Winston Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo

Courtesy Of "Global Research"

[stamp] PRIME MINISTER'S PERSONAL MINUTE

[stamp, pen] Serial No. D. 217/4

[Seal of Prime Minister]

10 Downing Street, Whitehall [gothic script]

GENERAL ISMAY FOR C.O.S. COMMITTEE [underlined]

   1. I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas. I would not use it unless it could be shown either that (a) it was life or death for us, or (b) that it would shorten the war by a year.

   2. It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.

   3. I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas, by which I mean principally mustard. We will want to gain more ground in Normandy so as not to be cooped up in a small area. We could probably deliver 20 tons to their 1 and for the sake of the 1 they would bring their bomber aircraft into the area against our superiority, thus paying a heavy toll.

   4. Why have the Germans not used it? Not certainly out of moral scruples or affection for us. They have not used it because it does not pay them. The greatest temptation ever offered to them was the beaches of Normandy. This they could have drenched with gas greatly to the hindrance of the troops. That they thought about it is certain and that they prepared against our use of gas is also certain. But they only reason they have not used it against us is that they fear the retaliation. What is to their detriment is to our advantage.

   5. Although one sees how unpleasant it is to receive poison gas attacks, from which nearly everyone recovers, it is useless to protest that an equal amount of H. E. will not inflict greater casualties and sufferings on troops and civilians. One really must not be bound within silly conventions of the mind whether they be those that ruled in the last war or those in reverse which rule in this.

   6. If the bombardment of London became a serious nuisance and great rockets with far-reaching and devastating effect fell on many centres of Government and labour, I should be prepared to do [underline] anything [stop underline] that would hit the enemy in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention. We could stop all work at the flying bomb starting points. I do not see why we should have the disadvantages of being the gentleman while they have all the advantages of being the cad. There are times when this may be so but not now.

   7. I quite agree that it may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there. Pray address yourself to this. It is a big thing and can only be discarded for a big reason. I shall of course have to square Uncle Joe and the President; but you need not bring this into your calculations at the present time. Just try to find out what it is like on its merits.

[signed] Winston Churchill [initials]

6.7.44 [underlined]

Source: photographic copy of original 4 page memo, in Guenther W. Gellermann, "Der Krieg, der nicht stattfand", Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1986, pp. 249-251

 =====

Winston S. Churchill: departmental minute (Churchill papers: 16/16) 12 May 1919 War Office

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. 

from Companion Volume 4, Part 1 of the official biography, WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, by Martin Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1976)

===

Henry Gonzalez, US Congressman, referred to this in the House of Representatives on March 24, 1992:

"But there again, where is the moral right? The first one to use gas against Arabs was Winston Churchill, the British, in the early 1920's. They were Iraq Arabs they used them against." http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920324g.htm

"Moral right" is of course the reason this piece of history has now been dredged up again - by people who see contradictions in the pious arguments of Messrs. Bush, Blair et al. And this seems only fair. In 1998 Clinton denounced opponents to his planned attack on Iraq for "not remembering the past".

> I remain unconvinced that the UK used chemical weapons > in the middle east in the 1920s.... > but I'm open to correction.

Not easy. And if you'd rather not...

Churchill thought of it as poison gas - and so, apparently did everyone else. The idea of using it was his alone. And he is also is also to have given the authorization to the RAF. He wanted gas to be used in addition to regular bombing: "against recalcitrant Arabs as experiment". According to Simons, gas was not dispensed in bombs.

The intention was to quell a growing rebellion in remote villages. He met with objections but maintained that "we cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier".

It seems Churchill wanted to cause "disablement", "discomfort or illness, but not death".

