MAYES YN Ete tes oper tien

PRIEST feretiew en

SARAH NRE Leh aes

Doug Collins

@ get this straight ®@

SHORTLY BEFORE he died, Harold Macmillan was
shown the manuscript of Churchill’s War, by David Irv-
ing. Macmillan, former British prime minister and head
of the great publishing house, read it and said: ‘‘Over my
dead body.’’ He would not publish it.

Other publishers said the
same, not only in the U.K. but in
the U.S. Now, however, the book
has been printed by a small
Australian publishing company
(Veritas) and is being sold here.
In Aussie it is a best seller.

Macmillan’s attitude was
understandable. He was close to
Churchill. But the man hasn’t yet
been born who was without
warts, and Irving shows all of
Churchill’s and adds a few.
Among other things, he paints
Churchill as a lush who alarmed
Mackenzie. King and worried
Franklin Roosevelt.

If you are a Churchill fan, as |
am, you will hate this ‘book
because Irving hates Churchill.
He has made no secret of it in his
book-plugging tours. But that
only adds to the fascination of
this 600-page tome that took 10
years to put together,

In Irving’s view, Churchill
should have made a. deal with
Hitler. That he failed to do so led
to the breakup of the British
Empire, in. which the Americans
joined joyfully. It also doomed
much of Europe through air at-

tack and led to the triumph of.

Bolshevism. Hitler is shown as
wanting nothing from the British
except the return of the former
German colonies. * ;
According to Irving, Churchill
was his own general, admiral and

air marshal and was the architect
of many disasters. He caused the
Germans to invade Norway by
planning to move into that coun-
try himself, but was out-smarted.
Churchill also committed a war
crime by smashing the French
fleet at Dakar.

He messed up in the Mediter-
Tanean by going to the aid of
Greece and defending Crete. This
split the British Army of the Nile,
and caused the 194) defeat in
Libya. General Wavel! became the
scapegoat.

As Britain moved deeper into
the mire, he sold everything to
the U.S. - British assets in North
America and scientific wonders
of the day in which the
Americans lagged far behind. His
aim was to get the Americans in-
to the war. To achieve that,
nothing was sacred.

For 50 beaten-up old
destroyers, only two of which
were of any use, he traded bases
in the West Indies ‘‘in perpetui-
ty.’? The Americans, meanwhile,
far from wanting to save civiliza-
tion, were nothing but hard-eyed
Yankee traders. Lend-Lease was
a ripoff and it wasn’t until their
own ass was kicked that they
came in.

There’s a lot more. Irving con-
tends that Churchill invited the
bombings of Britain by striking
at German civilian targets first,
albeit with much less success than

Hitler had when he attacked the
U.K. Of the raids that killed
7,000 people in Londo- in
September, 1940, he writes:

“The British people could not
know that for reasons of grand
Strategy Churchill and Boniter
Command had done their utmost
te induce this outrage.’’
Winston, meanwhile, is quoted as
saying during the Blitz: ‘‘The
sound of these cannon gives me a
tremendous feeling...’’.

Irving may be correct about
much of this. For my money,
Churchill was right to fight Hitler
tooth and nail at whatever cost.
Who is to say what the Nazis
would have done if Britain had
concluded a deal? Wasn't there a
deal over Czechoslovakia? Did
that stop the invasion of Poland?

The one thing that sticks in my
throat, though, is Irving’s heavy
hint that Churchill was a coward.
Privy to nearly all German plans
through Ultra, the marvellous
British code-breaking system,
Churchill, says Irving, used that
knowledge to skip out of London
when the Luftwaffe was coming
— while urging the hapless pea-
sants on to greater efforts. (This
has been emphatically denied by
Sir John Colville, one of Chur-
chill’s key secretaries in 1940.)

With regret, however, I must
say that-this book will have to be
reckoned with when the final tal-
ly on World War Two is made.
The research is awesome. There
are alsy some laughs. We learn,
for instance, that the Americans
called the foppish Anthcny Eden
‘Miss England.”? (Churchill’s
War, The Struggle For Power;
Veritas; $39.95.)

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