LABOUR COMMENT

RTE has become a training ground for the British broadcasting system.  Fergal Keane MBE and Orla Guerin are the successful Irish broadcasters because they have become British broadcasters.  Some time ago, Keane MBE was given a series of personal programmes on Radio 4 in which he regaled the British public with the awfulness of the Ireland in which he grew up—narrow, oppressive, introverted, claustrophobic.  The account was presented in terms of personal experience.  But, if you listened carefully, it became clear from the later programmes that his youthful experience of confinement and oppression was not actually experienced in youth but was constructed after the event.  His memory was false memory.  Keane MBE was retrospectively experiencing what he felt that young Keane ought to have experienced but didn’t.

RTE has become a feeder-system for the BBC, and its personnel therefore work with an eye to the BBC.  And, as RTE progressively loosens its specific relationship with Irish life, it naturally takes its view of the world from the BBC.  It is now in great part a British re-broadcasting system.  And, as war propaganda forms a steadily increasing part of the output of the BBC, so it does of RTE.  The foundations of the Irish state were laid during the war of 1914-19, in conflict with Britain.  But Ireland no longer has its own view of that war.  It re-broadcast this year the BBC television history that the BBC broadcast last year.  Ireland is supposedly becoming more European, but is actually becoming more British in what is presented in its main media.  And what it is shaping itself to is the Churchillian ideology of the past half century—which is increasingly felt to be inadequate by thinking elements in Britain.

Alan Clarke, History Of The Tory Party—currently being broadcast on BBC 2—is the first major outing of the slightly critical view of Churchill.

Thirty years ago, David Irving began to say things about World War 2 that Irish historians and journalists ought to have been saying all along.  When Irving was invited to debate in some Irish Universities a few years ago, media Ireland threw itself into a Churchillian frenzy of outrage, led by Fintan O’Toole.  So Ireland was kept Irving-free.  But then a very respectable historian operating within the British Establishment, John Charmley, published a biography of Churchill that went in the Irving direction.  And now Alan Clarke, a former Cabinet Minister, is doing it on television.

Clark and Charmley are no more pro-German than Irving.  All three are strictly pro-British, but they see Britain as having made very great miscalculations of its interest, and they want to correct the historical account in ways they see as being conducive to a reconstruction of British power.  But they do no want to be too discouraging, so their critical faculties are cut off at a certain point.

Take, for example, Clark on the Munich negotiations:

“Chamberlain found himself in the uncomfortable position of having, in order to avoid a world war, for which Britain was both mentally and physically unprepared, to compel the Czechs to give Hitler what he wanted”.

Why “a world war”?  Czechoslovakia was powerfully armed and its Government was apparently eager to fight.  The anti-German position was very much stronger in September 1938 than it was a year later when Britain declared war.  And the antagonism between Germany and the Soviet Union was operative.  It would have been entirely feasible to fight a limited war in defence of Czechoslovakia against a new, lightly-armed, German Army that had never fired a shot in in anger.  So why “a world war”?

Because of the balance-of-power mindset.  The balance-of-power strategy involved the manipulation of European conflicts with minimal British military engagement.  In 1914 the strategy had gone awry and Britain had allowed itself to be drawn into a slogging match almost to the same extent as the states whose conflicts it ought to have been manipulating.  It was determined that this would not happen again.

Limited war for a specific purpose was out of the question, not because the material balance of forces in September did not allow it, but because Britain did not think in those terms.

The difficulty in September 1938 was perhaps that the situation did not have the makings of a world war.  Things were different a year later, when the territory and armaments of Czechoslovakia had been taken over by Hitler and he had negotiated a Treaty with the Soviet Union preparatory to taking on Poland, with which Britain had signed a military Treaty which it did not intend to honour and had required France to do likewise.  That was situation out of which world war could be developed.

Clarke’s statement, if taken on its own merits, is gibberish.  But its function is to give a boost to Chamberlain’s reputation, which has to be done in order to diminish Churchill’s.

He says nothing about the luring of Poland into confrontation with Germany by the offer of a military alliance with Britain and France which neither intended to honour, and the bombing of Germany by the RAF with nothing but leaflets when Poland was attacked.  Certain things must be beyond question.

In Part 1, Lord Hailsham was allowed to say that, when Chamberlain resigned in May 1940, the choice lay between Lord Halifax and Churchill:  

“Quite rightly Halifax said that, as a member of the House of Lords, he couldn’t lead the Government in wartime.  And Churchill was left alone and remained silent, and was made Prime Minister.  And that is how we won the war!…”

But Clark knows that the problem is that the customary statement that Britain won the War is a piece of rhetorical extravagance.

Clark’s own view seems to be that Churchill’s achievement was to keep Britain at war for a year after every rational consideration should have led it to call off the War.  That was damaging economically, but was face-saving politically.  The time when it would have been prudent for Britain to have made a settlement was the early Summer of 1940.  Here is his commentary.  Within a fortnight of Churchill becoming Prime Minster, Allied forces in France were collapsing—

“On the 28th of May Halifax recommended to the War Cabinet that the Italians might be invited to arbitrate a settlement.  Churchill realised at once what this meant:  Once you talk about terms, you are effectively committed to a Ceasefire.  And once an Armistice was agreed Churchill’s Premiership would be finished.

