The historian Darryl Cooper has argued in an interview on Tucker Carlson's show that Winston Churchill "was the chief villain of World War II," which would be both interesting and indeed shocking were his thesis not based on such staggering ignorance and disregard for historical fact that it is safe to disregard completely.
Cooper's first argument was that Churchill "was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, something other than an invasion of Poland." Yet in the moment that Adolf Hitler invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg at dawn on May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was not even prime minister. Unless Mr. Cooper is arguing that from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty—the head of Britain's navy—Churchill was somehow able to force Hitler to unleash Blitzkrieg in the West, his first argument falls to the ground.
Hitler had planned his surprise attack through the Ardennes—the "Sickle-cut" maneuver—with senior generals such as Erich von Manstein, Erwin Rommel, and Gerd von Rundstedt several months before the attack took place. They bear responsibility "for that war becoming what it did," not Churchill. Furthermore, they also bear full responsibility for the unprovoked invasion of neighboring Poland itself, about which Cooper and Carlson were silent.
In April 1939, when Churchill was not even in the cabinet, the British government guaranteed Poland's security, so Hitler had no right to be surprised when Britain went to war with Germany when he flagrantly disregarded that guarantee.
Cooper's next egregious error was to blame Operation Barbarossa on Hitler's perception of a threat from Stalin, or a Soviet plan to capture Romanian oilfields, completely ignoring the genuine reason, which was the Nazi demand for Lebensraum—"living space" in Eastern Europe, especially in Belarus and Ukraine. One wonders whether Cooper has ever read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler's ultimate intentions were made plain. Elsewhere in the interview he makes the outlandish claim that Hitler "no longer thought of Russia as an international Communist movement," which contradicts all the evidence of Hitler's public and private statements prior to unleashing Barbarossa.
Cooper next claimed that the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity did so because the Nazi leadership "had no plans for POWs," ignoring the obvious fact, well supported by the sources, that in fact the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs were the deliberate Nazi plan for what to do with them.
Cooper goes on to castigate Churchill for not accepting Hitler's peace proposals during the Phoney War from October 1939 to May 1940, stating that Hitler "didn't want to fight France or Britain." Yet by then he had invaded Poland, and had no intention of disgorging it, so the original casus bellum remained.
"The war was over and the Germans won by the fall of 1940," Cooper states. Not so. The Germans had indeed forced the British from the Continent at Dunkirk by June 1940, but it is to Churchill's everlasting and untarnishable glory that he kept Britain in the war until Nazi evil was extirpated. The war at sea was continuing, as was the war on the North African littoral. Greece came into the conflict in April 1941, drawing German forces south two months before Barbarossa. The battle was lost by Britain, true, but the war was far from won by Hitler.
Cooper's wailing that Churchill rejected Hitler's peace offers also fails to take into account the fact that had Britain made an ignoble peace in 1940, Hitler would have been able to concentrate all his forces on the East in his invasion of Russia in June 1941. Instead, he was forced to keep 30 percent of the Luftwaffe and considerable land forces in the western part of Europe. It was perhaps Churchill's greatest act of statesmanship, that of a hero rather than "the chief villain of World War II."
When Cooper blames Churchill for "demonizing [Neville] Chamberlain" in 1940, he is presumably ignorant of the fact that Churchill in fact asked Chamberlain to join his War Cabinet, where he worked closely and cordially with him, and then gave one of his greatest speeches as his eulogy to Chamberlain in November 1940.
"Churchill wanted a war," claimed Cooper. "He wanted to fight Germany." Not so. From the moment Hitler came to power in Germany, Churchill warned of the threat the Nazis posed to world peace, and how weak the West was militarily, but his solution was to rearm, not to monger war. He had fought in the trenches in the Great War and had lost too many friends in it to want another war, but he was willing to undergo it if the only alternatives were disgrace and dishonor.
Cooper then alleged, again without any evidence, that Churchill wanted war because "the long-term interests of the British Empire were threatened by the rise of a power like Germany." Again, not so. All senior British policymakers recognized that the threats to the Empire came from Japan in the Far East, Fascist Italy in northeast Africa, and Russia in the Near East. Germany had no contiguous borders with the British Empire anywhere. A glance at a map would have shown Cooper that.
"I resent Churchill so much [because] he kept the war going when he had no way to fight it," said Cooper. "All he had were bombers." Not so, either. The Royal Navy at the time was the most powerful in the world, and in World War I it blockaded Germany extremely effectively. The Empire was also providing huge numbers of men for the cause of freedom—indeed, India provided the largest volunteer force in the history of mankind. The Royal Air Force fighter planes had won the Battle of Britain by September 1940, nine months before Barbarossa.
