Books
A Yankee at the Court
Robert Skidelsky
Churchill and Morton: Correspondence between Major Sir Desmond Morton and R. W. Thompson R. W. Thompson (Hodder and Stoughton £5.25) It was in 1960 that the war correspondent, Reginald Thompson, began his attempt to assess Churchill 'as a person and a personality, and his impact on his times in that light'. He had become convinced that while Churchill's eloquence and courage had helped save Britain in 1940, the war leader had later sold Britain (and Europe) down the river, leaving them to be distributed between America and Russia. The nub of the matter, as he saw it, was Churchill's failure to preserve an independent foreign policy in the war years. Such a policy i would have rejected unconditional surrender and tried for a compromise peace with a non-Nazi Germany. This would have preserved Germany's defensive capacity in Eastern Europe, and kept Britain as an independent force in world politics.
Churchill's failure to defend Britain's interests has to be understood, Thompson insists, in personal terms. The clues are to be found in his mixed Marlborough and Yankee ancestry. The first led him to play the part of Supreme War Lord, with disastrous results which undermined Britain's Position in the Middle and Fat' East. The second led him to subordinate Britain's interests too readily to those of the United States. (The triumph of the Yankee in him Was helped by his tortured relationship with his American mother: adoring her, but denied her love, he offered her his father's kingdom.) Thus Churchill renounced Britain's European mission: 'Europe was Winston's continent. There lay his role. Without his American obsessions, which were in his blood, he might have been ,one of the greatest Europeans of all time'.
So writes Thompson to Sir Desmond Morton in this fascinating exchange of letters written between 1960 and 1962, and now published for the first time. They were a kind of intellectual preparation for Thompson's book The Yankee Marlborough (1963), with Sir Desmond Morton, formerly of military intelligence and an intimate of Churchill for thirty years, acting as a sounding board for Thompson's ideas and an initiator into the mysteries of the Churchill personality. Yet The Yankee Marlborough, and Thompson's other books on the same subject, have sunk with hardly a trace. One can see why. He doesn't carry the historical guns to compel attention. Moreover, his theme is controversial— 'blasphemies about the Father-figure'but not fashionable. For most people the point about the war was the defeat of the Nazis, and it hardly matters that Britain did not emerge as strong as it might have. Besides, the type of anti-Churchill critique which Thompson represents has come mainly from the military lobby, and everyone knows that generals, and their defenders, always blame politicians for preventing victory, or robbing them of its fruits— particularly if the politician in question fancies himself as a strategist.
Yet, for the historian, it remains a tremendous subject which has never been properly tackled. Britain went to war in September 1939 to preserve itself as a Great Power. No important person at the time, least of all Churchill, would have justified the war on the ground that Nazism had to be destroyed or even, I think, on the ground that Germany posed an imminent threat to British independence, which was plainly absurd. To say afterwards that the war was justified because Nazism was destroyed, and British territorial integrity preserved, is to invent quite different war aims from the one with which Britain started. And that original aim was clearly not achieved. Britain has struggled through the postwar years as an increasingly enfeebled satellite of America, because the war destroyed, or fatally undermined, all the props of its previous position. The Second World War, in short, is the central episode in Britain's astonishingly rapid decline. So the question arises: was there some serious misjudgment in the decision to go to war in 1939? Or did the flaw in British policy develop during the war itself?
Thompson, Liddell Hart, and other critics of unconditional surrender believe the second to be true; and these letters principally discuss the way in which Churchill's personality may have contributed to that flaw. We meet an aristocratic warlord whd waged war erratically and capriciously because of a certain personal insecurity in face of the officer and gentleman class; a marvellously fertile mind with little capacity for 'basic toil' on uncongenial,
but necessary, subjects; an incurable romantic enslaved by the phrases which made each situation so 'Vivid to him; a total egocentric who expected life and people to fit the pattern of his own interests and enthusiasms; a soldier of fortune whose very lack of 'navigation' was liable to trap him in the first available drama. These traits are paraded to support a major conclusion: that Churchill was incapable of an 'objective' analysis of a si-tuation, and that the extent of his absorption in one task made him incapable of seeing that task in relatidn to others. Specifically, his obsession with destroying Germany, added to his American sympathies, blinded him to the part Germany ought to play in preserving Britain's, and Europe's independence.
M.uch of this character study is genuinely absorbing. Morton's view of Churchill as a 'magnificent character', one who does great things, independently of whether they are good or bad, hits him off perfectly. But how relevant is Churchill's character to Britain's failure to preserve its freedom of action? To suggest that he could have forced on his allies the idea of a negotiated peace with a non-Nazi Germany is fantasy. The Americans were never interested in the idea, although perhaps they should have been; the Russians had no possible interest in it once the war had started to go their way. Nor could Churchill have gone unilaterally against unconditional surrender: Morton points out rightly that 'Power, in the sense of money, men and arms was in the hands of the Americans. I do not think that Winston's hatred of the Nazis comes in there nor, he might have added, his Yankee sympathies. Britain's fate as a Great Power was decided the moment it locked itself into wartime partnership with America. Could that have been averted? I doubt it. Britain could survive as a Great Power only if it kept both the Germans and the Americans out of Western Europe. Once the Germans had reached the Channel, Britain was forced into dependence on the United States for its very survival. By a tragic irony, its finest hour marked the terminal point of its imperial greatness. It was the decisions taken between March 1939 and April 1940,'rather than anything Churchill did thereafter, which set the scene for Yalta, Potsdam, and the division of Europe.
Of course, over a longer period, the charge of Yankeeism is justified, against Churchill as well as against a governing class that since the late nineteenth century has been steadily marrying into Americah money. It helps explain why Britain over this period has chosen growing dependence on America to an alliance of equals with Germany, but it is obviously not the whole story. Germany's own ambitions, before both 1914 and 1939, posed vast problems. Perhaps even more important, though. Britain's rulers were never really prepared to accept the German claim to equality. They were the Romans, the Germans the barbarians. It was an attitude endorsed by the Yankee Marlborough.
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