David Irving spills beans on Churchill, total Jewwy criminal on-the-take fm Jews, owned by Jews; now u know why Iriving is hated

[Apollonian]

Irving on Churchill​

Dismantling Churchillian Mythology

Theodore J. O'Keefe

Link: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p498_Okeefe.html

World-class historian David Irving is no stranger to readers of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review. His address to the 1983 International Revisionist Conference, which appeared in the Winter 1984 Journal of Historical Review ("On Contemporary History and Historiography"), was something of a primer on Irving's revisionist historiographical method. It was spiced as well with tantalizing hints of new directions in Irving's research and new book possibilities arising from them.

Not the least among Irving's revelations were those that touched on Winston Churchill, descendant of one of England's greatest families and leader of his nation and its empire (as he still thought it) at what many of his countrymen and many abroad still regard as Britain's "finest hour." Readers will recall that Irving exposed several instances of Churchill's venality, cowardice and hypocrisy, including Churchill's poltroonish posturing at the time of the German air raid against Coventry and the facts of Churchill and his cronies' secret subvention by the Czech government.

It will also be recalled that in his lecture Irving spoke of his projected book on Winston Churchill, which at the time was to be published in the U.S. by Doubleday and in Great Britain by MacMillan, two great firms entirely worthy of an author who has been churning out meticulously researched historical bestsellers for a quarter of a century. As has been pointed out in recent issues of the IHR Newsletter, Irving's challenges to the reigning orthodoxy have become so unbearable to the Establishment that both these major houses refused to print the books as written. The task has now [1986] been undertaken by a revisionist operation in Australia. Nearing completion is the first volume of Irving's new book Churchill's War.

Last year David Irving made a world-wide speaking tour, visiting North America (the U.S. and Canada), Australia, South Africa, and Europe. He lectured on a wide range of topics pertaining to the troubled history of our century, with his customary flair for the pointed phrase and the telling anecdote. During one of his lectures, delivered at Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 31, 1986, Irving offered a series of mordant new facts and insights on the life and career of Winston Churchill.

At the outset of his lecture, Irving remarked that the late Harold MacMillan (Lord Stockton), recently targeted by Nikolai Tolstoy (The Minister and the Massacres) for his role in the forcible deportation of tens of thousands of anti-Communist Cossacks, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and others to the U.S.S.R. after World War lI, had stated that Irving's Churchill book would "not be published by his company, over his dead body." Clearly Lord Stockton's recent demise didn't alter things at MacMillan, however.

Then Irving let out an electrifying piece of information:

The details which I will tell you today, you will not find published in the Churchill biography. For example, you won't even find them published in Churchill's own biography because there were powers above him who were so powerful that they were able to prevent him publishing details that even he wanted to publish that he found dirty and unscrupulous about the origins of the Second World War.

For example, when I was writing my Churchill biography, I came across a lot of private papers in the files of the Time/Life organization in New York. In Columbia University, there are all the private papers of the chief editor of Time/Life, a man called Daniel Longwell. And in there, in those papers, we find all the papers relating to the original publication of the Churchill memoirs in 1947, 1949, the great six-volume set of Churchill memoirs of the Second World War. And I found there a letter from the pre-war German chancellor, the man who preceded Hitler, Dr. Heinrich Brüning, a letter he wrote to Churchill in August 1937. The sequence of events was this: Dr. Brüning became the chancellor and then Hitler succeeded him after a small indistinguishable move by another man. In other words, Brüning was the man whom Hitler replaced. And Brüning had the opportunity to see who was backing Hitler. Very interesting, who was financing Hitler during all his years in the wilderness, and Brüning knew.

Brüning wrote a letter to Churchill after he had been forced to resign and go into exile in England in August 1937, setting out the names and identities of the people who backed Hitler. And after the war, Churchill requested Brüning for permission to publish this letter in his great world history, The six-volume world history. And Brüning said no. In his letter, Brüning wrote, 'I didn't, and do not even today for understandable reasons, wish to reveal from October 1928, the two largest regular contributors to the Nazi Party were the general managers of two of the largest Berlin banks, both of Jewish faith and one of them the leader of Zionism in Germany."

Now there is a letter from Dr. Heinrich Brüning to Churchill in 1949, explaining why he wouldn't give permission to Churchill to publish the August 1937 letter. It was an extraordinary story, out of Churchill's memoirs. Even Churchill wanted to reveal that fact. You begin to sense the difficulties that we have in printing the truth today. Churchill, of course, knew all about lies. He was an expert in lying himself. He put a gloss on it. He would say to his friends, "The truth is such a fragile flower. The truth is so precious, it must be given a bodyguard of lies." This is the way Churchill put it.

Irving went on to describe several sources of secret financial support enjoyed by Churchill. In addition to money supplied by the Czech government, Churchill was financed during the "wilderness years" between 1930 and 1939 by a slush fund emanating from a secret pressure group known as the Focus.

Irving on the Focus:

The Focus was financed by a slush fund set up by some of London's wealthiest businessmen -- principally, businessmen organized by the Board of Jewish Deputies in England, whose chairman was a man called Sir Bernard Waley Cohen. Sir Bernard Waley Cohen held a private dinner party at his apartment on July 29, 1936. This is in Waley Cohen's memoirs ... The 29th of July, 1936, Waley Cohen set up a slush fund of 50,000 pounds for The Focus, the Churchill pressure group. Now, 50,000 pounds in 1936, multiply that by ten, at least, to get today's figures. By another three or four to multiply that into Canadian dollars. So, 40 times 50,000 pounds -- about $2 million in Canadian terms -- was given by Bernard Waley Cohen to this secret pressure group of Churchill in July 1936. The purpose was -- the tune that Churchill had to play was -- fight Germany. Start warning the world about Germany, about Nazi Germany. Churchill, of course, one of our most brilliant orators, a magnificent writer, did precisely that.

For two years, The Focus continued to militate, in fact, right through until 1939. And I managed to find the secret files of The Focus, I know the names of all the members. I know all their secrets. I know how much money they were getting, not just from The Focus, but from other governments. I use the word "other governments" advisedly because one of my sources of information for my Churchill biography is, in fact, the Chaim Weizmann Papers in the State of Israel. Israel has made available to me all Churchill's secret correspondence with Chain Weizmann, all his secret conferences. It is an astonishing thing, but I, despite my reputation, in a kind of negative sense with these people, am given access to files like that, just the same as the Russian Government has given me complete access to all of the Soviet records of Churchill's dealings with Ivan Maisky, Joseph Stalin, Molotov and the rest of them. I am the only historian who has been given access to these Russian records. It is a kind of horse trading method that I use when I want access to these files, because it is in these foreign archives we find the truth about Winston Churchill.

When you want the evidence about his tax dodging in 1949 and thereabouts, you are not going to look in his own tax files, you're going to look in the files of those who employed him, like the Time/Life Corporation of America. That's where you look. And when you're looking for evidence about who was putting money up for Churchill when he was in the wilderness and who was funding this secret group of his, The Focus, you're not going to look in his files. Again, you're going to look in the secret files, for example, of the Czech government in Prague, because that is where much of the money was coming from.

Irving then revealed further details of Churchill's financing by the Czechs, as well as the facts of Churchill's financial rescue by a wealthy banker of Austro-Jewish origins, Sir Henry Strakosch, who, in Irving's words, emerged "out of the woodwork of the City of London, that great pure international financial institution." When Churchill was bankrupted overnight in the American stock market crash of 1937-1938, it was Strakosch who was instrumental in setting up the central banks of South Africa and India, who bought up all Churchill's debts. When Strakosch died in 1943, the details of his will, published in the London Times, included a bequest of £20,000 to the then Prime Minister, eliminating the entire debt.

Irving dealt with Churchill's performance as a wartime leader, first as Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty and then as Prime Minister. The British historian adverted to Churchill's "great military defeat in Norway, which he himself engineered and pioneered," and mentioned the suspicion of Captain Ralph Edwards, who was on Churchill's staff at the time, that Churchill had deliberately caused the fiasco to bring down Neville Chamberlain and replace him as prime minister, which subsequently happened.

Irving spoke of Dunkirk:

In May 1940, Dunkirk, the biggest Churchill defeat of the lot. It wasn't a victory. It wasn't a triumph. Nothing for the British to be proud of. Dunkirk? If you look at the Dunkirk files in the British archives now, you will find, too, you're given only photocopies of the premier files on Dunkirk with mysterious blank pages inserted. And you think, at first, how nice of them to put these blank pages in to keep the documents apart. Not so. The blank pages are the ones that you really want to be seeing. In some cases, of course, the blank pages are genuinely censored with intelligence matters. But the other blank pages are letters between Churchill and the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, which revealed the ugly truth that Churchill, himself, gave the secret order to Lord Gort, the British General in command of the British expeditionary force at Dunkirk, "Withdraw, fall back," or as Churchill put it, "Advance to the coast." That was Churchill's wording. "And you are forbidden to tell any of your neighboring allies that you are pulling out. The French and the Belgians were left in the dark that we were pulling out.

I think it's the most despicable action that any British commander could have been ordered to carry out, to pull out and not tell either his allies on his left and right flanks that he was pulling out at Dunkirk. The reason I knew this is because, although the blanks are in the British files, I got permission from the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud's widow. His widow is still alive. A dear old lady about 95, living in Paris. And guiding her trembling hand, I managed to get her to sign a document releasing to me all the Prime Minister's files in the French National Archives in Paris. And there are documents, the originals of the documents which we're not allowed to see in London. and there we know the ugly truth about that other great Churchill triumph, the retreat to Dunkirk. If peace had broken out in June of 1940, Churchill would have been finished. No brass statue in Parliament Square for Mr. Winston Churchill. He would have been consigned to the dustbin of oblivion, forgotten for all time and good riddance I say, because the British Empire would have been preserved. We would, by now, have been the most powerful race -- can we dare use the word, the British race, the most powerful race on Earth.

Irving pointed out that Churchill rejected Hitler's peace offers in 1939, 1940, and 1941. (Irving supports the thesis that Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland was ordered by the Führer). Irving pinpointed one critical moment, and supplied the background:

The crucial moment when he managed to kill this peace offensive in England was July 1940. If we look at the one date, July the 20th, this I think was something of a watershed between the old era of peace, the greatness of the British Empire and the new era, the new era of nuclear deterrent and the holocaust, the nuclear holocaust. July 20, 1940: Mr. Churchill is lying in bed that Sunday out in Chequers, when he gets a strange message. It's an intercept of a German ambassador's telegram in Washington to Berlin. It's only just been revealed, of course, that we were reading all of the German codes -- not only the German Army, Air Force and Navy Codes, but also the German embassy codes. And if you're silly enough to believe everything that's written in the official history of British Intelligence, you will understand that the only reason that they released half of the stories is to prevent us from trying to find out the other half. And what matters is that we are reading the German diplomatic codes as well. On July 20th, the German ambassador in Washington sent a message to Berlin saying that the British ambassador in Washington had asked him very quietly, very confidentially, just what the German peace terms were. This, of course, was the one thing that Churchill could never allow to happen, that the British find out what Hitler's peace terms are. He sends an immediate message to the foreign office, to Lord Halifax, saying, "Your ambassador in Washington is strictly forbidden to have any further contacts with the German ambassador, even indirectly." They were communicating through a Quaker intermediary.

Now, on the same day, Churchill sent a telegram to Washington ordering Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, to have nothing to do with the German ambassador. And the same day, he takes a third move to ensure that the peace moves in Britain are finally strangled at birth. He orders Sir Charles Portal to visit him at Chequers, the country residence of British prime ministers. Sir Charles Portal was Commander in Chief of Bomber Command. Now what is the significance? Well, the significance is this. Up to July 1940, not one single German bomb has fallen on British towns. Hitler had given orders that no British towns are to be bombed and, above all, bombing of London is completely forbidden and embargoed. Churchill knows this, because he's reading the German code. He's reading the German Air Force signals, which I can now read in the German files. Churchill is reading the signals, and he knows that Hitler is not doing him the favor.

