The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History Read Online Free PDF

protest.
    Of the roughly two hundred countries in the world today, about 120 can claim to be democracies of some kind or other—to uphold the right of voters to determine their own fate. Most of the world pays at least lip-service to the idea that democracy is, as Churchill once put it,the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others. But if Hitler and Stalin had prevailed—or if one or the other had prevailed—does anyone seriously believe that democracy would be on her throne today?
    With their superstitious habit of imputing justice and rightness to the course of history, human beings would have absorbed a dismal lesson: that the gods had smiled on the tyrannies, and that tyranny was therefore what our incompetent species required.
    We in Britain would have acquiesced in this moral bankruptcy—and it is all too easy to imagine how Halifax (or Lloyd George, or whoever) could have persuaded the electorate that this was the peace they were yearning for—and yet there, surely, they would have been kidding themselves.
    Do you think that by this cowardice Britain could have bought peace from the Nazis? As Churchill pointed out to the War Cabinet, any deal struck with Hitler must mean disarmament of the fleet, anda fatal weakening of Britain’s long-term ability to defend herself or to fight back.
    And the crucial point was surely this: that there was no deal with Hitler that could conceivably be relied upon. Churchill had been proved crushingly right in his warnings about Nazism—made since the early 1930s, when he had been out to Germany to see the parades of gleaming-eyed youths. In countless newspaper articles and speeches he had identified a spiritual evil that so many others chose not to see: the fundamental revanchism and aggression of the Nazi regime. Now he had been massively vindicated, about the Rhineland, and about Czechoslovakia, about Poland and about the desperate need for Britain to rearm.
    Many counterfactual historians have pointed out that the Nazis were a long way ahead of their rivals in developing some of the most lethal weapons of the twentieth century: they had the first jet fighters; they had the first rocket-propelled missiles. Imagine if those German scientists had been so desperate to defeat the Soviets that they had been the first to produce an atomic weapon.
    Think of that fate for Britain, all you who are tempted by the revisionist argument, you who secretly wonder whether the country might have done better to do a deal. Britain would have been alone, facing a hostile continent united under a bestial totalitarianism, and with nuclear-armed rockets bristling on the V2 launching pads at Peenemünde. It would have been a new slavery, or worse.
    Hitler didn’t tell Guderian to stop his tanks on the Aa canal because he was some closet Anglophile. He didn’t stay his hand because of some fellow-feeling for those of the Aryan race. Most serious historians agree with Guderian: that the Führer simply made a mistake—that he was himself taken aback by the speed of his conquest, and feared a counter-attack.
    The truth is that he saw Britain not as a potential partner, but as the enemy, and though he sometimes burbled approvingly of the British Empire, he also called for the complete annihilation of British forces. He didn’t call off his extensive plans to invade Britain (Operation ‘Sea Lion’) because he wanted in some way to spare the British.
    He did so because it had become too risky, and because one man was telling the rest of the country to fight on the beaches and the hills and the landing grounds, and was even telling his own cabinet that rather than surrender he would die choking in his own blood upon the ground.
    Hitler’s Operation Sea Lion was a project not just of invasion but of subjugation. He was going to carry off Nelson’s column from Trafalgar Square, and install it in Berlin. Goering had plans to pillage the entire collection from the National Gallery.