John Charmley and the Story of Winston Churchill

For more than thirty years, I’d occasionally come across harsh attacks against a British historian named John Charmley for writing a highly-critical biography of Winston Churchill, the famed British leader, and that was about the only thing I knew of that author. I’d always vaguely wondered exactly what he’d said about Churchill that had infuriated so many others, and whether his criticism had been warranted, but never had enough of an interest in the topic to investigate it.

Then a year or two ago, I finally got around to ordering Churchill: The End of Glory from Amazon, with a mint copy of his original hardcover edition offered at an extremely attractive price, less than half that of the subsequent paperback version. Unfortunately, the doorstop-sized 750 page tome hardly struck me as casual reading, so it just ended up in a pile of my other books, where it quietly sat for the next eighteen months.

But with those book-piles growing disturbingly high, I finally decided to whittle them down a bit, and a book as thick as Charmley’s seemed like a good contribution to that effort. So I finally got around to reading it a few days ago, along with more than a dozen of the reviews and other articles it had generated, all of which helped refresh my memory of the half-forgotten controversy provoked by its 1993 release.

As Charmley explained on the first page of his text, he devoted 15 years to the book and since he was only 37 when it was released, he must have embarked upon that massive research project near the very beginning of his scholarly career, although he also published four other academic books on related subjects along the way.

The bulk of the massive text was a very detailed and solid presentation of Churchill’s political career prior to his 1940 elevation to Number 10 Downing Street, and I found its material quite informative in that regard though sometimes a bit dull.

I’d certainly known that in 1915 Churchill had been driven from the British Cabinet for the terrible Gallipoli disaster that he’d engineered, but I’d had the mistaken impression that his political career had been blighted during the many years that followed. Instead, I discovered that he’d soon returned to office in 1917, and then spent nearly all of the next dozen years in government, holding a variety of highly important positions, many of them near the very top of the political ladder, though his record in these posts was often regarded as less than successful.

Ironically enough, it was instead Prime Minister David Lloyd George—Britain’s victorious leader of the First World War—who was forced out in 1922 and never once regained a government position during the remaining two decades of his life.

The reason for Lloyd George’s political eclipse was the complete collapse of his British Liberal Party, reduced to a mere shadow of its previous standing. Its place on the political spectrum was largely usurped by Britain’s newly risen socialists of the Labour Party, which held power alone or in coalition during most of the 1920s.

The key factor behind the replacement of the Liberals had been the massive expansion of the British franchise in early 1918, removing property qualifications for voting and therefore tripling the size of the electorate, allowing the large working-class to finally play a central role in elections. Much of that working-class voted Labour, and the Liberals disappeared as a result.

Another important factor was the severe political backlash against the horrific human losses that Britain had suffered during the war, with most of the electorate now considering Britain’s involvement to have been a disatrous mistake that they blamed upon the Liberals who had governed during those years. It’s certainly more than coincidental that some of the most important early Labour leaders such as E.D. Morel had been ardent anti-war activists, even suffering years of harsh wartime imprisonment for their views. As a Cabinet member, Churchill had been notorious for his bellicosity, and in the 1922 elections he lost his parliamentary seat to Morel, with Churchill forced to spend the next couple of years out of politics.

The Charmley biography was tremendously rich in detail, and if I’d read it a decade ago, I surely would have missed many of its most telling and almost hidden elements, items that seemed to similarly escape the notice of all the many distinguished reviewers.

For example, on p. 383 the author devoted two half-sentences to a somewhat cryptic reference to what was almost certainly the central turning point of World War II. But since that story has suffered near-total suppression for 85 years by virtually all Western historians, I doubt if even one reader in a hundred picked up on that item:

At the Supreme War Council on 28 March…Chamberlain had put forward a number of plans for offensive operations. These included a scheme of Churchill’s…and a plan for attacking the Baku oilfields in Russia from which Germany obtained much of her oil…attacking the Baku fields, although a more attractive prospect, involved the risk of war with Russia.

That extremely brief mention refers to the very serious plans that the Allies—the British and French—made during the early months of 1940 to launch a massive attack against Stalin’s Soviet Union. Code named “Operation Pike,” they intended to use their Middle Eastern airbases to unleash the largest strategic bombing offensive in the history of the world against the Soviet oil fields of Baku, while they also made diplomatic efforts to enlist the Turks and perhaps the Iranians into joining the Allied attack against the USSR.

