That is a most decorous note you've struck Jonathan. Thank you for
your words.
I thought I had bought your book, but I was mistaken. I shall order it
straight away.
Take care
Lincoln
On Sunday, February 26, 2017 at 7:19:32 PM UTC+13,
chateaust...@att.net wrote:
I think our thanks are to you for bringing the topic up. The
discussion has been (in my sage and well-considered opinion) most
fruitful and I have appreciated all the insights. Well played,
gentlemen!
Jonathan Hayes
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Grimsdyke <lincol...@gmail.com <javascript:>>
*To:* ChurchillChat <church...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>>
*Sent:* Saturday, February 25, 2017 9:37 PM
*Subject:* [ChurchillChat] Re: Churchill’s treatment at the hands
of ‘Churchill Scholars’
From the amount of interest it has sparked, this seems to be
indeed a worthy topic; I’m now glad I began it. These are great
comments so far, and their greatest fascination for me is to see
how and in what form many people approach the life of this great
man. I hope the others on this forum will forgive me my habit of
dipping in only on weekends, because to my great regret weekdays
deprive me of even the smallest chance to indulge in Churchillian
and other delightful fare.
It’s quite right, I think, to say that history is rarely so simple
as to be reducible to ‘superhero thwarted by dullards’ narratives.
But Churchill (I cannot think of anyone less suited to being
pictured as an unnaturally muscled individual with sloping brow,
flashing teeth and coloured cape) at his energetic best was much
more impressive than an ordinary superhero, and thwarted he
certainly /was/ – if one would read the numerous accounts of the
campaign with all its details exposed. As I said before, many
accounts are equally instructive, but I find that among the most
readable and consecutive of these are the accounts by William
Manchester (/The Last Lion/), Violet Bonham Carter (/Winston
Churchill as I knew him/) and Michael Shelden (/Young Titan/).
Michael Shelden’s book is particularly interesting, and
illuminating far beyond even some of the best biographies of
Churchill that I have read (and I have read more than 30), and
meticulously researched. I shouldn’t spoil it for those who would
like to buy the book – which I can’t recommend too highly; but
pages 306 to 322 cover the Dardanelles imbroglio with zest and
superlative perspicuity, and you couldn’t possibly rise from
reading the book without realising how much there was about
Churchill that one hadn’t known before.
I think I’m inclined to agree with you, Chris Bell; 3 minutes is a
suspiciously short time to allot to something as climactic in the
Churchill record as the Dardanelles, and Martin Gilbert was hardly
the man to overlook this.
I don’t think I could disagree much with Jonathan, although I have
grave reservations about ‘not being able to fault Kitchener’ for
his part in depriving the campaign of troops, and supplying too
little too late. Michael Shelden is brilliant on this, as is
William Manchester. Violet Bonham Carter, who had the almost
unedited confidence of her father, Prime Minister Asquith,
expresses a perspective deeper and more intimate and often more
direct than any of the others, although her objectivity is
somewhat vitiated by her loyalty to Asquith - as concerns the
special sphere in which the Prime Minister's treatment of Winston
bears on these events when things began to go wrong. Also, his
almost treacherous lack of decisiveness is given scant exposure by
his daughter, who not surprisingly obfuscates it. For all that,
hers is a tremendously valuable book; superbly written, and
/readable/ in the extreme.