Hitler is still hoping that this madman in England will see reason or that he will be outvoted by his cabinet colleagues. So he's not doing Churchill the favor of bombing any English towns. Churchill is frantic because he thinks he's being outsmarted by Hitler. On July the 20th he sends for Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of Bomber Command, and he says to Sir Charles Portal, as we know from records from Command to the Air Ministry, "When is the earliest that you could launch a vicious air attack on Berlin?" Sir Charles Portal replies to Winston, "I'm afraid we can't do it now, not until September because the nights aren't long enough to fly from England to Berlin and back in the hours of darkness. September, perhaps, and in September we will have the first hundred of the new Sterling bombers ..." But he also says, "I warn you, if you do that, the Germans will retaliate. At present they're not bombing English targets, they're not bombing civilian targets at all and you know why. And if you bomb Berlin, then Hitler will retaliate against English civilian targets." And Churchill just twinkles when he gets this reply, because he knows what he wants.

We know what he wants because he's told Joe Kennedy, the American Ambassador - Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the late President - "I want the Germans to start bombing London as early as possible because this will bring the Americans into the war when they see the Nazis' frightfulness, and above all it will put an end to this awkward and inconvenient peace movement that's afoot in my own Cabinet and among the British population." I've opened Kennedy's diary. I've also read Kennedy's telegrams back to the State Department in Washington. They're buried among the files. You can't find them easily, but they are worth reading, and you see in detail what Churchill was telling him. What cynicism. Churchill deliberately provoking the bombing of his own capital in order to kill the peace movement. He's been warned this would be the consequence, but he needs it. And still Hitler doesn't do him the favor.

Irving then gave a detailed account of the cynical maneuverings of Churchill to escalate the aerial campaign against Germany's civilian population to the point at which Hitler was driven to strike back against Britain's cities, supplying the spurious justification for the R.A.F.'s (and later the U.S. Army Air Force's) monstrous terror attacks against centuries-old citadels of culture and their helpless inhabitants.

The British historian further expanded on a theme he had touched on in his address to the IHR's 1983 conference: Churchill the drunkard. Irving substantiated his accusation with numerous citations from diaries and journals, the originals of which often differ from heavily laundered published editions. He concluded his address with an anecdote of a ludicrous incident which found Churchill pleading with William Lyon Mackenzie King, wartime prime minister of Canada, to shift production in his country's distilleries from raw materials for the war effort to whiskey and gin, twenty-five thousand cases of it. According to Mackenzie King's private diary, the Canadian prime minister tore up Churchill's memorandum on the subject at precisely twenty-five minutes to eight on August 25, 1943, and Sir Winston had to soldier on through the war with liquid sustenance from other lands and climes. As Irving emphasized, Churchill's drunken rantings, often during cabinet meetings, disgusted many of his generals, as when, at a meeting on July 6, 1944, the prime minister told his commanders to prepare to drop two million lethal anthrax bombs on German cities. Of this meeting Britain's Flrst Sea Lord, Admiral Cunningham, wrote, according the Irving: "There's no doubt that P.M. is in no state to discuss anything, too tired, and too much alcohol."

Irving's demolition of the Churchill myth, based on a wealth of documentary evidence, most of which has been studiously avoided by the keepers of the Churchill flame, may constitute his most important service to Revisionism. The legendary V-for-victory- waggling, cigar-puffing "Winnie" is for many of a centrist or conservative bent the symbol and guarantee that Britain and America fought and "won" the Second World War for traditional Western values, rather than to bleed Europe white and secure an enormous geopolitical base for Communism.

Irving's Churchill biography promises to make trash of such authorized studies as that of Martin Gilbert (which has already been described in private by one Establishment historian as "footnotes to Churchill's war memoirs"). The publication of the first volume of Churchill's War later this year should be an historiographical event of the first importance.


From The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986 (Vol. 7, No. 4), pp. 498 ff.

 

[Apollonian]

Winston the spendaholic: He teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and was saved by secret backhanders. Yet a new book on Churchill's finances reveals he spent £40,000 a year on casinos and £54,000 on booze​

Churchill spent most of his life swimming in a mountain of personal debt
Gambled equivalent of £40,000 a year on holidays to the south of France
Had £54,000 bill from his wine merchant, including £16,000 for Champagne
Secret benefactor gave him £1million in 1940 as he became Prime Minister

By David Lough For The Daily Mail

Published: 16:36 EST, 11 September 2015 | Updated: 06:29 EST, 12 September 2015

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...s-spent-40-000-year-casinos-54-000-booze.html

[ck for neat pictures at site link, above]


The confession was a startling one, in light of the great man he became. ‘The only thing that worries me in life is — money,’ wrote Winston Churchill, then aged 23, to his brother, Jack. ‘Extravagant tastes, an expensive style of living, small and diminished resources — these are fertile sources of trouble.’

Indeed they were. For the qualities that were to make Churchill a great war leader came very close to destroying him time and again during his career, as manic optimism and risk-taking plunged him repeatedly into colossal debt.

In the Thirties, when he was a married man with four dependent children and already borrowing more than £2.5 million in today’s money, he would gamble so heavily on his annual holiday in the South of France that he threw away the equivalent of on average £40,000 every year.

Qualities that were to make Churchill a great war leader came very close to destroying him time and again during his career, as manic optimism and risk-taking plunged him repeatedly into colossal debt. But he became one of Britain's greatst heroes and is here receiving the Honorary Freedom of the City of Westminster

Qualities that were to make Churchill a great war leader came very close to destroying him time and again during his career, as manic optimism and risk-taking plunged him repeatedly into colossal debt. But he became one of Britain's greatst heroes and is here receiving the Honorary Freedom of the City of Westminster

In my own career, advising families on tax affairs and investments, I have never encountered addiction to risk on such a scale as his.

To a biographer, one of Churchill’s most convenient characteristics is that he left his own bank statements, bills, investment records and tax demands in his archive, despite the evidence of debt and profligate gambling they reveal.

In contrast to his well-documented periods of anxiety and depression, when the ‘black dog’ struck him, there were phases when he gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a ‘high’ — devoid of inhibition, brimming with self-confidence and energy.


As a result, he left behind a trail of financial failures that required numerous bailouts by friends, family and admirers.

And it was only by a wildly improbable intervention, almost an act of God, that he wasn’t bankrupt in 1940 instead of Prime Minister: as war loomed, a secret benefactor wrote two cheques for well over £1 million to clear Churchill’s debts.

His inventive efforts at tax avoidance would spell scandal if attempted by any politician today.

In the Thirties, when he was a married man with four dependent children and already borrowing more than £2.5 million in today’s money, he would gamble so heavily on his annual holiday in the South of France that he threw away the equivalent of on average £40,000 every year

In the Thirties, when he was a married man with four dependent children and already borrowing more than £2.5 million in today’s money, he would gamble so heavily on his annual holiday in the South of France that he threw away the equivalent of on average £40,000 every year

One of Churchill’s most convenient characteristics is that he left his own bank statements, bills, investment records and tax demands in his archive, despite the evidence of debt and profligate gambling they reveal. He's pictured here riding in a motor lauch in the harbor at Safi, Morocco

One of Churchill’s most convenient characteristics is that he left his own bank statements, bills, investment records and tax demands in his archive, despite the evidence of debt and profligate gambling they reveal. He's pictured here riding in a motor lauch in the harbor at Safi, Morocco

Though he wrestled to control his spending all his life, the defining disaster of Winston’s financial career was the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Churchill always told his friends his losses in the Stock Market collapse amounted to $50,000 — or £500,000 today. But that is only part of the story.

These were Winston’s years in the wilderness when, having served for a term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was suddenly out of power.

This was not without its benefits, for at last he was able to devote time to writing books and churning out newspaper columns to keep the bank at bay.

As a result, he left behind a trail of financial failures that required numerous bailouts by friends, family and admirers

As a result, he left behind a trail of financial failures that required numerous bailouts by friends, family and admirers

In return for his high fees as a journalist, Churchill’s friends among the press proprietors expected colourful copy that ran against the conventional political wisdom. He delivered it, but his trenchant commentaries made rehabilitation within the political establishment very difficult.

The problems began when he embarked on a North American tour to promote his book on World War I, The World Crisis, accompanied by his brother Jack and son Randolph.

He travelled through Canada by private railcar, sleeping in a double bed on board with a private bathroom. ‘There is a fine parlour with an observation room at the end,’ he wrote to his wife Clemmie, ‘and a large dining room which I use as the office. The car has splendid wireless installation, refrigerators, fans, etc.’

Surrounded by these modern marvels, Churchill began to trade again in shares and commodities. He was intoxicated by Canada’s money-making opportunities, especially in exploration for oil and gas.

Gripped by investment fever as he reached the prairies, he wired his publisher to demand an advance on his royalties, boasting of the profits he could grasp if he acted without delay.

To allay Clemmie’s concerns, he told her of the cash he was making by selling his book at public appearances — 600 copies in Montreal alone — and casually announced he had ‘found a little capital’ with which he ‘hoped to make some successful investments’.

He plunged tens of thousands of dollars into oilfields and rolling stock, assuring his bankers that, ‘I do not expect to hold these shares for more than a few weeks’.

In the States, he stayed with media tycoon William Randolph Hearst and bought stakes in electrical ventures and gas companies, before heading to California where he indulged in late-night parties with Hollywood’s movie elite and toured the studios.

In contrast to his well-documented periods of anxiety and depression, when the ‘black dog’ struck him, there were phases when he gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a ‘high’ — devoid of inhibition, brimming with self-confidence and energy

In contrast to his well-documented periods of anxiety and depression, when the ‘black dog’ struck him, there were phases when he gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a ‘high’ — devoid of inhibition, brimming with self-confidence and energy

After lunch with Charlie Chaplin on the set of his latest film, City Lights, Churchill boarded Hearst’s yacht and wrote to Clemmie that he had banked £1,000 (£50,000 today) by cashing in some shares in a furniture business called Simmons.

‘You can’t go wrong on a Simmons mattress,’ he crowed — but failed to mention that he had $35,000 (a third of a million pounds today) still invested with them.

His buying had spiralled out of control. Everything he could raise was plunged into U.S. stocks, in businesses from foundries to department stores.

His brokers sounded warnings by telegraph: ‘Market heavy. Liquidating becoming more urgent. Will await your telephone. Your bank still losing gold & there are rumours of increase in bank rate.’

Churchill ignored them. In four days he bought and sold $420,000 in shares — or more than £4 million-worth now.

It was like a drug to him. ‘In every hotel,’ he told Clemmie, ‘there is a stock exchange. You go and sit and watch the figures being marked up on slates every few minutes.’

The crash was inevitable. At the opening bell in the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, October 24, 1929, prices fell by an average of 11 per cent.

He wrestled to control his spending all his life, the defining disaster of Winston’s financial career was the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Churchill told his friends his losses in the Stock Market collapse amounted to $50,000 — or £500,000 today. But that is only part of the story. Pictured in 1958 with hipping magnate Aristotle Onassis

He wrestled to control his spending all his life, the defining disaster of Winston’s financial career was the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Churchill told his friends his losses in the Stock Market collapse amounted to $50,000 — or £500,000 today. But that is only part of the story. Pictured in 1958 with hipping magnate Aristotle Onassis

Churchill kept buying, confident of recouping his losses, right up to the moment he boarded an Atlantic liner to return home. By the time he reached Chartwell, his home in Kent, he was poorer by $75,000 (£750,000).

But instead of pulling in his horns, he tried to recoup — and within six months had lost another $35,000 (£350,000).

His efforts to cling to some kind of solvency became desperate. He borrowed money wherever he could — from his brother, his bank, his brokers, his publishers and newspaper editors. He arranged another speaking tour in America and took out insurance against its cancellation — then used the General Election of 1931 as an excuse for postponing and claiming his £5,000 (£250,000) indemnity.

He traded the insurers one of his oil paintings, in a deal he described as ‘highly confidential’.

Once the election was behind him, he set off to America — but, in his fraught state, stumbled into disaster.

Having arranged to meet a business associate in New York, he grabbed a taxi. But in his hurry, he forgot to take the man’s address. After a fruitless hour trying to find the building, he climbed out of the cab — and was hit by a car.

These were Winston’s years in the wilderness when, having served for a term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was suddenly out of power. This was not without its benefits, for at last he was able to devote time to writing books and churning out newspaper columns to keep the bank at bay

These were Winston’s years in the wilderness when, having served for a term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was suddenly out of power. This was not without its benefits, for at last he was able to devote time to writing books and churning out newspaper columns to keep the bank at bay

Even this was used as a means to scrape money together. He wrote a newspaper article about the accident, syndicated it worldwide for £600 (£30,000) and then claimed medical insurance on the spurious grounds he was ‘totally disabled’.