As the declassified documents eventually showed, the Allies mistakenly regarded the Soviets as Hitler’s weak and vulnerable ally, constituting the “soft underbelly” of the powerful German war machine. They incorrectly believed that several weeks of aerial bombardment would be sufficient to totally destroy the Soviet oil facilities, thereby cutting Germany off from its main supply of that vital commodity. Furthermore, the heavily mechanized nature of Soviet agriculture would mean that the loss of those oil supplies might well produce a huge Soviet famine, perhaps leading to the political collapse of Stalin’s regime.

However, all these supposed facts were entirely wrong. Little if any of Germany’s oil came from the USSR, and as the world would quickly discover the following year, Soviet military might was enormously strong and resilient rather than feeble. Moreover, vastly larger and more advanced strategic bombing attacks against oil fields later in the war eventually demonstrated that those facilities were far less fragile and easily destroyed than the Allied leaders had originally believed.

But wartime military decisions are taken based upon existing beliefs rather than produced in 20-20 hindsight. Not only would an all-out Allied attack against the USSR during the first few months of 1940 have certainly failed, but it would have had catastrophic strategic consequences, bringing the Soviets directly into the war as Hitler’s outright military ally and thereby almost certainly ensuring a rapid Allied defeat.

By the end of this preparatory period, unmarked Allied spotter-planes were regularly violating Soviet airspace, drawing up the last-minute list of targets for the bombing offensive that was about to be unleashed, while the attack was only canceled after Hitler’s panzer divisions swept through France in May 1940 and knocked that country out of the war. Thus, as I explained in a 2019 article, Hitler’s attack had inadvertently saved the Allies from a monumental strategic disaster.

Once the victorious Germans occupied the Paris area, they were fortunate enough to capture all the secret documents, and achieved a major propaganda coup by publishing these in facsimile and translation, so that all knowledgeable individuals soon knew that the Allies had been on the very verge of attacking the Soviets. This crucial fact, omitted from virtually all subsequent Western histories, also helps to explain why Stalin remained so distrustful of Churchill’s diplomatic efforts the following year in the months preceding Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.

Furthermore, some of the most far-reaching political consequences of a 1940 Allied attack upon the Soviet Union would have been totally unknown to the British and French leaders then planning it. Although they were certainly aware of the powerful Soviet-aligned Communist movements present in their own countries, only many years later did it become clear that the top leadership of the Roosevelt Administration was honeycombed by numerous agents fully loyal to Stalin, with the final proof awaiting the release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s. So if the Allies had suddenly gone to war against the Soviets, the fierce opposition of those influential individuals would have greatly reduced any future prospects of substantial American military assistance, let alone eventual intervention in the European conflict on the Allied side.

By any measure, the notion of a 1940 Allied attack against the neutral USSR would have been such a monumental blunder that it probably represented the single most embarrassing element of World War II, and a near-absolute blanket of silence quickly descended upon those facts, excluding them from virtually all subsequent Western histories. The first detailed coverage of that pivotal wartime turning point came in 2000 when historian Patrick Osborn published Operation Pike, an academic monograph based upon declassified government archives that appeared in a respected military history series.

Prior to that, I think the most extensive coverage in any Western book had been found in the 1955 wartime memoirs of prominent Anglo-French journalist Sisley Huddleston, which had causally mentioned the story in a couple of pages, whence I happened to discover it. The whole notion that the Allies had planned to attack the USSR in 1940 and that historical facts of such astonishing importance could have remained totally concealed for generations struck me as so implausible that I assumed the elderly Huddleston was merely delusional until I carefully investigated the issue and confirmed the reality of his remarkable claims.

Charmley only devoted about fifty words to this important topic, but I think that is fifty words more than the vast majority of other Western historians have allocated during the last eighty years, and his extremely brief mention convinced me of a couple of things. First, he was obviously aware of Operation Pike and its importance, but deliberately chose to completely downplay it, seeking to avoid academic controversy. And by absurdly stating that a massive Allied bombing offensive against the USSR “involved the risk of war with Russia” he seemed equally confident that virtually none of his readers were aware of the true facts, or would criticize such a ridiculous characterization of the situation.

Charmley’s very weighty book was a serious scholarly tome that his publishers had hardly expected to sell well, with their initial print-run limited to just 1,500 copies. Presumably they thought it might attract a few favorable reviews and then vanish into the remainder bins, or at best be lucky enough to land a spot on some academic reading lists.