In any case, to Churchill this was not a moral issue. Here is part of a memo, so you can 

see it through his eyes. He wrote this during WWII, when he contemplated using poison gas, but never did:

===

Excerpts below by www.informationwar.org

BACKGROUND: In 1917, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the British occupied Iraq and established a colonial government. The Arab and Kurdish people of Iraq resisted the British occupation, and by 1920 this had developed into a full scale national revolt, which cost the British dearly. As the Iraqi resistance gained strength, the British resorted to increasingly repressive measures, including the use of posion gas.] NB: 

Because of formatting problems, quotation marks will appear as stars *    All quotes in the excerpt are properly footnoted in the original book, with full references to British archives and papers.  Excerpt from pages 179-181 of Simons, Geoff. *IRAQ: FROM SUMER TO SUDAN*. London: St. Martins Press, 1994:

    Winston Churchill, as colonial secretary, was sensitive to the cost of policing the Empire; and was in consequence keen to exploit the potential of modern technology. This strategy had particular relevance to operations in Iraq. On 19 February, 1920, before the start of the Arab uprising, Churchill (then Secretary for War and Air) wrote to Sir Hugh Trenchard, the pioneer of air warfare. Would it be possible for Trenchard to take control of Iraq? This would entail *the provision of some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death...for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes.*

    Churchill was in no doubt that gas could be profitably employed against the Kurds and Iraqis (as well as against other peoples in the Empire): *I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.* Henry Wilson shared Churchills enthusiasm for gas as an instrument of colonial control but the British cabinet was reluctant to sanction the use of a weapon that had caused such misery and revulsion in the First World War. Churchill himself was keen to argue that gas, fired from ground-based guns or dropped from aircraft, would cause *only discomfort or illness, but not death* to dissident tribespeople; but his optimistic view of the effects of gas were mistaken. It was likely that the suggested gas would permanently damage eyesight and *kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes.*

    Churchill remained  unimpressed by such considerations, arguing that the use of gas, a *scientific expedient,* should not be prevented *by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly*. In the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with excellent moral effect* though gas shells were not dropped from aircraft because of practical difficulties [.....]

    Today in 1993 there are still Iraqis and Kurds who remember being bombed and machine-gunned by the RAF in the 1920s. A Kurd from the Korak mountains commented, seventy years after the event: *They were bombing here in the Kaniya Khoran...Sometimes they raided three times a day.* Wing Commander Lewis, then of 30 Squadron (RAF), Iraq, recalls how quite often *one would get a signal that a certain Kurdish village would have to be bombed...*, the RAF pilots being ordered to bomb any Kurd who looked hostile. In the same vein, Squadron-Leader Kendal of 30 Squadron recalls that if the tribespeople were doing something they ought not be doing then you shot them.*

    Similarly, Wing-Commander Gale, also of 30 Squadron: *If the Kurds  hadn't learned by our example to behave themselves in a civilised way then we had to spank their bottoms. This was done by bombs and guns.

    Wing-Commander Sir Arthur Harris (later Bomber Harris, head of wartime  Bomber Command) was happy to emphasise that *The Arab and Kurd now   know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five   minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.*  It was an easy matter to bomb and machine-gun the tribespeople, because they had no means of defence or retalitation. Iraq and Kurdistan were also useful laboratories for new weapons; devices specifically developed by the Air Ministry for use against tribal villages. The ministry drew up a list of possible weapons, some of them the forerunners of napalm and air-to-ground missiles:

    Phosphorus bombs, war rockets, metal crowsfeet [to maim livestock] man-killing shrapnel, liquid fire, delay-action bombs. Many of these weapons were first used in Kurdistan.

Excerpt from pages 179-181 of Simons, Geoff. *Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam*.

London: St. Martins Press, 1994.

Churchill Wanted To 'Drench' Germany With Poison Gas

Mark Weber writes,

In a secret wartime memorandum, Winston Churchill told his advisers that he wanted to "drench" Germany with poison gas. Churchill's July 1944 memo to his chief of staff Gen. Hastings Ismay was reproduced in the August-September 1985 issue of American Heritage magazine.

"I you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas," the four-page note began. Britain's wartime leader continued: "It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it [gas] in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women."

Churchill's directive bluntly stated: "I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay to use poison gas ... One really must not be bound within silly conventions of the mind whether they be those that ruled in the last war or those in reverse which rule in this." Specifically he proposed: "We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention ... It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent. In the meantime, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by the particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now here now there."

Churchill's proposal, which would have meant violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of poison gas, was never adopted. His military advisers argued that gas warfare would divert Allied war planes from the more effective strategy of bombing Germany's industries and cities. Gas attacks would not be decisive, they feared, and Germany would very probably retaliate with devastating effect against Britain. Churchill complained to an associate that he was "not at all convinced by this negative report," but he reluctantly gave in. "Clearly I cannot make head against the parsons and the warriors at the same time," he complained in private.