When the underwriters protested that he was still able to earn money from journalism, his broker retorted that he could not physically write — the article had been dictated to a secretary. Mere talking, he insisted, should not be classed as work. The insurers paid up.

Such sharp practice was not confined to his insurance claims. He told the Inland Revenue he had retired as an author, which entitled him to defer a large income tax bill.

To avoid paying tax on book royalties, he sold the rights and successfully argued that the money he received was not income but capital gains, which at the time was exempt from tax.

He borrowed money from his children’s trusts, and even cut down his drinking — not to curb his expenses, but to win a bet with the press baron Lord Rothermere, who wagered him £600 that Churchill would not drink any brandy or undiluted spirits for a whole year.

Churchill took the bet, reasoning to Clemmie that money won gambling was not subject to tax. But he turned down a bigger bet, £2,000 [£100,000], that he could not remain teetotal for 12 months.

‘I refused,’ he explained, ‘as I think life would not be worth living.’

In fact, his accumulated bills for alcohol came to £900 (£54,000). His gambling was even more costly — 66,000 francs (about £50,000) in a single holiday at a casino in Cannes in 1936, for example.

Clementine’s excesses were little better. That year, her bill at Harrods ran to more than 80 pages, with accounts, too, at Selfridge’s, Harvey Nichols, Peter Jones, Lillywhite’s and John Lewis.

Faced with a £900 [£54,000 today] demand from his wine merchants Randolph Payne & Sons in 1936, Churchill checked the bill and found the total came to even more — £920

Faced with a £900 [£54,000 today] demand from his wine merchants Randolph Payne & Sons in 1936, Churchill checked the bill and found the total came to even more — £920

Attempts at economising were feeble. Three servants were dismissed, with a saving of £240 [£14,400] and the same amount was cut from the laundry bill. The temperature of the swimming pool at Chartwell was also reduced in a bid to halve heating costs.

But by 1938, as the European situation with Hitler and Mussolini became critical, Churchill had run out of resources. Both Chartwell and his house in London were up for sale but had attracted no buyers.

CHURCHILL SANK 454 BOTTLES OF BUBBLY IN JUST TWO MONTHS

Faced with a £900 [£54,000 today] demand from his wine merchants Randolph Payne & Sons in 1936, Churchill checked the bill and found the total came to even more — £920 [£55,200], including £268 [£16,080] spent on champagne: ten magnums, 185 bottles and 251 pints of it.n At the outbreak of World War I, Churchill was smoking a dozen cigars a day, at about £13 a month [£1,300] — and he had not paid his suppliers, J Grunebaum & Sons, for five years.

Swimming in personal debt (about £1.5m today), Churchill announced some drastic household cutbacks in 1926, the year of the General Strike. The cost of food, servants and running a car were to be halved. ‘No champagne is to be bought,’ he warned his wife. ‘Only white or red wine will be offered at luncheon or dinner. No more port is to be opened without special instructions. Cigars must be reduced to four a day.’ The economy drive lasted less than three months.

On his way home from a Mediterranean cruise in 1927, Churchill — then Chancellor of the Exchequer — dropped in on the casino at Dieppe and, playing baccarat, lost £350 — the equivalent of £17,500 today.

Winston holidayed in the South of France 12 times during the Thirties and always gambled at the casinos. He came home a winner only once.

During World War II, his personal spending on wine, spirits and cigars was £1,650 a year [£66,000].

In a two-month spell in 1949, Churchill and his house guests at Chartwell drank 454 bottles of champagne, 311 bottles of wine, 69 bottles of port, 58 bottles of brandy, 58 bottles of sherry and 56 bottles of Black Label whisky.

.
His journalism could no longer even cover his back-taxes, and he had borrowed to the limit against his life insurance policies. Creditors were clamouring on all sides.

His overdraft had reached £35,000 (more than £2million) and his brokers were demanding an immediate payment of £12,000 (£720,000). His attempts to bargain were ignored.

‘For a while,’ he admitted, ‘the dark waters of despair overwhelmed me. I watched the daylight creep slowly in through the windows and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.’

Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. Churchill turned to his friend Brendan Bracken, co-owner of The Economist, to find him a rescuer. Bracken, in turn, approached his business partner, Sir Henry Strakosch, who was a fervent admirer of Churchill. He was also immensely wealthy.

Two months earlier, at Bracken’s request, Churchill had visited Sir Henry at his house in Cannes. The 68-year-old, who had made his fortune at the helm of South Africa’s gold-mining Union Corporation, had been unwell and Bracken described him as a ‘lonely old bird’.

This slightest of introductions paid colossal dividends.

Sir Henry, a naturalised Briton born in Austria, regarded Churchill as the one politician in Europe with the vision, energy and courage to resist the Nazi threat.

He had no hesitation in paying off £12,000 (about £660,000 today) of his share-trading debts.

Neither man ever spoke publicly about the rescue. Churchill kept knowledge of it to a very tight circle that did not include his bank or his lawyers.

Sir Henry’s only reward was to be nominated for The Other Club, the dining society based at the Savoy in London that Churchill had founded with his fellow political maverick F. E. Smith.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admirality, with a salary of £5,000 (£250,000 today) — exactly what it was when he was last given this Cabinet post, 25 years earlier in 1912. The pay, though substantial, was nowhere near enough to cover his expenditure, let alone the interest on his outstanding loans, which totalled £27,000 [£1.6 million].

For years he had been working on his three-volume History Of The English-Speaking Peoples, but despite his prodigious output, he had been unable to deliver the finished manuscript and collect his fee. The book had got no further than the American Civil War, but undaunted, Churchill declared it to be finished.

Swimming in personal debt (about £1.5m today), Churchill announced some drastic household cutbacks in 1926, the year of the General Strike. The cost of food, servants and running a car were to be halved. ‘No champagne is to be bought,’ he warned his wife. ‘Only white or red wine will be offered at luncheon or dinner

Swimming in personal debt (about £1.5m today), Churchill announced some drastic household cutbacks in 1926, the year of the General Strike. The cost of food, servants and running a car were to be halved. ‘No champagne is to be bought,’ he warned his wife. ‘Only white or red wine will be offered at luncheon or dinner

His publisher, Cassell’s, was dismayed at such an abrupt ending.

All protests were dismissed: Churchill was too busy to write any more. Reluctantly, Cassell’s paid up, which enabled him to pay £2,000 (£100,000 today) of overdue taxes and settle wine merchants’ bills that topped £3,000 (£150,000).

On May 10, 1940, as Hitler’s armies surged through Holland and Belgium, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, and by evening King George VI had asked Churchill to form a government. Today, the choice of man seems inevitable, but at the time there was consternation.

‘Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified,’ wrote one of Downing Street’s private secretaries, Jock Colville.

Churchill’s salary as PM might have doubled to £10,000 (£500,000), but with the highest rate of income tax standing at 97.5 per cent, virtually all of it went to the Inland Revenue.

Just two weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation, in June 1940, the Prime Minister was facing an ultimatum from Lloyd’s Bank for interest on his £5,602 overdraft (£280,100).

Once again, Sir Henry came to the rescue with a cheque for £5,000 (£250,000). The receipts show a flurry of payments to shirt-makers, watch-repairers and, naturally, wine merchants.

Despite rationing, food and drink flowed at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official residence. King George sent pheasant and venison from Balmoral, and the Admiralty agreed to double the wine budget, providing that all consumption was for diplomatic purposes.

On his way home from a Mediterranean cruise in 1927, Churchill — then Chancellor of the Exchequer — dropped in on the casino at Dieppe and, playing baccarat, lost £350 — the equivalent of £17,500 today

On his way home from a Mediterranean cruise in 1927, Churchill — then Chancellor of the Exchequer — dropped in on the casino at Dieppe and, playing baccarat, lost £350 — the equivalent of £17,500 today

That condition proved no problem: Churchill was determined to enlist the military might of the United States and American guests became frequent visitors to Chequers.

To pare back the tax demands, Churchill tried every possible ruse, even assigning some of his earnings as an author to his son Randolph, who was taxed at a lower rate.

This subterfuge could save £1,500 (£75,000) but it made Churchill uneasy — not least because Randolph’s gambling was even more reckless than his own.

What finally rescued Churchill’s finances, and put him on a stable footing for the rest of his life, was Hollywood.

In 1943, an Italian immigrant film producer paid him £50,000 (£2.5million) for the movie rights to his biography of his ancestor, the military genius Lord Marlborough.

The death of Sir Henry Strakosch in October 1943 brought a legacy of £20,000 (£1million) as well as cancelling a loan.

As D-Day approached, Churchill was solvent for the first time in 20 years. By the end of the war, he had collected another £50,000 (£2.5million) for the film rights to his History Of The English-Speaking Peoples.

And a further colossal bonus came when he was unexpectedly ousted from Downing Street by the voters in July 1945: on the day of his resignation, offers began to flood in from publishers around the world for his war memoirs.

Winston holidayed in the South of France 12 times during the Thirties and always gambled at the casinos. He came home a winner only once

Winston holidayed in the South of France 12 times during the Thirties and always gambled at the casinos. He came home a winner only once

Traditionally, generals and admirals who won great victories were rewarded by Parliament. Earl Haig, the Army’s commander-in-chief during World War I, was awarded £100,000 (£500,000) in 1918.

There could be no such payment for an ex-Prime Minister. But a group of his admirers came up with a scheme to buy Chartwell for the National Trust, then rent it back to the Churchills for a nominal sum. Churchill was delighted.

Despite this unaccustomed security, he was not above seizing a chance to bypass the taxman.

As bidding for his memoirs topped $1 million (£12.5million) from an American consortium, Churchill was investigating another scheme: by gifting his entire personal papers, including future memoirs and diaries, to a trust in his children’s name, he figured he could avoid most tax on his writings.

He planned to pen his books for a smaller fee, under the pretext of ‘editing’ them.

This editing proved to be thirsty work. When Churchill decamped to Marrakech in Morocco to work on the manuscript in 1947, his entourage’s drinks bill for five weeks came to more than £2,100 (£73,500).

In a two-month spell in 1949, Churchill and his house guests at Chartwell drank 454 bottles of champagne, 311 bottles of wine, 69 bottles of port, 58 bottles of brandy, 58 bottles of sherry and 56 bottles of whisky

In a two-month spell in 1949, Churchill and his house guests at Chartwell drank 454 bottles of champagne, 311 bottles of wine, 69 bottles of port, 58 bottles of brandy, 58 bottles of sherry and 56 bottles of whisky

One of his secretaries wrote home: ‘The money here aren’t ’arf going!’

It continued to ‘go’ for the rest of his life. By the time he became PM again in 1951, his annual expenses were about £40,000 (£1 million), much of it on a staff of Swiss nurses and footmen, all of them vetted by MI5.

But now the honours flowed in. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a tax-free £12,000 (£300,000). He turned down a dukedom on the grounds that a dukedom without a great landed estate would be an embarrassment.

When he died aged 90 on January 24, 1965, the world mourned. But some had a particular reason to regret his passing: they would never see such a customer again.

In France, Madame Odette Pol-Roger instructed that a black band of mourning should be placed around the label of every bottle of her family’s champagne.


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[Apollonian]

The Real Churchill​

Link: https://mises.org/library/real-churchill

02/27/2004•Adam Young


On February 4th, President Bush eulogized the life of Winston Churchill. The president described Winston Churchill as a "great man" and quickly zeroed in on the mistress that both Bush and Churchill share: war. "He was a prisoner in the Boer War, a controversial strategist in the Great War. He was the rallying voice of the Second World War, and a prophet of the Cold War." Indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a war—or an opportunity for war—that Churchill wasn't associated with during his long career.

Bush also recited Churchill's famous retort that "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it" adding that "history has been kind to Winston Churchill, as it usually is to those who help save the world," surely hoping that history will be kind to George W. Bush.

Except this history is a myth. The truth about the real Churchill—the Churchill that few know—is that he was "a man of the state: of the welfare state and of the warfare state" in Professor Ralph Raico's turn-of-phrase. The truth about Winston Churchill is that he was a menace to liberty, and a disaster for Britain, for Europe, for the United States of America, and for Western Civilization itself.

