Subscribe now and receive weekly newsletters with educational materials, new courses, interesting posts, popular books, and much more!
Articles
Churchill’s Animal Analogies: Enemy Crocodiles, 1907-1945
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | March 11, 2022
- Category: Q & A The Literary Churchill
Crocodiles and that ilk
My colleague and friend, the biographer Andrew Roberts, asks how often Churchill described the Soviets as crocodiles. The answer is: a lot—but not just the Soviets. A search of Churchill’s canon produces an interesting review of a literary technique: animal analogies. Piers Brendon’s charming and comprehensive Churchill’s Bestiary (2018) is a particularly good source.
Churchill was generally an animal lover, but nursed a serious dislike for certain species. He wrote about the Nile crocodile after touring Kenya as Undersecretary for the Colonies in 1907. In his travelogue, My African Journey, he rather sheepishly admits his dislike, while demonstrating his flair for narrative:
I avow, with what regrets may be necessary, an active hatred of these brutes and a desire to kill them. It was a tempting shot, for the ruffian lay sleeping in the sun-blaze, his mouth wide open and his fat and scaly flanks exposed…. The crocodile gave one leap of mortal agony or surprise and disappeared in the waters. But then it was my turn to be astonished…. At the sound of the shot the whole of this bank of the river, over the extent of at least a quarter of a mile, sprang into hideous life, and my companions and I saw hundreds and hundreds of crocodiles, of all sorts and sizes, rushing madly into the Nile, whose waters along the line of the shore were lashed into white foam, exactly as if a heavy wave had broken.1
Bolshevik crocodiles
Nothing happened to awaken Churchill’s aversion until the Bolshevik Revolution and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1917-18. Affronted by Britain’s loss of a Great War ally, and Lenin’s assault on liberty, he revived his images of the reptilian predators. As Minister of War (1919-21), he supported the vain military support of the White Russian resistance. In The Aftermath, his account of the decade after the war, he wrote of Lenin’s misleading assurances of moderation:
The Supreme Committee, sub-human or superhuman—which you will—crocodiles with master minds, entered upon their responsibilities upon November 8 [1917]. Many tears and guttural purrings were employed in inditing the decree of peace.… But the Petrograd wireless stirred the ether in vain. The Crocodiles listened attentively for the response; but there was only silence.2
In 1920, Commissar Lev Kamenev came to London, trying to negotiate a trade agreement. Young and self-assured, he also romanced Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan, a noted admirer and sculptress of Bolsheviks. After sculpting him, writes David Stafford,
Clare rushed off to a lunch with her cousin Winston. Here she listened, starry-eyed, while he expounded on Bolshevism. Nobody hated it more than he, and he would like to shoot every one he saw. But, he added with a grin, Bolsheviks were like crocodiles: sometimes they became simply too expensive to hunt.3
Churchill probably meant it was too expensive politically to criticize the suave Kamenev, a toast of London society. He had no qualms, however, about Soviet labor leader Mikhail Tomsky, who addressed a British trades union conference in 1926: “We do not want this new-laid crocodile egg from Moscow put upon our breakfast table.”4
German crocodiles
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill’s concern had shifted, and his crocodiles now took on Nazi form. Speaking to Parliament in January 1940, he registered regret at the neutrality of Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”5 There was no confusion with Churchill, wrote A.L. Rowse: “In the struggle with Nazi Germany the existence of the nation was at stake: if one is in mortal combat with a tiger, and a crocodile or great bear comes to one’s aid, is it sense to reject it?”6
Once Churchill slipped back into the Russian analogy. In June 1941, frustrated with Stalin’s refusal to heed his warnings of a German invasion, he told reporters that “the Soviet Government resembles a crocodile, which bites whether you beat it or pat it.”7 Once Stalin was on-side, of course, the crocodiles were uniformly German. In August 1942, giving Stalin the unwelcome news of no “second front,” he tried to placate him with his southern strategy:
If we could end the year in possession of North Africa we could threaten the belly of Hitler’s Europe…. To illustrate my point I had meanwhile drawn a picture of a crocodile, and explained to Stalin with the help of this picture how it was our intention to attack the soft belly of the crocodile as we attacked his hard snout. And Stalin, whose interest was now at a high pitch, said, “May God prosper this undertaking.”