But all of that dramatically changed when upon its release it received a strong endorsement in the Times of London by Alan Clark, a prominent historian and former minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Clark distilled and pungently amplified some of Charmley’s arguments into a particularly explosive form and thereby set off an enormous media firestorm.

Charmley had simply pointed out that by any reasonable standard, Britain had come out of World War II a gigantic loser—losing all its overseas economic holdings and financial reserves acquired over generations, losing the Empire that it had successfully created over two centuries, and losing its place in the world, reduced from a leading global power to merely being a midsize, forlorn, and semi-bankrupt island nation located on the periphery of Europe.

It was obvious that this sort of “triumph” seemed difficult to distinguish from disastrous failure, and all of it had occurred on Churchill’s political watch, mostly traceable to his own decisions and efforts. All things considered, there surely must have been better choices available.

Indeed, as Charmley explained, Britain had some excellent options for avoiding that disastrous war or quickly making peace to minimize its consequences, while Churchill and his bombastic rhetoric had been a crucial factor preventing any of this.

As the renowned Oxford historian A.J.P. Taylor had pointed out in his famous 1961 bestseller, the British could have avoided getting itself entangled in the German-Polish boundary dispute over Danzig that led Britain to declare war in 1939. Charmley reported that after Poland’s swift defeat in a lightening campaign of a few weeks, Britain could have made peace with Germany on very generous terms, while after France’s May 1940 military collapse, she could have once again accepted the extremely generous offer of peace that Hitler had eagerly extended.

Any one of those decisions would have led to a safe and secure Britain, saved from bankruptcy and still possessing most or all of its Empire, while avoiding an outcome that killed tens of millions and left half of Europe in the hands of Stalin’s greatly expanded Soviet Empire.

Towards the end of his work, Charmley noted that for decades Churchill and his admirers had brandished the cry of “appeasement” and “Munich” to denounce and smite their opponents. Yet by any reasonable standard, Churchill had followed exactly these same sorts of appeasement policies with regard to Stalin’s USSR towards the end of the war, with “Yalta” serving as its symbolic culmination. Under Churchill’s strong pressure, Britain had gone to war to protect Poland from giving way in a very minor German boundary dispute, but the ultimate result had been that Poland lost half of its entire territory to Stalin, and also spent nearly the next half-century under total Soviet domination and control.

Charmley had generally made these arguments obliquely, spreading them out across hundreds of pages of his very detailed text, where they might have easily sat completely unnoticed. But Clark packed them all together into just a few blistering paragraphs, and thereby provoked an enormous media firestorm that severely singed Charmley but also made his book a huge if controversial success, selling out within 24 hours and leading to several additional print-runs.

However, I suspect that part of the reason behind both Clark’s very pugnacious review and the thunderous reaction it provoked may have been the shadow of an entirely different book.

Five years earlier, renowned independent historian David Irving had published the first seminal volume of his masterwork Churchill’s War, a text very nervously ignored by most of the academic community but that had attracted strong sales.

In that book, Irving had explicitly and forcefully made exactly the same sort of arguments that Clark credited to Charmley, also taking them much farther. Unlike most other mainstream academics, Charmley had been willing to cite Irving’s work, but he only did so to a very limited extent and often rather dismissively.

Meanwhile, Clark was surely aware of Irving’s historical analysis and its total boycott by the media. The Times of London might consider Irving just too hot to handle, but Clark correctly assumed they would publish his strong endorsement of the work by a respectable mainstream historian such as Charmley, thereby allowing him to get some of those same controversial ideas into widespread popular circulation while doing so in much safer fashion. And Irving’s bitter ideological enemies probably understood exactly the game that was being played and reacted with outrage. So the history war nominally fought over Charmley’s writing may have also served as a proxy-war fought over Irving’s.

During his worldwide book tour a few years earlier, Irving had delivered some riveting public lectures summarizing his analysis of Churchill’s personal history and Churchill’s role in World War II. Watching any of these would easily explain the enormous public controversy that erupted when Charmley cautiously made some similar points along those lines.

Video Link

My suspicions regarding Clark’s surreptitious media strategy became much stronger once I investigated his background. Although I’d vaguely remembered his name from his Thatcherite days of the 1980s, I quickly discovered that he was actually a far more controversial figure than I’d ever imagined and he also seemed to have had some concealed connections with Irving.