Cooper then accused Churchill of unleashing terror bombing on Germany, which he calls "the greatest scale of terrorist attack in world history." Quite apart from the fact that the Combined Bomber Offensive was not a terrorist attack but a legitimate military offensive, as is shown by the RAF Intelligence Department's documents on the bombing of the Black Forest and much else, it was only undertaken once Hitler and Göring had already bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. "Why would he do that?" asked Tucker Carlson incredulously. To lower German war production is the (surely obvious) answer.
Cooper was correct in saying that Churchill and Britain did as much as possible to engage the United States in the war, but failed to point out that all these attempts failed, and it was Hitler's declaration of war on America on December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, that brought the United States in.
Cooper gave what Carlson called "the wryest smile I’ve ever seen" when he answered Carlson's naïve question as to "What was [Churchill]'s motive?" in wanting to fight World War II. The true reason was that Churchill knew he needed to extirpate Nazism, but according to Cooper it was because "Churchill's got a long and complicated history" that needed "redemption" because "Churchill was humiliated by his performance in the First World War."
This ludicrous piece of cod psychology simply does not stand up. Churchill's performance in World War I included being the man who got the Royal Navy ready for the war, who transported the entire British Expeditionary Force to France without the loss of a man in August 1914, who defended Antwerp during a crucial period that October, who undertook 30 trench raids in no man's land as a lieutenant colonel, and who was the minister of munitions who provided the British Army with much of the weaponry necessary to win in 1918. The idea that the Gallipoli disaster, for which Churchill was ultimately though not solely responsible, made him feel a need for "redemption" a quarter of a century later is hogwash.
Cooper then describes Churchill as "a psychopath," which surely says more about his own state of mind than Churchill's. He goes on to make the accusation that Churchill "was a drunk," which he was not, although he certainly drank a lot. Churchill could hold his liquor, and there was only one occasion during World War II when he was drunk, an astonishing achievement considering the pressure he was under.
"He was very childish in many ways," states Cooper of the man who wrote 37 books, formed two administrations, warned of the coming Cold War in his Iron Curtain speech, and still defines sublime leadership. When Cooper wins the Nobel Prize for Literature like Churchill did, I will be more inclined to listen to his sophomor(on)ic strictures.
Cooper then unleashed an attack on Churchill's Zionism, saying that he was "bankrupt and needed money and [was] getting bailed out by Zionists. … He didn't need to be bribed but he was put in place by financiers [and] the media complex that wanted to make sure he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict." If any reader owns a dog, don't let it hear that particular whistle!
It is also untrue. Churchill was never bankrupt, although he always needed money as his spending was huge. Some of his stock market losses during the Wall Street Crash were borne by Bernard Baruch, but that was four years before Hitler came to power. Another Jewish friend, Sir Henry Strakosch, left him a large amount of money in his will, but that could hardly have been a bribe for obvious reasons. Churchill was not a Zionist or an anti-Nazi because he was bribed by Jewish financiers but because he believed in both stances with every fiber of his being.
Furthermore, at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise throughout the world, it was profoundly irresponsible of Cooper and Carlson to make the insinuations that they did in that part of the interview. This thesis—if such a spewing of old lies and David Irving-esque Hitler-apologism can be termed as such—will be welcomed in certain areas of "Palestine," in Thuringia and Saxony, and in the danker recesses of cyberspace, but not in places where historical truth is still respected.
Far from "the media complex" supporting Churchill, he was ridiculed and opposed by most newspapers for most of his career, and editors only came round to his joining the cabinet in July 1939, once it had been made clear that all his warnings about Hitler and the Nazis had been proved correct on every particular over his long years in the political wilderness.
When Carlson commended Cooper's "belief in accuracy and honesty," it provided the only comic moment in the whole interview, unless one also counts Carlson's estimation that Cooper—of whom I confess I had not hitherto heard—is "the most important historian in the United States."
It was remarkable that in the whole interview, Darryl Cooper was not able to land a single blow on the reputation of Winston Churchill that was backed up by any evidence whatever. For in fact, Churchill made several mistakes in his career, as every responsible biographer of his attests. "I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes," he told his wife Clementine in 1916.
Yet in the three greatest threats to democracy and Western civilization of the 20th century—from Wilhelmine Germany in World War I, from Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in World War II, and from Soviet Communism in the Cold War—Winston Churchill both foresaw all three and provided much of the resilience and wisdom necessary to defeat them. Freedom of speech was thus saved, a freedom that has been so squalidly abused by the intellectually vacant yet preening snideness of Messrs. Cooper and Carlson.
Andrew Roberts is the author, most recently, of Churchill Walking with Destiny (Viking).