WSC did not comment on Stalin’s apparent departure from official atheism. But he often thereafter used the term “soft underbelly” to describe the invasion of Italy—which, as General Mark Clark quipped, proved to be “one tough gut.”9
The Soviets again
As Allied fortunes improved, Churchill reverted to his old image of Bolshevik saurians. Russia, he told a Ditchley dinner party in 1943, “is like an immoral crocodile waiting in the depths for whatever prey may come his way.”10 As divisions deepened over the shape of postwar Europe, he quipped to Field Marshal Alan Brooke: “Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile. You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it over the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up.”11
Soviet relations worsened, and the analogies piled up. In April 1944, Molotov complained that Britain’s Special Operations Executive was secretly backing Romania’s pro-German Antonescu. “Bolsheviks are crocodiles,” roared Churchill. Still, this led to the “percentages agreement,” by which Greece was saved after giving Stalin a free hand in Romania.12
“Never forget that Bolsheviks are crocodiles,” Churchill said again a month later.13 “But they were crocodiles,” Martin Gilbert added, “who had to be fed: in the previous eight months Britain had convoyed 191 ships to Russia’s northern ports, with more than a million tons of war stores, including aviation fuel.”14
The war ended and he was out of office, but his view of the Soviets remained. “He called them ‘realist lizards,’ all belonging to the crocodile family,” wrote Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. “He said they would be as pleasant with you as they could be, although prepared to destroy you. That sentiment meant nothing to them—morals meant nothing. They were hard realists, out for themselves and for no one else and would be governed only in that way.”15
Incidentally
Precise wordsmith that he was, Winston Churchill never confused crocodiles with alligators, or used the words interchangeably. Indeed he mentioned the latter only once, describing Britain’s forlorn pleas for peace with the Axis in 1938. He was, however, as colorful as ever.
According to Harold Nicolson, Churchill spoke of “this great country nosing from door to door like a cow that has lost its calf, mooing dolefully now in Berlin and now in Rome—when all the time the tiger and the alligator wait for its undoing.”16 The “alligator” in that case seems to have been Mussolini. That was quite a promotion for a man Churchill usually described as “the organ-grinder’s monkey.”17
The hard-used crocodile did have one favorable reference from the Prime Minister. Major General Sir Percy Hobart engineered a secret weapon that proved devastating to German resistance. A tank-like flame-thrower, it blasted flammable liquid with a range of 150 yards.
“I am very glad that the Churchill Crocodile Flame Thrower has justified your hopes,” wrote Churchill in 1944.18 Here at least was one brute which earned his approval.
Further reading
The Churchill Project, “Were ‘Soft Underbelly’ and ‘Fortress Europe’ Churchill Phrases?” (2016).
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill, My African Journey (1908; London: Leo Cooper, 1989), 99-100. Piers Brendon, Churchill’s Bestiary (London: O’Mara Books, 2018), 91.
2 WSC, The Aftermath (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929), 80-81.
3 David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (London: John Murray, 1997), 104. Kamenev later fell afoul of Stalin, and was executed after the first Moscow show trial in 1936.
4 WSC, Chamber of Commerce dinner, Leeds, 20 January 1926, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), IV: 3820.
5 WSC, House of Commons, 20 January 1940, in Richard M. Langworth, Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 261-62.
6 A.L. Rowse, The Later Churchills (London: Macmillan, 1958), 483.
7 Reported by Ambassador Ivan Maisky, 7 June 1941, in Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed. The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 359.
8 WSC, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951), 433.
9 Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 43. General Mark Clark, 1 June 1970 speech to the Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer Churchill Society, Edmonton, Alberta, in The Heroic Memory (Edmonton: Churchill Statue and Oxford Scholarship Foundation, 2004), 80.
***
10 WSC at Ditchley, 18 April 1943, quoted in General Hap Arnold’s diary by David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol. 1, The Struggle for Power (London: Arrow, 1987), 543. (Usual cautions about this highly disputed source, but Irving didn’t get it all wrong.)
11 WSC to Brooke, 24 January 1944, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 431.
12 WSC at Chequers, April 1944, in Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, 285.
13 WSC to Anthony Eden, 2 May 1944, in Martin Gilbert & Larry P. Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, Normandy and Beyond: May-December 1944 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2018), 29.
14 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory 1942-1945 (Hillsdale, 2013), 754.
15 Mackenzie King Diary, 26 October 1945, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale. 2013), 161.
16 Harold Nicolson Diary, 1 March 1938, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 262.
17 WSC, Ottawa, 30 December 1941, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 365.
18 WSC to Minister of Petroleum Warfare, in Brendon, Churchill’s Bestiary, 92.