Neville Chamberlain

All are all now firmly established in the great pantheon of the House of Commons. All experienced failure, engendered controversy, still do, and always will. In death, all passion spent, they can be evaluated for the characters that lay beneath their politics. And, in common, a deep seam of basic decency can be found.

Churchillians in Portland, Oregon have Sir Winston on their minds; their questions are pertinent to our understanding of him, and ourselves.

Historians tend to downplay Horace Wilson’s contribution to British Appeasement policy in the 1930s. Adrian Phillips fills in the blanks.

However repulsive Chips was, after this first volume, masterfully edited by Simon Heffer, readers will be eager for the rest.

The Calgary Churchill statue will celebrate Sir Winston’s prescience in peace, resolution in war, and lifetime quest for liberty and human rights.

Winston Churchill was not a man to bear grudges, and firmly admired the Irish. Yet he was strangely oblivious to the widespread, albeit not universal, hostility still felt towards him in nationalist Ireland. In 1953 he faced a libel action in Ireland arising out of his memoirs. It was brought by Eric Dorman-Smith, an Irish-born general whom he had dismissed during the Desert War. He expressed doubt that “an Irish jury would necessarily be unfair or that they would be prejudiced against me.” His legal advisers knew better. They made sure the case was settled before it got to be heard before a jury in Dublin. When Churchill died in 1965, de Valera, now President of Ireland, lauded him as a great Englishman. He could not omit to add the rider that Churchill had been a “dangerous enemy” of the Irish people.

Breathless media admiration of Hitler’s Anschluss obscured German military deficiencies that might have mattered if the democracies had stood firm.

Churchill looked back on the past with reverence and with regularity—thankfully so, for we owe him the same debt we owe to our history: gratitude.

Clews paints a loyal but frustrated Churchill who later defined the rule of the Phoney War: “Don’t be unkind to the enemy; you will only make him angry.”

Bouverie’s dismissal of the 1938 plot as “probably correctly” a fantasy is quite inexplicable. He lists Meehan’s book in his bibliography along with the memoirs of Erich Kordt, who wrote that swallowing Hitler’s terms at Munich “prevented the coup d’état in Berlin.” Even Henderson, the pro-Chamberlain British ambassador to Germany, thought the Hitler plot genuine. On 6 October, a week after Munich, Henderson wrote Halifax: “By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime.”

"My panic was genuine. I felt I had no qualifications whatever to attempt a Titan. Thoughts of the friendliness in Churchill’s voice fled. Robert Hardy was to climb Everest in everyday clothes with an Ordnance Map."

Both Churchill and Chamberlain understood that Nazi Germany was a time bomb. But whereas Chamberlain imagined that it could be defused by diplomacy, Churchill believed that it could only be defused by force, or the threat of force. When the diplomacy of appeasement failed Chamberlain was compelled to accept—albeit with the profound reluctance of a man who loathed war—that no other response was possible. In the final analysis the British Empire, which was already in decline, had to be sacrificed so that Britain itself could live.