By Theodore J. O'Keefe
Published: 1986-12-01
World-class
historian David Irving is no stranger to readers of the JHR. 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 the major houses refused to
print the books as written. The task has now been undertaken by a Revisionist
operation in Australia. Nearing completion, the new Irving book, Churchill's War, is
slated to be available from the IHR by the end of this year.
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 II, 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 Bruning 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 Chaim 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 wideness
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 rescuer 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 l938, it was Strakosch, who was instrumental in
setting 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 Checkers 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 an 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 insure that the peace moves in Britain are finally strangled at birth.
He orders Sir Charles Portal to visit him at Checkers, 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, the bombing
of London is completely forbidden and embargoed. Churchill knows this, because
he's reading the German codes, 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 f1y 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 maneuvering 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 countries’ 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 First Sea Lord, Admiral Cummingham wrote, according to
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 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.
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