The American Heritage article, written by Stanford University history professor Barton J. Bernstein, also reported that top American military officials urged the U.S. to begin gas warfare against Japan. Maj. Gen. William N. Porter, chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, pleaded in mid-December 1943 with U.S. Army superiors to initiate gas warfare against the Japanese, and on several occasions in 1945 Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff, urged using gas in the Pacific. There was some popular support for this view. The New York Daily News declared "We Should Gas Japan," and Washington Times-Herald agreed, explaining "You Can Cook `Em Better with Gas." But this was a minority view. About 75 percent of Americans reportedly opposed initiating gas warfare. After the war Gen. Marshall said that the main reason that gas wasn't used was opposition from the British, who feared that a desperate German might then use it in Europe.

The United States produced about 135,000 tons of chemical warfare agents during the war, while Germany turned out about 70,000 tons, Britain about 40,000 and Japan only 7,500 tons. Although the Allies had larger stockpiles of traditional chemical agents, Germany developed far more advanced and lethal nerve gasses, most notably the devastating agents Tabun, Sarin and Soman. They were never used.

After the war a British Army chemical warfare expert concluded that Germany could have delayed the June 1944 Allied cross-channel invasion by six months if it had gas. "Such a delay," he noted, "could have given the Germans sufficient time to complete their new V-weapons, which would have made the Allies' task all the harder and England's long range bombardment considerably worse." Even in March and April 1945, when German military resistance was rapidly collapsing, Germany kept its pledge not to use gas. Hitler reportedly refused to consider using poison gas in part because of his recollection of the horror of his own gassing during the First World War, which temporarily blinded him.

The Churchill You Didn't Know

Thousands voted him the greatest Briton - but did they know about his views on Gandhi, gassing and Jews...

Research by Amy Iggulden
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and nazism, I would choose communism.
Speaking in the House of Commons, autumn 1937

I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes.
Writing as president of the Air Council, 1919

It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.
Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931

(India is) a godless land of snobs and bores.
In a letter to his mother, 1896

I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place.
Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937

(We must rally against) a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin.
Quoted in the Boston Review, April/May 2001

"The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives and most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre - horrid and inexorcisable.
Writing in The World Crisis and the Aftermath, 1923-31

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.
Churchill to Asquith, 1910

One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
From his Great Contemporaries, 1937

You are callous people who want to wreck Europe - you do not care about the future of Europe, you have only your own miserable interests in mind.
Addressing the London Polish government at a British Embassy meeting, October 1944

So far as Britain and Russia were concerned, how would it do for you to have 90% of Romania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50/50 about Yugoslavia?
Addressing Stalin in Moscow, October 1944

This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
Writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 1920

Churchill Spurred The Decline Of The West

By Patrick J. Buchanan,
September 05, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

On September 3, 2009, a debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared, at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster, in London, considered the question: "Resolved: Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world."

Speakers for the motion: Pat Buchanan, Nigel Knight, political scientist and economist at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Norman Stone, historian and professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara.

Speakers against the motion: Antony Beevor, historian and author of the best-selling book Stalingrad; professor Richard Overy, historian, author of many books and articles on the Second World War and the Nazi regime; and Andrew Roberts, historian, who has spent 20 years writing, researching, and broadcasting about Churchill and the Second World War.

We publish below Pat Buchanan’s opening statement:

To borrow from Mark Antony’s funeral oration, we of the affirmative are not here to praise Mr. Churchill — but to bury him.

But, first, let us concede the greatness of the man.

In that finest hour of the British nation, 1940, Winston Churchill was indomitable, an inspiration to men everywhere. He was the Lion who gave Britain’s roar of defiance in the face of Hitler’s Germany. For that, he will be honored by peoples everywhere — and forever.

And if we judged him on that year alone, there would be no debate. There would be unanimity.

But Churchill’s career did not last a single year. It lasted half a century. And, over that half century, no other career of a Western statesman was more calamitous for his country and his civilization than that of Winston Spencer Churchill.

More than any other British leader, in 1914 and 1939, Churchill lusted for war and pushed his country to turn two European wars into world wars, so Germany might be destroyed.

Both times, he succeeded.