Not since fictional personages like Hercules and Zeus, have so many myths been attached to one man. As we will see, the Winston Churchill we're told about is not the Churchill known to honest history, but rather a fictional version of the man and his actions. And these words and actions have produced our mainstream "patriotic political myths" as John Denson calls them, which are merely the victor's wartime lies and propaganda scripted into the 'Official History.' The Churchill mythology is challenged by honest history, and the reality about Churchill involves hard, but necessary truths.

Churchill the Opportunist

Of course, central to the neocon mythology built up around their almost deified idealization of Churchill is that he fought for (in Bush's words comparing Tony Blair to Churchill), "the right thing, and not the easy thing," right over popularity, principle over opportunism.

Except that isn't true. Churchill was above all a man who craved power, and a man who craves power, craves opportunity to advance himself no matter what the cost.

When Churchill entered politics, many took note of his unique rhetorical talents, which gave him power over men, but it also came with a powerful failing of its own. During WWII, Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia, noted of Churchill "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way."

However, Churchill had other failings as well. The Spectator newspaper said of Churchill upon his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911: "We cannot detect in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue. . . ."

The great English classical liberal John Morley, after working with Churchill, passed a succinct appraisal of him, "Winston," he said, "has no principles."

Entering politics in 1900, Churchill (the grandson of a Duke and son of a prominent Tory) naturally joined the governing Conservative party. Then in 1904, he left the Conservatives and joined the Liberal party, and when they were in decline Churchill dumped them and rejoined the Conservatives, uttering his famous quote "It's one thing to rat, it's another to re-rat." Churchill allegedly made his move to the Liberals on the issue of free trade. However, Robert Rhodes James, a Churchill admirer, wrote: "It was believed [at the time], probably rightly, that if Arthur Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill would not have developed such a burning interest in free trade and joined the Liberals." Clive Ponting also notes that ". . .he had already admitted to Rosebery, he was looking for an excuse to defect from a party that seemed reluctant to recognize his talents." Since the Liberals would not accept a protectionist, Churchill had to change his tune.

It's not a surprise that this neoconservative administration and its apologists in the tamed media laud and venerate Churchill, for he was as President Bush described him; a man who was synonymous with war. Churchill loved war. In 1925, he wrote, "The story of the human race is war." This is untrue, but Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of true, classical liberalism. The story of the human race is increasing peaceful cooperation and the efforts by some to stop it through war. However, for Churchill, periods without war offered nothing but "the bland skies of peace and platitude."

Without principles or scruples, Churchill as a prominent member of the Liberal party government naturally played a role in the hijacking of liberalism from its roots in individualism, laissez-faire, free trade and bourgeois morality, to its transformation into the "New Liberalism" as a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and in America.

Churchill was also a famous opponent of Communism and of Bolshevism in particular. One of the reasons why Churchill admired Italian Fascism was Churchill believed that Mussolini had found a formula that would neutralize the appeal of communism, namely super-nationalism with a social welfarist appeal. This is a domestic formula for power that still appeals today, if the Bush Administration is any indication. Churchill went so far as to say that Fascism "proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison."

Then came 1941. Churchill made his peace with Communism. Temporarily, of course. Churchill gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcoming him as an ally, even embracing him as a friend, and calling the Breaker of Nations, "Uncle Joe." In his single-minded obsession with destroying German National Socialism (while establishing his own British national socialism) and carrying on his pre-World War I British Imperialist vendetta to destroy Germany, Churchill completely failed to consider the danger of inviting Soviet power and communism into the heart of Europe.

Of course, his self-created mythology--chiefly through his own books--states that he sensed the danger and tried to warn Roosevelt about Stalin, but the records of the time do not prove this out. In fact, Churchill's infatuation with Stalin reached the point where at the Tehran conference in November 1943, Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader's sword; Stalin, who had murdered millions of Christians, was now presented by Churchill as a defender of the Christian West.

But if one was to sum up Churchill's passion, his overall reason for entering politics, it was the empire. The British Empire was Churchill's abiding love. He fought to expand it, he defended it, and he created his decades-long hatred of Germany because of it. The Empire was at the center of his view of the world. Even as late as 1947, Churchill opposed Indian independence. When Lord Irwin urged him to bring his views on India up-to-date by talking to some Indians Churchill replied "I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don't want them disturbed by any bloody Indians." So much for democracy.

Churchill the Socialist

Churchill made a name for himself as an opponent of socialism both before and after the First World War, except during the war when he was a staunch promoter of war socialism, declaring in a speech: "Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word." Of course, such rank hypocrisy was by now Churchill's stock-in-trade, and not surprisingly, during the 1945 election, Churchill described his partners in the national unity government, the Labour Party, as totalitarians, when it was Churchill himself who had accepted the infamous Beveridge Report that laid the foundations for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian (mis)management of the economy.

As Mises wrote in 1950, "It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee's Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill."

Churchill was converted to the Bismarckian model of social insurance following a visit to Germany. As Churchill told his constituents: "My heart was filled with admiration of the patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the many glories of the German race." He set out, in his words, to "thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system." In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: "I am on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment should be introduced into the State and the municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new functions." Churchill even said: "I go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments."

Churchill claimed that "the cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions," and attacked the Conservatives as "the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their dependents against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak and poor." Churchill berated the Conservatives for lacking even a "single plan of social reform or reconstruction," while boasting that his "New Liberalism" offered "a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation," incorporating "a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative acts."

Churchill had fallen under the spell of the Fabian Society, and its leaders Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who more than any other group, are responsible for the decline of British society. Here he was introduced to William, later Lord Beveridge, who Churchill brought into the Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions. Besides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges, stating the need to "spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation" over the British labor market. Churchill even entertained a more ambitious goal for the Board of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby the Board of Trade would act as the economic "intelligence department" of the Government, forecasting trade and employment in Britain so that the Government could spend money in the most deserving areas. Controlling this pork would be a Committee of National Organisation to plan the economy.

Churchill was well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, so naturally Churchill became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 which reversed the judicial decisions which had held unions responsible for property damage and injuries committed by their agents on the unions behalf, in effect granting unions a privileged position exempting them from the ordinary law of the land. It is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions that made Britain the "Sick Man of Europe" for two generations and became the foil of Margaret Thatcher, originated with the enthusiastic help of her hero, Winston Churchill.

We can only conclude by Churchill's actions that personal freedom was the furthest thing from his mind.

Churchill and the First World War

The Great War destroyed European culture and the commitment to truths. In their place, generations embraced relativism, nihilism and socialism, and from the ashes arose Lenin, Stalin and Hitler and their evil doctrines that infect contemporary culture. In the words of the British historian, Niall Ferguson, the First World War "was nothing less than the greatest error in modern history."

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and, during the crises that followed, used every opportunity to fan the flames of war. When the final crisis came, in 1914, Churchill was all smiles and was the only cabinet member who backed war from the start. Asquith, his own Prime Minister, wrote: "Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization . . . has got all his war paint on."

Churchill was instrumental in establishing the illegal starvation blockade of Germany. The blockade depended on scattering mines, and classified as contraband food for civilians. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions created to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. One of the consequences of the hunger blockade was that, while it killed 750,000 German civilians by hunger and malnutrition, the youth who survived went on to become the most fanatical Nazis.

The Lusitania

Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear, but it is clear that he did everything possible to ensure that innocent Americans would be killed by German attempts to break the hunger blockade.

A week before the disaster, Churchill wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was "most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany."

The Lusitania was a civilian passenger liner loaded with munitions. Earlier, Churchill had ordered the captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines, and the Germans were aware of this. The German government even took out newspaper ads in New York warning Americans not to board the ship.

Churchill, by helping engineer the entry of the United States into the Great War, set in motion the transformation of the war into a Democratic Jihad. Wilsonianism lead to the eventual destruction of the Austrian Empire, and the creation of a vast power vacuum on Germany's southeastern border that would provide fruitful opportunities and allies for Hitler's effort to overturn the Versailles Treaty.

But Churchill was not a strategist. All he cared for, as he told a visitor after his Gallipoli disaster, was "the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans."

Churchill Between the Wars

Churchill, who had been appointed Colonial Secretary, invented two client kingdoms, Transjordan and Iraq, both artificial and unstable states. Churchill's aim of course was not liberty for oppressed peoples, as his admirers like to claim for him, but for Britain to dominate the Middle East to ensure that the oil wells of Iraq and the Persian Gulf were securely in British hands.

The Crash of 1929

In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservative party and was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he returned Britain to the gold standard but didn't account for the British governments wartime inflation, which consequently severely damaged exports and ruined the good name of gold. But, of course, Churchill cared nothing for economic ideas. What interested him was only that the pound would be as strong as in the days of Queen Victoria, that once more the pound would "look the dollar in the face." The consequences of this decision had a far-reaching and disastrous impact on western civilization and the consequent appeal of socialism, Nazism and communism: the Crash of 1929.

It was Churchill's unrealistic exchange ratio that caused the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve to collude to prop up the pound by inflating the U.S. dollar, which in turn fueled the speculative boom during the 1920's that collapsed when the inflating slowed.

Churchill's fame—and his mythology—originates during the period of the 30's, especially for neoconservatives, for whom it is always 1938. However, Churchill's hard line against Hitler was little different from his usual warnings about pre-war Imperial Germany, and his hard line against inter-war Weimar Germany. For Churchill saw Germany at all times and in all ways as a threat to the British Empire. A threat that had to be destroyed and forever kept under heel. For instance, Churchill denounced all calls for Allied disarmament even before Hitler came to power. Churchill, like Clemenceau, Wilson and other Allied leaders, held the unrealistic belief that a defeated Germany would submit forever to the shackles of Versailles.

And what the neocons forget, or don't know, is that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin acknowledged in the House of Commons that, had they told the people the truth, the Conservatives could never have won the 1936 election. "Supposing that I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must be armed, does anyone think that our pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry?" It was Neville Chamberlain who began the rearmament of Britain after the Munich Crisis, the arms which Churchill would not have had during the Battle of Britain, including the first deployment of radar, which Churchill mocked while in opposition in the 1930s.

Moreover, Churchill's Cassandra-like role during the '30s emerged largely because Churchill moved from one impending threat to the next: Bolshevik Russia, the General Strike of 1926, the dangers of Indian independence, the abdication crisis in 1936. During the '30s Churchill was the proverbial Boy Who Cried Wolf. Maybe his neocon admirers could have learned that lesson about Iraq.

But as in all things, even with this Churchill reversed himself. In the fall of 1937, he stated:

"Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime. . . . I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism."

And in his book Step By Step written in 1937, Churchill had this to say about the Mortal Enemy: ". . .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 indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." One has to wonder if Churchill was referring to himself in his hypothetical example.

The common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, felt obliged to write:

It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.

Moreover, as a British historian noted: "For the record, it is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose the appeasement of either Italy or Japan."

Churchill and the Second World War

After Munich, Chamberlain was determined that Hitler would have no more easy victories, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and Churchill was recalled to his old place as First Lord of the Admiralty. An astonishing thing then happened: the President of the United States by-passed all the ordinary diplomatic channels and initiated a personal correspondence, not with the Prime Minister, but with Churchill. These messages were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, and culminated in the imprisonment of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. embassy in London. Some of these messages contained allusions to FDR's agreement prior to the war to an alliance with Britain, contrary to his public statements and American law.

Three months prior to the war, Roosevelt told King George VI that he intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the U.S. Navy, and, according to the King's notes, the President stated that "if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences." The biographer of George VI, John W. Wheeler-Bennett, considered that these conversations "contained the germ of the future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement itself."

In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned over Churchill's aborted plan to pre-emptively invade Norway. After France's armed forces were destroyed by the Blitzkrieg, and the British army fled towards the Channel, Churchill the conservative, the "anti-socialist," defiled the common law by passing totalitarian legislation placing "all persons, their services and their property at the disposal of the Crown," i.e., into the hands of Churchill himself.

