Eminent Churchillians
Roberts, Andrew
EMINENT CHURCHILLIANS Andrew Roberts Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London) / 322 pages / £20 reviewed by STUART REID E ven in the 1930s, alas, the royal family was coming to terms with the modern...
...His first, a life of Lord Halifax, foreign secretary under Neville Chamberlain, was praised by Michael Foot for its "Macaulayesque narrative assurance...
...He believed the Germans had been the victims of a gross injustice at Versailles...
...Strachey was a revisionist, Roberts is not...
...f there is one thing that can be said with certainty about Lord Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India, it is that he was not a fascist...
...This is his second major historical work...
...The last one was none of my doing and if there is another one and we are threatened with being brought into it, I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself sooner than allow this country to be brought in...
...In the years immediately before the war there was a whiff of anti-Semitism surrounding the throne...
...Perhaps because those who had read it before it began to disappear from the bookstores remembered such parts of it as were pro-Semitic and anti-Nazi (and not quoted by Roberts...
...Perhaps in the years to come he will mellow a bit, and look more kindly on the foibles and failures of great dead white males...
...Of the foul-mouthed Beaverbrook he writes: "He came, he swore, he conquered...
...I will not...
...He was popular with his men, but was a poor military leader...
...The evidence does suggest, however, that Bryant had fascist sympathies, even if he was not a card-carrying member of the party...
...It is also an entertaining and invigorating book that will appeal strongly to American conservatives...
...General "Vinegar Joe" Sitwell recorded in his diary that Mountbatten's planning conferences were "terrible", "dumb," "sad," and "zero...
...Yet here, as elsewhere, PC takes no account of reality...
...Today we need counseling when we lose a pet or see a body bag on the evening news...
...On May 10 Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg on the West, and the national mood swung decisively behind Churchill...
...Military men will not agree with Roberts's blanket dismissal of Mountbatten, but military men do not make us laugh—or think—as much as Roberts does...
...That may be because he is a friend, an especially successful and good-looking one...
...Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA in 1979 while holidaying in Ireland...
...On the contrary, he was the royal family's leadinglefty...
...What we learn here is that King George VI not only backed Chamberlain's policy of appeasement but abused his constitutional position by openly rejoicing over the Munich agreement...
...It was supported by the vast majority of Britons and, albeit capriciously, by Churchill...
...LLD, Hon...
...It is, as its Stracheyan title suggests, a polemic...
...Eminent Churchillians is no less assured...
...During his tour of America in June 1939, George VI stayed with Franklin Roosevelt in upstate New York, and at the end of dinner the president tapped the king-emperor, 43, on the knee and said: "Time for bed, young man...
...We must be grateful to Roberts for helping us out of those initials: AMIEE stands for Associated Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers...
...Not Bryant...
...R oberts's chapter on the royal family is fascinating in its detail...
...Dickie" Mountbatten, who became Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia, was extraordinarily vain...
...Yet there's more to this than envy (or friendship...
...It is a joke worthy of A.J.P...
...EMINENT CHURCHILLIANS Andrew Roberts Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London) / 322 pages / £20 reviewed by STUART REID E ven in the 1930s, alas, the royal family was coming to terms with the modern world—or at least allowing the modern world to come to terms with it...
...In this case, the retreat cost as many as halfa-million Indian lives...
...Bryant was knighted in 1954...
...And perhaps he will invite me to his next party at the Beefsteak Club...
...In October 1939, when British soldiers were in France fighting the Nazis, the following marching song was banned: Onward Christian Soldiers, You have naught to fear, Israel Hore-Belisha Will lead you from the rear...
...It is hard not to sympathize with the old king...
...He was haunted by the figures...
...Appeasement was seen as a good idea at the time...
...Aaiiieeeee...
...Roberts thinks it was rather a flashy way to go...
...Roberts loves Churchill, and does not care who knows it...
...The fact remains, though, that by September 1939, when the war began, Britain was in a better position to fight than she had been in September 1938, when Chamberlain secured "peace for our time . . . peace with honor" at Munich...
...Bryant would never have said that, nor would Hugh Trevor-Roper...
...he approved of the retreat from empire...
...I am all for violence, but I have misgivings about Roberts's approach...
...Most Englishmen who thought along these lines had the wit and the decency to change tack, or keep their thoughts to themselves, when Britain went to war with Germany in September 1939...
...In a series of six essays, he reasserts the postwar consensus—that Neville Chamberlain and the Munich appeasers behaved cravenly and stupidly, and that only Churchill and his cronies had the true measure of the Nazi threat...
...Under Britain's unwritten constitution the Crown is supposed to be politically neutral, but the British constitution is about as easy to follow as the Ontological Argument of St...
...Anselm, and those of us who failed ontology in school find it hard to become indignant when a reigning monarch lets his political slip show...
...He tramples on those he believes diminished Britain in the years between, roughly, 1933 and 1955...
...He not only presided over Indian independence (and partition) in 1947...