And history records that those wars, that together took the lives of perhaps a hundred million Europeans, were the mortal blows that advanced the death of the West.

And it was Winston Churchill who led the West in its advance to barbarism.

As First Lord he instituted a starvation blockade that violated all the rules of civilized warfare and brought death to 100 times as many German civilians as there were Belgian victims of the Kaiser’s army.

Churchill’s purpose: it is, he said "to starve the whole population, men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound, into submission."

Four months after Germany laid down her arms, the starvation blockade remained in force. And Churchill rose in Parliament to exult: "We are enforcing the blockade with rigour and Germany is near starvation."

In 1920, as Secretary for War and Air, Churchill, enraged by Iraqi resistance to British colonial rule, declaimed, "I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes to spread a lively terror."

Eighty years later, Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali would be hanged in Baghdad for doing what Churchill urged Britain to do and what Britain did.

The day he became Prime Minister in 1940, as the German army was breaking through in the Ardennes, Churchill directed his bombers not against Rommel’s Panzers, but Rhineland cities, in what your historian Paul Johnson calls "a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times."

Coventry and the Blitz were war crimes.

But they were also reprisal raids for the terror bombing begun by Churchill. The climax came in 1945 with Thunderclap, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Florence on the Elbe, a defenseless city of a defeated nation packed with refugees fleeing the serial rapists of the Red Army. Estimates of the dead range from 35,000 to 250,000.

But he was a great war strategist, we are told.

But the greatest British debacle of World War I was Gallipoli, an ill-conceived drive to force the Dardanelles that cost a quarter of a million British, French and Anzac dead and wounded. Architect of the disaster: First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.

The greatest British debacle of World War II was Norway, when the invading Royal Marines arrived 24 hours after German troops had landed and occupied all the major Norwegian ports from Oslo to Narvik. Architect of the disaster: First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.

One British historian suggests the Norway operation was blown by Churchill himself, blabbing his plans to neutral press attaches, where German intelligence picked them up. That historian? Andrew Roberts.

What of Churchill the statesman?

In 1921, the Americans demanded that Britain come to a Washington Naval Conference, agree to scrap hundreds of warships, and sever a 20-year alliance with a Japan that had been faithful throughout World War I. Churchill urged capitulation to the Americans, and Britain capitulated, terminated the Japanese treaty, and began dismantling the greatest navy in the world.

British historian Correlli Barnett calls that capitulation to American demands, at Churchill’s insistence, "one of the major catastrophes of English history."

Five years later, Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill said, do not worry: "War with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonable government need take into account." In 1942, Singapore fell, and the empire was finished in Asia.

When Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936, Churchill hailed the French for taking the matter to the League of Nations.. But the ideal solution, he wrote, would be for Hitler to do the "noble" thing, and march back out of the Rhineland.

Apparently, Hitler did not read the column.

In 1939, he Churchill pushed his country to go to war for Poland. Britain did. Was Poland saved? Instead of losing Danzig, the Poles lost half their country, six million dead, and fifty years of freedom.

Churchill excoriated Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler. But Churchill’s four years of appeasement of Stalin make Neville Chamberlain at Munich look like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

At Moscow, Teheran, Yalta, Churchill told Stalin he could keep all the fruits of his devil’s pact with Hitler including the three Baltic republics. He acceded to Moscow’s domination of Eastern and Central Europe in violation of his solemn pledge in the Atlantic Charter.

When he came back from Yalta in 1945, Churchill told Parliament, "I know of no Government which stands to its obligations more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government."

Churchill then gave his benediction to the most barbaric act of ethnic cleansing in history: the forced expulsion of 13 million German old men, women and children from their ancestral homes. Two million died in the exodus.

At war’s end, Germany was a smoldering ruin but all the great capitals of Central and Eastern Europe — Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Vienna – were occupied by Stalin’s Red Army. Britain was bankrupt and broken. The empire was collapsing. And the Americans were going home.

But there was this consolation: Haile Selassie was back on his throne in Addis Ababa.

When Churchill entered the inner Cabinet as First Lord in 1911, Britain was first nation on earth and ruler of the greatest empire since Rome. When he left in 1945, Britain was an island dependency of the United States. He was a Great Man — at the cost of his country’s greatness.