During the Battle of Britain, Churchill gave perhaps his most famous speech, in which he plagiarized the French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and where he uttered his famous phrase "If the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will say, "This was their finest hour!" This calls to mind another man's boast about a thousand year Reich. Churchill also hinted at his plot to drag America into the war: ". . .we shall never surrender, and even if . . . this island . . . were subjugated . . . then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old." But like Marxist Revolutionaries, Christian Millennialists and other assorted cranks, Churchill was not at all interested in "God's good time" or any other presumed unearthly schedule, and he worked night and day to collude with Roosevelt to get America into the war.

As PM, Churchill continued his policy to refuse any negotiated peace. Even after the Fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler's renewed peace overtures. This, however, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. Yet what opportunities were lost to a free France and Britain and the Low Countries before 1940 to re-arm and negotiate military defense strategies? What of the time lost that could have been used to study the Blitzkrieg method of warfare before it crashed through France? The British historian John Charmley made the crucial point that Churchill's adamant refusal even to listen to peace proposals in 1940 doomed what he claimed was most dear to him: the Empire and a Britain that was nonsocialist and independent in world affairs. One could add that by allowing Germany to overrun its weaker neighbors when peace was possible it probably also doomed European Jewry as well. How many more millions of Jews and other Europeans were murdered because of Churchill's stupidity? But it is politically incorrect, and even possibly a hate crime to suggest that better alternatives were available during World War II than those made by the Allies. Just because something turned out one way does not mean that was the only way it could have turned out or was the best result. Somehow, it is controversial to say this.

The peace camp realized something that escaped Churchill the empire romanticist: even the British Empire and her vast resources alone could not defeat the concentrated power that Germany possessed in Europe. And even more after the Fall of France, Churchill's war aim of total victory could be realized only by embroiling the United States in another world war.

As an aside to the French-haters, what they forget is that, if the U.S. army had met the Wehrmacht in 1940, it would have fared considerably worse than the French Army. National chauvinists, however, prefer their petty hatreds.

Involving America was Churchill's policy in World War II, just as it was Churchill's policy in World War I, and would be his policy again in the Cold War. Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring Roosevelt came through.

In 1940, Churchill sent British agent "Intrepid" to the United States, where he set up shop in Rockefeller Center, where, with the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, "Intrepid" and his 300 agents "intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered" and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the "isolationists" (i.e., Jeffersonians) as nazis and fascists.

In June 1941, Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war, wrote regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen: "It would be better for instance that she should be located by a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be so grateful."

Churchill also instructed the British ambassador to Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, "the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent."

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Churchill told his Cabinet "The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident."

After the U.S. had officially entered the war, on February 15, 1942, in the House of Commons, Churchill declared, of America's entry into the war: "This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass."

This deceptive alliance illustrates another of Churchill's faults. His subordination of political aims to military planning. Churchill made war for the sake of making war, with little regard for the political results that follow. He once even told Asquith that his life's ambition was "to command great victorious armies in battle." And World War II was his opportunity. Churchill and Roosevelt were both willing to do anything to destroy the menace of Nazi Germany, at a time when Hitler had killed perhaps several hundred thousand, and to do so they would ally with Hitler's former ally in the invasion of Poland, Joseph Stalin (the Soviet Union had even been invited to join the Axis in 1940), who had already murdered tens of millions. But why is it conventional wisdom that compromise with one dictator at a vital period would have been immoral while collaboration with an even greater dictator with genuine global ambitions was the mark of greatness?

The truth is Churchill cared for nothing but Britain. The lives, homes and cultures of non-Britons he took and destroyed without a care or second thought. What sort of 'conservatism' requires the murder of millions of defenseless innocents? Winston Churchill was a man who along with Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, probed just how far Western Civilization could fall in just six short years of time.

Churchill threw British support to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito would mean was no secret to Churchill. When an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Stalinist model, Churchill retorted: "Do you intend to live there?" What a humanitarian.

Of course, in Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were confronted with a man who had an overall political aim for the war. Stalin knew what he wanted to achieve from the destruction of Germany. For Churchill, his only aim was to beat Hitler, and then he would start thinking of the future of Britain and Europe. Churchill said it in so many words: "It was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims."

Churchill's aim was in his words, the "indefinite prevention of their [the Germans'] rising again as an Armed Power." Not surprisingly, instead of making every effort to encourage and assist the anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with silence, thus helping to prolong the war and the killing. Even more shockingly, Churchill had nothing but scorn for the heroic officers after their failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944, even as Hitler was enjoying their filmed executions.

In the place of help, Churchill only offered Germans the slogan of unconditional surrender, which only prolonged the war further. And instead of promoting the overthrow of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans, Churchill's policy was all-out support of Stalin. Returning from Yalta, Churchill told the House of Commons on February 27, 1945 that he did not know any government that kept its obligations as faithfully as did the Soviet Union, even to its disadvantage.

The War Crimes

That Churchill committed war crimes—planned them, aided and abetted them, and defended them—is beyond doubt. Churchill was the prime subverter through two world wars of the rules of warfare that had evolved in the West over centuries.

At the Quebec conference, Roosevelt and Churchill adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed tens of millions of Germans, giving the Germans a terrifying picture of what "unconditional surrender" would mean in practice. Churchill was convinced of the plans benefits, as it "would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor." That the Morgenthau Plan was analogous to Hitler's post-conquest plans for western Russia and the Ukraine was lost on Churchill, who according to Morgenthau, drafted the wording of the scheme.

Churchill even brainstormed dropping tens of thousands of anthrax "super bombs" on the civilian population of Germany, and ordered detailed planning for a chemical attack on six major cities, estimating that millions would die immediately "by inhalation," with millions more succumbing later.

But Churchill's greatest war crimes involved the terror bombing of German cities that killed 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 injured. Arthur Harris ("Bomber Harris"), the head of Bomber Command, stated "In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing."

Churchill brazenly lied to the House of Commons and the public, claiming that only military and industrial installations were targeted. In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible. Hence the application of "carpet" bombing in an attempt to terrorize the Germans into surrendering.

Professor Raico described the effect of Churchillian statesmanship: "The campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins. . . ." No wonder that, learning of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard, was driven to telling "anyone who would listen" "that Churchill and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan."

According to the official history of the Royal Air Force: "The destruction of Germany was by then on a scale which might have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan." Dresden was filled with masses of helpless refugees running for their lives ahead of the advancing Red Army. The war was practically over, but for three days and nights, from February 13 to 15, 1945, British bombs pounded Dresden, killing as many as 135,000 people or more in three days. After the massacre, Churchill attempted to disclaim responsibility; even casually saying "I thought the Americans did it."

The terror bombing of Germany and the killing of civilians continued as late as the middle of April, 1945. It only stopped, as Bomber Harris noted, because there were essentially no more targets left to be bombed in Germany.

In order to kill a maximum number of Germans, Winston Churchill dismissed politics or policy as a 'secondary consideration,' and on at least two occasions said that there were "no lengths of violence to which we would not go" in order to achieve his objective. In fact he said this publicly in a speech given on September 31, 1943, and again in the House of Commons, on February 27, 1945, when unbelievable lengths of violence had already taken place. If Hitler had uttered this phrase, we would all cite it as more evidence of his barbarism. Yet, when Churchill utters it, his apologists palm it off as the resoluteness required of a great statesman, rather than describing it as an urge for mass, indiscriminate murder.

Of course, Churchill supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of another 200,000 civilians. When Truman fabricated the myth of the "500,000 American lives saved" to justify his mass murder, Churchill felt the need to top his lie: the atomic bombings had saved 1,200,000 lives, including 1,000,000 Americans. It was all just another of Churchill's fantasies.

Yet, after all this slaughter, Churchill would write: "The goal of World War II [was] to revive the status of man."

Churchill and the Cold War

Among Churchill's many war crimes, there are also those crimes and atrocities for which he is culpable that occurred following the war.

These include the forced repatriation of some two million old people, men, women, and children to the Soviet Union to their deaths. Then there were the massacres carried out by Churchill's protégé, Tito: tens of thousands of Croats, Slovenes and other "class-enemies" and anti-Communists were killed.

In the wake of the armies of Churchill's friend and ally, the mass deportations began. But Churchill was unmoved. In January 1945 he said: "Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . . I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-fields." Here Churchill, the great friend of liberty as Bush described him, approves of slavery. About 500,000 German civilians were enslaved to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance with the Yalta agreement where Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that slave labor constituted a proper form of "reparations."

Then there was the great atrocity of the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland, pursuant to Churchill's mad plan to violently uproot the entire polish population and move Poland westward, which he demonstrated with a set of matchsticks, and to Churchill's acceptance of the Czech leader Eduard Benes's plan for the ethnic cleansing of Bohemia and Moravia. Around two million German civilians died in this process. An entire ancient culture was obliterated. This sort of cultural jihad used to be something conservatives opposed. Today's neoconservatives instead, who evidently embrace the Marxist doctrine of sweeping away the past, would surely argue that in order to create, one must first destroy, or in that old Stalinist phrase, to make an omelet, you must first break a few eggs.

A large factor in the litany of Churchill's war crimes was his racism. Churchill was an English chauvinist, a British racist, and like Wilson, loathed the so-called "dirty whites," the French, Italians and other Latin’s, and Slavs like the Serbs, Poles, Russians, etc.... Churchill professed Darwinism, and particularly disliked the Catholic Church and Christian missions. He became, in his own words, "a materialist to the tips of my fingers," and fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest.

In 1919, as Colonial Secretary Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons on the "uncooperative Arabs" in the puppet state of Iraq. "I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas," he declared. "I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes." Some year’s later, gassing human beings to death would make other men infamous.

An example of Churchill's racial views are his comments made in 1937: "I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place."

In Churchill's single-minded decades-long obsession with preventing a single hegemonic power from arising on the European continent that would pose a threat to the British Empire, he failed to see that his alliance with Stalin produced exactly that. "As the blinkers of war were removed," John Charmley writes, "Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been made." Churchill is alleged to have blurted out after finally realizing the scale of his blunder: "We have slaughtered the wrong pig!"

But it was too late. For decades Churchill worked for the destruction of Germany. Yet only after Stalin had devoured half of Europe did this "great statesman" realize that destroying the ability of Germany to act as a counterbalance to Russia left Europe ripe for invasion and conquest by a resurgent Russia.

By 1946 Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage about the Iron Curtain of tyranny that descended on Eastern Europe. But Churchill helped to weave the fabric.

With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own hand, Churchill saw only one recourse: to bind America to Europe permanently. Thus Churchill returned to his tried-and-true strategy, embroiling the United States in another war. This time a "Cold War" that would entrench the military-industrial complex and change America forever.

Conclusion

With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. He helped destroy laissez-faire liberalism, he played a role in the Crash of 1929, he helped start WWI, and by bringing in America to help, prolonged the war and created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, prolonged WWII, laid the groundwork for Soviet domination, helped involve America in a cold war with Russia, and pioneered in the development of total war and undermining western civilized standards.

Chris Matthews described Churchill as the "man who save[d] the honor of the 20th century." Rather than this great accolade, Winston Churchill must be ranked with Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western civilization.

And it is fitting that the Library of Congress exhibition is entitled "Churchill and the Great Republic" because few men have done more to overthrow the American Republic(s) and institute the great centralized global war machine that has taken its place.

 

[Apollonian]

 

[Apollonian]

Churchill Sent 2 Mil Russian Refugees to Certain Death at End of WWII​

'They were certain that they would be killed or, at the very least, sentenced to the unspeakable horrors of the labor camps'.
This article from our archives was first published on RI in January 2018

Nikolai Tolstoy Sun, Jul 10 2022 | 4440 words 24,505 Comments

Link: https://russia-insider.com/en/histo...ssian-refugees-certain-death-end-wwii/ri22084

MORE: HISTORY CHURCHILL WAS EVIL FROM THE ARCHIVES

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Note from RI Editor Charles Bausman: We recently stumbled across this remarkable article from 1988! in the journal Imprimis, and when we read it, we could scarcely believe our eyes. When we started asking people about it, we heard different things - one person said this has been disproven, others said it was true and that they knew eye-witnesses who were deported.
Apparently the British government sued Tolstoy when he made these charges in an attempt to shut him up. We don't know if the charges are true or not, but it makes for extraordinary reading, and I appeal to people who know something about this to please help us fill out our knowledge in the comments section below. It is situations like this where our commentors are simply invaluable.

