In general, bone fide Churchill scholars have been fairly consistent in the way they handle his record, and what comes down to us is the image of a fiercely pugnacious, infinitely creative man of genius, with an incandescently brilliant mind who made both mistakes and their decided opposite, but whose motives throughout were gallant, noble, magnanimous ……and a host of other adjectives, none of which have any truck with mean-spiritedness, littleness, or spite or malevolence, or any of those characteristics that belong to lesser men. However, I have been puzzled beyond words by the treatment of certain parts of his record at the hands of some who had always seemed to be among the most discerning of ‘Churchill Scholars’.
A few years ago the BBC put out a 4-episode programme on Churchill which was written and presented by Martin Gilbert: it is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVQg_ehSu6A >From 21:39 to 24:39 on the first episode, he deals with Winston Churchill's involvement with the Dardanelles campaign. These 3 minutes seemed to me, as I’m sure they would seem to anybody with a sound reading of the intricacies of that episode in World War I, a travesty consisting of half-truths and deliberate omissions of crucial facts to achieve a result that places the blame unfairly and almost slanderously on Churchill. We all know, of course, that serious researchers from Alan Moorhead to Basil Liddell Hart and numerous other biographers have found that Churchill had little to do with the failures of the campaign, and in fact had been made the scapegoat of a debacle that owed everything to the blunders and mismanagement of others (Kitchener and Fisher particularly, and of course Asquith at a political level) and little, if at all, to any actual mistakes on Churchill's part. In fact the origin of the idea wasn't actually his: it was Hankey's first, and then enthusiastically taken up by a host of others – including Fisher, Gray, Asquith, and even Kitchener, and later Lloyd George with some initial misgivings. Subsequently, Churchill was exonerated by the Dardanelles Commission, although that Commission was, “struck by the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterised the proceedings of the War Council”. Thus, Alan Moorehead: “*in 1925, when Roger Keyes was in command of the Mediterranean fleet, he’s steamed through the Dardanelles and, according to Aspinall, who was with him, he could hardly speak for emotion. ‘My God’, he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed…… And because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another 3 years.*’ Thus, Clement Attlee: “*in the whole of the First World War, there was only one great strategic idea, and that was Winston’s*”. Attlee had been a soldier at Gallipoli. Thus, Alastair Cook (from Keynote Speech, Churchill Society International Conference, New Hampshire, 27 August 1988): “*Kitchener had seemed an Eisenhower-Montgomery-Nimitz, all rolled into one. He wasn’t, but we thought he was. We didn’t know then that his power was declining drastically, or that he was more than anyone morally responsible for the failure of the Dardanelles: he would not support the original expedition – would not produce the manpower or the materiel. But as you may have noticed, the deaths of a famous leader, especially by assassination, confers a halo. Kitchener was drowned and he got the halo. Churchill got the blame*.” However, all this (and countless other testimonials to the mistakes and blunders made by other men, but not Churchill, and the difficulties ‘on the ground’ caused by the fatal delays during that campaign) is seemingly completely ignored by the writer and presenter, Martin Gilbert. The icing on the cake is Gilbert’s inclusion of statements by AJ Silvester (principal private secretary to Lloyd George....... as if he would be impartial!) and Jimmy Page (British Army, Dardanelles 1915) and we hear them speak words that have virtually no other purpose than to drive home the message that it was Churchill’s vaulting ambition that made him not only careless of lives, but completely bullheaded and arrogant, and that he bore unmistakably the responsibility for the whole failure. As I say above, this is scarcely believable from such a man as Sir Martin (Winston may well intone from the grave, “et tu Brute?”) — which makes me ask myself if this is in fact the result of some ‘creative editing’ by the BBC – who, with their traditional hostility to Churchill (which seems to have begun with John Reith), may well have omitted several minutes of counterbalancing argument and statement that might have been included in the original footing by Sir Martin. I’d be grateful if anybody on this forum can throw some light on this. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to churchillchat+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to churchillchat@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