Violet makes it plain that Kitchener, after receiving an urgent
appeal from Grand Duke Nicholas for the British to make a naval or
military demonstration to draw off Turkish forces and ease the
Russian position, had then commended the Dardanelles as the
decisive place for such a ‘demonstration’ to Winston Churchill on
the one hand, and made a corresponding pledge to Nicolas on the
other. At the War Council on January 5 and 8^th 2015, “Lord
Kitchener once again expressed his preference for the Dardanelles
as an objective”, and Col Maurice Hankey, whose brainchild the
Dardanelles campaign had been originally, had minuted the
practically unanimous agreement of the War Council upon this. “It
seems strange” she writes, “that no one should have questioned the
decision to ‘take the Gallipoli Peninsula’ without troops when
Lord Kitchener had estimated that 150,000 would be sufficient for
that purpose and yet had made it clear that no troops were
available.” Later on, when troops became available for the Middle
East, Col Hankey expressed to Prime Minister Asquith his strong
view that naval operations should be supported by a military
force; on February 16 the War Council agreed that the 29^th
division should be sent to Lemnos as the foundation of the
military attack on the Dardanelles. “But it was not, alas, adhered
to by Lord Kitchener”. The War Council did not accept the doctrine
that sending men to ‘chew barbed wire on the Western front was the
way to achieve victory, and Churchill was foremost among those who
deplored the carnage and waste intrinsic to the ‘Western school of
thought’.
At the request of Churchill, Asquith arranged an interview between
Lord Kitchener and Winston in his presence, where Winston asked
Kitchener whether he took full responsibility for the military
operations and the strength of the forces needed to achieve
success. “Lord Kitchener had once replied that he did and the
Royal Naval division was handed over to his command.”
On March 18 when the whole Allied fleet of 14 British and 4 French
battleships advanced to the Narrows and 3 battleships struck mines
and sank, Admiral de Robeck refused to move without the army and
the naval chiefs of staff refused to order him to renew the
attack. Although Asquith agreed with Winston and Kitchener that
the Navy ought to make another big push, he shrank from overruling
the old Sea dogs. Sheldon is scathing on Asquith’s handling of the
war (quite deservedly), and leaves us in no doubt as to how far he
fell short of the qualities required of a wartime Prime Minister.
Lloyd George’s perfidy has an equally bright light shone upon it!
Although Roger Keyes had pleaded with Admiral de Robeck to reverse
his decision because waiting for the army would be fatal, the
Admiral seemed to be (as Asquith said) ‘in rather a funk’. If the
29^th division had been sent in February as originally intended,
the landing of troops would have taken place/before/ the Turks had
time to pour in reinforcements and cover the Peninsula with a
network of entrenchments. Within a day of the army’s landing in
Gallipoli on April 25, the slaughter began — on the beach where,
as Alan Moorhead writes, “the Marines walked in perfect safety 2
months before”. Even then Kitchener continued complacent; but,
writes Violet, “Winston did not share Kitchener’s complacency. He
was rightly disturbed by our tremendous losses, and took Fisher
with him to the War Office where they both entreated Lord
Kitchener to send immediate reinforcements from Egypt. Lord
Kitchener began by doubting whether these were needed, but he
yielded in the end and ordered an Indian Brigade and Territorial
division to be sent from Egypt…. Had they been made available for
the landing they would have been ready to follow up the advance on
the 28^th — when the Turks, exhausted and discouraged, were
retreating. Now Ian Hamilton was obliged to wait until 6^th May to
start his new offensive. By then opportunity had passed, and
though we threw in all our forces we gained only a few hundred
yards. Trench warfare had begun.” There seems no doubt about
Kitchener’s role in the debacle.
Michael Shelden writes, “As the situation went from bad to worse
in the next few months, mistake after mistake was made, by both
the Navy and especially the army, which tried to clear Gallipoli
of Turkish troops who proved to be far more disciplined and
determined than the British had been willing to believe. Beginning
on 25 April, Australian and New Zealand troops joined…, and though
both sides showed extraordinary bravery, they found themselves
bogged down in the same kind of stand-off that prevailed on the
Western Front. Tens of thousands died as the fighting dragged
through the rest of the year. The rugged terrain, harsh weather
and military incompetence turned Asquith’s ‘unique opportunity’
into one long misadventure that did nothing to change the course
of the war. The blame for this tragic campaign was widely shared,
but it was Churchill who was made to pay the price of failure.……
This setback was so big that a suitably big scapegoat was needed,
and Winston was it. As soon as things began to go wrong, little
time was wasted in pointing the finger of blame in his direction.