My casual efforts to find any contemporaneous public association between Clark and Irving came up completely dry. Upon his 1999 death Clark was very widely praised and eulogized by figures all across the political spectrum, not merely from within his own Thatcherite camp but also notably by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. Indeed, he was sufficiently prominent that a few years later, his political career became the subject of a six-part BBC miniseries staring John Hurt.

However, after his death far more controversial aspects of Clark’s true views soon got into public circulation. The media began reporting that throughout his entire life he’d regularly told his friends and associates that he was a deeply committed Nazi and a great admirer of Adolf Hitler and his policies, which he regarded as the best system for running a country. The second volume of his personal diaries, posthumously published the year after his death, seemingly confirmed all these remarkable claims:

“Yes, I told him, I was a Nazi. I really believed it to be the ideal system, and that it was a disaster for the Anglo-Saxon races and for the world that it was extinguished”. When Johnson questioned whether he was serious, Clark confirmed he was: “Oh yes, I told him, I was completely committed to the whole philosophy”

Even just a few months after Clark’s death, the Guardian quoted Irving as describing the huge admiration for Hitler that Clark had expressed to the historian at the time of the latter’s 1991 book party for Hitler’s War.

So what are we to make of all of Clark’s numerous and very forthright declarations of support for Hitler and the Nazis, issued both in word and in print? Perhaps as some have suggested, they were merely made tongue-in-cheek, but then again, perhaps not. At the very least, this evidence certainly suggests the sincerity of his published arguments that Britain should have made peace with Hitler and thereby saved itself from the disastrous consequences of the war.

In considering Irving’s book, I think his most astonishing revelations had been Churchill’s desperate financial position throughout much of the 1930s and its direct political consequences. As I summarized these matters earlier this year:

In 1987 Irving published the first volume of Churchill’s War, and his exhaustive archival research produced dramatic revelations regarding the character of that historic figure, demonstrating the latter’s tremendous venality and corruption. Churchill was a huge spendthrift who lived lavishly and often far beyond his financial means, employing an army of dozens of personal servants at his large country estate despite frequently lacking any regular and assured sources of income to maintain them. This predicament naturally put him at the mercy of those individuals willing to support his sumptuous lifestyle in exchange for determining his political activities. And somewhat similar pecuniary means were also used to secure the backing of a network of other elected representatives from across all the British parties, who became Churchill’s close allies in that project.

To put things in plain language, during the years leading up to the Second World War, both Churchill and numerous other fellow British MPs were regularly receiving sizable financial stipends—cash bribes—from Jewish and Czech sources in exchange for promoting a policy of extreme hostility toward the German government and actually advocating for war. The sums involved were quite considerable, with the Czech government alone probably making payments that amounted to tens of millions of dollars in present-day money to British elected officials, publishers, and journalists working to overturn the official peace policy of their existing government. A particularly notable instance occurred in early 1938 when Churchill suddenly lost all his accumulated wealth in a foolish gamble on the American stock-market, and was soon forced to put his beloved country estate up for sale to avoid personal bankruptcy, only to quickly be bailed out by a foreign Jewish millionaire intent upon promoting a war against Germany. Indeed, the early stages of Churchill’s sordid involvement in this activity were recounted in a chapter that Irving aptly entitled “The Hired Help.”

Ironically enough, German Intelligence learned of this massive bribery of British parliamentarians, and passed the information along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was horrified to discover the corrupt motives of his fierce political opponents, but apparently remained too much of a gentlemen to have them arrested and prosecuted. I’m no expert in the British laws of that era, but for elected officials to do the bidding of foreigners on matters of war and peace in exchange for huge secret payments seems almost a textbook example of treason to me, and I think that Churchill’s timely execution might surely have saved tens of millions of lives…

During the late 1930s, Churchill and his clique of similarly bought-and-paid-for political allies had endlessly attacked and denounced Chamberlain’s government for its peace policy, and he regularly made the wildest sort of unsubstantiated accusations, claiming that the Germans were undertaking a huge military build-up aimed against Britain. Such roiling charges were often widely echoed by a media heavily influenced by Jewish interests, doing much to poison the state of German-British relations.

