Churchill's Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Author:Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Far more serious was ‘Operation Unthinkable’, as it was secretly called. Churchill was now consumed with apprehension at the Russian advance into Europe, which was so much a consequence of his own actions. Roosevelt had died on 12 April, less than four weeks before victory. He was succeeded by his vice president, Harry Truman, whom Churchill now warned that an ‘iron curtain’ was falling across Europe, a phrase he would make much more famous the following year in Truman’s home state. After he had failed to get his way with his hare-brained scheme for a landing at the head of the Adriatic, Churchill had urged Eisenhower to press straight for Berlin so as to reach it ahead of the Russians. Eisenhower knew as well as Churchill that the partitioning of Germany into occupied zones had effectively been agreed, and he quite rightly declined to risk the lives of any soldiers under his command for a political gesture, and almost certainly a pointless one at that.

In his frustration, Churchill now began to think of another war. On 24 May he ordered his chiefs of staff to prepare plans to ‘impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’ by 1 July. ‘If we are to embark on war with Russia, we must be prepared to be committed to a total war, which will be long and costly.’ Brooke was even more angrily derisive than usual: ‘The idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible.’ Not only fantastic, ‘Operation Unthinkable’ was barely sane. British and American soldiers had fought long and hard, and wanted to go home, having been told moreover for years that the Red Army were their heroic allies. Any order to make war on the Russians would have provoked mutiny.

When the election campaign opened, Churchill made an almost graver mistake. On 4 June he gave a Conservative ‘PPB’, one of the carefully allotted party political radio broadcasts each party was allowed to present on the BBC. His theme was the encroaching power of the state, which had of course hugely increased under his own wartime government. But a Labour government would be a much more serious threat, he warned: ‘No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some sort of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.’

Even now it’s hard to believe that he uttered words so disgraceful, and so stupid. He was implying that Attlee and Bevin, two patriotic democratic socialists who had loyally served in his war cabinet for five years, were crypto-Nazis. The word ‘Gestapo’ was made worse not better by the Churchillian sarcasm ‘no doubt very humanely directed’, and was simply intolerable only weeks after the British had been given a harrowing radio report by Richard Dimbleby of the horrors of Belsen, that hell on earth filled by the Gestapo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.