It was in May 1915 that his colleagues and rivals began turning on
him. As Prime Minister, Asquith had been the one to decide that
the risk was worth taking. It was his responsibility to accept the
consequences of failure. But he evaded it, as did Kitchener, who
mishandled the Gallipoli campaign. As for Jackie Fisher, he would
later pretend that he had been opposed to the Dardanelles plan all
along.”
Yes, as Jonathan says, “life isn’t fair”. In Churchill’s case over
the Dardanelles it was more than unfair; it was dastardly. The
Dardanelles /was/ a /very good/ idea; various military historians
have considered it brilliant. The only imaginative plan of the
entire war, as Clement Attlee wrote.
Sebastien Haffner wrote, “the strategic concept was grandiose.
Turkey, allied with Germany since October 1914, was relatively
weak. The maritime location of the capital, Constantinople,
rendered it vulnerable to attack by superior naval forces. If
Constantinople fell, Turkey herself would probably collapse. This
would at least establish a secure sea route to Russia, whose
already depleted offensive strength could be restored by means of
massive arms shipments. In addition, however, Serbia was still
holding out, Bulgaria had yet to ally herself with Germany, and
powerful political forces in Greece and Rumania were ready to side
with the Allies if they won a victory in the region. The fall of
Constantinople would provide the awaited signal, and the Balkans
would burst into flames like a forest fire. From there, Austria
could be brought to her knees, completely isolating Germany and
threatening her with a war on 3 fronts instead of 2! This was
strategy on a Napoleonic scale. It was also /made to measure for
Britain/, with her vast naval forces and small but efficient army
– far more suitable than the slow recruitment and training of
immense armies destined for insertion in the /bone-mill/ operated
by static battles on the Western Front.
Also, it is incredible how swiftly the Little Men turned against
Churchill. He was the ablest and most courageous of them, but
their littleness paradoxically made them more powerful because
they constituted the majority. As Sebastien Haffner says:
“Churchill had no real backers. Kitchener was universally trusted
and forgiven for all his failures. Churchill, in contrast, was
regarded as untried and undependable. He needed successes in order
to hold his ground, even with Prime Minister Asquith, the ultimate
authority, who initially let him have his head with a kind of
sceptical, amused benevolence – not unappreciative of his talent
and originality and not without hope, but also coolly prepared to
drop him at any time. Such was the position from which Churchill
set out to direct the First World War. He took no trouble to
secure or reinforce that position, and he upset his closest
colleagues and assistants…. In their opinion, he behaved as if he
knew it all. They were not so wide of the mark: he did indeed
behave like that, but the tragicomic fact was /he really did know
it all/.”
Bob, I take your point about a work that presents ALL the evidence
leaving it up to the reader to form an opinion which is out of the
hands of the author. But in most cases, we /are/ dealing with
works that do /not /present /all/ the evidence; in fact most
authors tend to present evidence /selectively/ to bolster their
particular viewpoint. We are aware of this essential
characteristic of authors from the works of such as John Charnley,
David Irving etc. etc. Of course, Martin Gilbert is a million
miles away in the opposite direction from such folk as Charnley
and his tribe, but the point is that the BBC programme to which I
refer presents /anything but/ all the evidence, and is as
tendentious and slanted as it can be on the Dardanelles campaign –
which is why I found it so baffling that it could have originated
from Martin Gilbert. If anything, he would be fully aware of all
the intricacies of the campaign from his voluminous research, and
to be made to appear as the presenter of such a partial and biased
account is a libel on the man. Of course, I cannot know what the
terms of his contract with the BBC were; but if ‘intellectual
integrity’ counts for anything, biased editing of a historian’s
production should be challengeable in court. I’m surprised that
this did not happen. I am grateful to Richard Langworth for the
light he has thrown on this subject (22^nd of February). That is
indeed the explanation that makes greatest sense.
Richard, thank you for your caution about your recent book; I
prefer to wait until the hardback edition becomes available, and I
look forward extremely eagerly to reading it, as I do anything
from your pen.
Grimsdyke
On Sunday, February 19, 2017 at 3:48:01 PM UTC+13, Grimsdyke wrote:
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 <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.
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