure way of saving European Jewry was to eliminate Nazism from the planet as soon as possible, which was Churchill's policy and too few others'.

23 The Tory majority did not want to save the Empire by 'becoming dependent upon the Nazi's goodwill or pleasure' because if they had they would not have voted for the guarantee to Poland in April 1939, which would precipitate a war for reasons entirely unconnected with any threat to the Empire. Laying that European tripwire for Hitler proves that Imperial considerations could not have been uppermost in Tory minds.

These twenty-three substantial errors - quite apart from Mr Hitchens' bileful rhetorical devices and 'straw dog' arguments - serve to destroy his central thesis. Contrary to your front page headline, Churchill's reputation suffers no fall.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Roberts

Author: 'The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax', 'Eminent Churchillians', etc

www.andrew-roberts.net

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The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2002
 
Letters to the Editor

.....

Hitchens on Churchill

Christopher Hitchens

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THE ATLANTIC has given Christopher Hitchens another half page to defend himself against various critics, but they set up the critics by avoiding all the heavy criticism. For example, Andrew Roberts sent them a score of refutations (see our website, "Churchill in the News"), but THE ATLANTIC published only one.

So...nothing for it but to persevere!

To the Editor of THE ATLANTIC:

Why DOES THE ATLANTIC (July/August letters) continue to publish falsehoods about Winston Churchill? If I were Christopher Hitchens I would see a conspiracy in all this!

1) Hitchens relies for his lie that an actor delivered Churchill's "Fight on the Beaches" speech over the BBC on 12-year-old "research" by a company called "Sensimetrics". I'm sure I don't know why their "analysis" indicated a "different voice", but it was clearly faulty. For one thing...

2) Churchill--contrary to James Humes in this same issue--never delivered his June 4, 1940 "Fight on the Beaches" speech over the BBC! Excerpts were read by an announcer. Private Secretary John Colville, who was present at every speech Churchill delivered, said "If anyone else had delivered them, I would have known it."

3) Hitchens says "there is only a dispute about when, and how often Shelley...acted as His Master¹s Voice". The only dispute is in Hitchens's fevered mind. If he did his homework he would know that the Churchill Archives Centre, far more recently than "Sensimetrics", determined that the Shelley did indeed record the "Beaches" speech--for a commercial production AFTER the war. (C.H. Rolph to Robert Rhodes James, FINEST HOUR 112, Autumn 2001, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/fh112myths.htm). In his latest defence of his April ATLANTIC hallucination, Mr. Hitchens admits the Germans bombed civilians first--but says what he meant was "who struck first at whose capital". Instead of admitting he has Norman Shelley's "Children's Hour" role wrong, he says, well, Shelley played ANOTHER role in another program. In trying to discredit the Royal Navy's heroic sea actions of 1939-40 he claims "there was nothing like a premeditated fleet action" until the Brits bombed the French at Oran. He simply hasn't done his research--and tries to cover himself by dissembling. For God's sake--READ!

Richard M. Langworth

Editor, Finest Hour

The Churchill Center

www.winstonchurchill.org

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