Customer Reviews

Winston Churchill

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A very detail-heavy but ultimately startling re-assessment of the life and political career of the man regarded as Britain's greatest "hero" of the twentieth century.

I am grateful To Clive Ponting for taking the time and doing the research to compile and demonstrate from the historical files this more accurate understanding of Churchill's personality and track-record during WW2. This is a welcome rebuttal to the prevailing myth which Churchill himself deliberately helped propagate with his own memoirs.

I knew about how Churchill's complete lack of concern for the common man and his arrogant unwarranted regard for what he saw as his own military genius cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men at Gallipoli. But I had no idea that his bungling and vacillations and interference in strategy and planning was a disaster for the British commanders during WW2 also. Apparently it can be directly linked to his involvement and modus operandi that the allies lost France, had the retreat to Dunkirk, lost at Tobruk, lost Singapore, Norway, etc., etc. He comes across as a total disaster as Commander -in-chief.

Well, he was good at speeches and kept the British spirit up during the years of defeat though, right?
Wrong.
Another surprise was that all the speeches we now regard as being so brilliant and inspiring were not made to the British public at all but to Parliament (the House of Commons) so would have been largely unknown at the time to the mass of Britons. He was asked to give a speech via the radio to the British public but declined.

Then there is his personality. A snob, racist white-supremacist monarchist who had a terrible temper, was rude and inconsiderate to his subordinates and often resorted to sulks to get his own way.
It would be great if they made a film similar to 'Der Untergang' but showing how Churchill treated those around him. I'm sure it would make Hitler look very pleasant as a boss and leader by comparison.

Churchill advocated chemical warfare, gas attacks and the terrorising of German civilians by deliberate fire-bombing of civilian populations. That is the deliberate burning to death of men, women and children in their hundreds of thousands as a policy of demoralisation! :-0 It is quite clear from the mass of meticulously-sourced and referenced material, here collected by Ponting that had the second world war gone the other way, Churchill could have been quite rightly tried and executed as a war criminal.
I could go on...
But ...this is OUR GREATEST HERO??
We should be ashamed of him.

Thanks Clive for helping set the record straight and piercing the veil of victor's propaganda that I as a Brit born in the fifties have been subjected to.

P.S.
To think that Churchill was the "hammer of facism" I think one has to review historical fact via a distorting lens and then project a positive patina retro-actively.

Ponting demonstrates that Churchill was great admirer of Mussolini.
In the 1920's he said that Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world", showing "a way to combat subversive forces".

Even as late as 1940 Churchill was describing Mussolini as a "a very great man" during a speech in Parliament. Most of the aristocracy, Conservative politicians, leading capitalists and Royalists in positions of power in Europe prior to WW2 were afraid of the spread of Bolshevism. Many people in positions of power admired aspects of Fascism and saw it as a preferable system to Communism. Churchill was just one of many in this regard.

Even Hitler received some Churchillian approbation prior to 1939: "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as ADMIRABLE* to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." *[my emphasis]

From page 393:
In 1937 Churchill '...still seems to have hoped that Hitler would develop into a duplicate of Mussolini who he admired so much. He wrote:
"Although no subsequent action can undo wrong deeds history is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim and even frightful methods, but who nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures who have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler."

Does that sound like "the hammer of fascism"?

Regarding the commonly held view of the war being lost before it started because of not heeding WC's call for rearmament, and that WC had consistently been prophetically anti-appeasement, that is another myth.
From page 394.
On September the 7th, 1937 at the Tory Conference, WC ringingly endorsed Chamberlain's foreign policy and praised "the great effort for rearmament".
A week later in the Evening Standard he wrote "War is NOT imminent". He wrote that three years earlier he had been a loud alarmist but despite the dangers the Govt had taken action: "great efforts are being made to meet them. He wrote that he did not think the balance of armamnets would continue to shift in favour of Britain and France and so he wrote that 'now' was a good time to try and reach an agreement with Germany and Italy. He concluded with a biblical quotation: "Agree with thy adversary quickly whilst thou art in the way with him"
Evening Standard, 15.10.37

In 1938 WC even wrote privately to Paul Reynaud with considerations for making a deal with Hitler:
"The question now is can we make head against the Nazi domination or ought we severally to make the best terms possible with it - while trying to rearm?"
Pg 401.

As for WC's personal ways of dealing with subordinates and the comparison with Hitler's, Ponting quotes Admiral J.H. Godfrey who wrote:
"To get his own way he used every device. ...His battery of weapons included persuasion, real or simulated anger, mockery vituperation, tantrums, ridicule, derision, abuse and tears, which he would aim at anyone who opposed him or expressed a view contrary to the one he had already formed, sometimes on quite trivial questions."
Pg. 411

I heartily recommend reading Ponting's book if you want an honest and informed opinion of Churchill and a more accurate understanding of his war record.