Churchill's War: The Struggle for Power: 1 [Hardcover]

Second part of a trilogy - part three despite being promised for 2007 seems not to exist yet; Irving has been hounded out of house and home, partly as a result of his disastrous libel lawsuit, partly as a result of further state and personal actions against him.

This huge volume deals with, roughly, 1941 to 1943, the period when the war existed between Britain and Germany, but, as with the First World War, the USA stayed out at first. Consequently there's not much on the Battle of Britain, or on the Allies invading Europe, but a great deal on Roosevelt and war by Japan in China, as well as North Africa and Rommel, France and de Gaulle (including information on torture), and of course Stalin. The book is well-indexed, and also of course has detailed notes, one of the trademarks of Irving. There's a colour plate section of posters, portraits, documents, and black and white photographs of generals and airmen and personal material, including Churchill's family, and a British crowd applauding him. A double-page photo shows Churchill in 1943, with a general, in north Africa, with a sea of troop in shorts - not unlike sheep...

Irving pays a lot of attention to the physical appearance of his books - sections marked off by colophons, small caps at the start of subsections, quite elaborate typography. The jacket and notes include comments on attempts to silence him, and the generally shabby piracy of his earlier volumes by inferior researchers. Personally I'd prefer the chapter names to have been less pun-filled - just my taste though.

The mass of detail allows material to be extracted on, for example, restricted information. Here's an incomplete list:-

'... Dr Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich chancellery, had phoned to inform him that the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, had *repeatedly* ordered the solution of the Jewish problem 'postponed until after the war was over.' This did not suit Kempner at all, and when the file was returned to the document centre this particular photostat was missing...'

'... the 1,600 glass plates, on which Goebbels had had the diaries filmed for safety, were discovered by the Goebbels Diaries expert Dr Elke Froehlich in March 1992. ... The conditions in these archives in Moscow's Viborg street were, it must be said, challenging: Soviet archives were designed for keeping things secret, and the very notion of a public research room was alien to them. ...'

' ... On the instructions of the minister of the interior, on July 1, 1993 the archives [i.e. Bundesarchiv's federal archives] banished me forever from their halls, without notice, two hours before the conclusion of my seven years of research on this subject. ... As one consequence, evidently unforeseen by the German government, the Bundesarchiv has had to return to England its 'Irving Collection,' half a ton of records which I had deposited in its vaults for researchers over the last thirty years. These include originals of Adolf Eichmann's papers, copies of two missing years of Heinrich Himmler's diary, the diaries of Erwin Rommel, Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Canaris, Walther Hewel, and a host of other papers not available elsewhere. ...'

'... The files on Anglo-Japanese relations for September and October 1941 are still closed. The prime minister's 'Japan' files for December 1941, and for January and February 1942, are missing, as is the entire 'Japan' file from Eden's papers. ...'

'... for many years the prime minister's November 1941 file of cables and messages to President Roosevelt was also closed. Even now there are gaps: There are indications that Churchill sent one or even two as yet unreleased messages to Washington after one that we shall meet later as his 'thin diet' telegram of November 26. That date was unquestionably a turning point in the crisis. ..'

' .. That diplomatic historians never once bothered in thirty years to visit the widow of Joachim von Ribbentrop's state-secretary Ernst von Weizsaecker, father of the subsequent West German president, was a baffling mystery to me. Had they looked for the widow of Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop's liaison officer to Hitler, they would have learned about his diaries too. And who are these over-emotional historians of the Jewish tragedy who, until I did so, never troubled themselves even to open a readily available file of the SS chief Heinrich Himmler's own handwritten telephone notes, or to read his memoranda for his secret meetings with Adolf Hitler? ...'

'... Hess was forbidden to speak about the past. His letters were censored, his daily diary regularly destroyed. Aged ninety-four, he outlived Churchill and his entire cabinet, as well as all the Nuremberg judges and defendants. ...'

' ... the contemporary R.A.F. court of inquiry [into Sikorski of Poland's death] contains some weaknesses which, if it were published, could be embarrassingly exploited. ...'

' ... Churchill masterminded a slew of 'dirty tricks' designed to help Roosevelt to stir up public feeling. Most of the British files on these are still sealed, but some episodes are known ...'

' ... It seems that there are items of Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence which, if not lost or destroyed, are still awaiting release. These were just some of the two or three hundred signals which Sir William Stephenson's organisation in the U.S.A. passed each week via the radio station of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) to the Secret Intelligence Service (S.I.S.) in England, using a code readable only by the British. (Stephenson was director of 'British Security Co-ordination,' with headquarters in New York.) Some items have now reappeared, having been removed from the three depositories of Churchill papers ...'

' ... the key Japanese intercept which we shall meet on the way, known to historians as the 'winds-execute' signal, has disappeared from all wartime American files, thereby relieving certain generals (including George C. Marshall, Leonard T. Gerow, and Walter Bedell Smith) of the need to explain why nobody at the highest levels had paid heed to it. ...'

' ... Suffice it to remark that American historians have signally failed to spot the evidence of high-level falsification in their own archives. ...'

A lot of Vichy material is closed: '... One aspect of [operation] Torch worried Eisenhower. His country was about to launch an unprovoked attack on Vichy France, which was technically a neutral and a country with which they maintained friendly diplomatic relations. As General Eisenhower would later write, it met every criterion of a crime against international law, unless some way could be found of persuading the French to invite the Americans to invade ...'

' ... Even now, parts of the F.O. file are closed until the year 2016 and all the papers relating to Rougier and the Churchill-Petain deal have been physically removed by the British government from the late Lord Halifax's papers. ...'

' ... For a historian born that very day, when the British empire was at its greatest influence and extent, it is truly baffling to review the archives and compare the specious estimates of Hitler's aims and capabilities in the British records with what is revealed by the German archives. The former are strewn with the distortions of Britain's foreign-policy-making elite, inspired by hatred of Germany imbibed with their mother's milk decades before the Nazis and their atrocities. These men have created legends of magisterial permanence. The legends pollute the history books and have a charm and existence of their own, devoid of any foundation in the archives. ...'

To understand the Second World War, Irving on Hitler, and his two Churchill volumes, plus, if/when it is published, the third on Churchill, probably render other book redundant, except perhaps to dip in and marvel at the sheer magnitude and perseverance of liars and lies, their deceit and self-deception, and the cowardice and corruption and violence of the 20th century.

This book is characterized by its wealth of research, much of it original. Irving spares no one's feelings or reputation but exhibits no gratuitous ill will or bias. A thoroughly serious work, of interest to anyone who REALLY wants to know how the Second World War came about, and about Churchill's role in herding Britain's leaders and people into it; along with his powerful influence in bringing America and the then British Empire in too.
The reader is left to speculate as to whether Churchill almost single-handedly changed history by dint of his unique oratory and personality, or whether better things may have happened to Western civilization had Churchill not existed.
Was Churchill a self-seeking, brutal warmonger, a conceited liar indifferent to causing the death of millions ? Or a great statesman, a pragmatist who saved the West from worse ?
A very thought-provoking and disturbing study, this book will educate you on many little-known facts and sound evaluations on which to base your verdict.

You don't have to agree with the author, but you absolutely must take this book seriously. It is miles from the conventional narrative and so much the better for it. The book has been researched from original source material rather than just another rehash of cliches. The author is an uncompromising fellow and a brilliant historian, but don't let the hype put you off his work, your understanding will be deeply enhanced if you give this one a try.