Published five years later, Charmley’s book mentioned at least some of Irving’s remarkable facts, but treated them in rather skeptical and dismissive fashion. However, nearly three decades later Irving’s ground-breaking work was all fully confirmed and even extended by a different author:

Irving’s 1987 book on Churchill had laid bare his subject’s extremely lavish lifestyle as well as his lack of any solid income, along with the terrible political consequences of that dangerous combination of factors. This shocking historical picture was fully confirmed in 2015 by a noted financial expert whose own book focused entirely on Churchill’s tangled finances, and did so with full cooperative access to his subject’s family archives. The story told by David Lough in No More Champagne was actually far more extreme than what had been described by Irving almost three decades earlier, with the author even suggesting that Churchill’s financial risk-taking was almost unprecedented for anyone in public or private life.

For example, at the very beginning of his book, Lough explained that Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, the same day that German forces began their invasion of the Low Countries and France. But aside from those terrible military and political challenges, Britain’s new wartime leader faced an entirely different crisis as well. He found himself unable to cover his personal bills, debt interest, or tax payments, all of which were due at the end of the month, thereby forcing him to desperately obtain a huge secret payment from the same Austrian Jewish businessman who had previously rescued him financially. Stories like this may reveal the hidden side of larger geopolitical developments, which sometimes only come to light many decades later.

Those same two or three pages of Charmley’s book also cited a few of the very well-informed contemporaneous British sources who had publicly argued that Jewish money and Jewish media influence were together driving Britain into its very ill-conceived war against Nazi Germany.

The author’s sole rejoinder to those widespread claims was to note that in the aftermath of the “revelations from the Nazi death camps” even merely considering such a possibility has been regarded as tantamount to anti-Semitism and rendered almost totally unacceptable in respectable circles.

Interestingly enough, those half-dozen words constitute the only reference to any aspect of the Holocaust found anywhere across Charmley’s 750 pages of text. Indeed, that mention was so brief and fleeting it was easy to miss and some of the reviewers attacking Charmley denounced his book for allegedly avoiding any mention of the Holocaust whatsoever.

Yet when directed against a lengthy book about Churchill, such criticism seems strangely ironic. Consider the interesting point made by French academic Robert Faurrisson, a leading Holocaust Denier, just a few years later:

Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.

Indeed, across the nearly 4,500 pages of Churchill’s massive history of the Second World War, we can only find a vague sentence or two that might be identified with the facts of what we now call the Holocaust.

I think the obvious reason for Churchill’s extremely strange reticence was that he knew perfectly well that the stories were all propaganda-nonsense and he assumed that much like the anti-German atrocity-hoaxes of the First World War, they would soon collapse in shame and embarrassment.

His six massive volumes on the Second World War were intended to secure his place in history place for decades or generations rather than merely the next few years, and he feared that any mention of the Holocaust would completely destroy his future credibility and leave him an object of permanent ridicule. The equally striking omissions in the works of Eisenhower and De Gaulle probably had exactly the same explanation.

Similarly, when Charmley released his Churchill biography in 1993, the Holocaust myth seemed to be tottering and many expected its imminent collapse.

Until the late 1980s, Irving had never questioned the Holocaust story, but had only been surprised to discover the lack of any evidence that Hitler himself had known of those death camps or authorized their operation. But after being called as an expert witness in Canada’s Zündel trial of the late 1980s, he had become convinced by the chemical evidence of the Leuchter Report than that the gas chambers were merely mythical.

The fall of Communism had finally opened all those alleged extermination camps to Western visitors, and the year before Charmley’s book appeared, the official Auschwitz death-toll had been reduced by roughly 3 million, obviously raising huge doubts about all those long-accepted figures. So much like Churchill, Charmley probably felt that he was protecting himself by absolutely minimizing any mentions he made to a historical myth that seemed likely to soon evaporate.

The same year that Charmley published his book, the Auschwitz research analysis of a young German chemist named Germar Rudolf was reported in the media, with his “Rudolf Report” confirming and extending the findings of the existing Leuchter Report. Despite severe legal suppression over the three decades that followed, even including bouts of imprisonment, Rudolf has become the foremost publisher and distributor of such Holocaust-related material, writing or editing a long series of Holocaust Handbooks now conveniently available on the Internet.

On Friday I was interviewed for nearly three hours on these Holocaust issues and some related topics by Rudolf and one of his supporters, and I thought the discussion was interesting and quite informative, certainly worth watching.