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From the man who brought you the fire-bombing of Dresden ...
Imprimis Editor’s Preview: At the end of World War II, two million Russians—including White Russians, Cossacks, Slovenians, Croats and Serbs who were POWs or simply living in exile—were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union.

"Betrayal of Cossacks at Lienz, Austria June 1945" Painting by S.G. Korolkoff
Men, women and children were turned over to the Russian secret police at gunpoint. Non-Soviet citizens were supposedly exempt, but historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy charges that they were secretly betrayed by a few key military officials, a future British prime minister among them.

This tragedy, although nearly a half-century old, ought not be forgotten. What happened in 1944-47 was more than a sinister episode. Even in this era of “glasnost,” the Soviet Union still denies freedom of emigration, one of the most fundamental human rights, to its people.

Our thanks to the U.S. Business and Industrial Council who co-sponsored this Shavano Institute for National Leadership lecture on the Hillsdale campus in the fall of 1987.

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The last world war was a long time ago, and for many of us, even those with first-hand experience, it does indeed seem to have become a distant memory. Yet some images remain vivid. Only a child at the time, I remember the London bombing raids as if they happened yesterday.
But the particular experience which has occupied much of my adult concern, oddly enough, involves a story which I understood very little of in the 1940s or for many years afterward. I had heard people talking about it in the Russian church where emigres and refugees gathered in London, but the rest, for me, came later.

Though the story is over forty years old and may not be widely known, it is one which continues to gain in significance—and tragedy.

An excellent documentary film about the tragedy.

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Prisoners of War​

In 1941, after the demise of the brief cynical alliance between Hitler and Stalin, Germany invaded Russia and advanced very swiftly. The German forces took several million prisoners in the first three months of their offensive. Mistakenly, many of these prisoners and the inhabitants of the invaded regions regarded the Germans as liberators who were expected to overthrow the hated Stalin and restore their freedom. Some surrendered Russian Army units marched to meet their supposed liberators with bands playing, and Nazi propaganda films depict Russian peasants cheering as the German troops paraded through their villages in flower-strewn glory.

What happened to the Russian POWs after that, however, was far from glorious. They were thrown into wired camps on the open steppe. During the cruel winter of 1941-42, without shelter or proper food, millions died. This is a Nazi war crime, undeniably, but it is not one which should be laid exclusively at Hitler’s door.

During World War I, Russian prisoners received the same treatment as the British, French and American troops; they were all signatories of the Hague Convention. Ironically, it was not Imperial Russia under Czar Nicholas II which refused to be bound by the Hague agreement but the new Soviet regime which supplanted it in 1917.

Twelve years later, the world powers reached a more detailed agreement, the Geneva Convention, but the Soviets remained aloof. Throughout World War II, Russian POWs were completely unprotected. Except on a few rare occasions, the Red Cross was forbidden to enter the camps and Stalin refused to discuss the issue even though Germany urged Red Cross intervention.
Often with nothing but a barbed wire fence to separate them, the beleaguered Russians were forced to watch their British, French and American counterparts receive food parcels, clothing and letters from home. Still on record in the British Foreign Office are documents discussing requests from White Russian immigrants in Britain who pleaded for permission to help their countrymen.
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said, in effect, “Well, for some reason which we know nothing about, Stalin is determined that nothing should be done for the Russian prisoners” and nothing indeed was done. It is significant to note that Stalin did not oppose humanitarian aid for other Allied POWs; only for Russians. For those who recalled his brutal methods of subjugation in the Ukraine, the message is clear.
Thousands of Russians were drawn into the Third Reich willingly or unwillingly. Many, of course, had opposed the communist revolution of 1917 and desired autonomy, so they did not consider it treasonable to work for the Nazis. Men, women and children were also abducted from occupied zones by the hundreds to work as forced labor in Germany. Great numbers of refugees fled eastward for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which was to get out of the line of fire during the German retreat.

Consequently, at the war’s end, some six million Soviet citizens were located in Central Europe. The Allies were completely unable to comprehend the scale of such a problem. They had no way of assessing how many Russians were inside Germany or anywhere else, for that matter, but huge numbers of them showed up in North Africa, Persia, Normandy, and Italy too.

During the D-Day invasion in June 1944, British and American military authorities estimated that one out of every ten German soldiers captured was in reality a Soviet citizen. Of all the nations in Europe, the USSR was the only one to witness nearly a million of its subjects enlisting in the enemy army.
Many of the Russian prisoners were transported to Britain and were held in training camps originally used for British troops. Of politics, most of these men knew nothing. All their lives they had been harried hither and thither in the name of confused ideologies by commanders whose languages more often than not they could not understand. Among the more educated, knowledge of their precarious situation only contributed to a typically fatalistic attitude.
Soon the British authorities received their first glimpse of what it meant to be faced with the possibility of compulsory return to the world’s first Marxist state: Russian POW suicides began in July of 1944. The matter was brought before the British Cabinet (the Americans were only marginally involved at this time because they had been delivering all captured Russians into British hands), but already the decision had been made: All Russian POWs would be returned to the Soviet Union, whatever the fate in store for them.
One member of the government who spoke up for the unfortunate prisoners was Lord Selborne, then Minister of Economic Warfare, who was also responsible for occupied Europe’s sabotage and espionage operations under the Special Operations Executive. Russian-speaking officers under his direction recorded dozens of appalling stories of suffering from the POWs.
Common to all of them was an absolute dread of returning to the Soviet Union. They were certain that they would be killed or, at the very least, sentenced to the unspeakable horrors of the labor camps. Selborne wrote to Winston Churchill, who promised to consider the matter again. But at a second Cabinet meeting, Selborne, not being a Cabinet Minister, was barred from presenting his evidence and Anthony Eden was able to convince the Prime Minister that all Russian POWs must be repatriated, forcibly if necessary.

Return to the USSR​

In December of 1944, the first shipload of Soviet soldiers sailed around the North Cape of Murmansk by the White Sea. Nothingly overtly terrible was witnessed on this occasion, but rumors of the fate that awaited the Russians abounded and were verified later by first-hand and other reliable accounts of mass executions in abandoned quayside warehouses and factories. The prisoners were marched to these after disembarking and divesting themselves of the clothes and possessions the Allies had given them. Many were allowed to live, and were sent to “educational” camps. Regarding the other group however, here is one British observer’s account:

The disembarkation started at 1830 hrs. and continued for 41/2 hrs. The Soviet authorities refused to accept any of the stretcher cases as such and even the patients who were dying were made to walk off the ship carrying their own baggage. Two people only were carried off, one man with his right leg amputated and left one broken, and the other unconscious. The prisoner who had attempted suicide was very roughly handled and his wound opened up and was allowed to bleed. He was taken off the ship and marched behind a packing case on the docks; a shot was then heard, but nothing more was seen. The other 32 prisoners were marched or dragged into a warehouse 50 yards from the ship and after a lapse of 15 minutes, automatic fire was heard coming from the warehouse; twenty minutes later a covered lorry drove out of the warehouse and headed towards the town. Later I had a chance to glance into the warehouse when no one was around and found the cobbled floor stained dark in several places around the sides and the walls badly chipped for about five feet up.

These were not the only victims in this incident. Altogether, about 150 Russians were separated from the rest and marched behind sheds on the quayside. There they were massacred by executioners, many of whom appeared to be youths aged between 14 and 16.

Repatriation Policy​

It must be remembered that the early debate over the Russian prisoners had been won on Eden’s insistence (1) that it was vital to placate the Soviet government if British POWs liberated in Russian-controlled zones were to be safely returned and (2) that Stalin would not help them win the war unless his demands were met. What is surely suspicious, however, is the fact that Eden’s detailed plan for forcible repatriation was formulated before Stalin or any other Soviet official had raised the issue.
When Churchill and Eden traveled to Moscow in October 1944 to meet with Stalin, the Foreign Secretary offered the unconditional return of all Russian POWs. To Vyacheslav Molotov’s suggestion that Soviet citizens should be returned regardless of their personal wishes, Eden replied that he had no objection. At Yalta in February of 1945, however, the Americans balked. All prisioners captured in German uniforms were considered protected by the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull telegraphed a message to Ambassador Averell Harriman in Moscow the previous September to state unequivocally what had been American policy since December of 1943: No Russian POW could be returned by force. After the Yalta Conference it was agreed, however, that those designated as Soviet citizens would be forcibly repatriated.* With the surrender of the Nazis in May of 1945, the logistics of repatriation became much easier. The Russians liberated in Germany were simply handed over to Soviet troops on the spot.

[*Only one country stood firm against Stalin’s demands: tiny Liechtenstein, with an entire population of less than 13,000 people, most of them farmers, no army, and a police force of eleven men. No refugees, Soviet citizens or otherwise, would be sent back to Russia by force, the government of Liechtenstein courageously declared to the Soviet delegation which came to claim them in 1945.]
Altogether, some two and three quarters of a million people were repatriated. Most did not have to be physically forced—all their lives they had been used to following the orders of the state, and Stalin had, after all, broadcast a general “amnesty.” But many brutal scenes did take place.
A particularly grim experience for American soldiers involved the notorious extermination camp, Dachau. After the Nazis were defeated, the Americans used it for an internment center.
When they handed the Russian POWs over to the Soviet authorities, they discovered to their horror that a number had hung themselves from their bunks in the barracks. In another camp, soldiers were ordered to break up a religious service; they dragged Russians out of a church and threw them into trucks. A rare American Army film showed a POW stabbing himself 56 times to avoid being taken into custody by SMERSH officers.
In the British zone, as in the American-controlled territory, SMERSH operatives were allowed to roam freely and on frequent occasions they resorted to kidnapping and murder. Their blatant violence, combined with the obvious injustice and illegality of their actions, eventually led military commanders Eisenhower, Montgomery and Alexander to unilaterally issue orders outlawing forced repatriation.
This placed the British and American governments in an awkward position. Individual soldiers refusing to carry out orders was embarrassing enough, but this amounted to a mass revolt at the highest level of command, and was further complicated by the fact that if the unpleasant details of the Russian repatriation effort were made known to the public, there would certainly be a huge uproar.
But under strong pressure from the British Foreign Office, the U.S. State Department reluctantly agreed to pursue the policy. American resistance was sufficient only to severely limit the categories of repatriation candidates. Previously, mere Soviet citizenship, regardless of age, sex, career, or war record, meant mandatory repatriation, but now in late 1945, stipulations were made that only citizens who had actually lent aid and comfort or wore a German uniform were to be returned.
The trouble was, almost all who fit these categories had either been repatriated already or had escaped, often with the help of sympathetic Allied soldiers, including officers, who provided them with false papers or simply looked the other way at the right moment.
In 1946 and 1947, the policy known in Italy as Operation Keelhaul was typical. Unlike earlier repatriation efforts carried out in the chaotic final days of the war, Operation Keelhaul was very carefully executed. The officers who actually conducted the screening felt privately that it was up to them to shield as many Russians as possible. But it was made clear to them that they were to fill their “quota,” else the SMERSH agents would take things into their own hands.
In May of 1947, Operation East Wind handed over its final contingent of repatriates, bringing the long sad story of forced repatriation to a close, for the moment. Ironically enough, another simultaneous operation in the British Army, code name Highland Fling, was assisting Soviet soldiers to defect as the Cold War commenced.

Forced Non-Soviet Repatriation​

Over thirty years later, I wrote a book on the history of forced repatriation called Victims of Yalta, which appeared in the U.S. as The Secret Betrayal. At the time, I thought that my research, based on numerous documents and eyewitness accounts, had also drawn to a close. I never dreamed that within a decade, I would be publishing an even longer book on a single repatriation operation.
The new book, The Minister and the Massacres (1986), describes the fate of some 40,000 Cossacks, White Russians, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, including many women and children, who were interned in Austria after the British military authorities accepted their surrender in 1945. One group, the Fifteenth Cossack Cavalry Corps, had been fighting in Yugoslavia against Tito.
Large numbers within this group and others were not Soviet citizens. They had escaped Russia during or before the Revolution, rescued in British and French warships. They had taken new citizenship or possessed League of Nations passports attesting to their stateless status.
Throughout the repatriation campaign, both British and American authorities had adhered to an extremely legalistic view of their obligations. Even the British Foreign Office stated after the Yalta Conference that only Soviet citizens, i.e. residents of the Soviet Union after September 1, 1939, were to be compelled to return. This order was echoed in writing by the Supreme Allied Headquarters. Field Marshal Alexander accordingly issued stringent orders against the use of force.
But in May of 1945 the British Army in Austria handed over thousands of non-Soviet citizens, men, women and children, by the most brutal means imaginable. How did it happen? Was it an accident—a case of mislaid orders and fouled up communications—or was it a deliberate act, covered up these past forty years?
After examining the relevant evidence and talking to the soldiers involved, I came to the conclusion that the “accident” theory was untenable. First, it was clear that the presence and status of the non-Soviet Cossacks was well known at all levels within the British Fifth Corps, the unit to which they had surrendered at the close of hostilities. Second, all orders relating to the handover of the Cossacks emphasized that non-Soviet citizens were to be screened and retained in accordance with policy laid down by the British government. Given these indisputable facts, how could the surrender of Tsarist exiles be attributed to an oversight?

