Churchill

It seems to have become popular on various parts of the hard-left in recent months to seek publicity and pose as an iconoclast by attacking Winston Churchill.

It's not difficult to find grounds, a few justified, some grossly oversimplified, others complete rubbish, on which to attack Churchill. As someone who was born, grew up, served in the army and was first elected to parliament during the reign of Queen Victoria it is hardly surprising that some of his views appear utterly unacceptable to the millennial generation, particularly when quoted out of context.

Churchill was the sort of leader who produces lots of ideas, a few brilliant, many of them terrible, who can be very successful overall if he or she has senior advisors with the guts to tell him when his latest hobbyhorse is insane and the wisdom to listen to them, but will be a disaster if surrounded by yes-men or who refuses to listen to good advice.

Yes, he made some terrible mistakes, though ironically, far from being iconoclastic, the attacks which have been parroted against him by sections of the British left over the last few months have largely been repeats of grossly distorted and oversimplified tropes, or accusations which are complete rubbish, and ignored the decisions on which he is actually most open to criticism - letting Admiral Fisher develop the battlecruiser, for example, his role in sending the Black and Tans to Ireland, or his decision to put Britain back on the Gold Standard (which Churchill himself later regarded as the worst mistake of his life.)

But even if every word which has been written about Churchill's role in the Tonypandy riots, the Bengal Famine, and the supposed abandonment of the 51st Highland division had been fair, his role in inspiring Britain to stand up against Nazi Germany at the time when Hitler posed the greatest threat to civilisation in human history would still make him one of the greatest heroes of all time.

Andrew Neil's brilliant opening to "The Week" on Thursday 14th February 2019 deserves to be considered the definitive summary of the achievements of Winston Churchill and can be found here.



On the specific points on which Churchill has been attacked by the left

1) A more nuanced and balanced account by Richard Langworth of the myths and reality concerning the Tonypandy riots can be found on the website of Hillsdale college in the USA here.

2) Most informed observers would agree that the Bengal Famine was not the finest hour of anyone involved - not the national or local British authorities or the Indian government. It was a massively complex disaster which had a number of causes, and putting the entire blame on the malice of any single actor, either Churchill or anyone else, is oversimplifying to the point of being ludicrous. The causes included:

Natural Disasters:

• The late 1942 rice crop was afflicted by a severe outbreak of fungal brown spot disease. This was described by the biologist S.Y. Padmanabhan in his 1973 article "The Great Bengal Famine" as so destructive that "nothing as devastating ... has been recorded in plant pathological literature."
• A cyclone and three storm surges in October 1942 ravaged croplands, destroyed houses and killed thousands, at the same time dispersing high levels of the brown spot fungal spores across the region and increasing the spread of the crop disease
• The combined effect of the weather systems and crop disease was devastating: "7,400 villages were partly or wholly destroyed by the storm, and standing flood waters remained for weeks in at least 1,600 villages. Cholera, dysentery and other water-borne diseases flourished. 527,000 houses and 1,900 schools were lost. Over 1000 square miles of the most fertile paddy land in the province was entirely destroyed." (Mukherjee, Janam: "Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire." Oxford University Press 2015. ISBN 978-0-19-061306-8.)

Enemy Action

Japanese attacks both contributed directly to the disaster and made dealing with it vastly more difficult in the following three ways:

• Invasion of Burma: The Japanese conquest of Burma both made it impossible to buy rice from that country and flooded Bengal with refugees. A scorched earth policy by local British military authorities designed to stop the invasion probably also contributed to the famine, though given what had recently happened to local populations over-run by Imperial Japanese forces, the commanders responsible would have intended their actions to prevent an even greater human catastrophe. Anyone who doubts they had good reason to fear dire consequences for the people of India were the Japanese not stopped should read about the Rape of Nanking.
• Bombing raids: Japanese bombing of Calcutta, and mishandled attempts by the local authorities to deal with the food shortages caused by the raids, had disastrous and long-lasting consequences for the supply of food in the province.
• Attacks on shipping: from January 1942 to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships displacing a total of 873,000 tons in the Indian Ocean alone. The loss of these ships enormously complicated allied logistical problems and the war cabinet would have had reason to fear that any food they attempted to send to Bengal by ship was all too likely to end up at the bottom of the sea along with desperately needed ships and sailors.

You could write lengthy books arguing about the extent to which the failure to deal with the starvation and disease which resulted from these events was due to mistakes by the local British authorities, Churchill's government in London, and the Indian authorities, and people have.

I would not dispute that the famine was a terrible human disaster or that it was one of Churchill's worst failures. However, in the context of the problems caused by the natural disasters and enemy action described above, to suggest as some people do that the famine was all Churchill's fault and use out-of-context quotes to suggest that he deliberately caused the famine because he didn't like the Indians is not just a smear, but a ridiculous one.

3) The 51st Highland Division

Churchill has been wrongly accused of abandoning the 51st division at the time of Dunkirk. This unit had been deployed before he became PM to a part of France from which evacuation at Dunkirk with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) would have been utterly impractical. Here is a piece which I wrote when Churchill was accused last year of abandoning the division:

4) The latest ridiculous smear against Churchill, on Question Time this week, was that he was  somehow responsible or involved with the Concentration caps set up by Kitchener during the second Boer war. What utter nonsense!

For most of his involvement in the Boer War Churchill had no official position and was there as a journalist - he was war correspondent for the Daily Mail and Morning Post. When he signed up and re-joined the army in 1900 it was as a very junior officer - a subaltern in the South African Light Horse.

All the decisions about the creation and administration of the concentration camps which were set up during the second Boer war - and, by the way, I regard the conditions in which people were held in them as one of the worst mistakes ever made by the British Empire - were way above Churchill's pay grade at the time.


Conclusion:

Winston Churchill was a remarkable man. There is no doubt that during his long period of public service he made some terrible mistakes and was dead wrong about a great many things. There is also no doubt that in the face of the most evil and dangerous threat ever faced by modern civilisation on this planet, that of Hitler's Nazi regime, his courage and adversity made an immense contribution to the defeat of that threat.

As his grandson Nicholas Soames said, Churchill's reputation will survive these attacks. Those who belittle Churchill to gain a little cheap publicity or score a childish political point only make themselves look small.

The last words on Churchill should be these from the article the Spectator wrote on Churchill in 1965 as he was dying and which I quoted yesterday:

"We live as free men, we speak as free men, we walk as free men because a man called Winston Churchill lived."