Read more by Patrick J. Buchanan

• Did World War II Have To Happen? – August 31st, 2009
• Afghanistan, the Unwinnable War – August 13th, 2009
• Tell Israel: Cool the Jets! – July 30th, 2009
• Tiananmen Moments – June 18th, 2009

Chruchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War

By Patrick J. Buchanan
• Reviewed by: Robert Higgs
Courtesy of The Freeman Online

As a soldier, politician, and writer, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965) made a deep imprint on world history for more than half a century. He is best known for rallying his countrymen during the fateful Battle of Britain when he was prime minister—thereby, many people believe, stemming the flood that was sweeping Adolf Hitler to world conquest. Small wonder that Time magazine named him its Man of the Century, a designation that many other admirers have embraced.

Churchill, however, never waited idly for the world to construct his legend. From the 1890s onward, he strove to put himself in the places, especially the wars, where he would be best situated to advance his fame and realize his ambitions, and as he made his way through a series of adventures, he promptly wrote articles and books about each of them, thus shaping in large degree how others would view his actions. Moreover, he was an excellent writer; his articles and books sold very well, and in 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His sharp wit and dazzling rhetoric enhanced his reputation.

In Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War,” Patrick J. Buchanan seeks to demolish the Churchill myth, along with several related ones, which he does with surprising success. I say “surprising,” not because the myth itself was ever unassailable—excellent historians, including Ralph Raico, long ago pounded Churchill’s feet of clay into dust—but because Buchanan is known primarily as an ideological polemicist. Yet in this book he presents respectably balanced and well-documented arguments for his theses. If he is not himself a professional historian, he has absorbed the works of scores of well-reputed historians, and he carefully assesses a number of counterarguments against his position. Although Buchanan presents no previously unreported facts, he offers abundant evidence expressed in clear, forceful prose. All in all, he makes a persuasive case.

Buchanan correctly views the two world wars as “two phases of a Thirty Years’ War.” He argues that both phases were unnecessary and that Great Britain “turned both European wars into world wars.”

For World War I, he maintains: “Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.”

For World War II, he maintains: “Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year war in which fifty million would perish.”

He argues that the decisive event in the run-up to World War II was not the infamous 1938 appeasement at Munich—because the Germans had good reason to reabsorb the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia—but the 1939 guarantee, which was foolish of the British to make and foolish of the Poles to rely on. It was foolish because Britain had no means of defending Poland. When Hitler attacked in 1939, after Polish leaders refused to return Danzig to Germany, the British could only watch helplessly.

Buchanan begins his narrative at the end of the nineteenth century and ends it at the conclusion of World War II. Churchill occupies center stage in this extended drama because he “was the most bellicose champion of British entry into the European war of 1914 and the German-Polish war of 1939.” Along the way, Buchanan adduces evidence that Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria and nephew of King Edward VII, did not seek war with Great Britain (in 1910, he “marched in Edward’s funeral—in the uniform of a British field marshal”). Likewise, 30 years later, Hitler wished to avoid war with Great Britain, whose people and empire he admired: “His dream was of an alliance with the British Empire, not its ruin.”

The Lebensraum he sought lay to the east of Germany, not to the west. The Germans did not seek to “conquer the world,” despite frequent claims to that effect, and in any event, they lacked the means to achieve such a conquest.

No short review can depict the breadth, the depth, and the many fascinating details of Buchanan’s book. Read it and see for yourself. It may well challenge your most cherished beliefs about Winston Churchill and the world-shattering Thirty Years’ War of 1914–45.

Published by: Crown Books • Year: 2008 • Price: $29.95 hardcover and e-book; $20 paperback • Pages: 544 •

About the Author

Robert Higgs is senior fellow at the Independent Institute, editor of The Independent Review, and author of Neither Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government (Independent Institute).

See All Posts by This Author

Churchill's Secret Army Lived On

By Sanchia Berg
Today Programme
Page last updated at 06:01 GMT, Saturday, 13 December 2008
Courtesy Of The BBC

Files released this autumn at the National Archives in Kew include one dossier showing how the Special Operations Executive - Churchill's "secret army" - was not disbanded at the end of the Second World War, as is commonly thought.

Instead, nearly 300 agents were brought into the Secret Intelligence Service - later MI6.