Deception and Betrayal​

Among the Cossack officers were many famous heroes who had led the White Russian Army in alliance with the British, French and Americans during the Russian civil war. One, General Andrei Shkuro, had been honored for gallantry by King George V with the Companionship of the Bath, whose cross he still wore on his uniform alongside others awarded by King George’s cousin, Emperor Nicholas II. SMERSH operatives, significantly, had detailed lists of all former White Russian officers on which they checked off the names as the British relinquished custody of them.
These same operatives arranged to have Shkuro detained in secret by the British before he was forcibly repatriated. When he was handed over, the General tore the cross from his chest and threw it at the feet of the attending British officer. He and the Ataman of the Don Cossacks, Peter Nikolaevich Krasnov, one of the most famous Russian leaders of all, were hung together in the Lefortovo prison courtyard.
Beyond a brief notice in Pravda, their passing went unnoticed. Their helpless compatriots lie buried in mass unmarked graves in Gulag forced labor camps.
It seemed that two versions of the event existed. According to the official record, preserved among War Offices files, the non-Soviet Cossacks were screened and retained in British custody, and nothing in the files suggests that anything but this took place. In reality some two or three thousand Tsarist emigres, holding foreign or League of Nations passports and for the most part dressed in flamboyant Tsarist uniforms, were deceived into travelling to the Soviet lines at Judenburg. We seem to be inhabiting two different worlds: one fiction and one tragic reality.
Further research revealed that elaborate precautions had been taken to ensure that the Soviets regained this particular group of their most inveterate enemies, and that equally skillful measures had been adopted to prevent this aspect of the operation from becoming known outside the Fifth Corps. In short, the evidence suggested strongly that the tragedy resulted not from the muddle or oversight that one could so readily envisage in the chaotic circumstances of the time, but was planned and implemented throughout with great care and forethought in deliberate contravention of orders from above.
But if this view were correct, who could have been responsible for flouting undeviatingly clear government instructions in order to perpetrate an atrocity greatly beneficial to the Soviet government, but of no perceptible advantage to British interests? What was the motive for such action? These were questions which I was unable to answer in Victims of Yalta, and I was compelled to conclude my investigation with the admission that, “whether we shall ever know the full story is questionable.”
For the time being matters were left in this unsatisfactory state. Some years later I discovered that Winston Churchill himself, with all the resources of the Cabinet and War Office at his disposal, had been similarly unable to penetrate the secret. In the spring of 1953, disturbed by allegations received from an emigre Cossack general, he ordered a full enquiry. After an exhaustive search among the files, Brigadier Latham of the Cabinet Office was obliged to confess that “though we know most of the details of what happened we are at present unable to say why these events took place.”
On first launching into research for Victims of Yalta, I addressed appeals for information to all the surviving protagonists. The response was fruitful, with one remarkable exception. As Minister Resident in the Mediterranean in 1945, Harold Macmillan bore responsibility for providing political advice and decisions in British-occupied Italy and Austria. In view of his high authority in a region where many thousands of Russians fell into British hands and were subsequently repatriated, he was an obvious person to consult.
At the same time I had no reason to believe that he had been directly involved in the business with which I was concerned, since the decision to repatriate Soviet citizens had been made at the Cabinet level. His task, on the face of it, had merely been to transmit and explain that decision to the Supreme Allied Commander, Field-Marshall Alexander.
It was with some surprise, therefore, that in April 1974 I received a curt reply from Mr. Macmillan, informing me simply that, “I am sorry that I cannot be of help to you.” Though he was clearly under no obligation to assist every historian approaching him, this refusal appeared perplexing and, as I was later to learn, unusual. My suspicions were aroused, and his name moved to the forefront of my concern.
At the time of the public outcry which greeted the appearance of Victims of Yalta, I was approached on different occasions by Yugoslav emigres, who urged me to write about the parallel plight of thousands of their compatriots handed over to be slaughtered by Tito at the time of the Cossack tragedy. I was strongly sympathetic to their cause, but had to reply that as the Yugoslavs did not come under the Yalta Agreement, and as my field of study lay largely if not exclusively in Russian affairs, I felt their story should be told by a Yugoslav specialist.
But then it happened that my friend David Floyd wrote an important article on the subject at the end of 1979, published in the magazine Now. I read it with detached interest until I came across this quotation from a report by a Foreign Office official: “The handing over of Slovenes and others by the Eighth Army in Austria to Tito’s forces at the end of May was, of course, a ghastly mistake which was rectified as soon as it was reported to headquarters”
It was the phrase “a ghastly mistake” which attracted my attention. Two “ghastly mistakes” occurring at the same time and place appeared an improbable coincidence. I saw at once that the Yugoslav tragedy represented not only a subject in itself worthy of study, but one which might open up fresh avenues in an investigation which for some time seemed to have reached a dead end.
Examination of the relevant Foreign Office and War Office files revealed anomalies even greater than those attending the Cossack handovers. The Cossacks were divided into two categories, Soviet and non-Soviet, repatriable and nonrepatriable, which might (but for the evidence I had uncovered) suggest a source of confusion. In the case of the Yugoslavs, however, there existed no ambivalence of any sort.
The British and American governments had throughout maintained a consistent policy that no Yugoslav citizens falling into British hands were to be returned against their will. Despite this, thousands had been surreptitiously handed over. Something was very wrong, and it looked as if the twin operations might represent aspects of a single covert exercise. So at least I reasoned.
Gradually the evidence began to accumulate. It soon began to look as if someone hand had been at work, altering and removing documents, with the apparent purpose of implicating Field-Marshal Alexander. By this stage, however, the existence of what could only be a deliberate false trail merely provided further evidence of the extraordinary thoroughness with which the real culprit had covered his tracks. Slightly unnerving was the discovery that a crucial public document which I had actually handled had some time after been removed or destroyed.
Then came the moment in a hotel room in Toronto when my friend, the Croatian scholar Dr. Jerome Jareb, handed me a copy of Alexander Kirk’s revealing report of May 14, 1945. Now I felt I knew who my man was! But the manner in which he deceived not only his Cossack and Yugoslav victims but his own colleagues, at Fifth Corps Headquarters in Austria and Allied Force Headquarters in Naples, the Foreign Office and the Cabinet, was so complex and ingenious that it was still no easy task to unravel the skein of events.
Patiently I built up a circumstantial case which proved, to my satisfaction at least, that Harold Macmillan (later, Lord Stockton and Prime Minister of Great Britain) had himself largely engineered the whole affair. I published the fresh evidence, such as it was, concerning the Cossacks in Stalin’s Secret War (1981), and on the Yugoslavs in an article in Encounter (May 1983).
The case I presented was admittedly circumstantial and speculative, leaving considerable room for differing interpretation even if the salient points appeared clear enough. It also included a number of errors of commission and omission. I would regret what proved to have been a jejunely premature venture more than I do, were it not that publication stimulated anew public interest in the matter. As a result I began to receive a fresh flow of information, some of it implicating Toby Low, at the time Brigadier-General of Fifth Corps: the man who signed the orders arranging the handovers of Cossacks and Yugoslavs. Today, Toby Low is Lord Aldington.
Harold Macmillan died several years ago without answering the charges leveled against him in The Minister and the Massacres. Reluctantly, Toby Low has been pressured into a court case to which I am a party. The full facts will, I hope, come to light in the near future. Whatever vindication comes for the victims of forced repatriation, it comes too late.

---

Source Imprimis

 

[Apollonian]

Memo: From Winston Churchill To: General Ismay Date: July 6, 1944. It may be several weeks before I ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent​

27th October 1998
HERALD AND TIMES ARCHIVE

Link: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news...f-we-do-it-let-us-do-it-one-hundred-per-cent/

IF one Allied leader came out of the Second World War covered in glory it has to be Winston Churchill. Stalin was discredited by the communist brutalities of the 1930s and 1940s; Roosevelt came into the war late and died before it was over; De Gaulle was tainted by the collapse of France in 1940; Harry Truman has never been forgiven for vaporising Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the
Chinese supremo Chiang Kai Shek proved to be one of Asia's more
dismal warlords. Only Winston Churchill saw the war through from start to finish with his reputation unblemished. His familiar bulldog scowl remains one of Britain's most powerful and enduring icons.
But every icon has its darker side. Churchill is no exception. A collection of once-secret documents buried in the Public Record Office (PRO) in London conjure up a very different Winston Churchill. They reveal a war leader with an enthusiasm for the poison gases of the First World War who was prepared to defy international protocols and spray them on any German force which set foot on Britain. And who, long after the threat of invasion was over, pressed his service chiefs for plans to ''drench'' (his word) the civilian populations of 100 German cities with phosgene and mustard gas.
Churchill's readiness (eagerness even) to use gas as a weapon is one of the Second World War's better-kept secrets. In his own account of the war he mentions it only briefly, and in a series of footnotes. But from the very beginning of his premiership - and particularly after the debacle of Dunkirk - Churchill was determined that Britain should have huge stocks of poison gas, the weapons needed to deliver it, and
the will to use it first. It was a grim strategy which plainly appalled many of Britain's military chiefs.
Poison gas was first used in earnest on the Ypres salient on April 22, 1915, when the German army unleashed 170 of tons of gaseous chlorine on French, Algerian and Canadian troops. The Allies were outraged by this perfidy. Kitchener accused the Germans of stooping to tactics which vie with those of the Dervishes' - and promptly got the British War Cabinet's permission to go on a gas offensive.
And so began a deadly (and escalating) tit-for-tat. Chlorine was replaced by phosgene which was replaced (in 1917) by mustard gas. Along hundreds of miles of the Western Front thousands of tons were of gaseous chemicals were loosed into the prevailing winds. By the end of the war thousands of men on both sides had choked to death, or been blinded, or scarred with blisters or had their lungs seared.
The numbers were bad enough. But it was the nature of the injuries (blindness, scarred faces, liver damage, ruined lungs) and the sheer randomness of gas warfare that appalled the world. An unpredictable wind could easily send clouds of poison in among non-combatant women and children, something that seemed unthinkable during the First World War. It was to prevent such a calamity that 140 nations - including all the major powers - signed up to the Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibiting . . . ''the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous and other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials and devices.'' And particularly, the first use of such weapons.
But having agreed not to use gas weapons the major powers went on developing them. Britain was no exception. All through the 1920s and 1930s the scientists at Porton (now Porton Down) developed ever more lethal cocktails of gas. The Porton scientists were particularly interested in delivering poison gas from aircraft either by bombs or, better still, spray tanks. And it was the Porton scientists - in a long paper dated 1930 and entitled The Casualty Producing Power of Mustard Gas When Sprayed Directly On To Personnel - who produced the classic definition of a gas casualty. It was: ''A person who is burned to a degree which will prevent him, however willing, from performing any military duty, no matter how pressing the military situation may be.''

In September 1939 that military situation became pressing indeed when Britain and France declared war on Hitler's Germany. One of the War Cabinet's first acts - in October 1939 - was to step up the production of phosgene and mustard gas. And while His Majesty's Government had promised at Geneva in 1925 never to initiate the use of poison gas, by early 1940 people were having second thoughts. A meeting of the Joint General Staff and the Air Staff in April 1940 warned that ''our present Government policy is that we should use gas only in retaliation, but it is possible that, when the gloves are really off, and the war has become really grim, there might be a change of heart.''
That ''change of heart'' was not long in coming. A few months later the war became ''really grim'' when the remnants of the British Army had to be plucked off the beaches of Dunkirk and shipped back across the channel to lick its wounds.

