Dedicated to Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, GC.,CdG, heroine
of the French Resistance in 1943. Also an author of children's
stories: "Twenty Jataka Tales" retold.
"If democracy and Parliamentary institutions are to triumph in this war, it is absolutely necessary that Governments resting upon them shall be able to act and dare, that the servants of the Crown shall not be harassed by nagging and snarling, that enemy propaganda shall not be fed needlessly out of our own hands and our reputation disparaged and undermined throughout the world."
—WSC, House of Commons, 2 July 1943
Ypres Remembered
YPRES, AUGUST 15TH— For four long, gruesome years beginning in 1914, when German troops roared across Belgium on the way to France, this city was all but surrounded by the fetid trenches and desolate no man's land of the Ypres Salient, a critical bulge in a battle line that stretched almost all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel. Near-ceaseless shelling and three major confrontations obliterated the town and forced its inhabitants to flee. Exhibits at the museum describe the German introduction of chemical weaponry; daily life behind the front lines; the carnage at field medical stations; and the miraculous Christmas truce of 1914, when, without leave from their officers, German and Allied soldiers met in no man's land to celebrate Christmas together.
For much of the war, the Ypres salient was occupied by the Allies, especially the British, whose troops came from all over the empire: Scots, Jamaicans, Indians and Canadians, along with English, Irish and Welsh. More than 400,000 of them died here, which has made Ypres a place of special meaning to the British. "I should like us to acquire the whole of the ruins of Ypres. A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world," Winston Churchill said in 1919.
About 200 Great War cemeteries surround the town, including Tyne Cot just northeast of Ypres. To honor the almost 100,000 unidentified British dead from the Ypres salient, the English built a massive stone gate by the canal on the east side of town. There I saw wreaths of red paper poppies placed by people who haven't forgotten the significance of the Great War.
—SUSAN SPANO, LOS ANGELES TIMES
Unsordid Correction, Part II
WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 6TH— In George Mason University's History News Network (hnn.us/articles/1712.html), Professor James Lachlan MacLeod of the University of Evansville, Indiana, offered a good article explaining how widely Churchill's remark, "the most unsordid act...in history", was ascribed to the postwar Marshall Plan, when in fact it referred to the wartime LendLease Act.
Prof. MacLeod rightly corrected Finest Hour for suggesting (in "Datelines," issue 96) that Churchill's first reference to the "unsordid act" was in 1945, when it was really in 1941, and we have corrected this on our website. But he incorrectly stated that Finest Hour"p'ms the blame" for attribution to the Marshall Plan on Dean Acheson's 1960 book, Sketches from Life. (We simply reported that the New York Times had so ascribed the error.) If any reader can direct us to a writer who credited "Unsordid Act" to the Marshall Plan before Dean Acheson in 1960, we would be pleased to know about it.
Sordid Correction
ORLANDO, FLA., OCTOBER 28TH— "News for Tuesday," in the Orlando Sentinel favorably mentions Bodyguard of Lies, by Anthony Cave Brown (1975), which, they said, "details the massive misinformation campaign waged by the Allies to win World War II. The book title comes from Winston Churchill's remark, 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.' The good achieved by the World War II deception is undeniable. But there is a cost. Any time government is less than candid, it creates a tiny doubt that can bloom into a conspiracy."
The Churchill Centre website has a rapid response section for nonsense in the media, where the Orlando Sentinel joins a distinguished list of perpetrators. FH wrote the editors:
"'News for Tuesday,' 28 October 2003, praises a book about 'good' World War II deception, Bodyguard of Lies. Good lies there may be—but you should know this is a discredited work. Among other things, it floats the ridiculous myth that Churchill let Coventry burn in a German air raid to protect his source of secret intelligence. (In fact, Churchill was headed for the country that afternoon; misinformed that the raid would be over London, he turned his car around and headed for the capital, to await the bombers that never came.)" See also "Leading Churchill Myths (3)" in Finest Hour 114.
