Truths and Heresies

A recent film, Viceroy's House, narrates the story of the massacre in India following its independence and partition. While absolving the man most responsible—Louis Mountbatten—it charged Winston Churchill and his military secretary Hastings Ismay with the deaths of millions.

During the war, Britain had a fairly strict internment policy for incoming foreigners. Churchill certainly acknowledged the wisdom of carefully vetting incomers for enemy agents. However, Churchill quickly began to deplore the broad policy of interning refugees and foreigners, and firmly believed that no one should be imprisoned without just cause.

Beginning in the 1950s, reported UFO sightings were rampant in Great Britain. There was even a claim that Churchill ordered that one sighting be classified, in order to prevent mass hysteria in the public. This claim, unsubstantiated, is probably no more than a rumor.

At the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, historian Andrew Roberts encountered a misconception that Winston had condoned sexual assault, at a panel discussion entitled 'Churchill: Hero or Villain?' The persistence of this misconception contributes to the post-truth history that surrounds Churchill.

The worldwide media was exercised over the surfacing of what was alleged to be an unpublished Churchill article, held by the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, in which our author contemplates the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The Museum, which received the typescript from the wife of Churchill’s literary agent Emery Reves, believed the manuscript to be a new discovery. As much as we’d be pleased to find new Churchill material, however, the “Aliens” article is not new. Whole passages mark it as a variant of Churchill’s essay, “Are There Men on the Moon?” published by London’s Sunday Dispatch on 8 March 1942. In 1975 it reappeared in volume form in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill.

Critics have argued that the Allied victory in the Atlantic was delayed by Churchill’s stubborn refusal to provide Coastal Command with aircraft capable of operating in the region known as the “Air Gap”—the waters south of Greenland in which convoys could not count on air support from either land-based or carrier-borne aircraft. The implication is that millions of tons of merchant shipping and thousands of lives might have been saved if Churchill had not prioritized the bomber offensive over the U-boat war. In this article, history professor Christopher M. Bell addresses whether or not Churchill was really responsible for this delay.

Irish self-determination is something Churchill is alleged to have opposed. The truth is quite different. Readers will do well to understand the nuances.

Determined authors with an eye for scandal have an endless supply of grist to investigate every aspect Churchill's life, hoping to show that he was no greater a person than any of us, and profoundly flawed to boot. This is important apparently for our self-esteem.

Tonypandy, 1910: “Churchill sent troops to crush and kill Welsh strikers.” So goes the story. The truth is somewhat more complicated.

Randolph Churchill was an intensely interesting man. “Aside from his heroically dismal manners, his gambling, arrogance, vicious temper, indiscretions and aggression,” Andrew Roberts wrote, he “was generous, patriotic, extravagant and amazingly courageous.”

Party rat? Churchill has long been criticized for switching political parties (“ratting” in Parliamentary terms), which he did not once but twice. He left the Conservatives (Tories) for the Liberals in 1904, only to rejoin the Conservatives in 1925. Was he right or wrong?

Winston Churchill was no saint, and it is a disservice to pretend he was. But he is too complex a figure to be pigeonholed by writers who criticize without considering the full picture.