...In 1940 George VI helped to bring down the War Secretary, Leslie Hore-Belisha, who was Jewish...
...It contains many disobliging references to German Jews...
...In the circumstances of the late 1930s it made sense to negotiate with Hitler...
...seldom in serious, or even in semi-serious, works of history...
...Roberts disapproves, but need we...
...There are two essays on general subjects: the Tories who opposed Churchill after he had replaced Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940, and those who, in Churchill's 1951-55 administration, failed to curb mass immigration—shamefully, in Roberts's view...
...Roberts does not charge George VI with anti-Semitism, but there can be no doubt that in the military hierarchy there were those who were decidedly not philo-Semites...
...Those who feel the power of his boot, in addition to George VI, are Lord Mountbatten, the establishment historian Sir Arthur Bryant, and Walter Monckton (Churchill's postwar minister of labor, who, by yielding to organizedlabor, helped create the union militancy that plagued Britain in the 1960s and 1970s...
...The House of Windsor was not (and is not) without its faults...
...There is no hint in Eminent Churchillians of the fashionable view that Churchill was a warmonger who lost Britain her empire and helped to sell Europe into Soviet bondage...
...no doubt he should have been less willing to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt...
...No doubt he should have prepared with greater vigor, as Churchill wanted him to...
...Taylor...
...The same was true of men in the ranks...
...Dread of another war spanned the generations...
...The politically correct response, on the other hand, is to say: how shocking...
...72 The American Spectator February 1995...
...George VI's father, George V, is quoted by Roberts as having said to Lloyd George in 1935: "I will not have another war...
...He was a romantic high Tory, an anti-Marxist celebrator of"Englishry...
...Later in the month British fascists were rounded up and interned...
...Smart kid, Roberts...
...Chamberlain's policy was to pursue peace, and prepare for war...
...There are, of course, differences between Andrew Roberts and Lytton Strachey...
...FDR lived to tell the tale, and now Andrew Roberts has included it in his hatchet job on George VI in Eminent Churchillians...
...This is especially true in his chapter on the royal family...
...His jokes are the sort you find in the better smoking rooms...
...In his Who's Who entry he listed himself as "KG, PC, GCB, OM, GSCI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, FRS, Hon...
...Inevitably, though, the reader ends up splattered in blood...
...He spoke well of Hitler, describing him as "the Great German whom fate has raised up to rescue his people...
...Many years later, in 1959, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer told Mountbatten (by then Chief of the Defence Staff): "You're so crooked, Dickie, if you swallowed a nail you'd s--- a corkscrew...
...In his relentless stomping on the appeasers, Roberts weakens his case by overstating it...
...For the rest of the war Bryant devoted himself to Churchill and, as his contribution to final victory, wrote a series of piously patriotic books...
...Stuart Reid is assistant features editor at the London Sunday Telegraph...
...Clothed by Monty Burton, Fed on Lyons pies, Die for Jewish Freedom As a Briton always dies...
...Yet nothing seemed to dent Mountbatten's confidence or prick his pomposity...
...On the other hand he was probably not one of those fastidious English racists—and there were quite a few of them around in the 1930s, especially among officers' wives—whose chief anxiety about that vulgar little corporal Hitler was that he might give anti-Semitism a bad name...
...It is easier to share Roberts's indignation about Arthur Bryant than it is about the royal family and the Chamberlainites...
...On the contrary...
...R oberts uses his boot with wit and—quite a feat—with elegance...
...DCL, Hon...
...To take one at random: "They were arrogant, they were vulgar and they were vicious...
...Many Americans were knocked out by Mountbatten's regal charm, but not all...
...Nobody today cares much for Bryant, but he remained popular until his death in 1985...
...for instance, Bryant's condemnation of Hitler's racial theories as "repulsive gibberish...
...One of his early "shows," as Chief of Combined Operations, was the abortive Dieppe raid of August 19, 1942, in which 3,369 Canadians, out of a force of 4,963, were killed, wounded, or captured...
...Bryant saw the error of his ways and bought up all the copies of Unfinished Victory he could find, with the result that today it is a collector's item...
...For one thing, Roberts is a belligerent conservative, whereas Strachey was a pacifist Liberal...
...He lacked even a trace of irony...
...In July 1916, 60,000 British soldiers fell on the first day of the Battle of the Somme...
...DSC, AMIEE, AMBINT...
...In April 1940 he published Unfinished Victory, which Roberts describes as the British equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
...Chamberlain's policy toward Germany was driven by fear of massive slaughter, and rightly so...
...Roberts, 32, is one of Britain's angry young historians, a follower, not to say a founder, of the new brutalist school...
...On the broader question of the king's support for appeasement, the historically correct response is: so what...
...Why was Unfinished Victory not held against him...
...Strachey's eminences were all defenders of Victorian values, while Roberts's are for the most part men who tried to subvert Churchill...
Vol. 28 • February 1995 • No. 2
