This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The debate about Winston Churchill and his legacy has resurfaced in recent weeks, following an interview Tucker Carlson held with a podcaster named Darryl Cooper. Cooper attempted to present a revisionist account of the origins and continuance of the Second World War, arguing that Churchill was “the chief villain” of the conflict and employing the passive voice to explain the millions “who ended up dead” in the East as a consequence of a lack of logistic foresight by the Nazis.

This was not a serious work of Churchill revisionism, and Cooper must have recognised the inadequacy of his position when he refused to publicly debate with a genuine historian, Andrew Roberts, who is one of Churchill’s most convincing modern defenders.

Contributions from the most ignorant of revisionists (Cooper describes a “Zionist-backed” Churchill as a psychopath) might lull those interested in the historical record into a general dismissal of Churchill critics. We must not lose sight of the importance of retaining critical examination of Churchill, the conduct of the Second World War, and the ways in which it is resuscitated for commentary and guidance on contemporary politics.

Criticism of Churchill was present, across the political spectrum, before, during and after the course of the Second World War. It would be disingenuous to pretend that this criticism didn’t exist, or that the quality of such critique mirrors that of the Cooper contribution.

The early and middle years of the conflict saw a string of humiliating defeats, and strategic errors of judgement. When reading Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, one is struck by the impossible position in which General Wavell had been placed as Commander-in-Chief Middle East, and by the unreasonable and conflicting demands made of him by Churchill during his tenure. A strong case can be made that by diverting critical resources to Greece and Crete in 1941, we imperilled our control of the Suez Canal — the loss of which would have caused irreparable harm.

The nadir of Britain’s fortunes followed the intervention of Japan, and a six-month period witnessed the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the fall of Singapore and the fall of Tobruk. The loss of Singapore, more than any other event, obliterated British prestige in the Far East and signalled the end of Empire.

In response to this string of failures, John Wardlaw-Milne, a right-wing critic of Churchill (and a left-arm bowler with seven first-class caps), proposed a vote of no confidence in the prime minister, with the leading speech delivered by Aneurin Bevan, who claimed that Churchill “wins debate after debate, and loses battle after battle”.

Bishop George Bell, though no pacifist, was outspoken in the House of Lords in opposition to the policy of area bombing civilian areas of Germany. Whilst acknowledging that civilian deaths were an unavoidable consequence of targeted bombing of military and supply targets, he nevertheless asserted that “there are recognised limits to what is permissible”, arguing that the deliberate targeting of civilians was both immoral and strategically useless. Both the moral and military components of Churchill’s area bombing campaign have continued to be critiqued in recent years by the historian Richard Overy and the philosopher A.C. Grayling.

Criticism of Churchill since the war has remained bipartisan. Maurice Cowling (of the Peterhouse Right) was critical of the “Churchill Myth”, arguing that British defeat and imperial collapse were repackaged and misrepresented by Churchill after the war as a glorious victory. The socialist A.J.P. Taylor, whilst having denounced the Munich agreement at the time, would compare favourably the number of “betrayed” Czechoslovak dead (under 100,000) to the number of “saved” Polish dead (over six million).

In recent years, Peter Hitchens’ The Phoney Victory sought to re-examine the central narrative of Churchill and the “Good War”. In a secular world, he argued, the moral conflict of the Second World War has replaced the Gospel as the source and summit of our moral condition, resulting in a secular state that makes sense of subsequent conflicts exclusively through the prism of this core event.

Our rhetorical framework for discussing foreign policy derives almost exclusively from this central conflict, whether analysing Eden’s conduct during the Suez debacle or Bush’s during the Iraq War. Politicians seek to characterise their opponents as “appeasers”, implicitly casting themselves as the bold, heroic premier.

Despite these criticisms, one of the remarkable aspects of Churchill historiography — both popular and academic — is that the standard Churchillian narrative has remained the dominant orthodoxy since the war. Revisionist accounts of the Second World War and appeasement have always been in the minority, and they have typically attracted opprobrium.