"Churchill and the Baltic"
Bonnie L. Randall found the editors two-part article "Churchill and the Baltic" (FH 53-54) on our website, and wondered about the absence of footnotes and the author's credentials. The reply may interest readers. The back issues are available from our Washington office.
(To Ms. Randall.) Thanks for the kind words about my articles, which as printed contain eighty-two footnotes. I was surprised to learn they were not on the web version and asked our webmaster to add them to it.
My credentials to write about the Baltic are only those of a layman. I am of part-Latvian descent and own about 100 books on Latvia and the Baltic States, which I visited in 1992 and 1995. My Churchill studies led me to explore his attitude toward the Baltic; I concluded that Churchill comes in for more criticism than he deserves.
In 1995 with three colleagues I bicycled Latvia south to north, from the Lithuanian to the Estonian border, under Churchill Centre auspices. {FH 87, page 27.) The purpose was to commemorate the ongoing battle, post-VE-Day, for Baltic freedom, which continued into the mid-Fifties. We met President Ulmanis and several local officials. When we said "Churchill" they often replied, "Yalta," accompanied by hard stares. Churchill was a hard sell. They regarded the 1945 Yalta Conference as a sell-out of Baltic independence. The Mayor of Liepaja told us that it would have been best all-round if we had nuked the USSR in 1945. We said the Anglo-American public would have never stood for that. He replied, "Just think how much trouble it would have saved you, not to mention us." As a boy, he had been strafed and wounded by Soviet beach guards for violating curfew. He was lucky to have escaped with his life. It all depends on your perspective.
At Yalta, what little influence Churchill had was directed to rescuing Poland, which proved a forlorn hope. There was no chance to save the Baltic States, surrounded by a sea of Red Army divisions, though the resistance was still holding out in Courland when peace was declared on 8 May 1945. But I've always believed that in their hearts as well as officially, Churchill and Attlee fully supported the Baltic cause. Postwar British Prime Ministers preserved the independent Baltic embassies and safeguarded their gold reserves. As Larry Arnn once put it, Churchill's actions at Yalta were "the best he could do with the situation at hand." —RML
History Channel Video
WASHINGTON— Steve Goldfien advises that he ordered a History Channel DVD on Churchill which is portrayed as a "new" offering in mail-order video catalogues. However, this is the A&E Biography series narrated by Sir Martin Gilbert, marketed by the History Channel. This was not apparent from the catalogue. Steve and the editor, who made the same mistake, wish to warn that this is not "new."
Livadia Palace Library Building
WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 2ND— The Churchill Centre is helping to provide a complete set of Churchill's books for the Churchill Room at Livadia Palace, Yalta, where Lady Soames asked our help in holding the Churchillian end up against a massive exhibit dedicated to Roosevelt. Laurence Geller, Craig Horn, Devoy White, and Richard Langworth contributed books or funds to the project; Churchillbooks.com provided a large number of titles they could not locate individually.
The only titles we still need are: River War, World Crisis, Unrelenting Struggle, End of the Beginning, Onwards to Victory, War Speeches, Stemming the Tide, History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Unwritten Alliance, American Civil War, Young Winston's Wars, Complete Speeches, and Collected Essays.
Lady Soames is designing a bookplate which will bear the name of the donors. If you wish to donate any books, please contact the editor.
Scarecrow Extremes
WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 28TH— As the quadrennial American Presidential campaigns heat up with only (arrgh!) a year to go, the current incumbent is being compared to Winston Churchill by his supporters and Adolf Hitler by his opponents: which puts us in mind of Churchill's 1946 remarks to the General Assembly of Virginia:
"I read the other day that an English nobleman, whose name is new to me, has stated that England would have to become the forty-ninth state of the American Union. I read yesterday that an able American editor had written that the United States ought not to be asked to re-enter the British Empire. It seems to me, and I dare say it seems to you, that the path of wisdom lies somewhere between these scarecrow extremes."
