In July 1914, as Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had written about his feelings for the Great War to his wife: “I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?” He later wrote to Lloyd George’s daughter in 1916: “I think a curse should rest on me, because I love this war. I know it’s shattering the lives of thousands every moment, I can’t help it. I enjoy every second of it.”
He was right. His curse did shatter many lives. Ask the Anzacs who were torn to bits at Gallipoli, Churchill’s brainchild; or the New Zealand Wellington Battalion under Colonel Malone, bombed by Churchill’s navy at Chunnuk Bair. Ask the citizens of Dresden and countless other cities, including, yes, even 1,500 French towns and cities, bombed by the Anglo-American forces between 1940 and 1945.
Yet, the man once wrote that he fancied himself “a successful soldier. I can visualise great movements and combinations”.
Indeed!
In Churchill’s Secret War, writer and history teacher Madhusree Mukerjee talks about the famine in Bengal. While famines were known in India, this was of epic proportions and sunk Britain’s greatest colony to the depths of deprivations hitherto unknown. Mukerjee argues that it was seriously aggravated by Churchill’s war against Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, when he refused shipments of grain despite repeated appeals from two successive viceroys, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India and the US President.
Churchill went on record stating that Mahatma Gandhi, whom he loved to describe as a half-naked fakir (a fakir is a Sufi Muslim, Gandhi was Hindu, but apparently Churchill did not know the difference), should have been tied to the ground and crushed by an elephant with the Indian viceroy sitting on top.
Callum Alexander Scott, an Englishman currently doing a PhD at King’s College London on power relations between the elites, media and the masses, recently writing in the UK’s Morning Star, stated that in December 1910, Churchill wrote to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith warning of the “unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes” (general terms then used to describe the mentally ill and impaired). Their rapid growth, he argued, coupled with the “steady restriction of the thrifty, energetic, and superior stocks” (folks like himself, of course), constituted “a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate”.
He argued that they should be “sterilised” or “segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations”.
He told Parliament, Scott continues, of the need for compulsory labour camps for “mental defectives” and that for “tramps and wastrels there ought to be proper labour colonies where they could be sent for considerable periods and made to realise their duty to the State”.
As Churchill continued to put it, in his own words, “100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilised and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race”.
In 1937, Scott tells us, Churchill justified mass genocide of indigenous peoples on the grounds of white supremacy, announcing to the Palestinian Royal Commission: “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, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Of Palestinians themselves, he said that they are just “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung”. Again, these are more of Churchill’s own words.
War propaganda often hides treacherous and inhuman behaviour, not to mention gaffes
Released memos reveal that Churchill had ordered Air Force Chief Charles Portal and Air Marshall “Bomber” Harris, known in the RAF by his own airmen as the “butcher”, to carpet bomb German cities to oblivion. Having recalled his army to Britain, Churchill took the war to civilians and gave specific instructions, in clear violation of the Geneva conventions, as early as August 25, 1940, not to carry out strategic target bombing, but instead to stage what he himself called “terror bombing”, euphemistically called “area bombing”, at night, when no military targets can even be seen, and using incendiary bombs, no less.
The cities subsequently turned into raging infernos, burning for days. The complete destruction of Dresden alone resulted in up to 135,000 deaths, when Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together accounted for 100,000 immediate deaths. Women, children and the elderly who bore no responsibility for the war burned alive, while the war conventions gathered dust in Geneva, and Churchill puffed on his cigar over another whisky. The bombing of Hamburg left 60,000 dead. These are just two of hundreds of bombing raids.
To put it in perspective, the entire number of British civilians who died in air raids throughout the war, according to lists published by the Telegraph, were 40,000.
Churchill even wanted to drop thousands of anthrax bombs on German cities, stating in unearthed memos to army staff: “I want a cold blooded calculation to be made as to how it would pay us to use poisoned gas.” He kept insisting: “I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas. It is absurd to consider morality on this topic.” Maybe absurd for him. Thankfully the chiefs of staff refused, arguing that this could well have destroyed all of Europe for generations.
Britain had tested anthrax bombs on the Scottish isle of Gruinard. It remains uninhabitable to this very day.
If Gallipoli was a bad case of crass incompetence, what to say of the original radio telephone link between Churchill and Roosevelt? Churchill insisted on using one with a scrambling device engineered by Siemens. Now that’s clever! The Germans said ‘thank you very much’, promptly contacted Siemens for unscrambling guidelines, and listened in to every call from their listening post in Holland, until the Americans set up a more sophisticated system late in the war. US Chief of Staff George Marshall had expressed great concern to Congress about this.
After Mussolini was deposed in July 1943, Marshal Badoglio tried to allay German concerns by stating that Italy would remain fighting alongside Germany. But Churchill almost definitely spilled the beans when he informed Roosevelt, over the insecure line scrambled with Siemens technology, that Italy was considering changing sides. Now that really helped the war effort.
Upon the Italian September 8 announcement of the armistice, Germany moved very rapidly and occupied Italy, quickly defeating Italian forces, annexing South Tyrol, and freeing Mussolini four days later. How many more of the allied forces died as a result of this blunder when trying to take the Italian peninsula from the Germans?
War propaganda often hides treacherous and inhuman behaviour, not to mention gaffes. Citizens suffer and die while their leaders, who may have been imperialists, racists and white supremacists, might be revered mistakenly and naively as heroes, while playing chess with their lives like villains.
Making heroes of war leaders is a two-edged sword. It might help the war effort at a time when public morale is low, but it also risks later distorting the true history of their characters as well as of conflict itself, which can only play into the hands of the planners of future conflicts.
For history misinterpreted is as bad as history forgotten, and as the old adage goes, could well lead to it being repeated.
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.