“Churchill was outnumbered in the War Cabinet.  He suspended the sitting.  He got in all the Ministers of State and addressed them:  “I am convinced”, he said, “that every man of you would rise and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender.  If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it be only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground”.

“When the Cabinet came back that evening it was over.  There would be no talks.  Talks at this stage would have been little different from defeat in battle.  [In fact Britain was at that moment being comprehensively defeated in battle, along with France, in the war they had jointly declared on Germany.]  The Germans would have imposed on us anything that they wished.  And there is Churchill’s great achievement.  he saved us less than two and a half weeks into his Premiership.  No one else could have done that.”  (Part 2.)

In historical actuality, of course, it required the co-operation of somebody else.  Hitler had to call a halt to the momentum of the German Army around Dunkirk so that a segment of the British Army could be brought back to continue the island story, then he had to ensure that there was no invasion attempt, only a bit of light bombing.

Clark then skipped forward to the following Summer:

“Hitler, recognising military stalemate in the West, wanted to attack Russia before she became too strong, and in any event wanted to keep the British Empire in being as a counterweight in the Far East.  These were all respectable Tory objectives.  Hitler wanted to do a deal, and his deputy, Rudolf Hess, appointed himself unofficial Ambassador.  And so, on the night of the 10th of May, Hess flew himself to Scotland… and he brought with him the peace terms in the expectation that they would be put before the full War Cabinet.

“But there is no evidence that they were examined or even referred to in this room [i.e., the Cabinet room].  And all the key documents relating to this episode have either been destroyed or are still classified so highly secret that no one is allowed to look at them.

“Churchill wanted to continue the war.  But he had no strategic plan for winning it, other than by enlisting the United States, although they were no possibility of Roosevelt bringing America into the war unprovoked.”

This is not quite accurate.  It is hard to see how Britain could have made much headway towards winning the war, or even fighting it, merely by bringing America in.  The real point of carrying on was the hope of gaining Russia as an ally.  Even with America and Russia both in, Britain did not re-engage the German Army in France until three years after the invasion of Russia, during which time the substance of the German Army had been destroyed by the Red Army.

Following his comments on the Hess episode, Clarke played a newsreel clip about the American Lend-Lease Act, and commented:

“Partly to ingratiate himself, partly to cope with the hugely increasing dollar debt for arms, Churchill traded off British gold, foreign shareholdings, patents and other assets, starting with the notorious destroyer deal, when the whole of the British West Indies was ceded in exchange for fifty obsolete World War I destroyers.  By the middle of 1941, Britain had been stripped of all her assets and had become little more than an American mercenary—a status which she was to suffer for the next 40 years.  And still the United States had not entered the war.

“The King was appalled and wrote to Halifax in Washington.  [Halifax had been exiled as Ambassador to Washington in punishment for trying to initiate a peace process in May 1940.]  But what good was that?  In party terms there was no one in the War Cabinet who could, or dared, protest, although Beaverbrook occasionally had a shot at it.  For Churchill so ordered things that the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not even sit in on economic decisions, when they came before War Cabinet, until most of the damage had been done.”

“Churchill also made a huge strategic error.  He committed all our strength to Greece and left the Far East virtually defenceless”…

And the Empire in the East was permanently undermined by the Japanese successes in 1942.

In fact the escapade in Greece was a coherent part of the Churchill strategy, which was to spread the war at every opportunity in the hope that making it a generalised world war would enable Britain to end up on the winning side.  Greece was winning its war with Italy, and under General Metaxas it refused British assistance because that was certain to bring Germany in on the Italian side.  But, when Metaxas died, his successor accepted Churchill’s pressing offer of British assistance, bringing the Germans in, causing Greece to lose the war, and causing Yugoslavia to be occupied by Germany.

It may have been reckless, but it was not senseless.  And, given that Britain was committed to persisting in a war which it had no hope of winning by its own efforts, it misses the point to describe it as an “error”.

Finally the recklessness began to pay off.  Russia took prisoner at Stalingrad a far bigger German army than Britain had ever faced, and the British, with superior forces, finally won a little battle in North Africa (El Alamein).  And Alan Clark played a clip of Churchill’s End Of The Beginning speech in Washington, and commented:

“The cost both to the country and to the party was horrendous.  As well as being broke, the social order at home was disintegrating and socialist planning was actually being introduced by the Government—rationing, direction of labour, bureaucracy.

“All this had become part of the war effort, while the Red Army by its exploits was making Communism respectable, even glamorous.

“Churchill showed no interest in planning for the post-war future, for the Party or the country.  This neglect was epitomised by the Beveridge Report.  Its wide-ranging proposals for an extended Welfare State gripped the popular imagination.  While the Tories fudged and fumbled, Churchill, who had been so committed to the war, seemed almost to be bored by the prospect of peace.”

The cult phrase, revisionist history, is not in use in Britain.  What it means in Ireland is a kind of historical erasure, and a casting of doubt on whether the state should exist at all.  The thrust of this revision of Churchillian history in England is towards consolidating the state and recouping as much as possible of the power and independence which it lost by reason of Churchill’s war leadership, and restoring as far as possible the social structure of capitalism which was seriously damaged when Churchill relinquished domestic government to the Labour Party during the war.  And the Labour Party—if Tony Blair’s New Labour is still the Labour Party—has joined in that project.

Brendan Clifford

[This article first appeared in The Irish Communist, October 1979]

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