Invasion by the all-conquering Nazis seemed a real possibility. On June 15, only two days after the evacuation from Dunkirk was complete, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir John Dill produced what has been described as ''one of the most explosive memoranda of the war''. It is entitled The Use of Gas in Home Defence.

The time had come, Dill told Britain's military chiefs, to abandon the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and to use poison gas whether or not it was deployed by the Germans. Particularly if they invaded the coast of Britain. ''Enemy forces, crowded on the beaches, with the confusion inevitable on first landing would present a splendid target,'' Dill wrote. ''Gas spray by aircraft under such conditions would be likely to have a more widespread and wholesale effect than high explosives. It can, moreover, be applied very rapidly, and so is particularly suitable in an operation where we may get very little warning.''

The ends, Dill concluded, justified the brutal means. ''At a time when our National existence is at stake, when we are threatened by an implacable enemy who himself recognises no rules save those
of expediency, we should not hesitate to adopt whatever means appear to offer the best chance of success.''
Dill's memorandum raised a firestorm of opposition. The Director of Home Defence wrote back that: ''We should be throwing away the incalculable moral advantage of keeping our pledges and for a minor tactical surprise; and the ultimate effects of retaliation by the enemy would be very serious in this overcrowded little island.'' And Dill's own chief of staff, Major General Henderson, was appalled at the idea that Britain should initiate the use of gas. He replied scathingly to his boss: ''Some of us would begin to wonder whether it really mattered which side won.''
At which point Prime Minister Winston Churchill entered the fray - on Dill's side. It may be that Dill had been whispering in Churchill's ear. In a memo to his close military adviser General Hastings ''Pug'' Ismay (dated June 30) Churchill pitched his formidable weight behind the poison gas warriors. ''What is our gas output per month?'' he demanded to know. ''It should certainly be speeded up. Let me have proposals. Supposing lodgements (ie enemy bridgeheads) were effected on our coast there could be no better points for application of mustard than these beaches and lodgements.''

Churchill agreed with General Dill that Britain should not wait around for the Germans to use the gas first. ''In my view there would be no need to wait for the enemy to adopt such methods'' he wrote. ''He will certainly adopt them if he thinks it will pay. Home defence should be consulted as to whether the prompt drenching of lodgements would not be a great help. Everything should be brought to the highest pitch of readiness.''
It was an instruction that could not ignored. Britain's gas-making and gas-delivery machine swung into top gear. Chemical plants at Randle and Rocksavage in Cheshire began working flat out to produce mustard gas, phosgene (and some tear gas). A third factory was opened at Springfield in Lancashire.

As the war ground on a total of 5300 men and women - 4300 industrial workers, 600 researchers and chemists and 400 service personnel - were at work producing Britain's stocks of poison gas. Another 500 people from the Minister of Aircraft Production were employed making mobile containers and spray tanks for the aircraft which would ''drench'' the beaches of eastern Britain with gas if the Germans ever set foot on them. Four types of aircraft were earmarked for the job; Lysanders, which would carry two 250lb spray tanks; Battles and Blenheims equipped with two 500lb tanks; and Wellington bombers kitted out with a brace of 1000lb tanks. Twelve gas-attack squadrons were assembled, two of them in Scotland; at Lossiemouth on the Moray Firth and Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth. The rest were scattered down the east coast of England as far south as West Malling in Kent. (The Lysander squadron
at Grangemouth was later transferred to Macmerry in East Lothian.)

This prodigious gas apparatus is a tribute to Winston Churchill's ability to cajole, bully and persuade. He never stopped fretting about the need (as he saw it) to have large stocks of poison gas ready and waiting for delivery. A string of memos in the PRO testify to Churchill's preoccupation (obsession, almost) with gas. In July 1940 Churchill was pressing to have ''preparations complete''. In October 1940 he wanted to know why the plant at Randle was not working flat-out. When told there were difficulties he urged: ''Press on. We must have a great store as they will certainly use it against us when they feel the pinch.''

Churchill's relentless pressure paid off. All through the war British factories continued to churn out gas weapons. And in dazzling variety; mustard bombs, phosgene bombs, mustard airburst bombs, mustard spray bombs, mustard 25lb shells, mustard howitzer shells, mustard mortar shells, phosgene mortar shells, chemical mines, bulk contamination vehicles. By 1944 Britain's chemical arsenal was huge. The RAF was supplied with more than 700,000 poison gas bombs and spray tanks; the British Army had almost 4,500,000 shells and mines stuffed with poison gases. It was more than enough to encounter anything the Germans might throw at Britain.

By May 1941 it was clear that the British were prepared to use poison gas anywhere on the British archipelago - including neutral Eire. ''The use of gas in Ireland (including Eire) would be ordered and controlled by the General Officer commanding British troops in Ireland '' one top-secret memorandum declares. In other words, if the Germans had tried to use Eire as a back door into Britain the RAF would have sprayed the beaches of Ireland with mustard gas and/or phosgene.
But even more startling is Churchill's readiness to use gas towards the end of the war, when the threat of invasion was over. By July 1944 the Germans were reeling. The Allied armies had broken out from Normandy and were fighting their way across northern France. Rome had fallen and British and American divisions were pushing up through Italy. German cities were being pounded day and night by British and American bombers. On the

Eastern Front the Red Army was poised to crash into the Reich. In short, the Axis powers were being ground down into ruin.
All of which makes Churchill's plan to use gas against German civilians all the more startling. It may be that he was panicked by the German V-1 rockets which were then falling on and around London. He was certainly worried that the Allied landings at Normandy might become boxed in. Perhaps he saw a way of coercing the Germans into an early surrender. But whatever the reason, his lengthy ''personal minute'' of July 6, 1944, to General Ismay is Winston Churchill at his most chilling.

''I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas,'' he told Ismay It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion, changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.''
Churchill saw a distinct strategic advantage in deploying the gas. ''I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas, by which I mean principally mustard. We will want to gain more ground in Normandy so as not to be cooped up in a small area. We could probably deliver 20 tons to their one and for the sake of the one they would bring their bomber aircraft into the area against our superiority, thus paying a heavy toll.''

Churchill goes on: ''If the bombardment of London really became a serious nuisance and great rockets with far-reaching and devastating effect fell on many centres of Government and labour, I should be prepared to do anything that would hit the enemy in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in which a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention. We could stop all work at the flying bomb starting points. I do not see why we should always have all the disadvantages of being the gentleman while they have all the advantages of being the cad ''
Churchill wanted the gas to be used ruthlessly. He instructed his military chiefs that when the time came '' to drench Germany with poison gas let us do it 100%. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood, by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there.''
The Prime Minister ended

his four-page minute with a Churchillian flourish. ''Pray address yourself to this,'' he told Ismay. ''It is a big thing and can only be discarded for a big reason. I shall have to square Uncle Joe and the President (ie Stalin and Roosevelt) but you need not bring this into your calculations at the present time. Just try to find out what it is like on its merits.'' At first, Churchill's minute met with a stunned silence. The Imperial General Staff (and Ismay) probably thought that they had disposed of the Prime Minister's ''first use'' of gas plans back in 1940. Now they saw that they had not. And by July 25 Churchill was growing impatient. He sent a curt note to the faithful Ismay saying: ''I now request this report within three days.''
Three days later, Ismay duly submitted his report. It included a list of every German city with a population of more than 100,000 people. Among the cities targeted for ''drenching'' with mustard gas and/or phosgene were Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart and 50 others. A few days later Viscount Cherwell (the German-born scientist Frederick Lindemann) weighed in with the calculation that the RAF had enough mustard gas available to contaminate ''some 900 square miles - more than the areas of Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt and Cassel put together.

But while Britain had the means it did not have the will. Churchill (and Lindemann) were more or less alone in their enthusiasm for ''drenching'' the cities of Germany with poison gas. The military saw it as a strategy that could hinder the Allied advance across Europe - as well as bringing down the condemnation of the world. ''On balance,'' Ismay told Churchill, ''we do not believe that for us to start chemical and biological warfare would have a decisive effect on the result or the duration of the war against Germany.''
At which point Churchill backed off, grumbling. He did, however, send Ismay and the Chiefs of Staff a sour little memo on July 29. ''I am not at all convinced by this negative report'' he wrote. ''But clearly I cannot make head against the parsons and the warriors at the same time. The matter should be kept under review and brought up again when things get worse.''
In the event, things did not get worse The Axis continued to crumble. Nor did Adolf Hitler, even in his darkest hours of defeat, sanction the use of chemicals and give Churchill a reason to deploy his stocks of poison gas. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and the war in Europe was over. If Britain came out of the war with its reputation intact it is due to the good sense of the generals - and not to Winston Churchill. If the military had acted on Churchill's personal minute of July 6, 1944, and ''drenched'' every city in Germany with poison gas, Britain may well have emerged from the SecondWorld War as one of the 20th
century's criminal states.

I WANT you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas. I would not use it unless it could be shown either that (a) it was life or death for us, or (b) that it would shorten the war by a year.
It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.
I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas, by which I mean principally mustard. We will want to gain more ground in Normandy so as not to be cooped up in a small area. We could probably deliver 20 tons to their one and for the sake of the one they would bring their bomber aircraft into the area against our superiority, thus paying a heavy toll.
Why have the Germans not used it? Not certainly out of moral scruples or affection for us. They have not used it because it does not pay them. The greatest temptation ever offered to them was the beaches of Normandy. This they could have drenched with gas greatly to the hindrance of our troops. That they thought about it is certain and that they prepared against our use of gas is
also certain. But the only reason they have not used
it against us is that they
fear the retaliation. What
is to their detriment is to our advantage.

Although one sees how unpleasant it is to receive poison gas attacks, from which nearly everyone recovers, it is useless to protest that an equal amount of HE will not inflict greater cruelties and sufferings on troops or civilians. One really must not be bound within silly conventions of the mind whether they be those that ruled in the last war or those in reverse which rule in this.
If the bombardment of London really became a serious nuisance and great rockets with far-reaching and devastating effect fell on many centres of Government and labour, I should be prepared to do anything that would hit the enemy in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention. I do not see why we would always have all the disadvantages of being the gentleman while they have all the advantages of being the cad. There are times when this may be so but not now.
I quite agree it may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it 100%. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there. Pray address yourself to this. It is a big thing and can only be discarded for a big reason. I shall of course have to square Uncle Joe and the President; but you need not bring this into your calculations at the present time. Just try to find out what it is like on its merits.

The full text of Churchill's letter

 

[Apollonian]

Here's ANOTHER tremendous, good vid made by same guy, "Zoomer Historian," as I posted a day ago, suckers--gives substantial alternative understanding of WWII and the lead-up thereto. Note, the Jews and other liars say unc' Adolf invaded Czechoslovakia, etc., but that's NOT the case at all. Yet, we know fm hist. that FDR (Roosevelt) and UK made propaganda upon it (the Czech affair), using it as pretext for the OFFENSIVE treaty UK made then w. Poland, encouraging Poland to make aggressive moves against Germany, Poland trying to take the German city of Danzig, which Polish aggression was actually what started WWII, the Germans then pre-emptively invading, and UK and France DECLARING WAR--the war was started by UK and France, suckers, Jew S A instigating fm long-distance. This vid much helps to clearing things up historically. Watch it over and again until u're satisfied.

 

[Apollonian]

Was WWII really the "good" war?--it was very good for kikes and communists, who profited greatly, winning much after the war was over, Israel established by 1948

 

[Apollonian]

Who started WWII, why and how?--Poland believed they were a great power on same level as UK and Russia, suckers--how is this?--because Pilsudski thought of Polish realm as federative which included such as Lithuania, White Russia (or BeloRussia), and Ukraine, led by Poles, thus they signed an offensive treaty w. UK in Mar 1939, promising to start a war w. Germany which then UK and France would join, so Poles started to prosecute various provokations, esp. in murdering Germans who still lived in Polish lands taken fm Germany just after WWI.

 

[Apollonian]

Here's worthwhile, brief, capsule history of German city of Danzig btwn the two world wars which Poland was working to steal fm Germany (after the Mar., 1939 treaty w. UK that gave Poland the job of actually starting the war) as convenient "casus belli."