In the same year as Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (1961), Iain Macleod, the then-chairman of the Conservative Party, published a biography of Neville Chamberlain. Primarily concerned with his work on social policy, it nevertheless contained a sympathetic summary of his approach to foreign policy (though this section was produced by a ghostwriter, Peter Goldman).

This inconsequential defence of appeasement damaged Macleod’s reputation with the Tory party and remained a black mark against him for the party leadership thereafter. “It was a bad book,” Macleod admitted later. “I made a mistake in writing it. It made me no money, and has done me a lot of harm.”

People have been heavily criticised for mounting a defence of appeasement, yet despite the potency of the “Guilty Men” narrative, the options open to Conservative statesmen in the 1930s were unsatisfactory not least because the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 ensured the Royal Navy could not simultaneously sustain supremacy in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, as well as home waters.

Every move towards preparedness was bitterly contested. Following the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, Clement Attlee criticised British rearmament, complaining of the “ruinous arms race” which would “inevitably lead to war”, and as late as March 1939 the Labour Party voted against the introduction of conscription.

In 1938 or 1939 it simply wasn’t in the gift of British statesmen to protect either Czechoslovakia or Poland. No more was Britain able to protect either nation in 1945. In 1938, Britain engaged in humiliating diplomacy, colluding in the cession of major parts of central and eastern Europe to a murderous tyrant. In 1945, Britain was again forced into this demeaning dynamic, colluding in the cession of major parts of central and eastern Europe to a different murderous tyrant.

Following Hitler’s launch of Operation Barbarossa, realpolitik left Churchill with no option but to ally with Stalin, rendering it difficult to characterise the 1941–45 struggle as a Manichean conflict between good and evil, liberty versus tyranny, when our chief ally and the protagonist most responsible for defeating the Third Reich was the USSR.

In the aftermath of the Tehran conference in 1943, one letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to his son noted, “that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny & intolerance!” and the High Tory Evelyn Waugh’s disillusionment at finding himself supporting the communist partisans in Yugoslavia led to his assessment of the war as a “sweaty tug-of-war between teams of indistinguishable louts”.

In a piquant response to a criticism from Herbert Morrison, Churchill argued that the judgement of interwar politics ought to be left to history — “especially as I propose to write that history myself”. Churchill’s History of the Second World War became his attempt to present his narrative of those years and — despite its many excellencies — is therefore full of deliberately misleading statements and evasions. The guileless reader of that narrative would not realise that Churchill had supported the spending cuts imposed on the Royal Navy in the 1920s, dismissing the idea that Britain and Japan could end up at war.

Nor would that reader realise that, contrary to Churchill’s claim, the Cabinet had debated coming to terms with Hitler in May 1940. The true story of May 1940 — in which Churchill exhibited the strength of character to dominate the Cabinet and oppose the attempt to seek terms of peace — actually makes a much stronger claim for Churchill’s contribution to the war.

Churchill in his memoirs also provides an extraordinarily rosy view of the relationship — frequently antagonistic — between Britain and America. Bankrupt after defeat in 1940, Britain was stripped of gold and of bases in the western Atlantic by Roosevelt, and it became (both during the war and after) a satellite of an American imperium which saw no use for the wider British Empire and encouraged its downfall.

Churchill was producing his Second World War memoirs during the transition from “The Grand Alliance” of 1941 to the Cold War from 1945, in which our erstwhile ally in a previous struggle of freedom versus tyranny was now the central antagonist on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Much criticism of Churchill is absurd and mean-spirited: suggestions that he was responsible for the Bengal famine, or that he did not attempt to relieve it, are demonstrably false. Similarly, one cannot deny the colossal triumph of Churchill’s broader conduct immediately prior to and during the Second World War. It is a tribute to the great man that the dominant narrative around him remains fundamentally persuasive.

In the last analysis, Churchill was correct in identifying the unique threat which the Third Reich posed, and he cannot be blamed for our lack of preparedness in 1939. But no man is free from error, and both the War itself and its drivers and protagonists require critical examination.