Officially SOE, the organisation set up to run resistance in occupied countries, was "liquidated" in January 1946.

SOE operatives were trained in all aspects of clandestine operations. They organised sabotage, guerrilla actions, black propaganda operations and financial warfare. They were active in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

SOE researchers had perfected secret communications and even developed weapons such as exploding rats.

Training schools, like the one at Beaulieu in Hampshire, taught agents all manner of spy techniques, including how to kill an opponent with their bare hands.

When peace came, some in Churchill's government argued that SOE could have a valuable role. Lord Selborne, the minister responsible, suggested it could be used to run clandestine operations in communist Europe and elsewhere. But the incoming Labour Government was less enthusiastic. It was Clement Attlee who oversaw its demise.

Secret Operations

The recently released file reveals the liquidation was a front. One briefing paper for the Chiefs of Defence Staff from January 1946 shows that while the "liquidation party" at SOE's headquarters was closing down the office, 280 of its personnel were becoming "Special Operations Branch".

The plan was for them to be headed by "C" - the head of SIS - but to work independently.

SOE agents were trained in secret locations around Britain

However, in just a matter of weeks "C" - Sir Stewart Menzies - had decided that the idea of a separate branch was "unsound". He told the Chiefs of Defence Staff that he believed it would be better simply to merge them.

Though in wartime SIS and SOE had sometimes worked well together, they were in many ways quite different.

SIS had been founded in 1909, to secretly acquire intelligence. SOE - founded in 1940 - was far brasher, by the end of the war far bigger, and operated in a way that was closer to the James Bond idea of the secret agent.

So did merging the two mean the transformation of the secret service?

Dr Philip Davies, author of "MI6 and the Machinery of Spying", knew about the merger - though he had not seen the detailed manpower figures - and considers it more of a takeover.

He says that it was the acquisition of the training and research staff which was probably most significant, as SIS had few facilities in this area.

When it came to operations, Sir Stewart Menzies made sure that any decisions were left to SIS staff, and the Foreign Office had to approve foreign actions, so the intake of SOE staff didn't mean that James Bond came to SIS.

Nonetheless, some of the SOE staff brought in did run clandestine operations within the expanded service.

SOE and SIS

David Smiley, one of the SOE officers who operated behind enemy lines

I met probably the only surviving senior officer who did so - Colonel David Smiley, now 92.

The first time he went into Albania was with SOE in 1943. His task was to organise partisans to fight the Nazis. It was a difficult assignment. The conditions were harsh - and the Albanians reluctant to fight.

In Albania he had poor experience of the "other" service. An SIS agent had "hijacked" one of his supply drops.

"There was no love lost between SOE and SIS" he told me.

At the end of the war, David Smiley was invited to join SIS. As far as he knew, he was one of only three ex-SOE agents to do so.

In the late 1940s he was given another Albanian assignment - his first for SIS.

This time, David Smiley was to train pro-British Albanians and then infiltrate them into the newly Communist state from a base in Malta.

The operation ran from 1949 -1950. His task ended once the Albanians had gone in.

David Smiley was very concerned to discover later that his agents had been quickly captured.

He told me that for years he wondered how it had come about: had one of "his" Albanians been taken and "spilled the beans"?

He later learned that the operation had been betrayed by Kim Philby.

According to Dr Philip Davies, SIS ran similar operations in Ukraine, and the Baltic States.

Pro-British Albanians were trained by the SIS after WWII

The aim was to send in "stay behinds" - nationals of the country, working for the West, who would only become active in case of war. But here too, the networks were betrayed and the agents captured by the communists.

Other files uncovered at the National Archives show that it was the Russian nuclear bomb which put a stop to these adventures.

Once the Russians had tested their device, and there was evidence that they could deploy nuclear weapons, a secret Cabinet committee decided it was too risky to continue with such clandestine operations. Any escalation would be far too dangerous.

This part of history seems to be emerging in fragments - a veteran's recollections here, the odd file coming out at the National Archives.

MI5 - the domestic security service - is making its archive public. So far, the files run to the early 1950s.

By contrast, SIS, or MI6, has no plans to release any part of its own archive. The documents I found were in a folder from the Air Ministry.

Life with the partisans behind the lines in WWII In pictures